No, Israel is not ‘colonising’ Syria

‘Why do snakes bite? Why do birds sing? It’s the nature of things. It’s the nature of Israel.’ That was the response of Marwan Bishara, Al Jazeera’s senior political analyst, when questioned about the motivation for Israel’s recent extensive air assault on Syria.

A serious commentator would have looked at the radically new geopolitical context for Israel’s intervention in its eastern neighbour. As the whole world surely now knows, a coalition of rebel forces led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a former al-Qaeda affiliate, overthrew Bashar al-Assad’s brutal Syrian regime in a 10-day offensive earlier this month. This meant that Israel was suddenly facing the prospect of a state governed by violent Islamists on its border – indeed, HTS is also officially designated as a terrorist group by the US government.

In response, Israel mounted a massive aerial assault to destroy the chemical weapons, aircraft, missile depots and warships of the former Syrian government – military resources that Assad had used to kill hundreds of thousands of Syrian civilians. The last thing Israel would want is for Assad’s Islamist topplers to turn this armoury on the Israeli population. Israel has also sent troops into the buffer zone between itself and Syria in the Golan Heights, and probably beyond.

Yet Bishara, a leading figure for an international media network, ignored these obvious factors. He dismissed the possibility that Israel could be acting to defend itself, and ranted instead about how Israel has supposedly been waging war since its inception in 1948. Because, apparently, it’s in Israel’s ‘nature’ to be a warmongering aggressor. The fact that throughout its existence Israel has actually been responding to attacks and threats from its neighbours was entirely absent from this account.

Bishara is far from alone in seeing Israel’s intervention in Syria as an expression of its supposedly evil nature. A writer for Mondoweiss, an influential anti-Israel publication, also presents Israel’s intervention in Syria as the act of a regional aggressor. Apparently, Israel wants to ‘take strategic land, render Syria defenceless for the future and redraw the political map of the Middle East’.

Likewise, Guardian columnist Owen Jones argues that Israel is exploiting Assad’s fall to redraw the regional map to its advantage. In a video, Jones proclaims that ‘Israel has invaded Syria in a blatant act of illegal aggression… for the transparent reason of annexing yet more land’. Again, the fact that Israel might perceive an Islamist movement on its borders as a plausible threat is quickly dismissed. Clearly, Jones has a short memory when it comes to Islamist terrorist attacks on Israel.

Jones also engages in a familiar anti-Israel move in his ‘analysis’. He quotes an extremist Israeli politician, finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, calling for Israel’s borders to extend to Damascus in Syria. But this is not the authentic Israeli view. Smotrich often makes unhinged statements. To present his views as official Israeli policy is deeply misleading. Most Israelis, including those in government, disagree with him, but this is downplayed or ignored by the Western media.

Jones does acknowledge that Turkey has also invaded parts of Syria several times in recent years, and mentions in passing that Russia and Iran have also intervened. Yet it’s only Israel’s intervention that he presents as the act of an evil aggressor. It is only Israel that is said to be conducting ‘yet another land grab’ so that it can ‘steal land to colonise it’.

This is wilfully ignorant. Anyone who takes the trouble to examine Israeli history would know that Israel has sometimes expanded into its neighbours’ territory before eventually withdrawing. Israel captured the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt in 1956 and 1967, but in both cases ended up handing it back. It was not seeking to expand its territory. It was simply protecting itself against threats from its much larger Arab neighbour.

Israel also captured the Gaza Strip in 1967, after Egypt had controlled the territory for 19 years, but then withdrew in 2005. It was only after the Hamas pogrom of 7 October 2023 that Israel moved its military forces back into Gaza. Israel also invaded parts of Lebanon in 1978 and 1982 in response to attacks across the border from Palestinian terrorists. It attacked again in 2006, after an assault by Hezbollah, but then withdrew.

These were not colonial ‘land grabs’. In most cases, Israel has returned the territory after dealing with the perceived threat.

The problem is that so much of the discussion in anti-Israel circles now conforms to a pre-conceived narrative of Israeli evil-doing. Any inconvenient facts that contradict this tale of the Jewish State’s malevolence are ignored, while those that seem to confirm it are played up.

So deep is these pundits’ and activists’ loathing of Israel that they’re no longer capable of any reasoned understanding of Middle Eastern affairs.

Daniel Ben-Ami is an author and journalist. He runs Radicalism of Fools, a website dedicated to rethinking anti-Semitism. Follow him on X: @danielbenami