Julani in Damascus: Israel’s Perfect Excuse in Syria
From regime change to buffer zones: why Julani’s rule in Damascus serves Israel’s long game
When you look at Syria today, with Julani sitting in Damascus and Israeli forces steadily pushing deeper into the south under the banner of “security” and “protection of minorities,” you’d think this was some tragic but random outcome of the “Syrian Revolution”.
I don’t see it that way.
The way things look now suits Israel far too well to be dismissed as a simple accident of history.
For all its flaws, the previous Syrian state kept the country horizontally intact. There was one flag, one army, and one centre of decision-making. It was an authoritarian system, yes, but it still claimed to speak in the name of Syria as a whole: Sunnis, Alawites, Christians, Druze, Kurds, and others. That kind of state can still say “no” to its neighbours. It can still negotiate, resist, and, at least in theory, defend its borders.
From Israel’s perspective, that is a problem. A unified Syria, even if weakened, still has the potential to rebuild, to rearm, to form alliances that complicate Israel’s calculations in the region. A fragmented Syria, on the other hand, provides opportunities: you can deal with each fragment separately, you can push your lines forward in the name of security, and you can claim there is no real partner on the other side anyway.
Over the past decade, Israel did not stand aside as a neutral observer. It bombed Syrian positions and infrastructure repeatedly. It joined the broader campaign to isolate Damascus politically and economically. Along the southern border, it developed practical ties with armed groups operating against the state. None of this is secret. Fighters affiliated with Julani’s network received medical treatment in Israeli hospitals. There were documented cases of coordination and quiet understandings on the Golan front. Everyone knew who these groups were and what ideology they carried.
When you systematically weaken a central state while tolerating and enabling jihadist structures on its territory, you are not just reacting to events. You are helping to reshape the political landscape.
Today, that reshaped landscape has a name and a face: Julani in Damascus, presiding over a power structure with clear roots in Al-Qaeda’s Syrian branch.
It is worth asking why this has been accepted, sometimes even normalised, by so many regional and Western capitals. Part of the answer lies in the way such a regime functions internally. A jihadist government does not produce a broad, inclusive national framework. It rules through fear, sectarian rhetoric, and ideological policing. It narrows the political community. It divides society vertically.
Under this kind of authority, entire communities live in a state of permanent anxiety: Alawites are afraid of collective punishment; Christians worry about their physical presence in the country; Druze face pressure to submit or be branded heretics; Shia communities are treated as extensions of foreign enemies; even Sunnis who reject Julani’s ideology understand that they are only tolerated as long as they do not resist.
Instead of one country with internal tensions, you end up with isolated pillars of fear. Trust between communities collapses. Everyone looks for protection, and many look beyond the borders for it.
If you are sitting in Tel Aviv, this is a very comfortable situation. An openly jihadist leadership in Damascus can be described as a mortal threat one day and as a useful scarecrow the next. It is easy to point to its crimes and say to the world: “You see who we are dealing with. You see why we need more security measures inside Syrian territory.”
The massacres and abuses committed by Julani’s forces against minorities are not simply internal Syrian tragedies. They are also political assets for Israel.
Every time a Druze village is attacked, a church is vandalised, or a non-Sunni community is terrorised, the images travel fast. Western politicians and media outlets who spent years demonising the old state suddenly rediscover the existence of minorities in Syria and express concern about their fate under an extremist regime.
This creates the perfect rhetorical environment for Israeli interventions framed as humanitarian. Once you have an Al-Qaeda-linked government in Damascus and a series of atrocities against vulnerable communities, it becomes much easier for Israel to argue that it must act “responsibly” on its northern frontier.
The language is familiar: we cannot ignore genocide on our doorstep; we have to protect Druze, Christians, and others; we will establish a limited security belt; our presence will be temporary and strictly defensive. On television and in diplomatic talking points, this sounds like a moral duty. On the ground, it means troops, bases, and infrastructure inside Syria.
And crucially, these positions tend to have a way of becoming semi-permanent. Once a strip of land is turned into a “security zone”, it is very difficult to reverse this without conditions, negotiations, and new bargains. The legal border becomes less important than the line drawn by tanks and patrol roads.
Julani’s men did not rise from nowhere. Their networks benefited from money, logistics, foreign intelligence contacts, and safe rear areas. They were useful tools for weakening the older state. Now they are the state.
They control the security services, checkpoints, and prisons. They enforce their creed in the way such movements always have: by disciplining women, silencing critics, attacking religious minorities, and crushing any sign of alternative authority. The massacres that shock international audiences are not accidents; they are consistent with the ideology and history of these groups.
For Israel, this reality has an ugly but clear value. Each atrocity is another talking point, another example to wave in front of Western governments: “We warned you. Look at what this regime is doing. Is it really unreasonable for us to deepen our security presence to protect the people they are targeting?”
In other words, the more brutal Julani’s rule becomes, the more respectable Israeli expansion inside Syria can be made to appear.
If we trace the story in sequence rather than in isolated snapshots, it looks something like this.
First, the old Syrian state is exhausted and attacked from all sides. Its legitimacy is eroded in the media; its economy is strangled; its army is worn down by endless fronts and external interference. At the same time, jihadist movements grow, including along the borders where Israel is most concerned with its own security. That growth is not seriously obstructed when those movements are hitting enemies that Israel also wants weakened.
Then, as the war drags on, one of these actors – Julani – manages to climb into Damascus and capture the centre. A government with a clear Al-Qaeda pedigree is now in charge of the capital. Many of the states that wanted Assad gone decide they can live with this, at least for a while, because it keeps Syria fragmented, internationally isolated, and domestically despised.
Inside the country, the new regime turns its coercive power inward. Minorities and dissenters bear the heaviest cost. The social fabric that still existed despite the war is ripped further. National cohesion, already damaged, is pushed to the breaking point.
At that stage, the map begins to harden around enclaves and spheres of influence. You have Turkish-controlled strips in the north, US-backed Kurdish areas in the east, Julani’s authority radiating out of Damascus, and Israeli forces edging further into the south under the familiar pretext of “buffer zones” and “protection”.
By the end of this process, Syria has lost not only lives, infrastructure, and economic sovereignty but also the ability to negotiate as a single political entity. It is reduced to parcels. Communities that once shared a state, however imperfectly, now look at each other through the lens of trauma and betrayal.
Israel, in contrast, has gained strategic depth, more room to manoeuvre across its northern front, and a reasonably convincing case to present to Western audiences whenever its troops cross deeper into Syrian territory: “We are not expanding for the sake of it. Look at Julani. Look at what he is doing. Who else will stop him?”
When officials and commentators talk today about “safe zones”, “minority protection,” and “humanitarian corridors” in southern Syria, I cannot separate those words from the path that led us here. I look at who spent years bombing and sanctioning the old state; who turned a blind eye to the growth of Julani’s network when it was fighting their enemies; and who now presents itself as the reluctant saviour of the victims of that network.
Syria’s tragedy is often described as if it were a natural disaster, something that simply struck and left chaos behind. But political decisions, taken in specific capitals, brought us to a situation where an Al-Qaeda-linked regime rules Damascus and Israeli forces can advance under the banner of “protection”.
If we want to understand what is coming next – more buffer zones, more foreign supervision of our land, more fragmentation presented as “stability” – we have to start by naming this sequence honestly.
Julani’s rule is not just a domestic Syrian catastrophe. It is also a convenient instrument for those who prefer a carved-up, weakened Syria to a sovereign neighbour capable of defending its borders and its people without foreign tutelage.
—Kevork Almassian is a Syrian geopolitical analyst and the founder of Syriana Analysis.