Is Peace Between Israel and Syria Really Possible?

With new leadership in Damascus, Trump wants a deal between the two countries. That will be a tall order.

The Purple Line through Majdal Shams in the Golan Heights (Wikimedia Commons)

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu was in Washington, D.C., last week, and high on the agenda in his meetings with President Donald Trump was Syria—and the possibility of peace, or at least nonbelligerency, between Israel and its volatile neighbor.

That once unthinkable prospect now seems possible thanks to the overthrow of the murderous Assad regime in Damascus, Syria, and its replacement by the seemingly more moderate government of Ahmad al-Sharaa—the new president’s time in al-Qaeda notwithstanding. Having secured relief of U.S. sanctions from President Trump, who praised him as a “young, attractive. . . tough guy,” al-Sharaa is purportedly open to a deal. Brokering it, Trump might believe, could persuade Netanyahu to show more flexibility on Gaza. But far more than a mere carrot, the signing of an Israeli-Syrian peace accord would be an event of immense historical and strategic import.

In his classic work, The Struggle for Syria, British journalist Patrick Seale argued that Syria represented the linchpin of the Middle East. Whoever controlled it, he argued, would dominate the region. Egypt in the 1950s and ’60s certainly agreed with Seale, as did Iran after the Islamic Revolution of 1979. Conversely, by making peace with Syria, a country could ensure far-reaching stability. No nation understood that principle more profoundly than Israel.

Peace with Syria would enable Israel to forge untold swords—armored formations and artillery corps—into profitable plowshares of trade. It would strengthen Israel’s anti-Iranian alliance with the Sunni world and effectively end the Arab-Israeli conflict, further isolating Hamas and other Palestinian terror organizations previously supported by Damascus.

But the Israeli dream of peace with Syria is not new. And given the history of the two countries’ relationship, it is likely to remain chimerical.

Syria has always been Israel’s enemy par excellence. At the moment of Israel’s birth in May 1948, Syrian forces invaded northern Galilee and attacked and overran Israeli settlements. Though the Syrian invasion was eventually stemmed and an armistice signed in 1949, Syria has maintained its state of war with Israel ever since. Emblazoned in Israel’s collective memory is the image of the spy Eli Cohen dangling from a rope in Marjeh Square in Damascus in 1965 as tens of thousands of Syrians looked on cheering.

Under the armistice, Syria retained control of all but 10 meters of the eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee and of the entire Golan Heights, including the strategically crucial Mount Hermon, looming above the Galilee panhandle. From their placements atop the Golan, Syrian gunners and snipers fired indiscriminately at the Israeli farms and communities below in the years before 1967. As a volunteer on an Upper Galilee kibbutz in the early 1970s, I heard stories of kibbutzniks shot and killed while herding their cattle, and of children dashing for shelter as Syrian shells rained from the heights above.

Syria’s support for Palestinian terror, its attempts to divert the Jordan River before it reached Israel, and its constant artillery fire on Galilee settlements were among the major causes of the Six-Day War. Though Israel had no intention of attacking Syria in that conflict, massive artillery fire from the Golan necessitated its capture. Even then, Israeli troops fought one of the bitterest battles of the war against Syrian soldiers, many of whom were chained to their positions.

Six years later—on October 6, 1973, Yom Kippur—Syria and Egypt launched a coordinated attack against Israel. Hundreds of Syrian tanks and other armored vehicles broke through Israeli defenses on the Golan Heights, conquered Israel Defense Forces’ bases, and threatened the Jordan River crossings. In one of the greatest military victories in modern history, the IDF fought the aggressors all the way back to Damascus and put the city within Israeli artillery range. Even then, Israeli soldiers and pilots taken prisoner by the Syrians were relentlessly tortured, some of them to death.

As part of the separation of forces agreement negotiated by U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in 1974, Israel withdrew from the eastern slope of Mount Hermon and from an area of southern Syria. This became a demilitarized safe zone under the aegis of an international peacekeeping force—the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF). The border remained quiet for many years, but war with Syria remained a palpable possibility for Israelis.

Serving as a paratrooper in the Golan Heights in the late 1970s, I was constantly on alert for a renewed Syrian incursion. During the first Lebanon War in 1982, Syrian tanks mauled Israeli armor at the Battle of Sultan Yacoub, and Syrian commandos vehemently resisted the IDF’s advance on Beirut. My unit, already decimated in a Syrian ambush, became the last in Israeli military history to be strafed by enemy fighter jets.

It’s surprising, then, that Israel repeatedly offered a territory-for-peace agreement with Syria. The first of such initiatives was made only days after the end of the Six-Day War, when the Israeli government voted to return the entire Golan Heights to Syria in exchange for peace. Syria rejected Israel’s gesture outright.

In the 1990s, in the wake of the Oslo Accords with the Palestinians, the Israeli governments of Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Barak both made efforts to achieve peace with Syria. In exchange for relinquishing the Golan Heights, Israel would receive security guarantees and fully normalized relations with Damascus. In each case, though, Syrian dictator Hafez al-Assad, citing disagreements over the location of the pre-’67 border, rejected Israel’s entreaties.

Though he still vehemently denies it, Prime Minister Netanyahu also engaged in a clandestine peace process with Bashar al-Assad, Hafez’s equally evil son, in 2010. When I was Israel’s ambassador in Washington, I had multiple meetings with then-Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman John Kerry and with the amiable Frederic Hof, President Barack Obama’s special envoy for Syrian-Israel peace. Hof developed detailed plans for returning the Golan Heights to Syria and transforming the area into a demilitarized nature reserve that Israeli tourists could access with a passport. This effort, too, collapsed with the outbreak of the Syrian civil war in March 2011 and Assad’s subsequent massacre of 500,000 of his own countrymen.

Over the next decade, in Washington and later in the Knesset, I campaigned for rapid Israeli development of the Golan. The Syrian civil war would eventually end, I knew, and with less than 25,000 Israeli citizens living on the Heights, pressure would resume on Israel to surrender them. I simply worked to persuade the Trump administration to recognize Israeli sovereignty over the area, but even when this was obtained, and the new city of Trump Heights inaugurated, the Golan remains dangerously underpopulated.

The Syrian civil war has indeed ended, and Assad is gone, but does that mean peace is imminent, or even possible? Is the newly installed Ahmad al-Sharaa, formerly an ISIS jihadist, willing or capable of reversing nearly eight decades of his country’s relentless enmity toward the Jewish State? Will he agree to a border that has never been well-defined and was almost uninterruptedly in dispute? Will he be willing to forfeit Syria’s claim to the Golan Heights, which Netanyahu insists is permanently off the table, and be satisfied with an Israeli withdrawal from the southern buffer zone it occupied after Assad’s fall? Finally, in a country perennially held together by brutal dominant force and in which regimes are routinely overthrown, what are al-Sharaa’s chances for surviving long enough to fulfill an agreement with Israel even if he makes one?

Still, the U.S.-Israeli victory over Iran and the collapse of Hezbollah has restored to Syria the sovereignty denied it for decades. Blandishments such as further sanction relief, enlistment in regional defense pacts, and an IDF withdrawal from the buffer zone could induce Syria to show unprecedented flexibility. President Trump, meanwhile, remains eager as ever to win the Nobel Prize—and a Trump-brokered Israel-Syria peace would help his case.

Even if the two countries prove incapable of concluding a full peace treaty now, they can at least agree on nonbelligerency. They could revive Operation Good Neighbor, mounted during the Syrian civil war, in which Syrian civilians wounded in the civil war received medical treatment in Israel and Israel facilitated aid to Syrian border communities. Israeli Druze leaders could negotiate a truce between al-Sharaa and their brethren in Syria.

In colloquial Hebrew, one does not eat hummus but rather “swabs” it with a piece of pita bread. Lately, Israelis have been asking ourselves whether we’ll be swabbing hummus soon in Damascus. The answer is “maybe not this year, but perhaps sometime in the foreseeable future.” The vision of Israelis dining in Damascus may not yet be realized, but Trump and Netanyahu can certainly set the table.

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This article originally appeared in The Free Press on July 10, 2025.