Jerusalem also unleashed
a ferocious bombing campaign against Assad’s military arsenal,
including his navy and stockpiles of chemical weapons, to prevent it
from falling into the hands of the regime or other radical forces.
Predictably, the world responded with condemnation. A spokesman for
the Secretary-General of the United Nations, António Guterres, failed to
appreciate that Israel had not taken action, as it were, in a vacuum.
“We’re against these types of attacks,” he said. “I think this is a
turning point for Syria. It should not be used by its neighbours to
encroach on the territory of Syria.”
The notion that Israel was acting out of some lust for land rather
than well-founded security concerns was reinforced loudly by the media.
CNN described the mood in Jerusalem as one of “trepidation and glee,”
which to my ears resonated with certain stereotypes of Jews that we’d
all much rather forget.
France, which had occupied the region before partitioning it into
those two brilliantly successful nation states of Lebanon and Syria,
demanded that Israel “withdraw from the zone and to respect Syria’s
sovereignty and territorial integrity”, describing the military
deployment as a violation of the 1974 border agreement.
John Kirby, then the US National Security Council spokesman, added:
“We don’t want to see any actor… move themselves in such a way that
makes it harder for the Syrian people to get at legitimate governance.”
And in an ultimate expression of irony, Turkey’s president Recep
Tayyip Erdoğan, the man who for years has occupied northern Syria and
waged war on the Kurds, and who is the principal sponsor of the
country’s new jihadi rulers, Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), tutted:
“Security cannot be achieved by spilling more blood, by dropping more
bombs on innocent civilians.” Ha!
