TEL AVIV
No one in Israel is mourning the ouster of Bashar al-Assad, the exiled Syrian dictator accused of murder, torture, and political repression. He is an enemy of Israel who allied with the Iranian regime and supported the Lebanese terror organization Hezbollah.
Yet, after Syrian rebels deposed Assad and forced him into exile, any celebration in Tel Aviv is tempered by the uncertainty of what comes next — and the fear of a new radical regime next door.
“I don’t think anyone should be happy about another Middle Eastern country falling,” said Avraham Levine of the Alma Research and Education Center, a think tank in northern Israel, near the border of Syria, which studies Middle East geopolitics. Levine pointed to Iraq, where Westerners were happy when Saddam Hussein was deposed, but which is now home to thousands of Shiite fighters.
In Israel, where I visited this month on a trip sponsored by the American Middle East Press Association, Assad’s fall is met partly with a sense of triumph. The superpower among the radical Islamist segment of the Middle East today is Iran, and Syria is one of several proxies Iran used — along with Hamas and Hezbollah — to try to obtain hegemony over the Middle East. When the Arab Spring toppled other Arab dictators in the early 2010s, Assad maintained power in Syria with help from the Russians and Iranians.
Today, Russia is preoccupied with its war in Ukraine. But Israelis take credit for weakening Iran by crippling Hamas and Hezbollah, in response to Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, terror attack and Hezbollah’s rocket attacks on northern Israel.
Uzi Rabi, director of the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Tel Aviv University, compared Iran to an octopus with Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Assad regime among its tentacles. “Israel inflicted a real blow on both Hezbollah and Hamas, cut off some of the arms of the octopus,” Rabi said. Rabi suggested it was no coincidence Syrian rebels felt empowered days after Hezbollah agreed to a cease-fire with Israel.
Yet for all his brutality, Assad represented stability. Today Syria is in chaos. The danger to Israel and the West is that the next Syrian regime will be no friendlier. After all, the enemy of your enemy isn’t always your friend.
Syria is comprised of a Sunni Arab majority, the Alawites who ruled under Assad, Shia Muslims, Kurds, Druze, and others. The rebels themselves include different entities with different ideologies. The rebel leader who deposed Assad, Ahmad al-Sharaa, who goes by the name Abu Mohammad al-Golani, led a group that broke away from Al Qaeda. While he now claims he no longer supports Al Qaeda’s ideals, and he has in the past distanced himself from more brutal terror tactics, experts note that even the Taliban in Afghanistan tried to portray itself as moderate when it suited its public image. The United States has a $10 million bounty on al-Golani’s head due to his terrorist activities.
“A majority of those rebels are non-liberal jihadi Islamists,” said Ruth Wasserman Lande, an Israeli former member of parliament and diplomat. “Their ideology supports an imperialistic worldwide califate based on sharia [Muslim] law. That’s not good news for the West and Israel and anyone who’s liberal.”
Reflecting that fear, the Israel Defense Forces has devastated Syria’s military capabilities, destroying airplanes, missiles, chemical weapons, and other equipment to prevent it from falling into rebel hands. Israeli forces entered key locations along the Israel-Syria border to prevent any threat to Israel and helped repel an attack by an unidentified group of armed individuals on a United Nations post. Israeli officials say Israel will withdraw when the situation is stable, and Israel does not intend to seize territory.
“Our main worry is the security and the safety of our country on the border,” Israel’s deputy foreign minister Sharren Haskel said. The second worry, she said, is the safety of Syria’s minorities, which include Christians, Druze, and Kurds.
There are numerous ways the instability could have an impact beyond Syria’s borders. The United States has supported the Kurdish minority in Syria, but Turkey sees a threat from Syria’s Kurds, fearing that Turkey’s Kurds will join their counterparts in Syria in seeking independence. Already, Turkish forces fired on US-backed Kurds in Syria. Turkey wields power as a NATO member and US ally. Yet President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey has also overtly threatened Israel. Wasserman Lande said she fears Erdogan may, by backing radical elements of the Syrian rebels, seek to become a leader among Islamist forces.
Iran may seek to restore deterrence power through nuclear capabilities — which would be enormously dangerous and could spark a nuclear arms race among Middle Eastern powers, a threat that successive American administrations have vowed to avoid.
It remains unclear who will control Syria — or even if there will be a united Syria. Kobi Michael, senior research fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, noted that while many of the rebels are political Islamists, they also include secular groups. Even if they build a governing coalition, there is no indication that coalition will last. While the rebels captured Syria’s major cities, the Kurds still control parts of the country. The Alawites and Druze are dominant in different parts of the country, while Russia maintains military bases in Syria.
Rabi suggested if an agreement can be reached where the rebels, Turks, Kurds, Russians, and other groups each have their slice of Syria, “that would be heaven.” If not, he warned, there is danger of a civil war.
In the long term, Rabi suggested the best way to curb Iran and all of its proxies is to build on the Abraham Accords and seek to organize a moderate bloc of Arab states — countries like Saudi Arabia, Oman, Egypt, Jordan, and Sudan — that would oppose Iranian influence, see the United States as an ally, and avoid active conflict with Israel.
That, however, seems a long way off.
Shira Schoenberg can be reached at shira.schoenberg@globe.com. Follow her @shiraschoenberg.