Not getting sucked into the Syrian civil war has arguably been Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s greatest political achievement (as of March 2018). If it had wanted to, the Israel Defense Forces could have seized Damascus within a week, but what would Israel have gained from that?

After the Six Day War, Israel, having been under attack for forever, realized that this was an opportunity to once and for all create defensible borders. In other words, it decided to add strategic padding by building on the land it had recently acquired from Jordan and Egypt.

Within days, I replaced him as defense minister as well. The main item in my in-box would not be Lebanon, however. The Mossad had uncovered a threat hundreds of miles farther away: a construction site in northeast Syria along the Euphrates River, where the Syrians, with technical help from North Korea and funding from Iran, were building a nuclear