After meeting with President Donald Trump at the White House on Monday, Syria’s interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa said Trump supports his call for Israel to remove its forces from Syrian territory.
The Washington Post on Tuesday asked Sharaa a rather leading question about Israel “occupying Syrian land” and “fomenting sectarianism, particularly within the Druze community,” and asked about his plans for “protecting Syrian sovereignty” from the Israelis.
Sharaa responded by accusing Israel of harboring “expansionist ambitions” and using issues like protecting Syria’s Druze minority as excuses to occupy more Syrian territory, although he sounded less irritated about the situation than his Washington Post interviewers.
“Israel has always claimed that it has concerns about Syria because it is afraid of the threats that the Iranian militias and Hezbollah represent. We are the ones who expelled those forces out of Syria,” he boasted.
The jury is still out about Hezbollah’s presence in Syria. Israeli military spokesman Nadav Shoshani said on Tuesday that Hezbollah is still attempting to smuggle weapons from Syria into Lebanon, in defiance of the ceasefire agreement that was supposed to disarm Hezbollah fighters in southern Lebanon.
“We are working to prevent that from happening and to block the ground routes from Syria into Lebanon to a high level of success, but they still pose a threat to us,” Shoshani said.
“We are committed to the agreement but it must be held. We will not return to the reality of October 7 with a threat of thousands of terrorists on our border within walking distance of our civilians,” Shoshani stated.
“Hezbollah may have suffered a setback in Syria after the fall of the Assad regime, but it continues to exploit the country’s instability to rearm and expand its influence,” said research analyst Ahmad Sharawi of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) on Wednesday.
Sharawi said a security agreement between Syria and Israel was crucial because “both countries now face shared threats from Iran and Hezbollah.”
Sharaa acknowledged those mutual interests in his Washington Post interview.
“We are engaged in direct negotiations with Israel, and we have gone a good distance on the way to reach an agreement. But to reach a final agreement, Israel should withdraw to their pre-Dec. 8 borders,” he said, urging Israel to reverse the military buildup it began after Sharaa’s coalition of insurgents and jihadis overthrew Syrian dictator Bashar Assad last year.
“The United States is with us in these negotiations, and so many international parties support our perspective in this regard. Today, we found that Mr. Trump supports our perspective as well, and he will push as quickly as possible in order to reach a solution for this,” he said.
Sharaa chided Israel for occupying Syrian territory to enhance its own security, deploying a bit of hyperbole to suggest the process might never end.
“Israel occupied the Golan Heights in order to protect Israel, and now they are imposing conditions in the south of Syria in order to protect the Golan Heights. So after a few years, maybe they will occupy the center of Syria in order to protect the south of Syria. They will reach Munich on that pathway,” he said.
Sharaa is a former member of the al-Qaeda terrorist organization and founder of its Syrian franchise, originally known as the Nusra Front. His terrorist alias was “Abu Mohammed al-Jolani,” a name that signaled his family came from the Golan Heights. Sharaa was born in Saudi Arabia after his father was displaced from the Golan Heights by Israel’s occupation after the Six-Day War in 1967.
Foreign Policy noted last week that Sharaa has personal reasons to resent Hezbollah almost as much as he resents the Israeli presence in the Golan Heights, since Iran dispatched heavily armed Hezbollah fighters to keep its pet dictator Bashar Assad in power, prolonging the horrific Syrian civil war by years. Sharaa also knows that cracking down on Hezbollah will greatly increase his chances of winning sanctions relief and postwar reconstruction investment from the U.S. and its allies.
The pieces are all in place for a security agreement between Syria and Israel — provided the Israelis can trust Sharaa to hold up his end of the bargain. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu knows how much President Trump wants to bring Syria into the Western orbit as a diplomatic and strategic coup, so Netanyahu’s misgivings about Sharaa must be stubborn indeed to hold up the reconciliation process.
“Israel remains wary of Sharaa’s former terror ties and has criticized his government’s treatment of minorities, particularly the Druze. It has also launched multiple airstrikes and raids inside Syrian territory that it says are meant to prevent weapons from falling into the hands of hostile forces,” the Times of Israel (TOI) noted on Wednesday.
