For much of the international community, the jury is still out over Ahmed al-Sharaa’s near-transformation from jihadist revolutionary to Syria’s sober statesman.
Israel, by contrast, has long ago passed judgment on al-Sharaa and his administration, with Israeli ministers describing Syria’s interim president as “pure evil” and “an al-Qaeda terrorist.”
Since Assad’s regime fell, Israel has struck Syria an unprecedented number of times. Its troops have captured over 460 square kilometres of Syrian territory and on several occasions exchanged fire with and killed the territory’s residents.
Israel’s justifications for these actions are not credible. Its officials claimed that its expansion into Syria would be temporary. But Israel’s troops have pushed further into Syria, whilst Defence Minister Israel Katz later declared that the occupation would be “indefinite,” contradicting the earlier statements by his own officials.
In December 2024, Israel argued its airstrikes were necessary to eliminate the Assad regime’s conventional and chemical weapon stocks. Yet if this were true, why is Israel not only still striking Syria today, but escalating its attacks?
Equally implausible is Israel’s claim that its latest intervention in early May 2025 was to protect Syria’s Druze from a “pogrom” by al-Sharaa’s forces. What is true is that from 28 April, scores of Syrian Druze were killed. The attackers, though, were not the security forces, who later intervened to restore order, but primarily militias outside government control.
Despite Israel’s self-designated role as the protector of Syria’s Druze, most community leaders condemned the strikes. Druze leaders then reached a power-sharing agreement with Syria’s central government that restored a tentative calm.
But this did not stop Israel from launching the most extensive series of strikes this year so far. Gone were any pretences of targeting former regime installations or weapons caches. Israel’s attacks killed members of the security forces and deliberately struck just 500 metres from al-Sharaa’s presidential palace to “send a message” that it could “reach” Syria’s leader.
This episode reveals Israel’s true strategic logic in Syria. It sees al-Sharaa as a threat and is responding as it often does when it feels threatened, through military force and territorial conquest. This perception also informs its furtive objective: not to protect the Druze, but to exacerbate instability in Syria to keep the government and country as weak as possible.
On the face of it, none of this makes sense. Israel and the al-Sharaa government share common foes, most notably Hezbollah and Iran. There have been no attacks on Israel from Syria since Assad’s departure from the country. Al-Sharaa, in turn, has repeatedly stressed he does not seek conflict with Israel - words that Assad himself would rarely dare utter.
Why, then, is Israel determined to destabilise Syria? The roots of its policies there are little to do with what the al-Sharaa government does or does not believe and more a product of systemic changes in Israel’s foreign and security policy - its “grand strategy” - after 7 October.
Before the current regional conflict, Israel adopted a “better the devil you know” policy towards its neighbours. It was, in political science language, a “status quo power” that sought to freeze and perpetuate the Middle East’s balance of power.
Israel employed its qualitative military edge to “mow the lawn” and trim any threats to itself or the regional order down to size.
This was exceptionally bad if you were a Palestinian living under an indefinite Israeli military occupation. But it did mean that Israel was unlikely to start or escalate a regional war. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu regularly advocated regime change in Lebanon, the Gaza Strip and Syria. Israel’s actions, however, did not match his bellicose rhetoric; Israel even helped supply fuel, energy and money to Gaza to keep Hamas’s impoverished regime afloat.
There was an underlying strategic logic to Israel’s tolerance of threats on its borders. In leaked remarks from 2019, Netanyahu claimed that “anyone who opposed” Palestinian statehood should support the status quo, because it kept the West Bank and Gaza divided.
That same logic worked in Syria. Israel tolerated the Assad regime because it was too weak and too illegitimate to pose a threat. Assad’s callous massacres of his own citizens ensured that any external pressure on Israel to return the Golan Heights - Syrian territory it captured in the ‘Six Day War’ of June 1967 - dried up overnight.
Conversely, after Russia’s intervention in the Syrian Civil War, Israel deemed the now propped-up Assad regime strong enough to keep both countries’ mutual border clear of any threats, such as jihadists or other militias.
But 7 October engineered a fundamental change in Israel’s grand strategy. In response to its colossal intelligence failure, Israel adopted a more aggressive and high-risk approach that readily employed military force to escalate conflicts in order to reshape the regional balance of power.
This is as evident in Syria as it is on any of Israel’s borders. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich recently boasted that Israel will strike Syria until the country is “partitioned” and effectively ceases to exist.
In May 2025, an Israeli soldier serving in the Golan ominously warned that the distance between the Syrian city of Quneitra and an Israeli kibbutz “is about five minutes.” The Israeli media article that the quote appears in describes the Israel-Syria border as “an illusion of calm”.
The implication here is obvious: another 7 October awaits on Israel’s border with Syria. The only way to stop it is through a buffer zone (read: occupation) and pre-emptive military force.
This is the real reason why Israel is destabilising Syria. This is an outcome that is eminently achievable, given that Syria is already unstable. Yet it is also a poor one in that it is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Israel is repeatedly striking Syria and expanding its occupation because it fears al-Sharaa’s government and Turkey’s influence in the country. But it is these actions that are putting it on a collision course with both Turkey and the new Syrian government.
At the time of writing, Israel’s strikes have relented after talks with Turkey. Al-Sharaa even admitted to a UAE-sponsored backchannel between his government and Israel that has sought to simmer down tensions. Yet the backchannel has existed since 13 April and failed to stop Israel’s recent escalation.
The same is true of Israel’s “deconfliction” agreement with Turkey that both sides instituted in early April. Equally, given that all the conditions that drove Syria’s recent internecine conflict remain - poverty, sectarian tension and the lack of a strong central government - it may only be a matter of time before another outbreak of violence occurs.
If and when it does, Israel will likely use it as an excuse to intervene and create more chaos.
Rob Geist Pinfold is a Lecturer in Defence Studies (International Security) in the School of Security Studies at King's College London. His book, Understanding Territorial Withdrawal: Israeli Occupations and Exits, was published by Oxford University Press in 2023
Follow him on X: @DrRGeistPinfold