The Syrian Uprising and the Arab-Israeli Conflict

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Older blog 16 November, 2011

Syria is attracting a considerable international attention these days, not only because of the drama of peaceful protest against tanks and sniper bullets which represents a continuation of the Arab Spring started in Tunisia last December, but also because of that small country’s political importance on the Middle Eastern scene. A plethora of informational and analytical articles proliferates in the international press vouching for this importance. Analysts are pressed to speculate about the nature of what is happening, especially at the opaque levels of the Syrian top government officials, and also about the future of this civil unrest that many see as a potential game changer in the region. However, recently, an interesting NYT op-ed and a response to it seemed to pull our attention toward the past rather than the future. The author of the op-ed (“My Syria, Awake Again After 40 Years,” June 26, 2011) is Mohammad Ali Atassi, a prominent figure of the Syrian opposition, a journalist and a film maker, but also the son of Syria’s president during the crucial period of 1966-1970; the president who was toppled in a coup d’etat by Hafiz al-Assad, the father of Syria’s current president, Bashar al-Assad; and the president who was imprisoned without charge for 22 years until his death in 1992. The piece’s author posited his family’s plight as a backdrop for his piece which endeavored to draw a poetic picture of Syria’s recent history portraying it as having been laying dormant under the Assads’ Stalinist rule before resurrecting through the events currently unfolding in Syria. The true drama of two presidential but opposite families is a great metaphor of Syria’s modern history, albeit a bit reductive. However, why would such a compelling story prompt an otherwise unlikely surgical response from the Israeli Embassy? (Letter to the editor, “Syria and Israel,” July 1, 2011, by Dan Arbell, Dep. Chief of Mission, Israeli Embassy)

In fact the Israeli diplomat, true to his vocation, was responding to a minor part of the op-ed that alluded to an assumed duplicity of Israel in Syria’s plight represented by the Assads’ rule. “It [Syria the dormant] meant a concerted international effort to keep a dictatorial regime in power in the name of regional stability — preserving the security of Israel and maintaining a cold peace on the Golan Heights.” These were the words of Mr. Atassi, to which the Israeli diplomat retorted saying: “[your father] was also a Baath Party dictator, who in 1967 helped precipitate the Six-Day War by trying to deprive Israel of the Jordan River waters.” As a historian of the region, I see here  a display of another aspect of the Syrian problem that has not yet risen to the surface albeit being on many people’s minds; certainly the minds of the Israeli diplomacy that is keeping a watchful, and quite observant I might say, eye on what is happening. This aspect touches both the history and future of the Arab-Israeli conflict. What is at stake is no less than that: interpreting the past and shaping the future. Mr. Atassi’s claim is now a cliché among Arab intellectuals, but on which hinges a whole different perspective for looking at the conflict; a perspective in which Syria and other Arab countries appear as passive victims of the international politics of oil and Cold War that valued stability in the Middle East over the lives of the region’s inhabitants. The Israeli diplomat’s response was succinct, swift and surgical, nipping in the bud this view that is slowly emerging from the events of the Arab Spring. These events, while attracting much attention and support from western audiences, seem to germinate a minor “western guilt” toward Arabs, especially in the Egyptian case, given the past western support for its highly discredited ex-president and dictator Mubarak.

Despite many calls urging president Obama to interfere diplomatically in Syria, the USA remains largely inactive. This contrasts sharply with the US’s active role in Libya; especially that the Syrian regime has committed comparable atrocities to those of the Qaddafi regime. Israel, however, is the ever-present absent in the Arab Spring. It prefers, wisely so, to watch and confer with its closest friends rather than intervene in a way that could change the course of events in unpredictable and undesirable ways. The aforementioned letter to the editor, however, brings to the forefront a whole set of Israeli, and also American, anxieties relating to the eventual outcome of the Syrian problem. The latest Hollywood-esque intervention of the American ambassador to Syria, Mr. Robert S. Ford (i.e. his 8^th of July visit to the restive city of Hama), is another reminder of Syria’s importance in the even more important, yet volatile, Middle East.

The tenacity of the Syrian demonstrators, who even surpassed their own expectations, in demanding change, as well as the utter political immaturity of Syria’s current ruling clique is creating a dilemma for the US and the European Union. On one side, by supporting the legitimate demands of the demonstrators for more freedom and political representation they can homogenize their vacillating responses to the Arab Spring. However, on the other side, the lack of a viable alternative to the current Syrian regime among the Syrian opposition can make for a rocky transition of power in that country, which could have a destabilizing effect on the already precarious situation in Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt and Libya. It is clear that the US prefers to keep a reformed and weakened version of the Assad regime in Syria, one that is more amenable to external pressure, while at the same time keep looking for a viable alternative, or perhaps until the fragmented Syrian opposition could create such an alternative. But, what is “a viable” alternative in the eyes of the US and the EU? It is precisely the answer to this question that the aforementioned Israeli response can elucidate. A “viable” Syrian regime is one that moves the issues related to the Arab-Israeli conflict forward, not backward. From my perspective at least, the Israeli diplomat makes it clear that Israel does not want a regime with revisionist aspirations, one that redraws the portrait of such a pivotal moment as the Six Day War of 1967. Israel maintains, and wishes it to remain so, that the Six Day War was a defensive, or at worst a pre-emptive, war forced upon Israel by a reckless Syrian regime (that of Mr. Atassi’s Baathist father) who upped the belligerent rhetoric while trying “to deprive Israel of the Jordan River waters and firing thousands of shells at Israeli civilians.” The recently emerging images of Egypt and Syria as victims are highly undesirable to Israel.

Moreover, the issue of the Golan Heights (captured from Syria in precisely the 1967 war) and the Syrian regime’s inability to recover them from Israel are becoming a center piece in the opposition’s delegitimization campaign of the Assad regime. This development must be a cause of equal concern for Israel as well as for the Syrian rebels. For Israel, any future Syrian regime, in case the Assad regime is successfully toppled, will find itself bound to take the kind of action the lack of which has discredited its predecessor, i.e. recovering the Golan Heights or at least keeping a simulacrum of a recovery effort. For the Syrian opposition, their future efforts to rebuild their country’s dilapidated infrastructure and strained economy will be seriously undermined by such a military commitment; also given the fact that it was precisely a similar commitment that functioned as the ideological cover for the militarization of the Assad regime since 1970.

The resurgence of the Golan Heights issue in the Syrian uprising is not, however, a sign of resurgence of Baath’s Arab nationalism or Nasser’s pan-Arabism. In spite of the solidarity that Arab protesters in different countries have expressed toward each other’s causes, the current Arab uprisings have solidified regional identities and brought to the forefront regional particularities. These uprisings are paving the way for the formulation of social contracts within each country through the building of wide coalitions for the sake of toppling the entrenched dictators. Such social contracts were lacking in many Arab countries, especially in Syria, due to the fact that they were formed by their respective colonial masters at the outset of the First World War. These social contracts will in my opinion aid the formation of regional nationalisms at the expense of a larger and all encompassing Arab nationalism.

It is an irony of history that all complicated and stubbornly unresolved issues must come all together and absolutely demand to be resolved, and now. The Arab dictators, as well as the unresolved Arab-Israeli conflict, were becoming just another fact of life that one brought oneself to accept and expected to be there even in one’s children’s textbooks. Suddenly, seemingly because of a cart vendor’s mishap and subsequent desperate self-immolation, all of “life’s certainties” seem to change in the same stubbornness that characterized their previous defiance of all resolution. I do not envy the American foreign policy makers for the past four grueling months that they had; but also do not envy the Arab people who have now to make choices they have not encountered in forty years. I think it is imperative that countries like Syria and Egypt do not fall now in the trap that paved the ground for the emergence of long standing and cruel military dictators; I mean the trap of tying their identity and their raison d’être to such a cause as the eternal state of war with Israel. Regardless of who is at fault in the Arab-Israeli conflict, the continuous state of war with Israel has enabled successive Arab governments since 1948, especially in Syria and Egypt, to impose a continuous state of emergency and divert considerable resources to arming themselves and establishing repressive and corrupt military regimes. I hope not to see such a regime in Syria that uses the lion’s share of the country’s meager budget in order to build a massive army and a monstrous security apparatus which only serves to keep its population in check.

The post-colonial regimes of Syria engaged in the damaging two-faced policy of verbally and openly threatening Israel while secretly seeking peace (or at least non-aggression) arrangements with it; of building gigantic arsenals for the purpose of “defeating Israel” while using them exclusively against their citizens; of stifling internal dissent citing “foreign conspiracies” against internal stability and national unity (a favorite Baathist scare tactic) while engaging in regional conspiracies to destabilize neighboring countries or engaging in proxy wars with Israel for meager negotiation gains. These immature, and frankly thuggish, tactics never worked and were only suited for the Mafiosi style of governing that these regimes adopted. On the other hand, one must not be oblivious to the real existence of three major problems: the West Bank and Gaza, the Palestinian refugees, and the Arab population within Israel. Deciding on how to solve these problems, whether by two exclusive states or one inclusive state, will certainly involve all Arab countries neighboring Israel and is absolutely necessary for maintaining the much needed peace and stability in the region. Therefore, any emerging Syrian opposition that seriously wishes to gather international, especially western, support for its cause to topple the current regime must think about its future policy concerning the Arab-Israeli conflict. It must also keep a healthy degree of transparency vis-à-vis its own people concerning that policy. 

It is my belief that the unfolding Arab Spring presents a great opportunity for a breakthrough in the Arab-Israeli conflict. As the Arab Street moves in the direction of an ideological rupture with the past, as it makes clear its desire for liberal political reforms, and as it recognizes the need for international support for bringing about the demise of the powerful dictatorial regimes that oppress it, there is certainly hope for a change of direction in the Arab-Israeli conflict that could lead to its resolution to the satisfaction of all parties involved.