Assad Golan Loss Maps Bleak Syrian Future, Israel’s Zisser Says

By Jonathan Ferziger

Syrian President Bashar Assad’s abandonment of the Golan Heights to rebels offers a preview of how dueling warlords may carve up the country as his power ebbs, a career Assad-watcher in Israel says.
While the Al-Nusra Front’s gains against the Syrian army will probably be followed eventually by attacks on Israel, the al-Qaeda-linked group doesn’t pose an “existential threat” to the Jewish state, Eyal Zisser, a Tel Aviv University political scientist, said in an interview.
“For now Al-Nusra is focusing on Bashar” and ’’clearly they don’t want two fronts,’’ said Zisser, 54, author of “Commanding Syria: Bashar al-Assad and the First Years in Power,” published in 2006. “The moment will come that they will
say Israel is part of our agenda. That moment will come in a year, in a week, in months.”
Islamic State militants will probably make further gains in eastern Syria, with Assad retaining control of Damascus, Aleppo and other cities, he said.
Al-Nusra routed Syrian troops in August to capture the Golan’s Quneitra border station, in the process taking United Nations peacekeepers hostage. Israel captured the strategic plateau from Syria in the 1967 Middle East War and annexed it in a step that drew international condemnation and UN demands that the territory be returned.

‘No Reserves’

Tension between Syria and Israel hasn’t boiled over into fighting since the 1973 war, and the change at Quneitra threatens a new era of hostility, Zisser said. In adjacent southern Lebanon, Israel fired at Hezbollah positions yesterday after two of its soldiers were lightly wounded in an explosion claimed by the militant Shiite group.
Assad lost Quneitra because four years of battling rebels across the country international isolation has left him unable to project power outside Damascus and other urban strongholds controlled by his Alawite loyalists, Zisser said.
“He has no reserves so if something is escalating in one place, he has no forces to send there,” he said,. “Look at the Golan where he couldn’t afford to send another 200 Syrian soldiers and keep Quneitra in his hands.”
Zisser said he’s skeptical about Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s thesis, outlined most recently at the United Nations, that common interests such as fear of Islamic State will lead to new alliances between Israel and some of its Arab neighbors.

‘Dirty Job’

“We know that within the Arab world, without any movement on the Palestinian front, nobody will dare to normalize and make public their relationship with Israel,” he said.
He also said President Barack Obama’s campaign of air strikes against Islamic State is unlikely to stem the loss of confidence in America as a superpower that can enforce its policies.
“When you say, I’ll bomb you but ground forces are out of the question, you show everyone your limitations,” Zisser said. “There’s a lack of will to destroy ISIS, to sacrifice for this goal, to do the dirty job.”