by Maj. Gen. (res.) Gershon Hacohen
However misconceived, President Trump’s decision to withdraw US forces from Syria might have a silver lining for Israel. It forces Jerusalem to reevaluate the basic assumptions of the “peace process” with the Palestinians that has been actively and coercively led in recent decades by successive US administrations.
BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 1,051, December 30, 2018
The Oslo process took place under unique global
circumstances. The Soviet Union had just collapsed and the Cold War had
come to an abrupt end with the West’s clear victory. The US became “the
only remaining superpower” and the “End of History” loomed over the
horizon.
Since then, far-reaching changes have taken place.
Russia has reemerged as a major global force and has reassumed its
great-power status through direct military interventions in Georgia,
Ukraine, and Syria. The US, by contrast, has substantially reduced its
global involvement over the past decade and has lost its hegemonic
position in the Middle East. In this respect, President Trump’s recent
decision to withdraw US troops from Syria is but the continuation of the
disengagement policy begun by his immediate predecessor.
It is arguable, of course, that the withdrawal
casts serious doubt on the credibility of the US as a strategic ally.
Yet for all its attendant flaws, this step gives Israel a chance to
reconsider its longstanding belief in seemingly unshakable US backing.
For quite some time, the Jewish state has found
itself in a strategic quandary. On the one hand, the more omnipotent the
American image, the stronger Israel’s reputation as a major military
and political player. On the other hand, the widespread belief in
Washington’s ostensible ability to guarantee any Arab-Israeli peace
agreement has placed Jerusalem under constant pressure to take the risks
associated with withdrawal from areas vital to its national security.
Thus, for example, by way of paving the way for the IDF’s total
withdrawal from the West Bank as part of an Israeli-Palestinian peace
agreement, the Obama administration proposed a complex security package
that substituted the deployment of US forces in the Jordan Valley for
Israel’s longstanding demand for defensible borders (accepted by
Security Council Resolution 242 of November 1967).
But to what extent can foreign military forces
operating in a wholly alien environment provide an adequate substitute
for the IDF in enforcing the West Bank’s demilitarization? Judging by
the experience of international forces in the Middle East in recent
decades, the answer is far from satisfactory. The United Nations Interim
Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), deployed along the Israeli-Lebanese border
since 1978, for example, has miserably failed to prevent the
transformation of the area under its jurisdiction into an
unreconstructed terrorist entity – first by the PLO (until 1982), then
by successive Shiite terrorist organizations. As starkly demonstrated by
the recent exposure of Hezbollah’s attack tunnels penetrating Israel’s
territory, UNIFIL has totally failed to enforce UN Security Council
Resolution 1701 of August 11, 2006, at the end of the Second Lebanon
War, which stipulated the disbanding of all armed militias in Lebanon
and prohibited arms supplies to any group without government
authorization, as well as the presence of armed forces south of the
Litani River. Nor does the West’s experience in Afghanistan and Iraq
over the past decades inspire much confidence in the ability of external
powers to cope effectively with sustained subversive, terrorist, and
jihadist insurgencies.
These operational constraints notwithstanding, the
idea of international supervision suffers from an inherent
political-constitutional flaw, namely its total dependence on the
consent of the host government, which can demand the immediate
withdrawal of all foreign forces from its territory (as happened with
the removal of UN forces from Egypt in May 1967). To this must be added
the numerous instances where international supervisory and/or
intervention forces were withdrawn from countries they were supposed to
protect as a result of unilateral decisions by the sending governments:
from the evacuation of the American-French-British-Italian force from
Lebanon following Hezbollah’s bombing of its Beirut headquarters in
October 1983, to the hasty withdrawal of US forces from Iraq in 2011
with the attendant rise of ISIS and its takeover of large swaths of Iraq
and Syria, to President Trump’s latest decision.
According to Israeli security experts, the US
withdrawal has left Israel alone in the battle against Iran’s military
entrenchment in Syria. True enough, but this setback can potentially
entail an important silver lining. For the sooner Israel recognizes the
precariousness of a regional “Pax Americana,” the sooner it will grasp
the futility of “painful territorial concessions” in the West Bank, let
alone on the Golan Heights.
What Israel needs most from the US at the present
time is political and diplomatic backing in support of its vital
national interests, primarily 1) support for its continued hold of the
Golan as a vital condition for its defense; and 2) cessation of pressure
for further territorial withdrawals in the West Bank. With luck,
Trump’s Syria turnaround might catalyze a shift in US regional strategy
in this direction.
A shorter version of this article was published in Israel Hayom on December 28.
BESA Center Perspectives Papers are published through the generosity of the Greg Rosshandler Family
Maj. Gen. (res.) Gershon Hacohen is a senior research fellow at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies. He served in the IDF for forty-two years. He commanded troops in battles with Egypt and Syria. He was formerly a corps commander and commander of the IDF Military Colleges.
Source: https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/us-withdrawal-syria-blessing/
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