Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that while Israel supports the fight against “militant Islamic terrorism,” his country will largely sit out of the ongoing conflict in Syria.
In a video address to the Brookings Saban Forum in Washington, D.C., on Sunday, Netanyahu said Israel’s position is non-intervention in Syria, because while an Islamic State-dominated Syria would be “bad,” a Syria dominated by Iran, through its current embattled President Bashar Assad, is also “bad.”
“I think that our policy has been … not to try and strengthen one at the expense of the other, but weaken both,” said Netanyahu.
The only exceptions to Israel’s non-interventionist stand, Netanyahu added, is to provide humanitarian aid to Syrians. He also said Israel would prevent Syrian territory being used to stage a front against Israel and traffic weapons to the Islamist militant group Hezbollah.
Netanyahu added that he told Russian President Vladimir Putin, who backs the Assad regime in Syria, that Israel will continue to uphold its non-intervenionist policy.
“[I]t makes sense that Russia and Israel have de-confliction — we’ve done that — just as the United States has done that.”
Netanyahu did, however, call for an international coalition to defeat militant Islam, which he says threatens not only the Middle East, but the entire world.
“If I look at the world, overall, the core of the conflicts in the conflicts in the Middle East,” Netanyahu said, “that is the battle between early Medievalism and modernity is the battle that is being waged now around the world.”
“Civilized” countries around the world have to “make common cause to contain and ultimately defeat militant Islam,” Netanyahu said, using the same phraseology as President Obama, who a day before the Paris attacks in November said the U.S. strategy in the Middle East is to “contain” the Islamic State and that it has in fact been “contained.”
“The danger that we face is augmented when militant Islam gets a sovereign state,” Netanyahu said. In the case of the Islamic State, he said a sovereign state provides a platform to obtain oil revenues and the ability to develop or acquire weapons in the case of the Islamic State. And for Iran, Netanyahu said it helps them in their quest for nuclear weapons, submarines, satellites and precision-guided missiles.
Freedom and the spread of the information through freedom of technology will spell the end to militant Islam, said Netanyahu. He added that it worked to defeat another “murderous ideology bent on world domination: Nazism.”
