Regional peace with the occupation a recipe for disaster

The Syrian regime has been stepping up efforts to ensure regional stability in the Middle East, but engagement with the Zionist regime to achieve this objective is a counterproductive recipe. The momentum comes as Damascus expresses optimism for a security deal with “Israel”, which could include a return to the 1974 disengagement line. It could also include monitoring the ceasefire in southern Syria’s Sweida province.

However, it is worth noting that the Israeli occupation has spared no effort to ensure that the rights and liberties of innocent Palestinians are encroached upon and stands as the biggest obstacle to greenlighting humanitarian aid to Gaza. For Damascus to contemplate regional stability in tandem with the occupation is to welcome more provisions for sustained aggression in the region. Here is why US support for the talks on security arrangements along the Palestinian-Syrian border deserves optimum pushback.

First, the border has been consistently endangered by the Israeli entity, and efforts to generate deep divisions within Syria should not go unnoticed. This is the same Zionist regime that has been fighting tooth and nail to bombard Syria based on its skewed conceptions of “national security”, and occupation attempts to protect the Druze community in Syria should sound a sufficient alarm in Damascus. This is because the Druze community, long persecuted and discriminated against within “Israel”, is only a pretext to ensure a status quo of violence and belligerence in Syria. With these dynamics at the forefront of recent “Israel”-Syria developments, how does stability pursuit with the Zionist regime ring true to Damascus’ leaders?

That is a question I pose to leaders in Syria because the stakes for genuine regional stability are considerable. Protecting the Syria-Palestine border is a far cry when the occupation regime has taken on plans to press for normalization with Damascus and is effectively lacking incentives to secure border management with Syria. The genocide rages on, with war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu pushing to seize control of Gaza and operating in tandem with the United States to ensure an outcome that is favorable to the Zionist regime. Damascus needs to exercise sufficient leverage to undercut Zionist attempts at normalizing peacemaking with Syria, given its track record of widespread bloodshed against Palestinians, continued war crimes, belligerent assassination campaigns, and desire to further entrench the illegal occupation.

Palestinian liberties – now increasingly front and center of international momentum on statehood – need to be front and center of any regional stability equation brought to the fore. Sidelining Palestinian rights and overlooking Zionist atrocities can never be a recipe for just and lasting stability. Syria, which has been a witness to Israeli genocidal aggression since 2023 and even before, needs to put its definition of regional peace into action. Castigating the Zionist regime and fighting tooth and nail to alienate it are central considerations for any such outcome. The illegal occupation must come crashing down. Embracing war criminals, even tacitly, is a blatant endorsement of the occupation – an impression that the US is keen to cultivate even further. “Under current circumstances, it is difficult to envision that Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government would be considering concessions beyond reciprocal offers to refrain from interfering in the efforts of Syria’s new rulers to consolidate power,” Shalom Lipner, a veteran diplomat and former advisor to seven occupation prime ministers, including Benjamin Netanyahu, recently told DW.

Sidestepping “Israel” to promote regional peace carries plenty of incentives. The occupation represents the single biggest threat to stability in the Middle East and has demonstrated that by promoting belligerence against Iran, Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Palestine. Netanyahu’s penchant to use overseas aggression to cater to domestic sentiment should sound a considerable caution in Syria: this is the same occupation that made hollow promises of regional stability only to launch terror attacks on Syrian soil. Working in tandem with the occupation also lends unwarranted credence to the Trump administration’s criminal designs in the region, hoping to promote a streak of normalization that benefits from Palestinian blood and sows further divisions within the Arab world, a world that ought to be united against the terror entity of “Israel”.

Syria is not short of options. A feasibility assessment of what constitutes border violations would automatically shift the focus onto “Israel”, which has launched airstrikes on Damascus in broad daylight and has consistently signaled that it is no friend of the leaders in Syria. If such an outcome were the case, the occupation would first begin by opening itself up to international scrutiny and avoiding giving its war criminals a hard pass, as the global outcry over the lack of accountability persists. With these dynamics in mind, it is abundantly clear that any movement toward Palestine-Syria border securitization is a far cry when the very entity charged with belligerence and occupation terrorism is now at the table, contemplating peace.

Thus, the road forward for Syria’s leaders should be to mark a firm distinction between the Trump administration and “Israel”, on the one hand, and the rights and liberties of Palestinians and the Syrian population, on the other. The latter two are consistently endangered by the actions of the occupation entity that is pretending to broker peace at large.