Damascus is misreading Israel’s motives in Syria

The first factor that drives Israel’s Syria approach is the collective trauma of October 7th, which left the Israeli public and security establishment fearing a repeated cross-border invasion. The conclusion reached by the majority of Israelis and by officers within the Israeli Army after the attack - one not grounded in an inquiry into the failures that actually produced the massacres - was that Israel requires buffer zones opposite any potentially hostile force. 


Tied to this fear is a second factor: the assumption that the group now governing Syria threatens Israel. That assumption rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of Hayat Tahrir a-Sham (HTS), read as a jihadist militia and a Turkish proxy. Israeli intelligence and policymakers lost interest in HTS in 2018, when regime forces backed by Shia militias expelled it and other rebel groups from southern Syria, leaving it no way to threaten Israel from Idlib. The evolution the group underwent under the pressures of holding on to the last rebel bastion interested very few Israelis, and its sporadic clashes with Turkey and Turkey’s Syrian proxies flew below the radar. As a former head of the Mossad’s directorate of intelligence told me, “unless a group is capable of killing many Israelis, Israeli intelligence can’t dedicate the resources to tracking them. Resources are finite. We’re not US intelligence.”

A third driver is the machinery of military occupation itself, imported to southern Syria from the West Bank. The formal assumption of Israeli forces in the occupied areas is that the surrounding population is hostile. Hence, Israeli forces have confiscated privately-held weapons, sprayed herbicide along the Golan fence to deny cover to anyone crawling toward the forces stationed there, set up checkpoints, searched cars, and raided homes, always at night, breaking through private property and demanding that locals identify “the terrorists” in their villages.

Confusingly, a fourth driver runs in the opposite direction: an effort to win the goodwill of the same population. Israeli forces built a clinic in the Druze town of Hader and distributed aid to Sunni villages, which some locals accepted and others refused. Soldiers who served in the occupied south describe to me how, worn down by hundreds of days of reserve duty since October 7th and faced with few actual threats, they relax and mingled with the population, especially in the Druze towns, swimming, accepting gifts of cherries, playing with local children. The result is a contradictory mixture of behaviors that locals struggle to read or predict.

A fifth driver is hubris. After the military successes against Iran and the Axis it backs, Israeli regional policy is animated by a sense of entitlement to the status of regional hegemon, even “global power.” It manifests in the expectation that states such as Syria and Saudi Arabia will accept peace on Israel’s terms.

Sixth, and closely related, is a sense of impunity. The absence of consequences for the deadly campaign in Gaza, together with Israel’s military superiority over Syria, led it to correctly assess that it could invade, destroy Syria’s military capabilities, and pay no price.

Because Israel reads the government in Damascus as jihadist and subservient to Turkey, its overarching goal is a central government too weak to threaten it. This is why it lobbied Washington against lifting sanctions, the precondition for any economic recovery. Israel’s entry into negotiations with Damascus stemmed from US pressure and Trump’s desire to expand the Abraham Accords, and it was US pressure that also halted the sporadic Israeli airstrikes across Syria, not any genuine change of heart.

Israeli support for the Druze serves the same goal, but springs from other sources too. According to the Washington Post, Israel began arming Druze militias in Suwayda after Assad’s fall. It intervened militarily during the attacks on Druze in the Damascus suburbs in April and May 2025, and again during the massacres of July, bombing the assaulting government and tribal forces but also the Presidential Palace and the Syrian Army’s Chief of Staff building on Ummayad Square.

Keeping territory outside government control is part of the motive, but only part. The seventh driver, and the most misunderstood, is the genuine solidarity with the Druze community in Syria. To those unfamiliar with Israeli society, it seems baffling that a country that killed tens of thousands of Arabs in Gaza would trouble itself to protect Arabs in Syria, and the conclusion drawn is that Israel merely instrumentalises the Druze cause to advance a larger agenda.

Yet alongside those self-serving interests there is a genuine impulse to shield the Druze from violence. It stems from the community’s strength inside Israeli politics and its integration into Israeli society: the Druze of Israel serve in the military, the men speak fluent Hebrew, and they do not present themselves as Muslim but stress their Israeli-ness. At barely 1.5 percent of the population, the community is overrepresented in the security establishment and in politics, its members reaching high rank in the army and the Shin Bet, in part owing to their language skills. Their sacrifices for Israel’s security produced what Israelis call the “covenant of blood” between Jews and Druze, which allows the small Druze community to mobilise Israeli Jews behind their brethren in Syria.

This solidarity long predates Assad’s fall and does not depend on which government sits in Jerusalem. According to sources in Suwayda, from 2018 the Druze community in Israel funded weapons purchases for the Druze factions that fended off ISIS in the governorate, and Israel did not hinder the fundraising. More strikingly, since 2013 Israel has armed dozens of rebel factions in Quneitra and western Daraa on the condition that they not attack the Druze towns and villages around Hader and Jabl a-Sheikh, despite Hadr being a major regime and Hezbollah stronghold. It served as a recruitment and activity hub for Syrian Hezbollah, overseen until 2015 by Samir Quntar, whom Israel assassinated that year in the religiously mixed Damascus suburb of Jaramana. Hezbollah militants from Hader repeatedly planted IEDs along the Golan frontier. Israel never struck the town, and forbade the rebels from doing so. Even where its own security interest pointed toward using military force against targets inside Hader, Israel held back, solely because of the religious identity of its residents.

The July 2025 Israeli intervention in southern Syria thus drew on the desire to weaken Damascus, on genuine care for the Druze, and on the hubristic conviction that Israel may enforce “red lines” deep inside Syrian territory, barring the government from deploying significant forces south of Damascus. Domestic politics, the eighth and final driver, pushed in the same direction.

The massacres were, at first, a blow to Netanyahu. He cannot admit that he entered negotiations with Syria only because Trump coerced him into it, and so he embraced the track publicly. Three weeks before the massacres, he described the fruits of the 12-Day War against Iran: “This victory opens up an opportunity for a dramatic expansion of the peace agreements. We are working hard on this.” Three days later he used progress in the Syria talks as his latest excuse to skip his trial. Two weeks after that, the massacres made him look to the Israeli public like a dupe taken in by “the jihadist in a suit, al-Jolani,” as a-Sharaa’ is commonly called in Israel. For an Israeli leader, there is nothing worse than appearing naive and trusting toward a dangerous Islamist foe. Hence his insistence, in August 2025, at the home of Sheikh Muwafaq Tarif, spiritual leader of Israel’s Druze: “I’m not naive. I understand who we are dealing with and what we are dealing with. This is why we used force.”

In the longer run, though, Damascus’s own conduct turned the July 2025 massacres to Netanyahu’s advantage. According to nearly a dozen sources from and inside Suwayda, only a minority of the Druze population had previously supported the Israeli-backed militias gathered around Sheikh Hikmat al-Hijri, one of the governorate’s three supreme religious authorities and the most hardline among them. Several of their commanders are Assad-era war criminals, drug smugglers, and men who ran kidnapping-for-ransom rings, many of whose victims were the Druze of Suwayda themselves. Most of Suwaydas Druze therefore wanted integration into the Syrian state rather than rule by these gunmen. The massacres ended that possibility. As a human rights activist from Suwayda, himself sharply critical of the Druze militias, told me: “When you are facing an existential threat, you cannot be picky. These are the people who defended the [Druze] Mountain and continue to defend it.” The two other religious authorities, sheikhs Jarbou and Hinnawi, who had advocated integration with Damascus, fell silent. The largest militia, the Men of Dignity, which had signed an integration deal with the Syrian Army before the massacres, reversed course and fought the invading forces alongside al-Hijri’s men.

For the first time, the interests of the Israeli government, of all the Suwayda militias rather than only al-Hijri’s, and of the population converged on a single aim: keeping the Syrian government out of the governorate. Before the massacres, no more than a handful of individuals with tight ties to Israeli intelligence would raise an Israeli flag in Suwayda. After the slaughter, ordinary Druze hoisted dozens, in gratitude for the intervention that stopped the killing. At a moment when Netanyahu faces an International Criminal Court arrest warrant for war crimes and crimes against humanity, one that restricts not only the countries he can visit but the airspace he can cross, posters bearing his face went up in Suwayda.

Damascus’s policy since the massacres has deepened this alignment, serving Israel’s goal of a divided Syria and maintaining a friendly zone of influence. The government has offered no apology and made no serious effort to prosecute the state employees and tribal militiamen who committed the crimes. Furthermore, Damascus is utilising its control over salary payments for state employees inside Suwayda and administration of high-school graduation exams, to pressure Suwayda residents by conditioning the provision of these rights and services on accepting Damascus’ terms. According to independent mediators and a US diplomat who engaged with Damascus on the Druze file, the government believes time is on its side, that it can bring Suwayda to its knees and dictate terms, and it has therefore declined to negotiate with the governorate’s de facto leadership, an intransigence matched by al-Hijri, who has likewise refused dialogue.

A misreading of Israel’s motives is feeding Damascus’ intransigence. According to several Syrian government sources, Damascus believes it can reach a deal with Israel that would strip Suwayda of its protection, and then coerce the Druze, by the threat or use of force, into integration on Damascus’s terms. Because it sees Israel’s help to the Druze as purely instrumental, it assumes Israel would trade that protection away. But Israeli officials insist that they are committed to preventing Syrian government forces from ever again harming the Druze of Suwayda, even as it accepts that the governorate has no future outside administrative reintegration into Syria. Beyond that genuine commitment, any Israeli government would be gravely damaged at home by renewed violence against the Druze at the hands of a regime with which it had just signed a security pact. Should such violence recur, and especially if it is extensive, Israel will again resort to force. Damascus should accept that neither the current course of isolating Suwayda, nor a deal will Israel, will allow it to submit Suwayda.

If living under Damascus’ security control was acceptable to the Druze of Suwayda, the displaced Druze from towns ethnically cleansed during the massacres would have returned to them. They have not, despite the theft of aid intended for the IDPs by al-Hijri’s militias and deteriorating economic situation in Suwayda. Conversations with Druze indicate they view the government as a threat to their lives, and thus the preservation of life tops every other human need. An activist from one of the depopulated villages explained why the displaced are not returning to their villages: “We know what happens in the Alawite areas, the kidnapping of women, the killing of young men.” He then mentioned the February 2026 killing of five Druze farmers who went to work their fields in al-Mtouneh, one of the depopulated villages, by a General Security member, despite having received official approval to be present there. “How can people trust them and risk being killed or kidnapped?” he wondered. Rather than pursuing the current course, Damascus should turn to the slower work of reconciliation, rebuilding trust, and incorporating the governorate into the Syrian polity through negotiations.

A model already exists. The deal absorbing the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces and Hassakeh gave locals real authority over their own affairs and appointments. Rather than waiting for an arrangement with Israel that Damascus wrongly believes would let it impose a settlement on Suwayda, Damascus should extend the same offer, together with a formal expression of regret for the July 2025 massacres and a credible commitment to prosecute the war criminals in its own ranks. That would open a path to intra-Syrian healing. It would also be the sharpest blow available to Israel’s project of keeping Syria weak and divided.