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UNIVERSITY OF VIENNA

An international team of researchers led by Pere Gelabert and Ron Pinhasi of the University of Vienna and David Reich of Harvard University has produced the most complete set of Early Neolithic genetic data from Central Europe to date.

The results of this study, published in Nature Human Behaviour, reveal that the culture responsible for the expansion of agriculture in Central Europe 8,000 years ago showed no signs of population stratification.

The expansion of agriculture in Central Europe took place in the 6th millennium BC. Within a few generations, farmers from the Balkan region expanded down the Danube valley into present-day France and eastward into present-day Hungary and Ukraine.

The cultural traces of the farmers are homogeneous across this area, spanning thousands of kilometers—but the lack of genetic data from multiple families makes it difficult to understand whether these communities lived in social equality, or to assess which individuals were the ones who migrated across the continent.

Long-distance travelers

A research team of more than 80 geneticists, anthropologists, and archaeologists studying the social particularities of the Linear Pottery Culture (Linearbandkeramik, LBK) has integrated new genetic data from more than 250 individuals with extensive data sets: bone studies, radiocarbon dates, burial contexts, and dietary data. Studying the genetic links between those Neolithic individuals has shown that the LBK people expanded over hundreds of kilometers in just a few generations.

First and corresponding author Pere Gelabert, scientist at the Department of Evolutionary Anthropology, University of Vienna, says, “We have successfully found distant relatives in Slovakia and others in Western Germany, more than 800 km away.”

“In this study,” corresponding author Ron Pinhasi explains, “we report for the first time that families at the study sites of Nitra in Slovakia and Polgár-Ferenci-hát in Hungary do not differ in terms of the foods they consumed, the grave goods they were buried with, or their origins. This suggests that the people living in these Neolithic sites were not stratified on the basis of family or biological sex, and we do not detect signs of inequality, understood as differential access to resources or space.”

PhysOrg for more

by GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ

[Translated by Mark McHarry]

On December 6, 1998, Hugo Chavez won the presidency of Venezuela, his sixth consecutive election victory. Who really is this man who has awakened as many hopes as fears? With his characteristic style, the author of One Hundred Years of Solitude narrates the fateful political biography of Hugo Chavez. He concludes on a doubt. Now that Chavez’ administration is in power, the doubt should be resolved.

In the dusk of the evening, Carlos Andres Perez walked down off the plane which brought him from Davos, Switzerland. On the ramp he was surprised to see General Fernando Ochoa Antich, his defense minister. His curiosity aroused, he asked, ‘What’s going on?’ The minister’s confident reassurances put him at ease, enough so the president did not go to the Miraflores Palace but instead to the presidential residence, La Casona. He had begun to sleep when the defense minister woke him by telephone to inform him of a military uprising in Maracay. He had scarcely entered Miraflores when the first artillery barrages exploded.

It was February 4, 1992. With his penchant for historic dates, Colonel Hugo Chavez Frías was commanding the assault from his improvised command post in the History Museum of La Planicie. The president realized his only recourse was the support of the people, and he went to the Venevisión TV studios to talk to the nation. Twelve hours later the military coup had failed. Chavez surrendered on the condition he, too, would be permitted to address the people on television. The young mestizo colonel, with his paratrooper’s beret and his admirable facility with words, assumed responsibility for the movement. He spent two years in prison until he was pardoned by President Rafael Caldera. But his address was a political triumph. Many of his supporters, and not a few of his enemies, believe his speech in defeat was the first in the election campaign which brought him to the presidency of the Republic less than nine years later.

President Hugo Chavez told me this story on the Venezuelan Air Force plane which took us from Havana to Caracas, less than 15 days after he took office as the constitutional president of Venezuela, elected by popular vote. We had met for the first time three days before in Havana, during his talks with Presidents Castro and Pastrana. The first thing that struck me was the power of his cement-reinforced body. He had an easy cordiality and the native grace of a pure blooded Venezuelan. We both tried to see each other again but for both of our faults it wasn’t possible, and so we went together on the plane to Caracas to talk about his life and its miracles.

It was a good experience for an otherwise unoccupied reporter. As he recounted his life, I was discovering a personality which had absolutely no relation to the idea of a despot we had formed from the news media. It was another Chavez. Which of the two was the real one?

During the campaign, the harshest argument against him had been his recent past as a conspirator and coup commander. But Venezuelan history has digested four other coups. Beginning with Rómulo Betancourt, rightly or wrongly remembered as the father of Venezuelan democracy, who overthrew Isaías Medina Angarita, a democratic veteran military man who had tried to purge his country of the 36 years of Juan Vicente Gómez. His successor, the novelist Rómulo Gallegos, was overthrown by General Marcos Perez Jimenez, who would stay almost 11 years in power. He, in turn, was overthrown by a generation of young democrats who inaugurated the longest period of elected presidents.

The February coup seems to be the only thing which has turned out bad for Colonel Hugo Chavez Frías. He, however, sees it for its positive side, sort of a providential reverse. It’s his manner of understanding good luck, or his intelligence, intuition, astuteness’”whatever thing which may be the charm which has guided his acts since he came into the world in Sabaneta, Barinas, on July 28, 1954, under the sign of Leo. A faithful Catholic, Chavez attributes his good fate to the more than 100-year-old scapular he has worn since childhood, inherited from a maternal great-grandfather, Colonel Pedro Perez Delgado, one of his guardian heroes.

Z Network for more

The roads to Damascus

by TARIQ ALI

None but a few corrupt cronies will be shedding tears at the tyrant’s departure. But there should be no doubt that what we are witnessing in Syria today is a huge defeat, a mini 1967 for the Arab world. As I write, Israeli land forces have entered this battered country. There is not yet a definitive settlement, but a few things are clear. Assad is a refugee in Moscow. His Baathist apparatus did a deal with the Eastern NATO leader, Recep Tayyip Erdo?an (whose brutalities in Idlib are legion), and offered up the country on a platter. The rebels have agreed that Assad’s Prime Minister, Mohammed Ghazi al-Jalali, should continue to oversee the state for the time being. Will this be a form of Assadism without Assad, even if the country is about to pivot geopolitically away from Russia and what remains of the ‘Resistance Axis’?

Like Iraq and Libya, where the US has a lock on the oil, Syria will now become a shared American–Turkish colony. US imperial policy, globally, is to break up countries that cannot be swallowed whole and remove all meaningful sovereignty in order to assert economic and political hegemony. This may have started ‘accidentally’ in the former Yugoslavia but it has since become a pattern. EU satellites use similar methods to ensure that smaller nations (Georgia, Romania) are kept under control. Democracy and human rights have little to do with any of this. It’s a global gamble.

In 2003, after Baghdad fell to the US, the exultant Israeli Ambassador in Washington congratulated George W. Bush and advised him not to stop now, but to move on to Damascus and Tehran. Yet the US victory had an unintended but predictable side-effect: Iraq became a rump Shia state, enormously strengthening Iran’s position in the region. The debacle there, and subsequently in Libya, meant that Damascus had to wait for more than a decade before receiving proper imperial attention. Meanwhile, Iranian and Russian support for Assad upped the stakes of routine regime change.

Now, Assad’s ousting has created a different type of vacuum – likely to be filled by NATO’s Turkey and the US via the ‘ex-al-Qaida’ Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (the rebranding of its leader Abu Mohammad al-Jolani as a freedom fighter after his stint in a US prison in Iraq is par for the course), as well as Israel. The latter’s contribution was enormous, having disabled Hezbollah and wrecked Beirut with yet another round of massive bombing raids. In the wake of this victory, it is difficult to imagine that Iran will be left alone. Though the ultimate aim for both the US and Israel is regime change there, degrading and disarming the country is the first priority. This wider plan for reshaping the region helps to explain the unstinting support given by Washington and its European proxies to the continuing Israeli genocide in Palestine. After more than a year of slaughter, the Kantian principle that state actions must be such that they can become a universally respected law looks like a sick joke.

Who will replace Assad? Before his flight, some reports suggested that if the dictator made a 180-degree turn – breaking with Iran and Russia and restoring good relations with the US and Israel, as he and his father had done before – then the Americans might be inclined to keep him on. Now it is too late, but the state apparatus that abandoned him has declared its readiness to collaborate with whomever. Will Erdo?an do the same? The Sultan of Donkeys will surely want his own people, nurtured in Idlib since they were child soldiers, in charge and under Ankara’s control. If he succeeds in imposing a Turkish puppet regime, it will be another version of what happened in Libya. But he is unlikely to have it all his own way. Erdo?an is strong on demagogy but weak on actions, and the US and Israel might veto a cleansed al-Qaida government for their own reasons, despite having used the jihadis to fight Assad. Regardless, it is unlikely that the replacement regime will abolish the Mukh?bar?t (secret police), illegalize torture or offer accountable government.

Prior to the Six Day War, one of the central components of Arab nationalism and unity was the Baath Party that ruled Syria and had a strong base in Iraq; the other, more powerful one was Nasser’s government in Egypt. Syrian Baathism during the pre-Assad period was relatively enlightened and radical. When I met Prime Minister Yusuf Zuayyin in Damascus in 1967, he explained that the only way forward was to outflank conservative nationalism by making Syria ‘the Cuba of the Middle East’. Yet Israel’s assault that year led to the speedy destruction of the Egyptian and Syrian armies, which paved the way for the death of Nasserite Arab nationalism. Zuayyin was toppled and Hafez-al Assad was propelled to power with tacit US support – much like Saddam Hussein in Iraq, whom the CIA supplied with a list of the top cadres of the Iraqi Communist Party. The Baathist radicals in both countries were discarded, and the party’s founder Michel Aflaq resigned in disgust when he saw where it was headed.

These new Baathist dictatorships were supported by certain sections of the population, however, as long as they provided a basic safety net. Iraq under Saddam and Syria under the Assad père et fils were brutal but social dictatorships. Assad Senior hailed from the middle-strata of the peasantry, and passed several progressive reforms to ensure that his class was kept happy, reducing the tax burden and abolishing usury. In 1970, a vast majority of Syrian villages had only natural light; peasants woke up and went to sleep with the sun. A couple decades later, the construction of the Euphrates dam enabled the electrification of 95% of them, with energy heavily subsidized by the state.

It was these policies, rather than repression alone, which guaranteed the stability of the regime. Most of the population turned a blind eye to the torture and imprisonment of citizens in the cities. Assad and his coterie firmly believed that man was little more than an economic creature, and that if needs of this type could be satisfied, then only a small minority would rebel (‘one or two hundred at the most’, Assad remarked, ‘were the types for whom Mezzeh prison was originally intended’). The eventual uprising against the younger Assad in 2011 was triggered by his turn to neoliberalism and the exclusion of the peasantry. When it calcified into a bitter civil war, one option would have been a compromise settlement and power-sharing deal – but the apparatchiks who are currently negotiating with Erdo?an advised against any such arrangement.

Side Car -New Left Review for more

Syria war live tracker: Maps and charts

AL JAZEERA LABS

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is said to have fled Damascus to an unknown destination as opposition fighters entered the capital and people poured out onto the streets and public squares in celebration.

On November 27, groups opposing the government of al-Assad, led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, launched a surprise offensive that captured large parts of Aleppo, the country’s second largest city. In the week after, Syrian opposition forces moved at lightning speed to capture Hama, and now they say they have captured Homs.

The opposition forces’ rapid gains are the most significant since 2016 and have thrust various factions back into the spotlight.

Who controls what on the ground?

The map below shows the territorial control of various groups as of December 8, 05:00 GMT. In the early hours of the morning, opposition fighters entered the heart of Damascus and declared a “new era” free of revenge, inviting Syrians overseas to return.

The commander of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, Abu Mohammed al-Julani, said all state institutions will remain under the supervision of al-Assad’s prime minister until they are handed over officially.

There have been four main groups competing for control on the ground in Syria. They are:

• Syrian government forces: The army, the government’s main military force, fights alongside the National Defence Forces, a pro-government paramilitary group.
• Syrian Democratic Forces: This Kurdish-dominated, United States-backed group controls parts of eastern Syria.
• HTS and other allied opposition groups: The HTS is the largest fighting force and the strongest presence in opposition-held Idlib.
• Turkish and Turkish-aligned Syrian rebel forces: The Syrian National Army is a Turkish-backed rebel force in northern Syria.

Al Jazeera for more

Bashar al-Assad’s regime has fallen in Syria. How will this impact an already fractured region?

by ALI MAMOURI

The swift and unexpected fall of the Syrian capital, Damascus, to Sunni opposition forces marks a pivotal moment in the modern history of the Middle East.

Bashar al-Assad’s regime had withstood more than a decade of uprisings, civil war and international sanctions since the onset of widespread protests in 2011. Yet, it collapsed in a remarkably short period of time.

This sudden turn of events, with the opposition advancing without significant battles or resistance, has left regional powers scrambling to assess the fallout and its broader implications.

This dramatic development signals a reshuffling of power dynamics in the region. It also raises questions about Syria’s future and the role of its neighbours and global stakeholders in managing the post-Assad landscape.

What does the future hold for Syria?

With the collapse of the Assad regime, Syria now finds itself fragmented and divided among three dominant factions, each with external backers and distinct goals:

1. Syrian opposition forces, led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham: These groups, supported by Turkey, now control central Syria, extending from the northern border with Turkey to the southern border with Jordan.

Although they share a common religious identity, the Sunni factions have a history of internal conflicts, which could hinder their ability to form a cohesive government or maintain long-term stability.

The opposition forces range from former jihadists coming from Islamic State and al-Qaeda to secular groups such as the Syrian National Army, which split from Assad’s army after the 2011 uprising.

2. Kurdish forces: The Kurdish groups control territory in northeastern Syria, bordering Turkey in the north and Iraq in the east. They continue to receive support from the United States, which has established military bases in the area. This support risks escalating tensions with Turkey, which views Kurdish empowerment as a threat to its territorial integrity.

3. Alawite forces: Pro-Assad Alawite factions, primarily situated in the coastal regions of western Syria, maintain strong ties with Iran, Iraq and Lebanon’s Hezbollah militant group. These areas could serve as a stronghold for remnants of Assad-aligned groups after the opposition’s takeover, perpetuating sectarian divides.

The stark divisions among these groups, combined with the absence of a mutually acceptable mediator, suggest that Syria may now face prolonged instability and conflict.

How will this impact the region?

The swift fall of the Assad regime has profound implications for the major players in the Middle East.

The Sunni rebel forces, with strong Turkish backing, capitalised on a moment of vulnerability in Syria. The Assad regime’s allies were preoccupied — Russia with its ongoing war in Ukraine, and Iran and its proxies with their ongoing conflict with Israel. This provided a strategic opportunity for the rebels to advance swiftly across Syria to the capital, Damascus.

Turkey already effectively controls a strip of territory in northern Syria, where its military has been fighting Syrian Kurdish forces. Now, with the victory of its Syrian opposition allies, Turkey is expected to expand its political and military influence in Syria, causing more challenges for the Kurdish minority fighting for its autonomy.

The Conversation for more

Israel embarrassed: Hezbollah destroys IDF, Syria on red alert w/ Ghadi Francis & Kevork Almassian

Warring in Syria: New phases, old lies

by BINOY KAMPMARK

A new bloody phase has opened up in Syria, as if it was ever possible to contemplate another one in that tormented land. Silly terms such as “moderate” are being paired with “rebels”, a coupling that can also draw scorn.

What counts as news reporting on the subject in the Western press stable adopts a threadbare approach.  We read or hear almost nothing about the dominant backers in this latest round of bloodletting.  “With little warning last Wednesday, a coalition of Syrian rebels launched a rapid assault that soon seized Aleppo as well as towns in the nearby Idlib and Hama provinces,” reported NBC News, drawing its material from the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

We are told about the advances of one organisation in particular: Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), an outgrowth of Jabhat al-Nusra, a former al-Qaeda affiliate.  While the urgent reporting stressed the suddenness of it all, HTS has been playing in the jihadi playground since 2017, suggesting that it is far from a neophyte organisation keen to get in on the kill.

From Al Jazeera, we get pulpier detail.  HTS is the biggest group in what is dubbed Operation Deterrence of Aggression.  HTS itself comprises Jabhat Fateh al-Sham, Liwa al-Haqq, Jabhat Ansar al-Din and Jaysh al-Sunna.  That umbrella group is drawn from the Fateh al-Mubin operations centre, which is responsible for overseeing the broader activities of the armed opposition in northwestern Syria under the control of the Syrian Salvation Government (SSG). It is through the offices of SSG that HTS delivers essential goods while running food and welfare programs.  Through that governance wing, civil documentation for some 3 million civilians, two-thirds of whom are internally displaced people, has been issued.

The group, headed by Abu Mohammed al-Jawlani, himself an al-Qaeda recruit from 2003, then of Jabhat al-Nusra, has done much since its leader fell out with Islamic State and al-Qaeda.  For one, HTS has a series of goals.  It purports to be an indigenous movement keen on eliminating the Assad regime, establishing Islamic rule and expelling all Iranian militias from Syrian soil.  But megalomania among zealots will always out, and al-Jawlani has shown himself a convert to an even broader cause, evidenced by this remark: “with this spirit… we will not only reach Damascus, but, Allah permitting, Jerusalem will be awaiting our arrival”.

All of these measures conform to the same Jihadi fundamentalism that would draw funding from any Western intelligence service, provided they are fighting the appropriate villain of the moment.  We should also expect routine beheadings, frequent atrocities and indulgent pillaging.  But no, the cognoscenti would have you believe otherwise.  We are dealing, supposedly, with a different beast, calmer, wiser, and cashed-up.

For one thing, HTS is said to be largely self-sufficient, exercising a monopoly through its control of the al-Sham Bank and the oil sector through the Watad Company.  It has also, in the words of Robin Yassin-Kassab, become a “greatly moderated and better organised reincarnation of Jabhat al-Nusra.”  This could hardly cause cheer, but Yassin-Kassab at least admits that the group remains “an authoritarian Islamist militia” though not in the eschatological fanatical mould of its forebears.  “It has a much more positive policy towards sectarian and ethnic minorities than ISIS.”  Fewer beheadings, perhaps.

A fascinating omission in much commentary on these advances is Turkey’s outsized role.  Turkey has been the stalking figure of much of the rebel resistance against the Assad regime, certainly over the last few years.  Of late, it has tried, without much purchase, to normalise ties with Assad.  In truth, such efforts stretch as far back as late 2022.  The topics of concern for Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdo?an are few: dealing with the Kurdish resistance fighters he sorely wishes to liquidate as alleged extensions of the PKK, and the Syrian refugee problem.  The Syrian leader has made any rapprochement between the two states contingent on the withdrawal of Turkish forces from Syria.

Dissident Voice for more

Damascus is free?

by ASHRAF JEHANGIR QAZI

The Arabs cannot make war without Egypt. But they cannot make peace without Syria.—Henry Kissinger

Syria was my first ambassadorial assignment, so I have a special affinity for it and its people. On welcoming me, a Syrian official told me “You have served in Egypt. They are more charming. We are more honest.” Like all such sayings, there is a grain of truth in it. Nevertheless, I love Egypt and the Egyptians just as much.

I arrived in Damascus — reputed to be the oldest capital city in the world — just after President Hafez al-Assad had destroyed Hama in crushing an uprising against his Alawi-dominated regime. He was widely regarded as being as brilliant a strategist as he was ruthless a ruler. After the 1971 Arab-Israeli war and the Kissinger-engineered defection of Egypt from the frontline of Arab states against Israel, Syria emerged as the leader under Assad. Kissinger, while a strategic opponent, also admired Assad’s strategic acumen.

After 53 years of Alawi rule over Syria, it has suddenly ended. Depending on one’s inclination, Damascus has either fallen or is free. In truth, both descriptions are accurate.

Damascus, as the metropolis of Arab dignity and resistance to US and Israeli neo-imperial dominance over the region, has indeed fallen. And yet, given the brutal minority rule of the elder and younger Assad regimes that saw the brutal repression of any dissent, Damascus is indeed free — for the moment.

Setback for some, boon for others

There is no doubt that the latest developments represent a major strategic gain for the US, Israel, Turkiye and Saudi Arabia, and a major setback for Russia, Iran and Palestine. The regional picture, however, may in the short run be more important than the larger global picture.

Turkiye, and especially President Erdogan, appear to be immediate winners. Turkiye has considerable influence over the Kurdish region of Syria in the northeast, and possibly with the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which sees itself as an Islamic nationalist organisation, after having renounced its ties with Al-Qaeda.

Erdogan will now be able to repatriate Syrian refugees in Turkiye, and as a democratic country, will seek to moderate any authoritarian tendencies of the HTS. In this regard, Turkiye may be up against Saudi Arabia, which sees itself as the patron of Sunni regimes, even though it is apparently moving away from Salafi puritanism under Mohammed Bin Salman.

The immediate implications for Iran and Hezbollah are very negative. Iran’s influence over Syria, and Syria’s over Lebanon via Hezbollah, were significant obstacles to US hegemony and Israeli militarism in the region. The implications for the Palestinians, at first glance, may appear to be even worse. They depended heavily on the support of the apparent losers in the latest developments.

But Trump may turn out to be a wild card. His first response to the latest developments has been to call for a “hands-off” policy towards Syria. This may be out of deference to Putin; it may also be because he may now be able to tell Israel that a ceasefire in Gaza is far more feasible because Hamas has been effectively isolated from the assistance it needed to maintain its heroic resistance.

Accordingly, Israel is in a better position than ever to choose peace over security (read unending militarism), which would, in turn, enable the revival of the Abraham Accords to help Arab monarchs keep their people calmer over Palestine, and under control.

Great power dynamics

Dawn for more

Syria’s post-mortem: Terror, occupation, and Palestine

by PEPE ESCOBAR

The NATO-Israeli cabal cheering on Damascus’s fall will get more than they bargained for. Power struggles and infighting among extremist militias and civil society, each backed by different regional and foreign actors who want a piece of the pie.

The short headline defining the abrupt, swift end of Syria as we knew it would be: Eretz Israel meets new-Ottomanism. The subtitle? A win-win for the west, and a lethal blow against the Axis of Resistance.

But to quote still-pervasive American pop culture, perhaps the owls are not what they seem.

Let’s start with former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s surrender. Qatari diplomats, off the record, maintain that Assad tried to negotiate a transfer of power with the armed opposition that had launched a major military offensive in the days prior, starting with Aleppo, then swiftly headed southward toward Hama, Homs, aiming for Damascus. That’s what was discussed in detail between Russia, Iran, and Turkiye behind closed doors in Doha this past weekend, during the last sigh of the moribund “Astana process” to demilitarize Syria

The transfer of power negotiation failed. Hence, Assad was offered asylum by Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow. That explains why both Iran and Russia instantly changed the terminology while still in Doha, and began to refer to the “legitimate opposition” in a bid to distinguish non-militant reformists from the armed extremists cutting a swathe across the state.  

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov – his body language telling everything about his anger – literally said, “Assad must negotiate with the legitimate opposition, which is on the UN list.” 

Very important: Lavrov did not mean Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the Salafi-jihadi, or Rent-a-Jihadi mob financed by the Turkish National Intelligence Organization (MIT) with weapons funded by Qatar, and fully supported by NATO and Tel Aviv. 

What happened after the funeral in Doha was quite murky, suggesting a western intel remote-controlled coup, developing as fast as lightning, complete with reports of domestic betrayals. 

The original Astana idea was to keep Damascus safe and to have Ankara manage HTS. Yet Assad had already committed a serious strategic blunder, believing in lofty promises by NATO messaged through his newfound Arab leader friends in the UAE and Saudi Arabia.    

To his own astonishment, according to Syrian and regional officials, Assad finally realized how fragile his own position was, having turned down military assistance from his stalwart regional allies, Iran and Hezbollah, believing that his new Arab allies might keep him safe.

The Syrian Arab Army (SAA) was in shambles after 13 years of war and ruthless US sanctions. Logistics were prey to deplorable corruption. The rot was systemic. But importantly, while many were prepared to fight the foreign-backed terror groups once again, insiders say Assad never fully deployed his army to counterattack the onslaught.

Tehran and Moscow tried everything – up to the last minute. In fact, Assad was already in deep trouble since his visit to Moscow on 29 November that reaped no tangible results. The Damascus establishment thus regarded Russia’s insistence that Assad must abandon his previous red lines on negotiating a political settlement as a de facto signal pointing to the end. 

Turkiye: ‘we have nothing to do with it’

Apart from doing nothing to prevent the increasing atrophy and collapse of the SAA, Assad did nothing to rein in Israel, which has been bombing Syria non-stop for years. 

Until the very last moment, Tehran was willing to help: two brigades were ready to get into Syria, but it would take at least two weeks to deploy them. 

The Fars News Agency explained the mechanism in detail – from the Syrian leadership’s inexorable lack of motivation to fight the terror brigades to Assad ignoring serious warnings from Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei since June, all the way to two months ago, with other Iranian officials warning that HTS and its foreign backers were preparing a blitzkrieg. According to the Iranians: 

“After Aleppo fell, it became clear that Assad had no real intentions of staying in power, so we started to engage in diplomatic talks with the opposition, and arranged the safe exit of our troops from Syria. If the SAA does not fight, neither will we risk our soldiers’ lives. Russia and the UAE had managed to convince him to step down, so there was nothing we could do.”

There’s no Russian confirmation that they convinced Assad to step down: one just needs to interpret that failed meeting in Moscow on 29 November. Yet, significantly, there is confirmation, before that, about Turkiye knowing everything about the HTS offensive as far back as six months ago. 

The Cradle for more

The Fall of the House of Assad

by RAOUF HALABY

Remember the Biden pier off Gaza’s coast? It is perhaps the best metaphor for Genocide Joe’s failed foreign policy  (Near East and Ukraine). The takeover in Syria is an equally failed  Biden EU foreign policy, a policy that is dictated by Netanyahu’s Zionist fetish to “create a new Middle East.”  Credit the Brits and the French for their decision way back in 1917 when, at the Treaty of Versailles, they redrew the entire map of Middle East to suit their geostrategic interests (oil and access to their colonies).  The post-1917 superficial boundaries of the entire Middle East were drawn without regard to ethnic/religious/cultural sensitivities.

The Iraq/Kuwait/Syrian/Lebanese/ Iran/ Egypt/Palestine/Israel/ Kurdish wars that ensued can, in great measure, be traced to all the British and French partitions. With the emergence of a powerful America in the post-WWII era and the creation, in 1948, of the state of Israel on historic Palestine and the expulsion of 750,000 people, the US  became the hegemonic warlord of a region valued solely for its oil and as a buffer to Communism.  Since 1948, the never-seriously-addressed  Palestine issue and the never-fulfilled promise of a Palestinian state festered and burst on October 7, 2023. And the world has never been the same.  And just as the neocons talked bush into invading Iraq, Syria has been in Israel’s crosshairs. The fall of the House of Assad was, in great measure, brought on by their tyranny and brutality – thus adding yet another act to the ongoing sardonic drama called the Middle East. And in the shuffle, Palestine will be completely wiped off the map.

In 1917, the Brits and the French planted vile colonial seeds, the bitter fruit of which have become seasonal harvests of never-ending wars. That the Machiavellian Brit and the French schemed is a given; that it was only a matter of time for Assad to fall is also given; that, like Afghanistan post Russia’s withdrawal, the Islamists will take over is a strong given; that UAE, Turkey, Israel, and the US are complicit in this uprising is also given; that Netanyahu’s designs for a new Middle East, with Biden’s (US and EU) blessings, is a given (including Blinken, Hochstein, Fine, and all their neocon buddies at State) is a given; that, because the Sunni theocrats of the Gulf cannot stand the Alawites of Syria is a given – hence their support for the rebels; that the secular Iraqi, Libyan, and Syrian regimes have been in the crosshairs of Israel, the US, and the Gulf despots is a given (Hillary on Libya: “We came,  we saw, he died”; that Arab leaders with megalomaniac tendencies fight/fought hard to hold on to power (hence their demise) is given.  That Biden’s judgment is impaired because of cognitive dissonance is a strong likely given.

The Gulf despots are not immune; they, too, will be engulfed in the same fire (they helped start) and fervor that is blazing through Syria.

One of the most chilling movie scenes I’ve ever witnessed is from Zorba the Greek. A dying woman is surrounded by a roomful of her relatives and friends. Every time she appears to be taking her last breath, the black-clad women rise in unison, only to be seated again. After a long wait, and as soon as the woman gives up the ghost, all civility and piety give way to scrambling around and the pilfering of her belongings from her dresser, nightstand, and closet.

Counterpunch for more

Syrians Are Celebrating Fall of Assad, Even as “the Bigger Picture Is Grim”: Scholar Bassam Haddad

DEMOCRACY NOW

The fall of the Assad family’s 50-year regime in Syria brings with it “many more questions than answers,” says the executive director of the Arab Studies Institute, Bassam Haddad. While the regional and global implications are “not good,” as Israel in particular is celebrating the loss of Assad’s material support for Palestinian and Lebanese armed resistance, Haddad says the immediate relief of those suffering under Assad’s totalitarian regime should not be ignored or invisibilized. Haddad also discusses the political prospects for the rebel forces led by the group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which he says will likely form a coalition with other groups as the future of Syria is determined in the coming days and weeks.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, as we continue to look at how the Assad family has lost control of Syria after more than half a century of brutal dictatorship, following a rapid advance of rebel fighters. Today, U.N. Security Council will hold an emergency meeting on Syria. The U.N. Syrian envoy, Geir Pedersen, said an inclusive transitional government is needed to restore a unified Syria.

GEIR PEDERSEN: All armed actors on the ground maintain good conduct, law and order, protect civilians and preserve public institutions. Let me urge all Syrians to prioritize dialogue, unity and respect for international humanitarian law and human rights as they seek to rebuild their society.

AMY GOODMAN: Israel responded to the Syrian uprising by invading and seizing parts of Syria’s Golan Heights in violation of a 1974 agreement with the Syrian government. Israel also bombed a number of areas, including a Syrian air base and weapons depots. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday the collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria was a “direct result” of Israel’s military campaign against Hezbollah in Lebanon.

PRIME MINISTER BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: [translated] This is a historic day in the history of the Middle East. Assad’s regime is a central link in Iran’s Axis of Evil. This regime has fallen. This is a direct result of the blows we inflicted on Iran and Hezbollah, the main supporters of the Assad regime. This created a chain reaction throughout the Middle East.

AMY GOODMAN: Meanwhile, the United States carried out dozens of airstrikes inside Syria targeting areas held by the Islamic State. And in northern Syria, Turkish-backed armed groups have seized the city of Manbij, which had been controlled by U.S.-backed Syrian Kurdish forces.

For more, we go to Philadelphia, where we’re joined by Bassam Haddad, associate professor at George Mason University, author of Business Networks in Syria: The Political Economy of Authoritarian Resilience. He’s the co-founder and editor of the Jadaliyya ezine and is executive director of the Arab Studies Institute at George Mason University. His forthcoming book, Roots, Dynamics, and Transformation of the Syrian Uprising.

Professor Haddad, first, your response to what took place this weekend?

BASSAM HADDAD: Thank you, Amy. It’s good to be with you again.

The first thing I’d like to say is that there are so many more questions than answers, so it’s important — especially today, so it’s important to keep that in mind as we go along. I would like to be analytical, but there is no way to avoid the importance and the value of watching what happened and what it means, the collapse of the regime after 54 years — or 71, if you want to consider the Ba’athist rule — what it means to ordinary Syrians who have actually been living under this regime for so many decades.

It is a moment that if you look at all the news, that cannot be overlooked and cannot be trumped by analysis of the bigger picture at this very moment, although the bigger picture is grim, is very problematic, and it’s really important for us to get to it, and I hope we can get to it today. But it is not something that we could underestimate, given the brutality of the regime, not least its lack of ability completely to govern in the past several years, at least after 2019, 2020, and its inability to provide the infrastructure, social services and the basic needs for its people, which actually did play a role in the very rapid march of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham into all of the major cities of Syria.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain HTS, its history, and Julani, its leader, and what you’re most concerned about right now.

Democracy Now for more

Turkish-backed Islamists attack Kurdish forces after Syria regime’s collapse

by BARIS DEMIR

The 13-year imperialist-backed regime-change war against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who was supported by Russia and Iran, ended with the collapse of his regime in a matter of days. Now the imperialist states and regional powers, led by the US and its proxies in the country, are calculating how to carve up Syria.

Turkey, which controls several provinces in northwestern Syria, has intervened both by directly supporting the Syrian National Army (SNA), the successor to the former Free Syrian Army (FSA), and by backing the al-Qaeda-linked Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), despite recognising it as a terrorist organisation.

On Saturday, President Recep Tayyip Erdo?an did not hide his delight as HTS advanced towards Damascus, saying, “Idlib, Hama, Homs, the target is of course Damascus. This march of the opposition continues. We are following it both through intelligence and through the media. Of course we hope that this march in Syria will continue without any accidents.”

In the same speech, Erdo?an said, “We had made an appeal to Assad: ‘Let’s meet and determine the future of Syria together.’ Unfortunately, we could not get a positive response from Assad.” He added, “These troubled marches going on in the region as a whole are not what we desire, our hearts do not want this. Unfortunately, the region is in trouble.”

These words come from the main regional player in NATO’s war for regime-change in Syria. Erdo?an’s concern is that US-backed Kurdish nationalist forces are one of the main forces in Syria and that the conflict could be revived against the interests of the Turkish ruling class. The jihadist takeover of Damascus and the Israeli offensive in Syria, in the midst of the Zionist regime’s genocide against the Palestinians and its aggression against Iran, have increased this possibility.

Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan said Monday: “A new era has begun in Syria. We must now focus on the future. We want to see a Syria where different ethnic and religious groups live in peace with an inclusive understanding of governance. We want to see a new Syria that has good relations with its neighbours and brings peace and stability to its region.”

Özgür Özel, leader of the Republican People’s Party (CHP), who on Saturday called for dialogue with Assad, later joined the chorus: “We call on all friends of Syria to support the establishment of a transitional government representative of all Syrians, followed by a democratic regime based on human rights and the rule of law, in order to avoid repeating the mistakes of Iraq and Libya,” Özel wrote on X.

These statements are full of hypocrisy. The Turkish government and ruling class, together with its imperialist allies in NATO, are among the leading perpetrators of the war for regime-change in Syria, which has led to the death of hundreds of thousands, the displacement of millions and the destruction of the country’s infrastructure.

World Socialist Web Site for more

Al-Qaeda-linked ‘rebels’ in Syria say they ‘love Israel’. USA gave them billions in weapons & support

by BEN NORTON

The US spent billions over years arming and training militants in Syria, many linked to Al-Qaeda and ISIS. The extremist “rebels” who took over the country told the Israeli media they “love Israel”

The United States spent billions over years arming and training militants in Syria, many linked to Al-Qaeda and ISIS.

Current US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan admitted back in 2012 that “AQ [Al-Qaeda] is on our side in Syria”.

In December 2024, armed extremists overthrew the Syrian government and seized power in the capital Damascus, in an operation sponsored by NATO member Turkey.

This assault was led by a rebranded Al-Qaeda militia that espouses a fanatical Salafi-jihadist ideology.

Some of the Al-Qaeda-linked “rebels” who now rule Syria told the Israeli media that they “love Israel”. They vowed to establish a new pro-Western regime in the country.

Israel has for years given weapons and other forms of support to extremist “rebels” in Syria, including Al-Qaeda. They successfully toppled the government of President Bashar al-Assad, who had refused to recognize Israel and had provided military aid to resistance groups in the region.

Rebranded Al-Qaeda takes over Syria

The Salafi-jihadist militants who seized Syria’s second-biggest city Aleppo in late November, and subsequently took over Damascus on December 8, were portrayed sympathetically in Western media as “rebels”, but they were led by rebranded Al-Qaeda.

The main armed group that conquered Syria is called Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which emerged out of the country’s Al-Qaeda affiliate, Jabhat al-Nusra (also known as the Nusra Front). This was previously the largest branch of Al-Qaeda in the world.

HTS superficially distanced itself from Al-Qaeda as part of a Western-backed public relations campaign to depict itself as more “moderate”. Neoconservative think tanks in Washington have whitewashed HTS leaders as “diversity-friendly jihadists”, but they still maintain the same fascist ideology.

In fact, despite this cynical rebranding effort, the US government officially recognized HTS as a terrorist organization in 2018, adding the extremist group to its previous designation of Jabhat al-Nusra.

Terrorist designations like this, nevertheless, have not stopped the US and its allies in Israel, Turkey, and the Gulf monarchies from providing support to Al-Qaeda-linked groups in Syria.

HTS had previously established a de facto government in Syria’s northwestern Idlib province, where it ruled with an iron fist, with direct assistance from NATO member Turkey.

The rebranded Al-Qaeda militia used Idlib as its base of operations to launch the assault on neighboring Aleppo in November 2024. Major French media outlet AFP reported that Syrian “opposition sources in touch with Turkish intelligence said Turkey had given a green light to the offensive”.

After taking Aleppo, the extremists moved south and captured the capital, overthrowing the government.

Israel’s far-right Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took credit for the victory of the rebranded Al-Qaeda death squad.

Netanyahu proudly stated that the fall of Assad was “a direct result of the blows we have inflicted on Iran and Hezbollah”.

Geopolitical Economy for more

“Why Are We Doing Netanyahu’s Bidding?” Jeffrey Sachs On Syria, Assad & Putin

Professor Jeffrey Sachs, having become a staple of the disruptive discourse that is so valued on Uncensored, joins Piers Morgan yet again for a one-to-one interview on the state of the world. The most shocking development over recent days has been the rapid advance of Syrian rebel troops and their capture of the City of Aleppo. Sachs tries to explain that the conflict is extremely complicated, but that the main culprit is none other than Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He argues that Netanyahu has managed to drag the US military into wars against Israel’s adversaries, and that the fighting in Syria is just one part of his ongoing strategy. In Sachs’ mind, the world would be a better place if America just didn’t get involved.

Gulf monarchies scramble in Syria as ghosts of the Arab Spring return

by SEAN MATHEWS

UAE ‘livid’ as US backchannels to Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham through Turkey while Egypt and others urge US caution on accepting group

Gulf states who spent years trying to crush Islamic political movements viewed as a threat to their rule are now reconciling, potentially working with a government in Syria headed by Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) that is backed by rival Turkey and courting the US. 

Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Egypt have been caught off guard by what one Egyptian diplomat characterised to Middle East Eye as the “quick rebranding” of HTS, a former al-Qaeda affiliate. 

The UAE has also been unnerved by the US’s maneuvering to open backchannels of communication to HTS via Turkey, according to a senior western official. 

MEE spoke with a senior western official, one Egyptian diplomat, and a Gulf official working on Syria to discuss sensitive diplomatic discussions as Syria’s transitional government takes shape. 

Before HTS spearheaded a rapid offensive to take Damascus, the UAE was brokering talks between the government of Bashar al-Assad and the US. The UAE wanted to strike a grand bargain to keep the Assad family in power and facilitate relief from US sanctions in return for Assad closing Iranian arms supply lines. 

“The Emiratis are livid,” a senior western official working on Syria told MEE. “The Americans are running to the Turks. The UAE invested so much in Assad and are empty-handed.” 

The brewing distrust carries similarities to the time after the 2011 Arab Spring, when Saudi Arabia and the UAE opposed popular demonstrations against Middle Eastern autocrats and accused Turkey and Qatar of backing the Muslim Brotherhood. 

“Rulers already paranoid about Muslim Brotherhood-type Islamists will suddenly need to deal with something that’s like the Muslim Brotherhood on steroids, and also just way more dangerous and unpredictable,” Aron Lund, a Syria expert at Century International, told MEE. 

In recent years, leaders in the Middle East who found themselves on opposite sides of proxy wars in places like Libya sought to patch up ties. Saudi Arabia has moved closer to Qatar, but Doha’s relations with Abu Dhabi, while friendlier than during the latter’s blockade, remain strained.  

Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi, who ousted Egypt’s democratically elected Muslim Brotherhood president, Mohammad Morsi, met twice with Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan in 2024.

Erdogan backed Morsi and famously declared, “I will never talk to someone like him,” referring to Sisi. 

The fragile detente between Sisi and Erdogan could be tested now that HTS controls Damascus, a cultural and former economic hub of the Arab world. 

“Turkey’s power is on the rise, clearly,” the Egyptian diplomat told MEE. “And HTS is more Muslim than the Muslim Brotherhood dreamed of being. The Muslim Brotherhood could flourish in Syria.”

Only game in town

With Saudi Arabia and the UAE’s strategy of rehabilitating Assad now over, analysts say the Gulf states have few options but to engage HTS and accommodate Turkey’s influence. 

HTS’s political affairs office reportedly met with the ambassadors of Egypt, the UAE, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia on Tuesday. 

Middle East Eye for more

RASHID KHALIDI interviewd by TARIQ ALI

Let’s start with the present, not just in the sense of the horrors being inflicted on Palestine right now, but the present as part of Palestine’s still-active past. The brutal Anglo-Zionist repression of the great Arab Revolt of 1936–39 was followed by the Nakba of 1948, the Six-Day War in 1967, the 1982 siege of Beirut, led by Ariel Sharon, and the massacres of Sabra and Shatila, the two Intifadas, the continuous raining down of terror by Israel since then. Yet the post-October 7 genocide seems to have had a bigger global impact than any of these.

Yes, something has shifted globally. I’m not sure why those historic episodes did not have the effect of completely changing the narrative—the popular narrative, in particular. I don’t want to speculate about things like social media. But this has been the first genocide that a generation has witnessed in real time, on their devices. Was it the first in recent times in which the us, Britain and Western powers were direct participants, unlike others, in Sudan or Myanmar? Did the work of pro-Palestinian advocates over a generation or more prepare people for this? I don’t know. But you are right that as a result of the horrors that have been inflicted on Gaza over eight continuous months, and which are still being inflicted now, something new has happened. The displacement of three quarters of a million people in 1948 did not produce the same impact. The 1936–39 Arab Revolt is almost completely forgotten. None of those earlier events had anything like this effect.

The Arab Revolt has always fascinated me as one of the major episodes of anti-colonial struggle, which has had far less attention than it deserves. It began as a strike, became a series of strikes, then developed into a huge national uprising which had British forces tied down for over three years. Could you give us an explanation of its origins, development and consequences?

The Arab Revolt was essentially a popular uprising, on a massive scale. The traditional Palestinian leadership was taken by surprise, just as Arafat and the plo leadership were surprised by the First Intifada in 1987. Both uprisings were sparked by minor incidents; in the case of the Arab Revolt, it was the death in battle of Shaikh ‘Iz al-Din al-Qassam in November 1935, killed by British forces. Born in 1882 in Jableh, on the Syrian coast, al-Qassam was a religious scholar, trained at Al-Azhar, and a militant anti-imperialist, who fought against all the Western powers in the region, beginning with the Italians in Libya in 1911, then the French-Mandate forces in Syria in 1919–20. He ended up in British-Mandate Palestine, where he lived and worked mainly among the peasantry and the urban poor. Al-Qassam’s killing had an enormous amplitude, such that within a few months it had helped to detonate the longest general strike in interwar colonial history. The best account is by Ghassan Kanafani, the great Palestinian writer assassinated by the Israelis in 1972; it was to be the first chapter of his history of the Palestinian struggle, unfinished at his death.footnote¹

Kanafani’s analysis stands to this day. Among other things, he underlined the economic impact on the popular classes of increased Jewish migration to Palestine in the 1930s, after Hitler came to power; the sacking of Arab workers from factories and construction sites, in line with Ben-Gurion’s policy of ‘Jewish Labour Only’; the eviction of 20,000 peasant families from their fields and orchards, sold to Zionist settlers by absentee landlords; rising poverty. These popular revolts erupt when people reach a point where they just cannot go on as before, and in this case social anger combined with powerful national and religious feelings. The Palestinians rose up against the full might of the British Empire—which, in a century and a half, had not been forced to grant independence to a single colonial dependency, with the sole exception of Ireland in 1921. The Arab Revolt was crushed by what was still the world’s most powerful empire, but the Palestinians fought for over three years, with perhaps a sixth of the adult male population killed, injured, in prison or in exile. In the annals of the interwar period, this was an unprecedented attempt to overthrow colonial rule. It was only suppressed by the deployment of 100,00 troops and the raf. This is a forgotten page in Palestinian history.

Did not this defeat also lead to a demoralization within the Palestinian masses, so that when the Nakba proper began in 1947, they still had not recovered from the terror of 1936–39?

The defeat of the Arab Revolt created a heavy legacy that affected the Palestinian people for decades. As Kanafani wrote, the Nakba, ‘the second chapter of the Palestinian defeat’—from the end of 1947 to the middle of 1948—was amazingly short, because it was only the conclusion of this long and bloody chapter which had lasted from April 1936 to September 1939.footnote² What the British did was later copied in almost every detail by the Zionist leaders from Ben-Gurion onwards. For that reason alone, it’s worth recalling the cost to Palestinian society. At least 2,000 homes were blown up, crops destroyed, over a hundred rebels executed for possessing firearms. All this was accompanied by curfews, detention without trial, internal exile, torture, practices like tying villagers to the front of steam engines, as a shield against attacks by freedom fighters. In an Arab population of about a million, 5,000 were killed, 10,000-plus wounded and over 5,000 political prisoners were left rotting in colonial jails. 

In the process of crushing the Arab Revolt, the British gave the Zionist forces that were working with them valuable training in counterinsurgency.

Yes. The Zionists were taught every underhanded colonial technique by counterinsurgency experts like Orde Wingate, and other specialists in torture and murder. The British imported veterans from India, like Charles Tegart, the notorious Chief of Police in Calcutta, the subject of six assassination attempts by Indian nationalists. The same forts and prison camps built by Tegart are still in use by Israel today. They brought in people from Ireland and other places in the Empire, like Sudan, where Wingate started, and where his father’s cousin, Reginald Wingate, had been Governor-General and an intelligence officer before that.

Orde Wingate, a long-forgotten name. I doubt many readers would even have heard of this demented figure, of whom Montgomery said the best thing he ever did was to be in the plane crash that killed him in Burma in 1944. Who was he and did he have any special links to the Zionist forces? I vaguely recall a bbc tv series on him in 1976 where he was portrayed as a hero.

He was a cold-blooded colonial killer, ending up a major general, who was loathed by many on his own side, as Montgomery’s remark suggests; Montgomery also described Wingate as ‘mentally unbalanced’. Churchill, no slouch when it came to inflicting suffering on subject populations, called Wingate ‘too mad for command’. He was born in British India in a pious Plymouth Brethren family. A Christian fundamentalist and a Bible literalist, he promoted the Old Testament version of Jewish redemption. He arrived in Palestine as a Captain in military intelligence, just as the 1936 uprising was beginning. He knew Arabic, learnt Hebrew and became a key figure in training Haganah fighters as ‘Special Night Squads’—in other words, death squads—to target and kill Palestinian villagers in the mountains, as the Israeli military and settlers do today. His notoriety was such that on the outbreak of the European war in 1939, the Arab notables demanded that Wingate be expelled from the region. He was. His passport was stamped, prohibiting his return. His job was done. He had trained many of the men who became commanders of the Palmach and later the Israeli military, like Moshe Dayan and Yigal Allon. Several sites in Israel bear his name, and he is rightly considered the founder of Israeli military doctrine.

He taught them well.

Yes. What was once a British colonial speciality became an Israeli colonial speciality. Everything the Israelis have done they learned from the British—including the laws, the 1945 Defence Emergency Regulations, for example, that the British used against the Irgun. The same laws are still in force, now used against Palestinians. It all comes from the British colonial playbook.

A victory—or even a draw—for the Arab Revolt would have laid the foundations of a Palestinian national identity and strengthened their forces for the battles that lay ahead. Like Kanafani, you’ve argued that the vacillations of the traditional Palestinian leadership played a key role in the defeat, kowtowing as they did—at the St James Conference, for example—to the collaborationist Arab kings, who had been put on their thrones by the British?

Then as now, the Palestinian leadership was divided. They were stymied by their own inability to agree on an appropriate strategy—to mobilize the population and create a representative national forum, a popular assembly where these matters could be discussed. The British, unlike in India, Iraq and parts of Africa, denied Palestinians any political access to the colonial state. So the argument for a people’s assembly to break decisively with the structures of colonial control was very important.

The other background condition for the Revolt was the rise of fascism in Europe.

From the moment the Nazis came to power, the whole situation changed for Jews in their relationship to the world and to Zionism. That’s entirely understandable. It produced changes in Palestine too: between 1932 and 1939, the Jewish proportion of the population rose from 16 or 17 per cent to 31 per cent. The Zionists suddenly had a viable demographic base for taking over Palestine, which they didn’t have in 1932.

The Palestinians became indirect victims of the European Judeocide.

Absolutely. Palestinians are paying for the entire history of European Jew-hatred, going back to medieval times. Edward I expelling the Jews from England in 1290, the French expulsions in the following century, the Spanish and Portuguese edicts in the 1490s, the Russian pogroms from the 1880s and finally the Nazi genocide. Historically, a quintessentially European Christian phenomenon.

What if there had been no Judeocide in Europe and the German fascists had been ordinary fascists without the obsession to wipe out the Jews?

What a might-have-been. But look at the situation in 1939. There was already a Zionist project, with strong British imperial support, for reasons that had nothing to do with Jews or Zionism. It had to do with strategic interests. The Balfour Declaration was made by the man responsible for shepherding through the most antisemitic bill in British parliamentary history, the Aliens Act of 1905. The British ruling class didn’t care for the Jews per se. They may have cared for their reading of the Bible, but what they cared about most was the strategic importance of Palestine and the Middle East as a gateway to India, long before 1917. That was what concerned them, from the beginning to the end. When they were forced to leave in 1948, they could do so because they’d already quit India in 1947 and didn’t need Palestine in the same way. Had Hitler been assassinated, there would still have been a Zionist project, with British imperial backing. Zionism would still have tried to take over the entirety of the country, which was always its objective, and would still have tried to create a Jewish majority through ethnic cleansing and immigration. I couldn’t speculate beyond that.

But weren’t there also anti-Zionist currents within the Jewish communities?

Certainly, there were Jewish communists, Jewish assimilationists. The vast majority of the persecuted Jewish population of Eastern Europe chose emigration to the white-settler colonies: South Africa, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and, above all, the United States; some also went to Argentina and other Latin American countries. These were the majority and that’s where the bulk of the Jewish population of the world went, besides those who stayed in Europe. Anti-Zionism was a Jewish project, up until Hitler. Before then, Zionists were a minority and their programme was deeply contested in Jewish communities. But the Holocaust produced a kind of understandable uniformity in support of Zionism.

Defeats usually have the effect of stopping everything for a time; then the resistance rises again, in different forms. But in the case of 1936–39, the defeat was immediately followed by the eruption of the Second World War—which started in China, though many call it the European war. What was the attitude of the Palestinian leadership in that period? In Indonesia, Malaysia, India and parts of the Middle East, some sections of the nationalist movement said: the enemy of our enemy is our friend, if temporarily. Since our enemy is the British Empire, that means the Germans or the Japanese. In his book on Egypt, Anouar Abdel-Malek recounts how, as it appeared that Rommel might take Egypt, huge crowds gathered in Alexandria chanting, ‘Forward, Rommel, forward!’ They wanted anyone but Britain. What was the attitude in Palestine?

The attitude in Palestine was deeply divided. A minority faction of the leadership aligned themselves with the Germans, following the Grand Mufti. He had an extraordinary wartime career: the French kicked him out of Beirut, the British chased him out of Iraq, when they reoccupied it in 1941, then they chased him out of Iran. He tried to go to Turkey, but the Turks wouldn’t let him stay, so he ended up in Rome, and then Berlin. But most Palestinians did not adopt that line. Many joined the British Army and fought with the Allied forces. Of course, many leaders had been killed by the British, either on the battlefield or executed. Others were exiled. The British loved to exile their nationalist opponents to island possessions: Malta, the Seychelles, Sri Lanka, the Andamans. My uncle was sent to the Seychelles for a couple of years, together with other Palestinian leaders, then exiled to Beirut for several more years. And so the leadership for the most part understood that Britain could never be their friend. You can read my uncle’s memoirs—he became virulently, venomously anti-British. He was always a nationalist and anti-British, but the degree to which the Revolt changed Palestinian views is remarkable. Previously, the leadership had always tried to conciliate the British, along the lines of many co-opted colonial elites. This changed with the crushing of the Revolt.

Ultimately, the defeat of the Revolt and then World War Two left the Palestinians ill-prepared for what came after, when the two new superpowers—the us and the Soviet Union—supported Zionism, while on the ground the British collaborated with the Zionists and Jordanians to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state. The Palestinians were not sufficiently organized to face the assault of the Zionist military, which began in November 1947, months before the Mandate ended on 15 May 1948, when the un Partition was supposed to go into effect and the Arab armies joined the fray. By then, Zionist forces had taken Jaffa, Haifa, Tiberias, Safad and dozens of villages, expelling around 350,000 Palestinians, and had already overrun much of what was to have been the Arab state under the un Partition Plan. So the Palestinians were already defeated before the State of Israel was proclaimed and the so-called Arab–Israeli War began.

We’ll come to the United States’ role in all this. But how do you explain the Soviet Union’s support for the Zionists, supplying them with Czech weapons in order to carry on fighting?

New Left Review for more

by DIEGO FASSNACHT

Rising energy costs, renewable energy emphasis and rigid regulations all driving Germany’s deindustrialization and exodus to China

Germany’s domestic energy policies and economic environment are driving its biggest industrial players away from home and toward more favorable conditions in China. Escalating energy costs, massive subsidies for renewable energy and stringent regulations have created an environment in Germany that is increasingly hostile to industrial growth.

As a result, many of Germany’s most established companies are downsizing at home, shedding thousands of jobs, while investing heavily in China. This shift underlines the profound impact of current policies on Germany’s industrial landscape, with long-term implications for the local economy and employment.

Asia Times examines here the key factors and the companies that are reshaping their operations abroad.

High energy costs in Germany: The result of ideological policies

Germany’s energy policies have driven industrial electricity prices to levels that are among the highest in the world, second only to the UK. By 2023, the average price for industrial users will have reached almost US$250 per MWh; even this cost level is unsustainable without substantial government subsidies, which have now reached unprecedented levels.

Germany’s reliance on renewable energy sources such as wind and solar, combined with the phasing out of nuclear power, has increased the country’s reliance on imports and caused severe price volatility, ultimately putting pressure on both industry and taxpayers. These high prices have forced many companies to consider scaling back operations in Germany in favor of expanding abroad, particularly in China.

Asia Times for more

by KEITH ANG’ANA

As he loses his grip on power, Kenya’s president is losing the plot.

Kenya has, for many years, been a country whose politics is dominated by populism and tribalism. Election results have always been decided by what tribe you belong to or by how much a candidate is willing to empty their pockets to bribe the voters. Thus, once a politician gets into power, they have no obligation to perform their duties, since that was not the reason they were elected.

William Ruto, the current president of Kenya, got into politics right as Kenya headed to its first multiparty elections in 1992. As part of the Youth for KANU in 1992 (YK ’92), he and others, including Cyrus Jirongo and Sam Nyamweya, were recruited by then-President Daniel Moi in order to rally support for his presidential bid in the 1992 elections.

Their target group was their fellow youth. But if you think that they went around with brochures of their manifestos and campaigned honestly, then you are mistaken. The YK ’92 used dubious methods, such as printing money, which they would dish out during their campaigns (hence why the KSh 500 note, which was introduced at that time, became known as Jirongo).

William Ruto was at the frontline of this team, and since KANU won the ’92 elections, he seems to have learned an important lesson in Kenyan politics—that you can bribe people and have your way. Ever since this election, there have been six others. William Ruto, using the methods he learned under YK ’92, has won in all of them. For example, he defeated Reuben Chesire in the 1997, 2002, and 2007 elections for the Eldoret North Constituency seat, not legitimately, but through rigging.

And to this day, William Ruto has always played that game. Everywhere he goes, he ensures that people have been paid to attend his campaign rallies.  This makes us question whether he is merely a narcissist who craves validation from people, or whether he actually knows that he has no supporters, so he must scramble to create an image for himself. 

Whichever of the two is the answer doesn’t matter here. What matters is that the president and the rest of his government are used to paying crowds to attend their rallies, and that’s why they’re surprised by the recent turn of events.

William Ruto and the Kenya Kwanza regime came to power in September 2022 using a “hustler” narrative, which came with a raft of promises including: providing jobs for the youth, boda boda (motorbike) riders, mama mboga (grocery sellers), as well as micro, small, and medium enterprise operators; providing loans to entrepreneurs with no interest or collateral; reducing the cost of living. and reducing corruption.

In the two years that they’ve been in power, however, William Ruto’s government has only delivered 13 out of the 284 promises, a mere 5%. The youth and hustlers, whose name and fame he rode on during his campaigns, have been left behind—nay, discarded—in this government’s priorities.

It was no wonder, then, that when the anti-government protests began last month, they were spearheaded by the youth. Feeling betrayed, they went to the streets to protest—first, because of the Finance Bill 2024, then later, because of everything else, including corruption, unemployment, the high costs of living, education, and healthcare, and 200 other things. 

Their grievances are clear, written both on their placards and on their social media handles, but the government seems to be either blind or deaf, or even both. Why else would they claim that the protests are funded? Kenyans have legitimate concerns! Kenyans have said that they don’t want the Finance Bill, because of the taxes. Kenyans have said that they want jobs. Kenyans have said that they want the cost of living to go down. Kenyans have said that they want the government to cut down on unnecessary expenditure.

Despite these concerns, the government still alleges that the protests are funded. First, it was the government spokesperson Isaac Mwaura, who said that the protests are funded by the Russians. Next, it was Gatundu South MP Gabriel Kagombe, who said that the protests are sponsored by the Illuminati. (Jeez, that’s so 2010! I mean, were they even trying at this point?) In a TV interview, former Cabinet Secretary for Internal Security Kithure Kindiki, said that the protests are funded by politicians (whom he was afraid to mention).  And finally, William Ruto, in a tour to Nakuru County, where he had paid a crowd to listen to his speech, accused the Ford Foundation of sponsoring the protests (even though the list of all their grantees is on their website). 

The Elephant for more

by LAURA GEGGEL

A new reconstruction of a woman from a 17th-century “vampire” burial reveals a young-but-sickly woman whom villagers feared so much they buried her under a blade and padlock.

Centuries ago, villagers buried a “vampire” — a young-but-sickly woman — under a lock and blade. Now, a new reconstruction of this individual, who possibly came from a wealthy family, reveals what she may have looked like.

Although buried in Poland, the woman likely grew up in Scandinavia, a chemical analysis of her remains found. A skeletal examination showed that she had several debilitating health conditions, including a painful cancer in her sternum.

When archaeologists found the woman’s burial in a cemetery in Pie?, a small village, in 2022, they quickly realized that the 17th-century villagers who buried her were fearful her dead body would reanimate and terrorize them.

“She was found with the once sharp blade of a sickle placed over her neck, and a padlock around her left big toe,” Oscar Nilsson, a Sweden-based forensic artist who sculpted the woman’s likeness, told Live Science in an email.

This unusual burial was intended “to prevent her from coming back after death and haunt the living,” Nilsson said. According to Polish folklore, dangerous people possess a good and a bad soul. If the good soul leaves, the bad could take over the body, “and a vicious creature could arise: a ‘striga'” — a demon akin to a vampire, Nilsson explained.

The villagers likely hoped that the padlock would keep the woman’s “good soul” in her body. However, archaeologists noticed that the padlock had been opened, Nilsson said.

Roughly one-third of the 100 burials in the cemetery were those of “deviants,” or individuals who receive different and often disparaging burial treatments. Across archaeological sites in Europe, people given deviant burials include suspected criminals, unbaptized infants, people with disabilities and supposed revenants, according to the book “Deviant Burial in the Archaeological Record” (Oxbow Books, 2008). In the case of the Polish cemetery, items such as stones and padlocks had been placed in those burials, with the intention of preventing the dead from rising, Nilsson said.

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by FELIX PAL

Journal of Right-Wing Studies (2024)

Similarity Heuristics in the Indian Far Right

How the RSS Obscures Its Operational Scale

Felix Pal

School of Social Sciences, University of Western Australia, Boorloo/Perth

Abstract: To conceal their activities, far-right networks manipulate similarity heuristics that suggest their constituent organizations are discrete and coherent. When an organization crafts a public image indicating that only those who wear the same uniforms and march in the same marches are part of an organization, it implies that those who do not, are not. This use of cognitive shortcuts assists far-right organizations in crafting their organizational boundaries to obscure internal divisions of labor. That these disguised internal divisions of labor exist is strong evidence to support a renewed focus on the intra-organizational dynamics of far-right organizations—a focus that pivots from a discursive to a materialist understanding of the far right. I use the case of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), one of the world ’s largest far-right organizations, to argue that similarity heuristics disguise far-right connectivity. Paying granular attention to the organizational boundary-making practices of the RSS demonstrates that the true organizational focus of the RSS is its managerial manifestation, rather than its cadre division, which is just one organization the managerial RSS manages. This key finding suggests that scholars must focus on the mechanics of the managerial RSS over the aesthetic phenomenon of the cadre RSS. Such a focus inevitably leads to a network-centric approach to the Indian far right that better captures the mechanics of its mobilization. Keywords: far right, organizational networks, RSS, Indian politics, Hindu nationalism, covert networksFar-right organizations often face pressure to conceal their activities.1 Where they seek to challenge the status quo, they do so to avoid state scrutiny. Where they seek to reinforce the status quo (e.g., far-right militias tied to ruling parties), they do so to protect the collective legitimacy of their organizational network.

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by DEVAKA GUNAWARDENA & AHILAN KADIRGAMAR

Recent elections gave left-wing parties a commanding majority, but will they be able to wield it effectively?

The victory of the National People’s Power (NPP) candidate, Anura Kumara Dissanayake, in the Sri Lankan presidential election represented a major shift in the South Asian state’s political trajectory. Dissanayake’s upset was soon followed by parliamentary elections in which his coalition won two thirds of the seats, an unprecedented feat since the system of proportional representation was established in the late 1980s. For the first time since the 1970s, a left-wing party is not only participating in a government coalition, but leading it. This uncharted political territory represents a great opportunity to put Sri Lanka on a more sustainable, egalitarian developmental path, but also poses great risks. The NPP could buckle under institutional inertia and international pressure, and fail to deliver the kind of change for which it was elected. Consequently, the stakes are high for the broader Left movement in this historic moment.

The recent political earthquake comes after two years under President Ranil Wickremesinghe, whom the establishment, ranging from mainstream media and think tanks to foreign lenders, credited with bringing “stability” to the island nation. Following years of gross mismanagement and incompetence on the part of previous President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, Sri Lanka defaulted on its foreign loans for the first time in April 2022. The ensuing economic crisis led to long queues for fuel and basic items, and soon provoked tremendous popular protests culminating in the aragalaya revolt that ousted Rajapaksa in July 2022. Yet, after the uprising died down, a subsequent government led by Wickremesinghe suppressed dissent and carried on with an International Monetary Fund-led programme of brutal austerity measures. Meanwhile, the people bided their time until the next election.

It was in this tense atmosphere that the left-leaning NPP was able to win such a decisive majority, assuming office amidst great hopes and expectations. The NPP is primarily the vehicle of its chief constituent party, the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP). As the leader of both the JVP and the NPP, Dissanayake has portrayed the latter as a third force. He counterposes it to the corruption of the political class and its favoured home in Sri Lanka’s two historic parties, the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) and the United National Party (UNP), along with their contemporary offshoots, the Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP) and the Samagi Jana Balavegaya (SJB).

That said, we should not forget that the JVP’s move to form the NPP in 2019 was in part intended to deflect attention from its own bloody history, including its first armed insurrection in 1971 and an even more brutal attempt in the late 1980s. At the same time, the NPP’s victory aligns with global trends, as ever-larger groups of voters swing between left- and right- populist alternatives to the political establishment from one election to the next.

The NPP shares many of the ambivalent characteristics of left-wing formations in other countries in which neoliberalism has become politically dominant. Yet unlike the main left-wing parties in India, for example, which have governed in states such as Kerala and West Bengal for decades, the NPP is assuming power at a time when the political and economic order is already fraying. Nevertheless, despite the severity of the economic hardship and the ferocity of the 2022 revolt, it remains uncertain whether Sri Lanka’s new government will be willing to take steps towards an independent development path. That would require a break with neoliberalism.

Since coming to power, the NPP has pledged to follow the terms of the previous government’s IMF Agreement. It even accepted an Agreement in Principle with external bondholders, which contains unprecedented legal revisions to allow a restructuring of Sri Lanka’s bonds largely to the benefit of commercial creditors. In this regard, it does not appear that the NPP is yet willing or able to resist the blackmail of global capital.

Nevertheless, the NPP cannot be dismissed outright, particularly given the widespread anger with austerity that facilitated the coalition’s victory. The JVP in particular has played a key, albeit contradictory role in the multifaceted history of the Sri Lankan Left. The party, and by extension its electoral coalition, has tended to reflect broader contradictions in the polity. It straddles various class fractions and social groups. The NPP now stands at a critical juncture. Will it address the grievances of an increasingly immiserated middle class and the working people, who have borne the brunt of the current crisis, by pursuing self-sufficiency with a strong redistributive dimension? Or will it fall back on aspirational rhetoric that appeals to its newer backers in the professional and business communities, while sticking to the current economic trajectory?

Critical engagement with the party’s history is necessary to explore if and how the NPP can be pushed to the left — a question that left-wing forces around the world must also ask themselves as they strive to build viable progressive coalitions amidst the unravelling of the world order.

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by RAMZY BAROUD

Arab and Muslim American voters did not remove Democrats from office, nor did they cost Kamala Harris the Oval Office. They merely sent a strong message that Palestine matters, not only to Arabs and Muslims but to many Americans as well.

The ones who cost the Democrats the elections are the Democrats themselves. Their humiliating defeat on November 5 was due largely to their undeniable role in the Israeli war and genocide in Gaza.

Peter Beinart put it best in his November 7 op-ed in the New York Times, entitled “Democrats Ignored Gaza and Brought Down Their Party.”

“Israel’s slaughter and starvation of Palestinians — funded by U.S. taxpayers and live-streamed on social media,” according to Beinart, has “triggered one of the greatest surges in progressive activism in a generation”. The writer correctly indicates that the core of this activism was “Black Americans and the young”.

Undeniably, for the first time in US election history, Palestine has become a domestic American political issue – a nightmare realization for those who labored to maintain US foreign policy in the Middle East as an exclusive Israeli domain.

Aside from Arab voters, black voters and voters from other minority groups who prioritized Palestine, many white Americans felt the same way. This claim is particularly important as it suggests that American voters are challenging the identity politics paradigm, and are now thinking around common struggles, values and morality.

“Democrats may no longer be able to rely on young voters to boost numbers, as Harris appears on track to have the lowest support among voters aged 18-29 in this century,” a report in the British Independent newspaper noted. Knowing the relatively strong support for Palestine among young Americans, US politicians have much to worry about in coming elections.

We already know that support for Palestine is overwhelmingly strong among young Democrats. A poll conducted by Gallup in March 2023 indicated that, for the first time, Democrats’ “sympathies .. now lie more with the Palestinians than the Israelis, 49% versus 38%.”

Even more astonishing, the overall US Democratic constituency is more pro-Palestine than Israel. According to a poll conducted by the Pew Research Center last April, the overall young American population “are more likely to sympathize with the Palestinian people than the Israeli people.” While a third of adults under 30 sympathized “entirely or mostly” with Palestinians, only 14% sympathized with the Israelis.

These numbers did not seem to matter to the Democrats who continued to take for granted the votes of youth and other minority groups. They made a grave mistake.

The Biden Administration has played a central role in funding and sustaining the Israeli war machine, thus facilitating the Israeli genocide in Gaza. Millions of Americans took notice and acted upon their sense of collective rage to punish the Democrats for what they had done to the Palestinian people.

According to a report prepared for Brown University’s Costs of War project, the Biden Administration has granted Israel a record of at least $17.9 billion in military aid to Israel in the first year of the war. Additionally, according to a report published on October 4 by the non-profit investigative newspaper ProPublica, “the US has shipped more than 50,000 tons of weaponry” to Israel since October 7, 2023.

Merely hours after the US presidential election results were announced, the Israeli Ministry of Defense signed a deal “to acquire 25 F-15IA combat jets from U.S. manufacturer Boeing for $5.2 billion, with an option to get 25 more,” according to Defense News. In other words, Biden remains unrepentant.

Biden, Harris and others may twist the logic to justify their support for Israel in any way they wish. However, there can be no denying that their administration has played a leading role in the Israeli genocide in Gaza. For this, they were duly and deservedly penalized by American voters.

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