Israel Is Right to Take Responsibility for Its Attacks in Syria

In an interview with Bret Stephens published in the New York Times on January 11, the outgoing IDF chief-of-staff Gadi Eisenkot stated bluntly that Israel had struck “thousands” of Iranian targets in Syria in recent years. The same day, Benjamin Netanyahu made a similar on-the-record statement at cabinet meeting. These admissions mark a break from Jerusalem’s longstanding reluctance to claim responsibility for airstrikes it has carried out in the midst of the Syrian civil war—a policy that dates back even earlier, to such events as the destruction of a Syrian nuclear reactor in 2007. Eyal Zisser explains the rationale behind breaking with this policy of “strategic ambiguity”: