The Guardian view on Syria's hopes and fears: stability can't be built without the people
In March, hundreds of mostly Alawite civilians were massacred along the coast, after an ambush of security forces by supporters of the ousted dictator, Bashar al-Assad, a member of the sect. Then, this month, a dispute between a Bedouin tribesman and a member of the Druze minority in the southern region of Sweida swiftly escalated into horrific sectarian mass violence, involving Syrian government forces.
Armed clashes, bombardments, summary executions and then Israeli airstrikes killed hundreds of people, including civilians. What is perhaps most alarming is the speed with which incidents can spiral, and the inability or unwillingness of the new government to control what is less an army than a ragbag of militias and warlords.
Mr Sharaa has been adept at winning over his international audience, but much less so at addressing his domestic one. He has made gestures towards inclusivity, but substance has been much less evident. His leadership must straddle a fundamental contradiction: he needs to keep an extremist sectarian base on side – with Islamic State and others trying to lure members away – while reassuring the rest of a fragmented and deeply scarred country that he can protect them and meet at least their basic needs.
The Assads weaponised intercommunal divisions to bolster their rule. Many people are seeking redress or retaliation for abuses committed under the old regime. The ubiquity of weapons after years of war and the desire of militia leaders to defend their interests adds to the danger, as does competition for scant economic resources.
Israel's intervention this month – purportedly in defence of the Druze, a significant minority in Israel – has deepened the crisis. It has occupied additional territory and has clearly been working to reduce Syrian military capabilities and to undermine the leadership. Striking the defence ministry in Damascus didn't just send a message 'regarding the events in Sweida' but about its broader intentions. The US, which recognises that Syria's disintegration is not in its interests, has sought to rein Israel in and must continue doing so.
Amid this bleak outlook, there are still notes of hope, especially in persistent grassroots efforts to tackle intercommunal violence through dialogue and to pursue transitional justice. These two priorities are interconnected: without ending impunity for the events of recent months and past decades, Syria cannot hope to establish the trust on which effective discussions depend.
The government has paid lip service to transitional justice but has yet to name those it believes accountable for the slaughter in March – despite evidence on social media as well as from witnesses. It says there will be 'no tolerance' of abuses by anyone in Sweida. Terrified minorities will want to see proof of that assertion. Improved accountability, and commitment to building relations between communities, are not indulgences for happier and more prosperous times, but the foundation stones required for a successful nation. A Syria that is not inclusive and protective cannot hope to survive and thrive.
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The Independent
16 minutes ago
- The Independent
Netanyahu is leading Israel to pariah status – but don't expect him to go anywhere
By Benjamin Netanyahu 's standards, there was something almost ritualistic about his reaction to Keir Starmer's policy shift towards recognising a Palestinian state. There was the tendentious accusation that such a state would be a 'reward for monstrous terrorism '; a faint accusation of 1939s-style passivity in the face of Nazism with his reference to the 'appeasement' of Hamas; the hollow claim that an independent Palestine would pose a 'jihadist' threat to Britain itself. But for now, the Israeli prime minister has more pressing worries than the rapidly mounting European discontent at the starvation and mass killing of civilians in Gaza. Because that discontent is apparently – at least on some days – shared by Donald Trump. Netanyahu has already hastily U-turned by agreeing to 'humanitarian pauses' and the delivery of at least minimal UN aid to abate a famine he was still insisting just days ago did not exist. This doesn't mean that Trump is yet ready to apply irresistible pressure on Netanyahu to agree to a ceasefire on terms Hamas would accept. But either way, such concessions, however limited, were not what his two most ultranationalist and seemingly indispensable ministers, Bezalel Smotrich (who briefly threatened to quit at the beginning of the week when he heard about the aid U-turn) and Itamar Ben Gvir, signed up for. And that's a problem for Netanyahu – because if they had resigned, that could have spelt the end of his coalition. That malign dynamic has been central to Netanyahu's pursuit for 22 months of what he accurately promised would be a war of 'mighty revenge' after the murder and kidnapping of Israelis on 7 October 2023. The past week – the images of starvation, the moves by the UK, France and now Canada in recognising Palestine, the pressure from Trump – have all thrown a renewed light on how Netanyahu has pursued the war in Gaza. They also raise the question of how long he can survive in power. As long as the war lasts, Netanyahu is able to stave off the almost inevitable prospect of a commission of inquiry, which would expose all the failures that allowed October 7 to happen on his watch. The Israeli leader consistently blames the military and the intelligence services for those failures. Their now mainly resigned or sacked heads argue that he was repeatedly warned during 2023 that the huge divisions generated by his efforts to neuter the country's judiciary were weakening Israel and affording an opportunity to its enemies. An inquiry might also excoriate him for what is seen across a wide spectrum of Israeli political opinion as his continued willingness before 7 October to allow Qatar to fund Hamas and keep it in power. That scenario provided the perfect excuse for not negotiating peace with the Palestinians on the grounds that they had a leadership divided between Hamas in Gaza and Fatah in the West Bank. But keeping together the most right-wing government in Israel 's history serves another, still evolving, purpose. Only such a government – in return for favours like the unopposed expansion of settlements in the West Bank – would be prepared to take steps like the judicial 'overhaul' and the currently planned sacking of the Attorney General Gali Baharav Miara. And those together offered the best chance of halting Netanyahu's ongoing criminal trial on three corruption charges (which he denies). That said, his success so far in navigating US pressure, such as it has been for most of the war, and the demands of his cabinet extremists, is a testament to the world-class political skills of a man who has not become Israel's longest-serving prime minister by accident. Netanyahu has managed to weather a series of crises to get to the Knesset summer recess when the threat to his coalition is automatically, if temporarily, abated. As Amos Harel, military analyst on the liberal Haaretz newspaper speculated on Wednesday, he has probably in the last few days been sending out a characteristic double message, assuring Smotrich and Ben Gvir that he will resume the war once Trump is placated, while suggesting to the anguished families of hostages still in Gaza that a ceasefire to release at least some of them is imminent. For as long as Joe Biden was the American president, Netanyahu lined up with Smotrich and Ben Gvir in preference to the White House, a stance strongly fortified by his own lifelong ideological opposition to the Palestinian state that Biden was committed to. And he managed to escape any real sanctions (apart from one pause, now reversed by Trump, in the delivery of ultra-lethal 2000lb bombs) for serially ignoring US warnings to protect civilians in Gaza. Indeed, his attitude to Biden recalled a private remark to some settlers he was filmed making way back in 2001: 'If they say something… so what? ... The Americans are something you can easily manoeuvre.' When Trump took office, Netanyahu had reason to think he no longer even had to 'manoeuvre'. The funding and weapons supplies were unabated. He beamed seraphically in the White House while Trump unveiled his plan to evacuate Gaza's two million residents and establish a 'Riviera' by the Mediterranean Sea. Netanyahu has continued to endorse the expulsion of Gazans – a war crime – as 'the Trump plan'. No one – perhaps not even the chronically unpredictable Trump himself – knows whether the US president will continue to tolerate the Israeli prime minister's resistance to a deal which would end the war. But now that even Fox News is showing pictures of devastation and starving children in Gaza, Netanyahu can't be quite as certain that he will. At home, Netanyahu, who must face an election by October 2026, is not popular beyond his own hard-core voters. It's not just that the polls show that more than 75 per cent of Israelis are prepared to see an end to the war to bring back the remaining 50 hostages – alive or dead – it's also that even the euphoria generated by the 12-day war he launched on Iran did not produce the expected bounce. A poll for Israel's Channel 12 showed that his current coalition would win only 49 of the Knesset's 120 seats compared with a 61 strong majority for the opposition. It would be crazy to write off the chances of a politician as adept as Netanyahu surviving over the coming year – or even that he could somehow assemble a winning coalition when an election finally comes. How this will be affected by Britain's –and now Canada's – provisional decision to recognise a Palestinian state remains to be seen. Though welcome, they will have little practical effect without tangible sanctions to back it up. Many will be puzzled by the conditionality of Starmer's shift. If Palestinians have a right to statehood, do they have any less of one if a Gaza ceasefire is agreed? That said, it's 16 months since the ranking Jewish politician in the US, Democrat senator Chuck Schumer, warned that Israel's 75-year-old prime minister risked leading his country into 'pariah status'. The growing, if belated, momentum of opposition to the Gaza war by foreign governments suggests that this has finally begun to happen.
Reuters
17 minutes ago
- Reuters
US sanctions Palestinian Authority officials, PLO members
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The Guardian
17 minutes ago
- The Guardian
As Gaza suffers, US companies are reaping horrific payoffs
Thousands of famished people waiting for hours in 90-degree heat to secure bags of flour that run out after 10 minutes – this is a typical scene at the four aid distribution centers remaining in Gaza. The cause of this desperation isn't shortages per se, because the World Food Programme has tons of food waiting to be delivered to malnourished Palestinians. Instead, the problem is Israel's months-long blockade of aid, which more than 100 humanitarian organizations have stated is causing 'chaos, starvation, and death'. And though Israeli authorities began allowing a trickle of convoys to resume deliveries over the weekend, the face-saving gesture is too little for the one in three Gazans who haven't eaten in days, and too late for the dozens who have already starved to death. Amid this manufactured famine, however, Israel has permitted another kind of shipment to flow freely. Weapons imports have continued unabated, with thousands of pounds of bombs, guns and ammunition pouring into the Israel Defense Forces. A new report by Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, has uncovered the major supplier of this fatal equipment: the United States. Titled 'From economy of occupation to economy of genocide', the exposé lays bare how major American corporations have been all too eager to facilitate Israel's atrocities in Gaza in exchange for billions of dollars in revenue. It also reveals our nation's now undeniable complicity in what has been described as the worst humanitarian crisis of the 21st century. War profiteering is a phenomenon as ancient as war itself, but Albanese's investigation shows that the military-industrial-technological complex is reaping uniquely horrible payoffs in Palestine. Albanese describes how companies led by Lockheed Martin have built fighter jets for Israel that have carried out bombings which have killed or wounded almost 200,000 Palestinians. She describes Palantir's work with the Israeli military, and its consummation of that partnership by holding a board meeting in Tel Aviv (Palantir has denied involvement in IDF programs identifying Gaza targets). And she brings to light how Caterpillar Inc equipment has demolished homes and hospitals, crushing to death civilians stuck inside those structures. Perhaps the most hypocritical offenders are the members of the Magnificent Seven. Google's unofficial motto was once 'Don't be evil,' but now the company has joined Amazon to provide cloud computing services to Israel and its military for a persuasive $1.2bn. Albanese quotes an Israeli colonel who calls this technology 'a weapon in every sense of the word', a cloud as deadly as any poison gas. The Trump administration has responded to Albanese's research with its classic combination of denial and retribution. The secretary of state, Marco Rubio, has sanctioned her, calling her work 'political and economic warfare'. But Albanese's conclusions align with those of several prominent Jewish and Israeli figures. The former IDF soldier and leading genocide historian Omer Bartov defended Albanese by writing, 'I have been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century. I can recognize one when I see one.' On Monday, two major Israeli human rights groups announced they agreed with that description. The journalist Peter Beinart, the editor-at-large of Jewish Currents, has called Israel an apartheid state, and recently condemned the crisis in Gaza as 'an astonishing level of death and suffering that has been normalized'. A simple scan of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz turns up recent headlines like 'The Mathematics of Starvation' and 'Israel's Destruction of Gaza'. In the US Capitol, progressive lawmakers such as Representative Rashida Tlaib and Senator Bernie Sanders have repeatedly called for ending the transfer of US arms to Israel. A handful of other Democrats have also introduced the Block the Bombs Act, which would prohibit the sale of certain weapons without congressional approval, including those made by American companies like Boeing and General Dynamics. While the bill has gained little traction, outrage over Gaza has become a bipartisan consensus among voters. Only 23% of Americans deem Israel's military actions to be justified. But with activists like Mahmoud Khalil facing deportation over their pro-Palestinian advocacy, and with other protests worldwide being met with brutal and even deadly repression, crystallizing sentiment into a social movement seems an increasingly daunting task. Amid so much pushback, though, grassroots organizing against weapons exports to Israel still represents a concrete if challenging opportunity for change. Students in Israel, the US and across the globe have already been providing a moral witness on this front, despite the threat of retaliation, expulsion and blacklisting. Now, a broader coalition will be necessary to convince lawmakers that they should fear constituent backlash more than a primary challenge bankrolled by Aipac. Beyond pouring into the streets, Americans can also boycott the corporations living large while the population of Palestine dwindles. The employees of those very companies can do the same, like the 50 now-terminated workers at Google who led 'No Tech for Apartheid' protests last year. Otherwise, the warning recently issued by Beinart will remain true: 'Blood is on our hands as Americans because it is our weapons that are responsible for those children starving to death.' In the meantime, the thirsty toddlers of Khan Younis will continue to wait for some drops of salt water to drink, and the emaciated doctors of Gaza City will continue to scrounge for a few cans of expired food to eat. Katrina vanden Heuvel is editorial director and publisher of the Nation, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a contributor to the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times
