Israel has invaded Syria - with Western complicity

This is a blatant land grab - and an attempt to hobble any new Syrian government - by an Israeli state cheered on by Western politicians and media.

Israel has invaded Syria, in a blatant act of illegal aggression. Why isn’t this fact being plastered all over the Western media? Why isn’t this fact being condemned by Western politicians?

Well, the answer to that speaks for itself - Israel is treated as being above the law, as having total impunity, as being able to behave exactly as it so wishes, invading, occupying, annexing, colonising.

It is not just invading Syria, it is pummelling Syria with bombs in an attempt to destroy the potential military capacity of any new Syrian state, clearly treating any new post-Assad government as inevitably hostile to Israeli interests.

It is reported that Israeli tanks are up to 16 miles from the Syrian capital, Damascus, and have certainly officially gone six miles beyond the Golan Heights an a so-called buffer zone patrolled by the United Nations.

The claim made by Israel is that a disengagement agreement signed between the Assad regime and the Israeli state in 1974 has now collapsed - an agreement, it should be noted, that the Syrian regime has refused to challenge in that half a century.

That’s despite the fact the the Golan Heights are annexed Syrian land, illegally occupied by the Israeli state - land which belongs to the Syrian people, and which any new Syrian government should demand is returned to Syria.

What Israel is doing is invading Syria for the transparent reason of annexing yet more land. This is their habit - they claim they need a buffer zone, then that buffer zone becomes permanently occupied land they settle, then they demand yet a further buffer zone to protect what they already stole, and guess what then happens to that buffer zone.

You guessed it, the Israeli steals it - occupies it, de facto annexes it, and colonises it.

Discussing the status of the Golan Heights here is merely restating what international law says, which the British state is supposed to abide by. So let’s listen to Pat McFadden, government minister and one of the key players in the Starmer government.

So what this key British minister is doing - describing this invasion as self-defence to protect the Golan Heights - is thumbing his nose up at international law, supporting Israel’s right to flout international law, to cement its illegal grip over occupied land. Even despite the International Criminal Court leaving Benjamin Netanyahu a wanted man for war crimes and crimes against humanity, the British government still frames Israel’s aggression as self-defence.

What the Israeli state says is doubly legal illiterate. Just because the Syrian government has changed, doesn’t mean the 1974 agreement doesn’t still apply. The Syrian state, the Syrian nation still exists. This is a land grab.

Indeed just last month Israel’s finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, called for Israel’s borders to be redrawn all the way to Damascus. He said: "It is written that the future of Jerusalem is to expand to Damascus”.

As Sina Toosi, research associate at the National Iranian American Council and senior fellow at the Centre for International Policy puts it:

“Israel is systematically destroying what remains of Syria’s military—naval bases, warehouses, aircraft—leaving it defenseless for a generation. It’s seized 235 sq km of Syrian land (60% of Gaza!), yet the world & Syria’s new rulers are silent.A bid for total regional hegemony.”

Israel is battering Syria with air strikes. According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, they have hit 322 targets since the Assad regime fell on Sunday, including “warehouses, aircraft squadrons, radars, military signal stations, and numerous weapons and ammunition depots”

Footage of these air strikes abound on social media, and a map shows entirely unprovoked aggression by the Israeli state against Syria, showing where bombs are being dropped across what remains a sovereign nation (via Nassreddin2002)

We need to be listening to Syrian voices right now. An important such voice is Omar Alshogre: he’s a 29 year old Syrian refugee, director for detainee affairs the Syrian Emergency Task Force, who was first arrested by the Assad regime at an anti-government protest when he was just 15, and then arrested 7 times, spending 3 years in detention, suffering daily torture including electric shocks, beatings with cables, his finger nails removed, while both of his cousins were killed by the regime.

He said:

The international community should celebrate the fall of Assad regime & simultaneously speak up against the Israeli occupation and expansion in Syria.

Syrian weapons are the property of the Syrian people. No one has the “right” to destroy them but the Syrian people themselves.

As the journalist Murtaza Hussain at the brilliant Drop Site News puts it in response:

Israel appears to have deemed the new regime in Syria as hostile and is eliminating its weapons preemptively in order to zero out even hypothetical capacity to threaten it. That said obviously Syria will rearm and no attempt was made by Israel to seek pragmatic relationship.

Here’s a critical point. Israel has repeatedly bombed Syria under Assad, over and over again in fact, and the Assad regime did not lift a finger in response, despite some trying to present it as an anti-imperialist champion of the Palestinian people.

To quote the Israeli newspaper Haaretz:

Not only did Syria not play an active role in the "resistance front," but Assad prevented pro-Iranian militias from attacking Israel from its territory and ignored Israel's airstrikes on Iranian targets in Syria. This past April, Mohammad Reza Zahedi, the commander of the Quds force in Syria and Lebanon, was assassinated in Damascus.

That’s on top of course of the Syrian regime slaughtering and imprisoning thousands of Palestinians, according to the Action Group for Palestinians of Syria, who now report the release of multiple Palestinian refugees imprisoned by Syria’s regime

There was a revealing interview a few days ago with Eliyahu Yosian, a former member of Israeli unit 8200 military intelligence. Earlier in the year he did an interview on Israeli television in which he declared “Gaza is the enemy”, declared Israel needed to “level the ground”, “kill the largest number possible”, because “the woman there is an enemy, the baby there is an enemy and the first grader is an enemy, and the Hamas militant is an enemy, and the pregnant woman is an enemy”, going on to say that “we say a boy carrying chocolate in his band, yet this same boy will learn how to use a Kalashnikov in the first grade, he is a terrorist, although he is a boy.”

Well nice to know what we’re dealing with. Here’s what he said about Syria just before Assad’s fall.

That was clearly the consensus view for the Israeli state, to keep Assad in power:

“Because he is a weak enemy and a weak enemy serves my interests, no one can guarantee who will come after Assad’s fall, it could be an enemy more defiant than the Iranian regime.”

So he says:

“Now I know I have a weak assad whom i can attack in Syria every so often in coordination with Russia and without any threat.”

Indeed Israel’s defence minister Israel Katz has responded to the creation of a caretaker government in Syria by declaring:

“We will not allow an extremist Islamic terrorist entity to operate against Israel from beyond its borders.”

Now the Turkish foreign minister has released a statement condemning Israel’s invasion, but Turkey keeps invading Syria as well, the Turkish regime is the enemy of the Kurdish people, who it has waged a violent war against to suppress their legitimate right to national self determination.

Indeed it is waging war against the Kurdish area of Syria, notably Kobani, where the Kurds drove back the advance of ISIS years ago. And it has of course nurtured and supported Islamist militants who cannot be trusted with Syria’s future

Welcoming the downfall of a brutal dictatorship which is clearly despised by its people, who it has waged a merciless war against - levelling entire towns and cities in the process - does not mean wanting Syria handed to these militants.

The Syrian have the right to national self-determination and freedom, not to be a battleground for foreign powers - yes, that includes Russia and Iran, and it includes Israel, Turkey and the United States and its allies.

The Assad regime was no friend of the Palestinian people, and the polling of the Palestinian people by Palestinian organisations finds that Palestinians hate Assad more than almost any other foreign leader.

But Israel is seeking to neutralise the potential threat of a new Syrian government and to initiate yet another land grab.

All facilitated again by our Western media and our Western politicians. We have to hold them to account.