For weeks, Israel has engaged in back-channel talks over a diplomatic agreement with the Syrian government. Its strikes on Damascus this week highlight a lack of strategic clarity.
For weeks, Israel and Syria have engaged in secret back-channel talks, searching for a diplomatic resolution to decades of tensions, mainly over territory captured by Israel from Syria during the Arab-Israeli war of 1967.
The Israeli news media has been awash with optimistic predictions of a limited nonaggression pact, or even a landmark peace deal between the Jewish state and the former jihadists who seized control of Damascus last December.
Israel’s brazen strikes this week on Syrian government forces and infrastructure, including in the capital, Damascus, have highlighted the premature nature of such expectations in such a fluid geopolitical context. It has also exemplified how Israel, still traumatized by Hamas’s surprise attack in October 2023 but buoyed by its more recent successes against Hezbollah and Iran, is now more likely to use force to pre-emptively address perceived threats — even if it derails diplomatic efforts to achieve the same goal.
“It seems very discordant,” said Itamar Rabinovich, an Israeli historian of Syria who led Israel’s negotiations with Syria during the 1990s. “It runs against the effort to negotiate.”
The strikes reflect Israel’s post-2023 military doctrine, which combines, Mr. Rabinovich said, “a very strange mixture of paranoia following Oct. 7 and a sense of power following the success in Lebanon and in Iran. And the result is this preference for using force rather than diplomacy.”
Israel’s intervention in Syria, just as talks between the two were gaining momentum, prompted some exasperation in Washington, according to one senior U.S. official. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal assessments, said that Damascus had been trying de-escalate tensions but that Israel seemed intent on striking regardless. Marco Rubio, the U.S. secretary of state, described the Syria-Israel tensions as a “misunderstanding” and said that the United States had helped broker an agreement between all parties involved in the clashes.