This is a rough translation of ‘La crise syrienne déchire la gauche arabe,’ by Nicolas Dot-Pouillard, an article written in French and appearing in August’s Le Monde Diplomatique. Thanks to Sophie at Les Politiques.

In August 2011, the Lebanese leftist nationalist daily, Al-Akhbar, went through its first crisis since its inception. Its deputy editor, Khaled Saghieh, left the paper he helped found, while denouncing the newspaper’s lack of support for the popular uprising in Syria which began in March 2011. Al-Akhbar has never concealed its political proximity with Hezbollah, one of Bashar Al-Assad’s key regional allies, nor that it favored dialogue between the Syrian government and opposition rather than the outright collapse of the regime. At the same time, the newspaper made room for the voices of several members of the Syrian opposition, including Kaïleh Salamah, a Marxist intellectual, Syro-Palestinian, arrested in late April 2012 by the security services. In June, dissent appeared in the online English edition of the newspaper, with an article Amal Saad-Ghorayeb. Explicitly supporting the Assad regime, the Lebanese columnist attacked the proponents of the “third way” — those who denounce the Syrian authoritarian regime while warning against any foreign intervention, including one modeled on Libya. The same month, another contributor to Al-Akhbar English, Max Blumenthal, announced his departure in an article criticizing others at the newspaper who had become “Al-Assad’s apologists.”

The divisions inside Al-Akhbar are symptomatic of debates that both strategically and intellectually, divide the left in the Arab world. Some continue to support the Syrian regime in the name of the struggle against Israel and “resistance to imperialism.” Others are placed firmly alongside the insurgency in the name of “revolutionary” logic and the defence of “democratic rights”. Finally, there are those who support a middle ground, expressing from a distance solidarity with the demonstrators’ demand for freedom, rejecting “foreign interference”, while also advocate a form of “national reconciliation”. Sensibilities vary widely — some staunchly Marxist or communist, with others in the orbit of a certain nationalist left, some radical, and others more moderate. In reaction to the Syrian crisis, the Arab left has become a fractured mosaic.

Anti-imperialism as the analytical framework

Of course, there are few in the Arab left who fully support Assad and few are calling for a continuation of the existing system in Syria. But neither are the majority of leftists unconditional supporters of the popular revolt. Such support tends to be found at the far left of the political spectrum, among Trotskyists, the Socialist Forum in Lebanon, revolutionary socialists in Egypt, Maoists, and the Democratic Way in Morocco. Such groups have relations with some factions of the Syrian opposition, such as the Revolutionary Left of Gayath Naisse. They have participated, since the Spring 2011, with selective mobilizations at Syrian embassies and consulates in their respective countries.

Some intellectuals on the left, such as the Lebanese historian Fawwaz Traboulsi, also support the logic of insurgency. They demand the fall of the regime and oppose dialogue. While promoting the need for peaceful popular protest, they do not deny the right of rebels to take up arms. At the extreme left, supporters of the revolution nevertheless disavow the Syrian National Council’s alliance with states such as Qatar, Turkey and Saudi Arabia. They firmly denounce this because it could undermine the independence of the popular movement in Syria.

Denouncing the regime and calling for its downfall, some among the radical left remain wary of support provided by the Gulf monarchies to the Syrian revolution, even while affirming the anti-Assad rhetoric coming from that part of the ‘international community’ led by the U.S.. However, their anti-imperialist reflex does not take precedence over their support for the insurgency. Priority is given to the internal situation in Syria: the logic of a people’s uprising against their rulers comes first, as was the case in Tunisia and Egypt.

As for those who constitute the majority of the Arab left, they have maintained a cautious distance from the Syrian revolt. They denounced first the militarization of the uprising, which would only benefit the radical Islamist groups and foreign fighters flowing into Syria. They emphasize the confessionalisation of the conflict, placing progressives, Christian and Alawite minorities in opposition to a Sunni majority radicalized by repression, and see the threat of a protracted civil war. Finally, they worry about the regional and global balance of power — Iran and Syria against the Gulf monarchies, Russia and China against the United States. In the large regional and international war game that places Syria in the front line between several state actors, the Arab left is inclined to sustain its long-standing alliances with Iran and Syria, Russia and China.

Thus, when on April 4, 2012, a newly-formed union of nationalists and leftists in Jordan, a coalition of six political parties, from communists to Arab nationalists, organized a meeting in Amman for the ninth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, it was less the memory of the fall of Saddam Hussein than the Syrian crisis which took center stage. “Foreign intervention” in Syria was strongly denounced with some speakers making the parallel between the March 2003 military operation against Iraq and support by major Western powers for the CNS and the armed opposition.

In Tunisia, in a statement dated May 17, 2012, the powerful trade union of General Union of Tunisian Workers (UGTT) — in which part of the executive comes from the far left — while reiterating its support for the democratic demands of the Syrian people, warned against a “conspiracy” fomented by the U.S., “colonial and Arab reactionaries.” Two months earlier, the Tunisian Communist Workers’ Party (Poct) called, along with Arab nationalist groups, in a demonstration to denounce the holding in Tunis a conference of Friends of Syria, uniting around the CNS nearly sixty international delegations.

The Lebanese Communist Party, meanwhile, has adopted very careful positioning. While publishing in its press, articles by Syrian opposition members such as Michel Kilo (who is not in the CNS), it has nevertheless refrained from participating in some events that were held for a year in front of the Syrian embassy in Beirut. Moreover, it finds itself under fire from some critics in the far left in Lebanon, since part of the leadership of the party remains close to Qadri Jamil, head of the Popular Will Party in Syria and a member of the “legal” opposition. Jamil joined the new government of Riyad Hijab, appointed by Assad in June 2012, as vice premier for economic affairs.

It is usually a reformist logic that finds favor in some quarters of the Arab left: a solution to the conflict in Syria must be political, not military. The final communiqué of the Arab Nationalist Conference, which gathered last June in Hammamet, Tunisia, with some two hundred members drawn from the Arab nationalist left and to a lesser extent, Islamists, reflected this position. The document was intended to be as consensual as possible. While recognizing the right of the Syrian people “to freedom, democracy and peaceful transfer of power”, it condemns “violence from whatever source,” referring both to the regime and the opposition army, calling on both to be part of a process of dialogue, based on the plan to restore peace in March 2012 proposed by the envoy of the United Nations (UN) Kofi Annan.

If, for part of the Arab radical left, the revolutionary perspective must head the agenda in Syria, another fraction, substantially larger, has rejected this view. They do not want a sudden fall of the regime. For them, the heart of the contradiction lies in a cold war that dare not speak its name. Their greater fear is of a post-Assad Syria simultaneously reconciled with the United States and allied with the Gulf states, more than their fear of the survival of the regime.

In addition, Syria remains a kind of Janus in the eyes of Arab leftists. Few would deny its authoritarian and repressive nature, but even today the defensive discourse of the regime subjected to international sanctions, echoes one of the deepest ideological underpinnings of the Arab Left: the paradigm of the Third Worldist and anti-imperalism. For some, this feeling is tempered by their commitment to the popular character of the revolt, in others it is first multiplied by the increasing internationalization of the conflict.

Moreover, the Islamist dynamic of the Arab Spring in which forces from the Muslim Brotherhood have arrived at the gates of power in Morocco, Tunisia and Egypt, has undoubtedly caused, in part of the left, a backlash: the Arab revolts are now feared as they may lead to Islamist hegemony across the region.

While the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Jordan, and the Tunisia Ennahda movement have supported the Syrian opposition, the position of a large part of the Arab left on Syria reflects its own confrontation with the forces of political Islam. Thus parties usually committed to ‘revolution’ and ‘progressism’, and for some, to ‘Marxism’, paradoxically now prefer a negotiated and gradual transition in Syria, because they fear the outcome of this revolution.

The Washington Post reports: As the Arab world’s bloodiest revolt continues to maim, kill and ravage lives on an ever-escalating scale, anti-American sentiments are hardening among those struggling to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad, in ways that could have profound consequences for the country and the region in a post-Assad era.

America, once regarded by the Syrian opposition as a natural friend in its struggle for greater freedoms against a regime long at odds with the West, increasingly is being viewed with suspicion and resentment for its failure to offer little more than verbal encouragement to the revolutionaries.

In the nearly 17 months since Syrians joined the clamor for change that swept the Middle East last year, Tunisians, Egyptians and Libyans have voted in elections, chosen new leaders and embarked, however messily, on democratic transitions.

Syria, by contrast, is hurtling ever deeper into an all-out conflict with no end in sight, “and all we get is words,” said Yasser Abu Ali, a spokesman for one of the Free Syrian Army battalions in the town of al-Bab, which lies 30 miles northeast of Aleppo.

The rebels say they don’t want direct military intervention in the form of troops on the ground. But they have repeatedly appealed for a no-fly zone similar to the effort that helped Libyan rebels topple Moammar Gaddafi last year and for supplies of heavy weapons to counter the regime’s vastly superior firepower, say rebels and opposition figures.

When the regime falls, as the rebel battalion spokesman assumes it eventually will, Syrians will not forget that their pleas for help went unanswered, he said.

“America will pay a price for this,” he said. “America is going to lose the friendship of Syrians, and no one will trust them anymore. Already we don’t trust them at all.”

It is not entirely accurate that the United States is doing nothing to help the Syrian opposition, nor is it clear what more it usefully could or should be doing, analysts say. A debate is raging within the Obama administration over whether it is prudent to step up support for the rebels now that the effort to promote a diplomatic solution through the United Nations has failed.

President Obama has already authorized the provision of non­lethal aid to the opposition, including communications and satellite equipment. The State Department has been reaching out to Assad opponents inside Syria with a view to identifying potential allies and recipients of assistance.

Syrian opposition figures say they have received some financial help to buy arms from U.S. allies Saudi Arabia and Qatar. NATO member Turkey is also facilitating rebel movements across its 550-mile border with Syria, including, some Syrians say, the transfer of arms.

But the assistance has been small-scale, intermittent, and dwarfed by the demands of an expanding battlefield that now covers all corners of the country and has escalated to include the use of air power by the government. If some of the weaponry deployed against Assad’s forces has been provided with outside help, most rebel commanders seem unaware of its provenance. [Continue reading…]

At Syria Comment, Ehsani, a Syrian-American banker, writes: Like nearly 25 million other Syrians, one cannot help but feel stunned and exasperated by the events engulfing our country. How did we get here? How can a country long associated with “stability” suddenly unravel and enter what seems to most like a black hole?

Things could not look more differently back in November 2000. Barely few months into his Presidency, the 34 year-old new leader declared the closing of the Mezze prison and the release of hundreds of political prisoners. Those hoping for the birth of a new Syria felt vindicated. Surely, the past thirty years of the heavy handedness of the much feared Moukhabarat agencies would soon give way to a new atmosphere of political, legal and economic reform.

Michele Kilo, Burhan Ghalioun, Riad Seif, Aref Dalila, Anwar al-Bunni, Kamal al-Labwani , Mamoun al-Homsi, Omar Amiralay, Suhair al-Atassi, Hussein al-Awdat, Antoun al-Makdisi, Fawaz Tillo, Habib Salih, Haitham al-Maleh and Radwan Ziadeh certainly all thought so as they made up the major figures of what later became known as the “Damascus Spring”.

Groups of like-minded people were suddenly meeting in private houses and discussing political matters and social questions. Such locations were soon referred to as “mundatat” or “salons”. Naturally, political demands soon grew into what was later referred to as the “Manifesto of the 99”. The principal demand consisted of the cancellation of the state of emergency and abolition of martial law and special courts; the release of all political prisoners; the return without fear of prosecution of political exiles; and the right to form political parties and civil organization. To these was often added the more precisely political demand that Article 8 of the Syrian constitution be repealed. The movement never called for regime change nor challenged the legitimacy of Bashar al-Assad’s succession to the presidency.

Participants of The Damascus Spring were ahead of their time. The Arab world was yet to experience a spring of any kind. It is worth noting that the salons debated not only Article 8 but many political and social questions from the position of women to the nature of education methods and the Arab Israeli conflict.

How long did reforms last?

By February 2001, the security heads had seen enough. The young President must have been warned of the slippery slope nature that his promised reforms were likely to morph into.

A sudden change of heart caused such Political forums to be forcibly closed. Seif, Riad al-Turk, Mamoun Al-Homsi, Aref Dalila, and others were arrested and charged with “attempting to change the constitution by illegal means” and “inciting racial and sectarian strife” and were sentenced by the Damascus Criminal Court to five years in jail. The other eight activists including Walid al-Bunni, Kamal al-Labwani, and Fawwaz Tello were referred to the Supreme State Security Court which issued prison sentences between two to 10 years.

Only one salon, the Jamal al-Atassi National Dialogue Forum, was still permitted to function. The Atassi forum was finally also shut down in 2005 after a member had read a statement from the banned Syrian Muslim Brotherhood. The final red line was crossed. [Continue reading…]

Noam Sheizaf writes: Dr. Avner Cohen, the unofficial historian of the Israeli nuclear program, noticed today that a paragraph that appeared in the Hebrew print edition of a Haaretz op-ed by Sefi Rachlevski revealed for the first time a few details of a little-known incident from 1998.

While arguing against “the gamble” of going to war with Iran, Rachlevski writes:

In 1998, Saddam Hussein, weakened by the American no-flight zone, made one hollow threat. In response, [Prime Minister Binyamin] Netanyahu ordered to consider the arming of Jericho missiles. An order that wasn’t issued even during the [1973] Yom Kippur War, under a fear of destruction. Three people went to Netanyahu: Ariel Sharon, [former chief of staff and minister] Rafael Eitan, and [Chief of Staff] Amnon Lipkin-Shahak. They told him to relax, take a pill, and forget about it. Some things even a prime minister shouldn’t do. Will [Ehud] Barak be one of the three this time around? I don’t know.

The Washington Post reports: Syrian President Bashar al-Assad made a rare appearance with the head of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council on Tuesday in video footage broadcast on state television.

Assad has made one appearance since the assassination of four top security officials on July 18. In video footage broadcast the following day, he was shown swearing in a new defense minister.

Saeed Jalili, a top security official in Iran and the country’s lead nuclear negotiator, visited Damascus on Tuesday to discuss the fate of 48 Iranians captured by rebels just outside the capital on Saturday, as well as the ongoing crisis in Syria.

“Kidnapping innocent people is not acceptable anywhere in the world,” Jalili said, according to the official Islamic Republic News Agency. He said Iran would do what it could to “secure release of the 48 innocent pilgrims kidnapped in Syria.”

He also said the only way to resolve the unrest in the country would be to find a “Syrian solution.”

The Iranian government claims that the captives were Shiite pilgrims on their way to Sayida Zeinab, a Muslim shrine south of Damascus that is popular with Shiites. But rebels assert that the Iranians belong to their country’s elite Revolutionary Guard Corps and were on a mission to help the Assad government battle Syria’s persistent 17-month-long uprising.

Jalili’s visit came a day after Syria’s prime minister defected to Jordan, becoming the most senior official to quit Assad’s embattled government, according to rebels who claim they helped him escape.

The reported defection of Prime Minister Riyad al-Hijab buoyed the rebels, who saw it as a clear sign that top officials are abandoning Assad as he attempts

A statement attributed to Hijab and read on the al-Jazeera Arabic news channel Monday said he had resigned to protest his government’s harsh tactics in confronting the opposition.

“I am announcing that I am defecting from this regime, which is a murderous and terrorist regime,” the statement said. “I join the ranks of this dignified revolution.”

Real power in Syria is wielded by Assad’s inner circle of friends, family and the powerful chiefs of his security forces. But the defection of the head of Assad’s government nonetheless sent a strong signal that his support is rapidly unraveling even within the ranks of those assumed to still be loyal.

Hijab, a former agriculture minister and a member of the ruling Baath Party, is a Sunni Muslim from the eastern town of Deir al-Zour, which has been in open revolt against the government for more than a year.

McClatchy reports: For the Hafeiz family in Ramallah, the violence raging in Syria is just a computer click away.

The youngest members of the family, who are descended from Palestinian refugees who fled central Israel in 1967, are divided between Jordan, Syria and the West Bank. They’ve always relied on email and Skype to keep in touch, but since violence broke out in Syria more than a year ago, the computer has become a lifeline.

“I have their email passwords and they have mine. It’s a way of checking up on each other – the ones who can still use computers, at least,” said Sami Hafeiz, a 22-year-old student in Ramallah. “They are very active online.”

He showed McClatchy Newspapers some of the recent conversations he’d held with his cousins.

“You see here, they are worried about food, and medicine for our uncle. They write here about trying to get out, but it is impossible,” he said, scrolling through the older messages. “Some of them have now joined the fighting, others have not.”

The fate of some 500,000 Palestinian refugees currently living in Syria has recently become more perilous, as the violence that has raged in Syria for more than a year finally reached the doorstep of some of that country’s largest Palestinian refugee camps.

Last month, the Yarmouk refugee camp just south of Damascus became a focus of fighting after forces loyal to President Bashar Assad used live ammunition to disperse a demonstration, killing dozens; on Thursday, mortar rounds struck near the camp, killing 20 people, according to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, the international agency with responsibility for providing services to millions of Palestinian refugees throughout the Middle East. The U.N. agency said it did not know how many of the casualties were Palestinian, however.

“There were Palestinians killed in the fighting before, but this is when they realized that Assad was not going to spare them,” Hafeiz said.

The advocacy group Human Rights Watch has noted that Palestinians have increasingly picked up arms and joined the rebel Free Syrian Army. Exact numbers are unknown, but in recent months lists of casualties published by anti-Assad groups include dozens of Palestinians. Col. Kassem Saadeddine, a spokesman for the Free Syrian Army, told a Lebanese newspaper that “Palestinians are fighting alongside us, and they are well trained.” [Continue reading…]

Reuters adds: An aid convoy left the West Bank city of Ramallah on Sunday carrying food and medicine in a symbol of support for Palestinian refugees caught up in the crisis in Syria.

“Today the first convoy will leave from here, from the West Bank, from Palestinian soil towards Syria,” Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said at a press event marking the event.

An official donations drive netted around $650,000 worth of food and medical aid from Palestinian companies, businessmen, and individuals during the charitable month of Ramadan.

A one percent cut of salaries from the Palestinian Authority’s cash-strapped public sector went toward the convoy.

BBC Radio Wales: The news from Syria gets bleaker by the day. More than a hundred thousand have already fled as refugees, the killing continues, and Kofi Annan resigns as UN peace envoy, declaring the diplomatic task impossible in the present situation.

Syria has a rich mosaic of spiritual traditions, including some of the earliest of all Christian churches: but for how much longer? What future is there for religious minorities if the regime falls? And to what extent is religion a factor in this conflict?

Roy Jenkins is joined by four people with personal experience of Syria: Dr Harry Hagopian, international lawyer and consultant, and former Assistant General Secretary of the Middle East Council of Churches; the Rev Nadim Nassar, the only Syrian priest in the Church of England, and director of the Awareness Foundation, an educational charity founded in response to religious conflict around the world; British/Syrian journalist Robin Yassin-Kassab, author of The Road From Damascus and co-editor of the quarterly magazine The Critical Muslim; the Rev Christopher Gilham, a Congregational minister in Pembrokeshire who has made many visits to Syria over the years, and retains strong links with the country.

This broadcast lasts 30 minutes:

Rami G. Khouri writes: Amid the many scenarios for Syria are two widely discussed possibilities: that President Bashar Assad will respond to his imminent collapse by retreating with his Alawite compatriots to an Alawite mini-state in the northwestern coastal area of Syria; and that Syria will fragment into a series of smaller entities based on ethnicity and religion – Kurdish, Druze, Alawite, Sunni, Christian and so on.

I suspect that both of these dire expectations are wrong, though each carries within it a hint of what is possible, not only for Syria but also for much of the Arab world. In between the centralized police and welfare state and a collapse into fragmented ethnic statelets may be a more feasible and appropriate third way, one that is based on strong decentralization of regional power and identity within a looser national superstructure.

This might be an appropriate governance model for much of the Arab world, whose own citizens have never had the opportunity to shape their countries’ borders, values or policies. I am assuming that many of the Arab world’s troubles reflect a critical lack of legitimacy and natural cohesion, which has allowed so many states to fall into the hands of individuals and families that passed on rule, or intended to do so, as a personal inheritance, regardless of the will of the citizenry (Hafez Assad, Saddam Hussein, Ali Abdullah Saleh, Moammar Gadhafi, Omar Hassan Bashir, a dozen or so Lebanese families, not to mention the hereditary principle in a handful of monarchies).

Chronic autocracy in the Middle East has led to many other deficiencies and distortions that have defined our countries for generations. These include exaggerated militarism, economic frailty, recurring political violence, profound national vulnerability, corruption, lack of citizen participation in public life, and mass pauperization in the non-oil-producing states.

Syria is a perfect example of all that ails the modern Arab world, and it is no surprise that now is its turn to offer us pictures of tanks and jet fighters bombing civilian quarters of ancient cities, as the central government’s authority over the land shrinks.

In Syria and elsewhere, the past century of Arab statehood has been a tale of state birth and formation in the early decades, rapid socio-economic development in the middle of the last century, then the start of a downward cycle in the 1970s that included oil-fuelled massive distortions, consolidation of security-dominated and family-dominated leaderships for life, and wars and civil strife, which involved domestic forces, regional states and foreign powers alike.

The violent end of the Assad regime in Syria will give the citizens of that country the opportunity to configure their country’s institutions of governance according to their own values, identities and priorities, as Tunisians, Egyptians, Yemenis and Libyans have started to do. This process of national self-determination usually occurs when states are born, not a century later, though this is one of the peculiarities of modern Arab history, with its colonial heritage and the stultifying impacts of the Arab-Israeli conflict, the oil boom and the Cold War. [Continue reading…]