According to analysts, the Israeli prime minister helped overthrow Assad, but this was not planned by Israel. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Monday, December 9, that the fall of Bashar al-Assad in Syria was a direct result of Israel’s actions in the region, a claim that analysts in Israel say is only partly true.
Under mounting domestic pressure over the fate of Israeli hostages in Gaza and his own corruption trial, Netanyahu announced at a cabinet meeting that Assad’s fall “is a direct result of the blows we have dealt to Iran and Hezbollah, Assad’s main backers.”
Danny Citrinovich, a researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, told AFP in this regard that although it is true that Israel helped speed up events in Syria, the fall of Assad was an unintended consequence.
He said in this regard: “Obviously, what Israel did definitely led to the fall of Assad, but I doubt that they had a clear strategy for this in advance.” Netanyahu also warned Assad on Nov. 27, the day the Syrian rebels began their offensive, that he was “playing with fire” by supporting Hezbollah and helping move weapons into Lebanon.
Citrinovich said, referring to Abu Mohammad al-Julani, the Islamist leader of the rebel group that is leading the attack on Syria: “But Netanyahu never knew that Julani was planning to launch a massive attack on Syria. And of course, no one calculated how this fact The fact that Iran and Hezbollah have weakened to such an extent harms Assad’s ability to protect himself and his regime.
Analysts have also pointed to the role of Russia, one of Assad’s key backers, who was helped by Ukraine to bring down Assad, something that was beyond Netanyahu’s control and only happened because of Moscow’s involvement in the war with Ukraine.
No strategy was involved!
Mir Amit Center analyst and former Israeli military intelligence officer Aviv Oreg also said that Netanyahu’s claims are only partially legitimate. “It’s like dominoes… you topple the first one and then the second one topples and so on,” he told AFP, referring to attacks against Hezbollah in Syria and Lebanon that Israel launched in late September. He escalated it and cited it as the primary cause of Assad’s fall. Oreg also said that Netanyahu could not have predicted the consequences of Israel’s actions for Syria, but that the prime minister’s decision to quickly escalate the fight against Hezbollah was a “major military success.”
Analysts have also emphasized that during the civil war, Israel did not support government change in Syria. Didier Billion, at the IRIS think tank in Paris before Assad’s fall, said that Israel has long seemed to prefer “preserving Assad” over “the rise of Islamist or extremist jihadist groups in Syria.” But after the Hamas attack last October, everything changed.
In the end, according to Billion, there was no Israeli strategy to topple Assad, “but everything went so well and according to Israel’s wishes that we could say there was an amazing strategy by the Netanyahu government to topple Assad.”
