Israeli warplanes killed one and wounded at least 20 in a series of airstrikes on Damascus, Syria, on Wednesday. The strikes included the surroundings of the presidential palace, the Defense Ministry, and the Syrian army’s general staff building in Ummayad Square, the dynamic center of the Syrian capital.
In a joint statement, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz claimed that Israel’s strikes aimed at protecting the Druze minority community in Syria, and forcing the Syrian government to pull its forces back from the south of the country near the border with Israeli-occupied Syrian territory.
The strikes came shortly after forces belonging to the Syrian government entered the southern Druze-majority city of Sweida, where local self-defense groups have refused to lay down their arms despite demands from the new Syrian government. Video footage on social media coming from Sweida purported to show multiple abuses by government forces during the takeover of the city, as well as a video of people, purportedly members of the Druze community, raising the Israeli flag on the roof of a building.
The Syrian government’s attack on the city was ongoing when the Israeli bombing started. Shortly after, leaders of the Druze community announced that they had reached an agreement to lay down all the arms held by Druze groups, and to integrate the armed groups of Sweida into the state’s forces and ensure their participation in “maintaining order” in the city.
On Wednesday, Syrian president Ahmad Al-Sharaa said in a televised statement that Syria “does not fear war with Israel” but chose to avoid it for the “safety of its people.”
Why does Israel claim the need to ‘protect’ the Druze?
Israel’s positioning of itself as the defender and protector of the Syrian Druze community in Sweida can be traced to the historic relationship between the Syrian Druze and the Druze in the north of Palestine, who are Israeli citizens. In fact, they are the same community and the same families, though they were separated following Israel’s occupation and colonization of Palestine.
After the Nakba and the establishment of the Israeli state, Israel struck a deal with Palestinian Druze elders in the 1950s to draft young Druze men into the army, granting the Druze a separate status from the rest of the remaining Palestinians in the state of Israel. And while in recent years, Druze youth have been increasingly refusing to serve in the army, asserting their Palestinian identity, parts of the Druze community remain loyal to the state, and Israel continues to leverage that.
Unlike in northern Palestine, the Druze families in the Israeli-occupied Syrian Golden Heights never accepted Israeli citizenship and continue to collectively reject it, and as a result, have received the same treatment as Palestinians in the occupied Palestinian territory.
The people in Sweida became especially vulnerable after the civil war began in 2011. Although they became the target of repeated attacks by rebel groups, Israel at the time didn’t intervene or claim their protection. The rebel groups who attacked the Druze community in Sweida at the time were engaged in a fight to topple the Syrian government of Bashar Al-Asad, which also was in Israel’s interest.
Although the first protests against the Assad rule in 2011 included Druze-majority areas, like Sweida, the Druze community was largely neutral during the war that followed, and most Druze in the south of the country did not take part in the fighting. Between 2012 and 2015, the multi-national, Al-Qaeda-linked Al-Nusra Front advanced its control in the south of Syria, including in the surroundings of Sweida, which pushed some residents to form defence groups and take up arms, especially among the Druze citizens.
The Druze defence groups clashed with Al-Nusra Front multiple times, which at the time was led by the now-president of Syria, Ahmad Al-Sharaa, known at the time by his nom-de-guerre Abu Mohammad Al-Joulani. At the time, Israel did not intervene in the course of the fighting, except to grant safe passage for Al-Nusra wounded into Israel, to be treated in Israeli hospitals.At the time, Al-Nusra Front was leading the fight against the Syrian state army, and to topple the Assad rule.
Israel did however, bomb Syrian army bases in the south of Syria during the height of the civil war. Druze groups maintained their arms after the relative calm that followed the takeover of most of the Syrian territory by the Assad-led government, especially following attacks by ISIS on Sweida’s surroundings in 2018.
Today, following the fall of the previous Syrian regime, Israel continues to have the same strategic goal of clearing the south of Syria of any Syrian State forces. And as the hostility between elements of the Syrian forces who were in the ranks of the rebels years ago and the Druze community rise again, the opportunity for Israel to assert its control over the South now comes through the gate of protecting the Druze.
What the latest escalation could mean
Following the fall of Al-Assad in December of last year, Israeli forces invaded Syrian territory, occupying extensive areas and approaching 12 kilometers away from Damascus. The Israeli army took new positions on Syria’s Mount Al-Sheikh, while Defense Minister Israel Katz announced that Israeli forces will remain in the newly conquered territory for at least another year. Simultaneously, Israeli war planes took advantage of the brief power vaccum that followed the fall of the Assad regime and launched an extensive bombing campaign against Syrian army bases and warehouses, destroying most of the Syrian state military capabilities.
Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu stated at the time that Israel would not accept any military presence of the Syrian army in the south of the country or near Israeli borders. But another old Israeli goal of pressuring Syria was hinted at several times in the past months. In February, U.S. Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff said that Syria and Lebanon could join the Abraham normalization accords with Israel. Then, in May, Israeli ambassador to the U.S., Yechiel Leiter, said in an interview to PragerU that Syria could be closer to normalizing with Israel than Saudi Arabia was.
In May the ‘Jewish Journal’ quoted Ahmad Al-Sharaa saying that Syria and Israel had common enemies and that they could have a security partnership. Then in late June the U.S. Envoy to Syria Tom Barrack said that the Syrian president wants peace with Israel.
Israel has always sought a normalization with Syria, which it tried to achieve in the late 1990s and early 2000s, without giving Syria back the occupied Golan heights. The fact that a new government is in power in Damascus, with little force to impose its control over all Syrian territory, represents an opportunity for Israel to take over more territory, and potentially secure some sort of normalization or peace agreement with Syria. On the Syrian side, if al-Sharaa manages to strike a deal that would allow him to retain, or gain back some territory seized by Israel, he would get the status of having confronted Israel and brought Syrian territory back from under Israeli occupation.
