The question What is Syria? has suddenly become relevant again. But the only reason it’s a question at all is because Syrian leaders made a mistake picking fights with Israel decades ago and want the world to keep bailing it out of the consequences of its own actions.
This became clear with some unintentionally humorous reporting earlier this week on the post-Assad developments in Syria. Anti-Israel activists are getting impatient with Syria’s new Islamist leaders because those leaders don’t want to go to war with Israel.
“HTS spokesman Obeida Arnaout is asked by Channel 4 News about Israel’s strikes on over 300 sites in Syria (latest update: 480 strikes),” one progressive hub posted. “He refused to denounce Israel’s massive airstrikes and ground incursions. When pressed, he offered vague, general comments.”
The frustration is palpable. And also hilarious.
The narrative in parts of the press that Israel is “invading” Syria because it has been taking out loose chemical weapons stocks and securing its buffer zone is more an expression of emotional derangement than analysis, but egging on Syria’s rebels to go to war with Israel is a bit much even for this crowd.
There is a serious point here, however. Complaints about violations of Syrian sovereignty are reminders that the fluid borders are Syria’s own doing, by design. Countries that actually signed peace and recognition agreements with Israel don’t have this problem, because those countries were willing to delineate permanent borders with the Jewish state. No one is guiltier of obstructing that process than Syria.
Upon the passing of the UN partition plan in 1947 and the subsequent assurances by the British that they would fulfill plans to end the UK’s mandate for Palestine and allow for the division of the land into two states, one Arab and one Jewish, Syria began agitating for war and whipping up opposition to recognizing Israel among the Arab states. The Syrian government expressly warned the U.S. that should partition pass, there would be blood. It was not an idle threat.
In early 1948, U.S. diplomatic correspondence outlined Syria’s orchestration of a campaign of disregarding the sovereignty of Palestine while it was still held by the British: “Reports from the U.S. Mission at Damascus indicate that Syria is the center of recruitment and training of the so-called ‘irregulars’, which are intended for infiltration over the Palestine border and subsequent guerilla work in Palestine. There is evidence that such forces have already proceeded across the border to a considerable extent.”
The memo went on to explain in more detail: By New Year’s 1948, Syrian commanders had recruited thousands of irregular soldiers—more, in fact, than they had weapons for. Syria also became “the training center for recruits from Palestine, Egypt and Iraq.” Beginning less than a month after the partition vote, these militiamen began infiltrating Palestine with what appeared to be Syrian soldiers directing or covering them. A Syrian defense official described one attack on a village “as a ‘screen,’ under cover of which there is good reason to believe that approximately 600 Syrian-trained, equipped and transported ‘regular irregulars’ moved across the border into Palestine.”
The U.S. charge d’affaires in Damascus dryly suggested that the government “might consider cautioning the Syrian Government that its participation in recruiting, arming, training, financing and transporting the ‘irregulars’ to the frontier in Syrian army trucks is contrary to the word and spirit of the U.N. charter and the G.A. U.N. resolution on partition.”
Syria got its war, and failed to defeat the Jewish state. In 1949, Israel and Syria signed an armistice agreement that “emphasized that the following arrangements for the Armistice Demarcation Line between the Israeli and Syrian armed forces and for the Demilitarized Zone are not to be interpreted as having any relation whatsoever to ultimate territorial arrangements affecting the two Parties to this Agreement.”
Syria then spent the next two decades trying to claw land away from Israel and redirecting water supplies away from the Jews, while shelling Israeli civilians from Syrian-held positions. In 1967, Syria tried again and failed again: This time Israel was able to take the high ground of the Golan. After the war, the Arab states announced they would not negotiate with Israel over the return of land that changed hands during the war.
Now, however, those mourning the end of the Assad dictatorship would like to pretend that Syria acknowledges its own truce lines as permanent borders. If only the Syrians had done so the many, many, many times it had been offered! Meanwhile, HTS, the leaders of the rebel alliance that ousted Bashar al-Assad, have thus far refrained from making the same complaint. They don’t seem to want war with Israel, and they also know that they exist as a rebel front is partially because those weapons Israel took out were used by Assad primarily on them and other Syrian civilians.
It would be ironic indeed if Syria’s new Islamist rulers were to finally sign a pact with Israel, recognizing the Jewish state and setting permanent borders. Either way, it would be nice if the world would stop demanding Israel pay for Syria’s crimes.
