As the war in Syria dies down and the dust starts to settle, the enormity of Israel's strategic mistake during the long years of conflict is becoming all the more apparent. The first person to point this out publicly was Maj. Gen. Amos Yadlin, the Israel Defense Forces’ (IDF) chief of Military Intelligence from 2006 to 2010.

Yadlin is now the executive director of Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies, the country's most important research institution. On Nov. 23, he declared resolutely, "Israel made a mistake when it adopted a position of neutrality during the Syrian war. It should have done everything it could to bring down President Bashar al-Assad's regime as early as 2012." According to Yadlin, the weakness shown by the United States and Israel is what led to a situation in which the new Syria is being shaped by "the Czar [Russian President Vladimir Putin], the Sultan [Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan] and the Supreme Leader [Iran's Ayatollah Ali Khamenei].” At an attempt in Geneva to resolve the crisis several years ago, the United States dictated the list of participants. Now the United States has all but disappeared from the arena, while Israel is being excluded by Putin and Erdogan.

As revealed in an earlier Al-Monitor article, behind closed doors, Israel is bemoaning having missed a historic opportunity to be done with Assad, and with him, the Shiite axis along the Golan Heights and its border with Lebanon, since this axis is only getting stronger. As one very senior Israeli military official told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity, "There was a full year during the civil war in Syria in which anyone who wanted to could have taken down Assad without any effort and without anyone signing off on it, without it being attributed to some operation or other. Car bombs were going off outside his presidential palace during that year, and mortars were landing just a few dozen meters away from the struggling Syrian president. All anyone had to do was give it another little nudge."

Now Israel finds itself faced with dire strategic circumstances. While Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman said this week, "Right now there is no Iranian military force on Syrian soil," no one in the Israeli defense establishment plans to relax. No one has stopped worrying that Syria could become a protectorate of Shiite Iran or that Iran could establish itself in Syria and Lebanon, turning them into a military arm of the ayatollahs' regime, under its direct control.