Tyrants and messianics work to undo the Middle East

Newsroom

13 hours ago

Comment: In recent weeks the bewildering Middle East crisis factory – to borrow a term – has reached new heights of tragic complexity.
In Gaza, Israel and Hamas claimed to be closing in on a new ceasefire and hostage deal under duress from the US. Simultaneously, the US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation's aid distribution points critical to life (after the departure of all other aid agencies) continue to be death traps for Gazan civilians.
And a new Israeli plan to filter the entire Gaza population into a 'humanitarian city' in the southern part of the ravaged Gaza Strip looks hauntingly like a vast concentration camp.
Meanwhile, to the north the glimmer of a hope that was the collapse of the brutal Assad regime on December 8 last year – a date etched into Syrian history and many Syrians' rear car windows here in New Zealand – continues to slip into a pattern of ethno-sectarian violence and external intervention.
Following sectarian fighting and massacres on the Alawite-majority Syrian coast and Sunni-Druze clashes earlier this year, a new escalation occurred in the past week with violence between members of the Druze religious minority and Sunni bedouin fighters.
This triggered interventions in the Druze-majority city of Suwayda by the Israelis from the south and the new authorities in Damascus from the north.
Ostensibly both parties claimed to be intervening to protect minorities and to restore order. Nonetheless, as of writing this article, Druze fighters remain engaged in pitched battles with Syrian government security forces and allied tribal militias in and around Suwayda.
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to protect the Druze minority, a community which has a long history of pragmatic relations with Israel but also a proud history of Syrian and Arab nationalism going back to the 1925 Arab Revolt against the French.
It shouldn't be forgotten that it was Druze who continued to courageously defy the rehabilitation of president Assad in 2023 and were calling for a democratic Syria when other parts of Syria were silent and defeated.
This also explains the current divisions among Druze being exploited by both Israel and Damascus who have now entered direct confrontation. Israeli jets have targeted Syrian government units and even the Ministry of Defence buildings in Damascus.
This Syria-Israel flare-up comes only days after Syrian interim president Ahmed Sharaa and the Israeli leadership were exchanging messages about a possible normalisation, or at least a non-aggression agreement, based on the deal mediated by Henry Kissinger in 1974.
Moreover, Israel's closest ally, the US, had recently removed sanctions on the new Syrian regime, a huge relief to ordinary Syrians. The view was that Syria, the US and Israel had common ground in their mutual enmity towards Iran and its so-called resistance axis.
More extraordinary were recent rumours of land swap negotiations between Syria and Israel involving surrendering Syria's claims to much of the Druze-majority Golan Heights in exchange for the Sunni-majority northern Lebanese port city of Tripoli, which many Syrians believe was wrongly separated with the carving out of Greater Lebanon in 1920.
At the present juncture it seems sovereignty and notions of an international rules-based order have become virtually meaningless in the fluidity of a moment where brutal realpolitik and rampant identity politics from Gaza to northern Syria are unmaking the whole Levant.
Israel's current hardline government dreams of a patchwork of ethno-nationalist statelets based on simplified notions of Jewish, Druze, Kurdish and Alawite identity and a Sunni Arab emirate occupying the rump Syrian territory.
According to this view the latter would naturally be connected to the Gulf States and – via the Abraham Accords – Israel. Some scholars have already declared the end to the Sykes-Picot era, the infamous British-French secret agreement to carve up the Levant and Iraq in 1916.
So how should we try to understand such bewildering flux?
First of all, looking at the Levant through state-centric lenses of geopolitics or simplified one-dimensional notions of identity will be of little help. At this point I strongly suggest revisiting an alternative taxonomy for evaluating the struggle for a new Middle East.
The shaping of events today is very much in the hands of 1) established and would-be tyrants, whose sole purpose is short-term maintenance of unaccountable power, and 2) messianics, who have little cognisance of compromise with alternative interests and possibilities beyond perceptions of prophecy.
Genuine progressives who are capable of power sharing and compromise are politically repressed at both ends of the Levant. Subsistence masses continue to suffer grievously or are being consumed with hatred as they powerlessly watch the live-streamed suffering of others.
If we look at Gaza and Syria we can observe the effects of this turmoil.
On Gaza, there may be arguments to say that the Israeli military command's prime objective has quixotically been to separate Hamas and other militias from the general population to achieve their political masters' 'total victory' and recover the hostages held by Hamas.
This explains callous calculations of collateral damage in targeting Hamas, and the herding back and forth of civilians. It also explains the latest vain attempt to vet and seal off the non-Hamas population in the so-called Humanitarian City in Rafah to protect them while the IDF deals a final blow to Hamas.
However, the objective is different for Israel's self-declared messianics, who number around 12 percent of the electorate according to the last election results in 2022.
Representing this constituency are the openly racist cabinet ministers, Itmar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, who hold disproportionate control over the ruling coalition and Netanyahu's political fate via Israel's fully proportional electoral system.
For them the reclamation of all of 'greater Israel,' and the genocidal removal of all Palestinians is a divine duty.
Thus, we can recognise the lethal effect of the search for unlimited political power by Netanyahu combined with the messianic purpose of his political partners, for whom it should be noted, the reckless and callous exploitation of Palestinian suffering by Hamas for their own goals has been a precious political gift.
The shock of the October 7, 2023 massacres and the never-ending hostage trauma, the ongoing war with Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran and the Houthis, as well as the groundswell of anti-Zionist/Jewish sentiment around the world, seems to have had a disorienting and numbing effect on progressive Israelis.
They are caught between defending their right to a state and an identity on the world stage and confronting those among them who are destroying any chance of securing that state in peaceful coexistence with Palestinians and the many other overlapping communities of the Levant.
Turning back to Syria.
The collapse of the Assad regime was an opportunity to open a crack in the negative political context that has afflicted the Levant and wider Middle East. However, like Israel, Syria's opportunity to become a model for pluralist coexistence is thwarted by the duality of tyranny and religious messianism.
The current president in Damascus, the former Al-Qaeda leader Ahmed Sharaa, has enjoyed a honeymoon period and rode the wave of euphoria that came with the end of the suffocating Assad dynasty – 'forever has fallen' wrote the respected Syria scholar, Lisa Wedeen.
However, a combination of Sharaa's own personal desires to consolidate power, combined with the express interests of neighbouring regimes to ensure that their own autocratic systems would not be compared unfavourably by their subjects to a reborn pluralist Syria, has meant that centralised power is being reestablished in Syria from within and without.
Absolute rule can be stable, and in seeking self-preservation, especially in its early stages, can be pragmatic. But Sharaa, regardless of his own ideology, (which is unclear) is beholden to the Sunni Muslim jihadists that carried him through the war years and into power.
He wasn't even able to disband and repatriate the foreign jihadist fighters who followed him to Damascus from Idlib, such is his dependence on these messianics.
For the latter (Syrian and foreign), toleration of, let alone political equality with heterodox minorities like the Druze and Alawites is unthinkable. This explains how, even though genuine efforts are being made to reunify Syria, the messianic structure of Sharaa's power means he is doomed to continuous conflict and fragmentation with Syria's diverse communities.
Many of Syria's progressives who courageously stood against the Assad regime to demand a democratic state continue to reside outside Syria in Doha and Türkiye and elsewhere, ignored by the new Islamist authorities in Damascus.
For example, I met with the moderate religious figure, Shaikh Maoz Al-Khatib, in Doha in April. Shaikh Moaz was the first leader of the main Syrian revolutionary forces and commands respect and legitimacy across ethno-sectarian and ideological divides in Syria (as related by some of my minority contacts), and yet he is ignored by the new Syrian government and international actors alike.
At present tyrants and messianics are tearing gaping divides in the fabric of the intensely diverse Levant from the south to the north.
To prevent this outcome, track II (non-governmental) outreach initiatives and the empowerment and connection of progressives in all camps is needed to arrest the current pattern of conflict and division to remake, rather than unmake, the Levant's mosaic-palimpsest of identities.