#1679 The Middle East War Process: Syria's Transition, Israel's Expansion, and Beyond (Transcript)

Air Date 12/28/2024

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JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: [00:00:00] Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of the Left podcast. 

Decades of dictatorial rule in Syria has come to an end, leading to something else to be determined. Israel sprang into action, taking control of Syrian land on their border. And no one seems to care what the US thinks of all of this, which is telling. 

For those looking for a quick overview, our sources providing our Top Takes in about 50 minutes today includes The Muckrake Political Podcast, Middle East Eye, American Prestige, The Take, Democracy Now!, and Double Down News. 

Then in the additional Deeper Dives half of the show, there'll be more in three sections: Section A. The Syrian people; Section B. Israel; and Section C. Historical context and the proxy war.

Assad Ousted From Syria - The Muckrake Political Podcast - Air Date 12-10-24

JARED YATES SEXTON: I found out that Bashar al Assad's regime in Syria had fallen. Assad had fallen to his regime, which by the way, his family has been in control.

For [00:01:00] 50 years, more than 50 years, Assad himself has been in charge for 24 years. There's been 13 years worth of civil war in Syria. It's been one of the largest humanitarian crisis we've seen in the modern era. Rebels have taken control of Syria. Assad hopped a plane and went and hung out with his buddy Vladimir Putin.

I hope the two of them have a lot to talk about in Moscow. This is a big, giant story. There's a lot of stuff that has occurred in the past couple of days that we need to get people up to speed about what was your initial reaction to finding that Assad was finally deposed in Syria? 

NICK HAUSELMAN: I mean, I think obviously it's extremely encouraging and positive to be able to have an authoritarian dictator like that removed or leave or be forced out.

Like that 

JARED YATES SEXTON: shit bag. Yeah,

NICK HAUSELMAN: I mean, remember, he used chemical weapons against his own people. This was some sort of red line in the sand that Obama never really did anything about, which also caused him issues politically. And yeah, we're seeing footage now of the dungeons that they had kept. There was a guy who was released after 43 years of [00:02:00] being in prison for doing basically nothing.

And so the repairing of the country is going to take a long time and you can feel, however excited that they might be to be able to have freedom. It's going to take a long time to repair the psychic healing of that. And the. De stabilization in the area is really, really concerning, especially because, things aren't going that stably right now, everywhere else right around that.

JARED YATES SEXTON: Yeah and I'll go ahead and start with your last point and then I'll work my way out. Nick, one thing that we've been covering over the past couple of years is the decline of the American empire. There was one hegemonic country that basically was the world's policeman, carried the big stick, whatever you want to call it.

And now that we've entered decline, the American order has started to disintegrate and weird stuff happens when that occurs. When it comes to, and by the way, Assad, like. I, the only thing I'm sad about in this is that he got away because dictators who kill their own people. And by the way, we're talking up to half a million people who were killed in the civil war [00:03:00] civilians.

We're talking about tens of millions of refugees. God knows how many more there's going to be people like that, who torture their citizens and kill their own citizens, they shouldn't be able to hop a flight to Moscow. You know what I mean? Like there, there is an end that these people usually meet and Assad deserved it.

When we talk about this story though. This was a proxy for Russia. The only reason Assad was able to hold on to any power over the last 13 years was because Russia took care of them. And one of the only reasons this was allowed to occur was because of the invasion of Ukraine, right? So we talk a lot about moments of sorting, how the American order is being pushed against and how this access of other countries is starting to coalesce and do all kinds of things.

There's going to be weird movements in all of this. There's going to be weird associations. Israel's already trying to take advantage of this. They've already sent in troops that are meant to try and take as much land and resources as they possibly can. Meanwhile, like we don't know exactly what's going to happen from the rebels taking over.

[00:04:00] You know what you don't find in any story, Nick. Do you know where these rebels came from? Do you know where they got their training and they got their motivation for things? 

NICK HAUSELMAN: ISIS, the word, they get it. That'd be 

JARED YATES SEXTON: Al Qaeda. This is an Al Qaeda adjacent group. You'll notice that all of the coverage of this just always talks about them as.

Rebels. They don't talk about how the HTS has as its beginnings in Al Qaeda and radical, Islamic groups. 

NICK HAUSELMAN: Well, what's interesting is that they took over in about a week, right? An entire government that was backed by Russia falls in a week to rebels who don't have planes. They don't have long range bombs, right?

They don't they just kind of swept through and it sort of tells you you just, you're describing the decline of the United States, but you're describing the client of Russia on an even steeper path. And so that's really what was probably the most interesting thing to me there was how easy it was for, rebels to take over an entire country.

JARED YATES SEXTON: Yeah, I want you to imagine Assad. And by the way, like dictatorial assholes like this guy, I want you to put yourself in his mind for a second. As you start to [00:05:00] realize that Russia is getting ready to push this offensive with North Korea into Ukraine and you read the writing on the wall. Right? And all of a sudden, all the Ashton Martins that you have used blood money to buy, they're not going to make you safe anymore, right?

You suddenly realize the priorities have changed. I imagine, Benito Mussolini in Italy had a sudden realization that the Third Reich was going to let them in. Things fall apart for him and you start realizing where you are on the pecking order. And meanwhile, there's all kinds of other weird things that are happening here.

Nick, we've got Turkish militias that are taking place in here. We have no idea what's going to happen to the Kurds in Syria. One of the, one of the main like components in all of this was Iran's relationship with this regime. Iran has to be looking around saying what in the hell is going on?

Things do not feel good. And the whole point that I want to bring forward, because this is. As we talk about all this stuff the fall of the American empire and the emerging axis opposed to America, there's going to be a lot of [00:06:00] weirdness that takes place everywhere and things start destabilizing.

And I keep talking about flashpoints, Nick, you'll remember, I, God, what was it? Three or four months ago, we had a conversation and we. counted them up. There were like seven major flashpoints around the world that at any given moment, you had different multiple nations belligerence that were in a place where something could go wrong at any given moment.

We have just now had one of the flashpoints actually become a larger flashpoint. It's a vacuum where a lot of people are going to try and fill stuff. We're going to We don't know what's going to happen in Syria. We don't know if this is going to be a happy ending overall. All we know is that Bashar al Assad is out of power and that in and of itself is a good thing.

What happens after it up in the air? 

NICK HAUSELMAN: You know, it's funny because I think we felt pretty fortunate while Trump was in office last time that we didn't have a ton of these flashpoints happening all at once. Like it's weird, isn't it? Yeah. So we were like, and I know we were thankful for that. Cause I don't think he would have handled any of those things like that very well.

Well, he's going to take office in the middle of this now. And God, [00:07:00] Lord knows what is going to happen, especially because he's continuing to try and prop up Russia. He's continuing to prop up the old world order, even though he claims to be, an isolationist. The other thing that's interesting to me is that the last time we had something like this with a Russian backed dictator being ousted was Yanukovych.

Yeah. In Ukraine of all places. And so what happened to Ukraine? Well, they experienced democracy. They are reawakening and the country was taking itself back. And then sure enough 10 years later, whatever, 12 years later, Russia invades. So I'm now I'm trying to figure out if there's any kind of path that that's going to happen with Syria.

I like, are they now right for someone else in the nearby and nearby to, to overrun them and try and take them off? 

JARED YATES SEXTON: No idea. None. We really don't know where this is going to go, but again, I think a couple of things can be true at once. The world has one less murderous asshole dictator in it. That's a good thing.

What happens after we don't know, but also Nick American leadership in all of this. Pretty quiet. They're taking stock of it, but there's no real push for American leadership and what's [00:08:00] happening. And that is again, a symptom of this larger shifting order that we're watching take place right now.

Assad downfall: Is the Arab Spring back from the dead? - Middle East Eye - Air Date 12-14-24

DAVID HEARST: Are we witnessing a revolution bursting into flames again from the embers of a fire that was never fully stamped out? Books have been written, careers launched on the premise that the Arab spring is dead. And there's lots of evidence for it.

13 years have passed and the split that tore the coalition of revolutionaries in Tahrir Square apart is still there. And what happened in Tunisia? Didn't they think themselves so much more sophisticated than their brothers in Egypt? And haven't they followed Egypt down the same path to jail and dictatorship?

Back then, in 2011, Syria was hailed as the object lesson Arabs were told to avoid. Every government told its people not to rock the boat, to avoid the bloodshed taking place in Daraa. But it is here that the revolution could be starting up all over again. [00:09:00] It's the same scenes of toppling statues, ripped pictures, the joy of protesters climbing on tanks, the horror of discovering emaciated prisoners in Sednaya prison.

I was in Doha at the annual forum at the time all this was taking place, and you could see the tectonic plates of the region shifting in the body language of the delegates. The blood seemed to drain from the face of Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who became intensely uncomfortable fielding questions about Syria and demanded to talk about Russian success in Ukraine instead.

The Iranian delegation rushed in a huddle through the corridors of the Sheraton Hotel, ashen faced. Conversely, the Turks were ruling the roost. Almost overnight, the Syrian revolution had turned Turkey from a distressed observer into a player once more in the Middle East. Hakan Fidan, the foreign minister, and Ibrahim Kalin, the man in charge of Turkey's intelligence [00:10:00] organization, were stars again.

There is still fighting in the north between the Turkish backed Free Syria Army and the U. S. backed YPD Kurds, but so far the toppling of Assad has been peaceful. Hayat Tahrir al-Sham reassured the Christians of Aleppo. It handed over governance to policemen as soon as rebel troops could Sayyida Zainab Shrine in South Damascus untouched and did not confront Iraqi paramilitary groups.

The rebels kept the road open to Latakia for retreating Syrian army generals to flee. Learning the lessons of Iraq, they stopped looting and told the cheering crowds to respect government property. HTS leader Abu Mohammed al Jolani gave his victory speech in the historic Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, which is adjacent to the resting place of Saladin.

Absolutely no one in the Muslim world, or indeed the Arab world, would have lost [00:11:00] the significance of these symbols. The reaction of the pro Iranian secular left in the West has been to tar the HTS as unreformed jihadis, head cutters and oppressors of minorities, all trained by the CIA and now working in Israel's interests.

However, the Palestinian militant groups, most of whom have been funded by Iran, had a very different reaction, and no one can accuse Hamas of being CIA or pro Israeli. Hamas said that Syria will continue to play an historic and pivotal role in supporting the Palestinian people. And a senior Palestinian source who knows the thinking inside the movement told me every free person in the world should be happy about what happened in Syria, whether they're Christian, Jewish, or Muslim, because the situation in Syria was very, very clear. This was the worst example of genocidal attacks towards a people whose only crime was to call for reform, freedom, and social justice. 

Now Hamas concedes that Assad's fall is bad news for Hezbollah and [00:12:00] Iran, both comrades in arms. But it continues to think the relationship between Hamas and these groups will not change. There is no arguing that the collapse of Assad is a major strategic loss for Iran.

However, the axis of resistance is far from dismantled because Hezbollah and the Iraqi armed groups like Katib Hezbollah and Ansar Allah, the Houthis in Yemen, are still functioning fighting forces. But what would be a greater threat to Israel's plans for a messianic hegemony to dominate his neighbors would be the emergence of a successful Islamist neighbor, to show the Arab people how the weak can topple the strong. Which is why Israel's first reaction was to occupy the demilitarized border zone and strategic mountain peak in Mount Hermon range between Syria and Lebanon. They claim their presence is temporary, but temporary in the Middle East can last a very long time. 

If this does indeed turn out to be [00:13:00] the start of a new chapter in the Arab Spring, at least one lesson will have been learned. The revolutionaries in Egypt and Tunisia were not revolutionary enough. Armed revolt was not in the Muslim Brotherhood's DNA. Quite the contrary. They kept being seduced by false assurances from the Egyptian military that the army would allow a freely elected government to rule. Their tools were political only. They attempted to assemble this flat packed kit called democracy by dutifully reading the instructions and screwing it together piece by piece.

Meanwhile, the generals laughed and kicked down this cardboard construction with hobnail boots. The Syrian revolution, if it indeed continues as it started, toppled the army, the deep state, the secret police, the prisons, by force of arms. If it does succeed, Syria could provide a powerful lesson in how a rebel movement gains national legitimacy. And success in this brittle region is contagious. 

[00:14:00] That is why right now there must be more than one despot quietly plotting how to derail the experiment as they so successfully did a decade ago. Or is their counter-revolutionary toolkit out of date? To a large extent, that depends on the Syrian people themselves. But it is well past the time that Egyptians, Jordanians, Tunisians, Iraqis rethink their understanding of revolutions. They wax and wane, but they don't die.

Syria's Transition, Biden Migrant Detention Facilities Part 1 - American Prestige - Air Date 12-13-24

DEREK DAVISON: The new government, such as it is, which is largely being run by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the former al Qaeda group that was controlling Idlib province and now is the dominant force in Damascus, its leader, the man formerly known as Abu Muhammad al Jilani, but now calling himself by his given name, Ahmed al Shara, appointed a new prime minister earlier this week, Muhammad al Bashir, who happened to be filing the same role in the so called Salvation Government that [00:15:00] HTS has set up to run Idlib province back in 2017. So he takes over the country at this point. They release the names of a number of cabinet ministers as well, interim cabinet ministers. They interestingly have not yet appointed a foreign minister or a defense minister. We'll have to see how that shakes out. They have appointed an economy minister. And Danny, I know you'll be happy to know he is going to implement free market reforms, so that should work out great for everybody. He's intent on that. But right now the plan is for a suspension of constitutional rule and of the Syrian parliament until March. I don't know what's going to happen in March. The transition government that they've set out has a mandate that runs through March 1st. I don't know what they're planning to do on March 1st. They've [00:16:00] said a lot of the things that you would expect if you were calibrating your rhetoric to a Western audience, they've said a lot of the things that you would expect them to say, like, we're going to have a representative government, there's not gonna be any oppression of minorities or religious or ethnic minorities. Everyone will be represented. Everyone's gonna have a seat at the table. I assume that means some kind of election, but to organize an election on a national scale in a country that is, as we'll get into still pretty much torn apart, in pieces, that's not gonna happen by March. One would assume there's gonna be some effort at rewriting the Constitution. That's also not gonna happen by March. So, this March date, I really don't know what the plan is. When we get there we'll have to see if they elucidated a little bit more over the coming weeks, but right now it's just, [00:17:00] they're thinking three months ahead, or I guess two and a half at this point, they've got the transition government in place and they're dealing with some more immediate things like getting public services back up and running in Damascus and other places where this group is in control, which is not, again, not the entire country. And reestablishing relations with a lot of countries that had cut them, during the Assad years, Qatar, for example, became, the last of the Gulf states finally to reopen its embassy or announce that it was reopening its embassy. The other five Gulf Cooperation Council states had already reengaged with the Assad government. So, they've just rolled over to the new one. But Qatar had remained the lone holdout and they've now reopened their embassy. So, that kind of thing is happening There's some talk of getting out from under UN sanctions, US sanctions at some point, the Caesar Act, I'm quite certain that [00:18:00] Syrian leaders would like to get out from under that. There's been a move to repatriate refugees. I know the Turkish government opened the border to allow refugees to be processed out and go back to Syria. A number of European countries that are positively vibrating at the chance to do this are considering just on mass denying any asylum requests that they're getting from Syrians or any open cases. The UN has cautioned people to pump the brakes a little bit on that process because it's still not necessarily safe for people to go back to Syria and the Syrian government, Bashir, cleverly, I think, this week gave a little televised address in which he linked the idea of repatriating these refugees to Syria's foreign currency deficit to the fact that the syrian pound is pretty much worthless and that the Syrian economy is in tatters. So, I think he was nudging European governments to drop their [00:19:00] economic penalties to restore ties with Damascus as quickly as possible and pump money into the Syrian economy in order to facilitate what they would love, which is the return of these Syrian nationals to Syria.

DANIEL BESSNER: What about the fighting between the Syrian Democratic Forces and Turkish proxies? 

DEREK DAVISON: This has been going on mostly in, the north, after the HTS and the Syrian National Army seized Aleppo. there was a moment where the Syrian National Army and the Turks kind of moved off to the east. They dislodged the Syrian Democratic Forces from Tel Rafat, which is a nearby town, and also pushed them out of Aleppo city. They had seized, I think, the SDF had taken the airport and was holding a little bit of territory there. They pushed them out of that as well. They then moved on the city of Manbij, which has been held by the SDF for years now. They did, [00:20:00] on Tuesday, negotiate an agreement for the SDF to leave Manbij and cross from the western side of the, Euphrates River over to the eastern side where the rest of its forces are. Al Monitor, which is a site I read pretty regularly for Middle Eastern news, reported that this was the result of an ultimatum that the SDF got from the United States, which is, of course, its main patron, whereby the U. S. basically said, if you don't leave Manbij, the U. S. brokered this deal with Turkey that said, if, you, the SDF will leave Manbij and cross over to the eastern side of the Euphrates River, if you guys, agree, Turkey and its proxies, agree not to continue pressing your attack against the SDF on the eastern side of the river, and supposedly they agreed. For how long, who knows? But the SDF was hesitant initially to do this. And it apparently got to the point where the U. S. said, look, either you, leave Manbij and cross the river or [00:21:00] our relationship is no longer going to be of use to you or we're no longer going to protect you. Not that they're doing a very good job of protecting them so far. But that, according to this piece, at least was the terms of the deal. So the SDF has now left Manbij. Turkey has taken it over. The next target, if the Turks decide screw this we're going to continue you know, we're going to go over the river and continue to attack the Kurds, would be Kobani and Kobani is symbolically a pretty important place for the SDF. That's where the Kurds made their a big stand against Islamic State, which was getting tacit help from the Turks, by the way, many years ago, during the early years of the Syrian civil war. They lost a number of people, killed defending that city and ultimately were victorious. And so it's difficult to imagine that they would be as a blase about giving that up to the Turks as they were with the, I don't want to say they were blase about Manbij, but as sanguine, let's say, about [00:22:00] giving up Kobani as they were about giving up Manbij. So, that could be a big fight if it, if things progress to that point. The SDF has also after briefly taking control of the city of Deir ez-Zor, which is the capital of Deir ez-Zor Province in eastern Syria, has left that city, turned it over to groups affiliated with the new, government such as it is in Damascus. I have seen reports that basically one of the main Arab elements within the SDF, the Deir ez-Zor military council, just quit the group and went over to this new Syrian government. So, under those, circumstances, the SDF was unable to hang onto the city, but they did sweep in a few days ago as Assad's forces were leaving, as the then Syrian army was leaving the city and falling back. So that's another setback really for the SDF, although, admittedly, they hadn't controlled Deir ez-Zor prior to that, so it's not a huge setback. Manbij [00:23:00] would be the bigger deal here, but they are getting pressured from a number of different angles, and I'm not sure that their relationship with the United States is going to save them, particularly when Donald Trump, who, as we know, is no fan of either the SDF or the U. S. military presence in Syria comes back into office. 

Why is Israel bombing Syria? - The Take - Air Date 12-17-24

MALIKA BILAL: Aymenn, you've described what the impetus is from Israel. The Israeli government says that this military deployment to the buffer zone between Israel and Syria is temporary, and says the collapse of the "Syrian regime created a vacuum on Israel's border". I'm interested in what you think 'temporary' means here. How temporary could this actually be? 

AYMENN JAWAD AL-TAMIMI: I think it's temporary, at least until there's a clear idea of what the new government is and who leads it. Because right now it's still in a transition stage where we don't know yet. Are there going to be elections? When are elections [00:24:00] going to be held? What parties are going to be running for the selection? What's the role of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and Abu Mohammed al-Golani, in particular, its leader. 

REPORTER: Syria's de facto leader, Ahmed al-Sharaa, said on Saturday that Israel was using false pretexts to justify its attacks on Syria. He also said he was not interested in engaging in new conflicts as his country focuses on rebuilding. 

AYMENN JAWAD AL-TAMIMI: You have to remember also that there is some context. So,  Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, of course, was ruling parts of Idlib and its surroundings in the northwest of the country before they had this lightning offensive that brought down the regime. The discourse from there was very pro Palestinian. I mean, they'd have rallies for Palestine, you've had fundraising campaigns for Gaza. Also, I have to say this, also, that there was a lot of solidarity, too, with Hamas and its Katāʼib ʻIzz al-Dīn al-Qassām, the armed wing that fights Israel in the Gaza Strip.

So I'm sure the Israelis noticed [00:25:00] these kinds of things, and some U. S. analysts noticed these kinds of things, and they might look at that and say, hmm. how influential is this  Hayat Tahrir al-Sham going to be in the new government? And are they going to be, are they going to want to be at war with us? Are they going to try to support Palestinian resistance to the occupation? So I can understand from the Israeli perspective why there might be some concern or worry about that from their side, but I think it's temporary at least until they have a clear idea of what the new government is.

And it is possible, of course, also that they want to use this buffer zone as a levering, as a bargaining chip to say, we'll withdraw in turn for your recognition of the Golan Heights as Israeli territory. They might do that. And I wouldn't count out actually the U.S., for example, pressuring the new Syrian government on issues like sanctions as well, and saying, we'll lift sanctions [00:26:00] and we'll ease restrictions and make things easier for you if you normalize ties with Israel.

MALIKA BILAL: Wow. So, Aymenn, the Golan Heights has been claimed by Israel for decades, but it is Syrian territory captured during the war. As we mentioned earlier, no country other than the U. S. under Donald Trump in 2019 recognizes Israel's sovereignty over the Golan Heights. But that hasn't stopped Israel and the Israeli government from approving a plan as late as just Sunday to double the population in the area. So let's get into who currently lives there and how that came to be. 

AYMENN JAWAD AL-TAMIMI: Yeah. So right now, the Golan Heights, relative to the rest of Israeli controlled territory, is quite sparsely populated. There [are] multiple Israeli settlements there, inhabited by Israeli Jews. And these settlements tend to be quite small. Now, all the [00:27:00] original Syrian inhabitants were expelled from the Golan, except for three villages in the north of the Golan Heights, which are, they're inhabitants from a minority religious community, the Druze, it's an offshoot of Shiism, ultimately. And they live in three villages. One is Majdal Shams, which is right on the border, on the side of the Syrian controlled territory. You have another called Buq'ata, and then you have another called Ein Qiniyye.  Majdal Shams is the largest of them. These Druze people, broadly speaking, over the years, they've retained a Syrian identity, so they actually rejected Israeli nationality, broadly speaking as a community. And actually, most of them still do not have Israeli nationality. But, in recent years, there's been a slight trend towards more of them acquiring and taking Israeli nationality for reasons, for, say, [00:28:00] pragmatic reasons, for example, that they think that it would always be better, life would always be better for them under Israeli rule than it would be under Syrian rule.

But with what Israel is trying to do now, as I say, Israel's own policy is very much now that we want to retain the Golan and they have no interest in or desire to give it back to Syria. And an increasing number of settlers would cement that, but there will be other interest too fulfilled by expanding the Israeli presence within the Golan. For example, Israel's housing market is very notorious for its ridiculously high prices. Property in the Golan would be cheaper because it's more space, less pressure, less competition. 

MALIKA BILAL: Aymenn you have sprinkled this conversation with your conversations with people who are in some of these villages. So you visited the villages. 

AYMENN JAWAD AL-TAMIMI: I've been to the Golan area. Yes. And, [00:29:00] I've, following the Syrian war, I also came to know quite a lot of people on the Syrian side of the border too, going right from Hadar, which is this Druze village, which is just opposite  Majdal Shams, but on the Syrian side, right down to this Jemla village, which is in Deraa province, but on the border with the south of the Golan Heights and that's a certainly Arab locality. So yeah, I've come to know people on both sides of these borders. 

MALIKA BILAL: And so what are you hearing from people in these communities currently when it comes to the Israeli potential expansion, when it comes to who might rule Syria moving forward, when it comes to what they're feeling right now?

AYMENN JAWAD AL-TAMIMI: So this varies according to the place you talk to people. I have to mention that there is this controversy that's emerged within social media and also Israeli media picked up on this too. So this village of Hadar [00:30:00] I just mentioned, which is Druze, like Majdal Shams, but it's on the Syrian controlled side of the territory. They were talking about Hadar and other nearby Druze villages in Syria wanting supposedly to be annexed to Israel. Now this is based on a video clip in that emerged of a speaker who appeared to be suggesting something like that, that the Druze community can't trust the central government that's going to emerge in Syria and that they would have better survival chances by joining up with Israel. 

Now, the Israeli media that then took this to say these villages have declared to want to be annexed by Israel. That's a very big exaggeration of what actually happened. I know several people in the village of Hadar, and none of them support the idea of wanting to be annexed by Israel. And the local notables in the village also put out a [00:31:00] statement saying that we reject the idea of parts separating from Syria and that we're an indivisible part of Syria. And I think there are a minority of people in the village, in Hadar, and some of these other Druze villages that would be concerned because there's the worry about the nature of  Hayat Tahrir al-Sham in the center of power, and also the fact that in the course of the war they did stand by the regime. Hadar, for example, I documented all of the people from that village who died during the war fighting on the government side. It goes to over a hundred people. And that's not an insignificant number. So, I could understand some concerns among some people there about what their future is under a new post Assad order in Syria. On the other hand, this does not mean the village as a whole has declared it wants to join Israel. There are people in that village also [00:32:00] who have lost relatives because of Israel. 

MALIKA BILAL: Well, finally, Aymenn, I wonder where this could go from here? 

AYMENN JAWAD AL-TAMIMI: That is the question I think that we'd all... 

MALIKA BILAL: Million dollar question, right? 

AYMENN JAWAD AL-TAMIMI: Yeah, because we'd all want to know the answer. I think that for now, just at least, that it's Israel continues this sweeping along the border region, trying to clear out, to continue to search for, try to make people hand over weapons. But, in the meantime, here,  Tahrir al-Sham finds its hands a bit tied. But I don't see an all out war breaking out between Israel and  Hayat Tahrir al-Sham.

“Lawless”: Marwan Bishara on Israel Bombing Syria 800 Times & Expanding Occupation of Golan Heights - Democracy Now! - Air Date 12-16-24

MARWAN BISHARA: Israel is setting new precedents in the Middle East. It has been doing so for the past 75, 80 years, but this week, in the way it’s acting so lawlessly against Syria, [00:33:00] as a rogue state basically, bombing the hell out of its neighbor, simply because there has been a change of rulers in Damascus attempting a peaceful transitional governing there, taking care of the people, and sending all kinds of signals that they have absolutely zero intentions of getting into war with anyone. And yet, this what’s called “strategic opportunism” on the part of the Netanyahu government, also political opportunism just while he’s on trial for corruptions and the rest of it, being a war criminal also, he’s stealing the show by deflecting from what’s going on in Israel, attacking Syria everywhere in Syria, while at the same time expanding in the southern part of Syria beyond the already-occupied Golan Heights. And, as you said, he’s trying to double [00:34:00] the illegal settlements in the Golan Heights. So, all in all, Israel, Netanyahu are sending exactly the wrong messages, doing exactly the wrong provocations, and at the same time setting precedents for rogueness, that I think it might not come to bite them soon, but it probably could later.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: And your response, Marwan, to the summit that was held in Jordan over the weekend? What do you think came out of it, and especially Secretary of State Blinken being there?

MARWAN BISHARA: the first impression is to remember back the leaders’ parole, parole, parole. You know, sometimes things like only words, words and more words come out of Arab leaders and Arab summits, especially those with the United States. But then, if you look a little more [00:35:00] deep into it, you would know that a lot of those people who — a lot of those leaders who were convening the summit in Aqaba have already been normalizing relations with the former Assad regime, despite its murderous corruption, despite its narco-state criminal kleptocracy. They’ve invited him back in the Arab League in 2022 and embraced him in 2023, and they were actually strengthening economic relations in the most of them. But now they were suddenly meeting together and to talk about human rights and peaceful transition and minority rights in Syria, as if, moving forward, or as if the past 60 years, it was merely the majority rights that were violated in Syria by the Assad dictatorship.

Be that as it may, I think while they sing from the same sheet, I think they have very different approaches to what security means, [00:36:00] to what stability means in Syria, to what even terrorism means. They don’t agree on this, that and the other thing. And, in fact, each and every one of the major powers in that meeting supports different militia, different military force in Syria. Just to give you a simple example, we have now what? Five or six military forces in Syria. We have the Free Syrian Army; we have the National Syrian Army; we have the militias, Syrian forces in the south; we have the Syrian Democratic Forces; and we have, of course, HTS, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham — all in addition to Assad’s forces that remain there, as well as ISIS. A lot of these groups are supported by some of these people convening, including the Turks and the Emiratis and the Jordanians and so on and so forth. So, it’s going to be a very complicated way forward, and I remain doubtful that the Arab regimes are serious about [00:37:00] assisting the Syrian people, moving forward.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: I want to turn to President Biden speaking last week after the fall of Assad.

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: So we carried out a comprehensive sanction program against him and all those responsible for atrocities against the Syrian people. Second, we maintained our military presence in Syria, our counter-ISIS — to counter the support of local partners, as well, on the ground, their partners, never ceding an inch of territory, taking out leaders of ISIS, ensuring that ISIS can never establish a safe haven there again. Third, we’ve supported Israel’s freedom of action against Iranian networks in Syria and against actors aligned with Iran who transported lethal aid to Lebanon.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: That was President Biden taking credit for the fall of Assad. Your response, Marwan?

MARWAN BISHARA: I tell you, it’s [00:38:00] mind-boggling, mind-boggling, trying to whitewash genocide by saying, “Well, after all, 15 months of genocide, maybe, we were on the right track after all. Look at us. we are so great,” and basically tapping himself on the shoulders after all the war crimes that were committed in Lebanon and in Palestine. And now he’s taking credit for some change that happened in Syria by the Syrian people — by the Syrian people — despite the complicity and the conspiracies against the Syrian people, and despite the embrace of the Assad regime by Biden’s allies in the region.

The second thing that came to mind is that, Blinken and Biden keep warning us about ISIS, without mentioning that ISIS is basically the creation of the American invasion and occupation in Iraq, of the stupidities committed by everywhere from Bush to [00:39:00] Obama, how they dealt with the question of Iraq, including the de-Ba’athifications, including the dissolving of the Iraqi military, that basically led directly to rise of ISIS. So, really, American intervention in the region, whether it is in Iraq or in Syria, and certainly in Palestine, has been catastrophic. Trying to claim credit for what happened in Syria or could happen in Syria is just beyond the pale.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: I wanted to turn to the spokesperson Matt Miller, who was questioned by journalists recently.

MATTHEW MILLER: So, we support the work of the ICC. I know that, obviously, we have disagreed with their —

MATT LEE: Wait a second.

MATTHEW MILLER: Hold on. Hold on. I’m going to — let me address it.

MATT LEE: No, you support the work of the ICC —

MATTHEW MILLER: We do support —

MATT LEE: — until they do something like with Israel.

MATTHEW MILLER: We — so, we have had a lot — let me just answer the question.

MATT LEE: And then you don’t like them at all, or the U.S.

MATTHEW MILLER: You know what, Matt? Let me — Matt, let me answer the question, because I was addressing that before you interrupted me. We obviously have had a jurisdictional dispute [00:40:00] with them as it relates to cases against Israel. That is a long-standing jurisdictional dispute. But that said, we have also made clear that we support broadly their work, and we have supported their work in other cases, despite our jurisdictional dispute when it comes to Israel.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: So, that’s State Department spokesperson Matt Miller being questioned by AP’s Matt Lee, talking about why he would support Assad being brought up on war crimes charges at the International Criminal Court but doesn’t feel the same way about Netanyahu and Gallant. In fact, that was just a few days after Gallant had been in Washington, D.C., even though the ICC has issued this arrest warrant, meeting with U.S. officials. Marwan Bishara?

MARWAN BISHARA: You know, Amy, it’s funny, right? each and every era has an image that speaks to it, that represents it, that reflects it. This [00:41:00] was one of them, laughing out, laughing at the State Department spokesperson, the Biden administration’s spokesperson, for again underlining, emphasizing and basically speaking clearly to his double standard and hypocrisy.

But, as an international relations observer, let me tell you, America does not have double standard in the Middle East. It has a single standard. And that’s American interest, American-Israeli interest. So, it’s not really a double standard. global powers, empires, and notably the United States, it looks like, for us intellectuals and others, moralists, that there is double standard, but in the end of the day, they have a single, narrow American strategic, Israeli strategic interest, and they’ve always spoken to it, defended it, justified it.

So, that’s why for 15 months we’ve [00:42:00] seen — at Al Jazeera, we’ve reported from — live from Gaza the unraveling genocide, the war on doctors, the war on journalists, the war on children, on schools and hospitals. And a lot of this has trickled down to the American media, and we’ve seen it. And I think the Biden administration understands that there is a genocide, trying to get off technicality. Of course, again, this was exposed to be the total hypocrisy which it is. It’s OK for Putin to be taken or indicted by the ICC, and Assad, it’s OK, even the Myanmar generals, it’s OK, but not the Israeli leaders. It’s hypocrisy and double standard for the rest of us. For America, it’s the one single standard: American-Israeli interest.

Syria: Western Hypocrisy, Israeli Expansion & The Fall of Assad - Double Down News - Air Date 12-20-24

DAVID HEARST: Western policy is all over the place and has nothing to do with values in the Middle East. The West supports regimes just as brutal as the Assad regime. Sisi's Egypt, the Emirates under the presidency of Mohammed bin Zayed, Saudi [00:43:00] Arabia under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The murder of my dear friend, Jamal Khashoggi, personally ordered by Mohammed bin Salman, seems to have been conveniently forgotten.

All of these people have tortured, killed the opposition, and mounted a vicious counter revolution against the Arab Spring. So there's total hypocrisy about the West's sort of values. When it's convenient to them, it funds the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, and when Al Qaeda is formed, they declare that the number one terrorist group.

Western policy is shot through with hypocrisy. Terrorists one minute, are your allies the next. Israel's role in this has been incredibly negative. Israel wants to smash its neighbors, not coexist. Their immediate reaction was to seize the demilitarized border area and to push tanks to capture a strategic peak of Mount Hermon, a mountain range that [00:44:00] divides Syria from Lebanon.

And their tanks now are 25 kilometers from Damascus. They have conducted over 300 air raids on military assets, and they've destroyed the Syrian fleet. And it's now basically created a fourth front in Syria. What they want to do, if they can't have a pliant dictators, is to weaken the country so much.

That it won't raise its head again. Israel is behaving in exactly the same way to Syria as it did to the West Bank and as it has done to Gaza. It basically smashes its neighbors up. I was at the Doha forum when all of this was happening, and you could physically tell from the body language of the foreign ministers present how the tectonic waves were moving.

Plates of the region were shifting almost as we were speaking and the speed of the rebel advance was written all over the faces of the foreign ministers. There was Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister. He was floored by the collapse of Assad and didn't want to talk about it. There was the [00:45:00] Iranian delegation who, ashen face, hurried around the corridors without speaking to anyone.

And then, of course, there were the Turks, full of confidence, smiles, greeting everyone and organising a rally. The communications with the new rebel leaders of Syria. Turkey had gone from being a distressed observer of the Middle East to a major player. It is to be noted how well equipped and trained the rebel force was.

And I think Turkey played no small part. part in that. But Turkey tried very, very hard to get Assad to the negotiating table. Erdogan called him three times to set up a meeting and he refused each time. And latterly, through Iraqi Prime Minister Sudani, Assad told Erdogan, I'm not negotiating with you if I have a gun to my head.

Turkey was very frustrated by Assad because Turkey did want to normalize relationship with Assad. There were lots of guarantees. There was money involved of it. There could have been an understanding with Assad about the Kurds. That was Turkey's primary concern. And [00:46:00] Assad refused to talk to the rebels, let alone start negotiating with them. 

So, absent Russian bombers who are all engaged in Ukraine, absent Hezbollah who's just taking a battering from Israel, absent Iran preparing for a confrontation with Israel, then you've just got Assad and his troops.

They were on a wage that they couldn't live on, and so Assad's army melted away, and the speed of the advance was lightning. I think it's very bad news for the Gulf dictators who sense this general, popular, very contagious feeling of revolt. All of them, by the way, brought Assad back into the Arab League, and particularly Mohammed bin Zayed, the president of the United Arab Emirates, was promising Assad lots of money and support if he kicked out the Iranian militias.

So, not only did Iran not turn up, or [00:47:00] Russia turn up, but possibly for good reason. They said, why should we fight to save your skin? When you were in the process of making a dirty deal with the Emiratis. If there's any parallel with history about what's actually happened in Syria, I go back to 2011 and the Arab spring.

The conditions have always been there. The embers of a revolt have always glowed in the Arab street and the dictators and the reasons and the oppression. It's still there, probably more so now than it was under Ben Ali's time or under Mubarak's time. Now one argument is that where the Muslim Brotherhood went wrong in Egypt and Tunisia was because it was non violent, because they were Democrats who were interested in having constitutional assemblies.

And then free elections, all of which sabotaged by the generals who were still in place, who simply kicked this construction down with their hobnail boots. All the leadership in Tunisia is now back in a jail. Now what can be said in HDS's favor [00:48:00] is it is an armed rebellion and they have got rid of the army.

So in theory, they've got the power to rebuild a state from the bottom up without feeling that a deep state is there to sabotage it. Well, Al Julani himself is quite an interesting provenance. His defining moment was 9 11. He was inspired by the attack on the Twin Towers. That is when he began circulating in Al Qaeda circles in Iraq.

He managed to distinguish himself. Because of his Syrian heritage, in the eyes of Abu Bakr, who was then the leader of Islamic State, at a moment when the Islamic State wanted to expand from the Iraqi desert into the Syrian one, and Jalali was the man to do that, he started a group called Nusra. which was linked to Al Qaeda.

He broke with Al Qaeda and ISIS. And then when Nusra was dissolved, he and his group formed the HTS, which is [00:49:00] a Syrian nationalist force. He has, at least on paper, abandoned transnational jihad. There is a question mark over how tolerant The HTS is, it's the most disciplined of Syrian rebel groups, but it did put down an insurrection in Idlib in September last year, and there were reports of people being tortured and killed in jail.

So the HTS are certainly not pussycats. There also are reports about intimidation of journalists. Will HTS do the same as the lead group of a national government? The jury is out on that question. Now Iran itself is in a really quite difficult phase because this axis of resistance had been constructed over decades.

They're now finding that communications at least are being dismantled. There was a lot of missiles and military kit that came through the mountainous area that Israel is now occupying. However, the communications have been cut, but that still leaves [00:50:00] Hezbollah as a fighting force. And the Houthis. still have their missiles and their combat power.

And Kataib Hezbollah still has its drones and its missiles in Iraq. So all the constituent elements of the Axis resistance are there. The communications between them are much, much more difficult. And if that situation isn't complicated enough, Netanyahu has just gone on trial on corruption charges. Plus, the army is now getting war weariness.

and is saying that they want to cease fire in Gaza as well. So you've got three, four, five different crises, none of them being solved, all happening simultaneously, weakening Iran's position, but not totally. And Israel suffering fatigue from a 14th month war in which they just keep on opening up new fronts.

So can the Israeli army with its dependence on reservists, keep this up on four fronts for that much longer. That is [00:51:00] also a factor in analyzing how one can start de conflicting a region that is completely aflame. I think the outside forces will have to spend a period of reflection and time readjusting to the realities of Syria.

I think Syria will face real difficulties forming a national government that is independent of its backers. I think the region has been so battered by the events of the last 14 months. Israel has now opened four active fronts in their war to establish a greater Israel and to crush the Palestinian cause once and for all.

We have to wait and see how these various concurrent crises play out before deciding whether or not Netanyahu will have his way in reordering the region. The West should beware of making the same mistake again and again, which is to impose its simplistic view on an extremely nuanced, educated and [00:52:00] battered Middle East.

Note from the Editor on closing out the year

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: We've just heard clips starting with The Muckrake Political Podcast discussing the fall of the Assad regime. Middle East Eye looked at the historical context of the Arab Spring. American Prestige examined the ongoing transition period in Syria. The Take focused on Israel's military action inside Syria. Democracy Now! further discussed Israel's actions and the US's double standard on war crimes. And Double Down News gave a big picture assessment of Western policies in the middle east. And those were just the Top Takes. There's a lot more in the Deeper Dive section. 

But first, one last pitch as we close out the year. This podcast will be turning 19 years old in January. And It started as a hobby, but I knew from the very beginning that a project like this one, that takes as much work and research as it does, would always have to be a team effort if it were to survive. From the very beginning, I started asking for volunteers to help gather the raw material that would go [00:53:00] through my sort of curation grinder and come out as episodes on the other end. After a couple of years, I figured out about the idea of a membership program that would eventually allow me to do this full time. Only in the past few years did I finally manage to bring on additional research and production help. And I have no doubt that they are the reason I heard from a longtime listener recently saying that all though they really loved the show 10 years ago, they manage to find it even better today. 

All of this only continues with strong support from members. We do run ads on the show, but it's far less dependable and can fluctuate wildly. So it's absolutely imperative that we have a solid base of support from members. 

If you get value out of the work that we put into this show, curating news and progressive opinion in a way that, we think, provides more clarity than can be found elsewhere for any given topic we tackle, then think about becoming a [00:54:00] member, Increasing your monthly or annual pledge if you're already a member, or give a membership as a gift. 

 And if you need one more enticement, our winter sale is on, making memberships 20% off through the end of the year. All the relevant links are in the show notes, or just go to BestOfTheLeft.com/support. There you'll also find links to bookshop.org for Dead Tree Books and their sister site leebro.fm for audio books. Both are certified benefit corporations that help support brick and mortar bookshops, while you get the benefit and convenience of online shopping. 

Again, head to BestOfTheLeft.com/support or follow the links in the show notes to grab your own membership, currently on discount, or snap up some memberships or books as gifts.

Thanks to everyone who already supports the show and to everyone for listening. Hoping the best for all of us in the coming year.

SECTION A - THE SYRIAN PEOPLE

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And now we'll continue to dive deeper on three topics. Next up section a. The Syrian people followed by section B. [00:55:00] Israel and section C historical context and the proxy war.

What Syria's Political Future May Look Like | Emma Beals - Global Dispatches -- World News That Matters - Air Date 12-11-24

Speaker 13: I have to imagine That you have been just in constant contact with your friends, contact sources in Syria. Is there like a particular anecdote that someone has told you that you think is particularly illustrative of this moment?

Speaker 12: There are really two. Many to be honest over the last few days since kind of a Sunday morning where this became a reality where Assad had left the country where people started not to be afraid again and some of the most profound things for me were people who. Have not been able to call me when they were inside of the country, you know, they would have to leave to call me because I have a certain sort of profile or what have you just freely texting with me that they were happy that this was happening.

And suddenly having those moments of realization of, Oh, you can call me whenever you want. Let's just get on the phone [00:56:00] and have a chat. And then also people that I've worked with for such a long time have done so undercover, have done so without their faces showing without their full names, you know, secretively and doing a really important work, suddenly being able to use their name, put their photo.

Speak on camera to the media as this was, was happening and just some of those little things that you don't even really think about when it's not you and then just imagining how difficult that has been for folks to navigate. But yeah, just people that you've known for so, so long, seeing them able to just do things that you and I take for granted, you know, use our full names and our pictures on our Twitter accounts and.

Call our friends back home whenever we feel like it. 

Speaker 13: And just, there's like joy I can sense in your voice having been on the receiving end of these kind of calls that, you know, after having existed under such a totalitarian system for so long, it's [00:57:00] seemingly like emanating from your context to you, this kind of relief.

Speaker 12: Well, not just emanating from them, but actually feeling it myself. As you mentioned, I've worked on Syria pretty much since the beginning. And this kind of work, you hold a lot of space for people's pain and people's suffering. You know, you're talking to people all of the time. I've been investigating the Syrian detention system, the security state.

I've been working with the families and survivor groups to try to find out what's happened to their loved ones. Having lost their loved ones myself in Syria, you know, some of these things are really personal. I've, I've debated endlessly with officials about refugee return policy and peace process policy and, you know, how much weight we should be giving to elements of security for Syrians or their sort of broader protection.

And so, you know, It's not, it's not, not personal. You know, all of the things that we've seen come out [00:58:00] over the last couple of days, since that sort of very joyful part have just been, there's been this emotional rollercoaster there where it's been this anger that all of this was true. Everything I was saying was true and people didn't believe me or thought me naive and idealistic and was sort of prepared to send people back to, to risk these things.

But even then the joy for me, like a feeling. Like, all of those hours of work were actually worth it. I went to a celebration on Sunday. Obviously, I saw a lot of people I knew who were just crying and hugging. But just seeing people who are in exile with children, suddenly with the weight of the world lifted off their shoulders, knowing they could go home and visit family if they wanted to, knowing their children can see the country that they're from, knowing that this intergenerational trauma has been lifted.

And it's not very often that you get to it. See that in such a sort of dramatic way, you know, normally these changes are incremental in this sort of work It's a tiny win or it's the double negative or whatever it is You don't see the harm that [00:59:00] wasn't done that you prevented or whatever. So you don't normally see That and so not only was their joy infectious, but I felt an enormous amount of joy enormous amount of relief but also an enormous amount of grief and before the moments of joy, there were those moments of Seeing the names of these towns That were besieged where we had been working with people who were living in extraordinary circumstances, where there were military campaigns, where we documented what had happened to people.

And so all of those memories flooded back as well. So, you know, sitting with my joy, sitting with the joy of all of those people that I've worked with, but also everyone I've been talking to, it's been sitting with a flood of memories with anger, with feeling justified in a lot of things, as well as the joy and the hope.

Speaker 13: I mean, for me, at least, and I don't mean to make this, like, personal about us, this is not about us, and we'll, we'll move on in a minute, but for me, just as someone who kind of covers conflict and crises from afar, I'm [01:00:00] used to seeing, like, streams of cars and people fleeing a conflict, and it was so moving to me, at least, To see just traffic jams of people trying to return home after having existed as refugees for so long to me, at least that's like the visual manifestation of a lot of what you discussed.

Speaker 12: Yeah and for me it came in the inbox hundreds of messages from people going with i'm going home i'm going home or i've received videos of people who got home for the first time in years crying and showing me the insides of their houses and you know all of those kinds of. You. Of things. Yeah. It's just normally the other way.

They normally crying when they pack everything up and leave and sort of are telling you they don't know where to go and what to do. So to see people reuniting with each other and with their places of origin and their homes and their special memories was, I can't even describe. 

Speaker 13: So I'm interested in getting your expert take on how this came to be.

I mean, [01:01:00] there had been this essentially like a status quo in Northern Syria for many years that was seemingly and rather abruptly broken just over the last couple of weeks. And now Like the conventional wisdom, which I find compelling, and I'm curious to get your take is essentially that the Assad regime was left exposed by the fact that Iran and Russia were distracted by Israel and by Ukraine.

And then Hezbollah had been degraded. And in that context, HTS led this kind of improbable military campaign. I mean, it's probably too simplistic, but is that generally Broadly speaking, your interpretation of what happened, 

Speaker 12: I mean, that is certainly one big part of it. Because if you remember, um, the previous military campaigns, air power played a huge role, you know, Hezbollah did some of the most brutal sieges, Russia flew the planes and [01:02:00] was doing a lot of the air power and that had an enormous impact on the military campaigns and ability to it.

Yeah. Take and hold territory, but it's not the whole story. And I think that it's a mistake to think that it is. A lot of us have been warning that a frozen conflict is not peace, that the levels of violence have been ticking up gradually over the last wee while. But I think what's also important is the regime has not offered any kind of peace dividend or sensible form of governance in their areas.

And so people talk about, you know, the fact that the, uh, the Army kind of gave up their positions and they did, you know, people did not want to fight. They were defecting or withdrawing quite rapidly, which is partly how HTS took so much territory so quickly and with so little fighting really for what was a military campaign, but also communities did as well.

So, you know, there were notables negotiating with HTS to sort of say, yeah, come through. We won't fight you. And those weren't necessarily decisions [01:03:00] taken, you know, the military side, but the community side as well. What you have to understand is the regime, a lot of the fighting around Damascus and in their areas had finished in 2016 or 2018.

And people expected some sort of benefit for their children having, you know, fought for the Syrian army and believed all of the things about Assad being the only form of stability. But instead, what he did is continue to have a corrupt, kleptocratic, highly securitized dictatorship. And people would see their young men being arrested.

They would see the contracts going to the regime cronies. You had an economic shock. You had COVID where they didn't really go and help anyone after the earthquake. They were terrible at helping anybody. And so you had these schisms in Syria. Society and what we've seen with the coast and with Damascus as well is these supposedly stronghold areas where Assad was said to have had all this broad support just weren't really interested in him sticking around either.

So it was a combination of those big geopolitical events, you know, Russia [01:04:00] and Iran being tied up elsewhere, but also all of these really interesting dynamics within Syria itself as well.

US officials in 'direct contact' with Syria's HTS rebels - DW News - Air Date 12-15-24

Speaker 14: U. S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken says American officials have been in, quote, direct contact with Syrian rebel group Hayat Tahrir al Sham, that despite HTS being on the U. S. terrorism list. Blinken has been in Jordan for talks with officials from several Arab countries. Turkey, as well as the EU and the U.

N. They've agreed to support a peaceful transition process in Syria and urged the country's new rebel leaders to protect citizens rights. The Islamist group HTS has promised to govern inclusively after toppling Bashar al Assad's dictatorship a week ago. So let's just listen to what Anthony Blinken had to say.

Speaker 15: Yes, we've been in contact with HTS and with other parties. We're, we're watching, uh, this very closely. As I said earlier, we're also communicating directly, uh, with those in [01:05:00] positions of, um, of authority in Syria. And I hope that today's agreement, the, uh, the, the collective word of so many countries who will be important to Syria's future, uh, carries weight and helps, uh, communicate clearly to the Syrian people.

That we're there to support them, but communicates also what we expect and hope to see going forward. 

Speaker 14: Your Secretary of State Antony Blinken there and for more, I'm joined now by DW's Aya Ibrahim who is in Damascus. So Aya, there's a lot of international diplomacy going on as we've just heard. And of course, it's been a week since the Assad regime has been toppled.

Tell us, what's the mood in the Syrian capital now? 

Speaker 16: Very much euphoric, as was the case, uh, about, uh, a week ago, but we are at the beginning of the week and, as you can see behind me, the Damascus [01:06:00] traffic is now, uh, coming back in full force and we can see everywhere as we walk through the streets of Damascus that normal life, some kind of normalcy, is coming back.

Schools are reopening today. Universities, uh, are reopening, uh, uh, subsidies have been lifted off of fuel. So the price of transportation has gone up, but at the same time, inflation, uh, has, uh, gone down at the same time with the sort of uncertain situation that this new government might bring. There are, of course, we are hearing concerns from, uh, minorities, for example, about what the new Syria could mean for them, because even though, uh, HTS has And HDS leadership have been making inclusive, general statements about what the new government will look like, specifics, we've yet to hear, uh, specifics, but so far, uh, things are coming back to normal.

One thing that you wouldn't normally see here is people like me able to do their job on the streets, uh, freely. There are a lot of journalists here as well. And so that [01:07:00] that is something, Monica, that would have just simply been unbelievable a week ago that this amount of journalists would be on the streets, uh, getting a sense of what life is like.

This was simply unheard of under the Assad regime. 

Speaker 14: Now, uh, you already mentioned that HTS, of course, uh, being, uh, also called a terrorist group by the United Nations and the U. S. Uh, and, uh, they are in charge of Syria now, and you, uh, you mentioned about the sort of, uh, worries that, uh, some of, uh, the Syrian civilization, uh, or the people there, um, have about what's in store for them.

Uh, has there been any, um, sign yet, you know, about sort of Islamist rules being imposed on them? Or do we know anything about the HTS plan for Syria?

Speaker 16: There haven't been any sort of, you know, concerning signs on the ground here [01:08:00] in Syria that would indicate, uh, that, uh, you know, the HDS has some sort of, you know, sinister plans in store for Syria's minorities, but that doesn't mean that they're not concerned because you have to keep in mind the history of this country.

And the history of how minorities have been treated. And of course, there is, you know, we have been dealing with decades of Assad rule. And people are just living through an uncertain time because there aren't any, uh, concrete answers or concrete, uh, plans yet. But it remains to be seen really what the, what this new government, uh, does, uh, for, uh, minorities.

Speaker 14: All right, so still uncertainty there, but we know that Israel continues to occupy a buffer zone in the Golan Heights and that it carries out airstrikes against military facilities near Damascus. Uh, do we know how the HTS will deal with that? 

Speaker 16: Well, we've heard HTS leader Al Jolani say that he does not seek that Syria under Uh, his leadership and his, uh, group's leadership does not see conflict with Israel.

And this is really expected because you have to think about the momentous [01:09:00] task that this group now has to maintain basically stability in this country. And the last thing they need would be a full out military confrontation with a military uh, group. Power like Israel. And he has said that international diplomatic effort, international diplomacy has to really come together in this moment to make sure that there isn't an all out conflict between Syria and Israel.

As Syria really enters a phase where everything is huge. All

Mass Graves Discovered as Syrian Families Seek Answers to Loved Ones' Disappearances Under Assad - Democracy Now! - Air Date 12-19-24

HIBA ZAYADIN: Upon arriving in Damascus, one of the first sites that we decided to visit was that of the heinous 2013 Tadamon massacre, which a video of had leaked in 2021. We had been investigating this crime for a long time now. We had confirmed the exact location of the mass grave and decided to go confirm it for ourselves.

But what we found there, you know, we were not prepared for what we had found. We were not prepared for what we were going to see, even [01:10:00] though we knew, from conversations with residents earlier in 2021, that it was the likely site of other summary killings, as well. But when we arrived, what we saw was scores of human remains, of fingers, of a part of a skull, pelvic bones, strewn across the surrounding neighborhood. We saw families — you know, families had brought to us bags that they had collected of bones from the rubble in dilapidated stores in the area. We saw children toying with these bones. It was not anything that we had expected, that we had expected to see.

And we spoke to more residents and found out that this was the site of so much more horror than we had expected. You know, I had spoken to a resident who was forced at the age of 15 — this was back in 2016 — [01:11:00] to dig graves and to dump bodies, corpses into those graves. We had found — we had spoken to an ambulance driver who was tasked to retrieve bodies from that area in 2018 and 2019. I spoke to countless families who had missing loved ones that they did not know what had happened to and had no answers for.

And so, you know, it was really important that we highlight how imperative it is to protect and to secure this site and many others like it. There are mass graves across Syria, and this was just one of them. And we had visited others, as well. We had seen desperate families visiting these sites, sometimes taking matters into their own hands, digging the graves on their own, trying to find anything about this. We saw them at the morgue, where there were several unidentified bodies, families [01:12:00] clutching pictures of their loved ones, pushing it into the camera to try and show it to the world, to try and get any sort of information.

We also visited some of the most notorious detention facilities, that we had for a long time worked on and documented abuses and torture in. And, you know, what we found there, too, was quite upsetting, in that there was intentional destruction of documents, of evidence. There was looting. There was total insecurity for the first couple of days that we were there, with people coming in, retrieving files, leaving with them, tampering with the evidence. And we know that the Assad government operated a chilling bureaucratic system whereby they documented every crime. They documented it in detail. And that evidence had existed in these detention facilities, in the military courts, in the prisons [01:13:00] themselves.

And every minute that passes where there is inaction, where these documents, these sites are not being preserved and not being secured, is just one more family possibly never knowing what happened to their loved ones. And it also means that there are officials who have perpetrated some of the most horrific atrocities over the past decade that will go free and that will not be brought to justice because of just how quickly a lot of this evidence is disappearing.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, I’d like to read from a Financial Times article headlined “The Syrian neighbourhood at the heart of Assad’s killing machine,” which is the neighborhood that you’ve just spoken about, Tadamon. The article begins saying, quote, “In Tadamon, the children know the difference between a human jaw and a dog’s. So inured are they to decomposing remains, a consequence of living in this desolate Damascus suburb, that the [01:14:00] boys casually toss around skulls and fractured femurs.” So, Hiba, if could speak — you just talked about the importance of protecting these sites. I mean, many have said that Assad’s regime has just fallen, and this work is only just beginning, the work of excavating these mass graves. Are there concerns that these sites will not be protected? And if not, where will the — who will damage them? How will they somehow be disrupted?

HIBA ZAYADIN: Definitely, there are concerns right now. I mean, we have seen that for transitional authorities, this has not been a top priority. And our presence in Damascus was to call for the preservation of this evidence, was to make it clear to transitional authorities that this must be a priority and that it is of the utmost urgency, because now is the time — yesterday was the time, a week ago was the time to be protecting these sites. [01:15:00] And as I had said earlier, every day that passes, we’re losing more valuable information. And, you know, it is a priority, or it should be a priority, to transitional authorities not just because of justice and accountability efforts, but also because you have thousands upon thousands of families who are seeking answers, who deserve answers, and who have no idea what the transitional authorities are doing about this right now.

They need to be raising awareness about what it means to tamper with this evidence, what it means to retrieve documents from an area without preserving the chain of custody, because, you know, once you take these documents out without documenting exactly who and how and from where they were taken, none of this is going to stand in court. And this is what we’ve been impressing upon transitional authorities. This is what we’ve been calling for [01:16:00] U.N. bodies, relevant bodies to arrive at the scene as soon and as urgently as possible. We’ve been calling on international rescue teams to also arrive on site and for Syrian groups to really be at the forefront of this, of this massive, massive effort.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: This is State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller speaking earlier this week.

MATTHEW MILLER: When you look at the evidence that is coming out of Syria in the now 10 days since the Assad regime fell, it continues to shock the conscience. And I’m referring not just to the mass graves that have been uncovered, but information that we have been gathering inside the United States government, including information that’s not yet publicly known.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: Can you respond, Hiba, to these remarks, in particular, Matt Miller suggesting more will be revealed about abuses by the Assad regime?

HIBA ZAYADIN: So, I mean, [01:17:00] absolutely, more will be revealed. And I think, you know, there have been documents in detention facilities that remain intact. And there is movement. You know, we have seen a bit more of a stepping up in the security of some of these detention facilities. But there is no coordinated effort right now to preserve these documents. And it is really important to stress that these documents belong to the Syrian people. This evidence belongs to the Syrian people, and they need to be at the forefront of these efforts to preserve and secure — obviously, with the help of U.N. relevant bodies, obviously, with the help of international actors. But these documents belong to the Syrian people. The evidence belongs to them and needs to remain with them and in their hands. And that’s what I would stress in response to some of these remarks.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: Hiba, what is Human Rights Watch looking out for when Israel intensifies the attacks on Syria, expanding its occupation of the Golan Heights? You’ve said that [01:18:00] Israel bombed the only facility in Syria that had DNA equipment that would allow for the identification of remains in these mass graves. Can you explain?

HIBA ZAYADIN: Yes. So, I mean, Israel’s strikes in Syria come on the heels of its brutal military campaigns in Lebanon and in Gaza, where we’ve documented war crimes, crimes against humanity and, as my colleague has just been saying on your show, acts of genocide in Gaza specifically. You know, Syria is right now in a very fragile state, and the Israeli strikes have almost completely decimated its defense capabilities.

But also this has had repercussions and consequences for the issue that we’re speaking of right now, the preservation of evidence. Some of these strikes have hit vital facilities, including the Air Force intelligence branch, you know, [01:19:00] the institute where these DNA machines were being housed, other security branches, military security branches, that contain vital evidence. And so, these strikes are also adding to the quite upsetting situation that we currently find ourselves in, in terms of just preserving evidence, making sure that some day, hopefully, every family can learn what the fate of their loved ones had been, where they may have been buried, and to really be able to give them a decent burial.

Will Syrians return home? - Today, Explained - Air Date 12-14-24

NOEL: You are Syrian-American. Do I have that right? Can you just tell me about your ties to Syria?

AMANY: My heritage is Syrian. My parents are Syrian, but I grew up in the US my whole life, so I grew up in the Midwest.

NOEL: And where are we reaching you today, Amany?

AMANY: I'm in Gaziantep, Turkey. So for those unfamiliar, it's in the southeast of Turkey, one of the cities that was the epicenter, actually, of the [01:20:00] earthquakes that hit last year.

NOEL: I want to get a sense of the scale of movement that happened as a result of Syria's decade-plus-long civil war. 

AMANY: Mm hm.

NOEL: There were people who left the country. There were people who moved around inside the country. What are we talking about in terms of numbers and where did people tend to end up?

AMANY: Let's talk about outflow first. 

 SCORING IN <Neutral Irene - BMC>

 This is a country that has probably 6 to 7 million refugees outside of the country, one of the highest for those that have been following Syria for the past decade plus. This is one of the highest numbers of refugees across the world, now probably closely tied with Afghanistan and Ukraine. But for quite some time it was Syria. A lot of these refugees ended up in surrounding countries. 

UN: Syria civil war has left more than 130,000 people dead and forced millions to flee to neighboring countries like Jordan.

PBS: As fast as Turkey’s government could build the dozens of refugee camps along its borders [01:21:00] with Syria, they were filled to capacity.

 Almost four million Syrian refugees have settled in countries neighboring Syria: Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon.

AMANY: And then the rest ended up many, many places: Europe, the UK, the US, Canada

Euronews: Migrants and refugees received a warm welcome after arriving on a train from Austria to the German city of Munich. “How do you feel about being in Germany?” “I feel happy. We from Syria.”

CBS: The 10,000th Syrian refugee is about to land in the U.S. today.

WIVBTV: In Canada the government is taking in 25,000 Syrian refugees and groups are already arriving in Toronto.

AMANY: But I would say the bulk really of refugee hosting countries for Syrians have been the surrounding ones, including Turkey, where I reside right now. And then in terms of inflow within the country, across the various governorates, the majority of displaced communities have been in the northwest. This is one of the highest displaced populations across the [01:22:00] world right now. Within the country, it's about six or so million displacements. And in the northwest, it's housed about 4 million. So these 4 million have come from other parts of the northwest as a result of aerial attacks to civilian infrastructure, hospitals, clinics, schools, marketplaces. Some were fleeing forced military conscription, particularly young men of military age. So really a mixture of reasons. But the northwest in particular, I would say, really housing the majority of the displaced.

 

NOEL: What are you hearing from Syrians who were displaced outside of the country now that Bashar al-Assad is gone? Do they want to go home?

AMANY: I think yes, but there's a caveat. So absolutely. I think without, you know, getting emotional about this, you can feel the hope and you can see the [01:23:00] resilience of the Syrian people across the world right now. Scenes of people celebrating in almost every country and and real solidarity. I think, this is a moment in history, this is a moment in time for people and, before discussing kind of what's next, the apprehension that others might be, you know, questioning Syrians about is, let's, let Syrians have this moment. Let's let them celebrate, rejoice. Feel the joy. Feel the pain. Feel the suffering. Excuse me. Feel the loss and the family separation, the detainment, the persecutions. This is a bittersweet moment for a lot of people. And I think it's it's really important to let them process all of this. But on the other hand, when a lot of Syrians are now either wanting to return or, at a minimum, just get [01:24:00] permission to enter the country, to reunite with parents that they haven't seen for ten years, young men and women that had to leave the country, separate from their families, out of safety or simply because of how much economic deterioration there was. It's also for me, I'm very cautious about what this means when, you know, many say they want to return. Is the time necessarily now? No. Is there a firm timeline? I also don't know. What I would say, especially to host countries is, you know, this is not a moment to exploit asylum policies. This is not a moment to sort of weaponize this, you know, critical point in time and immediately start discussing returns, especially if they're not, you know, this trifecta: voluntary, safe and dignified for people. 

NOEL: This has been a contentious issue in some European countries. Have any European countries come out since Assad was forced out and said, we actually plan to do things differently now?

AMANY: [01:25:00] So it's been a dizzying few days. I believe Austria has. I am cautious to mention names of other countries, but even prior to this moment in time, a few countries have been looking at their migration policies. So this is this is not a secret. Anyone can Google this. Germany has been looking at its migration policies. Holland has been looking. Denmark previously is really trying to understand what are the conditions in Syria so that they can also, I don't know if it's reframe or recalibrate their own migration policies, and determine, is it safe for returns and can Syrians be sent back now.

NOEL: If people were to choose to go back, what are they going back to? What is Syria look like now?

AMANY: That's really hard. I mean, a lot of people, it's just home for them. It's just I'm going back home. I'm going back to, you know, mom and dad or my brothers and sisters that were, [01:26:00] you know, five years old before. And now they're teenagers. Like the heartwarming stories. So many of my colleagues, my team, you know, are going back right now and reuniting with family. And it's so touching. I think a lot of people had lost hope. There was a clear disillusionment, I would say, with the international system, very demoralized before this. But I do worry that what people are going back to now, you know, the country needs reconstruction. It needs development. It's been destroyed. So there really isn't, in certain areas, much to go back to. That's not the case for all parts of Syria. Um, inflation has hit the country hard. So generally, economic insecurity in Syria and outside, which is also adds to some of the the push-pull factors for some Syrians that have struggled also outside of the country, especially in neighboring countries, unable to afford basic services, basic amenities. You have decimated infrastructure. So [01:27:00] public infrastructure, schools, very little job prospects. And across the health system, obviously, and I'm a public health practitioner. So this has been my area of focus for many, many years now is the hospital and health care infrastructure that's almost completely collapsed in certain areas. 

NOEL: We talked to a young man named Omar earlier in the show who's 29 years old. He said his hometown is the most beautiful place in the world, but he's been in Europe since he was about 19 or 20. He has a whole life there. And so this is going to be a very, very hard call for someone like this young man. I imagine you're going to hear those types of stories again and again and again over the coming months and years.

AMANY: Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think a lot of people now are grappling with this, especially, you know, I think of a lot of my colleagues and friends who've had children that have been born in other countries now. And there's this identity, you know, where we know, we hear there's something called Syria that [01:28:00] we're originally from there. What that actually means, you know, they may be too young to process that.

 It's a tough decision then to kind of uproot them all over again, especially when some people, you know, some of the ones in Jordan and Lebanon, you know, they're on their fourth or fifth, sixth displacement. They've started their lives over multiple times. So some also just want stability in any form. So to then also be introduced to a different form of stability all over again. And I think it's just there's only so much a person can handle.

Where Is Syria Going After Assad and What’s Next for the Middle East - The Socialist Program with Brian Becker - Air Date 12-19-24

VIJAY PRASHAD: This is very complicated because we live in a world where Islamophobia is rife and, you know, people see a t shirt with Arabic writing and they think you're saying something terroristic. It's got to that stage of ridiculousness, you know, your t shirt might have your name on it, or it might even say the Boston Red Sox in, in Arabic, you know, as a joke, but somebody will say, my God, what does get this guy off the plane? We live in that kind of [01:29:00] context globally, where there is this deep Islamophobia. Now, on the other hand, it is also true that from roughly the 1970s, you know, I've written about this at great length, how the Central Intelligence Agency worked with the government of Saudi Arabia.

And other, you know, of what Tariq Ali calls the petrol stations of the Gulf, you know, like Kuwait and so on, you know, these countries to build an organization called the world Muslim league, uh, where they effectively was set up, you know, to bring Pakistani Bibles and distribute them in what was known to them as Central Asia.

Or in, in Dagestan, parts of the Soviet Union, where there was a Muslim population, the same thing they did in Western China, where they were coming in and preaching to, uh, the weaker population of Western China against communism and, and for a kind of Islam incubated in the, um, in Saudi [01:30:00] Arabia, Wahhabi Islam, uh, very much a sectarian Islam.

against any kind of so called apostasy. Um, this becomes more and more popular in parts of, of the Muslim world and it increases sectarianism. Sectarianism isn't a normal thing. You know, people can have line differences in religion just as they have line differences in politics. But that doesn't mean you go and slaughter people, you know, because there's a difference in understanding of the tradition and belief and so on.

Hezbollah, interestingly, coming out largely of the Shia tradition has a very tolerant understanding of differences because Hezbollah also is incubated in, in Lebanon, which is a very pluralistic society. There are Christians, there are Druze, there are Sunnis, there are Shia. There have been Palestinians there since 1948.

In fact, before then. And so on, very pluralistic country. It was impossible for Hezbollah and its leader. Aya Hassan Nara understood that it would be impossible for them to have a [01:31:00] sectarian politics. They always said, we believe what we believe. You don't have to believe what we believe. Uh, we respect your right to do things like drink and, and so.

We are not going to do it. You can do it, but we don't want you to impose it on us. We won't impose it on you. It's a very interesting form of pluralism. I respect that. I don't necessarily agree with all other people's beliefs, but I don't need to impose things on people as long as they are not imposing it on the body politic.

I think that's A formula that Hezbollah has basically had, has basically followed. Well, Hayat Harir al Sham has tried to differentiate itself from its, its origin in Al Qaeda, in Jabhat al Nusra, um, in, you know, a faction that becomes ISIS, um, in Mr. Zarqawi in, in Iraq. That faction comes straight out of Saudi hardcore sectarianism, where the framework, uh, for them is Those who are nearest are the [01:32:00] worst.

In other words, Islam, people who call themselves Muslims, but have created their own path are worse than those who are not Muslims. You know, it's a very peculiar understanding of the world. So for them, for instance, the Shia are a greater threat than a Christian. Um, but Christians are also a threat. And it's interesting, you know, when, ISIS started to behead people in, in the north of, of Syria and Raqqa governorate, um, you know, in, in the early part of ISIS's appearance, um, the Western press focused on the beheading of, of Americans and British journalists.

You know, I mean, I knew Uh, at least one of the people who was killed. I knew him personally, a very good reporter. Um, he had got his degree from UMass Amherst, uh, you know, had been kidnapped previously and so on anyway, but there was cause of Syrian Arab army soldiers who are being mass executed in the most brutal style by these same groups, because not because they were [01:33:00] Syrian army.

Uh, if you watch the videos, you'll, you'll listen to these guys. Call them the biggest slur words, you know, against the Shia. I don't even want to repeat those words. They massacred people based on their religion. That's their tradition. You know, it's not that it's not their form of Islam. It is Wahhabism of a worst kind, you know, The kind that is incubated and goes to Al Qaeda and so on.

Um, now by criticizing them, one is, I hope not being Islamophobic because that kind of argument suggests, you know, that if I critique Israel, I am being antisemitic. You know, for God's sake, there's got to be room to criticize people like Al Qaeda. There's got to be room to criticize people like Jabal Nusra.

And I would like to say there's got to be room to critique. Which it has now been reported in Italy was running a state form where they were saying no music allowed, no, [01:34:00] this allowed, no, that allowed, um, sounded a lot to me like the Taliban, uh, in, in Afghanistan. And, and, you know, for those who say, well, but the Taliban is following Afghan traditions.

furthest from the truth. Afghanistan has the most heterodox tradition of Islam, complicated, wonderful, beautiful forms of Islam. The Taliban imports that ideology from the camps and teachers in Pakistan, most of them trained in Saudi Arabia. Um, in Iraq, in the north, There was beautiful heterodoxy. I mean, anybody who had visited Aleppo or Idlib even will, will be able to talk about the shrines to different peers and, and important figures of historical Islamic interests.

All of this is considered apostasy by this tradition. So yes, uh, Hayat Tahrir al Sham comes out of that tradition. Now, when Jolani arrives at Umayyad mosque in Damascus and says, we don't want to hurt anybody. Nobody [01:35:00] should go in and attack the Zainab, you know, the, the Sayadaw Zainab shrine, um, that's there in outside Damascus.

Sayadaw Zainab shrine is a, is one of the most important shrines for, for the Shiite community around the world. Uh, I was worried that this shrine might be destroyed. That would open up enormous can of, of battle around the Middle East. Fortunately, the shrine is still intact. There are occasionally rumors of smaller shrines getting attacked, but Jolani did say to his credit that we should not attack other communities.

Now, how long this is going to continue and is he going to be able to control his forces? Is this a deal that he has made with. The Israelis and Americans and so on for the public. Let the public lose interest and then they go after these communities. My friends, for instance, who live in Syria, that is their feeling.

Their feeling is there is an interlude while the international media is paying attention. . Uh, the moment the television cameras disappear, these guys are [01:36:00] going to go harsh on the minorities.

It's very difficult to say for the sake of Syria. I hope that Mr. Jolani is being sincere and is not going to unleash, um, that ideological scene. Against the people of Syria. I

SECTION B - ISRAEL

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: Now entering section B. Israel.

If the US were to withdraw its 900 troops in Syria, what might happen? - DW News - Air Date 12-15-24

Speaker 7: Israel is to double the population of the occupied Golan Heights, a disputed strip of land along the border with Syria. Israel began building settlements there in the 1970s, and effectively annexed the territory a decade later. Israeli troops have moved into a buffer zone in the area since the fall of the Assad regime in Syria a week ago.

Israel has also stepped up attacks on Syrian military installations, saying the new rebel leaders still pose a threat. 

Speaker 8: Ships at Syria's Latakia port lie slumped in the water, destroyed by Israel's latest airstrikes. Since the collapse of Bashar al Assad's regime, Israel's military is estimated [01:37:00] to have struck Syria more than 450 times.

It says it aims to keep military equipment out of the hands of extremists and is targeting weapons depots and air defences. But the cross border attacks have prompted international condemnation, including from the UN. 

Speaker 9: The Secretary General is pretending particularly concerned over the hundreds of Israeli airstrikes on several locations in Syria, stressing the need, the urgent need, to de escalate violence on all fronts throughout the country.

Speaker 8: Israel has occupied most of Syria's Golan Heights region since 1967, but now it's expanding its reach, sending troops further into a UN patrolled buffer area. They've taken over an abandoned Syrian military post. Israel claims the move is to protect its security.

Speaker 11: There was a country here that was an enemy state. 

[01:38:00] Its army collapsed, and there is a threat that terrorist elements could reach here. We've moved forward so that these extremist terrorists will not establish themselves right next to the border. We are not intervening in what is happening in Syria. We have no intention of managing Syria.

Speaker 8: The rebel group Hayat Taqiyya al Sham, or HTS, which toppled Assad's regime, said on Saturday that Israel's advance, quote, threatens new and unjustified escalation in the region. But it added that the general exhaustion in Syria after years of war and conflict does not allow us to enter new conflicts.

Despite their moderate messaging, Israel maintains Syria's new regime could threaten its security. On Sunday, it announced plans to double the population in the occupied Golan Heights in what it says is a bid to strengthen the state [01:39:00] of Israel. 

Speaker 7: Okay, Stephen Simon is with the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

He previously served on the National Security Council during the Clinton and Obama administrations. Thanks for joining us. To what extent is Israel exploiting the power switchover in Syria to its own advantage? 

Speaker 10: Well, of course, it's exploiting the situation in Syria to its advantage, uh, uh, from an Israeli perspective, it would be irresponsible, uh, to do, uh, otherwise, um, Israel, uh, has long favored, uh, a weak and divided Syria, uh, as, uh, the best kind of Syria to be its neighbor.

Uh, and, uh, that policy is, uh, is simply being extended, uh, now that, uh, uh, Assad is gone, and there's this new, uh, uh, regime. And from an Israeli perspective, they want to be living next to, in effect, a demilitarized neighbor, which [01:40:00] is why they've gone to such great lengths to destroy the endowment of weapons, especially heavy weapons and chemical weapons production facilities that, um, Uh, the new regime inherited from the departing, uh, Assad regime.

Speaker 7: Yeah, in that context, Israel says it sees an increasing threat from Syria. Are the new rulers in Damascus a greater danger to Israel than Assad was?

Speaker 10: Uh, I don't really think so. Uh, certainly not now. Um, where, uh, you know, a situation where they lack the weapons that were once, uh, in Syria. Uh, I think, uh, you know, Ashara, you know, the guy who is, who is now running, uh, Syria on behalf of, uh, HTS, uh, Hayat Tahrir al Sham, is, uh, Uh, is quite right when he says that the, uh, Syrian people can't sustain another war.

I mean, they've had it, and they're certainly not going to go to war against, uh, Israel at this, at this stage. On the other hand, uh, [01:41:00] Israelis, uh, look at the very weakness of the new regime, and they ask themselves, well, suppose there are splinter groups, uh, more radical. Uh, jihadists, um, uh, or Islamists who, who really want to take on Israel and, and inflict some damage on it or draw, draw Israeli blood.

Um, and, uh, that's, they have to. They have to take that view, I would have thought. So what they're doing right now is establishing a buffer zone, or extending a buffer zone between Israel and, and, and Syria. Uh, in the hope that this will give them, uh, some, give Israel more strategic depth against, uh, these kinds of privatized threats.

Speaker 7: Yeah, this is, so, what you're saying there is this is about trying to cut off Hezbollah from getting its supplies through Syria. 

Speaker 10: Well, I think that's, that's effectively done. Um, I think what they're worried, uh, more about [01:42:00] are, uh, Sunni Um, uh, extremists who want to attack Israel now that they've managed to seize Syria from from Assad.

I don't think that HTS itself, the group that is ruling Syria in the wake of Assad's departure, wants to do this. I, um, I very much, I very much doubt it. But I also, uh, a question, and the Israelis probably question, uh, the ability of the new government to control all of the forces that were part of the coalition they led to bring down Assad.

And if they can't control them all, there might be some who want to, um, uh, Uh, now that they're flush with victory over the Assad regime, want to, you know, start, um, attacking, uh, Israel and HTS, um, uh, understands that this is not a good thing because it will give Israel the excuse to, uh, advance, uh, territorial claims.

Um, [01:43:00] gains that Israel has already made at Syria's expense since Assad's departure. 

Speaker 7: We know that the outgoing US government has been in direct contact with HDS in Syria. What do you know about whether Israel is also establishing some kind of line to them in Damascus? 

Speaker 10: I would be very surprised if the Israelis were not talking, uh, to the new regime in Damascus.

I think they each have a lot, have a lot to discuss because they have to work out some ground rules, um, uh, to avoid, uh, any kind of escalation or attacks, uh, across the line, uh, against, um, uh, Israeli settlements in the Golan. So, yes, I, I, I would have thought they're talking.

Greater Israel Explained: The Israeli Plan to Conquer the Arab World - BreakThrough News - Air Date 10-4-24

Speaker 43: What is Greater Israel? This recently came up after this article in one of the main English language Israeli newspapers, the Jerusalem Post, went viral. The article was called, Is Lebanon Part of Israel's Promised Territory? And it [01:44:00] explains the origins of a concept called Greater Israel. The article reads, In the last generation, the term Greater Israel has come to the forefront.

It's sometimes used in political or religious discussions about the ideal or future borders of Israel, often in the context of messianic or Zionist aspirations. Some interpret it as a call for the reestablishment of Israel's biblical borders. However, the concept varies in meaning, ranging from symbolic or spiritual interpretations to literal geographic claims.

Greater Israel has been a topic of discussion, especially after Israel's attacks in Lebanon, which revealed a deeper desire within Israel's extreme right to actually begin Jewish settlement in Lebanon. The so called Israeli Movement for Settlement in Southern Lebanon posted a map of the sites of prospective Jewish settlements, with all the Arabic names replaced with Hebrew names.

This ideology has had a resurgence lately, largely because Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu formed his coalition government with Messianic Zionist parties. There's a whole [01:45:00] documentary by TRT about this called Holy Redemption, Stealing Palestinian Land, and it's worth watching, but this video will focus on the history of the concept.

The article in the Jerusalem Post was taken down, but you can read it by using an internet archive site like archive. org, and the article says, quote, Greater Israel refers to the concept of the biblical boundaries of the land of Israel as promised to the Jewish people in various parts of the Torah.

It's often associated with the land described in the Covenant with Abraham, which stretches from the River of Egypt to the Parat River. And then it quotes a Torah, when Hashem, God, promised Abraham the land of Israel, the verse says, On that day, God made a covenant with Abraham, saying, To your descendants, I have given this land, from the River of Egypt to the Great River of the Euphrates, which is Mesopotamia or modern day Iraq.

While it has religious origins, the Greater Israel concept is referenced from the very first days of the Zionist movement. The Zionist movement was the movement of European Jews who wanted Jews in Europe [01:46:00] to move to Palestine to create a Jewish state. One of the first mentions of Greater Israel is written in the founder of the Zionist movement, Theodor Herzl's diary, in 1898, just one year after the first Zionist congress.

On page 711 of his diary, Herzl describes the geographic proposal for a hypothetical Jewish state and says that the area demanded will be from the brook of Egypt to the Euphrates. He then goes on to describe how this area will be slowly transferred from an Arab majority to a Jewish majority. The Zionist movement first presented this map showing what a future Jewish state would look like at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, the conference where the WWI surrender terms were being signed.

The empires that had won the war, Britain, France, Italy, and Japan, were dividing up the colonies of the losers, the Ottoman and German empires. One of the territories the Ottoman Empire lost was this area here, the Levant. The Levant is the heart of 3, 000 years of Arab civilization. For centuries, they lived under the Ottoman [01:47:00] Empire, but the empire's collapse during World War I brought hope that Arabs might finally be able to govern themselves.

Instead of that, however, the Allied powers took over and created entirely new countries based on completely arbitrary boundaries. The map of the Middle East we know today was literally drawn with pencils and straight edges at a meeting at 10 Downing Street in London, which is the British Prime Minister's office, by two British and French diplomats named Mark Sykes and Francois Picot.

Under the all too familiar colonial guise of protecting minorities, The European powers drew states that intentionally divided the region along the lines of sect. This is deeply ironic, because Arabs are often accused of being sectarian, that religious and ethnic conflict is just part of their culture.

But these distinctions between Christians and Muslims, Shia and Sunni, Arab and Kurd, were really exploited and exaggerated by the British and French, not Arabs. They literally tried to [01:48:00] bake conflict into these countries, a legacy which still hasn't gone away today. This divide and conquer strategy is the textbook strategy of colonialism, and can be observed in just about every single colonial situation in history.

Part of the British strategy in Palestine was to hand over their mandate to the pro Western, pro colonial Zionist movement. The Paris Peace Conference of 1919, where the British and French were dividing up the spoils of World War I, is where the Zionist movement first presented its proposal for the borders of a future Jewish state.

The map presented by then leading Zionist activist, and future first prime minister of Israel, David Ben Gurion, was drawn by the World Zionist Organization and included the East Bank, which is the eastern side of the Jordan River, part of southern Lebanon, and the Egyptian Sinai. The map was rejected by Britain and France, and what followed was a long debate over what the borders of the future Jewish state should be.

One of the leading proponents of expansive settlement was this guy, Zev Jabotinsky, a leader of the hard right [01:49:00] revisionist wing of the Zionist movement. At the 1931 Zionist Congress, Jabotinsky actually split the Zionist movement over the question of Transjordan being included in a future Jewish state because he felt it was such a crucial aspect.

This is notable because Jabotinsky is considered the ideological forefather of the Likud party, the party of Benjamin Netanyahu. His most famous writing, The Iron Wall, is an essay he wrote in 1923 that argued that there would never be a voluntary agreement over European settlement in Palestine and that there would Because, in his own words, there's never been a historical instance of a colonial project getting consent from the native population.

He argued the only way a Jewish state could be established is if Jewish settlers create an iron wall which the natives couldn't breach. The essay is only seven pages long, and it's definitely worth reading. Israel declares independence in 1948, but in its entire history, Israel's never actually defined its own borders.

Israel's borders have changed almost constantly in its [01:50:00] 70 year history because it's always conquering or trying to conquer more land. In 1948, Israel expelled Palestinians into neighboring countries to create a Jewish majority state. In 1967, Israel fought the Six Day War. The popular Israeli narrative of this war is that all of the Arab governments woke up one day and randomly attacked Israel because they hate Jews.

But the truth is, Israel provoked a war with the Arab states intentionally. This was openly admitted by several high level Israeli generals after the war. Matthew Pelled, one of the Israeli commanders in the Six Day War, told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz the thesis that the danger of genocide was hanging over us in June 1967, and that Israel was fighting for its physical existence, is only a bluff, which was born and developed after the war.

In the 1967 war zone. Israel conquers all of Historic Palestine, the Egyptian Sinai, and the Syrian Golan Heights, more than doubling its territory. The UN does force Israel to [01:51:00] return the Sinai, but Israel refuses to leave the Syrian Golan Heights, which is still under Israeli occupation today. One of the major turning points for Israel is its 1982 invasion of Lebanon.

It was Israel's first attempt at a major occupation of a country outside of Historic Palestine. But even before Israel's invasion, it had been using Christian sects in Lebanon as proxies to fight the Palestinian liberation fighters in the south of the country. Lebanese Christian fascists famously served as the trigger pullers in the Israeli orchestrated Sovereign Shatila massacres, where 3, 000 Palestinian refugees were executed over the course of a day and a half, in what the UN General Assembly condemned as an act of genocide.

One of the visions for Israel's long term strategic outlook to come out of this invasion was laid out by an aide to the Israeli Minister of Defense at the time, Ariel Sharon. The strategy paper, called the Strategy for Israel in the 1980s, which was published by the World Zionist Organization's ideological journal, [01:52:00] Hivunim, or Directions in Hebrew, Explains in thorough detail how Israel should exploit the sectarian divisions in other Arab countries as they did in Lebanon in a larger strategy to fracture the Arab world.

It says, quote, The Muslim Arab world is built like a temporary house of cards, put together by foreigners without the wishes and desires of the inhabitants having been taken into account. It was arbitrarily divided into 19 states, All made of combinations of minorities and ethnic groups which are hostile to one another, so that every Arab Muslim state nowadays faces ethnic social destruction from within, and in some, a civil war is already raging.

Then it goes on to say Syria is fundamentally no different from Lebanon. The real civil war taking place nowadays between the Sun Majority and the Shia Allo White ruling minority testifies to the severity of the domestic trouble. Iraq is, once again, no different in essence from its neighbors, although it's majority is Shia, and the ruling minority is sun.

It then lays out its strategy for what it calls the Eastern Front. The dissolution of Syria and [01:53:00] Iraq later on into ethnically or religiously unique areas such as in Lebanon is Israel's primary target. In the long run, while the dissolution of the military power of those states serves as the primary short term target, Syria will fall apart in accordance with its ethnic and religious structure.

This state of affairs will be the guarantee for peace and security in the area in the long run, meaning for Israel, and that aim is already within our reach today. If you observe the strategy followed by Benjamin Netanyahu throughout his career, it follows this strategy almost exactly. In 2002, he urged Congress to invade Iraq over the weapons of mass destruction it never had.

The U. S. occupation plunged Iraq into a bloody sectarian civil war by manipulating balances between the Shia and Sunni Muslims. In Syria, Israel held an official position of neutrality, but later admitted to arming the mostly Sunni rebels while simultaneously carrying out regular attacks against the government, which was controlled by Shia Alawites, in a situation where neutrality actually meant for Israel [01:54:00] And of course, in Lebanon today, we see Israel collectively punishing the Lebanese people and then telling non Muslims to blame Muslims for Israeli airstrikes.

News - Hottest Year on Record, Syria's Transition, Biden Migrant Detention Facilities Part 2 - American Prestige - Air Date 12-13-24

What is Israel doing in Syria? Israel is, uh, seizing a bunch of territory, which, uh, you know, they say is, is temporary. And of course we can believe them because it's not like Israel has ever seized. Syrian territory before and then refused to hand it back.

Um, no, but they, they have moved into, uh, southern Syria beyond the occupied Golan into, uh, the entirety of the buffer zone that was set up in 1974, an agreement that ended Syria's, formally ended Syria's involvement in the Yom Kippur War. Uh, there was a buffer zone set up on, uh, Uh, along the in Syrian territory, really along the goal on, uh, they've now seized all of that.

And I believe gone past that there was one report. I saw that they were 20 kilometers [01:55:00] away from Damascus. At one point, uh, the Israelis have denied going that far, but, uh, it's, it's, uh, entirely possible that they are, uh, so they appear to be occupying a pretty significant swath of Southern Syria. At this point, they are claiming that this is necessary because they need a buffer zone to protect.

The Golan, under the circumstances with chaos in Syria, they don't know who's in charge or what might happen. Uh, the Golan, of course, was a buffer zone when they first seized it in 1967. Uh, so they need a buffer zone for the buffer zone, and I'm sure they will need another buffer zone for the new buffer zone at some point, and we can just keep going on and on.

The other thing the Israelis have been doing is they have been absolutely pounding Syria from from the air. They've hit hundreds at this point of targets. Um, all of them apparently connected with the former Syrian military heavy armaments. Um, possibly chemical weapons sites. This is another thing that the U.

S. Is really pushing is to get control of whatever chemical weapons stockpile Syria might have had [01:56:00] left and destroy them. Uh, but places, you know, with, with advanced weaponry that the Israelis, you know, as much as they, um, viewed Assad as, as not a, a great guy, they also viewed him as somewhat stable and somebody who would not pop off and suddenly attack Syria.

And I don't think they have the same, Feeling about the new government. They're they're they're clearly very concerned that uh, Some of this hardware might fall into hts's hands and so they are destroying it systematically. I think For they they struck 480 targets, uh at the last The last time I checked and that's probably that number's probably gone up since then So yeah, they are they are just uh systematically going through and taking out all these sites, which is interesting I mean it reveals how much they apparently knew about the syrian military You Uh, and also I think, uh, kind of reveals what their feelings were about Assad, despite the, you know, seemingly surface hostile relationship.

I think they regarded him as, um, as I say, a source of at least [01:57:00] reliability, if not, uh, you know, uh, friendship or anything like that. Uh, and they, they seem to be a little bit nervous about, uh, the new status quo. Israel has incredible intelligence capabilities. I mean, that is a lesson of the last year. Plus it's wild how much they know in Lebanon, in Gaza, in Syria.

It's very interesting how they have such in Iran. They have such large and incredibly capable intelligence services. I wonder what it is. All right. Uh, we shouldn't maybe talk to someone about that. Anyway, let's move on to Israel Palestine and let's talk about this concession that Hamas has made vis a vis the ceasefire.

There were, there have been reports of a new stab at a ceasefire for several days. Now, the Qatari foreign ministers ministry said earlier this week that it was assessing the potential for, uh, inviting the whole gang to Doha again, uh, for a new round of talks. The fact that Qatar is even involved at this point, uh, is interesting because of course they withdrew from their [01:58:00] mediating role.

Uh, some time back out of frustration that there had been no progress and that they were kind of, you know, left holding the bag and to some degree, uh, publicly. So, you know, clearly they feel there's some, uh, potential for a deal here. Uh, now we've gotten the same. Disjointed response from the Israeli government, as we've gotten in every round of talks, which is, um, ministers, you know, one minister, another, in this case, Gideon Saar, the, the new foreign minister, uh, saying positive things he, Saar said, uh, you know, we're, we're optimistic for there's reason for optimism, uh, about the possibility of a deal only for Benjamin Netanyahu to turn around and tell reporters like, no, there's not, I'm not going to cut a deal in no way, uh, which he's done again here, uh, that said, uh, the wall street journal.

Uh, reported on, uh, I believe Wednesday, Wednesday evening citing Arab mediators, which could mean the Qataris could mean, um, Egyptians, who knows, uh, that, uh, reported that Hamas [01:59:00] has essentially dropped one of its demands, which is that the Israeli military withdraw from Gaza in the early Initial phases of a ceasefire deal, they've now accepted that there would, there could be an Israeli military presence in, uh, on the Netzerim Corridor, which is the, the, uh, road network and, and, uh, kind of, uh, area zone of control that they've established in central Gaza to divide the territory north and south.

And on the Philadelphia corridor, which lies along the Egyptian border. So this is, this has been a big sticking point in talks. If you recall, uh, sometime back there was supposedly a deal on the table. Supposedly Joe Biden told us that the Israelis had accepted it. Then Hamas said, okay, we accept it. This was, you know, like May, June, I think, uh, we accept it.

And then suddenly Netanyahu turned around and said, Oh no, no, no, wait, that deal isn't good enough. We have to have a permanent, uh, or, you know, indefinite military presence in Gaza and it's quite. Um, so the [02:00:00] Hamas is apparently now given up on, on the idea that the Israelis would leave at least in the initial stages.

As I say, there, there would be, could be a longer term outlook here. Um, we'll have to wait and see if that's enough for Netanyahu or if he comes up with some other reason to, to squash the deal, probably the latter. But who knows, uh, but as it stands, this is a pretty significant concession.

SECTION C - HISTORICAL CONTEXT AND THE PROXY WAR

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And finally section C historical context and the proxy war.

The Art of War: Proxy Warfare Part 1 - Warfronts - Air Date 8-19-23

Speaker 17: At its most basic level, a proxy war is a contrast to a traditional war. A war in which Nation A and Nation B are mad at each other, so Nations A and B gather up their respective militaries and go and have a bit of a fight. A proxy war, then, is a war in which Nations A and B Don't go head to head, but instead lean on a third party to do the fighting for them.

Those third parties could be allied nations, formal or informal protectorates, non state groups, insurgencies, or even civilian protesters. But in general, a proxy conflict will take one of three basic forms. [02:01:00] If we imagine that Nation A's smaller subsidiary ally is Nation A 1, and Nation B's ally is Nation B 1, then we might see Nation A fighting Nation B 1, or Nation A 1 fighting Nation B, or Nation A 1 fighting Nation B 1.

The whole point is that Nation A and Nation B never meet directly in open combat. Now, that's not to say that either Nation A or Nation B would ignore a proxy conflict. Far from it. Instead, these major powers partner together with the minor powers. The minor power is the one sending troops into battle, but the major power could be providing anything from financial support, to weapons to training, to safe haven, or, in some cases, taking away their own troops uniforms and. The major powers involved in proxy conflicts do end up spending their resources on a war, and both sides will typically give their all to attain victory.

But neither of the major powers should ever be able to hold each other directly responsible for the damage that the war brings. It's [02:02:00] not a secret that both major powers are involved, at least not usually. But that isn't the point. The point is that neither of the major powers actually wants to bear the costs of going to war with each other, but both sides are able to stomach the significant, but lesser damage of a bit of a side conflict.

Now, there's a few key reasons why major powers would generally elect to pursue a proxy war. Perhaps the most obvious is that the nation would rather not send its own citizens off to die if it doesn't have to. At other times, it's a matter of cost. Where waging a major war would be prohibitively expensive, especially for countries that can't foot the bill of moving troops between regions or even continents at scale, or in the case of the largest proxy conflict in history, the Cold War, the two major powers involved could do some truly unacceptable levels of damage to each other if they ever met in direct conflict.

As we'll discuss at length, just about any cost is worth avoiding a full on, world ending nuclear exchange, a consensus that the US and the Soviet Union thankfully agreed upon. Proxy warfare gives each side just enough plausible deniability that such a potentially [02:03:00] devastating outcome can be avoided. In other cases, proxy warfare offers real advantages that major powers often can't get.

For example, if you'd like to bring down some third world dictator in a remote, difficult area to navigate, it's far more likely that a knowledgeable local insurgency can have success rather than a group of your own special operators. And finally, there's the matter of solidarity, be it a question of politics, religion, shared ethnicity, or anything else.

A major power can advance its own goals or ideologies by helping its smaller foreign partners advance themselves. The other side of that coin, though, is that if the major power we're discussing has an equally powerful army, then that enemy is going to want to make sure they don't get their way. We've seen long term proxy wars play out like this, to pit Communism against Capitalism, Shia versus Sunni Islam, Catholicism against Protestantism, and, well, a whole lot more.

So, with a clear view of when and why proxy warfare takes place, it's only right that we should [02:04:00] now discuss the how, the tried and true methods that pop up again and again when proxy wars are being carried out. Unlike an alliance between two nations who simply want to fight a war alongside each other, proxy wars are strictly hierarchical.

The minor powers involved probably wouldn't be fighting at all, or might even not stand a chance, except that it's acting on the will of its larger ally. Depending on which party you ask, this relationship might be described as benevolent, or transactional, or exploitative. Really, it depends, but typically it's a short term and highly conditional partnership.

do what the big boss says and you'll be rewarded. Go off script or fail to keep up and the big boss will find someone else worth their time. The major powers support can manifest in a number of different ways In some cases, they'll train a smaller nation or an insurgency's troops or physically provide heavy duty weapons and equipment that they wouldn't otherwise have had.

At other times, they might supply crucial intelligence or tactical support in planning and carrying out attacks. They might provide large sums of money and let the smaller partner have the rest of themselves, or they [02:05:00] might handpick some of their own elite soldiers and tell those soldiers to go and help out the smaller nation as mercenaries.

It's not uncommon to see a major power offer logistical support or organize recruitment drives or help out with creating propaganda or organize other recruitment drives where fighters from around the world are convinced to travel on their own and go and help out. As for how success is defined, There are a range of options.

The proxy war can be won outright, or the smaller nation might grow powerful enough to carry on the fight without help, or the situation can settle into a stalemate, or a balance that everyone could just learn to live with. And lastly, we should also lay out just how risky proxy warfare is as a method of engagement.

Although entire global conflicts have been decided by proxy battles in the past, those same attempts at proxy warfare have just as often deteriorated into direct major power confrontation or otherwise gone way off course from what was supposed to be happening. Just as an example, leaning on a smaller power or a non state actor requires that to be [02:06:00] trustworthy.

And, often, those allies aren't quite as trustworthy as a major power might think. Just take the Afghan Mujahideen, who used US supplied armaments to fight the Soviets in the 1980s, but turned them back against the Americans just a few years later. At other times, proxy forces might not show up to battle in nearly the numbers that their sponsor had hoped, or they might become overly reckless, willing to take risks or make tactical errors because they know that their sponsors can get them out of a bad situation.

And finally, Proxy conflict has a nasty tendency to create situations where the end justifies the means. Take for example a major power that trusts a regional leader to shut down dissent or political opposition, but chooses to ignore the fact that this leader is torturing and disappearing their population in order to keep them in line.

Proxy conflict is chosen almost invariably, because it is the lesser of two evils. But being the lesser of two evils absolutely does not make something good.

The Middle East's cold war, explained - Vox - Air Date 6-17-17

Speaker 3: The most famous Cold War was fought for 40 years between the United States and [02:07:00] Soviet Union. 

Speaker 5: Looking forward to the day when their flag would fly over the entire world. 

Speaker 3: They never declared war on each other, but clashed in proxy wars around the world. Each side supported dictators, rebel groups, and intervened in civil wars to contain the other.

Like the U. S. and Soviet Union, Saudi Arabia and Iran are two powerful rivals. But instead of fighting for world dominance, they're fighting over control of the Middle East. In order to understand the Saudi Iranian rivalry, let's go back to the origins of each country. In the early 1900s, the Arabian Peninsula was a patchwork of tribes under the control of the Ottoman Empire.

After World War I, the empire collapsed, leaving these tribes to fight each other over power. One tribe from the interior, the Alsad, eventually conquered most of the peninsula. In 1932, they were recognized as the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Six years later, massive oil reserves were discovered in Saudi Arabia.

And in an instant, the Saudi monarchy was rich. That oil money built roads and cities all around the desert country, and it helped forge an [02:08:00] alliance with the U. S. On the eastern side of the Persian Gulf, another country was emerging, but having a much harder time. Iran also had massive oil reserves and an even bigger Muslim population, but constant foreign intervention was creating chaos.

Since the 18th century, Iran had been invaded by the Russians and the British twice. In 1953, the U. S. secretly staged a coup, removing the popular prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh. In his place, they propped up a monarch, Reza Shah, who was aggressively reforming Iran into a secular, westernized country.

But he harbored corruption and terrorized the population with his secret police, the Saavak. By the 1970s, both Saudi Arabia and Iran had oil based economies and had governments heavily backed by the U. S. But the feelings among each population were very different. 

Speaker 4: Ultimately, at the end of the day, the Shah of Iran, powerful as he was, simply didn't have the same control over his people or ultimately the same legitimacy and affection that the Saudi people felt toward their monarchy at that point [02:09:00] in time.

Speaker 3: That's because Iran's Muslims felt stifled by the Shah's reformations. And by the end of the decade, they finally fought back. 

Speaker 5: Iran's Islamic Revolution overthrew a powerful regime that boasted military might and the 

Speaker 4: It's really in 1979, when Ayatollah Khomeini and the Islamic Revolution overthrew the Shah, that the real tension between Iran and Saudi Arabia began.

Speaker 3: Ayatollah Khomeini was a Muslim clergyman who preached against Western backed secular monarchies. He advocated for a government that was popular, Islamic, and led by the clergy. And in 1979, he led a revolution to establish just that. It was a massive international event that prompted reactions around the world, especially in Saudi Arabia.

Speaker 4: The Iranian revolution terrified the government of Saudi Arabia. They were fearful that Ayatollah Khomeini would inspire their populations to rise up against them exactly the way that he had caused the Iranian population to rise up against the Shah. [02:10:00] 

Speaker 3: And there was a religious threat, too. Up until now, the Saudis had claimed to be the leaders of the Muslim world, largely because Islam's two holiest sites, Mecca and Medina, are in Saudi Arabia.

But Khomeini claimed his popular revolution made Iran the legitimate Muslim state. And there is another divide. Saudi Arabia's population is mostly Sunni, the majority sect of Islam, while Khomeini and Iran are mostly Shia. 

Speaker 4: Westerners always make a mistake in drawing an analogy between the Sunni Shia split and the Protestant Catholic split.

The Sunni Shia split was never as violent that in much of the Islamic world when Sunnis and Shia were living in close proximity, they got along famously well. 

Speaker 3: So while the Sunni Shia split was not a reason for the rivalry, it was an important division. After the revolution, the Saudis fears came to life when Iran began exporting its revolution.

This CIA report from 1980 details how the Iranians started helping groups, mostly Shia, trying to [02:11:00] overthrow governments in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Saudi Arabia. 

Speaker 4: And they prompted the Saudis to redouble their efforts to fight against Iran. 

Speaker 3: They bolstered their alliance with the U. S. and formed the GCC, an alliance with other Gulf monarchies.

The stage was set for conflict. 

Speaker 6: On September the 22nd, Iraqi planes attacked Mehrabad airport outside Tehran. Iraq was gambling on a short, sharp campaign. The rise 

Speaker 3: of Iran as a regional power threatened other neighboring countries as well. In September 1980, Iraq, under the rule of dictator Saddam Hussein, He was hoping to stop the Iranian revolution, gain power, and annex some of Iran's oil reserves.

But they didn't get far. The war bogged down into a stalemate, complete with trench warfare, chemical weapons, and heavy civilian casualties. When Iran started winning, the Saudis panicked, and came to Iraq's rescue. They provided money, weapons, and logistical help. 

Speaker 4: And so it becomes critical to the Saudis that they build up Iraq and build it up into a [02:12:00] wall that can hold back the Iranian torrent that they have unleashed.

Speaker 3: The Saudi help allowed Iraq to fight until 1988. By then, nearly a million people had died. The Iranians largely blamed the Saudis for the war, and the feud escalated. Fast forward 15 years, and Iraq again became the scene of oppression. In 2003, the U. S. invaded Iraq and overthrew Saddam Hussein. Neither Saudi Arabia or Iran wanted this to happen, since Iraq had been acting as a buffer between them.

But problems arose when the U. S. struggled to replace Saddam. 

Speaker 4: The United States has no idea what it's doing in Iraq after 2003, and it makes one mistake after another that creates a security vacuum and a failed state and drives Iraq into all out civil war. 

Speaker 3: Without a government, armed militias took control of Iraq, splintering the population.

Sunni and Shia militias suddenly sprang up all over the country. Many were radical Islamist groups who saw an opportunity to gain power amidst the chaos. [02:13:00] These militias were ready made proxies for Saudi Arabia and Iran, and they both seized the opportunity to try and gain power. The Saudis started sending money and weapons to the Sunni militias and Iran the Shia.

Iraq was suddenly a proxy war, with Saudi Arabia and Iran supporting opposing sides. That trend continued into the Arab Spring, a series of events. anti monarchy, pro democracy protests that swept through the Middle East in 2011. And this had very different consequences for Saudi Arabia and Iran. 

Speaker 4: That is terrifying to the Saudis, who are the ultimate status quo power.

They want the region stable, and they don't want anybody rising up and overthrowing a sclerotic autocratic government. for fear that it might inspire their own people to do the same. The Iranians are the ultimate anti status quo power. They have been trying for decades to overturn the regional order.

Speaker 3: Each country threw their weight behind different groups, all over the Middle East. Just like in Iraq, the Saudis began supporting Sunni groups and [02:14:00] governments, while Iran helped Shia groups rise up against them. For example, in Tunisia, the Saudis backed a dictator while the Iranians stoked protests. In Bahrain, Iran supported Shia leaders seeking to overthrow the government.

Saudi Arabia, in turn, sent troops to help quash the unrest. Both got involved in Libya, Lebanon, and Morocco as well. As Saudi Arabia and Iran put more and more pressure on these countries, they began to collapse. Now the feud has gone a step further, with both countries deploying their own militaries. In Yemen, the Saudi military is on the ground helping the central government.

They are fighting the rebels called the Houthis, who are an Iranian proxy group. And the reverse is happening in Syria. The Iranian military is fighting side by side with militias, some of them extremist groups like Hezbollah, in support of dictator Bashar al Assad. They are fighting rebel Sunni groups who are Saudi proxies.

The more civil wars that broke out in the Middle East, the more Saudi Arabia and Iran became involved. 

Speaker 4: Neither the government of Saudi Arabia nor the government of Iran are [02:15:00] looking for a fight. But the problem is that these civil wars create circumstances that no one could have predicted. Both the Iranians and the Saudis feel their vital national interests are threatened, are in jeopardy because of different things going on in these civil wars, things that they blame me.

Speaker 3: Now the Cold War is drawing in other countries. The Saudi government is threatening Qatar, a tiny Gulf state that was developing ties with Iran. Meanwhile in Syria and Iraq, the terrorist group ISIS is nearing defeat, and both the Saudis and Iranians are angling to take control of that territory. It's a Cold War that's becoming incredibly unpredictable.

The Art of War: Proxy Warfare Part 2 - Warfronts - Air Date 8-19-23

Speaker 17: By and large, the Cold War was made up almost exclusively of proxy conflicts between these two global superpowers. In some cases, like Vietnam and Korea, American troops ended up fighting on the battlefield directly, opposed not by the Soviets, but by Soviet backed opposition movements. The same thing happened in reverse in Afghanistan.

The Soviets weren't getting shot at by Americans, but they were getting shot at [02:16:00] by American weapons in the hands of Afghan militants. But in most of the era's conflicts, both the US and the Soviet Union would throw their support behind opposing sides in civil wars, or a border dispute, or a recently inflamed but very old cultural or tribal disagreement.

Those sorts of engagements were far lower impact, generally involving the loss of a lot fewer lives, but they were far greater in number than the instances where either American or Soviet troops were drawn into battle directly. Just as important were American and Soviet efforts to prop up various dictatorships and regional allies to ensure that certain parts of the world remained under their control.

For example, the United States spent the 1970s and 80s orchestrating Operation Condor, a coordinated intelligence sharing app that allowed authoritarian regimes across Latin America to hunt down dissidents on each other's soil. Likewise, the Soviet secret police spent decades hard at work trying to root out any American attempts to subvert their authority on Soviet soil.

As such, the conflict between the Americans and the Soviets was largely decided by the results of their proxy wars, with the United States [02:17:00] proving able to weather a war of economic attrition while the Soviet Union ultimately collapsed under its own weight. But alas, proxy warfare didn't end when the Cold War did.

Instead, the sovereign state of Russia largely pivoted into the major power vacancies that the Soviet Union had left behind. In the 1990s, NATO and Russia ended up on opposing sides of the Georgian Civil War, and each side did quite a bit of puppetry behind the scenes to figure out where exactly each new post Soviet state would align itself.

During these years, Russia, Ukraine, and Greece also entered into a sort of proxy war with Turkey, Pakistan, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, who had chosen to put aside their differences and fight toward the breakup of Yugoslavia. Pakistan and Iran also ended up facing off against Russia during a civil war in Tajikistan, while the US and France ended up being major players in major conflicts in Congo, Nepal, and on the Ivory Coast.

Rounding off our historical examples, the first Libyan civil war in 2011 was practically the proxy war to end all [02:18:00] proxy wars, as a massive US led global coalition sought to support the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi, and a smaller, more ragtag coalition of mostly leftist states worked unsuccessfully to keep the mad dictator in power.

In the modern era, though. No proxy war has played out quite so visibly as the Syrian Civil War, a multidimensional and quickly evolving conflict that is almost unrecognizable in 2023 from what it had been in the early 2010s. From the start of the conflict, many countries around the world had at least some skin in the game.

The regime of Bashar al Assad was seen as a stabilizing influence. region as well as an economic partner and geopolitical ally for countries like Russia, Iran and China, while western powers like the US, UK and the European Union had hoped that Syria would become yet another victory for the Arab Spring movement.

But since then, the innumerable Syrian factions on the ground and the military contributions of foreign nations have turned the Syrian civil war into a conflict that, at times, has seemed to only nominally be about deciding the fate of [02:19:00] Syria. Instead, it's been a forum for US backed militias to clash with Russian backed ones, for Israel and Iran to do other things.

Much of the same for Turkey to force the world to take sides in its long running conflict with the Middle East's Kurdish population and for disputes between secularist and Islamist governing principles to be settled with blood. The rise of the Islamic state in Iraq and Syria has just muddied the waters further, as the many, many proxy wars going on in Syria had also to take place against the backdrop of a very real, very direct war.

state the Islamic State. Overall, the civil war has appeared to resolve mostly in Russia's favor, with the Assad regime seeming to be on the precipice of victory at the time the script for this video was written. But this has been at the cost of millions of dollars per day for Russia, and on the occasions when Russian forces Clashed directly with the Syrian militias that opposed them.

Those battles have resulted in thousands of dead Syrian civilians, including by some estimates, nearly [02:20:00] 2000 children who were directly killed by Russian forces. Many of the Russian troops who gained experience in Syria now fighting Ukraine either for the Russian military itself or for the paramilitary of Arner group.

Then there's the Second Libyan Civil War, which, despite being the quieter of the two conflicts as it raged alongside the Syrian Civil War, has been even more of a geopolitical mess than Syria ever was. We've done a separate video on this channel detailing the wars in Libya, so do check that out if you'd like to learn more.

But to put it as simply as we can, Libya's precious oil reserves have prompted most of the world's major military nations to pick a side. The conflict has seen Iran working for the same goals as the Americans and the British. It's seen France split with the rest of the European Union, and join Russia on the opposite side of the conflict, and it's seen Israel and Saudi Arabia work together for common goals, even as Libya itself has splintered into a patchwork of militia controlled territories.

That's not to say that all sides have thrown in military support. Some, like the US, have stayed mostly focused on [02:21:00] counter terrorism operations in the region. But, even still, the battle has The control of Libya has been entirely dependent on foreign funds and support, without which all parties would probably have collapsed a very long time ago.

And much like Syria and Libya, Yemen's ongoing civil war has turned into a proxy conflict with a Saudi Arabian led coalition, including support from the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Egypt, America, the UK, and Germany have battled an Islamist movement known as the Houthis, who for the most part fight their own battles on the ground, much like the North Vietnamese of the Vietnam War.

However, they solicit ongoing support from an opposing coalition spearheaded by Iran and backed up by Iraq, Syria, North Korea, and Russia. The Yemeni civil war is just one in a long series of proxy conflicts between Saudi Arabia and Iran who have fought a cold war of their own for some 45 years. They've shown up on the opposite sides of conflicts, from Lebanon to Iraq to the Caucasus and the Balkans, and although China and Iraq have recently begun to help Iran and Saudi Arabia restore [02:22:00] diplomatic relations, there's no long term consensus yet on whether that peace will hold.

And finally, there's the Russian invasion of Ukraine, where the question of whether or not the conflict truly qualifies as a proxy war has been a subject of heated debate in the last year and a half. Now, we certainly aren't going to try and settle that debate once and for all, but it does bear pointing out that the prior stage of the conflict, a low grade war that was waged for years in Ukraine's Donbass region, was very much a proxy conflict.

In those years, Russian backed but Ukrainian led separatist movements were responsible for fighting the Ukrainian state, not Russia directly. Since Russia invaded, of course, the conflict has been very clearly fought between Russia and Ukraine. Although Russia has claimed that large numbers of NATO troops are fighting in Ukraine, those claims are, to put it kindly, complete bulls t.

The more relevant question is whether NATO's support for Ukraine, and on the other side, China's evidently growing support for Russia, is enough to consider the war a true proxy conflict. There are legitimate arguments on both sides. On the one hand, Western [02:23:00] financial and military support for Ukraine has absolutely bolstered the Ukrainian defense, so much so that it's an open question what the situation would look like today if that support had never come.

But on the other hand, the war is very much a war of Ukrainian independence versus Russian annexation. And the two principal actors in that question, the two countries with the biggest stake in the answer, They're battling it out directly. Thus, even if both sides of the war receive backing from international partners, neither side would qualify as a proxy force acting out the will of a sponsor nation or coalition.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly invoked the idea of the Ukrainian invasion as a proxy war with the West, even a so called defensive one. But this defense does little to excuse Russia's decision to invade a sovereign neighbor.

As major and regional powers continue to grow more and more militarily fearsome, the question of proxy warfare has become increasingly pragmatic in recent years. Although it's still regarded as a low or even shameful form of [02:24:00] warfare in some circles, other experts have advocated for a more focused development of proxy warfare doctrine from Western nations.

Basically, the thinking goes that as the world's advanced militaries become More and more capable of doing massive damage to each other, proxy conflicts actually get more and more attractive as a less devastating alternative. Following from that, if nations are going to keep engaging in proxy warfare, then they should at least have guiding principles and doctrine prepared for when they do so.

As our recent historical examples have made clear, the world certainly isn't at a loss for good proxy war tactics, but there's a lot of room between what we've currently got and a world in which powers like the US or the European Union develop proxy war skills as robust as, say, Iran. There's also potential for this to develop into yet another arms race, too.

If you'll accept a fairly loose definition of the term, as China and the West both pivot toward proxy conflict in advance of a new Cold War that many experts believe has already begun. China has remained conspicuously absent from many of the proxy wars of the last half century or so, and has [02:25:00] often chosen to play the role of peacemaker rather than a belligerent or sponsor.

But this may well change as China continues its evolution into a more Hi, welcome to the next major player in the proxy wars of the world, it seems entirely likely that the rest of the world's larger powers will continue to be drawn toward proxy warfare to suit their own goals. The United States and Russia have both proven continually willing to engage in this sort of warfare.

And as Russia becomes more and more isolated on the world stage, perhaps even crossing into the territory of a pariah state like Iran or North Korea, it may begin to rely on proxy warfare even more to exert its power abroad.

How the First World War Created the Middle East Conflicts (Documentary) - The Great War - Air Date 12-8-23

Speaker 2: While the heated discussions were going on at the League, the U. S. Congress changed its mind, and even though the League was President Wilson's idea, the U. S. refused to sign the peace treaty or join the League when it officially came into being in January 1920. For the British and French, this was an opportunity. [02:26:00] At the San Remo conference in spring 1920, they formalized the military reality on the ground.

France became the mandatory power for Syria and Lebanon, while Britain did the same for Mesopotamia, Transjordan, and Palestine. This allowed them to indirectly rule while not officially taking these regions on as imperial possessions. In the words of historian Michael Provence, The populations of the mandated territories thus assumed all the responsibilities and none of the benefits of national sovereignty.

One question the conference did not resolve were the borders. They would have to wait until a peace treaty could be signed with the Ottomans, who still ruled but in name only. The League did say France and Britain had to consider the wishes of the population, but British and French administrators mostly ignored local petitions.

The American King Crane Commission's survey received conflicting results. Some people wanted democracy, some wanted a greater Syria including Lebanon and Palestine, some wanted British oversight, some French and [02:27:00] some American, and some wanted a Hashemite king. A majority did not want the mandates at all, and 99 percent were opposed to Zionist settlement in Palestine.

After all the wartime deprivations and sufferings, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and a lack of a stable New World Order, it isn't surprising that there was widespread violence in the Middle East after the Great War ended. Egypt rose in a failed revolution against British rule in 1919, and there were clashes between religious and ethnic groups in Lebanon.

There was a major war in Anatolia between the Turkish Nationalist forces under Mustafa Kemal and allied, mostly Greek, troops, which resulted in the creation of the Turkish Republic and the formal dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. In Persia, the British wanted to counter Bolshevik Russian influence and secure access to oil, so they supported a coup by future Shah Reza Pahlavi, who took control of the country in 1921.

But the violence that was the most intractable and arguably impacted the troubled future of the region most of [02:28:00] all occurred in Palestine, Syria, and Iraq. In Palestine, the British Mandate incorporated the Balfour Declaration, and British authorities encouraged Jewish settlement. Some 35, 000 Jewish settlers arrived between 1919 and 1923, hoping for a better life.

International Jewish organizations often helped settlers buy land, some of which, but not all, was previously infertile. Some also declared their desire not just for a Jewish homeland, but a Jewish state, which stoked tensions with Palestinian Arabs, as did the British administration working closely with Zionist groups.

Some British officials and Jews wanted to curb settlement, but when enthusiastic Zionist supporter Herbert Samuel became British High Commissioner in Palestine, British support for settlement became more explicit. The British and some Zionists argued that settlement would benefit Arabs through economic improvements, but most Arabs saw things differently.

Writer Moussa Kazim al Husseini complained to Colonial Minister [02:29:00] Winston Churchill in August 1921. Jewish settlers depreciate the value of land and property and at the same time manipulate a financial crisis. Can Europe then expect the Arabs to live and work with such a neighbor? In response, Churchill reiterated his support for Jewish settlement.

Things turned deadly with Arabs rioting in Jerusalem and an organized firefight at Tel Hai in 1920 claiming the lives of a handful on both sides. Tensions fully boiled over in May 1921 in the town of Jaffa. A fight between rival Jewish socialist groups near a mosque spun out of control and led to deadly rioting between Jews and Arabs.

Arabs killed 47 Jews and the next day, Jewish groups and British police retaliated, killing 48 Arabs. A British commission mostly blamed the Arabs, but admitted that their grievances stemmed from quote political and economic consequences of settlement and perceived pro Jewish bias of the British.

Zionist [02:30:00] Ze'ev Jabotinsky felt that the time had come to build a metaphorical wall around the settlers. Zionist colonization can proceed and develop only under the protection of a power that is independent of the native population, behind an iron wall which the native population cannot breach. French rule in Syria and Lebanon got off to a violent start as well.

Hussein's son Faisal had led Arab forces into Syria in 1918 and announced his claim to the throne of a Syrian kingdom. But the French would not give up control, so French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau and Faisal agreed that Syria would become a de facto state under the French mandate. Faisal's Arab Nationalist allies of the Syrian National Congress, however, wanted full independence and control over Lebanon and Palestine.

A Nationalist society informed Faisal of their position. We are ready to declare war on both England and France. Faisal's [02:31:00] priority was becoming king, so he reluctantly agreed to cancel the deal with the French and was crowned King of Syria on March 7, 1920. France threatened to invade, so Faisal now accepted their terms, but his answer arrived late, so a French army invaded Syria anyway from its base in Lebanon, and defeated the ragtag Arab army at the Battle of Maissaloun in July.

Faisal fled to Mesopotamia, but Maissaloun became a symbol for Arab nationalism and resistance to European imperialism, as Ali Alawi has written. It was a military disaster, but its name has gone down in Arab history as a synonym for heroism and hopeless courage against huge odds, as well as for treachery and betrayal.

Faisal's position between the French and the Nationalists and his own family's ambitions have caused lots of historical debate about whether he was a power hungry opportunist, a sincere pan Arab nationalist, or both. In Mesopotamia, the British were also struggling. Their military was stretched thin [02:32:00] across the region, bureaucrats fought departmental turf wars, and politicians argued about how much independence Mesopotamia would have, and whether it would be one, two, or even three states in the future.

One thing soon became clear the population was divided. Some of the urban elite were not against British control, while the ex Ottoman Officers Association and much of the tribal countryside was. In June 1920, a local Arab politician warned British administrator Gertrude Bell. You said in your declaration that you would set up a native government drawing its authority from the initiative and free choice of the people concerned.

Yet you proceed to draw up a scheme without consulting anyone. That same month, the Iraqi Revolt, also known as the Iraqi Revolution, began. From a local tribe resisting British troops imprisoning one of their own, the unrest spread across the Middle Euphrates region. Tribal forces besieged several British garrisons, captured Najaf and Karbala, and [02:33:00] defeated multiple British relief columns.

It took the British until November and 450 dead to put down the revolt, and the settlement included a vague promise of an independent Arab kingdom that had yet to be defined. The fighting, though, caused some in Britain to question the mandate. How much longer are valuable lives to be sacrificed in the vain endeavor to impose upon the Arab population an elaborate and expensive administration which they never asked for and do not want?

The British defeated the Iraqi tribes, but they didn't understand them. Bureaucrats wrote reports that blamed the revolt on a conspiracy between Turkey and Faisal, a conspiracy between the Germans and the Turks and possibly the Bolsheviks too, the machinations of the American Standard Oil Company, Panislam, or the Jews.

Tribal leader Said Mussin Abu Tabigh was more pragmatic. The British hastened the revolt's timing by their ignorance about the proud personality of the Iraqi and [02:34:00] the numerous political mistakes they committed across the country. There is a historical debate about the Iraqi revolt or revolution as well.

Some see it as a rebellion of different groups who were upset at British rule because it was foreign and heavy handed. Others emphasize the role of former Ottoman officers who supported Faisal as future king. Still others consider it a national revolution that laid the foundation for a modern Iraqi identity and eventual independence.

The shape of the modern Middle East became more clear by 1921, even though formal peace only came in 1923. At the Cairo Conference, the powers agreed that Faisal would rule over the Kingdom of Iraq, his brother Abdullah would become King of Transjordan, and Britain would continue to support the Zionist project in Palestine.

Though Britain would still have significant influence, the new kingdoms enjoyed more autonomy than the British had intended thanks to the Iraqi Revolt. Independence, though, would have to wait. The French soon divided Syria and Lebanon into [02:35:00] five separate states, which they would rule for years to come.

They also decided to create greater Lebanon by attaching several Muslim districts to mostly Christian Mount Lebanon, creating an unfamiliar and volatile mix. And so the First World War had swept away the centuries of Ottoman rule and created a new Middle East. It was a region of fragile new states, supposedly on their way to independence thanks to the League of Nations, but in fact under British and French imperial control.

There was violence between religious and ethnic communities, and there was violence against foreign domination. And in Palestine, there was the uncertainty of the Zionist project. Would it result in the creation of a Jewish state, or would it result in perpetual tensions in Palestine? Or, perhaps, both.

Credits

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: That's going to be it for today. As always, keep the comments coming in. I would love to hear your thoughts or questions about today's topic or anything else. You can leave a voicemail or send us a text at 202-999-3991, or simply email me to [email protected]. 

The additional sections of the [02:36:00] show included clips from Global Dispatches; DW News; Democracy Now!; Today, Explained; The Socialist Program; American Prestige; Breakthrough News; War Fronts; Vox; and The Great War. Further details are in the show notes. 

Thanks everyone for listening. Thanks to Deon Clark and Erin Clayton for their research work for the show and participation in our bonus episodes. Thanks to our transcriptionist quartet, Ken Brian, Ben, and Lara for their volunteer work helping put our transcripts together. Thanks to Amanda Hoffman for all of her work behind the scenes and her bonus show co-hosting. 

And thanks to all those who already support the show by becoming a member, or purchasing gift memberships. You can join them by signing up today at BestOfTheLeft.com/support, through our Patreon page, or from right inside the Apple Podcast app. Memberships let you get instant access to our incredibly good and often funny weekly bonus episodes, in addition to there being no ads, and chapter markers in all of our regular episodes, all through your [02:37:00] regular podcast player. You'll find that link in the show notes, along with the link to join our Discord community where you can also continue the discussion. And don't forget to follow us on any and all new social media platforms that you may be joining these days. 

So coming to you from far outside the conventional wisdom of Washington, DC, my name is Jay!, and this has been the Best of the Left podcast coming to you twice weekly, thanks entirely to the members and donors to the show, from BestOfTheLeft.com.


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