As Syrians celebrate Assad’s fall, Israel is striking targets across the country. Andrew Mueller explains why. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
The fall of President Bashar al Assad of Syria and the end of more than half a century of his family's miserable misrule of the country is in and of itself unalloyed good news.
Syria's people are abundantly entitled to whatever transports of joy and hope they are presently exulting in.
They have waited long and suffered much for this moment.
A moment might, however, be all they get.
To consider the state of play in Syria right now is to contemplate a board and or arena.
Choose your own preferred metaphor, upon which many players, internal and external, are all at once playing games of varying subtlety from chess to rollerball.
This Saturday's episode of the Foreign Desk will take a broad view of the probable causes and possible consequences of the astonishing events of the last week or so, midday UK time, or wherever fine podcasts are downloaded after that.
This explainer, meanwhile, will consider the response as we understand it so far, of one very interested party Syria's neighbour and longtime antagonist, Israel.
Israel has advertently or otherwise played a significant role in enabling Syria's revolution.
Israel's recent decapitation of the Lebanese militia Hezbollah, which had long protected Assad at Iran's behest, helped make the rebels advance to Damascus militarily feasible.
It appears, however, that Israel is not going to sit around anticipating the gratitude of whoever ends up running the country next door.
In recent days, Israel has taken steps in keeping with its characteristically uncompromising approach to potential threats from its Arab neighbours, or, as Israel's critics might well have it, made typically opportunistic manoeuvres to help itself to its Arab neighbours.
Even as Syria's long suffering people celebrated the overthrow of their tyrant, the Israeli air force was striking targets across Syria, including inside Damascus.
Israeli tanks also rolled into the demilitarised buffer zone in Syrian controlled territory on the eastern side of the Golan Heights, of which more presently and Israeli troops seized abandoned Syrian positions on Mount Hermon and in Qunitra Province, both on Syrian territory.
We gave the Israeli army the order In a statement likely to have prompted an amount of mirthless laughter across the Arab world, Israel insisted that this move was temporary.
This is a temporary defensive position, though Israel is entitled to observe that this deployment was in part by way of assistance to a UN post on Syrian territory which had come under attack from renegades.
Unknown Israel's recent strikes are very far from the first such raids on Syria.
Israel has hit Syria pretty frequently over the last decade and change, mostly in efforts to interdict supply lines from Iran to Hezbollah and or disrupt Iranian and Hezbollah activities inside Syria.
And among the target in this latest onslaught was a Hezbollah convoy of 150 vehicles attempting to reach Lebanon.
These latest raids are, however, unusual in their intensity.