These actions by Israel has to be considered their right to defend their borders outside the assault against the Islamic State by the US lead coalition.
The coalition is not interested in engaging Syria or Assad. That is not the focus of this mission.
The reason the Golan Heights is a tricky place is because it originally belonged to Syria in it's entirety. Today Syria still maintains the eastern one third as their own sovereign land.
In the 1967 Six Day War Israel took the currently occupied lands from Syria. It officially annexed them in 1981. So this is more or less an opportunistic exchange of aggression due to the current military actions of the coalition. It is an opportunistic aggression on both parts Syria and Israel. Whether or not the Syrian jet was in Israel's occupied lands can be determined from where the Syrian jet met with Israel's missile. There is no way of knowing if the pilot survived.
This is some of the problematic issues that arise in this area of the world. While hostilities exist with the Islamic State other fighting of any kind can break out if one sees an advantage over another. I am quite certain Israel operated alone and in defense of acquired borders. So, let's just call this an isolated incident and unrelated to the mission of the coalition. No country involved in defeating the Islamic State needs complications that would be divisive to their loyalties.
Interesting to some of the troop movements and confrontation on the ground is the fact the Peshmerga are eager soldiers. They are completely engaged and committed. That is not new since the Kurds have had to fight most any year for the land their people call home. The Peshmerga is a generational force.
It is something any country in the region is going to have to get used to. Any peoples that want to maintain their right to exist has to realize they have a generational commitment to maintaining a growing military. Especially difficult for the Shi'ite populous because the only battles they have had to fight was against Saddam. At least for the most part. Then there were issues with American forces during the Bush years. But, what the people have to realize as well as their Clerics and Ayatollahs is that this is an ongoing episode until the region commits to peace from all people.
The Islamic State has increased the awareness of how tenuous life and identity can be when a region of the world is plagued by such horrible people with wrongful priorities carried out as a faux religion consenting to violence.
The best people to defend their countries, nations of people, identities and culture are the people themselves. To that end there needs to be a continued battle ready force that patrols borders and protects from such invaders as the Islamic State. Neighboring countries need to share alliances and intelligence to secure their people and form a strong Middle East whereby such groups can never conduct their violence. It isn't that difficult when the countries no longer see each other as potential enemies, but, related to a common cause of national security.
September 23, 2014
By Ian Deitch
The Israeli military (click here) shot down a Syrian fighter jet that infiltrated its airspace over the Golan Heights on Tuesday morning — the first such downing in decades, heightening tensions in the volatile plateau.
The military said a "Syrian aircraft infiltrated into Israeli air space" in the morning hours and that the military "intercepted the aircraft in mid-flight, using the Patriot air defense system."
The military would not say what type of aircraft was downed and said the circumstances of the incident were "unclear."...
