A Reading of the Israeli Mind on What is Happening in Syria: Between a Project of Hegemony and the Ambition for Partition

In a reading published in the Israeli newspaper “Maariv,” Moshe Elad presented an analysis and an Israeli interpretation of the repercussions of recent events in Syria, the advance of Syrian forces in northern Syria, the Syrian forces' control over oil and gas fields, and their internal and regional implications. Elad is an Israeli academic, a lecturer at the Western Galilee Academic College, and a former colonel in the Israeli army. He is known for his political and strategic analyses of Middle Eastern affairs, which gives his reading a dimension that reflects the Israeli security establishment's vision and its deep concerns about the ongoing transformations in the Syrian arena.
The Israeli reading presented by Moshe Elad regarding the Syrian forces' control over oil and gas fields attempts to appear descriptive and realistic, but at its core, it is an anxious reading charged with Israeli strategic concerns more than it is a neutral analysis of an internal Syrian field development. The language used reveals a deep fear of the return of the Syrian state with its central function, not merely a change in control maps or a decline in the influence of one actor or another.
Talking about what happened as “an event of deep regional significance” is not an innocent description but an implicit acknowledgment that one of the pillars of the project to dismantle the Syrian state since 2011 is being shaken, and that control over energy means restoring one of the nerves of sovereignty without which a modern state cannot exist. Israel, which has long bet on Syria remaining a weakened, fragmented state without resources, realizes that oil and gas are not just economic income but a political condition for rebuilding the center, imposing national decisions, and restoring regional negotiation tools.
What is striking in Elad's reading is his insistence on portraying the state's recovery of its resources as a “dangerous” act threatening minorities, while deliberately ignoring the fact that the disintegration of the state and the spread of armed entities is what historically opened the door to massacres and civil strife. The Syrian experience during the war years proved that areas outside state authority were neither safer nor more stable, but rather open arenas for external intervention, tribal fighting, and direct American and Turkish hegemony.
As for attributing the responsibility for the “collapse of the Rojava project” and the David corridor, which Israel dreamed of, to the control of the oil fields, it reveals the analysis's bias rather than its objectivity, because this project, since its inception, was not based on the right to self-determination as much as it was based on a security and military function linked to the American presence and the proxy war against ISIS. When Elad talks about stripping the economic basis of self-rule, he ignores the fact that these resources were never owned by a specific local power but rather a Syrian national wealth that was utilized in the context of an international war against the Syrian state.
In this context, Israeli concern appears regarding the Arab tribes abandoning the Kurdish alliance, not as a concern for stability but as a fear of the collapse of one of the indirect administration patterns that allowed eastern Syria to remain outside the comprehensive national equation. For Tel Aviv and Washington, tribes are not a social actor with national interests but a card that can be used or lost in the game of influence.
As for talking about “Washington's dilemma,” it is in reality a description of the American exposure, as it has become clear that the United States is no longer willing or able to engage in an open conflict to maintain post-ISIS arrangements, and that the “fire separation” policy is not a strategy as much as it is a gradual withdrawal management and an attempt to save face, which explains the feeling of local allies, especially the SDF forces, that they are facing a repetition of American abandonment scenarios from Afghanistan to northern Iraq previously.
At the core of the Israeli reading, the clearest contradiction appears when Elad admits that Israel prefers “controlled instability” over the existence of a unified and strong Syrian state. This sentence summarizes the Israeli security doctrine in Syria, which does not see the state's unity and the restoration of its sovereignty as a factor of stability but as a long-term threat, even in the absence of Assad, and even assuming Damascus moves away from Tehran, because the problem for Israel is not in the identity of the ruling regime in Syria as much as it is in the existence of a state that possesses its decision, borders, and resources.
Therefore, the recovery of the north and the oil fields cannot be read only as an economic or military shift but as a gradual breaking of the functional partition equation that prevailed during the war years, where Syrian geography was distributed among international and regional spheres of influence, and returning these resources to the state necessarily means reopening the question of sovereignty and rearranging the relationship between the center and the peripheries outside American and Israeli conditions.
The Israeli reading, then, is not a warning of chaos as much as it is an expression of fear of stability when it comes on an independent national basis. Stability that is not subject to dismantling or external management is the most disturbing scenario for Tel Aviv, which explains this overt concern about a “strong Syria” even if it comes in a new form and with different faces.
Ultimately, what is happening is not just a battle over oil, but a battle over the meaning of the state in Syria, and over who controls wealth, borders, and sovereignty, which makes this development a subject of close Israeli monitoring, not because it poses an immediate danger but because it signals the end of one phase and the beginning of another in which Syria is no longer just an arena, but is poised to return as a player, even if the road is still long and full of dangers.