For the past few weeks, there have been protests and riots in the Syrian city of Suwayda—an area that long seemed firmly under the regime’s control—calling for Bashar al-Assad to relinquish power. The unrest suggests that, even as Damascus has crushed the major pockets of resistance, its grip on the war-torn country remains unstable. Meanwhile, the IDF continues its yearslong “war between the wars” against Iran-linked military targets in Syria, having struck as recently as last week. Jonathan Spyer examines Israel’s current strategic position regarding its northern neighbor:

Israel’s primary goal in Syria is the halting of the advance of Iranian influence and [military capabilities] in the country. From an Israeli point of view, the current diplomatic situation in Syria—in which the regime remains isolated by the West, and without major reconstruction efforts underway from Western companies or states—is the ideal background for the continued prosecution of the Israeli military efforts against Iranian entrenchment and consolidation on Syrian soil.

Thus, Israel should use all available diplomatic channels to encourage the West to maintain . . . the continued isolation of the Assad regime. If Assad succeeds in ending his isolation and normalizing relations with the West, it is a near inevitability that at a certain point U.S. pressure on Israel would begin to induce it to cease its military campaign on Syrian soil, on the grounds that the conflict has finished, Syria is now a normal actor on the international stage, etc.

Similarly, the continued de-facto partition of Syria is a clear Israeli interest. The control [of the northeastern third of country] by the U.S. and its Kurdish allies in the Syrian Democratic Forces constitutes an incomplete but significant barrier to Iranian freedom of movement and action between Iraq and Syria.

Even the Sunni Islamist, Turkish-dominated enclave in the northwest of the country offers an advantage to Israel in that its presence keeps the regime weakened, prevents it from focusing on the reconquest of the southeast, and prevents the regime from extending its rule across the country and thus normalizing its situation. Thus, Israel should encourage Turkey in the direction of continued opposition to the Assad regime, and maintenance of its area of control in Syria.

Israel will likely respond directly against Iran after yesterday’s attack, and has made known that it will calibrate its retaliation based not on the extent of the damage, but on the scale of the attack. The specifics are anyone’s guess, but Edward Luttwak has a suggestion, put forth in an article published just hours before the missile barrage: cut off Tehran’s ability to send money and arms to Shiite Arab militias.

In practice, most of this cash comes from a single source: oil. . . . In other words, the flow of dollars that sustains Israel’s enemies, and which has caused so much trouble to Western interests from the Syrian desert to the Red Sea, emanates almost entirely from the oil loaded onto tankers at the export terminal on Khark Island, a speck of land about 25 kilometers off Iran’s southern coast. Benjamin Netanyahu warned in his recent speech to the UN General Assembly that Israel’s “long arm” can reach them too. Indeed, Khark’s location in the Persian Gulf is relatively close. At 1,516 kilometers from Israel’s main airbase, it’s far closer than the Houthis’ main oil import terminal at Hodeida in Yemen—a place that was destroyed by Israeli jets in July, and attacked again [on Sunday].