By Jeremy Salt
The overthrow of the Syrian government is a triumph for Turkiye’s Tayyip Erdogan and for Syria’s western enemies led by the US.
Israel’s ‘successes’ continue to mount. The latest is the decision of the Swedish government to end its financial support for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), thus buckling under in the most craven way to pressure from a government committing genocide.
It will henceforth distribute its humanitarian aid between several agencies, but UNRWA is the only one whose mandate is solely assistance to the Palestinians. Switzerland is now contemplating whether to take the same decision.
Sweden must know that by abandoning UNRWA it has put Palestinians more completely at the mercy of their persecutors. After an internal inquiry, the sacking of nine employees (out of more than 30,000) who “may have been involved” in the October 7 attack is the reason Sweden has cut all financial aid to UNRWA. Israel producing only accusations, not evidence that could be taken into account.
Yet while punishing the Palestinians through UNRWA, Sweden lifts not a finger to punish a government mass murdering Palestinians, found guilty of genocide around the world and headed by a Prime Minister indicted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Sweden must know that Israel’s plans for the West Bank will replicate Gaza. Its cities and camps are already being razed, its civilian population killed, its hospitals besieged, its shops and markets burnt down, its olive trees destroyed along with everything that represents Palestine in the minds of the soldiers and settlers set loose on the Palestinians like a pack of wild dogs.
The moral depravity of governments revealed by the Gaza genocide seems to have no limits. Only Ireland in the western world has had the guts to defy Israel, for which it has been ‘punished’ for the closure of the Israeli embassy in Dublin, saving the Irish the job of doing it themselves as some might say. Why would anyone want the flag of mass murderers flying in their city?
Even voting for UN resolutions supporting the long-since affirmed rights of the Palestinians is too much for a government committing genocide. Forget the thousands of children it has killed, the thousands it has maimed, and the hundreds of thousands it has condemned to a life without an education, without even enough food to eat. The criminality is stupefying yet it is Israel’s howls of rage not Palestinian at how unfairly it is being treated that fill the air.
The complicity of western governments in the Gaza genocide ensures that Israel has a free hand to inflict the same fate on the West Bank. Whether in Gaza or the West Bank, Israel wants all the Palestinians just gone. It always did. It got rid of a million in the wars of 1948 and 1967 and is now closing in on the rest.
Having massed the terrorized Palestinians into southern Gaza, Israel only has to smash the Rafah gate for them to pour into Sinai. Egypt will be unable to stop them and once in Sinai, the Israelis will never allow them back.
The same terror tactics will be used across the West Bank but with Jordan as the exit point. Its government will not be able to stop the flow either. In fact, under the outrage at this monstrous infraction of sovereign rights, the transfer of money to these two cash-strapped states as an emollient would hardly be surprising.
In February 2024 the Sinai Foundation for Human Rights, an Egyptian NGO, reported that a large walled compound was being built in Sinai adjacent to the Rafah gate to ‘receive’ Palestinian refugees “in the case of a mass exodus.”
Satellite photos showed seven-meter high walls being built around a 21-square km enclosure “capable of holding 100,000 people.” If Mawasi on the other side of the Rafah gate is any guide, actually holding as many people as Israel can push in without any consideration as to how they are going to survive.
We are now seeing the flowering of the evil seed planted in Palestine by Arthur James Balfour. Created by the ‘west’, Israel continually abuses the west and its laws and institutions. Yet it cannot survive without the west.
In one of the most perverse turnarounds in history, this small state is now able to dominate and intimidate its benefactors. Perhaps Krafft-Ebing has some explanations for this curious state of affairs.
Within a year, the Gaza genocide metastasized into a ramping-up of the permanent pogrom of Palestinians on the West Bank, war in Lebanon and the culmination of the assault on Syria begun in 2011.
This last stop represents the most determined attempt ever made by the west to destroy an Arab government. For Israel, Syria was always the primal enemy. For the United States, it was the ‘pivot’ on which the future of the region could be turned. Sitting at the heart of the Middle East, it could also be regarded as a plug that once pulled out would cause everything around it to collapse.
Syria itself did not just ‘collapse.’ It was collapsed by a line-up of powerful governments and their terrorist proxies. Their bloody attacks across the country were accompanied by the destruction of more than 80 percent of the economy. Occupation in the northeast deprived Syria of its oil and wheat. The destruction and looting of factories in Aleppo struck at the heartland of the industrial sector.
Global sanctions imposed by the US deliberately impoverished the civilian population. The freezing of bank deposits overseas reduced the flow of cash to a trickle, pushing what was left of the economy into hyperinflation.
In short, Syria was deliberately hollowed out. Its army fought on valiantly for a decade but eventually had to be worn down. Russia helped to stave off the downfall in 2015 but when it finally withdrew its support, for whatever reason, the end had to be inevitable.
The HTS leader Ahmad al-Shara’a (Abu Muhammad al-Julani) made it clear long ago that the groups united under his banner had no intention of attacking the west. Arrested in Iraq, Julani spent five years in US prison camps before being ‘coincidentally’ released in 2011 just as the war on Syria was getting underway.
The ‘rebels’ who have taken Syria over have never even scratched the side of an Israeli tank in defense of Palestine. What al-Shara’a wants now is the respectability being delivered by Arab and western diplomats visiting him in Damascus. The HTS leadership is sending out signals that it is looking ahead not to more war but to good relations with Syria’s ‘neighbors,’ apparently all of them.
Israel is the key that will open all doors to western acceptance and financial aid if or when HTS actively moves in this direction. Al-Shara’a’s new ‘moderation’ after leading the most violent armed groups on the planet has already led the US to remove the $10 million terrorist bounty on his head and other governments are certain to follow.
How far al-Shara’a will be able to move on this path must remain uncertain. The HTS alliance was put together after bloody internecine fighting in Idlib. Already there are reports of bloody reprisals by some groups. They want a hardline Islamic government in Damascus, hard on women and hard on the minorities, Christians, Alawi and Druze. Will they be prepared to trade the government they want in Damascus for respectability in the west?
The current situation is grotesque in so many respects. Governments committed to the ‘rules-based international order’ are allowing it to be shattered in Gaza, Lebanon and Syria. Even genocide is allowed, in fact enabled through active complicity (arms, financial and political support) or by the act of doing nothing to stop it. In allowing/enabling Israel to do whatever it wants, however, the west is cutting its own civilizational throat.
Netanyahu cannot travel to Poland to visit Auschwitz because the Polish government is warning that it will arrest him for the same crimes that led to the prosecution of Nazi leaders at Nuremberg, specifically in his case the war crimes of starvation as a method of warfare and intentional attacks on a civilian population and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution as well as “other inhumane acts.”
From October 7 onwards to the devastation of Lebanon and the overthrow of the Syrian government the hard lessons of the past have to be learned, absorbed and applied as the resistance moves into a new phase.
The overthrow of the Syrian government is a triumph for Turkiye’s Tayyip Erdogan and for Syria’s western enemies led by the US who, needless to say, reaching deep into history, are also enemies of genuine Arab independence. Their idea of democracy is selective. They don’t mind dictators at all as long as they are their dictators.
However, the greatest beneficiary by far of the destruction of the Syrian government is Israel. For those who simultaneously supported the Palestine cause and the overthrow of the government in Damascus, it should have been clear at the start of the assault on Syria that this would be the outcome of a ‘rebel’ victory. May they long be happy with what they wished for.
– Jeremy Salt taught at the University of Melbourne, at Bosporus University in Istanbul and Bilkent University in Ankara for many years, specializing in the modern history of the Middle East. Among his recent publications is his 2008 book, The Unmaking of the Middle East. A History of Western Disorder in Arab Lands (University of California Press) and The Last Ottoman Wars. The Human Cost 1877-1923 (University of Utah Press, 2019). He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.
