On Sunday, the Israeli media, stunned by Syrian rebel forces’ sudden overthrow of the Bashar al-Assad regime, offered some tentative takes on the implications of their victory. On the one hand, the Butcher of Damascus was gone and good riddance; but on the other hand, if jihadists filled the power vacuum, would they threaten Israel’s security on its northern border? For some of the more worldly correspondents, this framing was too provincial. Amos Harel, Haaretz’s defense correspondent, told one podcast host that the question was not whether the end of the Assad regime was good or bad for the Jews, but whether it was bad for Iran — which it was. And what’s bad for Iran is good for Israel.
Harel was speaking to Sami Peretz, host of The Stakeholders, the daily podcast for The Marker, Haaretz’s financial paper. After acknowledging that he had no idea what would happen in Syria, Peretz’s opening question was, “Isn’t a strong secular government [in Syria] better for us than a bunch of militias, some of which are made up of jihadists?” Harel’s response was a fascinating deviation from Israel’s generally solipsistic attitude toward Arab Middle Eastern politics. “First of all,” he said, “I don’t believe that anyone asked us. Secondly, there hasn’t been a strong, secular government in Syria for 15 years.” Harel described Assad as “one of the greatest murderers of the 21st century” whose regime was “rotten” and the territory he ruled a “narco-state” that survived “by the skin of its teeth” entirely due to support from Russia and Iran.
In the context of the major international media’s reporting, Harel’s analysis was unremarkable. But for Israelis, who know little about the Arab world and who tend to view events in neighboring countries through the lenses of deterrence and security, Harel’s detached perspective was unusual. During the first days of the 2011 Egyptian uprising, for example, television news studios were filled with panels of retired military officers, veterans of the 1967 and 1973 wars, who warned that if the protesters calling for freedom and bread did succeed in toppling Hosni Mubarak from power, they would then invade Israel. They seemed not to know that the unarmed demonstrators, most of whom were in their 20s, were on the streets to demand civil rights for Egyptians and had no interest in wars, that the Egyptian revolution was not at all about Israel. Now, it seems that the Israeli lens has changed somewhat and has perhaps become a bit more sophisticated. While the television news programs broadcast a few frames of black-and-white footage from the 1973 war in the Golan, the presenters did not offer any overwrought warnings about imminent war with Syria.
To be sure, Harel did implicitly credit Israel’s military and intelligence services for having helped provide the window for the rebel forces’ lightning military success by weakening Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy army in southern Lebanon that provided military support for the Assad regime. “I think we made some positive progress here in the region,” he said. The news presenters and military correspondents for the commercial television news programs were more explicit in taking credit for what they saw as Israel’s role in creating the opportunity for the rebel victory in Syria.
But even as they were congratulating themselves for helping the world get rid of Syria’s brutal dictator, Israeli media was reporting on steps the military and political establishment had taken to protect the country’s security and maintain its deterrence, should a jihadist group exploit the chaos in Syria to establish a foothold in the Golan. Gili Cohen, political correspondent for the public broadcaster’s Kan 11 News, reported that the army had announced that, for security reasons, it was advancing “a few kilometers” into the Golan, past the buffer zone established with the 1974 disengagement agreement between Israel and Syria. Cohen added that the army had not specified how many kilometers, while footage of empty roads and unguarded military checkpoints confirmed that it had met no resistance. The presenter responded to Cohen’s report by noting that Israel had not penetrated this deeply into Syria since the 1973 war.
Rubi Hammerschlag, Channel 12’s correspondent for the northern region, reported that the army had said its new position in the Golan was temporary; then he rolled his eyes slightly and added with a touch of cynicism that the military spokesperson had declined to define the parameters of “temporary.” Footage showing soldiers laying some kind of metal tracks in the newly occupied Hermon region of the Golan seemed to convey that the army was planning to be there for more than a few days.
None of the correspondents seemed particularly worried about an imminent invasion by jihadists; the tone of their reporting on the army’s incursion further into Syria conveyed the sense that it was a practical measure, which Israel was entitled to take for its security. To underline the point, a correspondent in the Golan, which is a popular tourist destination for Israelis, interviewed a guesthouse proprietor who confirmed that he was fully booked and there had been no cancellations. None of the Israeli reporters seemed to be aware that quite a few Syrians were convinced the Israeli army was planning a full-scale invasion of Syria, nor that the provenance of this rumor was Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, an extreme-right member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, who has said that his messianic vision of Greater Israel includes Damascus. If they had been aware of those Syrian fears, the Israeli media almost certainly would have dismissed them as absurd. This remained the case even as they cited foreign media sources when reporting on massive Israeli airstrikes that destroyed the Syrian navy in Latakia port and wiped out key regime military bases on Tuesday (official Israeli sources remained silent due to the military censor’s customary gag order). Israeli media outlets explained that the presumed rationale for the airstrikes was to prevent the weapons and ordnance from falling into the hands of jihadist groups. This would strike the average Israeli as completely reasonable, but it also lent credence to Syrians’ suspicions that Israel planned to expand its military presence in their country.
Lior Kodner, who hosts Haaretz’s twice-weekly Hebrew-language podcast, added a special episode on Sunday to discuss events in Syria. His guests were Sheren Falah Saab, a Druze citizen of Israel who covers culture in the Arab world for Haaretz; Syria expert and military analyst Carmit Valensi and journalist Jack Khoury, who hosts the Arabic-language Radio al-Shams in Nazareth. While Khoury gave a fluid overview of Syria’s history over the past 50 years and Valensi provided sharp analysis of the geopolitical factors that led to the rapid collapse of Assad’s regime, Falah Saab offered human insights that helped the listener understand the emotional currency of this moment for Syrians specifically and Arabs in general. She described conversations with relatives in Syria who told her that while they were worried about the future, they were celebrating the release of prisoners from Assad’s massive detention and torture complexes. Like Amos Harel, Falah Saab asked Israelis to “zoom out a bit,” to take a less Israel-centric view of the rebel victory and understand what this day meant for ordinary Syrians — to see the end of the Assad family’s brutal regime, which had caused so much terror and grief. “There’s a feeling of relief and victory, a need to celebrate today, although they don’t know what will happen tomorrow,” she said.
Netanyahu staged a media event on the Golan on Sunday. Standing on a windswept lookout point, he peered through binoculars at Syria, nodding as the military officers around him pointed and explained. Then he faced the cameras and said that the downfall of Assad was good for Israel because the deposed Syrian dictator had been a crucial ally to Iran. Israel is a friend to most Syrians, he said, mentioning the Kurds and Druze in particular. Israel, he said, had provided medical aid to “thousands” of wounded Syrian civilians who were evacuated to the Israeli-occupied Golan during the early years of the civil war. Except Netanyahu didn’t call it the Israeli-occupied Golan: He called it Israel. None of the media outlets corrected him.
By Monday, Syria was no longer the top news story in Israel. The media had returned to Benjamin Netanyahu’s corruption trial and to saturation coverage of the war in Gaza, leading with the names and photos of soldiers who had been killed in recent days and then turning to a video statement from one of the hostages that Hamas had recorded on Day 420 of the war. While some Israeli media outlets are beginning to report on conditions in Gaza, there are no expressions of compassion for the bereaved, the wounded, the hungry and the dispossessed. Not even for the children. The contrast with the expressions of compassion for ordinary Syrians as they search for missing relatives in the ousted regime’s prison complexes is quite striking.
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