this video was brought to you by brilliant on Tuesday evening Israeli defense minister Israel Katz announced that the IDF had begun a military campaign in southern Syria to quote pacify the region stating that Israel wouldn't allow Southern Syria to become Southern Lebanon this comes just 48 hours after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu demanded that southern Syria be quote demilitarized apparently to protect the local Drews community and this went down about as well as you'd expect with the new Syria government who rejected netanyahu's proposal as an unacceptable infraction of Syrian sovereignty Paving the way for the
escalation we saw on Tuesday so in this video we're going to take a look at the history of Israel Syria relations this latest escalation and what might happen next [Music] never miss an episode and always feel in the loop by subscribing and ringing the bell so let's start with a bit of context since the Six Day War in 1967 where Israel effectively defeated a coalition of Arab states Israel has occupied the Golden Heights in Syria Israeli forces captured the Golden Heights in the final days of the war largely because they considered it strategically valuable territory
during the war Syrian forces had used the area to Shell Israeli villages in the hoola valley below and Israel argued that not occupying the territory would leave it vulnerable to Future artillery attacks to understand this you sort of need to see a topographic map of the area the Golden Heights are sort of an elevated Plateau sitting above the Sea of Galilee to the north of the Golden Heights is Mount Hermon which is basically the last mountain in the anti-lebanon mountain range which sits about 40 km south west of the Syrian capital of Damascus anyway Israel
held on the Golan Heights until the yunga po war in 1973 when Syria launched a surprise attack on the territory coinciding with Egypt's assault on the cyani peninsula while Syrian forces originally made good progress Israel successfully counterattacked and ended up with more of the Golden Heights than they had in 1967 as part of un broker ceasefire to the yam kapore War Israel signed the 1947 agreement on disengagement which required Israel to withdraw and create a small buffer zone between the Israeli occupied bit of the Golden Heights and the rest of Syria but this buffer zone
is pretty tiny less than a kilometer wide in places and is occupied by un-led peacekeeping force known as un do in 1981 Israel unilaterally annexed the Golden Heights claiming it as Israeli territory although this claim has only been recognized by the US and is widely considered to be a violation of international law anyway this has been sort of the status quo for the past 5050 years Israel has def facto controlled the Golden Heights and the UN has administered a thin buffer zone between there and the rest of Syria however after Assad's regime fell in December
Israel launched a series of air strikes across Syria which basically destroyed every aircraft and Naval vessel in the country and Israeli troops Advanced into the UN buffer zone and onto Mount Herman with the Israeli government arguing that the 1974 agreement had been voided by the collapse of the Syrian government although we should say that the UN disagree with this this is sort of how things stayed for the past couple of months Israel was illegally occupying Mount Herman and other Syrian territory but Syria's own government wasn't really in a position to do anything about it Syria's
new president Ahmed Al Shar actually made an active effort to assuage Israel's concerns you might expect a former alqaeda jihadist whose Nar literally refers to the Golden Heights to be furiously anti-israel but sharar's rhetoric has been conspicuous measured and he's insisted that Syria would abide by the 1974 agreement and that iran-backed groups like Hezbollah would no longer be allowed to operate in the country unfortunately for shirado though his efforts to assuage Israel's security concerns have apparently been insufficient over the weekend Netanyahu gave a speech demanding that Syrian troops withdraw from Southern Syria specifically canra dur
and sua three of Syria's 14 provinces where most of Syria's Jus minority live unsurprisingly Syria's new government rejected Israel's plan on Tuesday sharar held a long- awaited national dialogue conference with 600 delegates from across Syria including from Syria's Drew communities the conference's concluding statement reiterated Syria's territorial Unity decried Israel's incursions in Syria and specifically rejected the quote provocative statements of the Israeli Prime Minister this apparently didn't go down too well with Israel who only a few hours later launched air strikes on Targets in southern Syria as well as ground incursions into a few towns around
Mount Hermon at least according to reports on Wednesday morning so why is Israel actually doing this well Netanyahu claimed that his plan to demilitarize Southern Syria was about protecting the Drews and promised that Israel would ensure their security but this doesn't really make sense there's very little evidence that the Drew actually want this while certain Drews groups have made overtures towards Israel the sueda military Council a coalition of Drew groups formed earlier this month announced a few days ago that they plan to join the National Army of the new Syrian state so if it's not
about protecting the Drews minority why else but there might be some genuine anxieties in Israel's security establishments about Shah's jihadist Past after all he did used to run an alqaeda offshoot but at the same time a sharah has actively tried to avoid upsetting Israel and B this government really doesn't look like it's going to be an Al-Qaeda inspired jihadist state if anything it looked like it's going to be friendlier to Israel than Assad was it's therefore at least possible that Netanyahu is trying to destabilize the nent Syrian state to make it easier for Israel to
occupy more Syrian territory so what happens next well shiran now faces a difficult dilemma if he fights back he risks tumbling into a full-on war with the IDF without a fully formed National army or state if he sits back though he risks undermining his legitimacy especially because Israel's actions have already triggered protests across Syria in this context he might be tempted to look to Turkey for help turkey was sharar's main backer when he was running the idlib province but since taking power shiraj tried to distance himself from anchora to prove to ordinary syrians that he's
not just a Turkish proxy but an independent Syrian who can reunify the country nonetheless with Israel threatening Syria's territorial Integrity sharam might decide to lean on Turkey a bit more this would be a risk for both sharah who could end up becoming essentially dependent on turkey and for the wider region given that there'd be a nonzero risk of some sort of direct confrontation between Israel and Turkey now the thing is often in politics we need to understand a wide variety of topics to truly grasp what's going on and fortunately our sponsor this week brilliant can
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