-Analysis-
BEIRUT — Satellite images recently revealed that Israeli troops had entered the Alpha Line demilitarized zone, which separates the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights from Syria, and had begun digging a trench and paving a road in there.
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These are signs of Israel military’s efforts in the 155 square mile zone, which has been demilitarized since 1974 as part of a UN Security Council resolution that established a cease-fire between the two countries after the 1973 Mideast war.
Since then, the zone has been outside the Syrian-Israeli conflict, which over decades has seen the cries of the people of the border villages behind the fence, as well as the Syrian regime’s attempts to “trigger the front,” as in 2011, when buses carried dozens of Syrian-Palestinians from Yarmouk Camp toward the border to “return” to Palestine in what was called the “March of Return.”
Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad — as Israeli warplanes hover over his palace — hasn’t lifted a finger over Israel’s bombings in “his Syria” at the recent Arab leaders’ summit in Riyadh, capital of Saudi Arabia. It was as if the area was outside his sovereignty. He is outside the current war.
“De-escalation through escalation”
“Israel bombs Syria.” It’s a sentence that has been reiterated almost every day in the news. Yet since the Israel-Hamas war began, the Syrian regime has condemned the bombing with its known rhetoric. The regime has just overseen what it calls “building a professional and developed military,” blackmail Syrians and Lebanese fleeing the war, and silently overseen the deployment of Hezbollah and Iranian militias in Syria.
The Israeli military justifies its bombing of the region, from Gaza to the borders of Iran and Iraq, using this argument which was produced by Assad’s political impasse and Iranian power. The argument says the whole area is controlled by militias, and there is no military to control the border. This means Syria is an extended battlefield, where politics is summed up as, as Axios journalist Barak Ravid described it, “de-escalation through escalation.”
The Israeli narrative of targeting ‘militias’ aligns with its broader strategy to reshape the region’s military and demographic landscape, creating a buffer zone that secures its northern borders while isolating Iran-linked forces.
The impasse leaves Syrians with a dilemma: “Who defends the homeland?” Anyone of those carrying weapons now in Syria who has not killed Syrians, has the right to “repel aggression.”
Russia answered the question by building a monitoring point and controlling the borders in the Golan Heights. Yet Alexander Lavrentiev, the Russian President’s special envoy to Syria, said that this isn’t the job of the Russian military in Syria. “This would require the establishment of new checkpoints along the border, a task that doesn’t fall within the competence of the Russian military in Syria,” he said in an interview with RIA Novosti.
Colonial strategies reduce populations to manageable data points rather than addressing root causes of conflict.
The “day after” plan for the region that follows Israel‘s war has two models: The first is through the power of money, such as the beaches of Egypt ,where the United Arab Emirates is investing in new cities. Those cities don’t include revolutions and protests, or demands for liberation. It’s only cities for consumption and entertainment, or what can be described as “entertainment citizenship.”
The other model — as proposed in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament — is through contracting with a “mercenary” company that will work with the Israeli army to create “humanitarian bubbles surrounded by walls” in Gaza. Gaza people will be received in these “bubbles” based on “biometric data.”
This model aligns with a broader pattern of using technology and urban restructuring to enforce control over disputed territories. However, critics argue it mirrors colonial strategies, reducing populations to manageable data points rather than addressing root causes of conflict.
The case of Syria
Syria is a different case. The redeployment of fighters and movement of displaced people, as well as Israel’s targeting of the displaced Shiites in the town of Qusayr has redivided the Syrian map. Israel’s bombardment has isolated the border crossings through its bombing, as well as Qusayr. Israel also bombed Damascus, forcing many to flee their homes in Kafr Sousa and Mezzeh neighborhoods.
There is a dual effort to redistribute the human masses: the Israeli war effort and the Syrian regime’s lack of effort.
Therefore, there are two competing images in killing and destruction to reshape the region. The expansion of the Israeli army’s operations in Lebanon reveals this effort. Israeli propaganda blackmails Lebanese people. It reiterates that Lebanese have an opportunity to “build a state” and “an army capable of controlling the borders,” a state that has the decision of war and peace. That’s simply a sovereign state.
Israel operates with almost complete immunity in Syrian territory
Here, the Syrian regime appears as a “silent partner,” as Zvi Bar’el wrote in Israeli newspaper Haaretz. Israel operates with “almost complete immunity” in Syrian territory, and the regime distanced itself from the war on Gaza to the point of preventing demonstrations of solidarity with Gaza. It required security permissions for any solidarity activity under the pretext of “protecting against terrorism and armed gangs, and maintaining security and safety.”
Over the past years, there have been repeated attempts to link the “evil” of the Syrian regime to “Nazi evil.” This has been previously observed in literary works and journalistic investigations, through the story of Nazi officer Alois Brunner, who was residing in Syria after fleeing Germany.
The stories revolved around his role in building security institutions and torture techniques. He was described as the architect of “Syrian evil,” in a form of self-Orientalism. Yet this can be answered simply: The dictator, the late Syrian President Hafez Al-Assad and his son, President Bashar Al-Assad, are Syrian, and his evil is Syrian.
The world vs. evil
After the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, the use of the term “evil” has increased. Israel compares Hamas to Hitler and the Nazis, to the point of saying that the attack on the Gaza Strip settlements is a “second Holocaust.” The Israeli army even published pictures of Hitler’s Mein Kampf said to have been found in the Hamas tunnels.
Supporters of Palestinian rights also accuse Israel of reproducing the genocide that their ancestors experienced in Germany. In 2022, leader Yahya Sinwar said that the Hamas’ aim is to isolate Israel globally. So the world is the focus of the conflicting parties who call on it to intervene either directly or by blessing the efforts to eliminate evil.
Here is a paradox in understanding the “world,” which faced “evil” in the 1940s and worked to eradicate it when this evil was expansionist. The world did not move to defend the exterminated group (the Jews), but rather to protect the borders of the European countries from the expansion of the Third Reich.
The bet was therefore through the following equation: The more heinous and public the murder, the more the evil of the murderer would be revealed and the “world” would be pushed to intervene. The result was the killing of Syrians, a genocidal war against the Palestinians in Gaza, the destruction of southern Lebanon, house by house.
Russia uses its veto in favor of the Syrian regime, the U.S. uses its veto in favor of Israel
The world, however, was satisfied with symbolic trials for the men of the Syrian regime, and with ICC arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. Here the farce of this “world” appears, or, more precisely, the mechanisms that were put in place to prevent the recurrence of genocide are unsuccessful in stopping the genocide — or any genocide.
The position of the world can be summed up in its institutional form, through the position of the two most effective camps, the UN veto holders: Russia used its veto in favor of the Syrian regime 17 times between 2011 and 2022, and the United States used its veto in favor of Israel about five times during a year of war.
The hypothesis that the world here is two poles could be dismantled. And if we wanted to use a more regional approach, we could say that sealing off the borders of Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Turkey and adhering to national borders, consolidates the concept of a sovereign state at the expense of genocide/elimination of militias outside the state, any state in the region.
Thus by the force of arms and agreement of the world, the region (Gaza, southern Lebanon, Syria) has turned into a pre-state model that must be “purified” to be worthy of “life.” It should be “purified” without a role for civilians other than deaths. Here, we can explain Assad’s silence. The “land” is not suitable for him to rule, so he suspends sovereignty over the little land he controls, until his “turn” in ruling comes.
Where are Syrians in this “world”?
As for the spectators in the world — those who do not have political effectiveness in their original homelands or political weight in their host countries — we exist in a space of inaction. There is no political model capable of containing us and at the same time possessing the effectiveness of the militia on the ground.
And the question is, where are we in this world, especially Syrians, who are silent about the Israeli bombing of their land, and what model do they await for the “day after”?
The answer to this question is being ignored by the two parties: the regime, and the revolution/opposition. There is a double silence regarding the potential “occupation,” and a clear military condition: Israel’s bombing of Syria from Latakia to Palmyra and Damascus. (We ignore here Russia’s bombing and the regime’s bombing of northern Syria).
Even the attempted exploitation of the war and the redeployment of Hezbollah in Syria and the move by the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) insurgent group to attack the Syrian regime, ended immediately with Russian raids that put an end to any chance of toppling Assad. There is the comic paradox: Syrians are betting either on Israel or on HTS to topple the regime.
Israel’s missiles, ground operations, the pushing of the border strip and the deaths across Syria are a new addition to the record of the destruction of Syria as a “homeland” that has been already destroyed with no horizon to reclaim it from “evil.” Unfortunately, there are voices that hail the Israeli bombing of Syrian cities, the homeland. Some say: “Let them destroy it completely, there is nothing worthy” or “they will save us from Iran.”
Evil always triumphs
We face two evils with historical repercussions if we want to adopt mutual accusations of Nazism. Two genocidal evils where “the Syrian issue” is represented not only in the partition of their positions, but also in reconsidering the world and its effectiveness and ability to confront the evil — especially when we have faced two genocides and systematic killing. The world did nothing to stop this.
American soldiers were surprised when they arrived at the Dachau concentration camp. The same thing happened to the Soviets when they entered Auschwitz. They did not know that they were death camps.
Since 2011, the world has been watching the killing machines clearly and with great precision. It has not intervened. It watched the disappearance of Syria, our homeland, at the hands of the political forces and the forces of the de facto situation, and the extermination of the Palestinians in Gaza by artificial intelligence.
If the Syrian massacre came as the question “What is the benefit of the world?” was asked, the massacre in Gaza is the answer: There is no benefit. Evil always triumphs.
The persistent failure of international frameworks to halt cycles of violence exposes the contradictions of global governance. Instead of delivering justice or deterrence, institutions like the ICC or the UN become tools of selective enforcement, deepening cynicism among those who witness unchecked atrocities.
