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https://www.politico.com/magazine/s...sands-of-syrians-with-humanitarian-aid-215754
OLAN HEIGHTS – In the middle of the night in early 2013, seven injured Syrians dragged themselves to the border fence separating Syria from Israel, pleading for help. Israel, after deliberations that reached the highest levels of the military and government, decided to take in and treat the Syrians; they wouldn’t have survived otherwise. What started with this one isolated event has, over four years later, expanded into a massive Israel Defense Forces operation providing thousands of Syrians across the border medical assistance, humanitarian aid, food and basic infrastructure. Israeli military officers are clear about the purpose of this largesse, dubbed the “Good Neighbor” policy: to assist desperate Syrians ravaged by years of civil war, and in the process stabilize the border region by showing this heretofore enemy population that Israel is not, in fact, the devil.
Since the Good Neighbor policy’s creation in June 2016, the IDF has deepened and expanded its outreach to the Syrian side: According to official figures, more than 200 humanitarian operations have been conducted, 44 in the past month alone. On any given night, the IDF is active on multiple points on the Syrian frontier, interacting with locals on the other side. More recently, this has also come to include the establishment of a medical clinic beyond the heavily fortified border fence, in territory that while still legally (de facto) Israel, is for all practical purposes inside Syria. The IDF, however, doesn’t operate the clinic; it only guarantees its security from afar. Rather, a little-known U.S. humanitarian NGO sent in volunteers to build and staff the place. U.S. citizens and devout Christians all, they believe they are doing God’s work – helping Israel by helping Syrians (and vice versa) – on the very edge of the closest thing to a modern-day hell.
***
“Your neighbor could be closer to you than your brother,” read the blue sign in Arabic taped to the pallet of dry spaghetti boxes. “Those closest to God treat their neighbors well,” the sign went on, quoting from the hadith, or narrative of the Prophet Mohammed. The spaghetti filled most of one metal shipping container. On either side were yet more containers brimming with boxes of baby formula and diapers, warm clothing and blankets, school supplies and fuel jerrycans. This was the operations hub of the Good Neighbor administration, located inside the IDF’s regional division headquarters on the Golan Heights, a territory Israel conquered and later annexed from Syria after the 1967 war (the international community still considers it occupied territory). The aid would soon be trucked over to the border a few kilometers away for distribution.
The unit’s insignia next to the Arabic writing made clear Israel isn’t trying to hide its humanitarian involvement in Syria – quite the opposite. The commander of the Good Neighbor administration, Lt. Col. E (as he is identified per Israeli military guidelines), was eager to point out the Hebrew writing on all the goods. “That’s the point,” he told me. “They should know where it’s coming from.” In the most expansive interview he’s given, E, a fluent Arabic speaker and veteran of the IDF’s civil-military operations in the Palestinian Territories, went into great detail about his unit’s involvement in a war that, officially, Israel has refrained from entering.
The Syrian civil war upended nearly four decades of relative calm, if not peace, on the Golan Heights: The Assad regime in Damascus kept the frontier quiet, while United Nations peacekeepers verified the limited deployments of Israeli and Syrian forces across a demilitarized ceasefire line. “We understood that something was changing on the other side of the border” once the civil war started, E said. It wasn’t only the chaos that would be unleashed by the potential fall of Bashar al-Assad as his army lost ground to rebel forces, but rather the encroachment of Iranian and Lebanese Hezbollah operatives up to the Israeli border that concerned the IDF. And indeed, in the early years of the Syrian war, cross-border rocket and small arms fire, as well as roadside bombs, were not uncommon, seriously injuring a number of Israeli soldiers and killing one civilian. Israel reportedly responded with a few targeted airstrikes, killing several senior Iranian and Hezbollah commanders attempting to set up a terrorist base on the Syrian side of the Golan.
Israel also responded in more subtle ways: with the Good Neighbor policy, a “hearts and minds” campaign meant to dissuade the local population from cooperating with such unsavory elements. In addition to the residue of the Syrian regime and its allies, Israel also faces a complicated array of other armed groups on this front – “fifty shades of black,” as one IDF officer described it last year, ranging from a local Islamic State franchise to al Qaeda-affiliated militants to more moderate Syrian rebels. “I’m not so noble or righteous,” E said matter-of-factly. “There is a clear operational interest for Israel” to be doing all of this.
There was also, to be sure, a moral imperative. While not anything like the devastation in Aleppo or Idlib, the destruction visited upon southwest Syria and the Quneitra province bordering Israel has been significant in its own right. A third of the population of over 200,000 has been internally displaced; medicine, food, basic goods and electricity are scarce to nonexistent; and 70 percent of doctors in the region, Israel estimates, have either fled or been killed. As the daily sounds of gunfire and plumes of mortar smoke can attest, the fighting is still ongoing.
The trickle of injured Syrians seeking help in 2013 was the start of what is now a flood, formalized and growing. More than 4,000 have been admitted into Israeli hospitals. The vast majority of these, said Col. Noam Fink, a cardiologist and chief doctor in the IDF’s Northern Command, have been male and relatively young, suffering from “multi-trauma injuries” consistent with warfighting. Israeli officers make clear they “do not check IDs” to see if these injured are rebel fighters; after a patdown at the border, everyone is admitted and given medical care (despite the fact that Sunni jihadists have also reportedly been among the injured).
E and his small team coordinate these evacuations to Israeli hospitals, as well as more routine day-long checkups, especially for children in need of specialists: eyes, ears, epilepsy, emotional care and the like. According to the IDF, two dozen children and their adult chaperones are bused in at a time, sometimes daily. “For a five year old who has only known war, that day in Israel might be the best of their lives,” E said. “And no one can accuse me of helping terrorists. At the end a child is a child. They see that the Jews treat them with respect. They’re my ambassadors.” (E denied a recent Wall Street Journal report that Israel actually funds Syrian rebels. “I give them millions [in aid] but not one dollar or shekel,” he said, repeating other similar Israeli denials.)
Flowing in the opposite direction, Israel has moved into Syria everything from the spaghetti and baby formula to fuel, generators and piping for water wells. The level of detail is in some cases astonishingly granular: flour in small bags for one village, snakebite antivenom delivered to another, with the Good Neighbor administration managing the medical files of several hundred Syrian children requiring follow-up care. While official numbers are classified, the scale of the operation appears extensive, reaching 14 kilometers into Syria and in some cases farther afield to Daraa province. Twelve heavy trucks a week move supplies from the division headquarters to the border. How is all this coordinated? E held up his phone.
“Abu Yakub,” as E is known to the locals, was personally in contact with Syrians on the other side – village elders, heads of local councils, professionals. “I can’t say we’re a consensus yet among the people there,” E admitted, “but they see that the aid really helps their villages.” The ultimate proof for this policy is that, other than one clash with the Islamic State late last year, the Syrian rebels – moderate, jihadist, or other – have yet to fire on Israel in anger.
There have, however, been instances where Israeli foodstuffs have been lit on fire and the video uploaded to social media; a play by regime elements, E claimed, to show that Israel was still the enemy. And to be sure, no one knows what will happen if Assad and his allies continue racking up victories in the war, possibly turning their attention back to the southern Golan front. “If we weren’t doing this, someone else would be,” E said, alluding to the yellow and green flag of Hezbollah. “There’s no such thing as a vacuum in this region.”
Friend Ships Unlimited, a Louisiana-based Christian humanitarian NGO, runs Camp Mazor Ladach (biblical Hebrew for “assistance to the unfortunate”). | Friend Ships
OLAN HEIGHTS – In the middle of the night in early 2013, seven injured Syrians dragged themselves to the border fence separating Syria from Israel, pleading for help. Israel, after deliberations that reached the highest levels of the military and government, decided to take in and treat the Syrians; they wouldn’t have survived otherwise. What started with this one isolated event has, over four years later, expanded into a massive Israel Defense Forces operation providing thousands of Syrians across the border medical assistance, humanitarian aid, food and basic infrastructure. Israeli military officers are clear about the purpose of this largesse, dubbed the “Good Neighbor” policy: to assist desperate Syrians ravaged by years of civil war, and in the process stabilize the border region by showing this heretofore enemy population that Israel is not, in fact, the devil.
Since the Good Neighbor policy’s creation in June 2016, the IDF has deepened and expanded its outreach to the Syrian side: According to official figures, more than 200 humanitarian operations have been conducted, 44 in the past month alone. On any given night, the IDF is active on multiple points on the Syrian frontier, interacting with locals on the other side. More recently, this has also come to include the establishment of a medical clinic beyond the heavily fortified border fence, in territory that while still legally (de facto) Israel, is for all practical purposes inside Syria. The IDF, however, doesn’t operate the clinic; it only guarantees its security from afar. Rather, a little-known U.S. humanitarian NGO sent in volunteers to build and staff the place. U.S. citizens and devout Christians all, they believe they are doing God’s work – helping Israel by helping Syrians (and vice versa) – on the very edge of the closest thing to a modern-day hell.
***
“Your neighbor could be closer to you than your brother,” read the blue sign in Arabic taped to the pallet of dry spaghetti boxes. “Those closest to God treat their neighbors well,” the sign went on, quoting from the hadith, or narrative of the Prophet Mohammed. The spaghetti filled most of one metal shipping container. On either side were yet more containers brimming with boxes of baby formula and diapers, warm clothing and blankets, school supplies and fuel jerrycans. This was the operations hub of the Good Neighbor administration, located inside the IDF’s regional division headquarters on the Golan Heights, a territory Israel conquered and later annexed from Syria after the 1967 war (the international community still considers it occupied territory). The aid would soon be trucked over to the border a few kilometers away for distribution.
The unit’s insignia next to the Arabic writing made clear Israel isn’t trying to hide its humanitarian involvement in Syria – quite the opposite. The commander of the Good Neighbor administration, Lt. Col. E (as he is identified per Israeli military guidelines), was eager to point out the Hebrew writing on all the goods. “That’s the point,” he told me. “They should know where it’s coming from.” In the most expansive interview he’s given, E, a fluent Arabic speaker and veteran of the IDF’s civil-military operations in the Palestinian Territories, went into great detail about his unit’s involvement in a war that, officially, Israel has refrained from entering.
The Syrian civil war upended nearly four decades of relative calm, if not peace, on the Golan Heights: The Assad regime in Damascus kept the frontier quiet, while United Nations peacekeepers verified the limited deployments of Israeli and Syrian forces across a demilitarized ceasefire line. “We understood that something was changing on the other side of the border” once the civil war started, E said. It wasn’t only the chaos that would be unleashed by the potential fall of Bashar al-Assad as his army lost ground to rebel forces, but rather the encroachment of Iranian and Lebanese Hezbollah operatives up to the Israeli border that concerned the IDF. And indeed, in the early years of the Syrian war, cross-border rocket and small arms fire, as well as roadside bombs, were not uncommon, seriously injuring a number of Israeli soldiers and killing one civilian. Israel reportedly responded with a few targeted airstrikes, killing several senior Iranian and Hezbollah commanders attempting to set up a terrorist base on the Syrian side of the Golan.
Israel also responded in more subtle ways: with the Good Neighbor policy, a “hearts and minds” campaign meant to dissuade the local population from cooperating with such unsavory elements. In addition to the residue of the Syrian regime and its allies, Israel also faces a complicated array of other armed groups on this front – “fifty shades of black,” as one IDF officer described it last year, ranging from a local Islamic State franchise to al Qaeda-affiliated militants to more moderate Syrian rebels. “I’m not so noble or righteous,” E said matter-of-factly. “There is a clear operational interest for Israel” to be doing all of this.
There was also, to be sure, a moral imperative. While not anything like the devastation in Aleppo or Idlib, the destruction visited upon southwest Syria and the Quneitra province bordering Israel has been significant in its own right. A third of the population of over 200,000 has been internally displaced; medicine, food, basic goods and electricity are scarce to nonexistent; and 70 percent of doctors in the region, Israel estimates, have either fled or been killed. As the daily sounds of gunfire and plumes of mortar smoke can attest, the fighting is still ongoing.
The trickle of injured Syrians seeking help in 2013 was the start of what is now a flood, formalized and growing. More than 4,000 have been admitted into Israeli hospitals. The vast majority of these, said Col. Noam Fink, a cardiologist and chief doctor in the IDF’s Northern Command, have been male and relatively young, suffering from “multi-trauma injuries” consistent with warfighting. Israeli officers make clear they “do not check IDs” to see if these injured are rebel fighters; after a patdown at the border, everyone is admitted and given medical care (despite the fact that Sunni jihadists have also reportedly been among the injured).
E and his small team coordinate these evacuations to Israeli hospitals, as well as more routine day-long checkups, especially for children in need of specialists: eyes, ears, epilepsy, emotional care and the like. According to the IDF, two dozen children and their adult chaperones are bused in at a time, sometimes daily. “For a five year old who has only known war, that day in Israel might be the best of their lives,” E said. “And no one can accuse me of helping terrorists. At the end a child is a child. They see that the Jews treat them with respect. They’re my ambassadors.” (E denied a recent Wall Street Journal report that Israel actually funds Syrian rebels. “I give them millions [in aid] but not one dollar or shekel,” he said, repeating other similar Israeli denials.)
Flowing in the opposite direction, Israel has moved into Syria everything from the spaghetti and baby formula to fuel, generators and piping for water wells. The level of detail is in some cases astonishingly granular: flour in small bags for one village, snakebite antivenom delivered to another, with the Good Neighbor administration managing the medical files of several hundred Syrian children requiring follow-up care. While official numbers are classified, the scale of the operation appears extensive, reaching 14 kilometers into Syria and in some cases farther afield to Daraa province. Twelve heavy trucks a week move supplies from the division headquarters to the border. How is all this coordinated? E held up his phone.
“Abu Yakub,” as E is known to the locals, was personally in contact with Syrians on the other side – village elders, heads of local councils, professionals. “I can’t say we’re a consensus yet among the people there,” E admitted, “but they see that the aid really helps their villages.” The ultimate proof for this policy is that, other than one clash with the Islamic State late last year, the Syrian rebels – moderate, jihadist, or other – have yet to fire on Israel in anger.
There have, however, been instances where Israeli foodstuffs have been lit on fire and the video uploaded to social media; a play by regime elements, E claimed, to show that Israel was still the enemy. And to be sure, no one knows what will happen if Assad and his allies continue racking up victories in the war, possibly turning their attention back to the southern Golan front. “If we weren’t doing this, someone else would be,” E said, alluding to the yellow and green flag of Hezbollah. “There’s no such thing as a vacuum in this region.”
Friend Ships Unlimited, a Louisiana-based Christian humanitarian NGO, runs Camp Mazor Ladach (biblical Hebrew for “assistance to the unfortunate”). | Friend Ships
