No Assad is ruling from Damascus for the first time in over fifty years. What does it mean?
When I came to Israel over 30 years ago on a US Fulbright scholarship, it was still mostly a socialist country. Shimon Peres would annually go to the May Day socialist conference in Europe, and the government-owned the big companies in Israel. Binyamin (Bibi) Netanyahu introduced many reforms during his first years as prime minister, and as government conglomerates were made private, the economy started to grow, as did the startup ethos. Privately-owned El Al is finally making money hand over fist after decades of losses and economic stagnation.
One place where a person can still find a taste of the old socialist country is at the post office. While banks and other institutions have moved to online interactions with customers or sophisticated apps, the post office is still where you better bring a book. Even with an appointment booked online, waiting 20 or 30 minutes is typical. Many years ago, as I stood in line at the post office, someone behind me declared, “This is the most significant day in Middle Eastern history.” Everyone knew what he had in mind, though I doubt that there was complete agreement with his conclusion. Hafez Assad had died, and his university-trained doctor son was now the ruler of Syria. The fellow continued to say that someone with such an academic pedigree would obviously be an upgrade over his ruthless, murderous father. Of course, history shows him to be wrong on all counts.
Bashar Assad was not supposed to take the reins. His older brother Bassel was a colonel and was being groomed to take over Baathist rule from his father. But Bassel was a swinger, and one day, he flipped his car over and died. A Mossad agent tells the story as he was in the car behind the elder son of the reigning dictator. They had been out partying, and when Bassel drove off, he flipped his car. The Mossad agent checked to see that he had no pulse and immediately went to the airport to take the first plane out of Damascus, but the destination was irrelevant. In leaving hastily, he left $1 million behind a wall of an apartment in Damascus. Later, he had to return to get the money back, which he did, and he successfully got to a Cayman Island account of Mossad via the Damascus branch of the infamous BCCI bank.
Sunday’s reports claim that Bashar Assad has fled Damascus. Earlier news posting claimed that the rest of his family was in Russia. How could the Assads fall so suddenly after more than sixty years of dictatorial terror while still armed with plenty of tanks and MiG fighters? Syria under Hafez Assad was always considered the greater danger to Israel. While Egypt signed a peace agreement, the elder Assad was a sworn foe of the Jewish state. His son showed himself to be no less of an implacable enemy. He tightly aligned himself with Iran and let Syria be the main conduit for Hezbollah’s ever-growing arsenal. Attempts to make peace, even offering him land up to the right bank of the Sea of Galilee, got nowhere. While he may have been a licensed physician, he was a dictator and terror supporter that would have made his old man proud.
And this fact is what our friend at the post office and many others like him miss. We assume that education somehow makes a person more refined and better. The fact is that education generally sharpens whatever is already in the person’s personality and psyche. George Habash was another physician-terrorist, the founder of the PFLP. Do we need to mention Josef Mengele? Rarely does education change a person. Look at the Jew hatred at US universities—has their costly education done anything to make them more tolerant? All it did was give them a license to express their hatred in a socially acceptable manner. I hope Trump drops federal funding for universities that allow for overt Jew-hatred, and I hope that he deports whoever is deportable.
As to Assads, whereas the old man crushed protests in Hama with around 30,000 dead, the younger version could not get control over the “Spring Revolution.” He answered protests with barrel bombs, and for years now, he has not had complete control of his country. He needed the active support of Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah to remain in power. With Hezbollah reeling from Israel’s highly destructive campaign against it, the rebels moved out and, in lightning fashion, went from the corners of the country into the heart of the major cities. How did they move so quickly against what, on paper, is a much bigger force? I guess that it is similar to what happened in Afghanistan. The Taliban offered the US-trained national army a very simple choice: join us or die. As they were all Muslims, the transition was not so hard. Assad’s armies were either fleeing or joining the rebels. Within hours, rebel forces have gone from the outskirts of Homs and Hama and into the city center. The Syrian army knows the jig is up and offers no significant resistance. I wonder if the rebels trying to learn how to fly their newly captured helicopters via YouTube videos have gotten up in the air.
Here in Israel, there have been assessments at the highest levels of the military and government of the rapid changes taking place in Syria. Israel would appear to be taking a mostly neutral approach for a couple of reasons:
1. There is really nothing that Israel can do in Syria.
2. Nobody knows who hates the Jews more, Assad or his replacements.
3. Israel in the past had a “good neighbor” policy to feed, arm, and treat rebels brought to Israeli hospitals, so maybe they have an in with some of these groups.
The big losers after Assad would be Russia, whose fleet has left Tartus, and Iran, whose advisors have left for home. The big winner is another Israel-hater, Recep Erdogan, who stands behind the more prominent rebel militias marching into Damascus. The fate of the Kurds is unclear, as the rebels have promised to leave them alone, but ultimately, Erdogan wishes to weaken them. How this all shakes out, I don’t know if anyone knows.
The 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement to divide the Ottoman Empire is falling apart. Iraq is a basket case, Syria is in the midst of a revolution, and Lebanon is once again facing an uncertain future. For the first time since I was six years old, there is no one named Assad in the presidential palace in Damascus.