Testing Israel’s Limits

US Special Envoy Tom Barrack, Israeli Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer, and Syrian Foreign Minister Assad Al-Shaibani. Credit: Geo War Scope

US-mediated talks between Israel and Syria serve as a bellwether for the extent to which Israel can reshape the Middle East and impose its will on the region. They also are likely to indicate the degree to which US and Israeli interests diverge in Syria.

Syrian Foreign Minister Assad al-Shaibani and Israeli Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer, a confidante of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, focussed this week on security arrangements in southern Syria in a round of talks in Paris chaired by Tom Barrack, the US Ambassador to Turkey and the Trump administration's Syria envoy.

The talks were the highest-level meeting between officials of the two countries in 25 years and the first since the latest clashes in the southern Syrian city of As-Suwayda between the country’s Druze minority, Bedouin militias, and Syrian security forces, and Israel’s bombing of Syrian military targets, including the defence ministry, in the capital Damascus.

The London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights put the clashes’ death toll at 1,399 people, 196 of whom were summarily executed.

Mr. Netanyahu dispatched Mr. Dermer to Paris following several meetings in Azerbaijan between Mr. Al-Shaibani and the prime minister’s national security advisor, Tzachi Hangebi, that fuelled Israeli and US hopes that security arrangements could be a first step toward Syrian recognition of Israel.

The Paris talks are likely to establish whether Israel can dictate to President Ahmed al-Sharaa where in Syria his military can operate and the degree to which Israel can successfully project itself as the protector of Syrian minorities, such as the Druze, a secretive monotheistic group based In Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Israel, and the Kurds in the north.