Israel’s government is making it clear that it doesn’t have a dog in the fight

Friends of Israel are watching to see what happens when a foreign leader crosses what President Obama defined as a red line, as he did in Syria. If the answer is nothing, they’ll have a better grasp of what they can expect out of the administration on Iran. But there should be no doubt about who set this red line about what is going on in Damascus. It wasn’t Israel, Netanyahu or the pro-Israel community in the United States.

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary/Contentions..
29 April '13..

For those who like to blame Israel for every aspect of American involvement in the Middle East, the debate about Syria must be frustrating. Despite being next door to the chaos in Syria, Israel’s government is making it clear that it doesn’t have a dog in the fight over whether the United States ought to intervene in some manner in the civil war tearing that country apart. Today at a New York conference sponsored by the Jerusalem Post, a member of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s Cabinet stated the obvious: It’s not Israel that’s pushing the United States to take action on Syria. Yuval Steinetz, who holds the odd-sounding title of minister of strategic and intelligence affairs and international relations told an audience:

We never asked, nor did we encourage, the United States to take military action in Syria. And we are not making any comparison or linkage with Iran, which is a completely different matter.

Israel’s position on Syria is, if anything, even more complicated than America’s. Their main interest is in keeping the border with a state that is still technically at war with them quiet. Though Bashar Assad was a butcher whose regime has slaughtered tens of thousands of his own people just like his father Hafez was before him, Israel has stayed aloof from the conflict in that country. Assuming Bashar does actually fall some day, most Israelis are far from confident that the next Syrian government will be any less hostile than that of Assad. Indeed, with al-Qaeda-allied elements, it may be even worse.

Birth of a Myth: Winning Over Syria's Dictator with High-Tech?

Barry Rubin
The Rubin Report
17 June '10


The dispatch of an official U.S. high-tech delegation to offer the Syrian dictatorship more Internet access and other gizmos--in exchange for him abandoning his alliance with Iran, Hamas, Hizballah, and now even Turkey!--reminds me of a little personal experience which shows a lot about Western naivete and how the media works nowadays.

After Bashar al-Assad became president of Syria, following his father's death, there was a huge amount about how he was a devotee of Internet and a real kind of twenty-first century "hip" guy when it came to hi-tech. The main, in fact the only, evidence of this was that he was head of the Syria Internet Society.

Being a bit of a researcher, I took 30 seconds and went to the site of the Syria Internet Society. Within another 30 seconds I noticed what was really going on. Yes, Bashar was the head of the Society, but the previous head had been his older brother, Basil.

Everyone knows that Basil was supposed to be the successor to their father, Hafiz, and that Basil was a real thug. But when he wrapped his sports car around a bridge pillar on the airport road near Damascus and was killed, Bashar inherited the family business. No one ever would have thought that Basil was a big Internet surfer. So that's the real story: Bashar was head of the Society not because he loved computers but because he was the dictator-in-training.

So here's the basis for the idea that Bashar is a liberal, high-tech loving guy: He became head of the Society because he was son of the dictator and the successor, not because he was an Internet surfing dude. I wrote about this in my book and elsewhere but, to my best knowledge, no one else has ever done this simple task or quoted my points on this matter.

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America’s “big game”

Tony Badran
NOW Lebanon
27 April '10

During last week’s stormy hearing on Syria in the US House Subcommittee on the Middle East and South Asia, the Obama administration for the first time laid out its Syria policy. Unfortunately, the policy is based on a flawed, old premise that brings Washington awfully close to accepting a line the Syrians perpetually seek to sell – the politics of grievance. Distressingly, the Americans are signaling that they're interested shoppers.

Although the basic components of US policy had been hinted at earlier, this was the first time that an official openly laid out what the administration’s end game is. Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Jeffrey Feltman, who was the official testifying before the subcommittee, outlined the administration’s conceptual framework as follows: The US is working to mitigate Iran’s regional influence, which Syria facilitates. But Syria is not Iran, and there’s a basic policy difference between them: Unlike Iran, Syria has an interest in negotiating a peace agreement with Israel. Therefore, the peace process is, in Feltman’s words, the “big game”. The administration believes that a peace deal between Damascus and Jerusalem would cure the Syria problem.

If this sounds like a familiar tune from the 1990s, that’s because in the end it's nothing but a reprise of the view that holds the conflict with Israel as the engine driving all regional dynamics and regime behavior. It’s the politics of grievance.

This line of thinking plays right into the Syrians’ hands, affording them a pass for their actions and duplicity pending the conclusion of a peace deal that may not materialize for years, if ever.

Witness, for example, this statement by Feltman: “Syria's relationship with Hezbollah and the Palestinian terrorist groups is unlikely to change absent a Middle East peace agreement.” The logic of this statement is but one step removed from justifying the arming of Hezbollah. It’s the logic that holds Syrian policy to be reactive and grievance-based. But the Obama administration’s “big game” is nothing if not a cocktail of this grievance logic and the infamous concept of “linkage”.

This toxic viewpoint was echoed by National Security Advisor Jim Jones at a recent event at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy: “One of the ways that Iran exerts influence in the Middle East is by exploiting the ongoing Arab-Israeli conflict… Advancing this peace would... help prevent Iran from cynically shifting attention away from its failures to meet its obligations.”

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