The Israeli raid is a step backward

Written by Nasser Kandil,

The concerned military officers and the observers of the Israeli raids in Syria from Palmyra to the vicinity of Damascus Airport assert that there are no targets related to what the Israelis claim about missile stores and shipments to the resistance. Palmyra is an example, it is not believable the arrival of missiles across a ground road to Palmyra but only if its beginning is in Raqqa, so were the missiles which they are talking about coming from there? The military officers themselves assert that the Israeli raids have multi-goals some of them related to the future of the geography of the Syrian Desert which overlooks on all the sites targeted by the Americans and the Israelis, from Deir Al Zour to Palmyra and Al Shuairat towards Damascus Airport. The Desert is the area which the Americans want to make as an alternative shelter for ISIS after Raqqa. The American has employed the Israeli to support him in achieving this goal but the strikes have moral functions that are related to situation of the collapsed militants, and from the Israeli pure perspective these strikes have a relation to the attempt of drawing rules of engagement for after the end of the war on Syria.

The Israelis tried to draw an equation of violating the Syrian airspace and to devote what they are talking about as a right to pursue the weapons shipments of Hezbollah in all the Syrian territories and by the airspace, after they assigned the groups of opposition and Al Nusra to hit the Syrian air defense systems, and succeeded in dismantling half of them as the President Bahsar Al-Assad said, but a year ago they started to discover that the Russian positioning on one hand, and the rebuilding of the Syrian air defense systems on the other hand have imposed restrictions on the movement of their aircraft and on their recognition of what they supposed that it is an required right in a loose-land, but it seems that whenever the military state recovers  and restores its military force, this does not happen against the armed groups alone, but it changes the rules of engagement with Israel. Within three months the Israelis faced a Syrian missile confrontation in two sequent times that prove that the Syrian airspace became forbidden to the Israeli aircraft.

In the first time the Israelis have received the new equation and they tried to get used to it, so they resorted to missiles from their planes with a range of sixty kilometers launched from the Lebanese airspace, and ground missiles launched from the borders of Golan which reached to a parallel range, till the US presence came and intervened in an attempt to change the rules of engagement and to let the Israelis hit by proxy in Palmyra in addition to secure their crossing the Syrian airspace, so this encouraged them to bet on changing the rules of engagement and to return to before the Syrian missiles. The result was the stabilization of equation of the inviolability of the Syrian airspace with more force and bigger determination.

The Israelis committed the raid of Damascus Airport to say that the Syrian deterrence prevents them from entering the Syrian airspace, but it does not prevent behaving according to what they drew as a security range for their missiles directed from the air or the ground without the entry into the Syrian airspace. Therefore the raid against Damascus by missiles launched from the Lebanese airspace belongs to the stage before breaking the deterrence balance which was devoted by the Syrian missiles without the recognition of Syria or the resistance of the rules of engagement which the Israeli wants to impose, even from the position of the recognition of the rules of the Syrian deterrence, by making the range of sixty kilometers from the borders with Golan and Lebanon an area for the Israeli processes.

From the position of drawing rules of engagement, the equation returned with a response that ensures a new deterrence that completes the deterrence made by the missiles regarding the inviolability of the Syrian airspace, so this prevents the tampering within the range of the Israeli missiles which seems approaching.

Translated by Lina Shehadeh,