Let's start with the glass half full. In a clandestine July 22 operation, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) evacuated several hundred activists from the White Helmets, the Syrian humanitarian civil defense group, and their family members, and removed them from the fighting in southern Syria, through Israel, to Jordan. From there, they will continue on, to be settled in the United Kingdom, Germany, France and Canada. Even the European Union, which does not often pamper Israel with compliments, issued a statement recognizing the efforts by Israel and others to bring the activists to safety. At the end of June, the IDF had provided tents, food, medical equipment, shoes and clothing for Syrians who had escaped to a tent encampment on the Golan.

As for the half-empty glass, after the rescue, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued a statement stressing that he had approved the activists’ transit through Israeli territory to other countries. In other words, none were allowed to remain on its territory. Israel only served as a conduit. The day after getting the aid to the displaced Syrians on the Golan, the IDF made clear that Israel would not allow in Syrians. In other words, residents of Israel’s settlements on the Golan Heights, which Israel captured from Syria in 1967, will soon be watching the slaughter of Syrians across the border by Syrian government forces.

As the forces of President Bashar al-Assad and their allied militias advance toward the Golan, based on new understandings reached with Russia, they will be looking first for collaborators with Israel. According to a June 18 Wall Street Journal report, for years, Israel has been regularly funneling cash to anti-government rebels in the border area to create and maintain a buffer zone populated by friendly forces. Syrian fighters told the paper that the IDF funds their wages and the purchase of weapons and ammunition. While serving as defense minister (2015), Moshe Ya'alon confirmed that in return for Israeli humanitarian aid, the rebels kept radical anti-Israel militias like Hezbollah and Jabhat al-Nusra away from the border.

Also inside the half-empty glass are tens of thousands of Syrian refugees for whom Israel has been responsible for more than 50 years but continues to ignore. On the eve of the 1967 Six-Day War, some 501,000 people were living in the Golan, 15,000 of them Palestinian refugees who had fled there following Israel’s 1948 War of Independence. According to the accepted Israeli narrative, residents of the Golan fled or were ordered by the Syrian army to vacate their homes when the fighting broke out. In-depth reportage by Haaretz in July 2010, however, told a very different story. A few days after the fighting ended, Gen. (res.) Elad Peled, who commanded the IDF battalion that conquered the Golan, said, “We received an order to start destroying villages.” Indeed, 153 villages and 112 farms were wiped off the face of the earth.