Syria

The quality of mercy … looking beyond Iran’s ghost republic

Paul Hemphill Leave a comment

The quality of mercy is not strained;
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.
William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

Whilst most media commentary focuses on questions like “will it be any different this time?”, “will outside incitement or intervention actually work?” , and “who can or will replace the current regime?”, this article by Unherd’s Us editor Sohrab Ahmari, and the comments thereon go variously beyond, behind, or beneath, to consider the potential, if any, for those famous “bright sunny uplands” that Churchill foresaw at the end of mortal strife. A précis follows, and also, a discussion of past, recent and contemporary efforts to realise the quality of mercy.

Beyond Iran’s Ghost Republic 

What persists, for now, is a ghost regime: a sad remnant of the last of the great modern revolutions that, like some apparition in a haunted house, is condemned to remain at the scene of its own demise …The Islamic Republic clamoured so much for death, sweet and glorious death, it lost sight of the basics of life: bread, water, electricity. Ghosts don’t need such things, but people do
Sohrab Ahmari, Unherd, 8 January 2026

Most media attention on Iran’s latest unrest fixes on the usual coordinates: will this time be any different from 1999, 2009, 2017, or 2022? Will foreign powers, quietly nudging or overtly intervening, succeed where the street protests have failed? And, inevitably, who might step into the vacuum should the current regime falter? These questions, while immediate and superficially urgent, only scratch the surface. Beneath them lies a far subtler and, perhaps, more consequential inquiry: what kind of life, if any, might the Iranian people permit themselves once the machinery of coercion is loosened? Where, if anywhere, are the “bright sunny uplands” that journalists, analysts, and policymakers treat as both metaphorical and material destinations?

The Islamic Republic has already, in practical terms, collapsed into a ghost. Its proxies lie defanged, its currency teeters toward ruin, and the strictures of ideological policing have been quietly suspended in many cities. It clings to slogans, chants, and ceremonial gestures – Death to Israel! Death to the Great Satan! –  long after the infrastructure, credibility, and political capital to back them have evaporated. Ghosts do not need electricity, or potable water, or functioning hospitals, but living people do. And the contrast between the familiar deprivation of Tehran and the gleaming towers, highways, and shopping malls of Istanbul, Dubai, and Riyadh is almost unbearable: the regime sold transcendence and martyrdom, but delivered only rationed life, graft, and perpetual economic anxiety.

Yet a collapse of the state apparatus does not automatically produce moral renewal. This is where both the film It Was Just an Accident and the commentary converge. The plot of Jafar Panahi’s latest work stages a moral test familiar to anyone who has witnessed, read, or lived through the aftermath of institutionalized terror: a man who suffered under the regime confronts a former torturer. The temptation to exact revenge – to allow history’s pain to be paid back in equal or greater measure – is immediate and compelling. Some characters urge restraint, others insist that justice without retribution is an idle abstraction. The film’s tension mirrors a larger societal question: can a people accustomed to cycles of repression, humiliation, and ideological fervour imagine a life beyond revenge, beyond the simple arithmetic of punishment and vengeance?

The comments on Ahmari’s article highlight the same moral and civic dimensions. Several voices underscore a paradox that no headline can capture: the Islamic Republic’s obsession with death and martyrdom was not merely symbolic; it was infrastructurally catastrophic. Water systems were ignored, electricity grids left to decay, the economy warped around fantasies of resistance and martyrdom. Yet, this same absolutist, apocalyptic impulse is not unique to Iran. As some observers wryly note, the West is not immune to ideologies that glorify moral purity and abstract heroism at the expense of lived reality. Certainty, as one commentator put it, often replaces curiosity; neat explanations flatter intelligence and virtue, while obscuring the messy work of sustaining life.

History offers uncomfortably blunt lessons. After the Khmer Rouge, Cambodia did not attempt exhaustive justice; it largely absorbed foot soldiers back into ordinary life, relying on a rough amnesty and the communal refusal of vengeance.   This might be Iran’s imagined future: to survive and flourish, ordinary citizens may need to exercise a similarly imperfect, sometimes clumsy, forgiveness. And yet the impulse to retribution is alive and articulate: Hamid in Panahi’s film embodies the argument that the fanatics who ran the Islamic Republic had no regard for life, and must be repaid in like coin.

Here, we converge on a truth both grim and hopeful: Iran’s fate will not be determined by foreign powers, strikes, or special forces. The country’s reckoning cannot be outsourced. The only way to allow the blood to run dry, to create the possibility –  however tenuous – of “bright sunny uplands,” is through an internal moral negotiation: a willingness to forgive, to rebuild, to live with one another despite the weight of memory and injustice. Forgiveness, in this context, is not an ideal; it is a strategic, civic, and existential necessity. Anything else risks a continuation of cycles that have already brought the country to the nadir described in headlines, film, and commentary alike.

The wider reflection, then, is less about predicting the regime’s fall than understanding the texture of human life that might emerge afterward. If Iranian society cannot cultivate mechanisms for restraint, empathy, and imperfect justice, then the collapse of the ghostly structures of the Islamic Republic will be little more than a ceremonial end to one cycle of totalising politics – ready to be replaced by another. Yet, if these “bright sunny uplands” are glimpsed, they will be the product not of weapons, tweets, or sanctions, but of courage, patience, and the audacious, often maddeningly slow, work of ordinary humans learning to forgive. In that possibility – fragile, improbable, and entirely human –  lies the truer story of Iran, past, present, and perhaps future.

Forgiveness and the Possibility of Civic Renewal

Forgiving is not forgetting; it’s actually remembering –  remembering and not using your right to hit back. It’s a second chance for a new beginning. And the remembering part is particularly important. Especially if you don’t want to repeat what happened.
Attributed to South African Bishop Desmond Tutu

When societies emerge from cycles of repression, violence, and ideological zeal, the first question is often: who will exact justice? Who will punish, and who will pay? Yet history and moral reflection suggest that the question of revenge is only the beginning. More crucial is the question of forgiveness: whether communities traumatized by systemic harm can find a way to release the past, preserve dignity, and allow life to take root. Iran, in the aftermath of decades of ideological extremism, structural neglect, and repeated cycles of protest and repression, faces precisely this moral crossroads.

Desmond Tutu, whose work with South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission helped a nation emerge from the moral abyss of apartheid, offers a clarifying lens. He reminds us that forgiveness is not weakness, nor a cover-up, nor the erasure of injustice. “To forgive is not just to be altruistic; it is the best form of self-interest,” he said. “If you can find it in yourself to forgive, then you are no longer chained to the perpetrator.” Forgiveness, in this sense, liberates the victim as much as it addresses the harm done. It is a deliberate, often risky act that preserves dignity, confronts wrongdoing honestly, and opens space for a new civic beginning. True reconciliation, Tutu insists, does not soften the truth: “Superficial reconciliation can bring only superficial healing. True reconciliation exposes the awfulness, the abuse, the hurt, the truth.” Forgiving does not mean forgetting; it is remembering without exercising the right to strike back, allowing life to continue without being perpetually tethered to past harm.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu 1931-21

The necessity of forgiveness becomes clearer when we look beyond Iran to societies that have struggled with similar dilemmas. South Africa’s post-apartheid transition, Northern Ireland’s gradual peace after the Troubles, and the painstaking reconciliation efforts in postwar Bosnia demonstrate that societies can arrest cycles of revenge when moral courage is coupled with institutional frameworks. Mechanisms such as truth commissions, negotiated agreements, or cultural rituals allow communities to confront trauma without succumbing to vengeance.

In South Africa, perpetrators were not erased from memory, but acknowledging harm, offering testimony, and sometimes asking for forgiveness created a space in which ordinary life could resume without blood-soaked reprisals. In Northern Ireland, decades of sectarian violence required not only formal accords like the Good Friday Agreement but persistent civic labor, everyday compromises, and the cultivation of mutual recognition across communities. Peace did not arrive because conflict ended; it arrived because people, institutions, and leaders collectively committed to the moral and civic work of restraint, remembrance, and imperfect forgiveness. Bosnia, by contrast, demonstrates how fragile such processes can be: tribunals, localized reconciliation projects, and political compromises made progress possible, but resentment and mistrust lingered for decades.

The lesson is that the labor of forgiveness is painstaking, morally taxing, and never complete; it requires social frameworks, cultural patience, and individual courage.

Other contemporary crises provide a darker counterpoint. Syria, ravaged by civil war, sectarian fragmentation, and foreign intervention, shows how cycles of violence can ossify when forgiveness is absent and survival becomes the primary moral calculus. Gaza and the Palestinian territories, trapped in occupation, blockade, and repeated military incursions, reveal how structural oppression perpetuates the need for revenge, making reconciliation seem both urgent and impossible. Myanmar and Sudan illustrate what happens when accountability fails entirely: persecution, displacement, and entrenched cycles of terror prevent civic life from taking root, leaving ordinary people imprisoned by histories they cannot escape.

In the Iranian context, the challenge is both urgent and intimate. A society habituated to ideological terror and systemic neglect faces a moral crossroads: the temptation of revenge is immediate, visceral, and understandable, but it risks reproducing the very cycles of harm that have brought the country to its present nadir. Panahi’s film It Was Just an Accident dramatizes this dilemma: victims confront their former torturer and wrestle with the question of retribution versus restraint. It is a moral negotiation that mirrors the broader societal question. True recovery cannot be imposed from the outside; no foreign military, sanctions regime, or spectacular intervention can replace the painstaking, often agonizing internal work that forgiveness demands.

Tutu’s reflections provide a moral compass for this work. Forgiveness is neither altruistic fantasy nor moral softening; it is self-liberating, dignity-affirming, and socially generative. “When we see others as the enemy, we risk becoming what we hate. When we oppress others, we end up oppressing ourselves. All of our humanity is dependent upon recognizing the humanity in others.” For Iran, the stakes of this insight are enormous. The collapse of the regime, already a ghost of its former ideological self, creates the space for moral and civic imagination, but it is up to the Iranian people whether that space becomes a playground for revenge or a canvas for rebuilding.

Viewed comparatively, Iran’s predicament is neither unique nor exceptional. Across South Africa, Northern Ireland, Bosnia, Syria, Gaza, Myanmar, and Sudan, we see the same pattern: cycles of violence thrive when forgiveness is absent and collapse is coupled with fear, trauma, and structural weakness. Yet the examples of South Africa and Northern Ireland also offer hope. Even societies deeply scarred by ideology and systemic harm can, through deliberate moral labor, cultivate restraint, empathy, and civic imagination. The “bright sunny uplands” are not gifts of fortune or foreign intervention; they are the product of human choice, moral courage, and the willingness – however faltering and tentative –  to forgive, remember, and begin again.

For Iran, the possibility of civic renewal rests on this moral labor. To forgive is to free oneself from the chains of the past, to preserve human dignity, and to allow ordinary life – bread, water, work, community – to flourish once more. It is difficult, risky, and imperfect work, but it is the only path to a society that can move beyond the cycles of ideological terror, revenge, and ruin. In choosing forgiveness, Iranians do not erase the horrors of the past; they confront them honestly, remember them fully, and, in so doing, claim a future that is no longer dictated by blood, fear, or vengeance.

For more on the Middle East in In That Howling Infinite, see A Middle East Miscellany, Messing with the Mullahs – America’s phoney war? and “Because of …” Iran’s voice of freedom

The cycle of revenge. Iranians must learn to forgive

Iran’s cycle of revenge

A still from the film ‘It was Just an Accident,’ directed by Jafar Panahi. mk2 Films

Sohrab Ahmari, Unherd, 8 January 2026

It’s become a running joke on Iranian social media — screen captures of Western headlines regarding previous popular uprisings in the country that read: “This isn’t like previous protests in Iran.” The message is that this latest tumult spells the end of the Islamic Republic. Except those earlier headlines appeared in 1999, 2009, 2017, 2022. The storms of popular discontent raged and then dissipated, but the regime didn’t budge.

We are told that the current uprising, sparked initially by anger over inflation, is different. But contrary to expectations, we’re unlikely to see a spectacular end to the regime in the manner of the ouster of Ceaușescu or the fall of the Berlin Wall — the 1989 moment whose eternal return liberals the world over yearn for. No, there won’t be a spectacular collapse, because the Islamic Republic of Iran has, in a sense, already fallen.

Its Arab proxies are defanged. Its nuclear program is partially buried under President Trump’s bunker busters. Its currency is reaching Zimbabwean levels. And it has largely given up enforcing its hijab and other Shiite morality norms in many urban centers. A much more likely ending is one in which more nationalist elements within the current regime take over, with or without a little push by outside powers.

What persists, for now, is a ghost regime: a sad remnant of the last of the great modern revolutions that, like some apparition in a haunted house, is condemned to remain at the scene of its own demise, faintly repeating the slogans of its former vitality, wondering if anyone still cares. Death to Israel! Death to the enemies of the jurisconsult! Death to the Great Satan!

The Islamic Republic clamored so much for death, sweet and glorious death, it lost sight of the basics of life: bread, water, electricity. . . . Ghosts don’t need such things, but people do. Especially people who look around at the likes of Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia, and behold gleaming prosperity, rising living standards, normality. Their own lot, meanwhile, is defined by diminished expectations, massive graft, and life and treasure wasted on building an arc of “resistance” against the Jewish state that was destroyed in a matter of months.

Against this haunted backdrop, it’s up to the Iranian people to decide, now, how they want to live together, and with their region and the world. Will they forgive each other? Or repeat the cycle of totalizing politics, repression, and revenge that brought them to their current nadir in the first place? As it happens, Iran’s greatest living director, Jafar Panahi, addresses these questions in his latest film, It Was Just an Accident, which hit the screen in major cities just as the latest unrest began.

A taut thriller in the style of Jean-Pierre Melville, the film tells the story of Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri in a quietly stunning performance), a worker who happens upon, and kidnaps, Eghbal (Ebrahim Azizi), the intelligence officer who’d tortured him when Vahid joined a labor strike over unpaid wages.

Vahid is about to bury Eghbal in the middle of the desert when he’s gripped by doubt. The real Eghbal had lost a leg fighting in the Syrian Civil War. But the man in the shallow grave insists that his prosthetic leg — whose squeaking sound led Vahid to believe he’d found his erstwhile torturer — is a recent addition. What if he’s got the wrong man? What if he’s about to murder an innocent? This simple doubt becomes the driving force of the film’s plot.

Vahid reunites with a fellow prisoner — Salar, a dissident intellectual — who urges him to free Eghbal, or whoever he is. “This business doesn’t have an ending,” Salar warns Vahid. This could mean that Vahid could face real-world consequences. But it also suggests that the blood in Iran will never run dry if people continually seek revenge. Vahid isn’t convinced. He’s lost everything to the regime Eghbal represents, and he’s bent on making him pay.

Salar refuses to help directly, but he introduces Vahid to a photographer, Shiva, who was also imprisoned for her political activities and tortured by Eghbal. Other former prisoners soon join the group. One of them, Hamid (Mohammad Ali Elyasmehr), instantly identifies the man in Vahid’s van as their torturer (by his smell) and thrills at the thought of inflicting suffering and death upon Eghbal.

Others are more hesitant, partly out of the same doubt that initially stays Vahid’s hand, but partly over deeper qualms: Will torturing and murdering a killer improve anything? No, Shiva and others begin to think. But Hamid is adamant, and it’s notable that while the rest of them are professional-class types who’ve landed on their feet, he’s been less fortunate (and, the film suggests, he was something of a loser even before his prison stint).

Thus unfolds the unlikely moral and philosophical debate folded into the film’s thriller script — a debate that confronts many ordinary Iranians opposed to the Islamic regime. Panahi, to his credit, gives Hamid a decent chance to make his case: to wit, the fanatics who run the Islamic Republic have no regard for the lives they ruin, and anything short of a willingness to act politically — in the Schmittian, friend-enemy sense of the term — is just playing around.

But in the end, the other side “wins” the debate. The kidnapped man’s phone rings. It’s his daughter, crying for her father to come home because her pregnant mother is unresponsive. The gang treks over to his house and drives mother and child to the hospital, where the baby is safely delivered. The group even pools cash to tip the nurses, as custom demands.

Only afterward is it revealed that — spoiler alert — the man in the van really is the torturer who’d subjected them to dozens of mock executions; who’d beaten Vahid so badly, he’s developed kidney problems; who threatened to rape the women before killing them (since, under Shariah law, virgins go straight to paradise).

I won’t spoil more of the plot. What matters is that the Hamid temptation — let us torture the former torturers, execute the executioners — is all too real, and it can derail whatever comes next into another national dead-end. No foreign intervention and no Trumpian Delta Force can save Iran from that outcome. It is up to Iranians themselves to forgive each other, and finally permit the blood to run dry.

Sohrab Ahmari is the US editor of UnHerd and the author, most recently, of Tyranny, Inc: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty — and What To Do About I

Feints, refrains and unfinished business. 2025 in review

Paul Hemphill 1 Comment

And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Mathew Arnold, Dover Beach

We called 2024 a “year of everything, everywhere, all at once”, and it earned the name. Crises collided, news arrived faster than we could process it, and the world seemed to exist in a state of constant shock. 2025 did not bring relief. Instead, the chaos began to settle. Wars dragged on, political divides hardened, social tensions deepened, and technology reshaped how we saw and understood it all.

It was the year the world stopped exploding in real time and started being what it had already become: messy, uneven, morally complicated, and stubbornly persistent. A year, indeed, in a world of echoes, refrains and unfinished business. And we spent the year watching power bargain brazenly in plain sight, trying to describe what was happening while it unfolded around us.

From Gaza to Ukraine, Sudan to Syria, from America’s self-inflicted fracture to Australia’s sudden wake-up call on Bondi Bondi, 2025 forced a reckoning: the world did not pause, but it did sort itself – deciding what we would notice, what we would ignore, and what we would learn to live with. Alongside human crises came the continuing advance of AI and chatbots, and the dominion of the algorithms that now govern attention, proving that disruption can be structural as well as geopolitical.

Gaza: War, Then “Ceasefire”

The war in Gaza dominated the year internationally and here in Australia, even as attention ebbed and flowed. Military operations continued for months, followed eventually by a “ceasefire” – a word doing far more work than it should or even justified. Fighting paused, hostages living and dead were returned and prisoners released, but the devastation remained: tens of thousands dead, cities demolished, humanitarian catastrophe unresolved. And the causes of the consequences standing still amidst the ruins and the rubble.

Western governments continued to back Israel while expressing concern for civilians, a contradiction that grew harder to defend, while street protests and online anger seethed all across the world. At the same time, antisemitism surged globally, often hiding behind the language of anti-Zionism. Two realities existed together, and too many people insisted on choosing only one.

By the end of the year, the war had not been resolved – merely frozen. Trust in Western moral leadership had been badly damaged, and Israelis and Palestinians remain in bitter limbo.

See Gaza sunrise or false dawn? Spectacle or Strategy

Iran, Israel and America’s bunker busters

Long-simmering tensions between Israel and Iran spilled into open conflict. What had once been indirect – proxies, cyberattacks, covert strikes – became visible. A brief but destructive war of missile exchanges ended with the United States asserting ordinance, deterrence and control.

The episode was brief but telling. It showed that America still reaches for its guns quickly, even as it struggles to define long-term goals. Another line was crossed, then quickly absorbed into the background of “normal” geopolitics.

Russia, Ukraine and Trump’s “Peace”

Ukraine entered 2025 mired in stalemate. Front lines barely moved. Casualties continued to mount. Western support held, but with clear signs of fatigue. And Donald Trump’s re-emergence reshaped the conversation. His promise to deliver instant “peace” reframed the war not as a question of justice or sovereignty, but of exhaustion. Peace was no longer about what Ukraine deserved, but about what the world was tired of sustaining and what the “art of the deal” could deliver.

The war didn’t end. It simply became something many wanted to stop thinking about. Not Ukraine and Russia, but. The carnage continues.

Donald Trump’s one-way crush on Vladimir gave us the one of the+most cringeworthy moments in global politics – Trump greeting the Russian president in Alaska: As the US president rolled out the red carpet for the world’s most dangerous autocrat, Russia’s attack on Ukraine accelerated. Trump got precisely nothing out of the meeting, except for the chance to hang out with a gangster he so obviously admires and of whom he is embarrassingly in awe.

Syria: Free, but stranded at the crossroads

A year after Assad’s fall, Syria remained unstable and unresolved. The regime was gone, but the future was unclear. Old sectarian tensions resurfaced, often in bloodshed, new power struggles emerged, powerful neighbours staked claims and  justice for past crimes remained distant.

Syria in 2025 was neither a success story nor a collapse – but suspended between heaven and hell, a country trying to exist after catastrophe with the rest of the world largely moving on.

See Between heaven and hell … Syria at the Crossroads

Women in Damascus celebrate the fall of the Assad regime

Sudan: what genocide actually looks like

Sudan’s civil war continued with little international attention. Mass killing, ethnic cleansing, famine, and displacement unfolded slowly and relentlessly. This was genocide without spectacle. No clear narrative. No sustained outrage. It showed how mass atrocity can now occur not in secrecy, but in plain sight – and still be ignored.

see The most nihilistic war ever …Sudan’s waking nightmare

America: a country divided against itself

The United States spent 2025 deeply divided, with no sign of healing. Pew Research polling showed that seven out of ten republicans think that the opposite side is immoral while six of ten democrats thinks the same of their rivals.

Trump’s return to power sharpened those divisions. His administration governed aggressively: mass deportations, punitive tariffs, the dismantling of foreign aid, political retribution, and pressure on democratic institutions. The country looked inward and outward at the same time – less cooperative, more transactional, more openly nationalist. Democratic norms eroded not overnight, but through constant stress and disregard. With three years still to run and the tell-tale midterms approaching, allies and cronies are adjusting, bickering rivals are taking notes, and uncertainty has become the defining feature of American leadership. Meanwhile, #47 is slapping his name on everything he can christen, from bitcoins to battleships.

See, for light relief, Danger Angel … the ballad of Laura Loomer 

Monroe Redux: the return of “the Ugly American”

US foreign policy took on a blunt, old-fashioned tone. Pressure on Canada and Mexico increased. Talk of annexing Greenland resurfaced. Venezuela, caught in the maw of Yanqui bullying and bluster, waits nervously for Washington’s next move. The administration promised imminent land operations – and then bombed Nigeria! The revival of the old Monroe Doctrine felt, as baseball wizz Yogi Berra once remarked, like déjà vu all over again, not as strategy, but as instinct. Influence asserted, consultation discarded. The “ugly American” was back, and unapologetic.

See Tales of Yankee power … Why Venezuela, and why now?

Europe at a inflection point

Europe in 2025 didn’t collapse, as many pundits suggested it might, but it shifted. Far-right ideas gained ground even where far-right parties didn’t win and remained, for now, on the fringes albeit closer to electoral success. Borders tightened; policies hardened; street protests proliferated – against immigration and against Israel, Support for Ukraine continued, but cautiously. The continent stood at a crossroads: still committed to liberal values in theory, but increasingly selective in practice.

Uncle Sam’s  cold-shoulder

Rumbling away in the background throughout year was the quiet but  cumulative alienation of America’s allies. Not with a single rupture, but through a thousand small slights. transactional diplomacy dressed up as realism, alliances treated as invoices rather than covenants, multilateralism dismissed as weakness. Europe learned that security guarantees come with a mood swing; the Middle East heard policy announced via spectacle; Asia watched reassurance coexist uneasily with unpredictability.

The new dispensation was illustrated by the Trump National Security Strategy. It is at once candid and contradictory: it outlines a narrower, realist vision of American interests, emphasising sovereignty, burden-sharing, industrial renewal, and strategic clarity, yet it is riddled with silences, evasions, and tensions between rhetoric and likely action. Allies are scolded for weakness while the document avoids naming Russia’s aggression, underplays China, and projects American cultural anxieties onto Europe. These contradictions expose both strategic incoherence and the limits of paper doctrine against presidential temperament, leaving Europe facing an irreversible rupture in trust and revealing a strategy as much about America’s insecurities as its actual global posture.

The post-WW2 order has not so much been dismantled as shrugged at, and indeed, shrugged off. Trust eroded not because the United States has withdrawn from the world, but because it has remained present without being reliable, and presumed itself to be in charge. Power, exercised loudly but inconsistently, has discovered an old truth: allies can endure disagreement, but they struggle with contempt.

Australia in 2025 … high flight and crash landing

Though beset by a multitude of crises – the cost of living, housing, health and education services – the Albanese Labor government was returned comfortably in May, helped by a divided, incoherent, and seemingly out of touch opposition. For the rest the year, federal politics felt strangely frictionless with policy drift passing for stability. The Coalition remained locked in internal conflict, unable to present a credible alternative. The Greens, chastened by electoral defeat and in many formerly friendly quarters, ideological disillusionment, treaded water.

But beneath the surface, social cohesion frayed. Immigration debates sharpened. Antisemitism rose noticeably, no longer something Australians could pretend belonged elsewhere. Attacks on Jewish Australians forced a reckoning many had avoided and hoped would resolve once the tremors of the war in Gaza had ameliorated. Until 6.47pm on 7th December, a beautiful evening on Sydney’s iconic Bondi Beach. Sudden, brutal and in our summer playground, sectarian violence shattered the sense of distance Australians often feel from global disorder. At that moment, politics stopped feeling abstract. The world, with all its instability, barged in and brought the country down to earth.

See This Is What It Looks Like

Lifesavers on Bondi Beach, 20 December 2025. Edwina Pickles

Featured photograph and above:

A handful of bodies on Bondi Beach, and behind them, the howling infinite of expectation, obligation, and the careful rationing of human empathy. The smallness of the beach against the vastness of consequences. On December 20, 2025, Bondi’s iconic lifesavers formed a line stretching the entire length of the beach -silent, solemn, a nation visibly in mourning. Similar tributes unfolded from Perth to Byron Bay, gestures of unity in the face of a shock that touched the whole country.

The Year of the Chatbot: Promise, Power, and Risk

And now, a break from the doom and gloom …

2025 was the year when artificial intelligence became part of daily life. Chatbots ceased to be experimental and became integral, transforming from novelty to utility seemingly overnight. People used it to write, research, translate, plan, argue, comfort, and persuade; institutions and individuals adopted it instinctively. Setting tone as much as content, the ‘bots have lowered barriers to knowledge, sharpened thinking, and helped people articulate ideas they might otherwise struggle to express. Used well, they amplified curiosity rather than replace it.

The opportunities are obvious – but so are the risks. Systems that can clarify complexity can also flatten it. Chatbots sound confident even when wrong, smooth over disagreement, and made language cleaner, calmer, and more persuasive – but not necessarily truer. They reinforce confirmation bias, outrage, and tribal certainty, generating arguments instantly and flooding the zone with plausible-sounding text. As information has became faster, cheaper, and less reliable, Certainty has spread more easily than truth, so truth has to work much harder.

Dependence is subtler but real. Outsourcing thinking – summaries instead of reading, answers instead of wrestling – did not make humans stupid, but less patient. Nuance, doubt, and slow understanding became harder to justify in a world optimised for speed. Yet conversely, man people still seek context, history, and complexity. Used deliberately, AI could slow the pace, map contradictions, and hold multiple truths at once.

By the end of 2025, the question was no longer whether AI would shape public life – it already had. The real question is whether humans would use it as a shortcut, or as a discipline. The technology is neutral. The danger – and the promise – lies in how much thinking we are willing to give up, and how much responsibility we are prepared to keep.

See The promise and the peril of ChatGPT 

Algorithm and blues

Alongside the chatbot sat a quieter, more insidious force: the algorithm itself. By 2025 it no longer simply organised information – it governed attention. What people saw, felt, and argued about was shaped less by importance than by engagement. To borrow from 20th century philosopher and communication theorist and educator Marshall McLuhan, the meme had become the message. Complex realities were compressed into images, slogans, clips, and talking points designed not to inform but to travel. The algorithm rewarded speed over reflection, certainty over doubt, heat over light. Politics, war, and grief were all flattened into content, stripped of context, and ranked by performance. What mattered most was not what was true or necessary, but what disseminated.

Passion without Wisdom

I wrote during the year that we seemed “full of passionate intensity” – Yeats’ phrase still apt in the twenty first century- but increasingly short on wisdom and insight. 2025 confirmed it. Anger was everywhere, empathy highly selective, certainty worn like armour. People felt deeply but thought narrowly. Moral energy surged but rarely slowed into understanding. The problem was not indifference; it was excess – too much feeling, too little reflection. In that environment, nuance looked like weakness and patience like complicity. What was missing was not information, but judgement – the harder work of holding contradiction, of resisting instant conclusions, of allowing complexity to temper conviction. Passion was abundant. Insight, increasingly rare.

Looking Toward 2026

Looking back on 2025, it seems that there  were no endings, neither happy or sad. Just a promise, it seems, of more of the same. The year didn’t solve anything. It clarified things. And if it clarified anything, it was that the world has grown adept at managing, ignoring, or absorbing what it cannot fix. It revealed a world adjusting to permanent instability. In this year of echoes, refrains, and unfinished sentences.

Passion, intensity, and outrage were abundant, but patience, wisdom, and insight remained scarce. Democracies strained under internal and external pressures. Wars lingered unresolved. Technology reshaped thought and attention.

Some argue that hope springs eternal, that yet, even amid the drift and the fractures, glimpses of understanding and resistance persisted, that although the world has settled into its chaos, we can be riders on the storm. But, I fear, 2026 arrives not as break, a failsafe, a safety valve, but as continuation. It looms as a test of endurance rather than transformation.  In my somnolent frame of mind, I’ve reached again for my Yeats. “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, the blood-dimmed tide is loosed …”

After the chaos of 2024 and the hardening of 2025, the question is no longer what might go wrong. It’s what we’re prepared to live with.

And so we come to what In That Howling Infinite wrote in 2025.

What we wrote in 2025

It was a year that refused neat endings.

It began in a wasteland – Gaza as moral ground zero – and moved, restlessly, through revolutions real and imagined: Trump as symptom and accelerant, Putin as a man racing his own shadow, Syria forever at the crossroads where history idles and then accelerates without warning. Gaza returned, again and again, sunrise and false dawn, as spectacle and strategy; Sudan burned in near silence; Venezuela re-entered the frame as empire’s backyard as the US disinterred its Monrovian legacy. In That Howling Infinite featured pieces on each of these – several in many cases , twenty in all, plus a few of relevance to them, including an overview of journalist Robert Fisk’s last book (The Night of Power – Robert Fisk’s bitter epilogue). A broadranging historical piece written in the previous year and deferred, Modern history is built upon exodus and displacement, provided a corrective of sorts to the distorted narratives that have emerged in recent years due to a dearth of historical knowledge and the partisan weaponisation of words. 

It was almost as light relief that we turned to other subjects. Of particular interest was AI. Approaching remorselessly yet almost unrecognised in recent years, it banged a loud gong and crept from curiosity to condition, from tool to weather system, quietly rewriting the newsroom, the internet, and the idea of authorship. ChatGPT and other chatbots appeared not as saviours but as promise and peril in equal measure. By year end, we were fretting about using ChatGPT too much and regarding it as something to moderate like alcohol or fatty foods. We published three pieces on the subject in what seemed like rapid succession, and then pestered out – sucked into the machinery, I fear.

What with so much else attracting our attention, we nevertheless managed to find time for some history – including a  particularly enthralling and indeed iconoclastic book on the fall of the Ottoman Empire; the story of an Anzac brigade lost in Greece in 1942; “the Lucky Country” revisited after half a century;  and a piece long in the pipeline on the iconic singer and activist Paul Robeson.

In August, as on a whim, for light relief, we summoned up a nostalgic old Seekers’ song from the mid-sixties, a time when the world was on fire with war and rage much as it is today, but for us young folk back in the day, a time of hope and hedonism. For us, the carnival, clearly, is not over. The machinery is still whirring, the music still loud, and the lights still on. History is insisting on one more turn of the wheel, and the dawn, so often promised, so frequently invoked, has not yet broken.

January
The Gaza War … there are no winners in a wasteland
The way we were … reevaluating the Lucky Country

February
Let’s turn Gaza into Mar e Largo
Trump’s Second Coming … the new American Revolution
Cold Wind in Damascus … Syria at the crossroads

March
Trumps Revolution… he can destroy but he cannot create
Where have all the big books gone?
Putin’s War … an ageing autocrat seeks his place in history

April
The Trump Revolution … I run the country and the world
The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the birth of Türkiye
Let Stalk Strine .. a lexicon of Australian as it was spoken (maybe)

May
The phantom of liberty … the paradoxes of conservativism
Shadows in search of a name … requiem for a war
The continuing battle for Australia’s history

July
A mighty voice … the odyssey of Paul Robeson

August
109 years of Mein Kampf … the book that ravaged a continent
High above the dawn is breaking … the unlikely origin of a poo song

September
Gaza sunrise or false dawn? Trump’s peace plan
Gaza sunrise or false dawn? Spectacle or Strategy
Will there ever be a Palestinian state?
Why Osana bin lost the battle but won the war
The Night of Power … Robert Fisks bitter epilogue
The promise and peril of ChatGPT
Who wrote this? The newsroom’s AI dilemma

October
AI and the future of the internet
Danger Angel … the ballad of Laura Loomer

November
A forgotten Anzac story in Greece’s bloody history
The most nihilistic war ever … Sudan’s waking nightmare
Answering the call … National Service in Britain 1945-1963
Tales of Yankee Power … at play in Americas backyard

December
Delo Kirova – the Kirov Case … a Soviet murder mystery
Between heaven and hell … Syria at the crossroads
This Is What It Looks Like
Tales of Yankee power … Why Venezuela, and why now?
Marco Rubio’s Venezuelan bargain

Read out reviews of prior years:

That was the year that was – retrospectives

A song for 2026: Lost love at world’s end …

It is our custom to conclude our annual wrap with a particular song that caught our attention during the year. Last year, we chose Tears for Fears’ Mad World.  It would be quite appropriate for 2025. But no repeats! so here is something very different. An outwardly melancholy song that is, in the most ineffable way quite uplifting. that’s what we reckon, anyway …

The Ticket Taker is on the surface a love song for the apocalypse; and it’s it’s one of the prettiest, most lyrically interesting songs I’ve heard in a long while. I could almost hear late-period Leonard Cohen and his choir of angels.

The apocalypse is both backdrop and metaphor. We’re not sure which. Is it really about a world ending, or just about the private ruin of a man left behind by love and fortune. The lyrics are opaque enough to evade final meaning, but resonant enough to keep circling back, like the ferry itself, between hope and futility. A love song, yes, but also a confession of entrapment: the gambler’s hope, the ark one cannot board.

The “Ticket Taker” song was written by Ben Miller and Jeff Prystowsky and is featured on The Low Anthem’s album Oh My God, Charlie Darwin. It features on Robert Plant’s latest foray into roots music – this time with English band Saving Grace. This flawless duet with Suzi Dian is mesmerising and magical.

Jeff will tell you that the song is “pure fiction,” that Ben “just made it up one day” – but fiction, as we know, has a way of smuggling deeper truths than fact dares admit.

Tonight’s the night when the waters rise
You’re groping in the dark
The ticket takers count the men who can afford the ark
The ticket takers will not board, for the ticket takers are tied
For five and change an hour, they will count the passers-by

They say the sky’s the limit, but the sky’s about to fall
Down come all them record books, cradle and all
They say before he bit it that the boxer felt no pain
But somewhere there’s a gambling man with a ticket in the rain

Mary Anne, I know I’m a long shot
But Mary Anne, what else have you got?
I am a ticket taker, many tickets have I torn
And I will be your ark, we will float above the storm

Many years have passed in this river town, I’ve sailed through many traps
I keep a stock of weapons should society collapse
I keep a stock of ammo, one of oil, and one of gold
I keep a place for Mary Anne, soon she will come home

Mary Anne, I know I’m a long shot
But Mary Anne, what else have you got?
I am a ticket taker, many tickets have I torn
And I will be your ark, we will float above the storm

Mary Anne, I know I’m a long shot
But Mary Anne, what else have you got?
I am a ticket taker, many tickets have I torn
And I will be your ark

Between heaven and hell … Syria at the Crossroads

Paul Hemphill 1 Comment

There are moments in the Middle East when history suddenly shift gears and takes us all by surprise. Lenin knew the cadence: there are decades, he wrote, where nothing happens; and then, weeks in which decades happen. A year ago, Syria – trapped in the vortex of its civil war for almost fourteen years  and virtually ignored by the rest of the world since October 7 2023 – suddenly leapt into one of those crazy weeks, leaving allies, enemies, and analysts alike blinking in the dust. Even now, a year after the astonishing fall of Damascus, the country sits like Kipling’s Tomlinson at the gates of judgement: not quite damned, not fully redeemed, suspended between heaven and hell.

Sleepers awake …

For years, as The Independent’s Bel Trew observed last December (see Syria. Illusion, delusion and the fall of tyrants) the world forgot about Syria – notwithstanding the courageous efforts of western and Syrian reporters and humanitarian workers who strove in perilous circumstances to bear witness. The civil war had become the background hum of the region, a grim drone many had learned to tune out as Ukraine and Gaza dominated the world stage. The regime of Hafez al Assad, brutal and immovable, bolstered by Russia, Iran and Hezbollah, looked set to endure indefinitely. The jihadi rebel enclave in Idlib, though supported by Türkiye, was dismissed as a besieged hold-out. Even those who professed expertise couldn’t reliably tell you whether the war was still ongoing, who was fighting whom, or what stage the conflict had reached. It was as if the wheels of war had stopped spinning.

Then, over the space of days – eleven, to be precise – the wheels spun again. Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham’s fighters burst from their confined redoubt with a momentum no one expected (including, it seems, themselves), sweeping through Aleppo and racing down the highway to the capital. Analysts reached instinctively for historical parallels: Havana 1959, Saigon 1975, Kabul 2021. Analyst David Kilcullen pointed instead to Timur Kuran’s theory of the “preference cascade”: the sudden collapse of a regime that had mistaken silence for loyalty and compliance for consent. Assad’s security apparatus – omnipresent, omniscient, yet somehow oblivious – realised too late that its soldiers had no stomach left for the fight. The all-powerful giant had feet of clay.

It didn’t help that Iran, Assad’s indispensable patron, had stumbled into the most grievous strategic miscalculation of its post-1979 history. Flush with revolutionary zeal, Tehran had kicked the hornet’s nest in Lebanon, prompting Israel to pivot from Gaza to Hezbollah with stunning force. Suddenly Iran’s expeditionary assets were exhausted, its proxies over-extended, and its clerical leadership exposed as both ageing and isolated. Even the Ayatollah’s conspiratorial refrain – that the fall of Damascus was all a plot by the Great Satan, the Little Satan, and the Sultan in Ankara – couldn’t mask the fact that this was less Zionist cunning than simple imperial overreach. When the rebels came, neither Iran nor Hezbollah, nor Russia, entangled in its Ukrainian quagmire, could ride to the rescue.

But the rebels, too, were surprised. Their mandate from Ankara was modest – expand the borders of their statelet a little, test the regime’s nerve. Instead, they found themselves virtually unopposed on the road to Damascus.  In an Informative article in E-zine Unherd republished below, British writer and investigative journalist Tam Hussein  writes how many of the fighters interpreted the victory as divine intervention – not jihadi zealotry, but a sincere theological attempt to explain the inexplicable. The suddenness of Damascus’s collapse felt, to them, like an echo of Muhammad’s bloodless conquest of Mecca. And in a land where the eschatological imagination has always saturated politics, it didn’t take long before social media brimmed with end-times speculation. Ahmed al Shara’a – formerly Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, with a $10 million American bounty on his head – was seen by some as “the one”, and the precursor of the Mahdi and the foretold end of days.

Yet as Hussein rightly notes, miracles make poor policy. The survival of the new Syrian administration will depend not on prophecy but on governance, and on whether Shara’a, interim president and ex-jihadi turned statesman, can transform a miraculous seizure into a sustainable state.

To his credit, he has avoided the catastrophic purges that helped destroy post-invasion Iraq. He has kept the civil service intact, flirted audaciously with Western diplomacy, and allowed at least the theatrical semblance of elections. He has restored the embassy in London, opened channels to Washington, even  visiting the White House  and played the charm-game with Gulf capitals that only recently readmitted Assad into their fold. As Hussein writes, he has shown political finesse: keeping the constitution, appointing seventy parliamentarians himself, and balancing piety with pragmatism.

But the tightrope is frayed. Sectarian wounds – Druze, Alawite, Sunni, Christian – remain raw and unstitched, with the Latakia massacres now entering their fraught judicial phase, and Israel stirring the Druze pot. Kurdish anxieties simmer: the old “Arab-first” chauvinism must be abandoned if Syria’s patchwork is ever to become a tapestry again. Foreign fighters, once lionised, now loiter between hero and hazard, implicated in sectarian atrocities. Kurds clash with Syrian forces; Turkish troops press deeper into Rojava; Israel remains the unpredictable neighbour bestride the Golan; and Iran, though weakened, is never entirely out of the game. It is not inconceivable that the forces that helped topple Assad could yet turn their sights toward Jerusalem in the belief that prophecy demands it.

And there are darker portents too – those flickering shadows that hint the wind of freedom may be blowing from the wrong quarter. The new government’s early gestures toward Islamisation – the hair-covering admonition, the curriculum purge, the dismissal of women from key posts, the torching of a Christmas tree in Hama – suggest that pro-Russia and anti-western platforms like RT and Mint may have a point when they warn that the leopard has not fully changed its theological spots. Shara’a’s declaration that elections may be four years away, the dissolution of the old constitution, and the folding of all rebel factions into state structures recall less a liberal transition than a consolidation of revolutionary power.

Meanwhile, the country remains a mosaic of mini-wars. In the north, Turkish proxies grind against Kurdish forces in Rojava. In the south, local militias continue to resist HTS’s claim to national authority. In the west, Alawite formations cling to their shrinking redoubts. To the east, Islamic State survivors eye the chaos, waiting for the prison gates to break. And overhead, as ever, the Americans and Israelis fly their competing deterrents, ensuring the war never quite ends.

So: Syria stands at the crossroads. Will Syria’s future be heaven, hell, or merely another circle of the inferno?

Optimism is possible – cautiously so. If the West can avoid its habitual fatalism, if, when sanctions are lifted, investment flows, if Turkey and Israel can be coaxed into tolerable coexistence, if Kurdish autonomy is honoured, if sectarian grievances are handled with equity and not vengeance — then Syria could, in time, become a conservatively stable hub. Shara’a’s Idlib experiment shows he can build an economy under duress.

But the inverse is equally imaginable: a Lebanon-style implosion, a Yugoslav-style partition, or a Gaza-style fortress of permanent mobilisation. As Isreali commentator and contributor to Haaretz Zvi Bar’el wrote a year ago, writes, the warm international “envelope” around Damascus is generous but tentative. Nobody quite knows where Shara’a is heading. They simply assume anyone is better than Assad – the same mistake Syrians once made about the old Ba’athi patriarch Hafez al-Assad himself.

Right now, the future’s not ours to see. Something’s happening, but we don’t know what it is, and anyone with a deep knowledge of the Middle East knows that one must expected the unexpected. The old regional wars – Gaza, Lebanon, the Red Sea, Iran’s Axis of Resistance – though seemingly on hold, have not paused to let Syria breathe. The war in Ukraine grinds into winter, the bizarre Gaza peace plan shuffles on, and there are constant political shifts in Washington. Each of these could rewrite the geopolitical chess board yet again.

Still, as Robert Fisk wrote in the final line of the final book he never lived to promote: all wars come to an end, and that’s where history restarts. Syria is restarting now – painfully, precariously, imprecisely –  but restarting nonetheless.

Whether Syria walks toward heaven or hell remains to be seen. The choice –  as ever in the Levant – will not be its alone.

Syria Today: Walking Through the Wreckage

A year after the Assads fell, Syria still moves through its own ruins – startled by its freedom, and half-afraid of it. The dynasty’s collapse ended the nightmare but did not usher in a dream; it simply exposed, in unforgiving daylight, the damage done over half a century of dictatorship and more than a decade of war. The smashed cities are visible to any passer-by; the deeper wreckage – the traumas, resentments, and debts of blood – is harder to map and harder still to mend.

Sednaya prison’s opened gates remain the sharpest indictment. The men who stumbled out were not just survivors but witnesses, their bodies forcing the nation to acknowledge what many had whispered and few had dared investigate. Yet even this reckoning has not united the country. Sectarian reprisals and atrocities on the coast, more atrocity and calls for Druze autonomy demands in Sweida, tribal restlessness in the south and northwest, Kurdish self-rule in the north, and Alawite fear of collective punishment keep the national psyche taut and divided. Bitterness circulates like a second economy.

The economy, meanwhile, balances on a fraying tightrope. Western aid and investment have brought cranes, reopened highways, and a flicker of commerce, but also inflation that is hollowing out households. Reconstruction glimmers like a desert mirage: real enough to chase, never close enough to touch. Corruption accompanying nepotism and patronage has survived the revolution, and many returnees discover that rebuilding a home now costs more than earning one.

Politically, the country sits in an improvised equilibrium. Al Shara’a rules as both liberator and question mark – trusted by some, tolerated by others, watched by all. His pivot toward Washington, his quiet coordination with US forces, and his break with former comrades offer a new direction, but also a gamble. Around him, sovereignty is nibbled at the edges: Israel digs deeper into Quneitra province; Türkiye tightens its grip in the Kurdish north. Liberation has shifted the map without fully restoring control over it.

So Syria stands on the threshold, like Tomlinson, neither damned nor redeemed, simply called to account. The war is over, but its aftershocks and tremors linger in regional loyalties, local vendettas and regional manoeuvres. The people are free, yet unsure of that freedom’s limits and what it asks of them. And the vast machinery of the state still creaks with old habits and temptation.

And yet – a small, highly qualified yet – Syrians are imagining a future again. Not the predetermined script of dictatorship, nor the fatalism of war, but something open, negotiable, theirs’. For a people long told that nothing changes, the mere possibility of change is its own quiet revolution. Hope is not guaranteed; neither is stability. But the impossible has already happened once, and that alone shifts the horizon.

Postscript: the strange, messianic weather of revolutions

Among the HTS fighters Tam Hussein describes, the astonishingly swift and almost bloodless collapse of Damascus could never be reduced to battlefield arithmetic. After over a decade of stalemate and slaughter, the conquest of Damascus and the fall of Assad felt too abrupt, too neat, too historically implausible to be merely human. And so they reached, perhaps instinctively, for the vocabulary of prophecy that has long circulated in the Levant: the old stories of tyrants toppled in the final days, of a just ruler rising at history’s eleventh hour, of a brief season of peace before a climactic confrontation with “the Romans,” a term that in popular imagination now stretches elastically to include Israel, America, or the West at large.

In this folk-level cosmology – not the carefully parsed doctrine of scholars, but the lived, emotional scripture of men who have lived too long fear, death and loss loss – the victory in Damascus reads like a prophetic epic ballad. When a fighter told Hussein that Syria would enjoy “ten years of peace before the war with Israel,” he was drawing from a hazy amalgam of hadith traditions and battlefield folklore to make sense if the improbable: the idea of a lull before the storm, a breathing space before the world tilts into its final reckoning. It is vernacular eschatology, shaped as much by trauma and longing as by text.

Within that register, the murmurs that Shara’a/Jolani might be “the one” carry an unmistakable Mahdist echo. No fatwas or proclamations like when Da’ish leader Abu Bakr  al-Baghdadi famously declared the caliphate from the minbar of Mosul’s al-Nuri Mosque in 2014; but the emotional charge behind the phrase is unmistakabl: an intuitive reach for a Mahdi-shaped idea of the righteous restorer, the unifier, the man who appears when everything has fallen apart. It’s not that anyone literally thinks Jolani is the Mahdi; it’s that the mood of the moment makes such thoughts feel briefly within arm’s length. A silhouette on the horizon, nothing more.

And here, Syria is not unique. Revolutionary periods everywhere – the Protestant Reformation, the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution and Civil War, the Arab Spring even, have their magical phase — those jittery days when people begin to speak as if the world has cracked open, meaning is pouring through the seams, and events blur into myth. When a regime that seemed immovable collapses in a fortnight, people fall back on stories larger than themselves. Sudden upheaval, long suffering, and the ascent of a charismatic figure combine to crack open the ordinary world. Prophecy offers a narrative frame when history seems to be behaving like fable.

So the eschatological edge in these fighters’ conversations tells us less about doctrine and more about psychology. It’s a very human response: a form of magical thinking that arises when reality becomes too strange to process, a way of giving shape to chaos, of telling themselves that their suffering fits into a larger story. A coping mechanism, if you like –  a mythic vocabulary for a moment when Damascus fell, and the ordinary rules stopped making sense and the earth seemed briefly to tilt on its axis.

See also in In That Howling Infinite, Syria. Illusion, delusion and the fall of tyrants and Cold wind in Damascus – Syria at the crossroads. And  on the subject of messianism in general, see A Messiah is needed – so that he will not come

Will civil war return to Syria?

Its future is in the balance

Tam Hussein, Unherd December 8, 2025

A few months ago in Damascus, I discovered a medieval hospital. The door had been left slightly ajar, and I wandered in with my companion Hassan Idlibi — a rebel fighter and old friend. He hadn’t been in the Old City since the fall of Syria’s capital, exactly a year ago today. “When Damascus fell,” he told me, “we were at our lowest ebb. Even the attack on Aleppo was our last gasp. We wanted to break the stalemate. And then we just pushed and pushed, and we ended up sleeping inside the Umayyad Mosque. It was a miracle.”Idlibi, like many Syrians, did not interpret the taking of Damascus through geopolitics — but as divine intervention. This wasn’t because he was a mindless zealot. Far from it. He is one of the most well-read men I know. But, to his mind, the fall of Damascus was so sudden, so unexpected, that only the miraculous could explain it. The victory, he noted, had been achieved by those who had been motivated by Islam. Help had come from foreign fighters, the mujahideen, who travelled from across the globe to aid their co-religionists. And the campaign had been led by a former jihadi, Ahmed al-Sharaa, now the interim president of Syria. At the time, the old al-Qaeda operative, then known by his nom de guerre, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, had a $10 million American bounty on his head.

After more than a decade of slaughter, no one had expected the capital to collapse. Assad, then president, had seemed like a stubborn wart: unpleasant but immovable. Jolani’s rebel enclave in the northern city of Idlib looked too small, too besieged, to pose a serious threat — though in fact it was performing better economically than inflation-ravaged Damascus, helped along by a reliable flow of Turkish hard currency. I myself expected the rebels to negotiate. What leverage did they have? Yet this rebel government, roughly the size of Croydon, took over the instruments of state, and since then has avoided stumbling into a new civil war.

The unexpected and largely peaceful victory was attributed to piety, prophecy, steadfastness. Some have even compared the final conquest of Damascus to Muhammad’s bloodless conquest of Mecca in 630. The idea of a “miracle”, here, is not mere rhetoric — it shapes political expectations. Some Syrians, at least based on my social media, think all this makes Sharaa “the one”, with my Facebook messages and WhatsApp chats awash with prophetic readings of the present. One believed Syria would now enjoy 10 years of peace before the war with Israel begins. Perhaps, he suggested, this was the prelude to the end of times. After all, so-called “Greater Syria” — encompassing much of the Levant — plays an important role in the Syrian and indeed Muslim sacral imagination. It is where prophets walked and is the place where many of the end of times narratives will play themselves out.

Yet if the fall of Damascus seemed miraculous to many Syrians, the survival of the new administration will depend less on providence than on governance. Despite his past, Sharaa has so far demonstrated an unexpected level of political finesse. He has kept the constitution, held elections — albeit with 70 seats appointed by himself — and all the while has acted the statesman. He is savvy enough to not mind having President Trump spray his latest fragrance on him in the Oval Office, or Syrian Jewish rabbis blessing him.

Sharaa has made some promising early decisions. By keeping the civil service intact, he has avoided the catastrophic purge that helped destroy post-invasion Iraq. He should continue recruiting highly-educated young Syrians from the diaspora — people familiar with Western administrations and political norms. Even so, the administration still has a tendency to fear scrutiny and behaves as if under siege. It should welcome a regulated free press, which would expose blind spots, not undermine authority. The British press has reported that Jonathan Powell’s Inter Mediate is working with the new government. This should be welcomed rather than criticised — not only for reasons of conflict resolution and soft power, but for its value in statecraft and building institutional capacity.

Sharaa’s priorities for the coming year are clear. The country remains immensely fragile, caught in a regional tug-of-war between Israel and its neighbours, and divided along ethnic and sectarian lines. The situation could easily drift into a reprise of Lebanon’s civil war. Sharaa’s first task is therefore to mend Syria’s sectarian and ethnic fractures with a sense of equity. The trials that began this month over the coastal massacres in Latakia will be an important test of how the country intends to move forward. The Druze and Alawite communities — already bruised by conflict and mistrust — require justice delivered without the language of sectarianism.

Meanwhile, Kurdish anxieties must be addressed by ending the Arab-first ideology of the old regime. Syria has never been a purely Arab country: even its favourite son, Saladin, the builder of that hospital I visited and whose grave in Damascus still draws multitudes, was a Kurd. Last year’s tentative permission for Kurdish new year celebrations (Newroz) suggests that a more pluralist future is possible. Yet it remains unclear how far Kurdish cultural expression will be allowed to develop. Already this month, exchanges of fire between Syrian government forces and Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) units under Kurdish command show how fragile the situation is.

Perhaps the most difficult balancing act involves the foreign fighters who fought on Sharaa’s side. They carry immense symbolic weight in Syrian society — and are the cause of immense fear in the West. Many are ready to resume normal life, but others still see themselves as Islam’s warriors. Recent clashes in the Idlib countryside involving French foreign fighters reflect anxieties that any rapprochement with the West might see them handed over to their home governments. The image of Sharaa standing beside Trump, receiving a symbolic “anointing” of his new fragrance, alarms them even if such engagement is politically necessary.

Granting these fighters legal status, regularising their papers, integrating some into the national army or demobilising them with stipends and educational opportunities — not unlike the GI Bill for US veterans — could go a long way toward neutralising one of Syria’s most volatile pressures.

Then there is the conundrum of Israel. On this, Sharaa has cultivated deliberate ambiguity. At the United Nations, Syria has repeatedly noted its restraint regarding Israel’s illegal strikes on Syrian territory, yet Sharaa has resisted pressure to join Trump’s flagship Abraham Accords. Signing them now would be political suicide. But ambiguity buys him room to manoeuvre — and time to consolidate the state. The question is how long this can last.

For its part, the West has worked to prevent Syria from sliding into another civil war — one that would inevitably spill over into Europe, potentially replaying the exodus of 2015. With regional partners like Saudi Arabia and Turkey, Western governments have effectively restrained Israeli escalation, aware that renewed instability would eventually reach Jerusalem’s door. It’s not impossible to imagine rebels, having overthrown a “pro-Western stooge” like Sharaa and aided by foreign fighters, actually marching toward Israel, convinced that “the infidels” will never allow them to determine their own future. As they did in Damascus, so too — in their imagination — must they do in Jerusalem.

Thus far Sharaa has governed with surprising openness. He has welcomed Britain’s foreign secretary David Lammy, met American diplomats and General David Petraeus, played basketball with US soldiers, and cooperated in counter-terrorism operations. He has also restored relations with London, with foreign minister Asaad al-Shaibani reopening the Syrian embassy.

If Western governments refuse to work with him because of his Islamist roots, they will share responsibility should Syria fracture again. Sharaa’s past is not erased; he may remain an uncomfortable partner. But what is the alternative? That he be excluded from political life and drift into a Castro- or Maduro-like role on the sidelines? If the Saudi Crown Prince can be brought in from the cold after the Khashoggi murder, then almost anything is possible.

Here I recall a meeting with former Saudi spy chief Turki al-Faisal in his South Kensington apartment after the release of his memoir. Faisal lamented how his advice went unheeded after the Afghan-Soviet war. He had urged the international community to launch something akin to a Marshall Plan — an investment programme to stabilise Afghanistan. Had that happened, the region might not have unravelled. Instead, the country collapsed into years of civil war.

Likewise, fully lifting sanctions on Syria and providing a major investment programme, coupled with training and cultural exchange, could restrain the country’s more radical elements. Reining in Israeli escalation, de-escalating the Druze conflict, and mediating between the SDF and Damascus would all help prevent new wars. On this, the West could also spare itself a future security headache by helping Damascus regularise or demobilise foreign fighters rather than leaving them to drift. This would all help to displace messianism.

What, then, would such investment bring the West, beyond avoiding another gaping wound on its eastern flank? For sure, it will not turn Damascus into another Beirut, a place for foreign journalists to party, nor into a Deano-friendly Dubai. Syria will likely remain socially conservative, more like Muscat in Oman. Given time, however, it could become a commercial hub with a distinct cultural life, just as it has been for much of its epic history. This isn’t mere optimism: Sharaa turned Idlib, once a distant town, into a magnet for Damascenes seeking commercial opportunity. Investment now would bring the West a friendly partner, business prospects and political influence. The choice is stark. With support, Syria could become a kind of West Germany: rebuilt, integrated, and stable. Without it, the country risks becoming a new Jerusalem — a battleground charged with fire and prophecy.

Tam Hussein is an award winning investigative journalist and writer. His work has been recognised by the Royal Television Society Awards.

The Night of Power – Robert Fisk’s bitter epilogue

Paul Hemphill 5 Comments

“All wars come to an end and that’s where history restarts”

“History stretches out into the future as well as the past”

“All wars may end in negotiations, but not all negotiations end wars”

The indefatigable British journalist, author, and longtime Beirut resident Robert Fisk Robert Fisk died of a stroke in St Vincent’s Hospital, Dublin, on October 30, 2020. He was 75. Fearless and inquisitive, often iconoclastic and controversial, “Mister Robert,” as he was known from Algeria to Afghanistan, was one of the finest journalists of his generation—the greatest reporter on the modern Middle East. There is probably no better body of work for understanding the region. Respected and reviled in equal measure by left and right alike, Fisk spoke truth to power for more than half a century.

He was obsessive, he was angry, and – having read many of his books – I believe he suffered from undiagnosed PTSD throughout his career in the Middle East. His lifelong obsessions were the arrogance and misuse of power, the lies and impunity of the rulers: presidents and prime ministers, kings and emirs, dictators and theocrats, torturers and murderers. And always the countless innocents who endured and suffered, dying in their tens – and tens – of thousands on the altar of power and greed.

The Night of Power 

His last book, The Night of Power: The Betrayal of the Middle East, published posthumously in 2023, takes up where his monumental The Great War for Civilisation (2005) ended—with the contrived U.S.-British-Australian invasion of Iraq. The Great War for Civilisation was a tombstone of a book, literally and figuratively, as was its predecessor Pity the Nation (1990), his definitive history of the Lebanese civil war.

The Night of Power  is no less harrowing, covering the occupation of Iraq, the 2006 Israel–Lebanon war, the Arab Spring, the rise of Egypt’s new pharaoh Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, the lonely death of Mohammed Morsi, Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and seize of Gaza, and the Syrian civil war. It ranges widely – but its coherence lies in Fisk’s unrelenting theme: the cycle of war, the corruption of power, and the persistence of memory. To read it is to feel Fisk’s own cynicism, sadness and anger.

The title is deeply symbolic. In Islamic tradition, Laylat al-Qadr, the Night of Power, is the night the Qur’an was first revealed to the Prophet Muhammad: “The Night of Power is better than a thousand months … Peace it is, until the rising of the dawn” (Qur’an 97). It is a night of blessing beyond measure, greater than a lifetime of devotion. The title is bitterly ironic: the “night of power” he recounts is one of betrayal, cruelty, and endless war.

It is both a summation of his life’s work and a testament to his method. Over four decades, Fisk was a witness to almost every major conflict in the Middle East — Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, Palestine, Algeria, Afghanistan, Syria, Egypt — and the wars of the Yugoslav succession. His dispatches carried both forensic detail and moral outrage. This last work, published in the year of his death, is less a memoir than a vast chronicle of empire, war, betrayal, and resistance.

Fisk had long insisted that reporters must “be on the side of those who suffer.” He was no neutral stenographer of official sources. He distrusted governments – Western and Arab alike – and prized first hand testimony, walking the ruins, speaking to survivors, writing down the words of the powerless. The Night of Power continues in this vein, but with a sharpened sense of history. Fisk threads together centuries of conquest and resistance, showing how imperial arrogance, local despotism, and religious zealotry have conspired to devastate the region.

The last two paragraphs Robert Fisk wrote before his death, closing The Night of Power, cut like a blade through the pieties of Western journalism:

“Failure to distinguish between absolute evil, semi-evil, corruption, cynicism and hubris produced strange mirages. Regimes which we favoured always possessed ‘crack’ army divisions, ‘elite’ security units, and were sustained by fatherly and much revered ruling families. Regimes we wished to destroy were equipped with third-rate troops, mutineers, defectors, corrupt cops, and blinded by ruling families. Egypt with its political prisoners, its police torture and fake elections, was a tourist paradise. Syria with its political prisoners, police torture and fake elections, would like to be. Iran, with its political prisoners, police torture and fake elections was not — and did not wish to — be a tourist paradise.” (p. 533)

In the end, according to those closest to him, including his wife Nelofer Pazira-Fisk, an award-winning Afghan-Canadian author, journalist and filmmaker, who edited the book and wrote its final chapter, Fisk despaired. He feared that nothing he had written over four decades had made any difference – that things had, in fact, grown worse. As Kent says to the blinded King Lear, “All is cheerless, dark, and deadly”.

And yet the worst was arguably still to come: the chaotic retreat of America and its allies from Afghanistan and the Taliban’s reimposition of rule, including the literal silencing of women’s voices; Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and its murderous war of attrition that has now passed its thousandth day; Hamas’s atrocity of October 7, 2023, Israel’s biblical-scale revenge, and the utter destruction of Gaza; and the latest Israel–Lebanon war that saw the decapitation and emasculation of Hezbollah.

The Legacy of a Fearless Reporter

The Night of Power stands as a testament to Robert Fisk’s fearless journalism and his relentless moral compass. Across decades of war reporting, Fisk bore witness to suffering few dared to confront. He was unflinching in exposing the hypocrisies of Western powers, the brutality of dictators, and the costs of occupation, war, and empire. Yet he also captured the human dimension: the courage, endurance, and resilience of those who suffered, whether in Iraq, Gaza, Egypt, or Syria.

This final work synthesizes Fisk’s signature qualities: exhaustive research, direct engagement with the people whose lives were upended, and an ethical rigor that held both oppressors and complicit outsiders accountable. The Night of Power is not merely a chronicle of events; it is a meditation on power, betrayal, and history itself.

Fisk’s prose, vivid and often lyrical, reminds readers that journalism can be a form of witness — bearing truth against overwhelming odds. Even in despair, he recognized the persistence of human agency, the cycles of history, and the moral imperative to see, to name, and to remember. His death in 2020 marked the end of a career unparalleled in courage and conscience, but his work, particularly this last book, endures as both a warning and a guide for understanding the Middle East and the forces that shape our world.

In reading The Night of Power, one cannot avoid Fisk’s central lesson: history may restart at the end of every war, but the witness to injustice is what shapes the moral memory of humanity. The quotations at the head of this review, indeed, the final words of the book, weary yet resolute, are a fitting epitaph. Fisk saw the world as it was, not as we wished it to be: corrupt, cruel, but always turning, always restarting.

All wars come to an end and that’s where history restarts
Robert Fisk, The Night of Power

Postscript

The final chapter of The Night of Power was written by Fisk’s wife Nelofer Pazira-Fisk, She was based in Beirut for fifteen years working alongside her late husband and reported from Iraq, Afghanistan, Turkey, Egypt and Syria. The following podcast by American war correspondent Chris Hedges, with Fisk’s first wife Lara Marlowe is a worthy tribute .

See also, in In That Howling Infinite The calculus of carnage – the mathematics of Muslim on Muslim mortality 

The following briefly summarizes the main themes of The Night of Power drawing largely upon his own words

Robert Fisk’s Catalogue of Carnage

Hear the cry in the tropic night, should be the cry of love but it’s a cry of fright
Some people never see the light till it shines through bullet holes
Bruce Cockburn, Tropic Moon

Iraq: Catastrophe Foretold

Fisk argued that Iraq’s occupation was fraudulent from the start, brutal in execution, and ferocious in its response to insurgency. The Americans tolerated the inhuman behaviour of their own soldiers, relied on mercenaries and “greedy adventurers,” and mixed Christian religious extremism with an absurd political goal of “remaking the Middle East.” It was “tangled up in a web of political naivety and Christian muscularity”.It was bound, he wrote, to end in catastrophe.

“We were pulling at the threads of the society with no sense of responsibility as occupiers just as we had no serious plans for state reconstruction. Washington never wanted Iraq’s land. Of course the countries resources were a different matter, but its tactics did fit neatly into the prairies of the old West. The tribes could be divided and occupiers would pay less in blood. as long as they chose to stay. One set of tribes were bought off with guns and firewater the other with guns and dollar bills. Serious resistance, however, would invoke “the flaming imperial anger” of all occupation armies.

The rhetoric echoed the 19th century missionary zeal of empire. Western fascination with the Biblical lands was used to justify conquest: as Lieutenant General Stanley Maude told the people of Baghdad in 1917, the Allies wished them to “prosper even as in the past when your ancestors gave to the world Literature, Science, and Art, and when Baghdad city was one of the wonders of the world” (p. 92).

The modern occupation, Fisk observed, was nothing but “the rape of Iraq”. Oil wealth was divided up in a scandal of corruption involving US contractors and Iraqi officials. “The costs were inevitably as dishonest as the lies that created the war … I knew corruption was the cancer of the Arab world but I did not conceive of how occupying Power supposedly delivering Iraqi their long sort freedom could into a mafia and at such breathtaking speed”.

Security became a malignant industry; by 2006 mercenaries accounted for half of Western forces, sucking money out of the country. The food system, 10,000 years old, was destroyed by Paul Bremer’s infamous Order 81, which forbade farmers from saving their own seed. Iraq became a “giant live laboratory for GMO wheat,” its people “the human guinea pigs of the experiment”.

And through it all, a campaign of suicide bombings –  unprecedented in scale –  turned Iraq into the crucible of modern terror. Editors never tried to count them. The figures, Fisk noted, were historically unparalleled.

The trial of Saddam Hussein

The US ambassador to Iraq once claimed she had been “unable to convince Saddam that we would carry through what we warned we would.” Fisk dismissed this as absurd. Saddam, he argued, was well aware of Western threats, but the framing of his trial was designed to obscure deeper truths.

If Saddam had been charged with the chemical massacre at Halabja, defence lawyers could have pointed out that every US administration from 1980 to 1992 was complicit in his crimes. Instead, he was tried for the judicial murder of 148 men from Dujail — heinous, but “trifling in comparison” (p. 92). The great crimes of the Baathist regime — the 1980 invasion of Iran, the suppression of Shia and Kurdish revolts in 1991 — were deemed unworthy of the court’s attention.

Pakistan: Fragile State, Useful Pawn

Fisk’s lens widened to Pakistan, where he recorded with scorn the ISI’s admission that the reality of the state was defined not by American might but by “corrupt and low-grade governance”. A US intelligence officer boasted: “You’re so cheap … we can buy you with a visa, with a visit to the US, even with a dinner.”

This, Fisk suggested, was not just Pakistan but almost every Arab or Muslim state in thrall to Washington: Egypt, Jordan, Syria, the Gulf states under their dictators and kings, even Turkey. He wrote that Osama Bin Laden’s choice to hide in Pakistan embodied a weird symmetry: the man who dreamed of a frontierless caliphate sought refuge in the very sort of corrupt, Western-backed dictatorship he despised.

Rendition: Complicity in Torture

The “war on terror” extended beyond borders. CIA, MI5 and MI6 operatives were deeply involved in rendition. Prisoners were knowingly dispatched to states where torture was inevitable, even fatal. Fisk insisted on repeating this uncomfortable truth: Western democracies had integrated torture into their security architecture.

Israel and Palestine: The Last Colonial War

Fisk was unsparing in his treatment of Israel’s expansion. He rejected any obfuscation: Israel seized the opportunity to consolidate its control with a land grab for the most prominent hilltops and the most fertile property in the West Bank for settlements constructed on land legally owned for generations by Arabs, destroying any chance the Palestinian Arabs could have a viable state let alone a secure one.”). These settlements, he wrote, “would become the focus of the world’s last colonial war.”

He surmised: “Will the Jews of what was Palestine annex the West Bank and turn its inhabitants into voteless guest workers and all of mandate Palestine into an apartheid state? There was a mantra all repeat that only other way to resolve Israeli rule in the West Bank would be a transfer of the Palestinians across the Jordan into the Hashemite kingdom on the other side of the river. In other words, expulsion”

The Wall 

Fisk’s Fisk’s description of the Separation Wall is dramatic and unforgettable: an   “immense fortress wall” which snakes “firstly around Jerusalem but then north and south of the city as far as 12 miles deep into Palestine territory, cutting and escarping its way over the landscape to embrace most of the Jewish colonies … It did deter suicide bombers, but it was also gobbled up more Arab land. In places it is 26 feet or twice the height of the Berlin wall. Ditches, barbed wire, patrol roads and reinforced concrete watchtowers completed this grim travesty of peace. But as the wall grew to 440 miles in length, journalists clung to the language of ‘normalcy’ a ‘barrier’ after all surely is just a pole across the road, at most a police checkpoint, while a ‘fence’ something we might find between gardens or neighbouring fields. So why would we be surprised when Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlisconi, traveling through the massive obstruction outside Bethlehem in February 2010 said that he did not notice it. But visitors to Jerusalem are struck by the wall’s surpassing gray ugliness. Its immensity dwarfed the landscape of low hills and Palestinian villages and crudely humiliated beauty of the original Ottoman walls Churches mosques and synagogues .. Ultimately the wall was found to have put nearly 15% of West Bank land on the Israeli side and disrupted the lives of a third of the Palestine population. It would, the UN discovered, entrap 274,000 Palestinians in enclaves and cut off another 400,000 from their fields, jobs, schools and hospitals. The UN concluded that many would “choose to move out.” Was that the true purpose?“.

Leftwing Israeli journalist Amira Haas, who lives in the West Bank, takes Fisk on a tour of the wall: “Towering 26 feet above us, stern, monstrous in its determination, coiling and snaking between the apartment blocks and skulking in wadis and turning back on itself until you have two walls, one after the other. You shake your head a moment – when suddenly through some miscalculation surely – there is no wall at all but a shopping street or a bare hillside of scrub and rock. And then the splash of red, sloping rooves and pools and trees of the colonies and yes, more walks and barbed wire fences and yet bigger walls. And then, once more the beast itself, guardian of Israel’s colonies: the Wall”.

See also, in In That Howling Infinite, Blood and Brick … a world of walls

Banksy on The Wall. Paul Hemphill, May 2016

Gaza: Junkyard of History

Although Oslo’s creators fantasied that it would become part of the Palestinian state, Gaza’s destiny was isolation. It has been a junkyard of history variously ruled by Christians and Muslims, ruined and rebuilt under the Ottomans, and fought for by the British and Turks in the First World War, and now reduced to a prison state.,

Egypt: A Revolution Betrayed

Mohammed Morsi embodied both hope and tragedy. “An intelligent, honourable, obtuse, arrogant and naïve man”. No visionary, he was “was shambolic, inspiring, occasionally brutal and very arrogant”.  He set off down the road to Egyptian democracy with no constitution no parliament and no right to command his own countries army …set off down the road to democracy “with no constitution, no parliament and no right to command his own country’s army”. And when the end came, as come it must, he could not smell trouble; he did not see what was coming.

In a coup that was not a coup, which former British prime minister Tony Blair called “an awesome manifestation of power”, “the democratically elected president was suspended, the constitution annulled, tekevion stations closed, the usual suspects arrested … Yet President Obama could not bring himself to admit this. He asked the Egyptian military “to return full authority back to a democratically elected civilian government… Through an inclusive and transparent process” without explaining which particular elected civil civilian government he had in mind”.

This was just the beginning. In the six years that followed, Egypt’s executioners and jailers were kept busy. “They hung 179 men, many of them tortured before confessing to murder, bomb attacks or other acts of terrorism”. It was claimed that Al Sisi had returned the country to a Mubarak style dictatorship in the seven years of his own war against the brotherhood between 1990 and 1997. Mubarak’s hangman had executed only 68 Islamists and locked up 15,000. By 2019  Al Sisi had 60,000 political prisoners

To Fisk, this was a sign of fear as much as it was evidence of determination to stamp out terror. Al Sisi had three separate conflict on his hands: his suppression of the brotherhood on the ground that they were themselves violent terrorists, the campaign by Islam extreme groups against Egypt’s minority Christian cops, and most frightening of all the very real al Qaeda and ISIS war against Al Sisi’s own regime. “The prisons of the Middle East, Fisk concluded, were “universities for future jihadi”.

See also, in In That Howling Infinite and Sawt al Hurriya – remembering the Arab Spring

Remember and witness

Silencing the women of the revolution 

The misogyny if the counterrevolution was stark. Fisk wrote: “… if the senior officers wished to prune the branches of the revolution the participation of women was something that could not be tolerated. Why did there suddenly occur without apparent reason a spate of sexual attacks by soldiers that were clearly intended to frighten young women off the street,  revealing a side to the Egyptian military that none of us had recognised. The misogynistic and shocking display of brutality towards women that could not have been the work of a few indisciplined units”. With sexual assaults on women protesters, virginity tests and public humiliation, “heroes of the 1973 war had become molesters”.

The lonesome death of Muhammad Morsi

Morsi would struggle on for years before a series of mass trials would entrap him and his brotherhood colleagues and quite literally exhaust him to death. Morsi’s slow death in solitary confinement was, Fisk insisted, “utterly predictable, truly outrageous and arguably a case of murder”. He was denied treatment, denied family visits, denied a funeral. “To die in a dictator’s prison, or at the hands of a dictator’s security services”, Fisk wrote, “is to be murdered.”

It did not matter, he continued “if it was the solitary confinement, the lack of medical treatment or the isolation, or if Morsi had been broken by the lack of human contact for those whom he loved. “The evidence suggested that Morsi’s death must’ve been much sought after by his jailers, his judges, and the one man in Egypt who could not be contradicted. You don’t have to be tortured with electricity to be murdered”.

Fisk’s description of Morsi’s death is a sad one. “Symbolism becomes all”, he wrote. “The first and last elected president of a country dies in front of his own judges and is denied even a public funeral. The 67-year-old diabetic was speaking to the judges, on trial this time for espionage, when he fainted to the floor. Imagine the response of the judges when he collapsed. To be prepared to sentence a man to the gallows and to witness him meeting his maker earlier than planned must’ve provoked a unique concentration of judicial minds. could they have been surprised groups had complained of Morsi’s treatment for the world media and the world had largely ignored the denunciations. What might have been surprising to his judges was that he managed to talk for five minutes before he departed the jurisdiction forever?”

See also, in In That Howling Infinite, Nowhere Man – the lonesome death of Mohamed Morsi 

Mohammed Morsi in the cage of justice

Russia in the Syrian Cockpit

Regarding Russia’s critical intervention in the Syrian civil war, Fisk wrote:

“We Westerners have a habit of always looking at the Middle East through our own pious cartography, but tip the map 90° and you appreciate how close Syria is to Russia and its Chechen Muslim irredentists. No wonder Moscow watched the rebellion in Syria with the gravest of concern. Quoting Napoleon, who said “if everyone wants to understand the behaviour of a country, one has to look at a map”, my Israeli friend (the late) Uri Avnery wrote that “geography is more important than ideology, however fanatical. Ideology changed with time”.

The Soviet Union, he continued was most ideological country in the 20th century. “It abhorred it predecessor, Tsarist Russia. It would have abhorred its successor, Putin‘s Russia. But Lo and behold – the Tsars, Stalin and Putin conduct more or less the same foreign policy. I wrote that Russia is back in the Middle East. Iran is securing its political semicircle of Tehran, Baghdad Damascus, and Beirut. And if the Arabs – or the Americans – want to involve themselves, they can chat to Putin”.

Yarmouk camp, Damascus. Once the thriving home of Syria’s Palestinian refugees, September 2025

Author’s note

Laylatu al Qadri

لَْيلَُةاْلَقْدِر َخْيٌر ِّمْنأَْل ِف َشْھٍر. َسَلاٌم ِھَي َحَّتى َمْطلَِعاْلَفْجِر
Laylatu alqadri khayrun min alfi shahriin.Salamun hiya hatta matla’i alfajrii
The night of power is better than one thousand months.
(That night is) Peace until the rising of the dawn.
Al Qur’an al Karīm, Surat Al Qadr 97

I first learned about the Quran and The Night of Power in Cairo when I was staying at the home of Haji Abd al Sami al Mahrous a devout Muslim doctor who had cared for me when I had fallen ill. There was a particular beauty and magic about the idea of a night that surpassed all other nights in sacredness. The fascination stayed with me, and when I returned to London and was learning Arabic and studying Middle East politic at SOAS, it inspired a song.

Shape without form, a voice without sound,
He moves in an unseen way;
A night of power, eternal hour,
Peace until the break of day;
The doubter’s dart, the traveller’s chart,
An arrow piercing even to the coldest heart,
A hand surpassing every earthly art,
And shows everyone his own way
Paul Hemphill, Embryo

When Freedom Comes, She Crawls on Broken Glass

In an earlier post in In That Howling Infinite, I wrote:

My song  When Freedom Comes is a tribute to Robert Fisk (1946-2020), indomitable, veteran British journalist and longtime resident of Beirut, who could say without exaggeration “I walk among the conquered, I walk among the dead” in “the battlegrounds and graveyards” of “long forgotten armies and long forgotten wars”. It’s all there, in his grim tombstone of a book, The Great War for Civilization (a book I would highly recommend to anyone wanting to know more about the history of the Middle East in the twentieth century – but it takes stamina – at near in 1,300 pages – and a strong stomach – its stories are harrowing).

The theme, alas, is timeless, and the lyrics, applicable to any of what Rudyard called the “savage wars of peace” being waged all across our planet, yesterday, today and tomorrow – and indeed any life-or-death battle in the name of the illusive phantom of liberty and against those intent on either denying it to us or depriving us of it. “When freedom runs through dogs and guns, and broken glass” could describe Paris and Chicago in 1968 or Kristallnacht in 1938. If it is about any struggle in particular, it is about the Palestinians and their endless, a fruitless yearning for their lost land. Ironically, should this ever be realized, freedom is probably the last thing they will enjoy. They like others before them will be helpless in the face of vested interest, corruption, and brute force, at the mercy of the ‘powers that be’ and the dead hand of history.

The mercenaries and the robber bands, the warlords and the big men, az zu’ama’, are the ones who successfully “storm the palace, seize the crown”. To the victors go the spoils – the people are but pawns in their game.

In 2005, on the occasion of the publication of his book, Fisk addressed a packed auditorium in Sydney’s Macquarie University. Answering a question from the audience regarding the prospects for democracy in the Middle East, he replied:

“Freedom must crawl over broken glass”

When Freedom Comes, She Crawls on Broken Glass 

There goes the freedom fighter,
There blows the dragon’s breath.
There stands the sole survivor;
The time-worn shibboleth.
The zealots’ creed, the bold shahid,
Give me my daily bread
I walk amongst the conquered
I walk amongst the dead
Paul Hemphill, When Freedom Comes

I reference this melancholy state of affairs in man of my songs:

High stand the stars and moon,
And meanwhile, down below,
Towers fall and tyrants fade
Like footprints in the snow.
The bane of bad geography,
The burden of topography.
The lines where they’re not meant to be
Are letters carved in stone.
They’re hollowed of all empathy,
And petrified through history,
A medieval atrophy
Defends a feeble throne.
So order goes, and chaos flows
Across the borderlines,
For nature hates a vacuum,
And in these shifting tides,
Bombs and babies, girls and guns,
Dollars, drugs, and more besides,
Wash like waves on strangers’ shores,
Damnation takes no sides.
Paul Hemphill, E Lucevan Le Stelle

Cold wind in Damascus … Syria at the crossroads

Paul Hemphill 1 Comment

In December, In That Howling Infinite published Syria. Illusion, delusion and the fall of tyrants, an analysis of the downfall of the Assad dynasty. It observed: “…the immediate future is far from clear. It is axiomatic to say that most commentators who say they understand what is going to happen in the Levant often don’t. To quote B Dylan, something’s happening, and we don’t yet know what it is … Syria now pauses at a crossroads, where both hope for a better future, and skepticism that it will be achieved, are equally warranted. Whether or not the new Syrian regime can succeed is an open question”.

Syria’s political transition is literally a regime change: not simply the switching out of personalities on the throne, but a total philosophical and conceptual reordering of governance. Maybe it’s not the wind of freedom that is blowing through the streets of Damascus.

Russian-oriented media platforms like RT and Mint have been saying for two months now that despite their friendly noises, including pragmatic contacts with western countries like the USA, Britain and France that once treated the Assad regime as a pariah and also regarded Hayat al Tahrir al Shams as a terrorist outfit, and wealthy Gulf states that had only just made up with the old regime, whilst hedging on the thorny issue of relations with Turkey and Israel on the one hand, and former enables of the regime, Russia, Iran and even Hezbollah, on the other, Syria’s new rulers are Islamists at heart and will soon show their true colours.

Maybe they have a point …

In late December, Obaida Arnout, a spokesperson for the Syrian transitional government, said that women’s “biological and physiological nature” rendered them unfit for certain governmental jobs, sparking demonstrations in Damascus and other cities. At a press conference, the new Syrian leader asked a female reporter to cover her hair. There are reports that the new authorities are purging the school curriculum of pre-Islamic history and content deemed contrary to Islamic strictures. Before Christmas, foreign jihadis allied to Hayat al Tahrir al Sham torched a Christmas tree in Hama, leading to protests by Syrian Christians.

Syria’s de facto ruler Ahmed al Shara’a declared that free elections could be four years away, and in late January, seven weeks after he led the rebel offensive that overthrew Bashar al-Assad. he was named president for the “transitional period“. Rebel military commander Hassan Abdul Ghani also announced the cancellation of Syria’s 2012 constitution and the dissolution of the former regime’s parliament, army and security agencies, according to the Sana news agency. As president, Sharaa would form an interim legislative council to help govern until a new constitution was approved, he said. Meanwhile, he added, all rebel groups which opposed Assad in the 13-year civil war would be dissolved and integrated into state institutions.

This may provie difficult if not impossible. in the north, Turkish proxy forces battle with Kurdish forces in semi-autonomous Rojava. in the south, rebel militias oppose the imposition of HTS authority. In the west, Alawite militias who supported the Assads engage in firefights with HTS. In the east, meanwhile, the Americans bombing surviving pockets of Islamic State fighters who may be encouraged by the chaos to stage a jailbreak of tens of thousands of jihadis held in camps guarded by the embattled Kurds.

Maybe it’ll be business as usual in the middle eastern axis of awful. It may be the wind of freedom that is blowing, but then again, maybe not. So far so bad …?

© Paul Hemphill 2025. All rights reserved

For more on the Middle East in in That Howling Infinite, see A Middle East Miscellany.

Women in Damascus celebrate the fall of the Assad regime

Fears Syria is the next Mid-East humanitarian nightmare

Henry Ergas, The Australian, December 13, 2024.
To describe the current Syria situation as combustible is consequently an understatement.

To describe the current Syria situation as combustible is consequently an understatement.

No one mourns the wicked, says the song. But, while the end of Bashar al-Assad’s blood-soaked rule is undoubtedly welcome, his overthrow is not likely to solve Syria’s crippling problems.

That Syria’s descent into a murderous civil war was partly triggered by economic factors is clear. Far-reaching land reforms in 1958 and 1962-63 created a vast number of small to very small farms, which accounted for 60 per cent of all agricultural holdings but only 23 per cent of cultivated land. That structure was always precarious; what destroyed it was a trebling in Syria’s population.

With inheritance laws subdividing those holdings as more and more sons survived into adulthood, the marginal farms, which accounted for the bulk of agricultural employment, became completely unviable. Steadily worsening water shortages, culminating in a disastrous drought from 2005 to 2010, then delivered the final blow, precipitating a flight to the cities, particularly from the Sunni areas, that left many rural villages without young men.

But Syria’s heavily regulated, corruption-ridden economy could scarcely absorb the inflow, so more than half of those young men became unemployed, eking out tenuous livelihoods in illegally built complexes on the urban fringes.

People gather to celebrate in Umayyad Square on December 11, 2024 in Damascus, Syria.

People gather to celebrate in Umayyad Square on December 11, 2024

None of that would have provoked the civil war had the rural collapse, and the subsequent rise in poverty, not aggravated deep-seated ethnic and religious conflicts. Exactly like Lebanon and Iraq, the country that gained independence in 1946 was a state without a nation. Nor were there any broadly shared goals or ideas that could shape a unifying national identity.

The extent of the differences became obvious in 1954, when a Sunni-dominated government enacted centralising laws that sparked a Druze revolt. The revolt was quickly suppressed but the inability to define a workable balance between the conflicting groups fuelled six military coups in rapid succession.

It was only in 1966, when the Baath (Resurrection) party seized power, and then in 1970, with the so-called Corrective Revolution, which vested undivided power in Hafez al-Assad, that a degree of stability prevailed. The Baath had secured just 15 per cent of the vote in 1963, the last more or less free election; but, at least initially, it managed to coalesce a viable, if never broad, base of support.

At the heart of that support was the army, whose officer corps, like the Baath, was dominated by Alawites, who replaced the Sunnis decimated in the military purges that followed the coups and countercoups of the previous decade. Complementing that core was a tidal wave of Baathist patronage as sweeping nationalisations in 1964-65 and a 20-fold increase in the size of the public service – enacted in the name of “the scientific Arab way to socialism” – politicised employment decisions.

There is, however, no doubt that the Sunnis, who derived few benefits from that patronage, were left behind, at a time when Islamic fundamentalism was gaining lavish funding from the newly wealthy petro-monarchies. Although a shadowy battle between the regime and the Muslim Brotherhood had raged for some years, the Hama revolt in 1982 proved the key turning point.

Suppressed in a sea of blood, the revolt of Hama’s Sunnis induced Assad to rely even more heavily on a pervasive security apparatus manned by Alawites and controlled by members of his family: of the 12 key officers who ran the military-security complex between 1970 and 1997, seven were linked to Assad by blood or marriage.

That pattern persisted when Bashar al-Assad acceded to the presidency in 2000. By then, however, the transition from “Arab socialism” to an especially degenerate form of crony capitalism had made the cracks in the regime’s foundations ever more glaring.

To begin with, because the Sunni birthrate was much higher than that of the ethnic and religious minorities, the minorities’ share of the Syrian population was a third lower than in 1980, narrowing the regime’s power base, heightening its paranoia and increasing its dependence on outside support (which eventually came from Iran and Russia).

At the same time, the growing concentration of young, unemployed Sunni men in the major towns created an immensely receptive audience for radical imams, who – repeating the Al-Jazeera sermons of Hamas’s spiritual leader, Sheik Youssef al-Qaradawi – denounced the Alawites as “even more defiled than the Jews”.

It is therefore no accident that it was a broadcast by al-Qaradawi, calling, on March 25, 2011, for an uprising to root out the unbelievers, that transformed highly localised demonstrations into a national civil war.

Retracing that civil war’s history would take too long. What matters is that each of its many protagonists sought to create a safe base for its constituency by ruthless ethnic cleansing.

The regime readily accepted – when it did not force – the displacement of some eight million people, mainly Sunnis, out of its area of control. That not only removed potential adversaries; it also allowed the regime, through a special law passed in mid-2018, to expropriate the displaced, reselling their assets (at bargain basement prices) to its Alawite, Christian and Druze supporters. That those minorities, which effected much of the regime’s dirty work, feel threatened by the victims’ return is readily understandable.

Nor was the ethnic cleansing any less brutal in the areas controlled by the regime’s Islamist opponents. In Turkish-controlled Afrin, for example, where Kurds previously comprised 90 per cent of the population, there are virtually no Kurds left, as Turkey’s military has replicated the “demolish and expel” strategy it implemented in Turkish-occupied Cyprus. To make things worse, it has, in what were relatively secular regions, enforced conformity to Islamic precepts to an extent unthinkable in Turkey itself.

Hayat Tahrir al-Sham chief Ahmed al-Sharaa

Hayat Tahrir al-Sham chief Ahmed al-Sharaa

Equally, in Idlib, which is governed by HTS (the Movement for the Liberation of the Levant), Christians, who were treated as dhimmis, have fled, as have any surviving Alawite, Ismaili and Yazidi “heretics”. Ahmed al-Sharaa, who heads HTS, presents himself as a technocratic nation-builder; the reality is that he never abandoned his jihadi outlook, reined in the Islamist fanaticism of HTS’s followers or relaxed the sharia-inspired prohibitions that dominate Idlib’s daily life.

Far from being a model of modernity, Idlib under Sharaa (who has reverted from Abou Mohammed al-Jolani to his original name) closely resembles Gaza under Hamas – an authoritarian, Islamist enclave that survives by diverting humanitarian assistance to fund HTS’s operations. There is every reason to fear Sharaa will try to take Syria down that road, provoking (in a repeat of the Iraqi scenario) a renewed conflict with the former regime’s supporters, as well as with the US-backed Kurds.

To describe the current situation as combustible is consequently an understatement. And it is an understatement too to say that Israel’s precautionary measures, which include strengthening its grip on the Golan Heights, are eminently rational.

Of course, that won’t stop the UN, and Australia with it, condemning the Israeli moves, while staying mum about Turkey’s expansion of its so-called “self-protection zone” in Syria and its indiscriminate bombing of Kurdish villages. But if the Syrian tragedy has a lesson, it is this: in the Arab Middle East, with its deep hatreds, long memories and searing fractures, only sheer power counts. To believe anything else is just a childish fantasy

Syria. Illusion, delusion and the fall of tyrants

Paul Hemphill 3 Comments

So we march to the rhythm of the revolution;
Oh it is our shining hour.
Move to the rhythm of the revolution,
And the revolution’s power.
Run with the rhythm of the revolution,
Storm the palace, seize the crown.
Rise to the rhythm of the revolution,
Shake the system, break it down!
Paul Hemphill, Rhythm of the Revolution

Recent events in the Middle East seem to validate Vladimir Lenin’s aphorism, “there are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen”.

”For years” wrote Bel Tru, the Independent’s correspondent in the Levant, a worthy successor to the late Robert Fisk and now retired Patrick Cockburn.East, “the world forgot about Syria. Many believed it was lost in an unsolvable abyss following the collapse of the 2011 revolution into a bloody civil war – made increasingly complex by the intervention of a mess of internal and international actors. Most assumed that the immovable regime of Bashar al-Assad had won, and that nothing would ever change. Few could even tell you if the war was still ongoing, let alone what stage it was at”.

Until Syrian rebel fighters stormed out of their fastness in Idlib province, which had been besieged and contained and for years by government forces and Russian bombers, and in an off sense that too the world by surprise, they took control of Aleppo, Syria’s largest city?

Over the space of a week, it seemed as if the nightmares of the past had come rushing into the present as the current wars in Gaza and Lebanon were pushed to the sidelines.

Iran’s theocratic tyrant Ayatollah Khamenei declared that the rebel offensive that destroyed the 52-year-old Assad dynasty in a mere eleven days was all a foreign plot concocted by the Great Satan and the Little Satan, aided and abetted by the wannabe Sultan of Türkiye (and there might indeed be a kernel of truth in that). In his opinion, it had nothing to do with the fact that the brutal and irredeemably corrupt Syrian regime was rotten to its core and that like the Russian army in 1917, its reluctant conscript soldiers, neglected, poorly paid and hungry, refused to fight for it whilst its commanders ran for their lives. Built to fight Israel and then to subdue Syrians, it had over time ate itself in corruption, neglect and ineptitude. Western radicals of the regressive left will doubtless believe the good ayatollah because that is what they are conditioned to believe rather than learning anything about Syria or the region generally.

if Khamenei could only have removed the mote from his eye, he’d have seen that the fall of Bashar al Assad was the indirect result of the most disastrous series of foreign policy miscalculations since the theocratic regime took power in Tehran in 1979. In the wake of Hamas’s murderous attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, Iran made the fatal error of ordering its proxy Hezbollah in Lebanon to begin a low-level war against northern Israel, lobbing missiles and drones into it almost daily. What Tehran did not calculate was that once Israel had largely destroyed Hamas in Gaza it would turn its guns on to Hezbollah with stunning force. The indirect effect of Iran’s miscalculation was that neither Hezbollah nor Iran was in a position to help Assad repel the rebels when they launched their assault. Iran has now lost its regional ally Syria, in addition to Hezbollah and Hamas, leaving it unusually isolated in the region when its ageing clerical leadership is increasingly unpopular with its own people.

Over the coming weeks and months, commentators, pundits and so-called experts will ruminate on the causes of the fall of one of the Middle East’s most enduring and also, even by the region’s low standards, brutal regime, and on what may or may not happen now.

I republish below two excellent opinion pieces offering some answers to each question respectively. Each in their own way follow the advice of most scholars of the Middle East: expect the unexpected. And whilst most observers admit to having been taken by surprise when Hayat al Tahrir al Sham fell upon Aleppo, including intelligence organizations that ought to have known better, none were perhaps more surprised than the insurgents themselves when only a fortnight ago, they were given the nod by their Turkish patron to endeavour to expand the borders of their statelet and suddenly found themselves on an almost empty highway to Damascus.

Analyst and commentator David McCullen (who has featured prominently on this blog in the past) examines warning signs that may have indicated that all was not well in the Assad kingdom, drawing on on historical parallels to explain why the Bashar al Assad and his longtime all-pervasive and ever-watching security apparatus failed to see the gathering storm unlit it had engulfed them.

He references particularly the political scientist Timur Kuran, the originator of the concept of “preference cascade”: “… under repressive regimes (or ostensibly democratic ones that censor dissent) the gap between public pronouncements and private opinions increases over time, until many individuals dissent from the approved narrative and lose faith in institutions that promote it but remain reluctant to reveal their real views. This “preference falsification” creates a deceptive impression of consensus. It can make regimes believe they have more support than they really do, while convincing dissidents they are all alone so there is no point expressing a contrary opinion. But when an unexpected shock reduces the regime’s power to suppress dissent, people suddenly feel empowered to express their real opinions. They realise these opinions are widely shared and the false consensus evaporates. This can trigger a “preference cascade”, where individuals or institutions suddenly change sides and support for the government collapses overnight”.

Kilcullen concludes: “Given the speed and totality of Assad’s collapse, some observers seem to be assuming that HTS will now, by default, become the dominant player in Syria. On its face, this may seem a reasonable assumption, given what happened in similar situations – Havana 1959, Saigon 1975, Kabul 2021 and so on”. But he cautions that “it would be premature in Syria’s case since the war is very much ongoing. As the northern hemisphere winter closes in and Western allies prepare for a change of administration in Washington, Syria – along with Gaza, Lebanon, the Red Sea, Ukraine, Taiwan and the Korean peninsula – will remain a major flashpoint into the new year”.

Indeed, the immediate future is far from clear. It is axiomatic to say that most commentators who say they understand what is going to happen in the Levant often don’t. To quote B Dylan, something’s happening, and we don’t yet know what it is …

In the second article republished below, Israeli commentator Zvi Bar’el examines possibilities, including the Herculean task of putting the fractured state of Syria back together again. As Australian diplomat David Livingstone wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald on 3 December, “Syria and its conflict is a mosaic of combatants rather than a dichotomy of good versus evil. Loyalties usually reflect a person’s religion or ethnicity. The Sunnis hate the nominally Shiite regime of Assad; Assad himself is the inheritor of atrocities by his father’s regime against the Sunni, including the destruction of Hama and slaughter of many of its inhabitants in 1982; the Kurds want an autonomous homeland; and the Turkmen are no friends to Assad or extremist Sunnis”.

So, where to from here? Syria now pauses at a crossroads, where both hope for a better future, and scepticism that it will be achieved, are equally warranted. Whether or not the new Syrian regime can succeed is an open question.

There is much to be done, with little time and meagre resources to do it. Forces, factions and faiths will now have to be reconciled. The divided country is shattered physically, economically and psychologically. Some 410,000 Syrians are estimated to have been killed in war-related violence up to the end of last year making it the bloodiest conflict of the 21st century to date. The dead will have to counted and accounted for, including tens and tens of thousands lost in the regime’s jails and prisons, and the survivors of rehabilitated. Scores may have to be settled either in blood or in spirit. About half of the country’s pre-war population has either fled abroad or internally displaced. The new government will need to ensure civilians’ safety, enable the return of millions of refugees and internally displaced, and rehabilitate the infrastructure and civil services. But the country is broke, while one economist estimates that the physical damage across the country amounts to $150 billion.

What form will a government take? Does the new administration intend to hold elections? Will HTS leader Ahmed al Shara and his comrades set up a government that will be agreed on by all the communities, factions, militia, and foreign forces? Will the new constitution be Islamic? To this his new prime minister replies, “God willing, but clearly all these details will be discussed in the constitutional process.” When Italian journalist Andrea Nicastro asks him “do I understand correctly when I say you’re ready to make peace with Israel and that you’re hostile to Iran, Hezbollah and Russia?” Al-Bashir thanks him and leaves without answering.

Meanwhile, Arab states, who once spurned Assad’s regime and were tentatively cozying up to him only recently, having invited Syria back into the Arab League. European states are contemplating whether or not to remove HTS from their lists of proscribed terrorist organizations. Assad’s erstwhile backers, Iran and Russia, which in fact controlled large parts of Syria, left Dodge in haste and are now replaced by two new-old occupiers, Israel, and Turkey. One took over the “Syrian Hermon” and a little further – to the condemnation of Arab regimes and the United Nations, the other is completing the occupation of the Kurdish regions in northern Syria.

No love is lost between the two of them, but it seems fate insists on making them meet in war fronts. As Bar’el adds, “… once as partners when they helped Azerbaijan in its war against Armenia and once as enemies in the Gaza front or now on Syrian soil. There’s no knowing, maybe al Shara will be the best man who will get to reconcile between them. Miracles happen, even if under the nose of the best intelligence services in the world, who didn’t know and didn’t evaluate the complete collapse of the Assad regime”. “The warm Arab and international envelope tightening around Damascus”, he writes, “is ready to give him credit although it doesn’t know yet where he’s heading, assuming any leader will be better than Assad. That, by the way, is what the Syrians also believed Assad senior would be when he toppled the rule of General Salah Jedid, only to get a new mass murderer.

Right now, as the old song goes, “the future’s not ours to see …” But we might take hope from the last line of the late Robert Fisk‘s last book, The Night of Power, published posthumously earlier this year: “… all wars come to an end and that’s where history restarts”. 

Author’s note

There have been many stunning pictures published to date of the Syrian revolution, but none that I’ve found as personally poignant as this one. It depicts jubilant Syrians lining the Roman archway that stands at the eastern end of Damascus’ historic Suq al Hamadiyah. When we were last in Syria, in the Spring of 2009, I photographed the arch from inside the darkened Suq (during one of the city’s frequent power cuts) , revealing the impressive remnants of the Roman Temple of Jupiter and the magnificent Omayyad Mosque, the fourth holiest place in Islam (after Mecca, Medina and Al Quds/Jerusalem).

For more on the Middle East in in That Howling Infinite, see A Middle East Miscellany:  

Syrians atop the Roman archway at the end of Damascus’ historic Suq al Hamadiyah

The Suq Al Hamadiyah, Temple of Jupiter and the Umayyad Mosque Mosque. P Hemphill 2009

The Suq Al Hamadiyah, Temple of Jupiter and the Umayyad Mosque Mosque. P Hemphill 2009

Aleppo shock to Hama huge leap forward: triggers in Syria’s 11-day blitz that unravelled Assad

David Kilcullen, The Australian, 13th December 2024

The speed of the regime’s collapse was startling, but it should not have been. Beyond the general dynamics of government collapse, something else was happening.

The regime’s collapse accelerated dramatically after the fall of the central Syrian city of Hama on the evening of Thursday, December 5, Syria time. Picture: Emin Sansar/Anadolu via Getty Images

The regime’s collapse accelerated dramatically after the fall of the central Syrian city of Hama on the evening of Thursday, December 5, Syria time. Picture: Emin Sansar/Anadolu via Getty Images

Last week’s offensive by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham escalated quickly, as the kids say. In 11 days, HTS routed regime forces, captured masses of military materiel and seized three cities, triggering the collapse of the Syrian Arab Republic and ending the Assad family’s 54-year rule. Even for many analysts who track the Middle East for a living, the assault seemed to come from nowhere.

This was not strictly true: HTS had been biding its time in its stronghold of Idlib province, on Syria’s northwestern border with Turkey, for five years since a ceasefire brokered by Turkish and Russian negotiators in 2020, avoiding direct confrontation with the regime and building its own structure outside state control.

Its parallel government included several ministries and a civil administration, the Syrian Salvation Government, governing a population of four million, the size of Croatia or Panama. Though dominated by HTS, the SSG has been somewhat politically inclusive, and several non-HTS leaders have had key roles in its administration.

It sought to include the independent governance councils that had arisen organically during the early days of the anti-Assad rebellion, and it established local municipal managers to provide essential services across its territory.

HTS’s small combat groups operated like a fast-moving light cavalry force. Picture: Omar Haj Kadour / AFP

HTS’s small combat groups operated like a fast-moving light cavalry force. Picture: Omar Haj Kadour / AFP

American analysts in 2020 assessed the SSG as technocratic, “post-jihadi”, focused on internal stability and non-ideological governance, seeking acceptance from Turkey and the US, and unlikely to become a launch pad for external attacks.

Aaron Zelin – the Western expert most familiar with HTS and the author of an important book on the organisation, The Age of Political Jihadism – has observed that despite still holding extremist beliefs, HTS acts more like a state than a jihadist group.

While the SSG was focusing on social services and economic activity, HTS commanders were investing in advanced military capabilities. Building on experience from before the 2020 ceasefire, HTS organised its forces into small combat groups of 20 to 40 fighters that could mass quickly to swarm a target using several teams, or disperse to avoid enemy airstrikes or artillery.

They were highly mobile, operating like a fast-moving light cavalry force, mounted in a mix of hard and soft-skinned vehicles that included captured armoured vehicles and armed pick-up trucks (known as technicals).

Reconnaissance teams, scouts and snipers moved in civilian cars or on motorcycles. HTS combat groups carried heavy and light weapons including rocket launchers, captured artillery pieces, mortars, recoilless rifles, anti-tank missiles and Soviet-bloc small arms seized from the government or rival resistance groups including Islamic State.

Rebel fighters stand next to the burning gravesite of Syria's late president Hafez al-Assad at his mausoleum in the family's ancestral village of Qardaha. Picture: Aaref Watad / AFP

Rebel fighters stand next to the burning gravesite of Syria’s late president Hafez al-Assad at his mausoleum in the family’s ancestral village of Qardaha. Picture: Aaref Watad / AFP

HTS also used the ceasefire to professionalise itself, studying the wars in Ukraine, Gaza and Lebanon. It established a military academy to educate officers in “military art and science”, and created civil affairs units, humanitarian agencies and a specialised organisation to convince government supporters to defect.

It used drones for reconnaissance, for leaflet drops on regime-controlled areas and as one-way attack munitions to strike targets with explosive warheads. It manufactured weapons and drones, and modified technicals with additional armour. HTS leaders built intelligence networks and command-and-control systems while allegedly also forging relationships with regional intelligence services and special operations forces.

Thus, the strength of HTS was not unexpected in itself. On the other hand, the rapidity of the regime’s collapse – which accelerated dramatically after the fall of the central Syrian city of Hama on the evening of Thursday, December 5, Syria time – was startling. It probably should not have been. Governments, unlike resistance movements, are tightly coupled complex systems that rely on numerous institutions and organisations, all of which must work together for the state to function.

As Joseph Tainter showed in The Collapse of Complex Societies, once co-ordination begins to break down, these interdependent systems unravel, the collapse of each brings down the next, and the entire structure falls apart. For this reason, in a process familiar to practitioners of irregular warfare, resistance groups (which tend to be loosely structured and thus more resilient to chaos) degrade slowly under pressure – and rebound once it is relieved – whereas governments collapse quickly and irrevocably once initial cohesion is lost.

As a team led by Gordon McCormick showed in a seminal 2006 study, governments that are losing to insurgencies reach a tipping point, after which they begin to decay at an accelerating rate. The conflict then seems to speed up and the end “is typically decisive, sudden and often violent”.

This pattern was very noticeable during the fall of the Afghan republic in 2021, for example, which also occurred in an 11-day period. The final Taliban offensive captured every province but one, and took the capital, Kabul, in a series of victories between August 4 and 15, 2021. Many garrisons surrendered, fled without fighting or changed sides.

Initial rebel successes made the regime look weak, allies failed to offer support, the security forces defected and other rebel groups suddenly rose up across the country. Picture: Aaref Watad / AFP

Initial rebel successes made the regime look weak, allies failed to offer support, the security forces defected and other rebel groups suddenly rose up across the country. Picture: Aaref Watad / AFP

To be sure, the Taliban’s final campaign was built on years of coalition-building and insurgent warfare. Similar to HTS, the Taliban relied on patient construction of parallel networks largely illegible to an Afghan state increasingly alienated from, and seen as illegitimate by, its own people.

It also was enabled by a stunningly shortsighted political deal with the US in 2020 and an incompetent US-led withdrawal in 2021. Even so, the collapse of the Kabul government was faster than expected, with president Ashraf Ghani fleeing by helicopter in a manner remarkably similar to Bashar al-Assad’s exit last weekend.

The fall of South Vietnam in 1975 was likewise extraordinarily rapid, occurring in just nine days after the decisive battle of Xuan Loc, with South Vietnam’s last president, Nguyen Van Thieu, fleeing for Taiwan on a military transport plane.

Similarly, Fulgencio Batista’s government in Cuba fell in only five days, between December 28, 1958 – when a rebel column under Che Guevara captured the town of Santa Clara – and the early hours of January 1, 1959, when Batista fled by aircraft to the Dominican Republic. He had announced his resignation to shocked supporters a few hours earlier at a New Year’s Eve party in Havana, starting a scramble for the airport.

 

In Syria’s case, beyond these general dynamics of government collapse, something else was happening: a military version of what political scientists call a “preference cascade”.

As Timur Kuran, originator of the concept, points out, under repressive regimes (or ostensibly democratic ones that censor dissent) the gap between public pronouncements and private opinions increases over time, until many individuals dissent from the approved narrative and lose faith in institutions that promote it but remain reluctant to reveal their real views. This “preference falsification” creates a deceptive impression of consensus. It can make regimes believe they have more support than they really do, while convincing dissidents they are all alone so there is no point expressing a contrary opinion.

But when an unexpected shock reduces the regime’s power to suppress dissent, people suddenly feel empowered to express their real opinions. They realise these opinions are widely shared and the false consensus evaporates. This can trigger a “preference cascade”, where individuals or institutions suddenly change sides and support for the government collapses overnight.

In particular, the moment when security forces, particularly police, refuse to fire on protesters is often decisive, as seen in the fall of the Suharto government in 1998, the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak in 2011 or the collapse of the East German regime in 1989.

Kuran’s initial work centred on the East European revolutions of 1989, which were unexpected at the time but seemed inevitable in retrospect, something Kuran later came to see as inherent in revolutionary preference cascades.

The most extreme case was the fall of Nicolae Ceausescu in Romania. During a mass rally on December 21, 1989 the dictator suddenly realised, his face on camera registering utter shock, that what he had initially perceived as shouts of support were actually calls for his downfall. When his security ser­vices refused to fire on the protesters, Ceausescu was forced to flee by helicopter. Four days later, he and his wife Elena were dead, executed after a brief military trial.

A woman poses for a photograph with a rebel fighter's gun in Umayyad Square in Damascus. Syria’s population finally felt free to dissent from the dominant narrative. Picture: Chris McGrath/Getty Images

A woman poses for a photograph with a rebel fighter’s gun in Umayyad Square in Damascus. Syria’s population finally felt free to dissent from the dominant narrative. Picture: Chris McGrath/Getty Images

Syria this week was another example of a preference cascade. Initial rebel successes made the regime look weak, allies failed to offer support, the security forces defected and other rebel groups suddenly rose up across the country. Syria’s population – previously reluctant to express anti-regime sentiment for fear of repression or social ostracism – finally felt free to dissent from the dominant narrative. Assad lost control, was forced to flee, and his government collapsed. It is worth briefly recounting the sequence of events.

On November 27, the HTS offensive began with a sudden attack on Aleppo City. The outskirts of Aleppo are only 25km from the HTS stronghold in Idlib, so although the outbreak of violence was a surprise, there was little initial panic. The regime responded with airstrikes and artillery, with Russian warplanes in support.

The first major shock was the fall of Aleppo on November 30, after three days of heavy fighting. As Syria’s second largest city, scene of a bloody urban battle in 2012-16, Aleppo’s sudden collapse was a huge blow to the government. The HTS capture of Aleppo airport, east of the city, denied the regime a key airbase from which to strike the rebels, and cut the highway to northeast Syria. At this point the regime seemed capable of containing HTS, though clearly under pressure, and there was still relatively little panic.

But then on December 4, HTS attacked the city of Hama, which fell on the evening of December 5. This was a huge leap forward – Hama is 140km south of Aleppo down Syria’s main north-south M5 highway, meaning the rebel forces had covered a third of the distance to Damascus in a week. The fall of Hama was another political and psychological blow to Assad’s regime: Hama had never been under rebel control at any time since 2011.

Syrian rebel fighters at the town of Homs, 40km south of Hama, a critically important junction controlling the M5 and the east-west M1 highway that links Damascus and central Syria to the coast, and dominating Syria’s heavily populated central breadbasket. Picture: Aaref Watad / AFP

Syrian rebel fighters at the town of Homs, 40km south of Hama, a critically important junction controlling the M5 and the east-west M1 highway that links Damascus and central Syria to the coast, and dominating Syria’s heavily populated central breadbasket. Picture: Aaref Watad / AFP

The collapse at Hama – and the perception of regime weakness this created – triggered a preference cascade. Immediately, commanders began negotiating with or surrendering to the rebels or evacuating their positions. Also, after Hama’s fall, Iranian forces negotiated safe passage and began withdrawing from Syria, denying the government one of its key allies, further weakening Assad’s credibility, and encouraging yet more supporters to defect.

The regime’s other main ally, Russia, had already retreated to its bases at Khmeimim and Tartous, on Syria’s Mediterranean coast, after losing large amounts of military equipment and a still-unknown number of casualties. The same day, Hezbollah declined to offer material assistance to the Syrian government, given that it was still under Israeli pressure and had taken significant damage in 66 days of conflict.

The town of Homs lay 40km south of Hama – not much closer to Damascus but a critically important junction controlling the M5 and the east-west M1 highway that links Damascus and central Syria to the coast, and dominating Syria’s heavily populated central breadbasket. By early Friday, December 6, HTS combat groups were massing to assault Homs, but the city’s defences collapsed and it fell without a significant fight. By this point, security forces were dispersing, some retreating to Damascus but many fleeing to coastal areas.

The fall of Hama and Homs in quick succession encouraged other rebel groups to pile on, with several now mounting their own offensives against the regime. Uprisings broke out in the southern cities of Daraa and As-Suwayda on Friday and Saturday, December 6 and 7. These were less of a shock than the loss of Hama – Daraa was, after all, the cradle of the revolution in 2011 – but given everything else that was happening, the government simply lacked the forces to suppress them.

Simultaneously, US-backed forces in the far south advanced north from their base at al-Tanf, near the Jordanian border, while US-allied Kurdish troops of the Syrian Democratic Forces attacked in the east, crossing the Euphrates and seizing regime-controlled territory near Deir Ezzour. American aircraft flew airstrikes to support the SDF, which also seized the border post at Bou Kamal, blocking access to Iraqi militias that had been crossing into Syria to support the regime.

By Sunday, the regime had collapsed and the rebels occupied Damascus without a fight. Picture: Louai Beshara / AFP

By this point – last Saturday evening, December 7, Syria time – the government was on its last legs. That night an uprising broke out in Damascus, launched by civilian resistance groups and disaffected military units keen to distance themselves from the regime as the rebels closed in. Government troops began abandoning their posts, changing into civilian clothes, ditching their equipment and disappearing into the night. Large numbers of armoured vehicles, including T-72 tanks, were abandoned in the streets of the capital. Assad had planned to address the nation that evening but did not appear.

Later that night, apparently without asking Assad, the high command of the Syrian armed forces issued an order to all remaining troops to lay down their weapons and disperse. Assad fled about 2am on Sunday, flying out in a Russian transport aircraft. Assad’s prime minister, Mohammed al-Jalali, announced that he was willing to act as caretaker during transition to a provisional government, showing that Syria’s civil government, like the regime’s military forces, had collapsed. Despite initial reports that Assad’s aircraft had been denied entry into Lebanese airspace then shot down over Homs, Russian media reported later on Sunday that he had arrived in Moscow.

By Sunday, the regime had completely collapsed and the rebels, led by HTS commander Ahmed al-Sharaa, formerly known as Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, occupied Damascus without a fight.

The same day, US aircraft mounted dozens of airstrikes across the country, targeting Islamic State or regime forces, while Israeli troops crossed the Golan Heights buffer zone and began advancing towards Damascus. By Monday, despite initially claiming their incursion was limited and temporary, Israeli forces were 25km from Damascus, Israeli politicians had announced the permanent annexation of the Golan, and Israeli aircraft were striking Syrian military bases and sinking Syrian ships at the Latakia naval base.

Israel has denied media reports that its troops have taken control of Syrian territory.
In addition to the Israeli incursion through the Golan, Turkish-backed troops of the Syrian National Army are attacking the SDF across a strip of northern Syria, apparently attempting to create their own buffer zone separating the SDF – which Ankara sees as allied to the Kurdistan Workers Party – from Turkish territory.

The SDF has seized a chunk of eastern Syria, other US-allied rebel groups hold key parts of the south, and Islamic State still has numerous supporters and active cells in the country. Russia still controls its two Syrian bases, while Syria’s ethnic and religious minorities including Christians and Alawites are deeply anxious about the future, despite promises of tolerance from HTS.

Given the speed and totality of Assad’s collapse, some observers seem to be assuming that HTS will now, by default, become the dominant player in Syria. On its face, this may seem a reasonable assumption, given what happened in similar situations – Havana 1959, Saigon 1975, Kabul 2021 and so on.

But it would be premature in Syria’s case since the war is very much ongoing. As the northern hemisphere winter closes in and Western allies prepare for a change of administration in Washington, Syria – along with Gaza, Lebanon, the Red Sea, Ukraine, Taiwan and the Korean peninsula – will remain a major flashpoint into the new year.

David Kilcullen served in the Australian Army from 1985 to 2007 and was a senior counter-insurgency adviser to General David Petraeus in 2007 and 2008, when he helped design and monitor the Iraq War troop surge.

The Most Courted Leader in the Middle East Still Has No State

Arab and European heads of state are lining up to meet Ahmed A-Shara, the leader of the Syrian rebel organizations that ousted Assad, who has returned to his original name and is no longer calling himself al-Golani

Zvi Bar’el, Haaretz ,Dec 13, 2024
After taking control, he hastened to renounce his underground name and resumed his local name, Ahmed A-Shara. He ousted Bashar Assad’s horror regime and started to sprout the first buds of “new Syria,” whose outcome is still hard to fathom. The race for shaking his hand is in full swing.
Qatar is an old friend of A-Shara (one has to practice the name) and during the years of his organization’s existence it supported the militias that made up Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which he set up on the ruins of Jabhat a-Nusra and it’s also expected to help him rehabilitate his country.

Qatar isn’t alone. In the race to the presidential palace in Damascus the Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan came first to shake A-Shara’s hand. The foreign ministers of other Arab states, such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE are preparing to land in Damascus in the coming days to personally congratulate the leader of the sister state.

At the same time Biden’s administration is examining the possibility of removing A-Shara and his group from the terrorists’ list while European leaders, headed by Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who only two weeks ago spoke of the possibility to normalize their relations with the Assad regime, are already trying to coordinate meetings with the new regime’s leadership.

The irony doesn’t stop there. Iran and Russia, which in fact controlled large parts of Syria, are now replaced by two new-old occupiers, Israel, and Turkey. One took over the “Syrian Hermon “and a little further, the other is completing the occupation of the Kurdish regions in North Syria. No love is lost between the two of them, but it seems fate insists on making them meet in war fronts.

Once as partners when they helped Azerbaijan in its war against Armenia and once as enemies in the Gaza front or now on Syrian soil. There’s no knowing, maybe A-Shara will be the best man who will get to reconcile between them. Miracles happen, even if under the nose of the best intelligence services in the world, who didn’t know and didn’t evaluate the complete collapse of the Assad regime.

The warm Arab and international envelope tightening around Damascus is ready to give him credit although it doesn’t know yet where he’s heading, assuming any leader will be better than Assad. That, by the way, is what the Syrians also believed Assad senior would be when he toppled the rule of General Salah Jedid, only to get a new mass murderer.

The first declarations and interviews of A-Shara and senior officials of his administration sound good and even encouraging. The temporary prime minister, Mohammed al-Bashir, said in an interview to the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera on Wednesday that at this stage the new administration has three top goals – to ensure the civilians’ safety, to return the refugees and to rehabilitate the infrastructure and civil services.
How to achieve those goals? “It will take time but we’ll get there,” says the former prime minister of the Idlib region’s rescue government under A-Shara’s command and was blasted publicly for the brutal way he ran the rebel province.
Al-Bashir also says the temporary government will serve until the beginning of March, but does not clarify what will happen after that date. Will he manage to draft a new constitution and election law by then? Does the new administration even intend to hold elections, or does he hope within that time to set up a government that will be agreed on by all the communities, factions, militia, and foreign forces?
Will the new constitution be Islamic? To this he replies, “God willing, but clearly all these details will be discussed in the constitutional process.”
Journalist Andrea Nicastro asks him “do I understand correctly when I say you’re ready to make peace with Israel and that you’re hostile to Iran, Hezbollah and Russia?” Al-Bashir thanks him and leaves without answering.
There can be no complaints about a prime minister or organization head who only two weeks ago merely prepared to expand the borders of his control region and suddenly found himself on an empty highway to Damascus, for having no political, economic, or strategic plan and for having to wriggle around ideological and religious issues. A-Shara has more urgent business, for example, an empty state coffer.
If he wants to ensure civilian safety and public services he’ll have to pay wages to thousands of policemen, teachers, judges, garbage contractors, rebuild the crushed electric system, mend roads and traffic lights when not a single dollar, according to al-Bashir, remain in the till.
Head of the Syrian trade bureau said this week Syria will move from a state-controlled economy to a free market economy. This is encouraging but to apply it they will need investors and ensure their investment.
Government ministers, most of them served in the “rescue government” in Idlib, estimate they’d be able to raise funds from Arab countries and mainly the UAE and Turkey, persuade Syrian businesspeople in exile to invest in the homeland and also return to Syria funds that were smuggled out by the Assad regime. But Arab and international aid usually comes with a list of rigid conditions, like demands for a profound economic reform, preserving human rights and minority rights, civilian safety, and no less important a political agenda that is compatible with the donor states’ aspirations.
Syria is not an only child. Soon the donor states will be asked to help to rebuild Lebanon and perhaps later Gaza as well. A conservative estimate sets Syria’s national debt at some $31 billion, $5 billion of them to the IMF and $26 billion to Russia and to Iran.
More realistic estimates cite a debt of more than $30 billion to Iran alone, which invested some $50 billion in the last 14 years.
The oil wells that remained in the Assad regime’s control produced only some 9,000 oil barrels a day, now the new administration can produce oil from the oil fields controlled by the Kurds in the northeast of the state after they retreated from Dir A-Zur, which was reoccupied by the pro-Turkish militias.
But perhaps this will no longer be enough to reinstate the agriculture and food production industry, or to generate millions of workplaces that were lost during the war.
A-Shara portrays himself as “everyone'” leader and his prime minister aspires to set up an administration that represents all the ethnic communities and minorities. But will he gain the cooperation of the Alawite minority, which makes up 10 percent of the population? Will the Kurds in the north give up their aspirations for autonomy?
A large concentration of Alawites resides in the Latakia province on the Mediterranean coast, its people are well armed and afraid that armed militias or the regime itself would want to take revenge on them. Will they agree to disarm?
The Kurds are being pushed out of some of their provinces and only this week retreated from Manjib city west of the Euphrates River, after the Syrian National Army, the large pro-Turkish militia, conquered the city.
This retreat is the outcome of American mediation leaning on a Turkish commitment not to harm Kurdish civilians who leave the city. But Kurds continue to control the regions east of Euphrates, and Turkey wants to keep them away from those too. AT the same time their conduct has made it clear it is ready to cooperate with the A-Shara regime and be an integral part of Syria.

But it’s not clear yet under what terms. Will they want to preserve their provinces’ autonomy, and will the Syrian regime agree, when Turkey operates its military and economic leverages. Will the Kurds even have a bargaining chip left when Trump enters the White House? Trump tried already in 2019 to withdraw U.S. forces from Syria and was blocked by internal and external pressure. Now he may implement his wish with his ally Recep Erdogan.

Syrian commentators have begun to draw a map in which Syria could be a federation divided into autonomous cantons, Kurdish in the north, Sunni-Arab in the center, Alawite in the west and perhaps Druze in the south, a sort of expansion of the Iraqi model where an autonomous Kurdish region exists. The Shi’ites in the south are demanding their own province.
It is doubtful whether this model has a chance of being implemented in Syria but bringing it up in itself shows the explosives in store for the new Syrian regime. This is only a partial list because beyond the various ethnic communities and minorities, A-Shara will have to deal with a population that is mostly Sunni but secular. Will this population toe the line with a radical religious agenda, on which A-Shara was raised and has preached?
So far Syria has conveniently been attached to the “Shi’ite axis though it was an organ of Iran’s Islamic revolution.
But the Alawite faction doesn’t count in Iran as an authentic Shi’ite faction. Hafez Assad himself had to ask his friend, the influential religious leader Moussa al-Sader, to issue a ruling that the Alawite religion is part of the formal “Shi’a” and therefore part of the Islam religion.
This was after a long violent clash he conducted against Sunni and Shi’ite religious leaders who ruled the Alawite faction wasn’t Muslim at all and therefore Assad senior cannot be president, because the constitution stipulated the state’s president had to be Muslim.
A-Shara won’t have that dilemma, but as one who hasn’t concealed his aspiration to set up a religious state, he will have to decide how to settle between the religious vision and the character of the population and the state that hasn’t yet been established

Can Lebanon free itself from Hezbollah’s grip?

Paul Hemphill 1 Comment

Contrary to what many of the historically uniformed opponents of Israel and the US and its allies might think as they rush to judgement on the streets of western cities, the current Israeli Lebanese war (the third of that name) did not begin with the wired pagers and walkie talkies and the killing of much of Hezbollah’s leadership, including its chief, Hasan Nasrallah. It started the day after the Hamas’ murderous assault on Israel’s border communities on October 7th last year, when, ostensibly as a show of solidarity for Hamas and Gaza and with theocratic Iran’s tacit approval, the Lebanese Hezbollah began launching drones and missiles at northern Israel – some 9,000 to date – forcing the evacuation of probably up to 100, 000 citizens to safer areas to the south – where they remain to this day.

Yet, it is only now, a year later, that there are calls internationally for a ceasefire. I’ve seen glaciers move faster! Not that messianic jihadis are much into ceasefires, let alone surrender. It’s not in their doomsday DNA – they’d sooner burn down the house with themselves and their co-religionists inside, as they have done in Gaza.

There is no question that Hezbollah had it coming and that Israel’s strikes have been perfectly justifiable. Hezbollah committed a series of gross miscalculations and grievous strategic blunders. Nasrallah’s delusions of power were his undoing. Now it remains to be seen if Hezbollah can survive the devastation it has suffered in the last two weeks, and more critical for the rest of the world, if the conflict escalated into a regional war in which Israel and Its allies have to confront Iran’s “Ring of Fire”, its “Axis of Resistance” – a war that is actually now being waged on seven fronts: Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran – and world opinion.

Anyone who is willing to bet for or against an escalation between Israel and Iran should quit gambling. While the United States’ involvement endeavours to avert further escalation, this is like trying to put toothpaste back in the tube: theoretically possible, practically impossible. Remember the ludicrous American and Israeli concept of “escalate to de-escalate” from merely a week ago. Unpredictable developments and spiraling escalation obviously outpace analysis

Hezbollah members carry the coffins of two commanders during a funeral procession in Beirut’s southern suburbs on September 25. AP

Slouching towards Beirut

The Sydney Morning Herald provided an excellent summary of how the Shia Hezbollah came to create a parasitic state within a state and to dominate Lebanon’s politics, economy and society, outman and outgun the meagre Lebanese army, and to potentially threaten the country’s survival. Like Hamas, its Sunni counterpart in Gaza, it is an Iran-funded messianic, fundamentalist organization dedicated to the elimination of Israel, and the theocratic Islamic Republic of Iran’s most important proxy in the “Axis of Resistance” to the Jewish state and the United States and its allies, a keystone in its Ring of Fire strategy. And also like Hamas, its jihadi ideology, evident in its name, The Party of God, does not permit compromise let alone surrender.

On 27th September, Tom McTague, the political editor of the UK e-zine Unherd wrote in an article called Why Lebanon can’t be saved:

“Today, Lebanon is a dead state, eaten alive by Hezbollah’s parasitic power. The scale of the catastrophe in the country is hard to comprehend, much of it caused by the disruptive nature of Syria’s civil war. Since its neighbour’s descent into anarchic hell, some 1.5 million Syrians have sought refuge in Lebanon — a tiny country with a population of just 5 million. But, more fundamentally, with Hezbollah fighting to protect Bashar al Assad, the opposing countries — led by Saudi Arabia — began withdrawing funds from Lebanese banks. This sparked a financial crisis that left Lebanon with no money for fuel.

By spring 2020, the country had defaulted on its debts, sending it into a downward spiral which the World Bank in 2021 described as among “the top 10, possibly top three, most severe crises globally since the mid-nineteenth century”. Lebanon’s GDP plummeted by around a third, with poverty doubling from 42% to 82% in two years. At the same time, the country’s capital, Beirut, was hit by an extraordinary explosion at its port, leaving more than 300,000 homeless. By 2023 the IMF described the situation as “very dangerous” and the US was warning that the collapse of the Lebanese state was “a real possibility”.

With Iranian support, however, Hezbollah created a shadow economy almost entirely separate from this wider collapse. It could escape the energy shortages, while creating its own banks, supermarkets and electricity network. Hezbollah isn’t just a terrorist group. It is a state within a state, complete with a far more advanced army. “They may have plunged Lebanon into complete chaos, but they themselves are not chaotic at all,” as Carmit Valensi, from the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University, told the Jerusalem Post.

Then came 7 October, after which Hezbollah tied its fate to that of the Palestinians, promising to bombard Israel with rockets until the war in Gaza was brought to a close. We have witnessed the frightening scale of its power over the past year, its bombardment forcing some 100,000 Israelis from their homes in Galilee to the safety of the Israeli heartlands around Tel Aviv. For the first time since modern Israel’s creation, the land where Jews are able to live in their own state has shrunk; the rockets are a daily reminder of the country’s extraordinary vulnerability, threatened on all sides by states who actively want it removed from the map – even from history itself. The pretense (in the walk of the Abraham Accords brokered by the US between Israel and a number of ‘friends’ Arab autocracies that the Palestinian and Lebanese questions could be contained, ignored or bypassed as part of a wider grand strategy to contain Iran has been shattered”.

The day after

Some commentators are more upbeat than McTague about Lebanon’s prospects in the event of the weakening if not outright removal of Hezbollah’s stranglehold on Lebanese life. I republish two such below.  Both acknowledge that this would not be easy.

Hezbollah’s command-and-control infrastructure is in tatters. But the Iranian control of Syria gives Hezbollah significant strategic depth, and, despite the recent losses, Hezbollah is a very large organization that is deeply woven into Lebanon’s Shia population, the largest sect in the country. But the events of the past two have seen the mystique around Hezbollah broken. Its prestige, built on “resistance” to Israel, has been irreparably damaged – not least by the revelation of how extensively Israeli spies have infiltrated its ranks. Hezbollah’s ability to dominate Lebanon is open to challenge in a way it has not been for decades. The end could well be nigh for the terrorist group.

As Israeli commentator Zvi Bar’el, wrote in Haaretz on 28 September:

“Even if Israel succeeds in destroying the entire stock of Hezbollah missiles that threaten it, the arms that remain in the organization’s hand will continue to serve as a whip threatening Lebanon’s domestic front so long as the country has no effective, equipped and trained army that can contend with Hezbollah. Iran fears that this lever is now liable to lose its power in the face of the heavy blows suffered by Hezbollah, which may lead to the Lebanese public to rear its head, considering the very heavy price it has had to pay for the war that is not its own, whose rationale has not been defense of the homeland, but assisting Hamas.

The Lebanese public and in particular the political rivals to Hezbollah, despite the sharp criticism that has intensified during the war, and in particular over the past two weeks, has still not taken to the streets to confront the organization. The political harmony between Hezbollah’s rivals has not yet ripened, their internecine revulsion and hate rivals what they feel toward Hezbollah, and there is no certainty that even in the face of the destruction of Lebanon will they be able to close ranks. Hezbollah is still demonstrating fighting ability despite the loss of its senior commanders, and the political road map that now appears optimal may disappear if a regional confrontation begins following the expected Israeli strike against Iran.

But the Lebanese have already demonstrated their power several times in the country’s recent history. In 2005, they drove the Syrian forces out of the country following the assassination of Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri, and in 2008, they violently confronted Hezbollah in a clash that killed dozens. They have toppled governments and forced the replacement of ministers, and most of all, in contrast to Gaza, they have a country that offers a collective national structure that they believe has been undermined by Iran, by way of Hezbollah.

With more than a million Lebanese uprooted from their homes, and Hezbollah’s social and health services no longer capable of responding to the needs of the homeless and wounded, forcing the group to rely on the services of the government it aspired to replace – Iran’s strategic challenge is to prevent a situation in which the country and its people will reject, or at least erode, Hezbollah’s status as the party that determines the nation’s policy and character.’

But the way ahead is daunting. Lebanon was in dire straits even before October 7th.

An economic crisis that began in 2019 and a massive 2020 port explosion for which Hezbollah was partly responsible, have left Lebanon struggling to provide basic services such as electricity and medical care. Political divisions have left the country of 6 million without a president or functioning government for more than two years, deepening a national sense of abandonment. Reeling from years of economic dysfunction brought on by corruption and the presence of perhaps over a million refugees. A comprehensive international effort is needed to rebuild its political, economic, and military institutions. Yet critical aid and reconstruction money has been withheld precisely because of exasperation with Hezbollah’s corrupting presence in the country.

Lebanon must be freed of Hezbollah and Iran, and it should not be left up to Israel and its highly problematic Netanyahu government. The international community needs to take an active role in supporting Lebanon’s recovery and resisting Iranian interference. The UN Security Council can start the process by demanding the implementation of the United Nations Security Council resolution 1701 which was intended to resolve the 2006 Lebanon War. It was unanimously approved by the Security Council  and the Lebanese cabinet.

That resolution called for a full cessation of hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah; the withdrawal of Israeli forces from Lebanon to be replaced by Lebanese and United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) forces deploying to southern Lebanon; and the disarmament of armed groups including Hezbollah, with no armed forces other than UNIFIL and Lebanese military south of the Litani River which flows about 29 km north of the border. As of 2024, the resolution was not fully implemented. Hezbollah and other armed groups in southern Lebanon have not withdrawn at all; in particular, Hezbollah has since significantly increased their weapons capabilities

For more on Lebanon in In That Howling Infinite, see Lebanon’s WhatsAPP intifada, Pity the Nation and O Beirut – songs for a wounded city 

Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrullah

The Day After Nasrallah: Lebanon’s Government Is Unsure How to Handle the ‘Historic Opportunity’ Ahead

With Nasrallah gone, Lebanon has a unique opportunity to envision a post-Hezbollah reality, yet the militant organization still maintains a tight grip on the country. They will not permit the government to secure a diplomatic solution acceptable to Israel.

Zvi Bar’el H

A little more than 20 years after the execution of Saddam Hussein and the end of his reign of terror, and about 13 years after the Arab Spring overthrew a number of dictators, a show of euphoria is resolutely predicting that Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah’s death will “change the map of the Middle East,” accompanied by proposals and work plans meant to take advantage of the opportunity to redraw that “dream map.”

The obvious starting point for this imagined renaissance is Lebanon, whose most significant political, economic and military center since the civil war ended in 1989 with the signing of the Taif Agreement, has now been damaged. The uniqueness and importance of the Taif Agreement was that it sought to shatter the confessional structure of the government that gave Christians a majority in the government and its institutions, as well as in the companies affiliated to it and in the army.

The agreement stipulated that Christians would no longer have an automatic majority in parliament, based on a population census conducted in 1932. Instead, its 128 seats would be divided equally between Christians (and other non-Muslim minorities) and Muslims, a definition that also included the Druze and the Alawite. In the important secondary division of the Muslim sects, 27 seats were allocated to Sunnis and 27 seats to Shi’ites.

At the base of this division was the aspiration that no single sect would ever be able to rule the country exclusively; for a government to be established, each sect would have to form a coalition with other sects that would share the political and economic spoils.

At the time, this structure was seen as an appropriate solution to ending the 15-year civil war. It did not build better politics in the country, but it did give Lebanon years of stability. This structure has not changed and it is not expected to change even after the removal of Nasrallah and Hezbollah’s military leaders; it is anchored in the Lebanese constitution, which no one currently intends to change.

The Taif agreement has led to the formation of trans-confessional coalitions, but they brought the country to economic collapse and to the brink of bankruptcy and political paralysis: In this situation, the rival parties cannot agree on a president, and since it is the president who appoints the prime minister it is then impossible to form a permanent government to make the critical decisions necessary to rescue the state from the crisis.

In an interview with Yossi Melman, former Mossad chief Tamir Pardo said, “The Israeli government should announce loudly and clearly that Lebanon is a single entity, and that the Lebanese government bears sole responsibility for every act of aggression that comes out of Lebanon. That the territory known to the world as Lebanon has one government, one flag and one army. That any negotiations to end the war and determine security arrangements will only take place with the Lebanese government. This war could be ended within hours from the moment Israel makes this clear and the international community acknowledges the fact that there is only one single legal entity in Lebanon.”

This is a statement that rests on admirable theoretical foundations, but they are detached from the reality of Lebanon and above all from the reality of the torn, crazy patchwork quilt known as the “Lebanese government.” It is true that any negotiations must be conducted with the Lebanese government, and that the country has “one government,” but it is a government with cabinet members who serve on behalf of Hezbollah who, together with their coalition partners from the Amal movement and, until recently, Gebran Bassil’s Christian party the Free Patriotic Movement, hold the government and the country by the throat, with or without Nasrallah. To bring about the “historic change,” Lebanon will have to hold a new general election, which at the present is about as likely as appointing a president or implementing economic reforms.
Lebanon has “one flag and one army,” but in practice it has two armies: the official one, headed by the Christian general Joseph Aoun, who has been mentioned as a candidate for the presidency; and the “Hezbollah army.” Even after all of the latter’s long- and medium-range missiles are destroyed and it no longer poses a threat to Israel, it will still have enough weapons to threaten Lebanon’s internal security and its own political rivals.
The Lebanese Army, on the other hand, is a ghost army. On paper, it has an estimated 80,000 or so soldiers, as well as a token navy and air force, lacking air defenses that could protect Lebanon’s skies from hostile attacks. Above all, it is a bankrupt army, that relies on Qatar and America for the wherewithal that allows the force to pay its soldiers their monthly wages of about $100. Many soldiers on the army’s payroll take on odd jobs in order to support their families.
Hezbollah’s fighters have no such problems. Their salaries are much higher, with a funding pipeline that relies on tremendous assistance from Iran and on the organization’s resources outside of Lebanon, without forgoing their share from the state budget.
During and before the war, Jean-Yves Le Drian, French President Emmanuel Macron’s special envoy to Lebanon, and U.S. President Joe Biden’s envoy Amos Hochstein have presented an operating plan to implement UN Security Council Resolution 1701, in particular the section that prescribes that the Lebanese Army and UNIFIL will deploy in southern Lebanon and prevent the establishment of Hezbollah forces up to the Litani River.

The plan includes recruiting, training, equipping, and arming 15,000 more men for the Lebanese Army and it even has the consent of Prime Minister Najib Mikati’s government, which announced an initial plan to recruit 5,000 “volunteers”. Paralleling the deployment of these forces, when their recruitment and training is completed, Lebanon and Israel will negotiate to mark their land border, which is supposed to neutralize Hezbollah’s grounds for pursuing the conflict with Israel.

Only one element was missing in the plan to complete its implementation: Hezbollah’s agreement. Although Nasrallah hinted that he would not oppose any decision that the Lebanese government would make on the issue of demarcating the border, he stressed that he was only prepared to discuss it after a cease-fire in Gaza. Even after his death, Hezbollah MPs and ministers will continue to be committed to this position.

It may be assumed that if the Lebanese government decides to initiate the plan with Hezbollah’s consent, the Lebanese Army or any international body that goes to Lebanon to help implement the settlement will encounter violent resistance by Hezbollah, for which they will not need long-range missiles. Assault rifles, machine guns, grenades, and IEDs will suffice.

Nonetheless, there is a chance for a turnaround and implementation of the diplomatic action plan, and it lies in establishing a strong political coalition that will adopt the French-American action plan. The key figure for this measure is the Speaker of Parliament Nabih Berri, who, until now, served as Nasrallah’s representative in all negotiating issues on settlements, a cease-fire, and contact with the West.
Berri, 86, is a veteran and sophisticated political battle fox, who has made a fortune estimated at tens of millions of dollars (other estimates mention a billion dollars), and enjoys broad support in the Shi’ite community. In the last elections, in 2022, his party won 15 seats, compared to Hezbollah’s 12.
Nasrallah’s removal may give Berri a major political edge, which if he can exploit to build a supporting coalition, he will be able to navigate Lebanon toward a diplomatic and military settlement or even finally bring about the appointment of the country’s president. And yet, even with his new position of political power, Berri cannot ignore or bypass Hezbollah’s position if he wants to implement a settlement that will satisfy Israel.
To help Berri and the Lebanese government make the “right” decision, it is possible to try and mobilize international pressure, offer financial rewards for Lebanon or threaten sanctions, but it should also be remembered that they have all been applied to Lebanon, before and during the war, without leaving their stamp on Lebanese politics.
It seems that the map of the new Middle East that will begin in post-Nasrallah Lebanon will have to find a different cartography department to draw it.

Without Hezbollah, Lebanon’s Economy Could Rise Out of the Ashes

It’s a long shot, but even amid financial crisis, dysfunctional government and brain drain, Lebanon has many of the raw materials to start over

David Rosenberg., Haaretz, Oct 1, 2024
As it turns out, things could get a lot worse. As Israelis hail a decisive victory over Hezbollah, Lebanon is being pummeled by Israeli bombs. Hundreds of thousands of residents in the south have fled for fear of Israeli airstrikes. The government – three years later, still a caretaker without a president – not only can’t defend the country, it has done nothing to help the refugees or care for the wounded. “They have no money and they have no control over what’s happening on the ground,” Mark Daou, a lawmaker, told The New York Times.
The old chestnut about Lebanon being the Switzerland of the Middle East is nothing more than a fun fact out of the distant past for the history books. The last time Beirut could boast of being a major banking center was before its civil war erupted in 1975. Today, it would be better described as the Somalia of the Middle East, with warlord No. 1 being Hezbollah.
Yet the Somalia comparison isn’t entirely fair. Amid all the dysfunction and chaos in Lebanon, there remains considerable latent potential to return to the glory days.
Rebuilding the economy will not be easy. The government is hopelessly corrupt and ineffectual, as evidenced by the fact that five years into the biggest peace-time economic collapse since the 19th century, it has not even proposed a recovery plan. It is heavily in debt and since it defaulted, can no longer tap the international financial market for funds. Infrastructure is in shambles. The state power company doesn’t come close to meeting electricity demand, leaving Lebanese to rely on private generators. The only way an ordinary Lebanese can get his or her money out of the bank is by robbing it.
In the short term, the economy may be even worse off without Hezbollah, which the hundreds of millions of dollars a year it received in Iranian funding was spent on local goods and services. Lebanon also stands to lose the export receipts from Hezbollah’s drug smuggling, arms and cigarette smuggling, and currency counterfeiting mainly in Latin America.
There is also a risk that Israel’s successful assault on Hezbollah over the past two weeks could set off a new round of sectarian fighting in Lebanon and destroy the last remnant of political stability and a functioning economy. “The demolition of Hezbollah’s capabilities will likely embolden its opponents and anti-Iranian forces within Lebanon,” Imad Salamey, an expert on Lebanon at the Lebanese American University, told Al-Jazeera television.
But the reverse could also happen: the elimination, or at least the significant weakening, of Hezbollah could remove its baleful influence and enable Lebanon to begin rebuilding its decimated economy.
Silver lining
Among other things, Lebanon would have to contend with far fewer Western sanctions, most of which are directed at Hezbollah and affiliated institutions. It is just possible that freed of Hezbollah interference, a government can finally be formed. Aid and investment from the Gulf and the West may be forthcoming for the first time in years.
Perhaps a more intense effort to find natural gas off Lebanon’s Mediterranean coast will get underway. Lebanon’s enormous diaspora – estimated at 15.4 million, almost three times the domestic population – could be a source of capital and for opening up foreign markets, just as the Jewish diaspora was for Israel in the past. There is even a silver lining to Lebanon’s feckless government, namely less government red tape and low taxes.
But in the end, Lebanon’s economic fate will depend on its people, or more precisely its human capital. Without significant natural resources or a domestic market to support industry, the future will depend on its becoming a knowledge economy, one based on technology and sophisticated services, as Tarek Ben Hassen, a Qatar University economist, proposed in a recent article.
Not surprisingly, even in 2019, before the roof caved in, Lebanon had long ceased to be a globally competitive economy. The World Economic Foundation’s Global Competitiveness Report that year ranked Lebanon 88th of 141 countries, one notch below Tunisia and one above Algeria – not the kind of neighbors a self-respecting country would want on this league table.
But on a few critical metrics, Lebanon came out looking much better. It placed 24th on graduates’ skill sets, 23rd on digital skills and 26th for imparting critical thinking in primary school teaching. And, these rankings probably understate Lebanon’s talent base: Like many countries, they are an average between a highly skilled elite and a less skilled majority. But a knowledge economy can get started with a small elite, if it is sufficiently capable.
Lebanon has another knowledge economy asset in its system of higher education. Despite all the economic and political vicissitudes of the last few years, six Lebanese universities are ranked among the world’s top 1,000 (top-ranking American University of Beirut comes in at 250), according to the QS World University Rankings for 2025.
And although it is not much in evidence these days amid economic collapse (the WEF ranked Lebanon 74th in 2019 for entrepreneurial culture), Lebanon has a long history of entrepreneurship stretching back to the days of the Phoenicians. Lebanese labor costs for engineers and the like are low. These kinds of numbers are a good foundation for a knowledge economy. The catch is that they reflect the situation as it was in 2019; since then, the collapse of the economy caused the country’s traditionally high rate of emigration to balloon 4.5-fold in 2020 and 2021. Many of those who fled were Lebanon’s best and brightest, and the young who contend with a youth unemployment rate of nearly 50 percent.
If Lebanon can get its act together, it may be able to lure many of these expatriates back. The knowledge that Hezbollah is no longer casting its shadow over the country will certainly be an incentive. The wreckage that Lebanon is today may be seen by the most ambitious and entrepreneurial as an opportunity.
With or without Hezbollah, establishing relations with Israel is unlikely. But if Lebanon were to do that and establish a warm peace involving trade, tourism and business deals, like the one between Israel and the other Abraham Accord countries, the road to a thriving economy would be that much shorter.

When Freedom comes, she crawls on broken glass

Paul Hemphill 2 Comments

Flashing for the warriors whose strength is not to fight
Flashing for the refugees on the unarmed road of flight
An’ for each an’ ev’ry underdog soldier in the night
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing
Bob Dylan, Chimes of Freedom

Hear the cry in the tropic night, should be the cry of love but it’s a cry of fright
Some people never see the light till it shines through bullet holes
Bruce Cockburn, Tropic Moon

When Freedom Comes is a tribute to Robert Fisk (1946-2020), indomitable, veteran British journalist and longtime resident of Beirut, who could say without exaggeration “I walk among the conquered, I walk among the dead” in “the battlegrounds and graveyards” of “long forgotten armies and long forgotten wars”. It’s all there, in his grim tombstone of a book, The Great War for Civilization (a book I would highly recommend to anyone wanting to know more about the history of the Middle East in the twentieth century – but it takes stamina – at near in 1,300 pages – and a strong stomach – its stories are harrowing).

The theme, alas, is timeless, and the lyrics, applicable to any of what Rudyard called the “savage wars of peace” being waged all across our planet, yesterday, today and tomorrow – and indeed any life-or-death battle in the name of the illusive phantom of liberty and against those intent on either denying it to us or depriving us of it. “When freedom runs through dogs and guns, and broken glass” could describe Paris and Chicago in 1968 or Kristallnacht in 1938. If it is about any struggle in particular, it is about the Palestinians and their endless, a fruitless yearning for their lost land. Ironically, should this ever be realized, freedom is probably the last thing they will enjoy. They like others before them will be helpless in the face of vested interest, corruption, and brute force, at the mercy of the ‘powers that be’ and the dead hand of history.

The mercenaries and the robber bands, the warlords and the big men, az zu’ama’, are the ones who successfully “storm the palace, seize the crown”. To the victors go the spoils – the people are but pawns in their game.

In 2005, on the occasion of the publication of his book, Fisk addressed a packed auditorium in Sydney’s Macquarie University. Answering a question from the audience regarding the prospects for democracy in the Middle East, he replied:

“Freedom must crawl over broken glass”

Freedom Comes 

… all wars come to an end. And that’s where history restarts.  Robert Fisk

There goes the freedom fighter,
There blows the dragon’s breath.
There stands the sole survivor;
The time-worn shibboleth.
The zealots’ creed, the bold shahid,
Give me my daily bread
I walk amongst the conquered
I walk amongst the dead

Here comes the rocket launcher,
There runs the bullets path,
The revolution’s father,
The hero psychopath.
The wanting seed, the aching need
Fulfill the devil’s pact,
The incremental balancing
Between the thought and act.

The long-forgotten army
In the long-forgotten war.
Marching to a homeland.
We’ve never seen before.
We feel the wind that blows so cold amidst
The leaves of grass.
When freedom comes to beating drums
She crawls on broken glass

There rides the mercenary,
Here roams the robber band.
In flies the emissary
With claims upon our land.
The lesser breed with savage speed
Is slaughtered where he stands.
His elemental fantasy
Felled by a foreign hand.

The long-forgotten army
In the long-forgotten war.
Marching to a homeland.
We’ve never seen before.
We feel the wind that blows so cold amidst
The leaves of grass.
When freedom comes to beating drums
She crawls on broken glass.

Thy kingdom come, thy will be done
On heaven and on earth,
And each shall make his sacrifice,
And each shall know his worth.
In stockade and on barricade
The song will now be heard
The incandescent energy
Gives substance to the word.

Missionaries, soldiers,
Ambassadors ride through
The battlegrounds and graveyards
And the fields our fathers knew.
Through testament and sacrament,
The prophecy shall pass.
When freedom runs through clubs and guns,
She crawls on broken glass.

The long-forgotten army
In the long-forgotten war.
Marching to a homeland.
We’ve never seen before.
We feel the wind that blows so cold amidst
The leaves of grass.
When freedom comes to beating drums
She crawls on broken glass
When freedom comes to beating drums
She crawls on broken glass

© Paul Hemphill 2012

From: In That Howling Infinite – Poems of Paul Hemphill Volume 5. 

See also in In That Howling Infinite, A Middle East Miscellany, See also: East – An Arab Anthology and   A Short History of the Rise and Fall of the West

Blood and Brick … a world of walls

Paul Hemphill 4 Comments

When our gallant Norman foes
Made our merry land their own,
And the Saxons from the Conqueror were flying,
At his bidding it arose in its panoply of stone,
A sentinel unliving and undying.
Insensible, I trow, as a sentinel should be,
Though a queen to save her head should come a-suing,
There’s a legend on its brow that is eloquent to me,
And it tells of duty done and duty doing.
The screw may twist and the rack may turn,
And men may bleed and men may burn,
O’er London town and its golden hoard
I keep my silent watch and ward!
WS Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, The Yeomen of the Guard

I read British historian David Fry’s informative Walls: a history of civilisation in blood and brick a few years ago.

We’re not talking here of idioms, metaphors and analogies, like “facing the wall”, “up against the wall”, “another brick in the wall” and the anodyne “blank wall”. It’s all about imposing and impressive, massive and deliberately built structures designed to protect, contain or separate.

The breaching of Israel’s formidable high-tech wall which ostensibly sealed off the Palestinian enclave of Gaza on October 7th 2023 (more on that later) brought me back to my earlier notes. I’d gathered a few excellent reviews and random thoughts thereon, and I resolved to complete this article. The reviews republished below are informative and comprehensive, and well-worth reading.

I offer my own thought on the subject by way of an introduction. Neither they or I mention of a certain iconic song by Pink Floyd (I “almost mentioned the war” above) but I couldn’t resist opening with what many would call “the wall of walls”. It’s not Hadrian’s Wall, which has fascinated me since our first visit in 2015, when we stood atop the windswept knoll that is Housesteads Roman Fort on a freezing May morning. Nor is the Great Wall of China, iconic and impressive as it is – though I’m sure that if it had existed, you’d’ve been able to see this too from space. By the way, the opening quotation is a paean to the Tower of London, which, “if walls could talk” would have a great tale to tell.

The author at Housesteads Fort on Hadrian’s Wall

…

The view from Housesteads Fort, Hadrian’s Wal

The Wall has stood through it all …

I am the watcher on the wall. I am the shield that guards the realms of men. I pledge my life and honor to the Night’s Watch, for this night and all the nights to come.
The Oath of The Night’s Watch, Game of Thrones

George RR Martin, the author of the Game of Thrones epic has said that his Ice Wall separating the northern wintry waste with its nomads and its demons from the settled and temperate Westeros with its castles and cities, its palaces and slums, and destitute and the depraved, was inspired by a visit to Hadrian’s Wall – only he built it much longer and much, much higher. “We walked along the top of the wall just as the sun was going down. It was the fall. I stood there and looked out over the hills of Scotland and wondered what it would be like to be a Roman centurion … covered in furs and not knowing what would be coming out of the north at you” However, the author adds thats: Hadrian’s Wall is impressive, but it’s not really tall. A good ladder would be all you need to scramble right on over it. When you’re doing fantasy, it has to be bigger than in real life”.

We built a wall once …

A big one. Separating the backyard of our house from Camden Street, Newtown, Sydney. It was well over six foot high, rendered and scored to look “authentic” and entered thought a gate set into an ornate arch moulded to replicate the century-old portico of our front door. To build a wall that high, we had to take Council to the Land and Environment Court. We left that house over two decades ago. Our old house has changed hands several times since, but when the present owners wanted to redevelop the back end of that one-time corner shop that we once called home, Council mandated that the wall and the gateway had to be preserved because it was “heritage”. Such is the power and presence of walls.

Which brings us to the punchline. We built the wall for privacy and for security. But one night, while we were socialising upstairs, person or persons unknown scaled our wall, entered our house and swiped the handbags on the kitchen table. When the police came to investigate, a very agile constable shimmied up the wall and sat atop. So much for our wall. We ought to have laid broken glass or razor wire!

And that is the thing about walls:

Walls work … until they don’t 

We know that the Ice Wall protected by those Watchers of our opening quote fell to the zombie ice dragon Viserion and the dead. Drogon, the last of Queen Daenerys Targaryen’s “children” shattered the walls of Kings Landing, the decadent yet depressing capital of Westeros, and incinerated its unfortunate townsfolk.

The dead watch Visarion do his thing

Hadrian’s Wall fell into disrepair – it was always permeable, and in time, had served its purpose – which was perhaps as much about public relations as protection. Archeologist Terri Madenholme wrote in Haaretz: “Despite itself having a culture of violence, Rome aimed to project an image of a nation of the civilized, and what better way than having it monumentalized in stone? When Hadrian set to build the 73-miles-long wall drawing the border between Roman Britannia and the unconquered Caledonia, the message became even more clear: this is us, and that’s them. Hadrian’s Wall was much more than just a border control, keeping the Scots in check: it was a monument to Roman supremacy, an attempt to separate the civilized world from the savages”.

“He set out for Britain”, Hadrian’s historian tells us, “and there he put right many abuses and was the first to build a wall 80 miles long [Roman miles] to separate the barbarians and the Romans.

The Great Wall of China has in many places withstood the ravages of time, which says something about the skills of the workers who built it and the quality of its brickage. It had only been breached by Genghis Khan and the Manchus – until August 24 2023 when two Chinese construction workers in Shanxi province, were looking for a shortcut and drove heavy machinery through it, causing what authorities described as “irreversible damage” when they used an excavator to widen a gap in the wall.

The hole in the wall

The famous Theodosian Walls protected Constantinople since the foundation of the new capital of the Roman Empire by Emperor Constantine in 324 until they were breached by the Ottoman sultan Mehmet the Conqueror in 1453. He’d brought along a huge army and a bloody big gun. [The event is imaginatively recreated in Cloud Cuckoo Land  the 2021 novel by Pulitzer prize-winning author Anthony Doerr] Istanbul remained the capital of then Ottoman Empire for over half a millennium, and though dilapidated and discontinuous, they endure still. We have walked around them.

During the Cold War, Soviet controlled East Germany built its Berlin Wall virtually overnight to halt the haemorrhage of its population to the west and freedom, and it endured for thirty years with all its concrete, wire, guards, guns and deaths, until it fell, over thirty years ago, virtually overnight. And rejoicing Germans demolished it for souvenirs.

In Belfast, the capital of Northern Ireland, there are imposing walls that have actually stood longer than that in Berlin. Now called the the Peace Walls, they were first erected by the British army in 1969. They were temporary affairs of corrugated iron, as the inter-community conflict solidified and ossified, they were soon  extended and upgraded to bricks, steel and concrete. The walls separated predominantly Protestant loyalist and Catholic nationalist enclaves throughout The Troubles, the three decades of bombings, murders, riots and civil-rights protests.

Though not all linked, 38 kilometres of walls still slice through the city, outliving the conflict that engendered them. Only some short sections have been removed – partly they’ve become a tourist attraction, while the communities that live closest to them say they still provide a sense of security – though tensions may have eased, people are easily divided and it’s much harder to bring them together again. In the Shankill and Falls roads area of western Belfast, which were particularly notorious during The Troubles, the wall is splattered with political messaging, which makes it easy to know which side you’re on. One side has portraits of British soldiers and the queen and kerbs are painted red, white and blue. On the other the colours of the Irish flag predominate, framing portraits of Republican heroes and hunger-strike martyrs.

Belfast’s Peace Wall

Walls or fortified fences are all the fashion in the Middle East. Egypt has built one on its border with Libya – and also with Gaza. Saudi Arabia has put one between it a Yemen and also, one with Iraq. Kuwait has one too with its former invader. In the Maghreb, Morocco constructed the longest wall in the world dividing the former colony of Spanish Sahara from its independence fighters in their Algerian sanctuaries; and yet, the modern world’s longest enduring independence struggle continues.

The Israelis built the Separation Wall to halt the bombings of buses and bistros in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv during the Second Intifada and have maintained it as an instrument of security and control and of divisive national politics. And on the whole, it has worked, except that it has entrenched the isolation from each other of the Israeli and Palestinian communities, and increased in many, a lack of familiarity and empathy and a mutual fear and loathing that does not auger well for peaceful coexistence.

If you walk atop the Ottoman Walls that still circle the Old City of Jerusalem, you can see it and the Haram Al Sharif, the Dome of the Rock, from where the walls pass Mount Zion. It snakes away in the distance through the arid landscape and white sandstone suburbs like an incongruous grey scar. We’ve crossed through the wall and IDF and Border Police checkpoints many times in our travels through Israel and Palestine. On one journey, a cross-country drive across the Judean desert from the satellite city of Ma’ale Adumin to the ancient and amazing monastery of Mar Saba, we passed through fields where Bedouin women harvested wild wheat with sickles as their forebears did of old and actually walked across the footings of a section of the wall that has been abandoned when the high court determined that its construction would prevent the Bedouin from traversing their traditional grazing grounds.

In his final book, Night of Power, published posthumously in 2024, the late foreign correspondent Robert Fisk provides a dramatic description of this “immense fortress wall” which snakes “firstly around Jerusalem but then north and south of the city as far as 12 miles deep into Palestine territory, cutting and escarping its way over the landscape to embrace most of the Jewish colonies … It did deter suicide bombers, but it was also gobbled up more Arab land. In places it is 26 feet or twice the height of the Berlin wall. Ditches, barbed wire, patrol roads and reinforced concrete watchtowers completed this grim travesty of peace. But as the wall grew to 440 miles in length, journalists clung to the language of ‘normalcy’ a ‘barrier’ after all surely is just a pole across the road, at most a police checkpoint, while a ‘fence’ something we might find between gardens or neighbouring fields. So why would we be surprised when Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlisconi, traveling through the massive obstruction outside Bethlehem in February 2010 said that he did not notice it. But visitors to Jerusalem are struck by the wall’s surpassing gray ugliness. Its immensity dwarfed the landscape of low hills and Palestinian villages and crudely humiliated beauty of the original Ottoman walls Churches mosques and synagogues .. Ultimately the wall was found to have put nearly 15% of West Bank land on the Israeli side and disrupted the lives of a third of the Palestine population. It would, the UN discovered, entrap 274,000 Palestinians in enclaves and cut off another 400,000 from their fields, jobs, schools and hospitals”.

Leftwing Israeli journalist Amira Haas, who lives in the West Bank, takes Fisk on a tour of the wall:

“Towering 26 feet above us, stern, monstrous in its determination, coiling and snaking between the apartment blocks and skulking in wadis and turning back on itself until you have two walls, one after the other. You shake your head a moment – when suddenly through some miscalculation surely – there is no wall at all but a shopping street or a bare hillside of scrub and rock. And then the splash of red, sloping rooves and pools and trees of the colonies and yes, more walks and barbed wire fences and yet bigger walls. And then, once more the beast itself, guardian of Israel’s colonies: the Wall.

The Separation Wall between Jerusalem and Ramallah. Paul Hemphill 2016

Israel also built a forty-mile so-called smart fence around the Hamas-controlled enclave of Gaza, decked out with cameras, radars, and sensors. It was meant to both stop large-scale Hamas attacks and provide warning if Hamas was gathering its forces. This failed disastrously on October 7th 2023.

Those defenses, of course, did work for many years. The Hamas, which used to send numerous suicide bombers into Israel, was largely unable to penetrate the border from Gaza, in large part due to the fence. In fact, Hamas had to plan for several years and conduct a massive operation to overcome the defenses – not an easy task and one that should have been detected and disrupted by Israeli intelligence.

The Hamas’ assault on the black Shabbat demonstrated chillingly that defenses by themselves are never sufficient. They must be backed up by intelligence and a rapid-response capability, making any breach less consequential for Israel and potentially disastrous for Hamas. Indeed, had Israel been able to scramble a small number of attack helicopters to Gaza quickly as the assault force was breaching the fence, Hamas would have suffered huge losses.

Yes, walls work, until, for one reason or another, they don’t …

Aida Refugee Camp outside  Bethlehem, Paul Hemphill 2016

An illusion of safety

I will ask more of you than any khal has ever asked of his khalassar! Will you ride the wooden horses across the black salt sea? Will you kill my enemies in their iron suits and tear down their stone houses? Will you give me the Seven Kingdoms, the gift Khal Drogo promised me before the Mother of Mountains? Are you with me? Now… and always!”  
Danearys Targaryen, Game of Thrones

And they were, and they did, with the help, of course, of dragons.

While walls are destined to fall one day, people like walls. They project a language of security – but their construction stems from a sense of insecurity, an intense fear of losing what you have.

In an early post, The Twilight of the Equine Gods, we talked of the horsemen of the plains and steppes who descended violently upon the sedentary lands of Europe the Middle East and China. The folk on the pointy end of their depredations built walls to keep them out.

But while people feel safe behind walls, their impregnability is often illusory.

Walls have gates and these permit ordinary, decent folk to enter and exit – to work, to trade, to parlay, to mingle, communicate and court. The forts along Hadrian’s Wall tell the story of such coexistence and cohabitation. But some people don’t bother with gates. Thieves can scale them and climb over them. Enemies too – they clamber over them, dig under them, mine them and bring them tumbling down, or by subterfuge, they can suborn, beguile or bribe a turncoat or waverer to open the gates or reveal a secret entrance. The ancient Greeks bearing their dubious gifts brought down “the topless towers of Illium” with a ruse that launched a thousand analogies and the famous aphorism “beware Greeks bearing gifts”. The Greeks have never lived that one down.

I’ve had the privilege and pleasure of walking the corridors and standing on battlements of some of those great crusader castles of Syria and Palestine – of Qala’t al Husn, known to the world as Krak de Chevaliers, of Qala’t Salahuddin in Syria’s Alawite heartland, and Belvoir in Israel. These fell not by storm but by subterfuge – plants, turncoats or bribes By geological happenstance, these three significant citadels were built above the great Rift Valley that runs from Africa to Turkey and from their still imposing ramparts, the traveller can look out over several countries and appreciate the strategic importance of these man-made megaliths.

Krak de Chevaliers, Husn, near Homs, Syria. Paul Hemphill 2006

Krak de Chevaliers,Paul Hemphill 2006

The Golden Gate, Jerusalem, from Gethsemene. Paul Hemphill 2016

A world of walls

And the great and winding wall between us
Seem to copy the lines of your face
Bruce Cockburn, Embers of Eden

In his Booker Award winning novel Apeirogon, Irish author Column McCann’s Palestinian protagonist Rami, speaking of the death of his daughter at the hands of the IDF, says: “all walls are destined to fall, no matter what”. But Rami “was not so naive, though, to believe that more would not be built. It was a world of walls. Still, it was his job to insert a crack in the one most visible to him”.

Walls are in vogue nowadays. We declare that we should be building bridges, and yet, we keep building walls. Indeed, walls and wire define and divide the brotherhood of man.

Walls keep unwanted people out and nervous people in. Or prisoners – the world is full of those. The USA, The Land of the Free, incarcerates more than any other nation – except China. More than Iran, or Turkey, each with tens of thousands of political prisoners. The majority of inmates in American and Australian jails are black.

And walls protect us from “the other”.

Australian commentator Waleed Aly wrote in the SMH 9 November 2019: “A wall doesn’t just exclude. It obscures. It renders those on the other side invisible. And once people are invisible, they become mythological beasts. Their lives, their attitudes, their aspirations all become figments of our imagination”. Read the full article below.

To my thinking, this can apply to several of today’s intractable conflicts. The division between North and South Korea, for example, with its heavily weaponized DMZ. Iran and its ostensible enemies. And as I alluded to above, the walls that divide Israelis and Palestinians in the West Bank and in Gaza.

Back in the day, I would walk from Ramallah, then but a small town, to Jerusalem. I’d traverse the old city, and head up the Jaffa Road to the bus station and thence, to Tel Aviv. Today, there is the Separation Barrier and checkpoints, and exclusive roads – easier for visitors like ourselves as we traversed the Occupied Territories, but excruciating and humiliating for the tens of thousands of Palestinians who, until October 7, crossed into Israel daily to work “on the other side” and visit family and friends in East Jerusalem and in Israel.

Amira Haas describes the road I once walked down: “It’s a destruction of peoples life – it’s the end of the world. See here? We go straight to Jerusalem. Not now. This was a busy road and you can see here how people invested in homes with a little bit of grace, the strength of the houses, the stone. Look at the Hebrew signs because these Palestinians used to have so many Israeli customers”. But, Fisk writes, “almost all the shops are closed, the houses shuttered, weeds and sticks along the broken curb. The graffiti is pitiful, the sun merciless, the sky so caked with the heat that the grey of the Wall sometimes merges into the grey stone of the sky. “It is pathetic this place” Amira Hass says. I’ve always been showing it to people always, you know hundred times and it never stop shocking me”.

The border fence between Saudi Arabia and Iraq

The border fence between Kuwait and Iraq

Girt by sea … 

That’s from our Australian national anthem, a paean to our pale Anglo-Celtic Christian heritage, continually updated as our values and our demography changes. It reminds us that walls are not necessarily built of bricks and mortar. An ocean can serve the same purpose.

The English, for example, have always rejoiced in their insular status. As early as the 13th century, an English chronicler described England as “set at the end of the world, the sea girding it around”. It was the sentiment which Shakespeare put into the mouth of the dying John of Gaunt in Richard II”: This precious stone set in the silver sea, which serves it in the office of a wall, or as a moat defensive to a house, against the envy of less happy lands.” It is part of the classic canon of English patriotism. Yet it was and remains a myth. As historian Jonathan Sumption, has pointed out, politically, England was not an island until defeat in the Hundred Years War made it one – had been part of a European polity.

Indeed, the aforementioned Hadrian’s Wall served as a more strategic historical reference point. In the preface to Pax, the latest volume of his magisterial history of the Roman Empire, English historian Tom Holland notes that the northern bank of the river Tyne was the furthest north that a Roman Emperor ever visited. What was so important about Hadrian’s visit to Tyneside in 122AD was his decision there to mark in stone, for the first time, the official limits of his Empire. North of this great wall, there was paucity and unspeakable barbarism, scarcely worth bothering about; below the wall was civility and abundance and the blessings of Romanitas. To this day, those 73 miles of the Vallum Hadriani across the jugular of Britain still shape the common conception of where England and Scotland begin and end, even though the wall has never delineated the Anglo-Scottish border. For this colossal structure left enduring psychological as well as physical remains. To the Saxons, it was “the work of giants” and was often thought of as a metaphysical frontier with the land of the dead – George  R got that part right too.

The “sceptred isle” tag prevails, but. It’s how many Brit’s saw themselves back then and right up to the sixties when we had to memorise it at grammar school: This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, this other Eden, demi-paradise, this fortress built by Nature for herself against infection and the hand of war. This happy breed of men, this little world”. I couldn’t resist quoting it.

Our Island Story: A Child’s History of England, by British author Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall, first published in 1905, covered the history of England from the time of the Roman occupation until Queen Victoria’s death, using a mixture of traditional history and mythology to explain the story of British history in a way accessible to younger readers. It depicted the union of England and Scotland as a desirable and inevitable event, and praises rebels and the collective will of the common people in opposing tyrants, including kings like John and Charles I. It inspired a parody, 1066 and All That. Former Prime Minister David Cameron chose the book when asked to select his favourite childhood book in October 2010: “When I was younger, I particularly enjoyed Our Island Story … It is written in a way that really captured my imagination and which nurtured my interest in the history of our great nation”.

Maybe the Island Nation prevailed in its time – notwithstanding John Bull’s Other Island just over the water and the “troubles” it caused. But the French port of Calais that was such a headache to the Plantagenet kings back in the day is a persistent migraine today as folk from faraway places arrivethere hoping to board flimsy boats, casting their fortunes and their lives to the waves of one of the world’s busiest and tempestuous sea ways in the hope of a better life in the green and pleasant land of song and story.

We in Australia do have a unique wall – the ocean surrounding us.

Our former and now disgraced Australian prime minister Scott Morrison prime minister once declared that he himself was a wall, barring what we in official Australia call unauthorized arrivals by sea. The wall surrounding our continent – we are indeed the only nation that covers exclusively its own continent – is a wide watery one – huge, forbidding, and, depending on the operating budget and competence of the Australian Border Force, impenetrable. And it costs is a motza. In December 2020, The Guardian reported that Australia will spend nearly $1.2 billion on offshore detention – it’s called “processing” – that financial year, even though fewer than 300 people remained in ‘offshore detention” in Papua New Guinea and Nauru That’s roughly $4m for each person. Our government has spent more than $12 billion on offshore processing in the past eight financial years.

It might be less than the US$20 billion President Trump wanted to waste on a border wall, but it is far more as a proportion of government revenue and national income and more than five times the UN refugee agency’s entire budget for all of Southeast Asia.

That’s all from me. The reviews follow, but first some of the articles referred to in my narrative.

© Paul Hemphill 2024.  All rights reserved.

Al Tariq al Salabiyin – the Crusaders’ Trail

Roman Wall Blues – life and love in a cold climate

The Twilight of the Equine Gods

Thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, we are building them again

Waleed Ali, Sydney Morning Herald, November 7, 2019

Sometimes that is literal as in the case of Donald Trump most famous, still unfulfilled promise. Sometimes this is figurative as in the case of Brexit (though it has dangerously literal implications in Northern Ireland). And sometimes this is a particularly pointed development, as in the case of countries that were once part of the Soviet bloc, which have turned in sharply illiberal, nationalist, anti-immigrant directions: places like Hungary and Poland.

Even as far afield as Australia we are being lightly stalked by this fortress mentality, too. Mostly this has focused on boats, but it is spreading now to a populist suspicion of globalisation more generally, especially where it involves us having obligations to other countries or the environment.

I don’t want to stretch the comparison too far. Today’s walls are about excluding the foreigner, while the Berlin Wall was built for the opposite reason: to keep East Germans in. But there is still an important continuity here, something powerful and important in the idea of a wall, that makes it so symbolic, whatever immediate function it serves. More profound than the physical barrier is the psychological one. That’s as true today as it was in Berlin.

Konrad Schumann leaps the barbed wire into West Berlin on 15 August 1961

Children at the Berlin Wall on Sebastianstrasse, around 1964 (Lehnartz/ullstein bild, Getty Images)

The fall of the Berlin Wall, November 1989

These narratives tell an uncomplicated story of the other that is really designed to tell an uncomplicated, heroic story about oneself. The East’s imagined multitudes of poor Westerners was a way of saying the Eastern system was superior and just. Hence, the West had to be wild and unequal. Meanwhile, the Western story of the East was a way of eliding its own shortcomings, establishing a triumphant narrative of freedom that swept away concerns about social injustice.

Walls make this so much easier. Aside from all else they do, walls prevent us from knowing each other. That has serious real-world consequences. We call the period after the Berlin Wall fell “reunification”, but it was really a Western annexation of the East. East became West, not some other accommodation. So thorough was the West’s self-regard, so comprehensive its belief in the East’s unmitigated bleakness, that it respected none of the institutions the East had built. It privatised and sold off its industries to the highest bidder – inevitably West Germans. It shut down its companies, more or less assuming they had nothing to offer.

The result saw East Germans with little choice but to head West for jobs, and the East hasn’t quite recovered. Today it is older, poorer, and endures higher unemployment. It’s only by knowing this that we can understand why a government study found 38 per cent of East Germans think reunification was a bad thing. A majority feel they are now second-class citizens. We’re seeing a rise of far-right radicalism, even neo-Nazism, in Germany. Its heartland is in the East.

Today’s walls are built on the same logic. They all offer some self-aggrandizing view of the world in which everyone else deep down wishes they were like us. Whether believing in the eternal supremacy of the British Empire in the case of Brexit, or that asylum seekers are really more interested in finding a back door to Australia than they are in fleeing persecution, the foreigner exists mostly as a counterpoint to our own magnificence. What matters is that they remain unknown and unknowable so we can mould them to our opposites, and they can be scapegoated for our problems.

We’re so committed to this kind of psychology that we will establish walls precisely where we’re told they can’t be built. Even something as borderless as the internet has become a landscape of barricades, populated by people talking only about their enemies and only to their friends. As a result, almost no one is knowable anymore.

So let me add one more idea to this week’s litany of Berlin Wall reflections: that it be a symbol of human arrogance. The arrogance to control and lie to one’s own people, sure. But the arrogance of choosing isolation, too. The arrogance of believing that the other has nothing to offer us. And the arrogance of believing that we can be fully formed in others’ absence; of treating other people as mere raw material from which we can manufacture ourselves.

Waleed Aly is a regular columnist and a lecturer in politics at Monash University.

A crash course in barrier building

Walls: a history of civilisation in blood and brick by David Fry Faber 2018.
Reviewed in the Australian by Pat Shell, March 16, 2019

“Build bridges, not walls. It’s a slogan”, writes Frye (Ancient and Middle Eastern History/Eastern Connecticut State Univ.), “designed to give military historians fits.”

Bridges, after all, have military purposes: to get across moats and earthworks and to ford rivers into enemy territory. Walls, on the other hand, make peace – history offers plenty of examples, he writes, to show that “the sense of security created by walls freed more and more males from the requirement of serving as warriors.”

Indeed, by Frye’s account, walls are hallmarks of civilization, if ones that are easily thwarted.

One of his examples is the Tres Long Mur, a defensive structure built more than 4,000 years ago, stretching across the Syrian desert and shielding some of the world’s oldest towns from marauders from the steppes beyond. There are mysteries associated with the ruins, just as there are with the Great Wall of China, another of Frye’s examples—and one that proves, readily, that where walls go up, people find ways to get around and over them.

The author’s pointed case study of Hadrian’s Wall shows that it may not have been a defensive success, but that does not mean it didn’t have a defensive purpose, as some scholars have recently argued. As he writes, wittily, “there is little to be gained from rationalizing an irrational past.”

Another defensive failure is the Maginot Line, which became more symbolic than practical in an age of modern tanks; on the reverse side are spectacular successes, such as the great walls of Constantinople, which shielded the city from siege by as many as 200,000 soldiers of the caliphate, “one of the greatest turning points in history.”

Walls have many purposes, he concludes, and it is rather ironic that the matter of walls is often as divisive as a wall itself.

A provocative, well-written, and – with walls rising everywhere on the planet – timely study.

Walls work, and walls save lives. So declared Donald Trump in the 2019 State of the Union address. Not long after that, he went a step further, just clearing Congress’ refusal to front with the funds for 4 billion bricks to be a national emergency.

There are times when that view could be right. How a well-built levee might postpone the inevitable when the rain keeps fallin’ and the river done rose. For a while it least.

But the US president wasn’t talking about breakwaters and climate change mitigation. The tsunami he is hoping to surf home to a tsecond term is a tidal bore of human flesh. He thinks that a Mexican wall is needed to keep out rapists, drug dealers, terrorists and Venezuelan communists.

But his wall, if ever built, will never achieve what wall builders through the ages have vainly striven for: to stop time itself, to freeze history at the pinnacle of their power. And in so doing, through the erection of military masonry on a monumental scale, confidently wallow in the triumphant delusions screamed by Ozymandias at weary gods who have heard it all before.

In short, the inevitable corollary of the invention of Real Estate: the creation of an exclusive neighbourhood to keep out riffraff.

Walls, David Frye’s fascinating and timely analysis of the rise and fall of empires, religions, cultures and languages, is so compellingly readable because it urges to look closely at human artifacts so everyday, so ordinary that we only rarely see them as instruments of power and authority. They can be impressive, sure, but not like an aircraft carrier steaming lies and all the flight of the two banners overhead.

We walk past walls every day. We live behind them. They hold up our roofs. Once fitted with a solid locked door and the steel-grated windows, they protect us, and not just from the wind and the rain.

Frye is an American historian. His main point is not just that walls, the stone and earthen shield of homesteads, palaces, towns, indeed entire nations, are as old as civilisation itself. He thinks that for all intents and purposes, walls are civilisation itself, or, at the very least have allowed civilisations to come into being.

He reminds us that like armies, walls don’t go anywhere. Like armies, they can be enormous, and symbolic of great power and proprietary rights, but they rise and fall in situ, and define the status of all who live around them.

Either you live inside the wall, or you don’t. And depending on how you define civilizations, they rarely flourish without a stable address of some sort. The Athenians wouldn’t have bothered building the Parthenon if they’d had to pull it down every winter to follow their goats to Macedonia in search of greener pastures. But they had to be able to go to bed at night confident that the marvels of the Acropolis would still be there in the morning.

And while the kind of people who write and read books such as Walls are by definition “inside the wall” characters, Frye notes the disdain with which “basket carrying” sybarites were regard by those on the outer.

The barbarians, the hordes. The marauding warriors. Luxury is for wimps, art an affectation citation for the feeble and effete. The Huns, Mongols, Cossacks, Names that are synonymous for people who would rather burn a city to the ground than simply move in and celebrate their luxurious residential arrangements by draining the wine cellars and frolicking in the fountains.

When the great unwashed arrived in sufficient numbers to break down the ramparts, they didn’t mess around. To them, plumbing, hanging gardens, marble theatres and elegant geometry will not try ounce of human aspiration, but conversions.

It is this primal fear of defenses overwhelmed that fuels Trump’s calculated hysteria today. While he may, without quite saying it in so many words, be grasping for historical legitimacy by asking his countrymen to “Remember The Alamo”, He does play on fears food in for thousands of years of siege warfare, and the grizzly fates that befell the losers.

And while the discounted insurance premiums that come with the electrified fences and gated communities of Bel Air and Rhode Island might ease the terror of wealthy Americans, a home invasion is small beer compared to the total collapse of “homeland security” in the real world.

Of the examples Frye gives of barriers breached and the resultant bloodbaths, and there are many, perhaps the most extraordinary is the Mongol demolition of Thirteenth Century China. “ The population of China fell from a 120 million in 1207 to 60 million in 1290. Mongols “boasted that they could ride over the sites of many former cities without encountering any remains high enough to make their horses stumble”.

Genghis Khan, born and bred on the merciless steppe, saw Chinese sophistication as an affront to nature, much as the Spartans mocked the music and theatre of the Athenians.

He shrugged off the carnage and destruction he had wrought as nature’s mockery of Chinese hubris and pretensions: “Heaven is weary of the beauty of the inordinate luxury of China”.

Trump doesn’t care for it much either, it seems. Perhaps a wise adviser might take a moment to point out to him the bridges are usually a far better long-term investment than barbed wire.

as The Eurasian Steppe by the archaeologist Warwick Ball makes clear, rather than a semi-wild anteroom to the continent, “the history, languages, ideas, art forms, peoples, nations and identities of the steppe have shaped almost every aspect of the life of Europe”. Europeans from further west have for centuries been prone to viewing the steppe as the haunt of wild tribes, and the source of occasional, fearsome destruction.
https://unherd.com/2022/07/the-fate-of-europe-lies-in-the-steppes/

Review of Walls: history of civilisation in blood and brick 

John M. Formy-Duval, retired teacher of ancient and medieval history and educator, on this books and  reading blogspot.

In Walls: a History of Civilization in Blood and Brick, David Frye has written an encompassing and enlightening review of walls through the centuries, ranging from 2000 B.C. to the present. A “Selected Timeline” covers the subject matter in four geographical areas: Near East and Central Asia; Europe; China; and the Americas. Frye writes that walls can take the form of “protectionist economic policies,” a “great internet firewall,” razor wire with motion sensors, or concrete barriers. Stringent, punitive immigration policies around the world seek to keep the perceived destroyers of “our culture out.” That is, we belong here; you do not.

“Few civilized people have even lived without them,” Frye emphasizes. From ditches to sapling fences to berms to walls, the level of sophistication rose as people perceived an increasing need for protection from, literally, the barbarians at the gate. Farmers settled and fortified their small villages. Even today one finds fences around Maasai villages in Tanzania. As villages transitioned into cities, their walls grew with them, often into great defensive bulwarks. Even Shakespeare’s Juliet recognized that “these walls are high and hard to climb.”

The epilogue “Love Your Neighbor, but Don’t Pull Down Your Hedge” covers the period from 1990 to the present. This section begins and ends with an account of how the Malibu coastline transitioned from the single ownership of May Rindge in 1892 until 1926, when she grudgingly agreed to lease some properties after numerous shootings, sheep poisonings, and a Supreme Court decision that went against her. Focusing on the present, Frye embarks on an account of the spate of walls built since the Berlin Wall was torn down. From the United States to the Middle East to Southern Europe and India, and nearly everywhere else, it seems, the pace, enormity, and sophistication of these walls is astounding.

People are familiar with the walls Israel has erected in which “infrared night sensors, radar, seismic sensors for detecting underground activity, balloon-born cameras, and unmanned, remote-controlled Ford F-350 trucks, equipped with video cameras and machine guns, augment the wall’s concrete slabs and concertina wire.” Lesser known is Saudi Arabia’s effort, begun in 2003, to create a barrier across its eleven-hundred-mile border with Yemen. The barrier rises across the desolate Empty Quarter, home of significant oil reserves. “Ten-foot high steel pipes, filled with concrete” provide the frame for razor wire while tunnels burrow deep underground. The Saudis have a second, more heavily fortified wall that ranges six hundred miles along their border with Iraq. Egypt, Jordan, India, Thailand and Malaysia, Morocco and Algeria, and Kenya are also in the wall-building business, often with funds or construction assistance either from the United States government or private businesses.

The U.S. was in the wall-building business along our border with Mexico long before the present administration, although the present focus changed the dialogue. We had barriers, little more than fences, before the Berlin Wall fell. Under President Clinton, for example, extensions were added to the existing barriers in 1993, 1994, and 1997. After Berlin, however, the word “wall” was largely abandoned in favor of softer language, and in 2006 the “Secure Fence Act” extended the extensions undertaken during Clinton’s time in office. Who knows what will happen at the present time?

Walls have deep effects on us. They box us in; they shut us out; they keep others out. They come in physical form, but they can be purely psychological, designed to prevent us from sinking into “the other side of the tracks.” Professional nomenclature excludes people and gives the holders of the language key a sense of superiority. Myriad iterations of “wall” provide endless means to isolate us and keep them out.

Frye provides the who, what, where, when, and how of walls ancient and modern. The Great Wall and Hadrian’s Wall are generally known, but he touches on the thousands of walls that continue to exist today and continue to be built “while we wait on everyone else to become just as civilized as we are.”

About Walls

Review in Always Trust in Books blog

For thousands of years, humans have built walls and assaulted them, admired walls and reviled them. Great Walls have appeared on nearly every continent, the handiwork of people from Persia, Rome, China, Central America, and beyond. They have accompanied the rise of cities, nations, and empires. And yet they rarely appear in our history books.

Spanning centuries and millennia, drawing on archaeological digs to evidence from Berlin and Hollywood, David Frye uncovers the story of walls and asks questions that are both intriguing and profound. Did walls make civilization possible? Can we live without them?

This is more than a tale of bricks and stone: Frye reveals the startling link between what we build and how we live, who we are and how we came to be. It is nothing less than the story of civilization.

‘The creators of the first civilisations descended from generations of wall builders. They used their newfound advantages in organization and numbers to build bigger walls. More than a few still survive. In the pages that follow, I will often describe these monuments with imposing measures – their height, their thickness, sometimes their volumes, almost always their lengths. These numbers may begin to lose their impact after a while. They can only tell us so much. We will always learn more by examining the people who built the walls or the fear that lead to their construction.’

David Frye’s Walls is a classic non-fiction read that left me not only well informed but with a deeper appreciation and understanding of world history. From 10,000 B.C right up to the present day, David Frye explains how fundamental the invention, construction and development of walls were (and still are) to the progression of humanity. If you are here purely for a history of walls then you may be disappointed as DF is more interested in the influence instead of the existence of walls. DF took me on a guided tour through key periods in the history of mankind and how the creation (and protection) of walls allowed us to flourish as a species but also the ramifications and innovations that they led to later on.

DF lead me through civilisations that either accepted or rejected the concept of being walled (or caged) in and how their decisions affected the population and also the other nations around them. Walls redefined our ability to exist in a barbaric world and allowed us to focus on scientific and cultural advancements. It also allowed some kingdoms to go soft, so to speak. DF also focuses on the absence of walls and how it changed the civilisations who refused to hide behind them; nations like the Spartans, Mongols and Native Americans who lived to fight for what was theirs or claim new lands for themselves.

The amount of coverage is exceptional, from the Roman Empire, Mesopotamia and China (with their many great walls) to Greece, Constantinople and Berlin. Walls are essential to the telling of history and David Frye did a fantastic and immersive job with his writing. Informative, concise, engrossing (narrative elements), well structured and paced out, David’s writing made this book totally worth my time. He could have easily knocked out this book with his extensive knowledge of war and culture but he went the extra mile. Making connections, observations and theories that made the content more comprehensive and digestible (with some hilarious comments too).

Recent history seems in part to be governed by a chain reaction that saw the building of more and more elaborate walls. Each emperor saw fit to out do their predecessors or competition. Each iteration of wall has its successes and failures, while destroying them advanced weaponry and military tactics along the way. I loved spending time with different time periods and walking amongst the mythos, history, socio-economic backgrounds, knowledge and statistics surrounding the world’s walls and those compelled to build them for their own needs or the needs of many. I especially enjoyed how David Frye’s message about walls was fluid and how it evolved over the course of the book. How humanity grew out of their need for walls and yet still see them in a symbolic nature. How destroying a wall can be as powerful as building one.

Frye knows perfectly where to stop and elaborate or move on to new points. He also doesn’t shy away from the darker shades of history so be aware of graphic detail. There is a lot to learn in this book but DF has written it in a way that it is never too much and I always wanted to know more. There are many highlights to Walls and I can’t recommend it enough to Non-Fiction lovers of many varieties. If you like detail, history, mythology (and ghost stories), the many aspects of building civilisation and humanity’s past then Walls is a great book to get stuck into. We owe walls our lives and without their protection our societies would have never been the same.

‘The walls alone have seen the truth, and they are mute’

David Frye

A native of East Tennessee, David Frye received his Ph.D. in late ancient history from Duke University in 1991 and is presently a professor of history at Eastern Connecticut State University, where he teaches ancient and medieval history. Frye’s academic articles have appeared in the UK, Germany, Sweden, and Denmark, as well as the United States, in journals such as Nottingham Medieval Studies, Classical World, Byzantion, Historia, Hermes: Zeitschrift fur klassische Philologie, The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, and Classica et Mediaevalia. In addition, he has published in various popular archaeological and historical magazines and on the online humor site McSweeney’s. As part of his research, he has participated in archaeological excavations in Britain and Romania. (Goodreads Biography)

 

The calculus of carnage – the mathematics of Muslim on Muslim mortality

Paul Hemphill 8 Comments

Call it moral relativism or “whataboutism” (or, like some conjuror’s trick, “don’t look here, look over there!) but it is not a matter of opinion, more a simple matter of observation, to point out that Muslims are in the main subdued when their fellow Muslims are killed by other Muslims.

The Syrian civil War has killed over half a million souls. 150,000 have did in Yemen.  In Sudan, more than ten thousand people have perished in the latest civil war. ISIS killed tens of thousands. Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan. Muslims killed by Muslims. And millions displaced and enduring famine and disease.

In recent years Muslims have slain more Muslims than those killed by Israeli forces and settlers since 1948 (though we”ll never know how many  – official and semiofficial figures cite casualties from the Independence War and al Nakba of 1948 to 2021, 63,543, including 31,227 fatalities, plus, of course, the ghastly toll of the current Gaza war, but this is probably massively understated).

There has been no significant unrest in the West over the hundreds of thousands of Muslims killed by fellow Muslims (apart from a visceral horror of the violence inflicted upon civilians and prisoners by the jihadis of the Islamic State. No public outcry or social media fury, no angry street protests by left-wing activists of vacuous members by armchair, value-signaling clicktavists.

Why this apparent indifference? Many left-wing impressions are coloured by a an antipathy for the policies of the United States, an antipathy that for many was born of the Vietnam War and was perpetuated by America’s interference in the affairs of nations large and small since then – and of course, America’s strong ideological and military support for Israel. Uncle Sam certainly does have a case to answer. There’s no denying the hundreds of thousands, millions maybe, of bodies of men, women and children that could be laid at the foot of Abe Lincoln’s huge statue in Washington DC.

And what of the rise in antisemitism around the world? After the blood Hamas pogrom of October 7, it took just 24 hours for anti-Israeli sentiment to turn into anti-Jewish sentiment. It was on full display throughout the West before the bodies of the men and women and children murdered had even been counted and identified, and the number of hostages revealed; and before Israel’s relentless and brutal retaliation again Gaza which has killed tens of thousands more innocents.

A charitable explanation would be a mix of political and historical ignorance and a dogmatic belief that renders Jews, whether Israeli or in the diaspora ‘white’, ‘colonial’ and ‘oppressors’, and Muslims ‘oppressed’, and encourages progressives to turn a blinkered or blind eye to some of the most hideous crimes on the planet. It is an ideological stance uninformed by knowledge and awareness of the nature of the Israeli and Palestinian entities, their peoples, and their cultures in the 21st Century.

But there is also reality that what we’ve been seeing in cities around the world is that antisemitism is the devil that never goes away.

I republish below an article that summarizes quite well the mathematics of Muslim on Muslim mortality. It is written by a rightwing author in a right-wing publication, and many of his observations thereon may be selective, subjective, controversial, and potentially exaggerated and inaccurate, but the underlying basic arguments is sound. Countries subject to interminable potentially intractable and often internecine conflict, rigid, authoritarian, and ofttimes theocratic conservative beliefs and social structures, and endemic political instability rarely prosper in our modern interconnected world and often end up serving as expendable pawns in more powerful players’ power games. 

I also republish a recent article by The Australian’s foreign editor Greg Sheriden on how the rising antisemitism in the West is undoubtable fueled by the increasing numbers of migrants form conservative countries where antisemitism is encouraged and inculcated by the media, by educational systems and by socialization.

These communities often have an enormous political and cultural impact on their host countries. While the overwhelming majority of Muslims in Australia and other western countries are law-abiding, productive citizens, a small minority is attracted to some form of political violence or intimidation. And, if Australia’s Arab and North African Muslims are remotely similar to those in Europe and the US, they harbour serious anti-Semitic attitudes, plus other views that are anti-Western.

In 2014, the Jewish Anti-Defamation League conducted an immense survey that sampled the opinions of 53,000 people in numerous countries. It found that 74 per cent of Middle East and North African respondents (not necessarily all of them Muslim, though the overwhelming majorty would be) expressed anti-Semitic attitudes, which was measured by endorsing six or more of 11 common anti-Semitic stereotypes, such as Jews controlling world banking, or the US government, or being responsible for most of the world’s wars. This figure of 73 per cent was vastly in excess of any other regional or national group. Non-Jewish think tanks produce similar results. A survey conducted by the Henry Jackson Society in 2020 found nearly half of British Muslims hold anti-Semitic views.

See also in On That Howling Infinite, “You want it darker?” … Gaza and the devil that never went away …

For more on antisemitism in In That Howling Infinite, see: Little Sir Hugh – Old England’s Jewish Question; and The Shoah and America’s Shame – Ken Burns’ sorrowful masterpiece 

For more on Palestine and Israel in In That Howling Infinite, see: A Middle East Miscellany

The paradox of piety
Observes no disconnect,
Nor registers anxiety
As the ship of fools is wrecked.
So, leaders urge with eloquence,
And martyrs die in consequence.
We talk in past and present tense.
As greed and fear persist.
For reasons only dead men know,
Few can resist the call to go.
That is your fate, the wise man said,
The good book in his fist!

From E Lucevan Le Stelle, Paul Hemphill

Journalists should not be duped into blaming Jews for the Middle East’s problems

Chris Mitchell, Australian Business Review, 17 December 2023

Syrians run for cover following Syrian government air strikes on the Eastern Ghouta rebel-held enclave of Douma, on the outskirts of the capital Damascus in 2018. Picture: AFP

Syrians run for cover following government air strikes on the Eastern Ghouta rebel-held enclave of Douma, Damascus 2018. AFP

Why do so many journalists analysing the Middle East’s problems think the answers lie in a tiny country of 9.7 million people, seven million of whom are Jewish?

Israel has no natural resources while Arab countries surrounding it occupy 1000 times more land, dominate global oil production and have a combined population of more than 400 million?

Look at income distribution patterns and one thing becomes apparent. The Arab and Persian worlds are among the poorest areas on Earth, despite the vast wealth of their rulers. Israel, with ingenuity its only resource, has average income about the same as Australia’s, while most in the Middle East languish on lower wages than black South Africans or Brazilians.

Yet it’s not only the grinding daily poverty of the Arab street that the moralising Western left ignores. It’s also the violence done to ordinary Muslims across the Middle East and North Africa by other Muslims. Add the 48,000 Islamic terror attacks listed by the French think tank Fondapol between 1979 and 2021 and their 210,000 mostly Muslim victims.

Where is the left on the medieval Arab and Persian regimes that spread Islamist terror from the Middle East to Europe, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Indonesia?

This is not another call for a Muslim reformation, but for political and media honesty.

Yet the Islamic Middle East certainly needs modernisation. The left’s favourite French economist Thomas Piketty and fellow Paris School of Economics writers Facundo Alvaredo and Lydia Assouad in 2018 analysed income inequality in the Middle East. They found “the Middle East appears to be the most unequal region in the world with a top decile share as high as 64 per cent (of national wealth) compared with 37 per cent in Western Europe, 47 per cent in the US and 55 per cent in Brazil”.

Regular readers will know this writer has a daughter living in Tel Aviv and working in the tech sector. Previously, family members have lived and worked in Jordan. Comparisons between the two countries are fascinating given both were once part of British mandate Palestine.

Thomas Piketty and colleagues analysed Middle East income inequality. Picture: Getty Images
Thomas Piketty and colleagues analysed Middle East income inequality. Getty 

Jordan has a slightly larger population of 11.3 million. With at least three million Palestinians according to the government, and perhaps many more if you follow the historical arguments, it occupies four times the land area of Israel.

Life expectancy for males in Israel is 81 years and 85 for females.

In Jordan the averages are 72 and 77.

Israel’s unemployment rate is 3.5 per cent, Jordan’s 17.9.

Average income in Israel is $80,000 and in Jordan $6,500.

Jordan is a good and safe place to visit but it is clear within hours that it is much poorer than Israel. Israel’s GDP of $783bn dwarfs Jordan’s of $72bn.

The wealth picture is less stark comparing Israel with the Middle East’s oil states. Saudi Arabia has 32 million people, GDP of $1.5 trillion and is the world’s No.18 economy. Its GDP per capita is $40,000, so half Israel’s. Saudi average wages are less than Israel’s, although Saudi prices can be cheaper.

Iranian GDP sits at $549bn but its wage levels are far below those in Saudi Arabia and Israel. Its legislated minimum wage this year sits at $1700 a month.

The Western left also ignores violence against Muslims by Muslims. Few demonstrators took to the streets of Western cities to protest during the Syrian civil war this past decade. The death toll as of last March stood at 613,000, dwarfing the casualties in Gaza the past two months.

Ditto the ongoing Yemen civil war that started in 2014 and in which 150,000 have died fighting and 227,000 have perished in famine.

The disastrous Somalian civil war has been going for 40 years. Genocide Watch last year said between 350,000 and one million mainly Muslims have been killed since 1991 and 3.5 million displaced Somalis, including 1.5 million children, face starvation. The country is 99 per cent Muslim.

Add the millions killed in the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s and the thousands killed by al-Qa’ida in Iraq after the US invasion in 2003.

To put the Israel story into perspective, between 1948 and 2021 total Palestinian deaths number 31,227. Total Israeli deaths in war excluding terrorism number 24,981. The 1948, 1967 and 1973 wars that cost Palestinians so much of their land followed invasions by Israel’s Arab neighbours.

Former farmer Habiba Osman Ahmed in Dollow refugee camp in southern Somalia in 2011. After Somalia's 20-year civil war pushed the drought into famine she didn’t even have a pot to cook in, and had to share with another family.
Former farmer Habiba Osman Ahmed in Dollow refugee camp in southern Somalia. 2011. After Somalia’s 20-year civil war pushed the drought into famine she didn’t even have a pot to cook in, and had to share with another family.

Islam has also been waging war on black Africa for much of the past 100 years.

Tablet Magazine on December 12 said “the same Jihad that targeted Jews on October 7 has been targeting black Africans for decades”.

Tablet discusses the “hidden holocaust” from 1983 to 2005 when “northern Sudanese Arabs sought to subjugate and enslave the black Sudanese of the mostly Christian south. The onslaught cost the lives of perhaps 2.5 million black Sudanese. The Arab Muslim government’s jihad utilised kidnapping as its terror weapon of choice, not to mention casual gang rape and mutilation”.

Tablet cites Arab pogroms against black Africans in Nigeria, Mauritania and Sudan’s Western Darfur. Asking why the civil rights left ignores these, it says “on account of their ‘intersectional’ dogma – which makes Jews ‘white’ and Muslims ‘oppressed’ – the Western human rights industry, media and campus left activists are ideologically determined to mostly ignore some of the most hideous crimes on the planet”.

Trouble is, most journalists know nothing about Islam or Islamism. The Koran is not a peaceful book: it does encourage Jew hatred and other violent behaviours against non-believers. When large communities celebrate the martyrdom of their sons and daughters, the left needs to understand that fanatics mean and do what they say. They really do see Jihad as the road to paradise.

This religious outlook has served the interests of the Sunni princes who finance the spread of Wahabism and the Islamic boarding schools (Pesantren) that spread it to Pakistan and Indonesia. It serves Iran well to finance Hamas and Hezbollah.

Blaming Jews for the Middle East’s problems lets the mullahs and princes off the hook for what they don’t do for their own people. Journalists covering the Middle East should not be duped the way the Arab street is. Of course Palestinian lives matter but Islamism is the real “context”.

Matti Friedman
Matti Friedman

Back on August 26, 2014, after another Israeli-Gaza war, former AP Jerusalem bureau editor Matti Friedman published a fascinating account in Tablet explaining how much the Western media mis-reports what is really happening in Israel and Palestine. He says AP had more than 40 staff in Israel in 2011 but only a single stringer in Syria where tens of thousands were dying each week. Its Israel bureau was bigger than staff numbers in Russia, China or India. Why?

The answer then was the same as now: it’s about Western media assumptions about Jews, power and victimhood.

That combines with a complete media disregard for what real Palestinians think and want and what Islamists really believe.

Here’s a clue. Most Palestinians and Hamas do not support a two-state solution. They support the elimination of Israel, and at least some support the elimination of all Jews.

A poll last week by the Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Research found 72 per cent support across Gaza and the West Bank for Hamas’s murder of 1200 civilians on October 7. While 95 per cent thought Israel had committed war crimes since October 7, only 10 per cent believed Hamas had.

Chris Mitchell began his career in late 1973 in Brisbane on the afternoon daily, The Telegraph. He worked on the Townsville Daily Bulletin, the Daily Telegraph Sydney and the Australian Financial Review before joining The Australian in 1984. He was appointed editor of The Australian in 1992 and editor in chief of Queensland Newspapers in 1995. He returned to Sydney as editor in chief of The Australian in 2002 and held that position until his retirement in December 2015.

Muslim migrants and Western Left create new anti-Semitism crisis

Greg Sheridan.

Palestinian supporters demonstrate in Melbourne against the current Israeli bombardment and invasion of the Gaza Strip.
Palestinian supporters demonstrate in Melbourne against the Israeli bombardment and invasionThe worldwide crisis in anti-Semitism, so much of it fuelled by Arab and North African anti-Semitism, now in a crude alliance with the anti-Semitism of the far left, points to a deeper malaise in Western democ­racies.

It raises again the compatibility of large Arab and North African populations with the traditions and culture of liberal democracy.

Consider. EU Home Affairs Commissioner Ylva Johansson declared Europe confronts a “huge risk of terrorist attacks” over Christmas because of the conflict between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.

In December a terrorist killed one tourist and injured others in Paris. In Dublin a knife attack allegedly by a Muslim asylum-seeker left children and adults severely wounded, though Irish police say they believe it was not terror related. In Germany, alleged terrorists were arrested preparing a bomb. In Brussels in October a Tunisian terrorist killed two Swedish football fans.

If Middle East conflict pro­duces terrorism in Western democratic nations, it’s reasonable to ask how anyone living in a modern, free, democratic society views random murder as a constructive, purposeful, moral response.

Australian agencies believe there is an increased risk of politically or communally motivated violence here, too, but not to the point where they’ve formally altered the terror alert level.

We’ve also seen US President Joe Biden plead for the world, including Western feminists, to condemn the “horrific” sexual violence of the October 7 Hamas atrocities. The deliberate, premeditated Hamas attacks were the most depraved, sexualised sadism the world has seen. Yet Western feminists, deafening in their silence, practise #MeToo unless you’re a Jew.

In Australia, the authorities decided that Islamic clerics who welcomed the Hamas atrocities and urged all Muslim nations to spit on Israel so it would drown had no legal case to answer. Demonstrators filmed on the Sydney Opera House forecourt screaming “Kill the Jews! Gas the Jews! F..k the Jews!” – none of them has been arrested or charged either.

Imagine the shuddering national convulsions that would follow if some group of extremist Christian activists gathered a few hundred demonstrators to scream: “Kill the Muslims!” All society would be rightly outraged. The whole nation would denounce it. The counselling bill at the ABC alone would double the national debt.

But society seems never to react this way when the target group is Jewish, although NSW has moved to strengthen its laws.

The Albanese government has been mealy-mouthed, equivocal, all at sea on all of this. It can’t mention anti-Semitism without conjuring a spectral, matching Islamophobia. Let’s be clear. The global anti-Semitism crisis, a profound civilisational challenge, is not matched by an equal, opposite and morally equivalent phenomenon called Islamo­phobia.

Start with the numbers. There are perhaps 1.9 billion Muslims and about 16 million Jews. There are about 50 Muslim majority nations and one Jewish majority nation. In dozens of other nations, Muslims make up a big minority. Only in the US do Jews pass even 2 per cent. Within Australia there are about 100,000 Jews, perhaps a touch more, and almost 900,000 Muslims. The size of the Jewish population is static. The Muslim population will continue to grow rapidly. Its age profile is younger, it has a higher birthrate and continuing Muslim immigration.

Opposition foreign affairs spokesman Simon Birmingham will lead a bipartisan delegation to Israel in solidarity with the Jewish state. The Albanese government is terrified of being seen as too pro-Jewish or pro-Israel. No head of government solidarity visit from it. Instead, in response to Birmingham, the anonymous Tim Watts, Assistant Minister for Foreign Affairs, will call in on Israel as part of a Middle East Cook’s tour. Foreign Minister Penny Wong will visit Israel early next year as part of a wider Middle East tour. By then it’s certainly not a visit of solidarity but an old-fashioned Australian pretence of participating in Middle East diplomacy.

Jews are the most intensely targeted people in the world for terrorism and irrational hatred. It’s true there have been a small number of violent attacks on Muslims in the US by people it would be fair to call far-right terrorists. Such attacks are horrific and deserve absolute condemnation. Their number, thankfully, is very small.

The vast majority of Muslims who die in terrorism are killed by fellow Muslims. Hamas killed Israeli and foreign Muslims on October 7.

A pro-Palestinian rally in Sydney in October. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Monique Harmer
Pro-Palestinian rally in Sydney in October. CA NewsWire / Monique Harmer

The plague of anti-Semitism is a crime against Jewish people. It is the world’s oldest racial hatred. There are distinct anti-Semitic traditions in the West, but after the Holocaust, in which the Nazis murdered six million Jews, all of the old Western traditions of anti-Semitism have been repudiated.

The West has a new tradition of anti-Semitism in the West, on the far left, especially at universities.

This week, in US congressional testimony, Harvard University president Claudine Gay, Liz Magill of the University of Pennsylvania and Sally Kornbluth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology all said anti-Semitism was a serious and growing problem at their institutions.

That is astonishing, and grotesquely illiberal, for 2023.

But it’s hooked up with an entirely different anti-Semitism too. For by far the most important dynamic of anti-Semitism, globally and within the West itself, is the age-old Arab and North African anti-Semitism.

Naturally, a concern for the suffering of innocent people in Gaza is not a sign of anti-Semitism. Every human being feels compassion for the people of Gaza. The moral responsibility for their suffering lies 100 per cent with Hamas.

Anti-Semitism has broadened and is now a deep, pervasive ideological, cultural and fanatical strain in contemporary Western life. Proceeding from the left’s identity politics ideology, which damns the entire Western project as intrinsically unjust, sexist, economically exploitative, colonialist, racist, hetero-normative, the left has, logically enough, arrived at a hatred of Jews, for the Jewish tradition is so central to the West. And because the left sees all Muslims as victims, it has allied with Islamic anti-Semitism.

But the cross-pollination of Islamic and Western anti-Semitism goes back a long way. It reached a height in the deep Nazi collaboration with both the Muslim Brotherhood and the mufti of Jerusalem. Arab anti-Semitism long predates either Nazis or the Muslim Brotherhood.

The earliest military victories of Muslims involved conquering and sometimes slaughtering Jewish communities. Christians and Jews were often allowed to live reasonably safely in Muslim kingdoms, but only as acknowledged inferiors, dhimmis. Frequently that status was abrogated.

Bernard Lewis, the legendary scholar of Islam, has written that “the golden age of equal rights (under Islam) was a myth”. In the ninth century Baghdad Jews were required to wear a yellow badge, echoed by the Nazis a millennium later. This happened in many Arab centres.

It’s important to note many Christian kingdoms practised similar or worse persecution of Jews. The facts about Arab history simply establish the obvious that a long and pervasive anti-Semitism flourished in Arab and North African culture. There are indeed some explicitly anti-Jewish pas­sages in the Koran.

The contrast with Christianity is that all Christian denominations comprehensively repudiated their past anti-Semitism, which in any event was never uncontested. There has not been a similar Arabic repudiation of anti-Semitism. Some Arab states are liberalising a little, but it’s easy to over-estimate this.

Arab anti-Semitism also obviously long predates the modern state of Israel.

From the mid-1930s the Nazis strongly backed Arab anti-Semitism. They co-operated especially with Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem, who helped recruit Bosnian Muslims into Hitler’s SS.

Sayyid Qutb, the leading thinker of the Muslim Brotherhood, was notable for his hatred of the West. However, he also hated Jews, describing them as “the bitterest enemies of Islam” and urging Muslims: “Do not rest until your land is free of the Jews.”

Sayyid Qutb.
Sayyid Qutb.

The Nazis provided money for the Muslim Brotherhood and translated some Islamist publications into German. The Nazis wanted to eradicate European Jews and also the Jews of the Middle East. For six years, the Nazis broadcast anti-Semitic material, in Arabic, on radio. In the 1930s and ’40s, radio was the one true mass medium.

The first most important rejection of the two-state solution, a Jewish Israel next to an independent Palestine, came when all of Israel’s neighbours and the local Palestinians refused to accept the UN partition of the territory and launched an all-out war against Israel.

Today there are probably 40 million Muslims in Western Europe and North America, though so much population movement is irregular and undocumented that it’s impossible to establish reliable figures. They are having an enormous political and cultural impact. They also have introduced into those nations a savage new burst of anti-Semitism. It is neither racist nor discriminatory to look at the beliefs and behaviours of potential and actual immigrant populations and question problematic features for a liberal democratic society.

It goes without saying, but must be said, that the overwhelming majority of Muslims in Australia are law-abiding, productive citizens. A small minority is attracted to some form of political violence or intimidation. And, if Australia’s Arab and North African Muslims are remotely similar to those in Europe and the US, they harbour serious anti-Semitic attitudes, plus other views that are anti-Western.

In 2014, the Jewish Anti-Defamation League conducted an immense survey that sampled the opinions of 53,000 people in numerous countries. It found that 74 per cent of Middle East and North African respondents (not necessarily all of them Muslim, though the overwhelming majorty would be) expressed anti-Semitic attitudes, which was measured by endorsing six or more of 11 common anti-Semitic stereotypes, such as Jews controlling world banking, or the US government, or being responsible for most of the world’s wars. This figure of 73 per cent was vastly in excess of any other regional or national group.

Non-Jewish think tanks produce similar results. A survey conducted by the Henry Jackson Society in 2020 found nearly half of British Muslims hold anti-Semitic views.

In 2015 German chancellor Angela Merkel admitted a million Muslim irregular immigrants to Germany. By 2017 she pronounced that German multiculturalism had “utterly failed”. By 2018 she said “refugees or people of Arabic background” had brought a new wave of anti-Semitism to Germany.

In 2020, the libertarian Cato Institute published a long essay, Freedom in the Muslim World, by Mustafa Akyol. This was a systematic comparison of human freedom across a range of dimensions among Muslim societies and against international averages.

Akyol found that Muslim societies were substantially less free than the global average, and much less free than Western Europe or North America. Of course, there was great variety among Muslim nations and some were relatively free. The least free of all were the Muslim nations of the Middle East and North Africa.

He also found, paradoxically, in numerous Muslim nations increasing democracy led to decreasing personal liberties. In other words, the curtailing of human freedom was often a popular move by Muslim governments.

I’ve spent some time in the past few years in Poland, Hungary and Greece. In Poland and Hungary I interviewed Jewish leaders who told me these were the safest countries for Jews in Europe. In every case the government and society had turned against traditional anti-Semitism. But, most important, there were very few Muslims, so little active, threatening anti-Semitism.

Greece does receive a lot of asylum-seekers but doesn’t give them much welfare and they quickly move on. In Thessaloniki in northern Greece recently I saw a hotel hosting a big international delegation and there was the Israeli flag flying proudly out the front with no sign, in the days I was there, of demonstrations or disturbance.

Australia, on the other hand, is subject to an Israeli travel warning; it’s not safe for identifiable Jews or Israelis.

Nobody wants a religiously or ethnically discriminatory immigration program. But countries and cultures with deep traditions of anti-Semitism and anti-Western sentiment pose a big challenge if they are a major source of immigration.

Consider three books.

The French Intifada, by Andrew Hussey, establishes an extraordinary degree of hostility towards France itself by its Muslims. Reflections on the Revolution in Europe by Christopher Caldwell establishes how attitudes have in some manner grown more radical through succeeding generations among Europe’s Muslims. He also establishes that European voters never wanted this huge influx. The Strange Death of Europe by Douglas Murray shows Europe being eaten up by hostile attitudes among its citizens, both some immig­rants and the left establishment at universities, with no one to defend Europe’s traditional beliefs.

As we watched anti-Semitic demonstrations in London recently, an English colleague remarked: “Imagine what it’ll be like in 20 years, when the Muslim population is twice as big as now.”

In France, where Muslims may be nearly 10 per cent of the population, they are younger and have a higher birthrate than the host population. They could be 40 per cent of France by 2060.

Islam holds that its mission is to establish a political order in accordance with its teachings. Once the Islamic minority becomes big enough, that becomes a problem.

To settle immigrants successfully, a society should be self-confident, secure in its history, civic identity and ethical culture. Sound like the West at the moment? There are now types of self-loathing in our societies almost beyond parody. The Canadian Human Rights Commission recently argued that having public holidays for Christmas and Easter is discriminatory because other religions’ holiest days don’t have public holidays.

There’s plenty of equivalent nuttiness in Australia. When we hate our own traditions that much, how can we imagine migrants with contrary ideas will fall in love with our nation?

Greg Sheridan is The Australian’s foreign editor. His most recent book, Christians, the urgent case for Jesus in our world, became a best seller weeks after publication.