Trump’s Warming Toward Syria Complicates Israel's Military Strategy

Israel has launched more than 700 attacks on Syria in the months since Islamist rebels toppled the dictator Bashar al-Assad, one of them a recent airstrike that landed just feet from the presidential palace in Damascus.

The chief goals, according to Israeli officials, were to keep weapons from falling into the hands of any hostile group and to prevent such groups from entrenching in southwestern Syria near Israel.

“This is absolutely a lesson from southern Lebanon,” said Uzi Arad, a former national security adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, and now a critic of Mr. Netanyahu’s. Israel spent decades fighting Palestinian and Hezbollah militants who dug into southern Lebanon and launched attacks from there across the border into northern Israel.

Israel has also called the new Syrian government, led by an Islamist rebel faction once linked to Al Qaeda, “extremist.”

But just days after Israel’s May 2 airstrike near the palace in Damascus, President Trump upended decades of American foreign policy by meeting with President Ahmed al-Shara of Syria and announcing plans to lift all sanctions on the country. Mr. Trump said Mr. al-Shara had “a real shot at pulling it together,” after a nearly 14-year civil war fractured his country.

Since that meeting on May 14, the Israeli strikes on Syria have all but stopped.