Israel Can Install AProxy In Damascus But Cannot Hold Syria

Ayman Ahmed

Jumada' al-Akhirah 10, 1447 2025-12-01

News & Analysis

by Ayman Ahmed (News & Analysis, Crescent International Vol. 55, No. 10, Jumada' al-Akhirah, 1447)

Israel’s only achievement of the past two years of the regional war has not been on the battlefield, but in the balance of power in Damascus. Its proxy now governs Syria and the Axis of Resistance has been relegated to the status of the “opposition.” Yet ruling a devastated, fragmented Syria is far more difficult than disrupting it, and it is in this asymmetry that the strategic opportunity to undo Israel’s grip on Syria lies.

The tactical advantage of the zionist regime in the regional war is, paradoxically, its main strategic weakness. Israel’s “acceptance” in the region rests on brute force, total dependency on NATO regimes, and alliances with regional dictators. This means that every time Israel imposes its will through violence, it inevitably generates organic political, social, and military resistance to its brutality. Any “calm” it achieves is therefore not a stable peace, but a fragile pause before the next escalation—one that drains Israel militarily, economically, and psychologically.

Given that the current regional war is the most severe crisis Israel has ever faced, and that it is now widely viewed as a global pariah, the regime finds itself in a structural catch-22 situation: it cannot maintain its position without escalating violence, yet every escalation deepens its isolation and strengthens the forces determined to end its grip on the region.

Israel’s so-called success in Syria is neither sophisticated nor enigmatic; neither is the path to unseating it. Syria was never an intricate geopolitical riddle. For decades, Damascus served as a logistical and political artery for Palestinian and Lebanese Islamic resistance movements, both of which posed real, sustained challenges to the zionist regime. To neutralize this obstacle, Washington and the zionist regime relied on their long-standing Salafi-Wahhabi proxies to tear the Syrian state apart.

The outcome is visible today: even with heavy western support, Syria remains nowhere near a functional state. And it is precisely this reality that gives the Axis of Resistance a unique strategic opening. Israel’s proxy may sit in Damascus, but to govern a shattered country is to inherit every one of its crises—economic collapse, political fragmentation, social exhaustion, and deep popular resentment toward zionist occupation. This is a built-in vulnerability.

If the Axis of Resistance pursues a coherent strategy, Israel will be pulled into a slow-grinding quagmire. Tactical Israeli advantages in Syria, military and political will, over time, discredit Israel’s clients in Damascus by exposing them as an incompetent, power-obsessed militia unable to stabilize the very state they seized. Simultaneously, the organic Syrian anger toward zionist control of Syrian land can be sharpened into a broad political current, turning the new Damascus authorities into the visible local extension of foreign occupation.

And, unintentionally, Israel’s own handiwork gives the Resistance additional depth: the economic and political black hole Syria has become continues to generate gaps, corridors, and informal networks that function as involuntary logistical space. In other words, the very destruction engineered by the US-Israeli axis creates the structural weaknesses that can now be used to undo Israel’s gains.

Undoing Israel’s gains in Syria no longer depends on reinstalling an explicitly anti-zionist government in Damascus. The task is far simpler: Syria must once again become a front that Israel perceives as volatile, unpredictable, and capable of erupting at any moment. This can be achieved through a spectrum of low-cost, high-impact, multifaceted pressure tactics that disrupt Israel’s political, military, and intelligence footprint in the country.

Given that the Lebanon front will inevitably reopen, the combination of renewed northern pressure and unprecedented regional hostility toward Israel and its western enablers will gradually turn Syria into a strategic environment resembling Lebanon in the 1990s. In that period, Israel had military superiority, air dominance, and local proxies—yet its position was eroded by continuous, small-scale, decentralized resistance that imposed a constant political and economic price. Israel’s tactical advantages produced no strategic stability. Instead, they created a prolonged vulnerability that ultimately forced an abrupt withdrawal in 2000.

Syria is poised to follow a similar trajectory.

A hostile public mood across West Asia, combined with widening global isolation, means western regimes will be deprived of a reliable, state-backed anchor in the region to protect their geopolitical and economic interests.

Israel and its external patrons may succeed in installing a loyal, vicious militia in Damascus, but they will not enjoy the stability they seek. Instead, they will inherit a governing structure that requires continuous, exhausting intervention to sustain political micromanagement, military operations to suppress opposition, intelligence campaigns to hold fractured takfiri alliances together, and economic infusions to keep the proxy afloat.

In other words, Israel’s supposed “victory” in Syria merely forces it into the same structural trap it faced in Lebanon: ruling through a proxy whose survival depends on constant, draining effort. And the more Israel commits to preserving its client in Damascus, the more it exposes itself to exactly the kind of long-term attrition that the Axis of Resistance is uniquely positioned to exploit.

In the end, Israel’s position in Syria reveals a deeper strategic truth: domination without legitimacy is inherently self-defeating. By overturning the Ba‘ath government only to install a brittle militia in its place, the zionist regime has exchanged a single, centralized adversary for a durable ecosystem of resistance that transcends geography and formal borders.

The next phase of the regional war will not hinge on who sits in the presidential palace in Damascus, but on who can shape the political weather across West Asia. And on that terrain, Israel holds no durable advantage.

The Axis of Resistance does not need to “retake” Syria to win; it only needs to ensure that Israel’s hold on the country remains costly, unstable, and reversible.

In a region where occupation fatigue is rising, alliances are shifting, and the legitimacy crisis of western regimes grows deeper by the month, Israel’s foothold in Damascus may ultimately prove to be less a triumph than the opening chapter of its next long retreat.