Syria, Israel, and the Narrowing Window for Normalization

By Asher Smith | July 2025

By Wednesday evening, at least 200 people had been killed in southern Syria amid violent clashes between Druze and Bedouin militias in and around Suweyda, a historically autonomous Druze-majority city. In response, Syria’s interim government, led by Ahmed al-Sharaa, deployed national military forces to contain the unrest. Within hours of that deployment, Israel launched a series of intense airstrikes, targeting military convoys and security installations from southern Syria to central Damascus. The strikes have killed at least 3 people and injured 34 more, including civilians, and significant infrastructure damage was reported in the capital.

The airstrikes mark a sharp escalation in Israel’s engagement with Syria and have cast a long shadow over what just weeks ago appeared to be an emerging, if fragile, opportunity for normalization between the two countries.

The interim government in Damascus, led by Prime Minister Ahmed al-Sharaa, has actively distanced itself from Iranian and Russian interference, reopened dialogue with the U.S., Turkey, and Gulf states, and engaged in direct backchannel communication with Israeli officials, including recent meetings held in Baku and Istanbul. Within some foreign policy circles, the notion of Syria joining the Abraham Accords had shifted from far-fetched to increasingly plausible.

Sharaa’s Turn to the West

Al-Sharaa’s motivation is clear: his government is operating under conditions of postwar exhaustion, international skepticism, and economic ruin. Normalization with Israel, especially under the U.S.-backed Abraham Accords framework, offers access to international capital, reconstruction funds, and potential political legitimacy. With Iran’s influence weakening and Russia distracted in Ukraine and elsewhere, Sharaa has increasingly turned toward Turkey, the Gulf States, and the West for support. That pivot is not ideological; it is pragmatic. If the price of survival is diplomatic reintegration through engagement with former adversaries, the interim leadership appears willing to consider it.

From Israel’s perspective, normalization with Syria offers real strategic rewards. It could facilitate deconfliction along a historically volatile border, sever Iran’s regional corridor, and further isolate Hezbollah. For Syria, it could unlock urgently needed foreign capital, U.S. security cooperation, and economic legitimacy after a decade of war. While both sides remained cautious, the groundwork for a limited yet transformative agreement was underway.

That momentum now appears in jeopardy. Israel has long maintained a policy of strict intolerance toward the deployment of centralized Syrian military forces south of Damascus, a posture rooted in past experiences and the need to prevent hostile actors from gaining operational depth near the Golan Heights. However, the Sharaa government’s recent intervention in Suweyda, by most accounts, was aimed at containing internal unrest rather than enabling external threats. Israeli intelligence has not offered public evidence suggesting Iranian proxy reinfiltration into the region, nor has Syria’s new leadership signaled openness to restoring ties with Tehran.

What the airstrikes do reflect is Israel’s continued reliance on preemptive military dominance as a form of signaling, a doctrine that prioritizes visible action and swift deterrence over reciprocal diplomacy. Civilian casualties and damage to urban infrastructure underscore the scale of this approach, and its political message is difficult to misinterpret: Israel will not tolerate ambiguity near its borders and will dictate the terms of any future engagement.

This posture, rooted in long-standing Israeli defense strategy, is viewed with deep skepticism in many international capitals. Critics argue that repeated escalations, even if tactically justified, risk closing off fragile diplomatic openings before they can be tested. But within Israel, the reaction is more nuanced. While some segments of the public and political opposition question the government’s overreliance on force, especially in light of the October 7 security failures and the ongoing hostage crisis, decisive short-term military campaigns, like the one seen during the twelve-day war with Iran, remains broadly supported by a significant portion of the population. For many Israelis, deterrence through dominance has yielded tangible security dividends over the past year: Hezbollah’s diminished capacity in Lebanon, the collapse of Assad’s Iran-aligned regime, and the devastating blow to Iranian nuclear and missile capabilities last month. As a result, Israel has significantly amplified its leverage and solidified its secure standing across the region.

In this context, normalization with Syria, while strategically sound, now faces a more complicated path. Syrian public opinion was already wary. Decades of anti-Israel sentiment, the unresolved status of the Golan Heights, and deep sympathy for the Palestinian cause remain central features of political discourse, particularly as the war in Gaza continues. Recent polling shows that while minority communities (Druze, Kurds, Christians) express cautious support for normalization, broader skepticism persists. The latest Israeli strikes, especially those causing civilian harm, are likely to reinforce those doubts and delay any public consensus within Syria.

For Prime Minister Sharaa, the cost of pursuing normalization has risen. His political survival depends on balancing the promise of economic recovery with the need to preserve domestic legitimacy. Any deal with Israel, particularly one struck in the wake of airstrikes, will now require greater concessions from Israel and its allies: investment guarantees, symbolic recognition of Palestinian statehood aspirations, or firm security agreements. Absent these, normalization may be politically untenable, regardless of its strategic appeal.

Israel, for its part, appears unwilling to shift from its precedent: no normalization without first securing clear, strategic concessions. Its strikes serve as both deterrent and message; that it will meet diplomacy not with reciprocity, but with demonstration of its military superiority and resolve. In this way, Israel risks being perceived not as uninterested in peace, but unwilling to pursue it on anything but its own terms currently.

Normalization After Airstrikes

There is also a broader risk: that any future agreement between Israel and Syria could be viewed, domestically and regionally, not as a shared step toward peace, but as an outcome extracted under pressure. If normalization appears to be the product of Israeli airstrikes and Western leverage rather than internal Syrian agency, it may provoke backlash among Syrian factions and feed popular mistrust of both Sharaa and the process itself. For normalization to be politically viable, it must be framed as a sovereign decision — not a concession granted under duress. Otherwise, its legitimacy could collapse before its benefits are ever realized.

And yet, the logic of normalization remains. For Syria, the Abraham Accords offer not only reintegration but survival for a fragile interim government. For Israel, they offer reduced regional risk and a decisive blow to Iranian ambitions. But that logic may not be enough. With each cycle of escalation, the window narrows, not necessarily because diplomacy fails, but because it has not yet been given a chance to come to fruition.