Beirut, Lebanon – Israel’s continuing attacks intend to keep its neighbours unstable, weak and fragmented, analysts say, and are contributing to the derailing of governing projects in Lebanon and Syria.
Conversations with experts, analysts, and diplomats reveal a belief that Israel wants to keep the two states weak and fractured, maintaining Israel as the strongest regional power.
“The Israelis believe that having weaker neighbors, as in states that aren’t really able to function, is beneficial for them because, in that context, they’re the strongest actor,” Elia Ayoub, writer, researcher, and founder of The Fire These Times podcast, told Al Jazeera.
Lebanon and Syria, the targets of Israel’s forays, have largely not retaliated against the Israelis, who outpower them militarily, financially and technologically.
‘Israel has no limits’
Lebanon and Syria are both in a fragile condition.
Lebanon has been in dire economic straits for at least six years, with bouts of political paralysis, and has just emerged from a prolonged Israeli assault that killed more than 4,000 people and destroyed swaths of the country.
That war, which also badly damaged the armed movemen tHezbollah, a major domestic actor in Lebanon since the 1980s, ostensibly ended with the November 27 ceasefire.
Syria, meanwhile, recently emerged from a nearly 14-year-long war that displaced millions and killed hundreds of thousands.
The transitional government is working to unify armed factions, stabilise the economy and gain international recognition.
Along with Lebanon, which is led by its first functioning cabinet in years, Syria has new leadership that wants to turn a page on recent history but, analysts told Al Jazeera, Israel seems intent on preventing that.
Israel has been violating the ceasefire with Lebanon since it was signed, justifying each breach by claiming it had hit “Hezbollah targets”.
The situation is particularly gruesome along Lebanon’s southern border, where some villages were obliterated during the war and others were completely razed since the ceasefire was agreed on.
“There are a lot of violations,” a member of Lebanon’s civil defense force, who asked to not be named, told Al Jazeera from the battered southern town of Meiss el-Jabal, adding, “There’s nothing we can do about it.”
Israel has also refused to fully withdraw from Lebanon, as the ceasefire stipulates, instead, leaving its forces in five points that experts say are likely being held for future negotiations over delineating the Lebanon-Israel border.
“The very clear path ahead is that Israel has no limits in its operations within Lebanon,” Mohanad Hage Ali, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut, told Al Jazeera.
“The only distinction made is in firepower and destruction, which is reserved for disproportionate responses to attacks on northern towns in Israel.”
Israel betting on Syria’s failure
In Syria’s chaos following the Assad regime’s overthrow on December 8, Israel launched attacks on military infrastructure around the country, focusing on the south and creeping its forces further into Syrian territory.
Syria’s transitional government has said it has no interest in regional war. Instead it has said that it has no intention to attack Israel and would respect the 1974 Agreement on Disengagement between the two countries.
But the Syrian government’s overtures fell on deaf ears, and the attacks have continued.
The Israeli government immediately revealed its position towards the new Syrian government following President Bashar al-Assad’s overthrow, calling it “a terror group from Idlib that took Damascus by force”. Israel has since repeatedly bombed Syria, and seized territory along the frontier between the occupied Golan Heights and the rest of Syria.
“Israel has made a bet that Syria will fail and will be fragmented,” Aron Lund, a fellow at Century International, told Al Jazeera.
“What they’re doing is trying to position themselves in that scenario, as a push to have sway over the south and keep it unthreatening to them and protect their now almost unlimited freedom of manoeuvre in their airspace.”
In March, Israeli air strikes on Syria increased and expanded to new areas, with ground incursions increasing by 30 percent, including into the southern areas of Deraa and al-Quneitra.
“The impact on civilians has been increasingly deadly,” Muaz al-Abdullah, ACLED’s Middle East Research manager, said in a statement.
“To defend themselves, residents in the village of Kuya, in Deraa, fired warning shots to deter Israeli forces from advancing into the village on March 25. The response by Israeli forces was an air strike and shelling of the village, and at least six civilians were killed.”
Imad al-Baysiri, from Deraa, told Al Jazeera about a similar incident in Nawa, 34km (21 miles) north of Deraa city.
The Israeli army “tried to advance to all the large squares in Nawa so some young men started running and the Israeli army started shooting at them”, he said, adding that locals confronted the army and forced them to retreat.
“They brought in helicopters and drones and for around four hours bombed the area,” he said. “Warplanes and helicopters also bombarded the city of Nawa with missiles from helicopters and drones.”
‘They know war, but not peace’
Analysts can see little that would stop Israel’s near-daily attacks on Lebanon and Syria.
“They listen to Americans, but only to a certain extent,” a Western diplomatic source, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Al Jazeera.
Hezbollah’s arsenal may once have acted as a deterrent, but the latest war has changed that calculus.
“All deterrence has been lost,” Hage Ali said.
Without any diplomatic or military pressure in its way, Israel seems set on disrupting any progress in Lebanon and Syria and keeping them mired in chaos.
“That’s how Israel views its best-case scenarios in the region,” Ayoub said. “It speaks to a deep cynicism at the heart of Israeli politics, and one that comes from decades-long militarism that has become a normalised part of day-to-day Israeli political culture.”
Many analysts have spoken of Israel needing a “forever war” in the region, something that it would be “quite comfortable” in, according to Natasha Hall, senior fellow at the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, speaking at the American University of Beirut on April 8.
Or, as the diplomatic source told Al Jazeera: “This [Israeli] government has shown that it knows how to make war. But it has yet to show that it knows how to make peace.”
