A December 31 Globe and Mail column by Hussein Ibish, a Washington, DC-based scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute entitled: “Israel’s land grab in Syria isn’t justified,” used loaded language and cherry-picked facts to frame Israel as a baseless aggressor, this time against Syria.

Almost every line of Ibish’s article dripped with anti-Israel hostility, from the foregone conclusion of its headline that “Israel’s land grab in Syria isn’t justified” to its claim that “Israel is taking advantage of [regional] instability to expand its territory,” wrapping with a hostile closing where he called Israel a “rapacious neighbour” threatening to swallow up Syria.

Cutting through the rhetoric, many of Ibish’s claims are exaggerated or false.

Israel’s security buffer zone, for example, which Ibish accused of “cutting deeply” into Syria, extends only 10 kilometres at its deepest point and represents only about 0.2 percent of Syria’s land.

This in contrast with Turkey, which controls up to 15 percent of Syria both directly and through proxies, including a buffer zone of up to 30km. Not only did Ibish fail to mention this, he also had the audacity to claim that “Turkey has not evinced any territorial ambitions in Syria… and is unlikely to.”

This is a ludicrous claim given that Turkey already controls large swathes of Syrian territory.

As a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute, Ibish is certainly aware of this. He’s probably also aware that Turkey has likely committed war crimes in Syria. Yet he only seemed concerned about occupation or international law when he can point a finger at Israel.

Perhaps because there’s no way around it, Ibish did nod to Israel’s glaring security concerns. He called Israel’s strategic destruction of military assets left behind by the Syrian Assad regime an “extreme and unlawful, but understandable, act of self-defence.”

Israel cannot allow the Islamic State and Al-Qaeda affiliates to proliferate near its vulnerable border communities. It cannot allow these jihadi militias to access military assets including chemical weapons. No country would tolerate such a threat, even if—as Ibish claims—these supposedly reformed terrorists are now wooing the West with “moderate words and professed intentions.”

According to Ibish, while destroying weapons might be “understandable,” Israel’s “major new land grab” is not. He accused Israel of violating a 1974 disengagement agreement signed with the regime of Hafez al-Assad, father of the newly deposed Bashar al-Assad.

Since 1974, the Israel-Syria buffer zone has been nominally guarded by UNDOF peacekeeping forces. But the Syrian civil war has made this dangerous and many countries have pulled their forces from Syria. In 2014, UNDOF peacekeepers were even forced to flee the buffer zone into Israel to escape armed militias like those that now control Syria.

Israel is now in the second year of a seven-front war. It faces rocket attacks from Yemen and Gaza almost daily. It cannot afford to leave its Syrian border in the hands of a beleaguered, weak UNDOF.

Syria’s new leader, Ahmed Hussein al-Sharaa, now claims that Israel was “preparing for a large-scale war against Syria.” He could easily use this claim as a pretext to attack Israel at any time.

Ibish seems to have forgotten that the name of this group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), means “Organization for the Liberation of the Levant.” That refers to a broad swath of Middle Eastern territory including Jordan, Lebanon, and Israel. Al-Sharaa himself declared in 2018 that “we will not only reach Damascus, but, Allah permitting, Jerusalem will be awaiting our arrival.”

For all these reasons, an unstable Syria poses a clear and present danger to Israel’s security. This, too, Ibish admits: “Israel has a right to defend itself.” He even echoed Israel’s statement that its moves into the buffer zone are temporary—he just doen’t seem to believe it.

With his one-sided narrative of Israel as the sole aggressor—and his downplaying of Israel’s security concerns—Ibish aims to convince readers that Israel ought to just sit quietly and wait until HTS decides that the time is right to march down and claim Jerusalem.

It’s worth noting that this isn’t Ibish’s first time at the let’s-dump-on-Israel rodeo.

HRC called out Ibish previously for downplaying Hezbollah’s aggression in a previous Globe and Mail column back in September. There, he accused Israel of “escalating” in Lebanon with its closely targeted pager attacks. He failed to acknowledge that a year of increasingly deadly missile and drone attacks by Hezbollah might have contributed to the deteriorating status quo.

The situation in Syria is complicated enough without one-sided articles, distorted facts, and biased rhetoric. The Globe and Mail’s editorial code promises “honesty, accuracy, fairness, balance and transparency.” With Ibish’s thinly-disguised attack on Israel in the guise of geopolitical commentary, the Globe has failed to uphold these standards.