The fall of the Assad regime is sending shock waves throughout the Middle East.
Its implications for Israel are numerous and are still unfolding. One of the most significant of these, alongside the weakening of Iran’s “Axis of Resistance,” is found outside the Middle East, in the strategic relations between Israel and the United States. With an emphasis on the way the American administration views Israel’s conduct of war.
US President Joe Biden’s remarks, upon learning the Assad regime fell, constitute a turning point in this regard. So far, the focus of the administration’s statements – and not only due to concerns about the events’ impact on the presidential elections – has been the need to prevent regionalization of the war, the need for an immediate ceasefire, and concerns about humanitarian relief, alongside a measured call supporting Israel’s limited right to self-defense.
For the first time since the beginning of the war, Israel’s offensive action has been positively described by the president, and it has been credited with a decisive contribution, along with Ukraine, to what is emerging as the most significant tangible achievement in the Biden administration’s foreign policy – the fall of the brutal Assad regime.
A historic development that he described as a “fundamental act of justice. A moment of historic opportunity for the long-suffering people of Syria to build a better future for their proud country.”
For Israel, struggling for its standing among the family of democratic nations while its moral reputation is daily tarnished, being part of this hopeful and inspiring transformation is no small feat.
Israelis should be proud of their contribution to the fall of this abhorrent regime, mainly because they were not its main victims, as well as for being mentioned in the same breath as Ukraine, which was a symbol of the struggle for freedom of the free world, especially at the beginning of the war, when it fought the world’s largest nuclear power, using Molotov cocktails and Czech hedgehog.
Syria is a crossroads where these two countries met, whose self-defense wars the United States supports, whether resolutely as in Ukraine, or with reservations as in Israel. In the convergence of these conflict arenas, the US administration was able to reap the first fruits of its investment in both wars.
In addition, it was able to identify the commonality of the two wars, the moral logic of supporting its two allies, and to reposition Israel ideologically in the place it deserves to be, on the side of the forces fighting fundamentalism.
In describing the factors that led to the fall of the Syrian regime, Biden made a direct connection between his support for the struggle waged by Israel and Ukraine against Hezbollah, Iran, and Russia, Bashar al-Assad’s close allies, and this moment of the fall of his regime, and avoided mentioning Turkey, despite its significant role in the overthrow of the regime, due to its support for jihadist elements opposed to Assad, not by weakening his backers.
Israel's contribution to overthrowal of the Assad regime
In fact, Israel’s contribution to this was not limited to inflicting massive damage on the Syrian regime’s allies and strategically weakening their ability to come to its aid in suppressing the rebels.
The war that Israel waged against them drove a political-ideological wedge between Syria and its Shi’ite backers. Assad was indeed a link in the axis of resistance, but a passive one. Unlike Hezbollah, he did not choose on October 8 to join the conflict in “solidarity with the Palestinians,” to the dismay of those who called for “unity of fronts” against Israel.
He was afraid of the possibility that the war would spill over into Syria and that the fate of Damascus would be like that of Gaza or Beirut, and he was deterred from actively joining the “Axis of Resistance,” and his name was almost absent from the story of the war in the 14 months preceded his fall.
And this is another reason why he was abandoned by his allies, not only because they could not come to his aid, but also because they did not want to, due to the resentment they felt towards him.
This contrasts with Assad’s other ally, Russia, which did come to his aid, but its impact on the survival of his regime was minor, due to its military weakness. In other words, Israel’s indirect contribution to the fall of the regime is even greater than that of Ukraine.
IN ANY case, in Biden’s words about his unflagging support for Israel’s war, there is indeed a rewriting of history (the war already has one), or at least a belated recognition of the justice of Israel’s offensive approach – certainly in what is related to the blows it has delivered upon Hezbollah and Iran – but Israel should warmly embrace this change in approach.
The US is in effect retroactively adopting Israel’s approach, even though it opposed it in real time, partly due to a lack of imagination regarding possible developments of degrading and defeating Iran and its proxies and focusing only on the possibility of normalization with Saudi Arabia.
However, that is less important now, and what is important is that the paradigm shift may have positive implications for the next stages of the Middle East’s transformation.
The fact that the American administration takes credit for its active support for Israel’s fight against Iran and its proxies, whose weakening was a decisive factor in the fall of Assad, is evidence of the great importance it attributes to this event. The Obama-Biden administration invested enormous and prolonged efforts in overthrowing the Assad regime during the bloody peak years of the civil war.
Toward the end of his second term, president Barack Obama was tormented by his failure to bring relief to the humanitarian crisis, and admitted that the war haunted him relentlessly:
“I would say of all the things that have happened during the course of my presidency, the knowledge that you have hundreds of thousands of people who have been killed, millions who have been displaced, [makes me] ask myself what might I have done differently.”
Obama’s legacy was severely tarnished when he chose not to respond to the use of chemical weapons in 2013. In 2016, after years of thought and reflection on how past leaders dealt with dilemmas in their darkest hours, he still had not been able to find an answer to how he should have stopped the use of weapons of mass destruction:
“I do ask myself, ‘Was there something that we hadn’t thought of? Was there some move that is beyond what was being presented to me that maybe a Churchill could have seen, or an Eisenhower might have figured out?”
Ironically, it was a statesman whom Obama valued much less, his successor in the White House, who brought about a resolution to the issue, when a few months later, in April 2017, he sent the US Navy to launch a strike of 59 Tomahawk missiles against Syria in response to a chemical weapons attack that killed dozens of civilians. After this, the dictator did not use weapons of mass panic ever again.
In other words, Biden’s competition for credit is not only interstate with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu but mainly intra-party with Obama, to whom he owes his term, although he did not appreciate his VP, refused to endorse his candidacy in 2020 immediately and was apparently the architect of the rebellion against him that led his exit from the 2024 race – but it was Biden who overthrew Assad, and Obama was left with a “redline in the sand” that was savagely crossed.
However, optimism is accompanied by reservations. It is important to remember that despite this positive development, it is too early to rejoice completely, not only because it is difficult to imagine the establishment of a peaceful regime that respects human rights being restored in Syria shortly, or even a stable and sovereign regime, despite the moderate tone that characterizes the rebel leader, but mainly because Assad survived, and given asylum in Russia, a country that, despite the withdrawal of its army from Syria, may soon once again play a decisive role in determining its future.
The politicization and partisanship of all areas of the US government, including foreign policy, may also affect this issue. A hint of this could be found in President-elect Donald Trump’s remarks on the eve of the fall of the regime that the United States had nothing to do with this: “THIS IS NOT OUR FIGHT. DO NOT GET INVOLVED!”
Thus, despite Trump’s good and sincere desire to bring an end to the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, one of the negotiating cards may be Assad’s return to power, as part of a possible agreement with Russian President Vladimir Putin, like the unwritten one between the two leaders, which ended the war in Syria in 2017.
The writer is a PhD candidate in the Department of Middle East Studies at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and a member of the researcher’s forum of the Elyashar Center at the Ben-Zvi Institute.