On Sunday 8 December, hours after the flight of deposed President Bashar Al-Assad, Israel invaded Syria. Boasting of unilaterally ending diplomatic agreements with the departed government and establishing new forward positions in the country, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself broadcast triumphantly from occupied territory. Within a day the IDF had pushed deep into the country, threatening the capital city of Damascus, which along with other military sites is being heavily bombed by Israel, the US and Turkey.

From its first moments, post-Assad Syria’s future was being sculpted by the wars that are re-casting the entire Middle East. In the last act of Assad’s bloody reign, Syrians refused to fight for him. His own government ministers handed over authority to the incoming regime, as the erstwhile strongman fled to Moscow.

The new strongman, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, is far from an unknown quantity. A former leading figure in al-Nusra, the sometime Syrian franchise of Al-Qaeda, he has been in effective power in the northern Idlib province for years, where he has a reputation for authoritarian rule. This did not prevent him from being gingerly welcomed in the liberal western media, enthused by the ouster of a key Russian and Iranian regional ally. A quarter century of war against ‘terror’ in general and al-Qaeda in particular has witnessed many hypocrisies and strange permutations, but this is the most freakish yet.

News from the base of Syrian society is scarce and difficult to verify amid fast moving events. But everything we do know suggests that a mass, civic revolution does not hold power over the state and paramilitary actors who are driving events. This is hardly surprising. During the years of civil war, the revolution the broke surface in 2011, has been subject to fragmentation, demoralisation and above all violent repression. What remains of the revolution is its negation. Instead of asking what the chief slogans are in the squares, those wanting to understand the politics of the opposition were waiting on statements from one man in army fatigues who depends on opaque connections and brute force. The hastily assembled government is a creature of Jolani’s Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) militia.

The character of the overthrow has a significant bearing on what is most likely to happen next. We should hope that democratic forces do rally new institutional strength and try and force a popular agenda. But it aids no one to deny the current balance of forces, and the extreme disadvantages any such movement would now face. HTS failure to resist the devastating Israeli invasion and bombing – which has smashed so much of the state’s military infrastructure – is telling of the distinction between what we are witnessing and a mass revolutionary process. Were their such a revolution, Syria would certainly be vulnerable to attack. But it would have been a problem for a mobilised nation, with its own independent capacities and organisation. Instead there is only an inert putschist government, theoretically in charge of a prone country.

We should recall the particular process by which the Syrian revolution was destroyed: crushed in a vice between Assad and his allies on one side, and the Salafi-Jihadist movements on the other. The brutal crackdown by Assad, backed with enormous force by Russia, Iran and Hezbollah, made the militarisation of the Syrian revolution inevitable. But this process undercut the civic and mass character of the revolution, and empowered reactionary movements and their foreign sponsors. Both sides of this counter-revolution targeted democrats, Kurds, and Palestinians among others.

It was not the revolution that arrived in Damascus on pick-up trucks on Sunday. It was one part of the counter-revolution, coming to knock-out the other side of the counter-revolution. They have been supported in doing so by many who were active in the revolution in years past, and yet more disillusioned by Assad after his re-conquest of much of the country. But the masses of people were not the primary force in Assad’s ouster.

Geostrategic calculations

The US will be watching events with some apprehension. Glad to see a setback for Russia and especially Iran, it must nonetheless deal with the unpredictability of the new regime, which is already struggling to cohere Syrian territory behind a single government (something Assad had been failing to achieve for years).

Chief concern will focus on the potential expansion of Turkish power. President Erdogan has made little secret of his connections with some of the armed factions that stormed Syria, and have laid siege to Kurdish areas in the north east. It remains to be seen how big a player Turkey will be in the new Syria, but the US will be cautious of the expansion of Ankara’s influence. The regional power has displayed growing autonomy from the US in recent years, even while enjoying the status of Nato member (and the protection this has afforded in everything from its rivalry with Russia to human rights abuses in Turkey and the Kurdish regions).

The toppling of Assad was greeted as another triumph by Netanyahu. A long-term antagonist of Israel has been toppled, and a key artery in the Iran-centred ‘Axis of Resistance’ severed. It is true that this axis had a complicated and equivocal relationship with the Palestinian cause. It’s crumbling demonstrates it was weaker in fact than most imagined. But with the power of Israel and other anti-Iran forces rising, the Palestinians are even more isolated. Netanyahu promised to reshape the middle east and, so far, he can tell his people he has been true to his word.

The IDF has battered Gaza, and is clearing the population from parts of the strip. Hezbollah has been badly weakened, and is now bereft of its Syrian ally. Israeli forces are now tearing into Syria, without meeting any resistance from the new government. In every conquest, Israel has acted with impunity and under the protection of its western sponsors. There is no sense in trying to guild any of these realities.

The US naturally supports the strengthening of a key ally, but will also worry about Israeli radicalisation and unpredictability, and the growing chaos in the region. It is naïve to imagine everything as a conspiracy hatched in Washington or anywhere else. The US is riding the tiger, like every other actor. With its powerful military means and regional allies, events are broadly benefiting the chief world power. But that does not mean the US is omnipotent and without reason to fear the growing power even of its friends. Multipolarity has sometimes been understood as the decline of US hegemony against competitors in China and, to a lesser degree, Russia, with which it finds itself tangled in a proxy-war over Ukraine. Some will be tempted to argue that multipolarity is thus reversing since states like Russia are experiencing setbacks in the Middle East. This would be to misunderstand the phenomenon.

Below the level of great power politics, multipolarity means the increasing relative autonomy of regional powers as well. Both great powers and regional powers are challenging the old format of US hegemony. In the Middle East, many states are demonstrating a growing sense of their own autonomous capacity for action. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Israel, Turkey, Iran and others are all making risky and bold plays to expand their influence, and are each recruiting the world powers in various initiatives, with highly unpredictable consequences.

The Middle East region is experiencing a lightning-quick re-division between spheres. It is not necessarily surprising that events still favour the largest concentrations of global military and economic power. And this is not only a regional dynamic – it links directly into European manifestations of the breakdown of western order, from the Ukraine war to inflation, refugee movements and the rise of the new hard right.

These circumstances naturally hold extreme dangers of further escalation, drawing western actors yet deeper into the malaise. It is essential that the anti-war movement in Britain is prepared for fresh crises, and prepared to resist all arguments for intervention.

Palestine

The peoples of the north African and middle east region have yet to make an independent stand for their own interests. Though some countries have seen large scale pro-Palestine marches, the mood remains subdued after years of revolutionary failure, and under brutal repression – not least in states which are key western allies. The short-lived and limited democratic gains of the Arab Spring have wilted in Tunisia and Egypt. It’s telling that no side publicly anticipates the establishment of a democratic, participatory or even well-functioning political settlement in Syria, after the many failed predictions of western liberal hawks in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. The utopian vision of the neoconservative movement, of a region forged in the western image by war, has given way to its dystopic negative – Netanyahu’s new middle east, where war is the permanent destination. In place of the spent dream of Arabian/American liberal democracy, the brute virtue of strength through atrocity.

During the Syrian civil war, the Assad regime and reactionary rebel factions both oppressed the country’s Palestinian diaspora. Conservative forces in the region have always found the Palestinians a problem, because their demand for statehood challenges the entire political structure of the region – not just Israel and the west, but also the various Arab regimes that have made either open or tacit peace with Israel, and the existing division of influence across the region. One sign of the rude health of the Egyptian Revolution at its peak, was the solidarity it expressed with the Palestinian cause.

This possible alliance is the ultimate hope for a region transfigured time and again by rival imperialisms. Whatever room to breathe radical forces manage to achieve, western governments and their allies will try and stamp out, just as they did in the Arab Spring. This is why western anti-war movements must not turn away from Palestine in its hour of need, and why we cannot tolerate western intervention into the region. As dangers to the middle east and the world mount, discipline on these questions will be more important than ever.

Article taken From CONTER website