"Israel will prefer status quo or chaos in Syria to transition to the nascent Turkish/Egyptian-style option"

"... of course, Assad is not an ally (for either the Israelis or the Saudis), but he is part of an ancien régime for which Israel had effective management strategies in place. And Israel is none-too-enamored of the alternatives in Damascus. ...  alternative -- that of Syria becoming a largely ungoverned chaotic space and forming an arc of fitna (or sectarian strife) with Iraq and Lebanon is also unattractive.

For the peace rejectionist government of Prime Minister Netanyahu, the survival of an embattled, desperate, and thoroughly discredited Assad regime apparently hits that Goldilocks sweet spot -- just the right outcome.

Is this a calculation that still makes sense for Israel after Sunday's clashes on the Golan? Some reports suggest that the Naksa day marches to the Golan were encouraged and perhaps even sponsored by the Assad regime ...  President Assad may be sending a signal to the outside world (this is what happens if I get nasty or if I am no longer around to keep things in check),...  Israel will now be reassessing its response posture.

Ongoing protests at the Golan border position will require Israel to reconfigure its IDF deployment and redirect assets to the northern border. There will also be concerns that regularized protests from within Syria could encourage similar phenomenon elsewhere, whether from neighboring countries, from within the Occupied Territories, or even inside Israel itself.

But there is also a flipside to this. The compromised circumstances of the Syrian-Palestinian protests (set against the backdrop of, and perhaps in the service of the violent oppression of the Assad regime) could serve to discourage or undermine popular mobilization elsewhere. The Syrian context has also acted as a shield for Israel's own actions. Israel has come under remarkably little scrutiny for its apparent killing of so many unarmed civilians. As a leading Israeli military analyst, Ofer Shelach, wrote in yesterday's Maariv: "[I]t is clear that as far as the world's reaction is concerned, Assad is Israel's number one asset: When he massacres his own people, no one will criticize the IDF too severely when it kills dozens of demonstrators trying to forcibly cross an international border."

Israel now has to choose through which looking glass it should be eying up developments in Syria. The dominant prism so far has been the more conventional one of regional balances of power and Israel's preferences within the typology of regional regime characteristics. That typology, until recently, basically consisted of three categories: First, undemocratic regimes, backed by the United States, co-opted to Israel's overall agenda (and in some instances, formally at peace with Israel); second, undemocratic regimes opposed to the U.S. and Israel, with limited soft power assets but carrying a certain military nuisance capacity; third, regimes characterized by internal strife and governance chaos.

Turkey has recently introduced a new prototype to the equation -- a democracy with an independent foreign policy and soft-power credibility and non-aligned in terms of its maintenance of relations with all relevant regional and international actors.

Of the old models, the first was of course most convenient to Israel. While the second and third posed the occasional question, they did not represent a sustained challenge. An Israel unwilling to reconfigure its relations with the Palestinians and with the region finds itself most ill at ease with the new, more democratic, and more diplomatically assertive model -- a direction that Egypt now appears to be pursuing. From this perspective, Israel will prefer status quo or chaos in Syria to transition to the nascent Turkish/Egyptian-style option.

But there is that second lens through which Israel may have to increasingly calculate its moves -- the question of what is most likely to advance or retard unarmed popular Palestinian struggle. Were this to emerge in a concerted, determined, and disciplined fashion, it is likely to pose the greatest threat to the continuation of current Israeli practices...  Much more than any UN vote, this will be the wildcard in the coming months on the Israeli-Palestinian front.

After so many failed attempts, it is clear that the asymmetry built into the existing bilateral negotiations formula renders them incapable of delivering Palestinian freedom. A UN vote will also not achieve that. It might though begin to produce some leverage for the Palestinians and mark a more definitive break with those long moribund strategies of the past... (Continue, here)