Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 4/25/25 Jason Ditz on Israeli Operations in Syria and Lebanon

Episode Date: April 28, 2025

Scott interviews Jason Ditz about the latest news concerning Israel’s actions in Syria and Lebanon. They discuss Syria’s new Islamist leader’s apparent willingness to normalize relations with Tel Aviv, the Israeli occupation of Syrian territory, the Turkish regime’s interests in Syria, the Israeli goals in Lebanon and more.    Discussed on the show: “Syrian Leader Sharaa Says Willing to Normalize Relations With Israel” (Antiwar.com) “Turkey Halts Offensive Against Syria’s Tishreen Dam Amid US-Mediated Talks” (Antiwar.com) “Israeli Tanks Cross Border, Raid Southern Lebanon Villages” (Antiwar.com) Jason Ditz is senior editor of Antiwar.com. Read all of his work at news.antiwar.com and follow him on Twitter @jasonditz. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Roberts and Robers Brokerage Incorporated; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; Libertas Bella; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott. Get Scott’s interviews before anyone else! Subscribe to the Substack. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjY Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

almost immediately after they took over and started taking over the demilitarized zone and moving deeper than that since then. So the plan for normalization hasn't exactly gone off without a hitch. Yeah. So isn't it funny how they said that Assad and the Balthus and the SAA were such a threat? They bombed them all the time. And they said, man, we would really prefer al-Qaeda there.

took credit for helping al-Qaeda win. Netanyahu goes to the border and gives a big speech about how, yeah, see, because I weakened Hezbollah. I made it possible for al-Qaeda take over the country. Congratulations to me and my great leadership skills. But then, as you said, like the next day, the Israelis completely decimate what's left of the Syrian Arab army because evidently, by their behavior, they seem to demonstrate that they're a lot more worried about that equipment being in the hands of a bunch of bin Ladenites. than they ever were about it being in the hands of the Bathis. Am I reading that wrong? Well, that's certainly what they've been saying. I don't know that it's so much that they're really concerned about Al-Qaeda being in charge of Syria, although it clearly isn't ideal, despite them saying for years they preferred that to Assad. I think, honestly, a lot of it is just, well, it's an unclear. situation in Syria and it's a perfect excuse to expand their buffer zone inside Syrian territory

to include more of Golan. Yeah, that's all, huh? They're just taking advantage. All right. So, you know, I confess I don't have a very zoomed in map of this area in my head there, right where the very northwest, northeastern part of Israel, including the occupied now annexed and stolen Golan Heights and Lebanon and Syria all meat and all this. I got a map in my head, but it's not great. But so how far into Syria did the unoccupied Golan stretch? And the Israelis have now taken control of all that? Well, they haven't, they haven't formally taken control of all that.

They've sent troops. I mean, first there was the demilitarized zone. between the occupied and annexed golan and the rest of golan which was a u.n observer force controlled area they've taken pretty much all of that and then they've moved beyond that into cunitria and dara governorates and in some cases they've gone about 10 or 15 miles beyond the old golan line but uh in other places they haven't gone nearly that far and are just barely in in past the demilitarized zone they're not really occupying and annexing the towns and villages in that area they just sort of raid them every once in a while

rummage through their town records and uh confiscate electronic equipment and any military equipment that might have been positioned there and then leave. So they're not so much formally occupying it like they did southern Lebanon earlier this in the past few months. But they remain in de facto control. They've made sure to take control of the water resources in the area so they have control over whether these towns get water or not. So they have some symbolic shows of like settlers coming and consecrating the land and all this stuff.

They haven't made much more of that? They haven't made a lot of that. The biggest thing they did was they had some big Passover hiking opportunities where Israelis could sign up and have the military take them into occupied parts of Syria and go hiking and take pictures and hang out with the soldiers and things like that. There have been a few cases where some settlers got in. They were talking about scouting out areas maybe for potential settlements. I'm not sure anything's actually happened with that, though. And officially,

they're saying they're going to stay indefinitely some Israeli officials are making it out like this is a more or less permanent takeover of the area but really we're not sure where they stand or what they hope to accomplish doing this huh so well we'll switch

to Lebanon in a second but just in contrast going back to the original founders of Zionism they talked about going at least as far as the Latani River or I don't know if that's really a very good source of fresh water or what, but it makes sense that at least on the face of it, that's a resource to covet there in southern Lebanon.

In Syria, I don't know, there's Mount Hernan, but I don't know if that's valuable real estate in any way or any of that other than if it fits within the ideology of building a greater Israel that the northern border is supposed to extend to here or there, then, I don't know. I guess we may or may not be able to tell by the Israelis sort of stance now what they mean to do in the long term. I guess that they were really just going to annex it and do their worst. They might have signaled that pretty blatantly by now. But it sounds like you're saying they really haven't.

Maybe they don't even know what they want to do. Yeah, they've been very unclear about it. They're trying to justify the land they've taken in Syria as a buffer zone against al-Qaeda and playing up the idea that HTS is a huge threat against Israel's survival and that they have to prepare to defend themselves militarily, even though HTS has been pretty open even before they took. the country about wanting to normalize ties with Israel. And it seems like for now, the takeover and the hostility is more for its own sake

to just stay with Syria being an enemy instead of another country like Jordan that they have a decent relationship with and kind of have to work with. Yeah, which by the way, I was referring to the Israeli's arrogance rather than their honesty there when I was saying they might have signaled exactly their intent by now. But, you know, if you go back to the Odid Yanan plan, the idea always was, at least from that point of view, was to break up all the Arab states into as small pieces as possible and just keep them small, weak, warring tribes. I mean, how much of a state could Al Qaeda ever really make?

You know what I mean? Yeah. And it really isn't clear what kind of state they're going to end up. making in Syria because they talk about being very conciliatory and uniting everybody into this sort of ideal united Syria. But their new cabinet that they announced really cut out a lot of the minorities. The Kurds got nothing. There was one sort of token position for an Alloite and a token position for a Druze. And then another position that was the only woman and the only Christian in the cabinet but all the power positions are going to sunni islamist groups so that made a lot of

people unhappy so far it has led to any direct conflict over it but i think in the long run it probably is is going to be very difficult for them to unite the country when they intend to maintain pretty much all the power for themselves yeah i mean you can see this coming, that even if Mohammed al-Shara, he's calling himself now, Jolani, the former bin Laden guy in charge, if he really has been as tamed as he at least fronts when he's speaking with the West, he's clearly got public relations advice from the Turks and probably the CIA. You know, we also, it was so blatant the way they got Martin Smith from front line.

line to try to launder his reputation for him back in 2018 so they've been working on this but if he is really that you know frankly weak in the face of America and Israel how long

could anyone expect for him to last in power when all his guys are a bunch of bin Laden night cooks too I mean some of his major leaders are guys that we know from the last war where they were the leader of the suicide bomber brigades and stuff like this these guys from Jashal Islam and whatever, Arar al-Sham, who are all part of this thing.

I mean, they've tried to sort of fix their reputation this way by rebranding what they stand for, but ideologically, they don't seem to have changed all that much. They're still basically pretty closely aligned with al-Qaeda. And in fact, when Jabhat al-Nusra, which later became HTS, started moving away from al-Qaeda, some people were pretty open and saying that it was just a trick so they would be eligible to get U.S. military aid to just say, well, we're going to officially be an independent group and break off with them, but not really. And a lot of the al-Qaeda leadership were, they were openly saying that for a little while, but then I think they got clued into the fact that if they're saying that publicly it's not going to work, so they started saying, oh, we don't support this in anyone. way. Yep.

So I think ultimately they, it was just kind of a cynical way to go, wow, the U.S. doesn't really know what they're doing and they'll aid pretty much anybody against Assad. So if we, if we're just nominally not Al-Qaeda, they'll be fine with giving us weapons. And, and they were. So it worked. I don't know if those guys have a sense of humor at all or not, but if so, they must be laughing at us.

Like, boy, those Americans. must really hate the Shiites if the Israelis tell them to because here our side knocked their towers down and they don't seem to mind. Like, what do they tell each other to explain that? Is there cashing checks from USAID, you know? Yeah, it doesn't seem to have taken a lot of justification to get people on board with the idea that, oh, Al-Qaeda is the best solution for Syria. So now here's the thing, man, is, you know, like in Iraq War II, it's such an interesting kind of same but different dynamic where the bin Ladenites were part of the broader Sunni-based insurgency, but they were never dominant.

They were just the vanguard of the thing. But when the local Sunnis got sick and tired of them and turned on them, they were gone. Whereas here, you know, in the so-called awakening that Petraeus took credit for, but it was really just the local Iraqi Sunnis did it before America even started bribing them to do it. it. Anyway, I know you know that. But in this case, the al-Qaeda guys were dominant on the battlefield the whole time. And here, you know, are the ones inheriting the power. But unlike in Iraq where you had, I know there were very mixed cities in some places and whatever, but by and large, you had a predominantly Shiite south and east and a predominantly Sunni north and west there um whereas in syria there are many more factions and there were Christians and other

ethnic minorities and religious minorities in iraq as well but i think not as much proportion wise as in syria we had you know four or five different types of Christians and you had Shiites and um and then you know whatever drews and and whoever uh different groups and And then you got the bin Ladenites now sack in Damascus. Oh, the Alawites, of course, who had been the ruling caste, very close to the Shiites, and who had been the rulers under the Baathist regime. So what's supposed to happen to all these people now? We saw how the bin Ladenites treated the Christians and the Shiites and the Druze and the other minorities back 10, 15 years ago in Obama's dirty war.

We saw these recent maskers of the Alawites in the West. And in fact, let me just ask you about that. Like, what all do you know about that? And especially if you know death tolls. And to what degree were Christians caught up in this same set of pogroms? And for that matter, are they even over at this point, the killing of the Alawite, these massacres? Well, it doesn't seem like they're really over. They've certainly slowed down from when they were killing just thousands of people a day.

we don't really have a great final death toll. I've seen some estimates that are much higher than others. It's a lot of people for what is a relatively small amount of northwest Syria ended up getting killed. And it's chiefly Al-Wites, but it does seem like in some places the Christians got swept up in it too, which historically probably isn't a big surprise. because the Alawites were always kind of the outsiders when this was all Ottoman territory, you know, over a century ago. It was like, oh, the Alawites, they're a religious my minority. We kind of, they're allowed in the country because they're from this area, but they're not really given full rights.

And the Christians that lived in the area are kind of the same way. So there was a lot of sense that the Christians and the Alawites are basically the same thing, at least from the Islamist perspective. And there were times where when they released videos of them beating up Alawites or summarily executing them, they would call them Christians just because, well, they're one of those religious minorities in that area. and they're all more or less the same thing as far as they're concerned. Yeah. Remember they would chant Christians to Beirut, Alawites to the grave.

So we're always referring to the last war. Can you believe it was 15 to 10 years ago was when all this Obama dirty war was happening? We've been having this conversation on and off since then. It's crazy. Hey, y'all, here's how you can support those. who support this show, and stay awake while you're doing things. Moondose Artisan Coffees, Moondoseartisan Coffees.com.

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Make a deal with Expanddesigns.com for your new business or news site. They will take care of you. Use the promo code Scott and save $500. That's expanddesigns.com. Man, I wish I was in school so I could drop out and sign up for Tom Woods' Liberty Classroom instead. Tom has done such a great job on putting together a classical curriculum for everyone from junior high schoolers on up through the postgraduate level, and it's all very reasonably priced. Just make sure you click through from the link in the right margin at Scott Horton.org. Tom Woods' Liberty Classroom, real history, real economics, real education. So let's talk about the great dictator, Resa Berdawan of Turkey, and his role in here and his goals. What do we know about him and how at odds does it put, do they put him, I guess, with Benjamin Netanyahu?

It's Turkey's, Turkey's goal in Syria is kind of complicated in its own right with itself because Turkey seems to stand hugely, hugely to gain economically from being involved in the reconstruction after the war. A lot of the Turkish stock market had been up quite a bit on infrastructure projects that they expected to land out of this war being over. But then there are some questions because Erdogan's other main goal is that Kurdish autonomy in the northeast of Syria absolutely can't remain and that they have to be completely absorbed into the central government and effect. Effectively, they have to be destroyed as a separate military force in Syria, which on the one hand, the HTS has given lip service to the idea that, oh, we can't have any independent military factions, and that includes the Kurdish SDF. But in practice, they've gone very slow on integrating them into their military, and it's not clear that at the end of the day, they're going to do all that much to make the Kurds not effectively an occupational. autonomous region of the country. Yeah. So certainly Turkey could,

Turkey's threatened, in fact, to send troops in to force the issue time and again, saying, oh, if they're not satisfied with the progress and the deals made, they might have to send troops to enforce the disarmament of the Kurds. but doing so could really risk the position they're in, which is having a good relationship with the Syrian government and getting all those economically important contracts. And then on top of it, you have Israel who is interested in carving out southern Syria as part of a sphere of influence and sees Turkey carving out the northern.

part and even the central part as their sphere of influence. And there's suddenly the sense that, hey, Turkey's interests and Israel's interests are going to be budding heads in the middle of Syria, and it could lead to a conflict. We've seen recently where Israel launched some airstrikes against an old Syrian air base, but it was a base that Turkey had been very public about wanting to take over for themselves. right and uh you know just it was literally like one day there was a story of turkey wants the t4 basin tadmore and then the next day oh israel's bombing the tier t4 base in tadmar man so you got a wonder right you got these extremely powerful regimes in israel and in turkey

and then he got a bunch of bin ladenite nutballs who've now seized the four or five major Syrian cities in between them, sponsored by the Turks and acquiesced to all along and encouraged by the Israelis with some support, at least in the past, for these same guys. And so you just got to wonder, like, how much of a real Syrian state can even exist between these two powers there now?

Or we're just going to see truly expanded borders of both countries at the expense of what used to be called Syria. You know, if we just fast forward five or ten years from now, what's the map going to be shaped like then? I don't know. Yeah, it's really hard to say because the U.S. hasn't the U.S. hasn't spoken out as far as being committed to Syrian territorial sovereignty or anything and has kind of held that out as one of the things that they would consider doing if the HTS meets a whole bunch of their conditions, which includes banning all the Palestinian organizations and

dismantling their chemical weapons arsenal, which effectively they'd already done years ago. But they've let the OPCW into the country to go through the warehouses and clean them out and make sure there's nothing left. But a lot of that's going to be difficult to placate the U.S. about because the U.S. isn't, exactly the type to believe them when they say they got rid of something even if there's not really

evidence they have it anymore and so long as the u.s isn't saying oh Syria has to remain a country of its own on on these borders both israel and turkey are kind of going to feel free to say well we're going to take this part and they're going to take this part and it's not clear that how much is going to be left in the middle. Wouldn't that be interesting if Israel attacked Turkey and then America had to answer Article 5 of the NATO treaty

and go to war against Israel? Sorry, those are the rules. No, I don't encourage that. But it would be funny. Well, it would be ironical. Hey, listen, tell me all about Libya. I mean, not Libya, Lebanon.

You know, the one next door to Syria there. They both have a city named Tyre. But anyway, I want to talk about Lebanon and boy, Hezbollah seems like the Israelis, whatever that giant missile store that they supposedly had, the Israelis really took out the bulk of it, I guess, before they had a chance to use it and then bombed a bunch of guys from the air and with Pagers and seemed to have really crippled Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. I don't know if you could put a percentage on it or how you would estimate the decrease in. their, well, just their violent capacity. I don't know about their political power in Beirut, but their ability to wage war in southern Lebanon. They've lost a lot of territory, although I don't know how much.

And so I don't know. Tell us, give us a good update. Yeah, it's really hard to say how much capacity they lost. Certainly with the fall of Syria, they don't have the easy route of, you know, military aid access because the Syria-Lebanon border used to be a popular place to smuggle in weapons. That's truly what this is all about, by the way, right? Is breaking Iran's ability to supply Hezbollah by way of Syria, and they've finally done it.

Right. That was a big part of this. It's not really clear how much Hezbollah has left. it probably is a substantial amount, but they sure haven't been using it since the ceasefire went into effect. There's effectively no missile strikes into Israel that have been conclusively linked to Hezbollah. There were only a couple of rockets that barely crossed the border and got intercepted, which it sounds like a different group did, a Hamasling group did. and Hezbollah was very clear they had nothing to do with it. So it's not really clear how much Hezbollah has left, but whatever it is, they sure aren't using it right now.

Yeah. Well, and apparently losing their leader was a big blow, too, or at least they're feigning so. But like you say, there's a ceasefire, so maybe they're, I guess we don't know the degree to which they're being successful at rebuilding right now and looking their wounds and whatever. But it's interesting because it all just goes to show then or all raises the question of how much free reign is Israel going to have in southern Lebanon now if they've done such a great job of neutralizing their resistance there. That's potentially a big problem because the terms of the ceasefire were, okay, Hezbollah is going to withdraw north of the Latani River.

Israel is going to withdraw back to the pre-war borders. And it never really happened. I mean, Israel eventually left all the towns and villages in that area that they'd occupied, although they destroyed a lot of them before they left. But they kept a bunch of military outposts that they built on hilltops on the Lebanese side of the border. And they've insisted they're just going to keep those outposts. In fact, earlier this week, they sent tanks across the border again into a couple of the southern Lebanese villages. It's not clear what they did.

They raided the villages overnight and searched some homes and the like, but they didn't really get in any battles. And it was so far south that the Lebanese army hasn't deployed there yet. So it's effectively still Israeli occupied territory, even if Israel isn't there, 24-7. It's just a question of when they feel like showing up to do something. And Hezbollah doesn't appear to have much left south of the Latani. They reported handing over a lot of their old military bases to the Lebanese army. And the Lebanese army confirmed taking them over and dismantling a lot of them because they were old and not much value anymore. more. But they didn't, they're not claiming they gave them every single base they had. They are

claiming they don't have any forces south of the Latani anymore. But Israel keeps attacking south of the Latani pretty much every day and insists everyone they attacked as a Hezbollah operatives. So even if Hezbollah isn't there. Right. Even if Hezbollah isn't there, it doesn't really matter because Israel is still going to use that as a pretext to keep attacking. Yeah. All right, man. Well, I'm sorry. I'm so short on time today.

I want to ask you a bunch of questions about Gaza, but that's going to have to wait until next week. Not that the Israelis are waiting to bomb them. That's still ongoing, but we'll have to cover it then. But thank you for coming back on the show. It's great to talk to you again, Jason. Yeah, good to talk to you. aren't you guys

that is Jason Ditz he is our senior editor senior news editor at antiwar.com maybe just senior editor why not I think so yeah

and he writes with Dave DeCamp and the boys Kyle Anzlon as well at news dot antiwar dot com news dot antiwar

dot com especially for keeping up on all your lit why do I keep doing that I know the difference just can't talk right all your Lebanon news

Oh, by the way, speaking of talking right, sign up for my substack, Scott Horton Show.com, and you can get the first three sections of the audio book of Provoked. I know that doesn't sound like a lot, but it's 10 hours of audio just for the H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton chapters. And I'm getting working on the rest here. So sign up, Scott Horton Show.com. Thanks for listening to Scott Horton Show, which can be heard on APS Radio News at Scott Horton.org, Scott Horton Show.com, and the Libertarian. Institute at libertarian institute.org