Israel, Syria and Jihadi terror

On May 13, 2025, President Donald Trump announced that the U.S. will cease sanctions against Syria “to give them a chance at greatness.” As part of that announcement, Trump chortled to Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman: “Oh, what I do for the crown prince.” But could any of this ad hoc commentary make policy sense for Israel?

It’s not a hard question. In Jerusalem, nothing could conceivably be less welcome than encouraging a Syrian “chance at greatness.” Even if the US president was correct that sanctions relief will strengthen the new Damascus regime and correspondingly accelerate Saudi support for defensive measures against Iran, such benefits would become a double-edged sword.

In Syria, longtime ally of Iran, assorted jihadi groups will configure and reconfigure under the watchful gaze of interim President Ahmad al-Sharaa, but several jihadi terror groups (not just al-Sharaa’s HTS militia) will simultaneously seek to expand their relative power. As for Sunni Saudi Arabia, reasonable fears of Shiite Iran would provide Israel not with a once-unthinkable ally, but with an original adversary now openly determined to “go nuclear.”

Whatever the nuances of jihadi reconfiguration in Syria, the triumphant terror groups will focus more determinedly on transcendent goals than short-term tactical advantages. In the final analysis, like all jihadi groups – past and present – the ultimate goal of these groups will be “power over death.” It follows that Israel’s acceptance of promised security benefits based on Syrian sanctions relief would elevate contrived hopes over dispassionate analyses.

If Sigmund Freud were here to assess these geostrategic issues, he would doubtlessly describe the American president’s expectations for Syria as “wish fulfillment.”

What next? How should Israeli military planners meaningfully acknowledge that the fall of Bashar al-Assad in December 2024 could never birth a welcome era of “Syrian greatness?” Unlike Israel’s systematic orientation to counter-terrorism – a posture that centers on logic, science and engineering – jihadi orientations to violence will continue to revolve around manipulation, mystification and gratuitous cruelty.

Accordingly, the following core question regarding Syrian jihadism should be assigned a prominent pride of place in Jerusalem and the answer carefully studied:

How should unchanging jihadist beliefs in personal immortality (beliefs based on the necessary “sacrifice” of “unbelievers”) be combatted by Israel’s national security decision-makers?

In every domain of religion-based mystifications, there will arise powerful yearnings of anti-reason. Facing seductive jihadi ideologies that promise eternality to “the faithful,” Israel will need to remain wary of projecting ordinary political/strategic preferences on all jihadi foes. This is not meant to suggest uniform enemy irrationality, but only to underscore that “normal” secular political preferences (e.g., “Palestinian self-determination”) would be secondary.

“Normally,” projections of decision-making rationality make sense in world politics. Nonetheless, there are enough significant exceptions to temper any hope-dependent generalities. If Israel’s national decision-makers were to appraise current reconfigurations of global jihadist terrorist organizations (Sunni and Shiite) from an analytic standpoint – one that acknowledges the faith-based impact of “power over death” – the nexus between “martyrdom operations” and “life-everlasting” could become more understandable.

At that point, Jerusalem’s national security planners could begin to place themselves in a significantly-improved position to deter Islamist murderers, hostage-takers and suicide-bombers. Such egregious outlaws (known under international law as hostes humani generis or “common enemies of mankind”) include both individual terror-criminals and enemy state terror patrons.

There are corresponding elements of justice. Jihadi insurgents seeking to justify unrestrained attacks on Israeli noncombatants are acting in contravention of authoritative international law. In law, all law, rights can never stem from wrongs: Ex injuria jus non oritur.

In world politics, indiscriminate violence is never acceptable. Whatever the cause, violence becomes terrorism when insurgents intentionally kill or maim noncombatants. In law, it is always irrelevant whether the expressed cause of political-violence is presumptively just. Unjust means used to fight for allegedly just ends are never permissible. In law, the favored jihadi mantra (“by any means necessary”) is nothing more than an empty witticism. Recalling Hague Convention No. IV: “The right of belligerents to adopt means of injuring the enemy is not unlimited.”

Martyrdom-seeking jihadis sometimes advance a supposedly-legal argument known formally as Tu quoque. This discredited argument stipulates that because the “other side” is allegedly guilty of similar, equivalent or greater criminality, “our” side is innocent ipso facto. Jurisprudentially, such an argument is always wrong and always invalid, especially after post-war legal judgments of the Nuremberg and Tokyo Tribunals.

In Israel’s no-choice war against Hamas and variously allied jihadists, the death and injury of Palestinian Arab noncombatants remain the legal responsibility of “perfidious” Islamist enemies. Because these adversaries place terror-fighters in protected places (e.g., schools, hospitals, mosques), these places are no longer off-limits to defensive military actions by Israel. For the Jewish State, enemy use of “human shields” is always exculpatory for any needed Israeli military force. In law, the applicable principle is called “military necessity.”

Though Israel’s bombardments of Gaza produce many Palestinian Arab casualties, legal responsibility for these harms lies with the Jewish State’s “perfidious” jihadi foes. While Israel-inflicted Gazan casualties are unwanted, inadvertent and unintentional, Israel-suffered civilian deaths and injuries are the result of intentionally indiscriminate Palestinian Arab terror.

In legal terms, only the Palestinian Arab side has “criminal intent” or mens rea. To wit, there is a consequential difference between raping and murdering celebrants at a public music festival and the lethal consequences of a beleaguered state’s self-defense operations.

In this connection, it is well worth remembering that the entire State of Israel is less than half the size of America’s Lake Michigan.

Insurgent movements that fail to meet the test of “just means” can never be protected as lawful. Even if relevant law could somehow accept the argument that terror groups had fulfilled all valid criteria of “national liberation,” (e.g., Iran-supported Hamas), these groups would not satisfy equally important legal expectations of distinction, proportionality, and military necessity. Historically, these critical standards of humanitarian international law were applied to insurgent or armed sub-state organizations by the common Article 3 of the four Geneva Conventions of 1949, and by the two 1977 Protocols to these Conventions.

Standards of “humanity” remain binding on all combatants by virtue of customary and conventional international law, including Article 1 of the Preamble to the Fourth Hague Convention of 1907. This rule, commonly called the “Martens Clause,” makes “all persons” responsible for the “laws of humanity” and associated “dictates of public conscience.” There can be no permissible exceptions to this universal responsibility, except in cases where enemy perfidy endangers a state’s preeminent right to self-preservation.

Terrorist crimes mandate universal cooperation in both apprehension and punishment. As punishers of “grave breaches” under international law, all states are required to “extradite or prosecute” individual terrorists. Under no circumstances are states or sub-state actors permitted to treat terrorist “martyrs” as law-backed “freedom fighters.”

Although this imperative is currently most relevant to Israeli operations in Gaza/Judea/Samaria, it could soon become tangible in post-Assad Syria. As for US-promised sanctions relief for Syria, it will more likely produce the next generation of jihadi terrorists seeking “power over death” than encourage any plans for “greatness.”

Louis René Beres was educated at Princeton (Ph.D., 1971) and is the author of many books and articles on war, terrorism and international law. Emeritus Professor of International Law at Purdue, he was born in Zürich at the end of World War II. Professor Beres’ twelfth book is Surviving amid Chaos: Israel’s Nuclear Strategy.