Syria has always been an Israeli obsession. Now it has unexpectedly given Netanyahu his coveted image of victory | Aluf Benn

Wars are remembered by their iconic images, and finding a triumphal photograph has been a key goal for belligerents striving to leave their mark on history. On 8 December, after fighting ceaselessly for 14 months, Israel finally got its image of victory. It shows three soldiers in full combat gear posing with Israel’s Star of David-and-stripes flag on a mountaintop against the cloudy sky. The IDF’s special forces captured the highest peak of Mount Hermon in Syria, explained the caption, overlooking Damascus and the Golan Heights.

Mere hours after the flight of Syria’s deposed despot, Bashar al-Assad, Israel launched a quick attack to capture the formerly demilitarised zone across the disengagement line that has marked the de facto Israel-Syrian border since 1974, pushing its conquest up to the Hermon peak. The land grab, which met no resistance, was coupled with a massive bombing campaign to destroy the dangerous assets left behind by the ousted regime’s military: jet fighters and helicopters, warships, missile factories and storage facilities, air defence systems, research and development laboratories. All were targeted lest they fall into enemy hands.

Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who never misses a publicity stunt, flew to the border on 8 December to declare the “collapse” of the 1974 disengagement agreement, blaming the defecting Syrian soldiers abandoning their positions. The next morning he was scheduled to take the stand in his ongoing corruption trial. Now he could sugarcoat the courtroom appearance with his typical bravado: “I said we would change the Middle East and we are indeed doing so. Syria is not the same Syria. Lebanon is not the same Lebanon. Gaza is not the same Gaza. And the head of the axis, Iran, is not the same Iran,” he declared in a statement. His arch-nemesis Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, supported Netanyahu’s claims, blaming the United States, “the Zionist regime” and “a neighbouring country” (Turkey) for the toppling of Assad, the Islamic Republic’s erstwhile ally.

Then on Tuesday, a body armour-clad Netanyahu concluded his triumph by visiting the newly occupied peak (and exacting a day off from court), pledging from the mount to hold the territory “until a new arrangement, determined by Israel, could be found”, or in other words for ever. The symbolic subtext could not be missed: Netanyahu is the last man standing. Shrugging off his responsibility for Israel’s worst-ever calamity, the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023, manoeuvring his political enemies at home and adversaries abroad, and presiding over the successful military counteroffensive against Hamas in Gaza and, most significantly, against Hezbollah in Lebanon, the prime minister has proved himself to be the master of job survival.

But the peak performance was not celebrated only by diehard Bibists. The New York Times’s top Middle East watcher, Thomas Friedman, hardly a Netanyahu cheerleader, equated the recent Israeli achievements against Iran and its proxies to its 1967 blitzkrieg victory. Retired general Amos Yadlin, a former pilot and military intelligence chief, co-authored a Foreign Affairs article titled An Israeli order in the Middle East. Both have captured the uplifted mood of victory among the country’s Jewish majority. This feeling has permeated Israeli society since the assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in September, followed by the group conceding defeat by accepting a ceasefire and ditching the battered Palestinians in Gaza. The ensuing fall of Assad and footage of newly acquired territory and charred Syrian aircraft has only lifted the national morale higher.

Syria has always held a special place in Israel’s national mythology as an unrelenting rival, from the 1948 war of independence through endless wars and skirmishes over the years (although for a while it was a coveted peace partner). Bashar’s father, Hafez al-Assad, sought “strategic parity” with Israel’s nuclear deterrent by acquiring chemical weapons; his son upped the ante and secretly built a nuclear reactor with North Korean help, which was disclosed and destroyed by Israel in 2007. Both negotiated a land-for-peace deal over the Golan Heights that never matured. When Syria imploded under the Arab spring rebellion, Israel launched an airstrike campaign against Iran’s military buildup there, but the Golan border was kept quiet and stable – even after President Donald Trump recognised Israel’s annexation of the territory in 2019.

Now Trump is coming back with a vengeance – and so disregarding international law, and its opposition to acquiring territory by force, couldn’t be easier for Israel. Netanyahu described the Syrian upheaval as the most important development in the region “since the Sykes-Picot agreement” of 1916 between colonialist Britain and France, which designated spheres of influence in the event of the Ottoman empire being partitioned, thereby hinting at a new era of redrawing of borders. The Israeli punditry is accordingly excited over the new possibilities opened in Syria: carving up its territory, moving the border eastward, sponsoring its Druze and Kurdish minorities as Israeli proxies. Meanwhile, the IDF is keeping a low profile in its new positions in Syria, liaising with local villagers and confiscating arms while its soldiers are grabbing photos of the Assads from deserted Syrian positions as booty souvenirs.

At the height of Syria’s civil war in the previous decade, Israel backed rebels who are now part of the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) alliance that kicked out Assad and took charge in Damascus. Its leader, Ahmed al-Sharaa (AKA Abu Mohammed al-Julani), has raised only mild protest against the Israeli offensive in Syria, but the rightwingers in Jerusalem would not forgive him for his past association with al-Qaida. Defence minister Israel Katz told a Knesset committee that “we need to prevent a murderous regime with Nazi ideology from growing on our doorstep. Assad, al-Julani, Erdoğan – it’s all the same thing.” In other words, Netanyahu and his political allies are sensing an opportunity to promote their Greater Israel ideology and will not climb down from the Hermon peak.

Alas, images of victory never tell the entire story. As the US theorist Susan Sontag wrote in her farewell book, Regarding the Pain of Others: “To photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude.” The magic of the Israeli Iwo Jima copycat lies in its sterility. There was no fighting on the Syrian front, hence no IDF casualties. Nor was there mass death, devastation and starvation on the other side, as in Gaza, where Israel retaliated fiercely for the 7 October massacre of its citizens and service people. Faced with pictures and testimonies from Gaza, Israelis tend to look the other way. They prefer the beautiful skies over the slopes, filling their lungs once again with the long-lost air of superiority and self-righteousness.

• Aluf Benn is the editor-in-chief of Haaretz

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