Three young Arabs took seats in the row behind me, and I somehowmanaged to introduce myself and start a conversation with them. I learnedthat they were Syrians. I mentioned the recent breakup of the United ArabRepublic, the union of Egypt and Syria under the pan-Arab leadership ofGamal Abd-al-Nasser.
My three neighbors were very happy about the split. One of them drew apassport from his bag and passed it to me. It was a shiny new document,issued by Syrian Arab Republic.
There could be no mistake about the immense pride with which this youngSyrian showed me – an Israeli enemy – this evidence of Syria’s new-foundindependence. Here was a Syrian patriot, pure and simple.
ONE OF the books which had a profound impact on me in my youth wasPhillip Hitti’s “A History of Syria”.
Hitti, a Maronite Christian from what is now Lebanon, was educated inOttoman Beirut and emigrated to the US, where he became the father ofmodern Arab studies.
His ground-breaking book was based on Syria being one country from theSinai desert to the Turkish mountains, from the Mediterranean Sea to theborders of Iraq. This country, called Sham in Arabic, includes the present-day states of Lebanon, Israel, Palestine and Jordan.
Hitti recounted the history of this country from the earliest prehistorictimes to the (then) present, layer upon layer, including every period andevery region, such as Biblical Israel and the Petra of the Nabataeans.Everything was part of the superbly rich history of Sham.
The book changed my own geographical and cultural view of our placein the world. Even before the State of Israel was created, I argued thatour schools should apply this inclusive view to the history of Palestine
throughout the ages.
(This would have enraged Hitti, who denied that there was a country calledPalestine. In a long public controversy with Albert Einstein, a devotedZionist, Hitti claimed that the entity called Palestine was invented by theBritish in order to fix in the mind of people that Jews had a claim on it.)
FROM HITTI I learned for the first time about the many ethnic-religiousgroups of today’s Syria and Lebanon. Muslim Sunnis and Shiites, Druze,Maronites, Melkites and many other ancient and modern Christianconfessions in Lebanon; Sunnis, Alawites, Druze, Kurds, Assyrians and adozen Christian confessions in Syria.
The European imperialist powers, Britain and France, which broke upthe all-inclusive Ottoman Empire after World War I, had scant respect forthe diversity of their new acquisitions. However, they both adopted theprinciple of “divide et impera”. The French excelled in it.
Faced with a fierce nationalist opposition and an armed uprising led bythe Druze, they carved up the rump Syria into small religious-ethnic-geographical statelets. They played on the animosities between Damacusand Aleppo, Muslims and Christians, Sunnis and Alawis, Kurds and Arabs,Druze and Sunnis.
Their most far-reaching venture, the division between a Christian-dominated “Greater Lebanon” and the rest of Syria, had a lasting effect.(It was called Greater Lebanon because the French included in it not onlypurely Christian regions, but also Muslim ones – Shiite in the South andSunni in the port cities.)
WHEN THE French were finally kicked out of the region at the end of WorldWar II, the question was whether and how Syria and Lebanon could surviveas national states.
In both there was an inbuilt contradiction between the unifying nationalismand the dividing ethnic/religious tendency. They adopted two differentsolutions.
In Lebanon, the answer was a delicate structure of a state based on abalance between the communities. Each person “belongs” to a community.In practice everyone is the citizen of his community, and the state is but afederation of communities.
(This is partly an inheritance from the Byzantine and Ottoman empires, butwithout an emperor or a sultan. It exists in Israel, too – Jews, Sunnites,Druze and Christians have their own courts for personal status affairs andcannot intermarry.)
The Lebanese system is a negation of “one person – one vote” democracy,but it has survived a vicious civil war, several massacres, a number ofIsraeli invasions and a shift of the Shiites from last to first place. It is morerobust than might have been supposed.
The Syrian solution was very different – dictatorship. A series of strongmenfollowed each other, until the al-Assad dynasty took over. Its surprisinglongevity arises from the fact that many Syrians of all communities seem tohave preferred even a brutal tyrant to the breakup of the state, chaos andcivil war.
NO MORE, it seems. The Syrian Spring is an offspring of the Arab Spring,but under very different conditions.
Egypt is far too different from Syria to allow a comparison. The unity ofEgypt has been unquestionable for thousands of years. Egyptian nationalpride is almost tangible. The question raised by Israeli commentators,whether the new President is first of all a Muslim Brother or first of allan Egyptian, sounds gratuitous to an Egyptian. The Egyptian MuslimBrotherhood is, or course, first of all Egyptian. So are Egyptian Copts, thesizable Christian minority. (Their name, like the word Egypt itself, derivesfrom the ancient name of the country.)
The unity of Egypt, like that of Tunisia and even Libya, after the overthrowof the dictators, is evidence of the national consciousness of thesepeoples. This is not a given in Syria.
If the Monster of Damascus is finally removed, will Syria survive?
All over the West, and in Israel, pundits gleefully foretell that the countrywill break into pieces, more or less on the lines of the French colonialprecedent.
This is quite possible. One of the few options left to Bashar al-Assad is togather the Alawis in his army and retreat to the Alawi redoubt in the North-West of the country, cutting it off from the rest of Syria.
This would lead to much bloodshed. The Alawis would certainly drive outall the Sunnis from their region, and the Sunnis would drive the Alawis outof all the other regions. It could resemble the horrible events in India during
the partition of the sub-continent and the creation of Pakistan, if on a muchsmaller scale .
The Druze in the south of Syria would then found their own state (an olddream in Israel. The Kurds in the north-east would do the same, perhaps tojoin the neighboring Kurdish semi-state in Iraq, a Turkish nightmare. Whatwould be left of Syria would be the eternally competing cities of Damascusand Aleppo.
Possible, but certainly not inevitable. It would be a supreme test of Syriannationalism. Does it exist? How strong is it? Strong enough to overcomethe separatism of the communities?
I would not dare to prophesy. I can only hope. I hope that the diverseelements of the Syrian opposition unite enough to win the present brutalcivil war and create a new Syria.
Unlike most Israeli commentators, I am not afraid of the “Islamization” ofSyria. True, the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood has always been more violentthan the Egyptian parent organization. By their actions at the time theyhelped to provoke the terrible massacre in Hama perpetrated by Hafez al-Assad. But political power has a moderating effect, as we are seeing inCairo.
FOR ME, one riddle remains. I see on the internet that many well-meaningpeople around the world, especially on the left, support Bashar.
This is a phenomenon that repeats itself. There seems to be a kind ofleftist monsterphilia around. The same people who embraced SlobodanMilošević, Hosni Mubarak and Moammar Qaddafi now embrace Basharal-Assad, again loudly protesting against American imperialist designsagainst this public benefactor.
Frankly, this seems to me a bit looney. True, Great Power politics doinfluence what’s happening in Syria, as they do everything else in theworld. But the character and actions of Bashar, following those of hisfather, leave nothing to doubt. He is a monster butchering his people, andmust be removed as quickly as possible, preferably under UN leadership. Ifthat is impossible, owing to the Russian and Chinese veto – why, for God’ssake?! – then the Syrian rebels must be supported as much as possible.
I HOPE with all my heart that a free, unified, democratic Syria will emergefrom this turmoil, another daughter of the Arab Spring.
In sha Allah, if God wills it, as our neighbors would put it.