Netanyahu’s reshaped Middle East aligns neatly with Trump’s new world order

 

By James M. Dorsey

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Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s effort to reshape the Middle East aligns neatly with US President Donald J. Trump’s notion of big power geopolitics.

In 2023, Mr. Netanyahu outlined elements of his vision in an address to the United Nations General Assembly. The prime minister held up a map that erased Palestine and showed the Golan Heights, captured from Syria in the 1967 Middle East war, as part of Israel.

Mr. Trump’s plan to resettle Gaza’s 2.3 million Palestinians elsewhere and turn the war-ravaged Strip into a high-end beachfront real estate development has allowed Mr. Netanyahu to officially embrace the notion of ethnic cleansing for the first time, even though ultranationalist members of his Cabinet have long propagated expelling Palestinians from the territory.

US and Israeli officials said concern that Hamas may repurpose some 30,000 unexploded ordnances was one reason why Mr. Trump proposed resettlement.

Even so, Mr. Trump’s plan fits a pattern, following his recognition in his first term as president of Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights.

Since then, Mr. Netanyahu’s big power vision of the Middle East has evolved substantially as a result of the toppling in December of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad by rebels led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, a Turkish-backed group with jihadist antecedents.

Mr. Al-Assad’s fall broadened Mr Netanyahu’s threat perception. Before the president’s overthrow, Mr Netanyahu saw nuclear threshold Iran and Palestinians, whose national rights challenge Israel’s maximalist territorial claims, as existential threats.

Turkey and Syria’s new government, headed by Ahmed al-Sharaa, have since joined Iran and the Palestinians. Israel’s relations with Turkey have long been strained because of Palestine.

Some within Mr. Trump’s circle have echoed Israeli concerns.

Steve Bannon, whose War Room podcast is required listening in Mr. Trump’s world, recently reiterated his assertion that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was “one of the (world’s) most dangerous leaders” because he wants to "re-establish the Ottoman Empire.”

Mr. Trump seems more ambiguous. He referred to the Syrian rebel victory as an “unfriendly takeover” by Turkey but noted that “Assad was a butcher.”

To counter the new threats and capitalise on improving US-Russian relations, Mr. Netanyahu dispatched his military secretary, Maj. Gen. Roman Gofman, to Moscow, to persuade Russia to help counter Turkish influence in Syria.

Simultaneously, Israel lobbied the Trump administration to endorse a continued Russian military presence in a decentralised Syria.

Although a far shot, Mr. Netanyahu would prefer Russia rather than Turkey maintain military bases in Syria, train the country’s reconstituted armed forces, and secure its airspace.

Israel also pushed the administration to keep some 2,000 US troops in Syria to fight the Islamic State. During his first term, Mr. Trump backed away from an initial decision to withdraw the troops.

Turkey has long opposed the US presence in Syria and US support for the Kurdish-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) that provided the ground troops in confrontations with the jihadists.

Turkey asserts that the SDF is an extension of the outlawed Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) that has waged a four-decade-long low-intensity war in southeastern Turkey.

Turkey created a buffer zone on the Syrian side of the border and a Turkish proxy, the Syrian National Army (SNA), that battles the SDF in northern Syria.

Imprisoned PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan called earlier this month for the group to lay down its arms and dissolve itself.

Some Western diplomats, noting that Mr Trump has no burning interest in Syria, suggested that the president may remain on the sidelines and let Russia and Israel deal with the country.

Mr. Al-Sharaa’s government has suggested it would consider a continued Russian military presence in Syria provided Russia returns Mr Al-Assad and takes responsibility through “concrete measures such as compensation, reconstruction and recovery” for enabling the former president to get the upper hand in the country’s decade-long civil war.

Mr. Al-Assad fled to Moscow in December on a flight that departed from a Russian airbase on the Syrian Mediterranean coast as the rebels entered Damascus.

With Mr. Al-Sharaa replacing Mr. Al-Assad, Israel launched hundreds of air strikes to prevent the Syrian military’s arsenal from falling into the hands of Syria’s new rulers.

The air campaign was part of a new Israeli strategy in the wake of Hamas’ October 7, 2023, attack that killed some 1,200 people, mostly civilians.

The strategy involves weakening the Syrian state, defanging the Syrian military, grabbing land, supporting restive religious and ethnic minorities, and playing Russia and Turkey against the middle.

“Israel’s preference is now for buffer zones on hostile borders, keeping enemies as far as possible from Israeli communities. (Hayat Tahrir’s) failure to quickly consolidate its hold over Syria…enabled Israel to act quickly and establish a de facto area of control,” said Jonathan Spyer, a journalist and associate of the far-right, Philadelphia-based Middle East Forum.

Israel said it would stay for the foreseeable future in Syrian territory it has occupied since Mr. Al-Assad’s fall. Israeli troops moved into a United Nations buffer zone in Syria immediately after Mr. Al-Assad’s overthrow.

Satellite images show that the military has established at least seven new outposts in the buffer zone.

Mr. Netanyahu has since demanded that the Syrian military and Hayat Tahrir, Mr. Al-Sharaa’s rebel group, refrain from deploying south of the capital Damascus.

“We demand the complete demilitarization of southern Syria in the provinces of Quneitra, Daraa, and Suwayda from the forces of the new regime. Likewise, we will not tolerate any threat to the Druze community in southern Syria,” Mr. Netanyahu said.

Days later, Israeli drones hovered over the Damascus suburb of Jaramana as Syrian security forces clashed with Druze militiamen.

The Druze, a Muslim sect viewed by Sunni Muslims as heretics, populate the Golan Heights and areas of Syria occupied by Israel since Mr. Al-Assad’s downfall.

Druze leaders in recently occupied Syrian territory have demanded Israel’s withdrawal while refusing to disarm and integrate their militias into the Syrian military without their rights being constitutionally guaranteed.

In a similar vein, the Syrian Democratic Forces insist on integrating into the Syrian military as a bloc rather than as individuals. Moreover, the SDF and its aligned political groups demand Kurdish autonomy in a federated Syrian state.

Syrian Kurdish media reported in January that Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar gave “positive guarantees to the rights of the Kurds.” Earlier, Mr. Saar described the Kurds as Israel’s “natural allies.”

Like with the Druze, Israeli support for the Kurds has not gone beyond statements and symbolism.

Mr. Netanyahu may have mixed feelings about recent clashes in the predominantly Shiite Muslim Alawite Syrian Mediterranean coastal regions of Latakia and Tartus between government forces and Al-Assad supporters.

On the one hand, the clashes served Mr. Netanyahu’s goal of weakening, if not fragmenting, Syria, with Israel watching from the sidelines. On the other, Iranian support for the insurgents may not be farfetched even if there is no evidence.

The clashes, the worst violence since Mr. Al-Assad’s overthrow, occurred in an erstwhile stronghold of the former president. They pose the most significant challenge yet to Mr. Al-Sharaa’s transitional government and his efforts to consolidate authority.

Mr. Al-Assad’s family hails from Latakia, which, together with Tartus, hosts Russian bases. Scores of Alawites and Al-Assad loyalists sought refuge on the bases as the fighting erupted.

The Institute for the Study of War noted in a just-published report that Al-Assad supporters could potentially field the most effective insurgency in Syria.

The report said they "already have pre-existing networks that they can leverage to rapidly organize insurgent cells. These networks are military, intelligence, and political networks, and criminal syndicates that were regime supporters and lost significant economic and political influence in the aftermath of Assad's fall."

Dr. James M. Dorsey is an Adjunct Senior Fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, and the author of the syndicated column and podcast, The Turbulent World with James M. Dorsey.