With Israel entering into the fray, could Syria’s civil war transform into a regional crisis?

Israel’s direct engagement certainly marks a new development in Syria’s ongoing civil war, but the conflict was already regional in terms of its implications and scope.  Lebanon-based Hezbollah has stopped pretending it is not actively involved across the border in Syria. 

There has been a growing and more visible presence of Hezbollah fighters in the country, and just last week, Hezbollah’s leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah announced that Hezbollah would be offering any "...possible and necessary aid..." to the Syrian regime.  

As affirmed by Will Fulton in a recent interview on The Iran Primer, Iran is also known to have been sending in Islamic Revolution Guards Corp fighters  to aid the Bashar al-Assad regime.  Meanwhile, to varying degrees, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, and Jordan have been providing military aid to Syrian opposition forces.  So when Israel bombed what have been described as convoys suspected of moving Iranian weapons to Hezbollah in Lebanon last week, it became just one more actor to enter the fray.

Yet, Israel’s actions should not be construed as an attempt to influence the outcome of the Syrian civil war.  Israel has been ambivalent on the outcome of this conflict since its inception. 

How so?

Israel views this as a choice between the proverbial “devil you know….” and the uncertain day after scenario in Syria. 

Where Israel is not ambivalent is on its tolerance for Iran transferring advanced weapons to its proxy Hezbollah.   In that context, Israel’s motivation for striking these targets in Syria can be seen as defense and prevention.  Syria is an almost incidental bystander, with Iran and Hezbollah the primary target and audience.  Yet Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad has predictably seized the opportunity to compensate for lack of hard power by wielding propaganda. Al-Assad points to the strikes as “evidence” that the opposition is a tool of Israel who is cynically behind the fomenting of civil strife in the country.  His hope is to speak to those Syrians, and others in the Arab world, who have as yet refrained from throwing their support behind the opposition--fearful of what that opposition may come to represent-- and to tarnish his internal enemies with the all-powerful stigma of association with Israel.  Turkey strongly admonished Israel for the airstrikes for this reason yesterday on these grounds yesterday, blasting the country for providing the al-Assad regime with this perfect pretext.

What kind of military response, if any, should we expect from Israel’s neighbors?

A direct and large-scale attack is not likely.  Bashar al-Assad is too embattled and embroiled in trying to control in his country to risk entering a military entanglement with Israel.   
Hezbollah is also unlikely to risk a significant military confrontation with Israel at this point – as noted above, they too are immersed in fighting al-Assad’s battle against a Sunni take-over in Syria. 

The legacy and lesson of the 2006 confrontation with Israel also lingers.  That war may have resulted in effective stalemate, but the death and destruction it wrought in Lebanon has given Hezbollah pause ever since.  In a rare moment of candor in that war’s aftermath, Sheikh Nasrallah acknowledged that if he knew the consequences would be so dire, he might not have ordered the precipitating raid on Israel.    Hezbollah is, after all, Lebanon’s key political actor, and wary of the cost to its domestic legitimacy should the Lebanese see the group as dragging the war-battered country into a devastating military confrontation with Israel.   

Iran, appears to be playing a well-rehearsed game of fiery condemnation, with non-specific long-term threats and buttressed by deflection and passing of the buck to their Arab neighbors:  “Arab nations must stand by their brethren in Damascus,” as Iran’s  foreign minister said in the wake of the Israeli strikes. 

This cumulatively supports Major General Yair Golan’s statement  that there are no “winds of war” in northern Israel, but it does not rule out the most likely threat that Iran and Hezbollah could attack Israeli interests abroad.  This approach would echo terrorist operations such as the July 2012 Bulgaria bus bombing, which targeted and killed Israeli civilians.   While denied by Hezbollah, the bombing is widely reported to be the work of that group.

 The above, in the short term, adds up to the tense and bloody "business as usual":  a well-rehearsed dance between Israel, and Hezbollah and Iran, as the former seeks to minimally manage—and maximally neutralize--Iran's proximate strike capability embodied by Hezbollah, and as the latter two exert every effort to retain regional influence (to the concern of several Sunni Arab regional actors).  The turmoil inside Syria has raised the stakes on all sides given that country's role as Iranian ally and land conduit for supplies to Hezbollah.   

Israel's recent action by itself has not rendered the Syrian war a regional crisis.  Neither, it seems, does it augur an immediate-term regional conflagration.  Rather it has underscored a long-valid truth about Syria's bloody and brutal civil war that continues to claim and destroy the lives of Syrians at a ghastly magnitude:  the stakes and ramifications of its outcome resonate far beyond its borders.