Nasir QadriWhile Gaza bleeds beneath the skeletal remains of starved children and aid-seekers gunned down in food lines, Israel speaks its language, not in diplomacy, but in fire.
On July 16, as 81 more Palestinians, including 25 queuing for food, were killed in Gaza, Israel extended its aggression across borders.
Air strikes pounded Syria’s Sweida and the Damascus countryside, targeting military infrastructure and communications hubs. But this was not a war of necessity, nor a response to provocation.
It was something else, a doctrine in action: what Israeli strategists call “mowing the lawn”, the routine, repeated use of force to weaken adversaries – imagined or real – and prevent long-term stability in neighbouring states.
Wars and aggression often require excuses, even if they are flimsy.
The US invaded Afghanistan under the pretext of the ‘war on terror’, and Iraq to ‘install democracy’.
But Israel needs neither reason nor justification. It has bombed Lebanon, Yemen, and Iran. It now intensifies its strikes on Syria, a country still reeling from over a decade of civil war and now undergoing post-conflict transformation.
Transitional periods are fragile and critical; political scientists widely regard them as windows where sustainable peace, state-building, and reconciliation must be protected, not sabotaged.
But for Israel, the absence of a threat has never been a barrier to war.
Destabilisation by design
Following the fall of the Assad regime in late 2024, Israel has pursued a deliberate policy to undermine Syria’s territorial reconstitution.
Its campaign began with the occupied Golan Heights, where it expanded military presence beyond the 1974 disengagement lines and quickly evolved into a coordinated strategy of aerial bombardment, drone incursions, and covert operations.
Over 600 airstrikes were launched within ten days of Assad’s ouster. Ammunition depots, air defence systems, and military airports were systematically hit.
By December, Israeli forces had occupied the buffer zone and advanced up to 12 kilometres inside Syrian territory, laying minefields, displacing civilians, and establishing forward positions in open defiance of post-war norms.
Israel’s aggression in Syria is not limited to missile trails and craters. It is shaping realities on the ground, politically and ethnically. One pillar of this strategy has been the instrumentalisation of Syria’s Druze minority.
Since early 2025, Tel Aviv has openly declared its intent to “protect” Druze populations in Sweida and Quneitra, even threatening direct military intervention. It’s a familiar tactic: reframe aggression as ethnic guardianship.
Behind this rhetoric lies a campaign to arm and organise sectarian militias.
The emergence of the ‘Sweida Military Council (SMC)’, a Druze armed group backed by Israeli intelligence, is no coincidence. Israeli officials have framed this as a buffer against “Iranian proxies,” but on the ground, it fragments Syrian sovereignty and seeds civil strife.
By encouraging ethnic divisions and supporting autonomous militias, Israel is turning Syria into a patchwork of controllable zones, a method borrowed from its occupation playbook in Palestine.
A doctrine of regional chaos
Israel is not reacting to threats; it is generating them. As a regional aggressor driven by expansionist ambitions, its current campaign reflects long-standing designs for territorial dominance.
What critical Middle East analysts have long identified as the ‘Greater Israel’ project, a mix of revisionist Zionism and security maximalism, is not a theory, but a praxis. In this vision, the region’s fractured states are not unfortunate casualties but strategic necessities.
Israel has rewritten the language of international relations. It does not engage in diplomacy; it perpetuates bombardment. It does not negotiate; it levels cities.
From Gaza to Damascus, Tel Aviv speaks only in airstrikes. Its security claim is an alibi for structural violence. Genocide in Gaza, strikes in Syria, and assassinations in Iran all fall within a normalised continuum of militarised governance.
When states begin to recover, whether Lebanon’s civil society or Syria’s post-conflict institutions, Israel intervenes to stall sovereignty.
In Lebanon, it has repeatedly targeted civilian infrastructure and undermined stability through a rhetoric of Hezbollah containment. In Syria, it has turned a fragile transition into another battlefield.
Transitional governments, by their nature, require stability, consolidation, and international protection. Israel offers the opposite: fragmentation, sabotage, and selective strikes.
At the heart of this strategy lies Benjamin Netanyahu, a man whose political longevity now depends on perpetual war.
Facing trials for corruption, international condemnation for Gaza, and eroding support at home, Netanyahu has few cards left but firepower. Through constant escalation, he manufactures urgency, postpones accountability, and repositions himself as Israel’s wartime necessity. It is a form of political parsimony: fewer solutions, more strikes.
At the state level, Israel's destabilisation is not erratic; it is structured.
The ‘Greater Israel’ project, grounded in ideological territoriality and strategic depth, demands a weak neighbourhood. States like Syria, Lebanon, and even Iraq must remain dismembered, distracted, and deterritorialised.
Law as cover, war as policy
Israel’s latest assault on Syria does not represent a deviation from international legal norms; it manifests their instrumentalisation. These strikes constitute a calibrated projection of force, legitimised through juridical theatrics.
While the UN Charter enshrines sovereignty, non-aggression, and collective peace, Israel has effectively reinterpreted that framework, weaponising Article 51 to transform “self-defence” into a standing license for preemptive aggression.
This is not a distortion of law veiled in justification; it is the unveiling of law’s complicity.
Legal scholars have long warned that the frameworks devised to regulate warfare, proportionality, distinction, and necessity have never operated with neutrality. These principles, often upheld as universal, remain contingent not on legal doctrine but on political power.
When it bombs a sovereign state during a fragile post-conflict transition, it does so with impunity, not because red lines have been crossed, but because they no longer exist.
The humanitarian infrastructure built after 1945 now functions as performance: it speaks, it condemns, it debates, but it does not intervene.
What should ignite international outrage has been reduced to a procedural ritual.
The inertia of the UN Security Council is no longer a temporary condition; it has become a structural feature. General Assembly resolutions, while expressive, have been reduced to symbolic theatre, offering gestures of concern without mechanisms for enforcement.
International courts remain disengaged, not due to a lack of legal mandate, but rather because of political hesitation.
The global legal architecture is not collapsing under doctrinal fatigue; it is stagnating under the weight of selective application and diplomatic accommodation.
Impunity is the new order
Israel exploits this legal vacuum, not in defiance of the system, but through a fluent mastery of its loopholes.
As Noura Erakat persuasively argues, over the past century, the application of law has disproportionately advanced Israel's interests, highlighting that the outcome was not an inevitable consequence but rather a product of political interventions.
Tel Aviv accepts its frameworks; it choreographs them, enacting legality as performance, bending it toward impunity, and securing its legitimacy not in norms, but in repetition.
In Syria, Israel’s repetition of force is not incidental; it is tactical. By invoking "security" to justify cross-border strikes, it dismantles the foundational norm of sovereignty.
Targeting a post-conflict state, one navigating the fragile architecture of institutional recovery, not only sabotages national reconstruction but also betrays the very international commitments Israel purports to respect.
In doing so without consequence, it affirms what critical jurists have long cautioned: that when enforcement withers, law ceases to restrain and begins to serve as an instrument of power.
The strikes on Sweida and Damascus are not anomalies; they are structural breaches. These are not mere attacks on physical targets; they are assaults on the idea that legal norms apply to those with power.
Israel does not destabilise the region despite international law. It destabilises it because international law no longer interrupts– it acquiesces.
