Israel's Love Affair with Syrian Jihadis

For years, Zionists have backed the most radical elements in Syria

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Zionist apologists commonly present support for Israel as a necessary extension of opposition to radical Islam and the threat of Jihadi terrorism. “Support us fighting them here, so you don’t have to fight them there” is a common plea to the West from Zionist spokespeople within Israel. Yet when it comes to the Syrian Civil War, the conflict which sparked the major refugee crisis responsible for flooding Europe with millions of Muslims, Israel has been firmly on the side of Jihad, even and most particularly Al-Qaeda.

Israeli support for Jihadis in Syria first became known in the West when reports circulated of Israel providing medical care to anti-Assad fighters on its contested border with Syria.

Israel portrayed this as a principled humanitarian response, but in 2015, the Wall Street Journal reported that only a third of those treated by Israel were women and children. Electronic Intifada:

The rest have been fighters who Israeli officials admit are not screened and likely belong to al-Nusra.

Once it became undeniable, Israel confessed it was treating fighters, but claimed that they were moderates.

But after al-Nusra captured and ejected UN peacekeepers in the Golan Heights last August, there was no longer any doubt that al-Nusra was the dominant force among opposition fighters in the area.

Efraim Halevy, a former head of Mossad, defended the aid on humanitarian grounds, but confirmed there was a “tactical consideration”. In a 2016 interview, Halevy dismissed the idea that Israel would suffer any blowback from supporting Al-Nusra, the Syrian offshoot of Al-Qaeda. While rejecting the idea Israel might also offer medical assistance to Hezbollah fighters on similar humanitarian grounds, he explained that the difference between Hezbollah and Al Nusra Front was that Israel was “not specifically targeted by Al-Qaeda”.

In 2019, an outgoing Israeli army commander Gadi Eisenkot confirmed suspicions that as well as medical aid, Israel had been providing lethal material support for Syrian Jihadists. Eisenkot said that Israel had been years providing light arms weapons to rebel groups along the Syrian/Israeli border. Eisenkot also acknowledged that “we carried out thousands of attacks [in recent years] without taking responsibility and without asking for credit.”

Israeli support for these groups actually went well beyond the “light arms” Eisenkot acknowledged. In September 2018, Foreign Policy magazine reported that Israel had funded “at least 12 rebel groups in southern Syria”, based on reports from “more than two dozen commanders and rank-and-file members of these groups.” The transfers included:

Assault rifles, machine guns, mortar launchers and transport vehicles. Israeli security agencies delivered the weapons through three gates connecting the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights to Syria—the same crossings Israel used to deliver humanitarian aid to residents of southern Syria suffering from years of civil war.

Israel also provided salaries to rebel fighters, paying each one about $75 a month, and supplied additional money the groups used to buy arms on the Syrian black market, according to the rebels and local journalists.

Israel also carried out numerous airstrikes in the region which exclusively benefited groups like Al-Nusra front. In one incident, Israel responded to some rebel group firing rockets into the occupied Golan Heights by launching airstrikes on Syrian army artillery positions.

In a year and a half period from 2017 to 2018, Israel carried out over 200 airstrikes in Syria, mostly directed at Iranian forces assisting the Syrian army. In a 2015 interview, Bashar al-Assad responded to the question of Israel’s agenda in Syria:

They are supporting the rebels in Syria. It’s very clear. Because whenever we make advances in some place, they make an attack in order to undermine the army. It’s very clear. That’s why some in Syria joke: “How can you say that al-Qaeda doesn’t have an air force? They have the Israeli air force.”

As far back as 2015, senior Israeli military figures had justified Israeli support for Al-Nusra front in Western media. Michael Herzog, a former chief of staff for Israel’s defense minister, told The Wall Street Journal

Nusra is a unique version of al-Qaida. They manage to cooperate with non-Islamist and non-jihadi organizations in one coalition … They are totally focused on the war in Syria and aren’t focused on us. But when Hizballah and Iran and others are pushing south, they are very much focused on us.

The same article quotes Amos Yaldin, a retired Israeli general, who reasoned that:

There is no doubt that Hizballah and Iran are the major threat to Israel, much more than the radical Sunni Islamists, who are also an enemy…Those Sunni elements who control some two-thirds to 90 percent of the border on the Golan aren’t attacking Israel. This gives you some basis to think that they understand who is their real enemy — maybe it isn’t Israel.

Also in 2015, the Pentagon acknowledged that the “moderate rebels” who were being armed and trained by the United States and its allies were passing their equipment to Nusra Front.

Although the US publicly claimed it did not intentionally support Islamists like Al-Qaeda and ISIS in Syria, leaked internal documents have repeatedly shown that US officials were aware that these groups dominated the Syrian opposition and were often the chief beneficiaries of their aid. For example, a declassified 2012 memo from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) revealed that, from the beginning of the Syrian Civil War, the US believed that “The Salafist, the Muslim Brotherhood, and AQI are the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria”. AQI being a reference to Al-Qaeda in Iraq, which later evolved into ISIS.

The DIA also foecasted “the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist principality in Eastern Syria (Hasaka and Der Zor), and this is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want, in order to isolate the Syrian regime”.

This is exactly what happened when the region was overrun by ISIS. The DIA even pointed to Mosul, the future capital of the Islamic State and base of its expansion, as a prime potential location for this “Salafist principality”.

Wikileaks revealed that current US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan told Hillary Clinton in 2012 that “AQ (Al-Qaeda) is on our side.”

When ISIS did emerge, many voices within Israel saw it as a positive. A 2016 paper by an Israeli strategic think-tank that contracts for NATO and the Israeli government argued against destroying the Islamic state, since "The continuing existence of IS serves a strategic purpose", and could be "a useful tool in undermining" Israel’s enemies of Hezbollah, Iran, Syria and Russia.

Arguing against the perspective that a defeat of ISIS would help stabilise the Middle-East, the paper noted that:

Stability is not a value in and of itself. It is desirable only if it serves our interests. The defeat of IS would encourage Iranian hegemony in the region, buttress Russia’s role, and prolong Assad’s tyranny.

Other senior Israeli figures also saw an opportunity in the growth of ISIS. Naftali Bennett, now a former Prime Minister of Israel, told the annual Herzliya conference — a "closed-door annual gathering of the country's very top political, security, intelligence, and business elite" — that the emergence of ISIS would offer Israel an opportunity to legitimise its annexation of the Golan Heights. Calling for a quintupling of the Jewish occupation population to 100,000 in a 5 year period, Bennett argued the chaos in Syria now made Israel’s claim more appealing than ever to the international community:

Who do they want us to give the Golan to? To Assad? Today, it's clear that if we listened to the world we would give up the Golan and ISIS would be swimming in the Sea of Galilee. Enough with the hypocrisy.

By supporting Jihadis in Syria, Israel fulfilled multiple strategic goals: weakening Iranian and Russian influence in the region, dragging its arch-enemy Hezbollah into a costly fight, and solidifying its hold on the occupied Golan Heights from the claims of the Syrian regime.

The Jihadis who love Jews

In late November 2024, the world was shocked with the news that rebel forces in Syria had seized Syria’s second city of Aleppo. This came just days after the announcement of a ceasefire between Israel and Assad ally Hezbollah, significantly weakened by a year of conflict with Israel since Israel began it’s war on Gaza.

This latest advance was led by the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which has maintained control of the north-western province of Idlib. HTS grew out of a merger of multiple radical Islamist groups in Syria, most notably the Al-Nusra Front. Its leader Abu Mohammad al-Julani, is previously a member of Al-Qaeda, ISIS and Al-Nusra, as well as other Jihadi groups, and fought in both the Iraqi insurgency and Syrian Civil War, leading to the US State Department declaring him a "Specially Designated Global Terrorist" and placing a $10 million bounty on information leading to his capture.

Now though, “Jolani” is providing thoughtful interviews to CNN, where he promises Syria under HTS rule will be a pluralist country, ready to join the civilised world. As well as working on working on their PR with the liberal-democratic West, this new wave of Jihadis have also been keen to improve their relations with Israel.

Notably, the one time ISIS actually attacked Israeli forces — in a brief exchange of fire in the Golan Heights — it promptly issued an apology.

Israel’s state media outlet Kan interviewed some of the Jihadis leading today’s advance, who were surprisingly grateful to the Zionist state. Those interviewed expressed gratitude for Israeli strikes on Hezbollah and weapons transfers within Syria “which have allowed us to return and free the lands and the country”.

Times of Israel:

“They accuse us of cooperating with you because we were quite happy when you attacked Hezbollah, really happy, and we’re glad that you won,” the source said.

Both said the rebels had no issue with Israel. “We love Israel and we were never its enemies,” the man from the Idlib area said. “[Israel] isn’t hostile to those who are not hostile toward it. We don’t hate you, we love you very much.”

Given that Israel is carrying out a genocide on their Muslim brothers and sisters in Gaza, you might think militant Muslims in Syria wouldn’t be the biggest fan of the Jewish state. Yet Israeli media has ran multiple pieces on the pro-Israel sympathies of the chief threats to Assad’s rule. A commander for the US-backed Free Syrian Army assured Israel’s Channel 12 News that:

We are open to friendship with everyone in the region – including Israel. We don’t have enemies other than the Assad regime, Hezbollah and Iran. What Israel did against Hezbollah in Lebanon helped us a great deal. Now we are taking care of the rest.

With Assad’s forces seemingly being overrun, the future of Syria is uncertain. What seems assured is a strengthening of Israel’s position. Assad was a key ally of Iran, whose rule in Syria allowed them access to the “resistance highway” of Tehran-Beirut, a Shia crescent extending across the Middle East right up to Israel’s door. If it comes to pass, Assad’s fall will follow a year of war on Hezbollah and Hamas that has significantly debilitated each. Who or what will replace Assad, and whether Syria as an entity will even survive the transition or be balkanised or collapse into years of sectarian conflict remains to be seen. But Israeli leaders are confident that what follows will not offer the same resistance to its hegemony that an Iran-aligned Syria did.

When Israeli support for Jihadist groups was first reported, it sounded too crazy to be true, the kind of thing one might hear from an Infowars host sensationalising the complicated dynamics of the region. We now know it was not just real, but far greater extent than suspected. As its long time enemy Bashar al-Assad now seemingly faces his end, and Iran’s axis of resistance loses a crucial link in its chain, the cold logic of Israel’s Jihad-friendly military leadership and their cousins in the Pentagon appears to have borne fruit.