The Levant Between Dread and Euphoria
You’re looking at a snapshot of old Damascus.
“The Emperor Has No Clothes, And Neither Do We,” was the fourth lesson I drew from the 2011 Arab uprisings in This Arab Life, A Generation’s Journey Into Silence:
There are no pretenses anymore; no pretense of a real bond, a serious promise, or common cause. It’s a nakedly honest relationship between ruler and ruled. They no longer pretend to care for our wellbeing, because who would believe them? And we no longer pretend to love them, because who would believe us? It’s a bare, bare Arab political terrain. Every grand idea and party and movement that lit up the 20th century survives only as a relic in the twenty-first.
My meaning was clear: the uprisings may not have succeeded in shepherding a kinder and more promising era for much of the Arab world, but the regimes themselves were teetering on a terribly frayed status quo. Hollowed out and beleaguered, it was bound to give way, and they were bound to tumble, fracture, or morph.
And so, Syria’s moment has arrived. Bashar Assad has fallen. Good riddance, say many! God help us, say others. Tellingly, quite a few in both camps utter these two sentiments of justified euphoria and well-earned apprehension at one and the same time.
After all, this is the Levant. Ours are never neat, linear beginnings and endings, never quite as stark as they first appear, never the sure sparks or outcomes we initially believe them to be –– a prickly temperament as frustrating to our enemies as it is to us. A small reminder, this, to those in our midst already high-fiving or lamenting the onset of Pax Israelia.
Therefore, before we allow ourselves to be overcome by the enormity of the Syrian regime’s collapse and the great scramble for Syria, we have to acknowledge this essential fact: Assad fell under the weight of his colossal failures. And while he may have crashed to the ground now, his plunge had commenced in 2011. Purely on its own terms, his fall was foreseen well before competing foreign powers kicked off their struggle to save or topple him in 2013. Because without the boundless brutality that defined the very nature of his rule, he would have been long gone.
Predictably, in many a circle, there is much chagrin that the man and his family have decamped to Moscow thanks to foreign scheming. Turkey, Israel, and the US invite the most vehement protests. But if such voices really want to be balanced in their aversion to such meddling, they should own up to the Russian and Iranian interventions that previously worked in overdrive to keep him over a butchered, tormented nation.
That’s the other essential fact about Syria: for much of its modern history before and since independence in 1946, it has been more regional pawn than player; very insecure even when apparently stable. Five coups d’état took place between 1949 and 1954 alone, and 16 governments were formed between 1949 and 1958, when Syria and Egypt came together under the very short-lived United Arab Republic (UAR). Syria finally found its place in the region’s sun between 1970 and 2000, ironically, under the reign of Bashar’s father, the ever so wily and tenacious Hafez Assad. Pointedly, however, even under him, the regime never could quite achieve the security it so craved.
It is hardly surprising, then, that this jewel in the Levantine crown would gradually lose its perch under the bizarrely obtuse Bashar and contend with its balkanization soon after he began to wobble on his throne. The plain fact is that the real jostle for Syria commenced barely months after its people rose in 2011. We are today not at the beginning but well into this momentous watershed
The Levant is thus all but flattened, its states functioning in incoherent, overwrought pieces; its non-state actors either allies or on the run.
A rather impressive array of victories for Israel, all in the full glare of genocide in Gaza, ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, carpet bombing in Lebanon, and a frenzy of strikes on a dismembered Syria. Just a couple of more genius moves––my eyes, as yours should be, are on Iraq and Iran––and the circle of fire will have been effectively lit and closed.
The dawn of Pax Israelia?
I very much share the skepticism of Ghassan Salamé, Lebanese intellectual and diplomat:
…the kind of regional hegemony Israel is attempting to build is totally non-Gramscian: it does not seek to integrate the defeated but, on the contrary, keeps excluding him. Its expansionist messianism is unpalatable even to the least bellicose of the region’s populations simply because they could have no part in it.
It’s curious that 80 years of seemingly successful campaigns –– some its own, others it egged on –– to remake the Middle East through mass transfers and wars and assassinations and conquests and open air prisons and occupations and pogroms, Israel has not grasped that its constant need to murder, disinherit, and humiliate a people to feel secure, let alone thrive unequaled, is by itself a mark of resounding failure. Salamé captured quite well this nagging paradox for the Jewish state:
There indeed is no doubt that Israel has altered the balance of power…How to remain rational, let alone modest, under such a constellation of stars? The question is not that of this substantial change’s reality but of its durability.
Especially since the balance of power may very well have tilted in a direction far thornier for Israel. It’s one kind of challenge to cross swords with Iran and quite another with Turkey; the former a sanctioned pariah, the latter a titan that presided over the Near East for centuries, strategically straddles East and West, and is a member of NATO. In the West’s favorite sectarian lingua: one an embattled, subversive, unwelcome Shiite theocracy, the other a Sunni behemoth in a predominantly Sunni expanse. Concerningly for Israel, this new contest looms when its economy reels, its society seethes, all the blood is on its hands, and the pariah status haunts it.
It’s interesting that as Netanyahu, the peacock that he is, struts victorious around the arena, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdǒgan, who is largely responsible for Hayat Tahrir al Sham’s (HTS) leap for Syria is conspicuously quiet and coy. It’s also interesting that it was president-elect Donald Trump who publicly declared Turkey the owner of this turning point. We all know he was not relying on his deep knowledge of the politics and history of the Middle East when offering this insight.
Israel will need to muster all its strength for this duel. It’s doubtful it will be able to do so with Netanyahu and his gang at the helm. Might he be the first casualty of his own supposed success? It’s not an outrageous bet. Should Erdǒgan fully prepare for Israeli skulduggery? Absolutely!
There are many features of this fast-evolving new geopolitics that have yet to settle into a recognizable form, though. There are many questions that have to wait very patiently for a satisfying answer, among them Iran’s options as it faces a convergence of internal and external threats. Among them as well are the paths we as Levantines choose at the gates of a new epoch laden with perils but not without its opportunities.
I am open to conspiracy talk but I have no tolerance for the feelings of helplessness that attach to it. If we make the mistake of proclaiming ourselves a maf’oul bihi (done to), a put upon people destined to live a future designed for us by others, then we will have written ourselves yet again out of our very own story. Of all the tragedies we might suffer as a consequence, this self-inflicted wound would be the most pitiable.
Dare I scratch for now deeper than this surface?
Anyone who truly knows anything about our neighborhood knows not to.
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On Another Note
Whatever tomorrow brings, this is the day of Syria. I thought I would dedicate this page to Nizar Qabbani’s “Damascus, What Are You Doing To Me?”
Read the full poem here.
I return to Damascus
Riding on the backs of clouds
Riding the two most beautiful horses in the world
The horse of passion.
The horse of poetry.
I return after sixty years
To search for my umbilical cord,
For the Damascene barber who circumcised me,
For the midwife who tossed me in the basin under the bed
And received a gold lira from my father,
She left our house
On that day in March of 1923
Her hands stained with the blood of the poem . . .
I return to the womb in which I was formed . . .
To the first book I read in it . . .
To the first woman who taught me
The geography of love . . .
And the geography of women . . .
I return
After my limbs have been strewn across all the continents
And my cough has been scattered in all the hotels
After my mother’s sheets scented with laurel soap
I have found no other bed to sleep on . . .
And after the “bride” of oil and thyme
That she would roll up for me
No longer does any other “bride” in the world please me
And after the quince jam she would make with her own hands
I am no longer enthusiastic about breakfast in the morning
And after the blackberry drink that she would make
No other wine intoxicates me . . .