Arab League debuts for new Lebanon and Syria leaders reflect profound regional shift
The Arab League summit in Cairo concluded on Tuesday with a unified stance on Gaza's reconstruction, endorsing Egypt's $53 billion plan to rebuild the enclave, while rejecting any proposals that involve Palestinian displacement.
Leaders from the Arab region came together to counter US President Donald Trump's suggestion that Palestinians should be forced out of Gaza so that it could be rebuilt as a US-run 'Riviera of the Middle East'.
The summit saw the participation of two notable newcomers: Syrian interim President Ahmad Al Shara, amid Syria's full return to the Arab diplomatic fold, and Lebanese President Joseph Aoun, attending his first regional summit since taking office in January.
As the emergency summit began, Bahrain's King Hamad welcomed the Syrian and Lebanese presidents on behalf of all attendees. Both presidents brought priorities that diverge from their Tehran-aligned predecessors, reflecting the shifting dynamics in the Middle East.
Syria and Lebanon are seeking to enhance their relations with Arab nations. Both countries' leaders chose Saudi Arabia as the destination for their first foreign visits.
During Bashar Al Assad 's rule, Syria was suspended from the Arab League over his deadly 2011 crackdown on pro-democracy protests, which spiralled into civil war. Syria under Mr Al Assad was readmitted to the bloc in 2023 after years of regional isolation.
But the regime of the former Syrian president fell in December at the hands of rebel forces led by Hayat Tahrir Al Sham, under the leadership of Mr Al Shara.
Mr Al Assad has fled to Moscow and a transitional government has been established in Syria. Since then, regional and global powers have re-engaged with Damascus, with its new leadership taking part in high-level international conferences.
'Syria is now in its rightful place – among its brotherly nations and within the Arab fold,' Mr Al Shara told Al Arabiya TV on the sidelines of the summit.
Stability in Syria remains a priority for many in the region. Under Mr Al Assad, Syria served as a land corridor to Iran-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon, anchoring Tehran's influence in the Levant.
His ousting was a major blow to Iran, disrupting its regional strategy and weakening its 'Axis of Resistance'. Losing Syria meant Iran faced setbacks in supplying Hezbollah and maintaining a direct front against Israel.
The Lebanese militant group is today weaker than at any point previously after a year-long war with Israel, which resulted in the destruction of its infrastructure, the elimination of its leadership and the infiltration of its security apparatus.
Decades of military and economic investment in Mr Al Assad's survival were undermined, forcing Tehran to reassess its regional posture. Domestically, it fuelled debates over Tehran's costly foreign interventions, while externally, it emboldened its foe, Israel.
In Lebanon, Hezbollah's military defeat enabled the election of a new president and the appointment of a prime minister who are more invested in strengthening relations with the US and neighbouring Arab states, while being far less constrained by Iranian influence.
Since assuming leadership, Mr Al Shara has taken steps to address smuggling along the Syria-Lebanon border and said his country would not interfere in its neighbour's affairs.
Mr Al Shara and Mr Aoun's participation in the Arab summit emphasised the profound shift taking place in the Arab region, Neil Quilliam, associate fellow with the Middle East and North Africa Programme at the UK-based Chatham House think tank, told The National.
'With Iran firmly on the back foot, Arab states recognise the need to step up and play a more dynamic role in supporting regional security and development,' he said.
While Mr Aoun and Mr Al Shara had spoken by phone in February, Tuesday marked their first in-person meeting on the sidelines of the summit.
'President Aoun and Syria's President Shara tackled several issues,' the Lebanese presidency said on X on Tuesday, adding that they agreed on 'the need to control the border between the two countries.'
Syria shares a 330km border with Lebanon, with no official demarcation at various points, rendering it porous and prone to smuggling.
Assertive speeches
At the summit, Mr Aoun said Lebanon 'has suffered greatly but has learnt from its sufferings'.
'It has learnt not to be at the mercy of other people's wars. It has learnt not to be a headquarters or a corridor for foreign policies. It is also not a stronghold for occupations, tutelage or hegemony,' he said.
'We, as Arabs, must all be strong for Palestine to be strong,' Mr Aoun added. 'When Beirut is occupied, Damascus is destroyed, Amman is threatened, Baghdad is in pain, or Sanaa falls, it becomes impossible for anyone to claim that this is in support of Palestine.'
In October 2023, following Hamas' unprecedented attacks on Israel, Hezbollah opened what it called a 'support front' for its Palestinian ally by firing rockets into Israeli territory. This escalated into near-daily cross-border exchanges between the Lebanese group and the Israeli army before Israel launched a full-scale war on Lebanon in September 2024. Many in Lebanon accuse Hezbollah of advancing an Iranian agenda.
Israel also sent troops into southern Lebanon. While most have withdrawn, a contingent remains stationed at five key positions across the border. These forces are unlikely to leave any time soon, sources have told The National, citing 'strategic reasons' as the rationale behind Israel's continued presence.
'In my country, just as in Palestine, there are still lands occupied by Israel. Lebanese prisoners are in its jails,' said Mr Aoun. 'We do not give up our land, we do not forget our prisoners and we do not abandon them.'
Mr Al Shara equally called on the international community to pressure Israel to 'immediately' withdraw its troops from southern Syria.
'We urge the international community to uphold its legal and moral commitments by supporting Syria's rights and pressuring Israel to immediately withdraw from southern Syria,' said Mr Al Shara.
Shortly after the fall of Mr Al Assad, Israel pushed through a buffer zone between the occupied Golan Heights and southern Syria, establishing military positions inside a UN-monitored demilitarised zone. Israeli forces have remained there since, despite protests by Syria's new government and the UN.
Syria's new leadership has adopted a policy of regional non-aggression. Experts told The National that they are neither willing nor capable of responding militarily to Israel, instead prioritising diplomatic support from Arab nations.
Mr Quilliam sees that the Trump administration's ambivalence to the region and Israel's penchant for acting with impunity has given Arab states a greater urgency to work together in pursuit of their collective interests.
'They can longer afford to sit back and let the US drive policy. The diminution of Iranian influence in Syria and Lebanon presents Arab leaders with an opportunity to shape the regional security order,' he said.
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In 1948, and in line with this Zionist strategy, the dominant western narrative cast the Zionists, who massacred Palestinians and expelled them from their homeland, as poor victims merely defending themselves against the indigenous population whose lands they had conquered. It was, however, Israel's "defensive" conquest of the West Bank and Gaza - 58 years ago this month - that firmly entrenched its image as a besieged "victim" and laid the groundwork for the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Today, even that genocide is presented in the West as a matter of self-defence. Israel, we are told, remains the victim of its victims - 200,000 of whom it has killed or injured in its latest war to "defend itself". Saintly victimhood The June 1967 War elevated Israel to the status of untouchable, saintly victimhood in the West. Its supporters multiplied, among western Christians and Jews alike, who viewed Arabs and Palestinians as the oppressors of Israel. 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This erasure was hailed in the West as a miracle: the building of a Jewish state after the Holocaust in spite of the hateful resistance of the indigenous Palestinians seeking to save their homeland. The historian Isaac Deutscher - often described as a critic of Zionism - called Israel's effacement of Palestine and the Palestinians "a marvel and a prodigy of history", akin to "the great heroic myths and legends" of antiquity. Moshe Dayan, Israel's military chief of staff, reflected on its mythical achievements in destroying Palestine in 1969: "Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You don't even know the names of these Arab villages, and I don't blame you, because these geography books are no longer in existence. Not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either." Dayan's pride in Israel's theft of Palestinian land led him a year earlier to urge Israelis never to say "that's enough" when it came to acquiring territory: "You must not call a halt - heaven forbid - and say, 'that's all; up to here, up to Degania, to Muffalasim, to Nahal Oz!' For that is not all." Western complicity That the Zionists established their state on stolen Palestinian land was never a cause for criticism in the West. While glorifying Israel's legendary land thefts, western powers lamented its small territory and backed its colonial expansionist plans - already well underway. After all, if Israel was the victim, then it naturally required more territory to occupy. This view was recently echoed by US President Donald Trump, who in February defended planned Israeli annexation of the West Bank by claiming: "It's a small country… it's a small country in terms of land." Israel's attack on Iran: Why Netanyahu opted to roll the dice Read More » Israel's avarice for the land of others was made unmistakably clear before and after its 1956 invasion and first occupation of Gaza and the Sinai Peninsula. After this conquest, the secular David Ben-Gurion, Israel's founding prime minister, waxed biblical, claiming that the invasion of Sinai "was the greatest and most glorious in the annals of our people". The successful invasion and occupation, he claimed, restored "King Solomon's patrimony from the island of Yotvat in the south to the foothills of Lebanon in the north". "Yotvat" - as the Israelis rushed to rename the Egyptian island of Tiran - "will once more become part of the Third Kingdom of Israel". Amid inter-imperial rivalry with France and Britain, the US insisted on Israeli withdrawal, prompting outrage from Ben-Gurion: "Up to the middle of the sixth century Jewish independence was maintained on the island of Yotvat… which was liberated yesterday by the Israeli army." He also declared the Gaza Strip "an integral part of the nation". Invoking the biblical prophecy of Isaiah, he vowed: "No force, whatever it is called, was going to make Israel evacuate Sinai." Despite popular support for Israel in the West, the Israelis withdrew four months later under pressure from the UN, the US and the Soviet Union. Egypt welcomed the UN Emergency Force (Unef) to its side of the border, but Israel refused to receive Unef monitors. 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Within six days, it had occupied the Gaza Strip and Egypt's Sinai Peninsula all the way to the Suez Canal - for the second time in a decade - as well as the entire West Bank from Jordan and Syria's Golan Heights. Unlike the Arab world, which refers to the invasion as the "June 1967 War", the Israelis and their western imperial sponsors not only insist that Israel was the one "invaded", rather than the invader of its Arab neighbours, but also refer to its multiple invasions as the "Six-Day War" - likening Israel to God, who created a new world in six days and rested on the seventh. The West erupted in unbridled racist jubilation. The Daily Telegraph called the war "The Triumph of the Civilised", while the French daily Le Monde declared that Israel's conquest had "rid" Europe "of the guilt it incurred in the drama of the Second World War and, before that, in the persecutions, which from the Russian pogroms to the Dreyfus affair, accompanied the birth of Zionism. In the continent of Europe, the Jews were at last avenged - but alas, on the backs of the Arabs – for the tragic and stupid accusation: "they went like sheep to the slaughter". Erasing Palestine As they had done in 1948, the Israelis proceeded to wipe Palestinian villages in the West Bank off the map, including Beit Nuba, Imwas, and Yalu, expelling their 10,000 inhabitants. They went on to decimate the villages of Beit Marsam, Beit Awa, Hablah and Jiftlik, among others. In East Jerusalem, the Israelis descended on the Mughrabi Quarter, so named seven centuries earlier when Mughrabi volunteers from North Africa joined Saladin's war against the Crusading Franks. In Gaza, Israel expelled 75,000 Palestinians by the end of 1968 and barred another 50,000 from returning home The neighbourhood had been owned by an Islamic endowment for centuries. Thousands of residents were given only minutes to vacate their homes, which were immediately bulldozed to make way for the conquering Jewish masses to enter the Old City and celebrate their victory facing the Buraq Wall - the so-called "Western Wall". The first Israeli military governor of the occupied territories, the Irish-born Chaim Herzog, who would later become Israel's sixth president, took credit for the destruction of the ancient, densely populated neighbourhood. In typical Israeli racist fashion, he described it as a "toilet" that they "decided to remove". This, it seems, is what "civilised" victims do when they triumph over their victims. Israeli jeeps drove through Bethlehem with loudspeakers threatening the population: "You have two hours to leave your homes and flee to Jericho or Amman. If you don't your houses will be shelled." Mass expulsion followed, with more than 200,000 Palestinians forced to cross the River Jordan to the East Bank. As in 1948, Israeli civilians and soldiers looted Palestinian property. In Gaza, Israeli forces expelled 75,000 Palestinians by December 1968 and barred another 50,000, who had been working, studying or travelling in Egypt or elsewhere during the 1967 war, from returning home. The UN recorded 323,000 Palestinians displaced from Gaza and the West Bank, 113,000 of whom were 1948 refugees now expelled a second time. Apparently, this, too, was consistent with "civilised" behaviour. 'Civilised victims' Israel expelled more than 100,000 Syrians from the Golan Heights, leaving just 15,000 in the territory at the end of the war. It demolished 100 Syrian towns and villages, transferring their lands to Jewish colonists. In the Sinai, where the population at the time was mostly Bedouin and farmers, 38,000 people became refugees. Israel killed more than 18,000 Egyptians, Syrians, Jordanians and Palestinians during the war, while losing fewer than 1,000 soldiers. During and after the war, the Israelis shot dead at least 1,000 Egyptian prisoners of war who had surrendered, forcing many to dig their own graves before being executed. The Israelis killed the captured Palestinians serving in the Egyptian army, selecting them specifically for execution. Israel continued to deport Palestinians by the hundreds as the occupation advanced. All of the above was, in the eyes of the West, further proof of what "civilised" victims do when they conquer the lands of those they deem uncivilised. Yet, despite its signature war crimes, crimes against humanity and unabashed anti-Arab racism and supremacist contempt, Israel's conquest was still portrayed as a righteous victory by Israeli "victims" over their Arab "oppressors". Colonial expansion While a pro-Israeli chorus in the West insisted that poor Israel was maintaining its brutal occupation of the territories it conquered in 1967 in order to barter them for peace from its warlike victims, in reality, it was proceeding with the business of colonisation. Israeli atrocities are nothing new. The only novelty is the scale Joseph Massad Read More » Let us take a quick inventory. By 1977, 10 years after the invasion, successive Israeli Labor governments had annexed East Jerusalem, built 30 Jewish settler-colonies in the West Bank alone and four in the Gaza Strip, with more under construction. Upwards of 50,000 Jewish colonists had already moved to colonies established in East Jerusalem, which came to be deliberately mischaracterised as "neighbourhoods". Labor governments also established the majority of the 18 settlements in the Sinai Peninsula before the Likud party came to power. In 1972, Labor expelled 10,000 Egyptians after confiscating their lands in 1969. Their homes, crops, mosques and schools were bulldozed to make way for six kibbutzim, nine rural Jewish settlements, and the Jewish colony of Yamit in occupied Sinai. The Sinai colonies were ultimately dismantled in 1982, following the signing of the Egypt-Israel peace treaty. In occupied Syria, Israel established its first Jewish colony, Kibbutz Golan, in July 1967. While touring the Golan Heights immediately after the 1967 war, Israeli Labor Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, born Shkolnik, was overwhelmed with nostalgia for his birthplace, exclaiming joyously: "Just like in the Ukraine." The Israelis evicted some 5,000 Palestinian refugees from their homes in East Jerusalem's "Jewish Quarter", which was never exclusively Jewish and which, before 1948, was less than 20 percent Jewish-owned. At the time, Jewish property consisted of no more than three synagogues and their enclosures. After 1967, Israel returned Jewish property in East Jerusalem to its original owners while confiscating all Palestinian property in the same area In 1948, the quarter's 2,000 Jewish inhabitants fled to the Zionist side when the Jordanian army saved East Jerusalem from Zionist plunder and occupation. Even before 1948, Muslims and Christians were in fact the majority of the inhabitants who lived in the 2-hectare "Jewish Quarter", and most of the Jews who lived there rented their property from them or from Christian and Muslim endowments. After the Israeli conquest, the quarter was substantially expanded to cover more than 16 hectares. The Jordanian Custodian of Absentee Property had preserved all Jewish holdings in the name of their original owners and never expropriated them. After 1967, the Israeli government returned Jewish property in East Jerusalem to its original Israeli Jewish owners, while confiscating all Palestinian property in the quarter. Meanwhile, Palestinian property in West Jerusalem, seized by Israel in 1948, was never returned to the Palestinians of East Jerusalem who now, under occupation, laid claim to it. Remaking Jerusalem On 29 June 1967, Israel placed occupied East Jerusalem under the expanded municipality of West Jerusalem. It dismissed and later deported the Palestinian-Jordanian mayor, dissolved the municipal council and Judaised the entire city administration. Immediately following the conquest, the area was declared "a site of antiquity", banning all construction. Israel closes Al-Aqsa Mosque to worshippers until further notice Read More » Israeli authorities launched archaeological excavations underground in a desperate search for the Jewish temple, leading to the destruction of numerous historic Palestinian buildings, including the 14th-century Fakhriyyah hospice and al-Tankiziyya school. In 1980, Israel officially annexed the city - a move declared "null and void" by a UN Security Council resolution. Excavations and drilling under and next to Muslim holy sites proceeded apace in search of the elusive First Temple, which has never been found - assuming it ever existed. Evictions of Palestinian Jerusalemites soon followed. Periodic curfews and collective punishment were imposed across the occupied territories. The Israelis also renamed the West Bank "Judea and Samaria" and altered the names of cities and streets to accord with their biblical fantasies. All this and much more preceded the current genocide, and drew either accolades or indifference from Israel's western supporters and funders. Enduring template It seems that support for Israel in the western mainstream increases in proportion to its cruelty towards its victims. The Nakba it perpetrated in 1948 and the apartheid system it imposed on those Palestinians it could not expel between 1948 and 1967 were hailed as epic achievements of "Jewish victims" over the people whose lands they had usurped and whose lives they have destroyed ever since. But if in the West today, it is deemed a moral crime to describe the Palestinian response to ongoing Israeli colonialism as resistance, the very same Ben-Gurion did not hesitate to call it just that in 1938. It was Israel's 'defensive' and near-divine capacity to annihilate its victims in 1967 that assured the West of its lofty civilisational prowess The Palestinian revolt, he explained, "is an active resistance by the Palestinians to what they regard as a usurpation of their homeland by the Jews - that's why they fight". He continued: "Behind the terrorists is a movement, which though primitive is not devoid of idealism and self-sacrifice... we are the aggressors and they defend themselves. The country is theirs because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down, and in their view, we want to take away from them their country, while we are still outside." This aside, it was Israel's "defensive" and near-divine capacity to annihilate its victims in 1967 that assured the West of its lofty civilisational prowess. That war became the enduring template for Israel's so-called "preemptive" campaigns, wars that expand its colonial reach while allowing it to pose as the righteous victim. It is no surprise, then, that Israel's western supporters have invoked this legacy not only after its latest strikes on Iran, but throughout its genocidal campaign in Gaza and its wider aggression in the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen. In their view, Israel is not merely defending itself, but acting as a proxy for the West. Its current rampage is yet another striking demonstration of what western "victims" can and should do to their non-western victims. The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
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