Israel’s dangerous military intervention in southern Syria has put the spotlight back on the Zionist state’s controversial David’s Corridor project, which threatens the territorial integrity of the war-ravaged country amid rising tensions across the volatile Middle East.

Southern Syria’s Sweida region witnessed ethnic clashes between Druze, an ethno-religious Arabic-speaking minority, which is an offshoot of Shia Islam, and Sunni Bedouin tribes, leaving hundreds of people dead and injured. 

Sweida is the only Druze-majority area in Syria where Sunni Arabs constitute the majority. 

Amid growing tensions in the region, Türkiye has vowed to intervene to prevent further bifurcation of Syria – in what is being seen as a tough message to Israel’s expansionist policies. 

The so-called David’s Corridor project is part of Israel’s bigger plans in the region.

As per plans, the corridor will allow Israel unimpeded passage from the occupied Golan Heights to Sweida and as far as the US base of Al-Tanf and Deir Ezzor, a region under the control of the US-backed SDF/YPG terror group in northeastern Syria.

Israel envisions that the corridor can even reach Iraq’s autonomous northern Kurdish Regional Government (KRG), which neighbours both Türkiye and Iran. 

“This David’s Corridor project is an attempt by Israel to establish its hegemony over the Middle East,” says Sami al Arian, a leading Palestinian academic and the director of the Center for Islam and Global Affairs at Istanbul Sabahattin Zaim University. 

“This is a dream they have been trying to attain ever since the Zionist project started with Theodor Herzl and particularly since the 1967 war,” Arian tells TRT World, referring to two critical milestones in Israel’s history. 

Theodor Herzl, an Austrian-Hungarian journalist, is the founder of the Zionist movement in the late 1890s. 

The 1967 war, or the Six-Day War, was a significant Israeli victory over four Arab states, which allowed Tel Aviv to illegally occupy the West Bank, Gaza and Syria’s Golan Heights, which has a significant Druze population. 

Experts also see a conceptual connection between the David’s Corridor and Greater Israel, a biblical concept of ancient Israel that stretches from the Nile River to the Euphrates.

The idea of Biblical Israel has been publicly embraced by Netanyahu’s extremist coalition partners and often used as a justification for Tel Aviv’s expansionist policies. 

A divide and rule strategy

According to Arian, the David’s Corridor is an attempt to link the illegally occupied Golan Heights with the Iraqi Kurdish region through southern Syria. 

By instrumentalising the corridor and through other political and military means, Israelis want to partition and divide Syria into Sunni Arab, Alawite, Kurdish and Druze groups across the country. 

By forming alliances with minorities like the Druze in Syria and Maronites, a Christian Lebanese population which aligned with Israel in the past, the Zionist state aims to exploit the ethnic and religious faultlines to fragment the Middle East into as many parts as possible, says Arian. 

But he describes this Israeli agenda as a pipedream, which can not succeed. 

In the name of supporting the Druze, who also have a significant presence in Israel – including some top generals in the country’s army – the Netanyahu government not only bombed Bedouin tribes around Sweida but also the central government’s defence ministry in Damascus. 

Netanyahu also declared southern Syria a demilitarised zone, in clear signs that Tel Aviv is proclaiming control over the area to gain access to the US Al-Tanf base from which it can connect with Deir Ezzor, which is under the US-backed YPG terror group operating under the SDF banner. 

Under international pressure, Israel and Syria reached a fragile ceasefire in Sweida as central government forces withdrew from the region, leaving the area under de facto control of the Druze. 

Amid growing regional tensions, Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan accused Israel of planning to fragment Syria and threatened to intervene to protect the country’s integrity. 

While Fidan did not directly address the so-called David’s Corridor, it has long been a growing concern in Ankara. 

Omar Alhariri, a Daraa-based Syrian journalist who lived through the brutal civil war, the regime change in Damascus and the Israeli strikes, has a thinking similar to Fidan. 

“Israel’s actions clearly reflect a consistent strategy aimed at fostering internal chaos and preventing the emergence of a stable and prosperous Syrian state,” Alhariri tells TRT World.

“Israel’s behaviour towards Syria amounts to outright bullying, emboldened by the international community’s silence regarding its actions in Gaza.” 

Daraa, Alhariri’s hometown, was the cradle of the anti-Assad opposition at the beginning of the civil war in 2011 and now the target of Israeli strikes because it lies directly in the path of the David’s Corridor. 

Israelis now have a presence in the far west of Daraa and in the Yarmouk area on the border between Syria, the Golan Heights and Jordan. 

“As for David’s Corridor, publicly available maps suggest a potential severing of the Syrian-Jordanian border, (which could be) an extremely dangerous development that threatens the sovereignty and stability of both nations,” says the Daraa-based analyst, referring to Jordan and Syria. 

Israel, a Zionist state based on secularist Jewish nationalism, has long been attempting to weaken and destabilise the Arab states as part of its statecraft. 

Previously, Israel’s rightwing Defence Minister Israel Katz advocated “a federal Syria that includes different autonomous regions”, seen as a euphemism for a weakened state.

US envoy to Syria Tom Barrack recently confirmed this view, saying that the Netanyahu government aims to fragment the war-torn country because strong nation-states do not align with Israeli interests. 

“Israel is also using this corridor to project the narrative that its movement through Sweida or eastern Syria is motivated by a desire to protect minorities or that it enjoys local support. These claims are false and deliberately aimed at sowing division among Syrians—divisions that ultimately serve Israel’s strategic interests,” says Alhariri. 

“This particular narrative is especially dangerous—as recent events in Sweida have clearly demonstrated—because it exploits identity and community sensitivities to serve Israel’s strategic aims.” 

Will Israel attack Daraa? 

Alhariri believes that an Israeli ground attack on Daraa, a densely populated area and home to over one and a half million people, will meet “a prolonged and determined resistance”.

He underlines the region’s strong tribal and social ties with neighbouring Jordan, which means that any Israeli attempt to occupy this area would risk igniting a broader regional conflict.

“If such an Israeli attack happens, it would lead to a long and violent war that could last for years, spreading across the whole region. Israel is not ready to deal with something that serious.”

An Israeli occupation of southern Syria would also mean cutting the Arab state off from Jordan and the Gulf, breaking the land route between Türkiye and the Gulf countries, according to Alhariri. 

“This would have serious consequences far beyond Syria,” he adds.