What if no one wants to win the Syrian war?
TERRA INCOGNITA
Last Shabbat morning I spoke in the Nitzanim Synagogue in Jerusalem, delivering the morning sermon. Five days after my daughter’s wedding, I was in high spirits but delivered a somewhat ominous message. It was a missive Israelis are not accustomed to hearing and to which they are not immediately receptive: the very legitimacy of their country is under international assault.
You’d think it obvious to Israelis that their country is being demonized around the world. You’d guess that they’re well aware that a hypocritical United Nations is regularly condemning them while turning a blind eye to near-genocide of Arabs over the border in Syria. You’d imagine that seven million Israelis are aware that they’re up against an onslaught of billions who are unsympathetic or hostile. Amazingly, they’re not. Yes, the Israeli people are deeply familiar with the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS). And yes, they know that European anti-Semitism has reared its ugly head yet again, just 70 years after the Holocaust, in the form of grotesque anti-Israel bias. But fighting this global onslaught is simply not a priority for the Israeli people. It’s not very high on their radar screen. After my speech I found myself in spirited debate with my listeners, many of whom felt I was overstating the case. Israelis, in their opinion, have far bigger fish to fry, like stabilizing the security situation, creating affordable housing, reducing unemployment and growing the economy.
As an American Jew who visits Israel frequently I can posit a number of reasons for this glaring omission.
First, for Israelis Israel’s foremost threat is understandably not a public relations debacle but physical annihilation. Every day Israelis face an existential threat from potential Iranian nukes, Hezbollah terrorist raids, Hamas rockets and Palestinian stabbings and bombs. The last thing on their mind is a couple of students out in Berkeley who want to pass a BDS motion at the student council.
Second, Israelis survive through sheer toughness. They know they are a nation alone. They are conditioned to not give a flying damn about what people think of them. A nation which is proud to call itself “sabras,” the famous cactus fruit with its prickly exterior, is hardly going to start worrying what Socialist Worker activists in Trafalgar Square think of them.
Third, Israelis feel, justifiably, that BDS and anti-Israel demonization is not their fight. That surely American Jews, British Jews, Australian Jews, who are not called upon to risk their lives dodging Hamas mortar fire should have some responsibility for the Jewish future, no? And they’re the ones who live in the countries that are assaulting Israel. So let them join the fray.
And finally, and perhaps most importantly, Israelis are convinced that the justice of their cause is so self-evident that it requires no response. They look at their neighborhood, survey their surroundings and surmise that the world could not possibly support honor-killing Hamas against democratic Israel. The global community could not possibly champion women-stoning, gay-hanging Iran over Israel. So Israelis retreat from the battle in the belief that ultimately the
Last week a new player fully entered the Syrian war as the Turkish army rolled into Jarabulus along with thousands of Syrian fighters with whom it is allied. To placate the Turks US Vice President Joe Biden happened to be on hand to tell the Kurdish-backed YPG to go back across the Euphrates. The Turkish intervention, supposedly directed at “fighting Islamic State,” was also directed at interdicting any attempt by Kurdish forces to connect their Afrin canton with their existing areas in northeast Syria.
Others have written extensively about the various sides in the Syrian civil war and also about what an ideal outcome might be. Jonathan Spyer in The Spectator asked, “Who should rule Syria?” and concluded that none of the major players should. “The Assad regime should not be permitted to reunite Syria under its rule, the Islamist rebels should similarly not be allowed to establish a Jihadi state in the country, and the Islamic State should not be permitted to remain in existence,” he said.
A deeper problem in Syria is that no one wants to win the war.
The Turkish intervention stemmed from two parallel interests: to support the various Syrian groups allied with Turkey such as Faylaq al-Sham, and to reduce the influence of the Kurds in Syria. Turkey has a history of declaring it is fighting ISIS while then noting it is fighting “other terrorist” as well and attacking Kurds, as it did in the fall of 2015. From the Turkish point of view the Kurdish PKK and YPG are the real terrorists.
The Turkish role in Syria is not to win but merely to create a buffer zone. The Kurdish role in Syria is also not to win, but only to create some sort of united federal region, linking Kobane, Rojava and Afrin, the historic Kurdish areas. ISIS is also not bent on winning in Syria, and never was – its interests often were across the border in Iraq, in its global “caliphate” and mass rape and murder around the world.
Syrian President Bashar Assad pays lip service to winning, but isn’t his real goal to use the presence of jihadists groups to prop up his own legitimacy as the “defender” of Syria, the “resister of imperialism,” the lone shield “fighting terror”? PR war will settle itself and the truth will come out.
But little do Israelis realize that they can build up even the strongest army in the world but it is useless if it neutralized by international condemnation that portrays Israel as an aggressor. A single CNN camera can neutralize an entire brigade, and a New York Times editorial can keep a squadron of F-15s on the ground rather than hitting back against Hamas terrorists in Gaza. The PR battle for Israel, which rages around the world, affects Israel in every way, from a growing boycott of its goods to the demonization of its academics to the attempt to arresting its government ministers when they travel abroad to the threat of physical danger and the murder of its citizens when they travel abroad.
Is the fight against the Israel haters primarily the responsibility of Diaspora Jewry? I would say yes. But we cannot fight this battle alone, without the active participation and engagement of the Israeli people, which is why more Diaspora Jewish speakers need to address Israeli audiences about the level of threat. Simply stated, Israeli engagement against BDS domestically is vital to the efforts to defeat it abroad.
In the most straightforward sense, we Diaspora Jews need some of the basic on-the-ground facts and information as weapons in our arsenal for this war. And I’m not talking about facts that can be googled or even those which I present in my new book, The Israel Warrior, that gives vital information for Israel activists around the globe in their battles on behalf of the Jewish state. Rather, I’m speaking about empirical facts that can only be known to those who experience everyday life in the Jewish state.
For instance, last week I visited the Jewish communities of Samaria in the West Bank, including Kfar Tapuah and Yitzhar. We went to the Barkan Industrial Park and met Palestinian workers of an Israeli-owned plastics factory. If I had not posted the video of some of the workers’ comments, you would not believe what they said. How they felt that their factory was not a business but a family. How the Israeli owners paid them approximately 10 times what they would earn working for Palestinian factories and how the Jewish owners treated them with unending dignity and respect. And, most importantly, how much they detest the BDS movement for attempting to destroy their livelihood and force them to live in squalor, all in the name of Israel-hatred that masquerades as Palestinian rights. The money part of the video was when I asked a Palestinian worker what he thinks of BDS and he said he felt it was “Sh-t!” How’s that for politically incorrect.
Now, why haven’t these Arab men been interviewed before? Why haven’t they been asked to do a speaking tour of American campuses so that, rather than ignorant and biased anti-Israel Western students speaking in their name, Palestinian workers themselves can offer their view of BDS and its harmful effects on Arab rights?
Because we in the US did not even know they existed, or would be courageous enough to speak out.
The video has since gone viral. But that is no substitute for an in-the-flesh, first-person account of these workers exercising their right of free speech to say how they feel without the Palestinian Authority intimidating them into silence, or, worse, threatening them or their families for ever speaking out on behalf of Israel.
Israelis must awaken to the extreme dangers of BDS and work with the American Jewish community to destroy this new iteration of Jew-hatred and anti-Semitism. Post SYRIAN REBELS walk with people who were evacuated from the besieged Damascus suburb of Daraya, after an agreement reached on Thursday between rebels and Syria’s army, after their arrival in the rebel-controlled city of Idlib on Saturday.
Russia’s intervention in Syria in the fall of 2015 was not aimed at winning but propping up Assad. Iran and Hezbollah’s intervention in Syria, dating to the earlier years of the war, was not aimed at winning. The Americans don’t want to win in Syria, they want ISIS defeated. The Syrian rebel groups, the multiplicity of groups that might run to 1,000 different factions, of which a dozen are large players or coalitions, have no ability to win the war, and it isn’t clear most of them want to. Most want to control some tiny little area.
If you were told there was a war and no one wanted to win it, then you might have to revisit the paradigm under which you imagined the “war” was being fought. Here is what the Syrian civil war The Washington The Israel Warriors Handbook. looks like in retrospect.
March to July of 2011 began with protests. For a year and a half there was serious fighting. In August 2013 there was the chemical weapons attack and fears of intervention by the US and increasing Hezbollah involvement. There is the rise of ISIS in 2014 and its capture of Palmyra in May 2015. At around the same time there are the military successes of the YPG and Russian intervention in the fall of 2015. There is also increasing American and coalition intervention in Syria, beginning with failed attempts to find “viable” rebel groups and then partnership with the Kurds. In August of 2016 the Turkish intervention began.
With each round of successes of one group comes another round of intervention. With each setback a new player, with each alarming weakness of one faction a new injection of support. Assad’s forces were bled white in Syria, like the French at Verdun, so Hezbollah had to be bled white and then Iran and Afghan mercenaries and Shi’ites from Iraq. Rebel factions also exhausted themselves. The Kurds also overstretched in their temporary success at Manbij.
In some ways the Syrian civil war bares a gross resemblance to the Thirty Years War in Germany. It isn’t merely the sectarianism and numerous interventions by outside parties to support their proxies, but also the mass destruction and brutality.
If you accept the parallel with the Thirty Years War, with Syria as the victim of numerous state struggles and divided into a plethora of little statelets, then you have to ask yourself where is the Middle East’s “peace of Westphalia” and the remaking of its order in the wake of the conflict? Since no one wants to win the war, no one can win the war and no one should win the war, the only option is to end the war. But there is apparently much blood to be spilled before that can happen, and the great and regional powers involved don’t care particularly if it continues. For them, like France and the Habsburgs, the interest is influence, buffers, and killing. Indeed, one reason no one wants to win is because, like ISIS reveling in executions or those videos of the beheading of a teenage Palestinian by one rebel group, or regime soldiers torturing prisoners, many of those involved just like abusing the weak and preying on easy targets. Some of those involved just want to kill people for the sake of it.