Netanyahu Visits Area Israel Recently Seized in Syria, Officials Say

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?

More recently, in 2012, I was given another lesson in geostrategy: as Syria descended into full-blown civil war, I was standing on a Syrian hilltop, overlooking a valley south of the city of Hama, and saw a hamlet burning in the distance. Syrian friends pointed out a much larger village about a mile away, from where they said the attack had come. T

Syria soon escalated into a civil war between an Alawite-led, Iranian-backed regime and its mostly Sunni, Saudi-supported opponents.

FOR SOME TIME, the region had been growing increasingly tense. Syria had declared its intention to divert water away from Israel’s National Water Carrier, by up to 35 percent. Israel had responded that it would consider such a diversion an act of war, but the Syrians continued. Border clashes ensued, with Syria firing on Israeli villages while Isra

In defeating the Arab armies, Israel captured more land than that allotted to it by the U.N. partition. Much of the newly captured land had significant Jewish populations and settlements, such as in western Galilee. This land had to be captured in order to assure the safety of its Jewish civilian residents. The Egyptians and Jordanians also capture