This week marks the 80th anniversary of three seismic events in North Africa that would change the shape of the entire Middle East. On November 8, 1942, Britain and the U.S. launched Operation Torch—the invasion of French North Africa (today Morocco and Algeria). Germany responded the next day by sending its forces to Tunisia, which until then had remained under Vichy control. Then, on November 11, Britain defeated the Nazis at El Alamein in Egypt—winning their first major victory of the war. Robert Satloff reflects on the long-term consequences of these events:

[T]he most lasting impact of the Nazi presence in Tunisia was to give Arabs an up-close look at a model of all-powerful government infused with supremacist ideology. Along with the 1941 arrival in Berlin of the Jerusalem mufti Hajj Amin al-Husseini and Iraqi putschist Rashid Ali, both forced to flee from Baghdad, the Tunisia experience would play a role in building two movements that competed for power in the Middle East for decades to follow—the radical Arab nationalism of Gamal Abdul Nasser and Saddam Hussein and the Islamist extremism of Osama bin Ladin and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Whether both of these movements have been flushed from the Arab political system—or are just passing through a period of reassessment, retrenchment and rebirth—is one of the region’s most profound uncertainties.

As recent scholarship shows, the Germans had designs on Egypt and the Levant that went beyond the purely strategic objectives of controlling the Suez Canal, the eastern Mediterranean, and the oil fields of Arabia. In fact, there is convincing evidence that the Nazis planned to follow on Rommel’s expected sweep into Cairo and then onto Jerusalem with the extermination of the Jewish communities of Egypt, Palestine, and beyond. If the Panzers were not defeated in the Western Desert, this would likely have added more than 600,000 additional Jews to the Holocaust death toll.

This would have aborted any hope of the Zionist dream for a “Jewish national home” in the historic homeland of the Jewish people. The near annihilation of the Jews of Europe fed the desire for Jewish sovereignty; the annihilation of the Jews of the Levant would have killed it. Israel would never have been.

In a momentous meeting with the Syrian president Ahmed al-Sharaa in Riyadh, President Trump announced that he is lifting sanctions on the beleaguered and war-torn country. On the one hand, Sharaa is an alumnus of Islamic State and al-Qaeda, who came to power as commander of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which itself began life as al-Qaeda’s Syrian offshoot; he also seems to enjoy the support of Qatar. On the other hand, he overthrew the Assad regime—a feat made possible by the battering Israel delivered to Hizballah—greatly improving Jerusalem’s strategic position, and ending one of the world’s most atrocious and brutal tyrannies. President Trump also announced that he hopes Syria will join the Abraham Accords.

This analysis by Eran Lerman was published a few days ago, and in some respects is already out of date, but more than anything else I’ve read it helps to make sense of Israel’s strategic position vis-à-vis Syria.

Israel’s primary security interest lies in defending against worst-case scenarios, particularly the potential collapse of the Syrian state or its transformation into an actively hostile force backed by a significant Turkish presence (considering that the Turkish military is the second largest in NATO) with all that this would imply. Hence the need to bolster the new buffer zone—not for territorial gain, but as a vital shield and guarantee against dangerous developments. Continued airstrikes aimed at diminishing the residual components of strategic military capabilities inherited from the Assad regime are essential.

At the same time, there is a need to create conditions that would enable those in Damascus who wish to reject the reduction of their once-proud country into a Turkish satrapy. Sharaa’s efforts to establish his legitimacy, including his visit to Paris and outreach to the U.S., other European nations, and key Gulf countries, may generate positive leverage in this regard. Israel’s role is to demonstrate through daily actions the severe costs of acceding to Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ambitions and accepting Turkish hegemony.

Israel should also assist those in Syria (and beyond: this may have an effect in Lebanon as well) who look to it as a strategic anchor in the region. The Druze in Syria—backed by their brethren in Israel—have openly expressed this expectation, breaking decades of loyalty to the central power in Damascus over their obligation to their kith and kin.