ISRAEL has invaded Syria, its tanks moving beyond a “buffer zone” adjacent to the illegally occupied Golan Heights to within a few miles of Damascus.
Its Defence Minister Israel Katz boasts that its bombers have entirely destroyed the Syrian navy as it sat idle in dock. It is conducting hundreds of other bombing raids over Syria, destroying the weapons stocks and military infrastructure of a country with which it is supposedly at peace.
The United States has also launched hundreds of bombing missions over Syria in the last few days. Turkey, which has long sponsored the Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) jihadist group which swept away the Bashar al-Assad government at the weekend, has deployed its proxy Syrian National Army to attack Kurdish forces in the country’s north-east.
We do not know what deals have been struck behind closed doors. HTS, though it talks about unifying Syria and has left the functioning of most Assad-regime ministries untouched, has stayed very quiet about Israel’s brazen violations of Syrian territory, though US allies Saudi Arabia and Egypt are protesting. Turkey’s President Erdogan gives radio interviews suggesting he and Russian President Putin have come to an agreement on Syria’s future.
At the least, it appears Israel is intent on the complete degradation of Syria’s ability to defend its borders, turning it into a limited-sovereignty country its troops can move in and out of and its bombers bomb at will, the status already suffered by Lebanon.
At worst, it may plan to treat parts of Syria like Palestine, and engage in a project of territorial expansion and ethnic cleansing. Those who think this far-fetched should note that Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has publicly stated the territory of a Greater Israel should extend to Damascus.
The situation is fluid, as no-one knows exactly what an incoming Donald Trump presidency in the United States is prepared to rule in or out. Israeli leaders are confident that Trump will smile on their plans: National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir says he is looking forward to presenting him with a project for Israeli settlement of Gaza and the “voluntary” emigration of its current population, which Israel continues to massacre and starve. Benjamin Netanyahu says the fall of Assad is part of Israel’s “reshaping” of the Middle East.
Yet a Morning Star front page warning foreign powers should stay out of Syria is dismissed as “bizarre” by Nato cheerleader Paul Mason, while Board of Deputies of British Jews public affairs director Daniel Sugarman calls us “cranks” for pointing to an Israeli role in developments its government openly boasts about.
These attacks are aimed at dividing the peace movement which has shown such determination in mobilising some of the largest demonstrations in British history against the genocide in Gaza month after month.
They aim to exploit differences over events in Syria and the nature of the forces which have overthrown its state to split left opposition to imperialism and war.
They hope to distract us from a British government so cynical it has halted processing of asylum applications from a Syria descending into chaos, and ruled by a faction that same government designates as a terrorist organisation.
A government which is utterly complicit in the slaughter of the Palestinian people, as Keir Starmer hinted when telling British troops on Cyprus, where our RAF bases are involved in supplying the Israeli military, that “we can’t tell the world what you’re doing.”
The unity of the peace movement for Palestine is a problem for Britain’s war lobby. Awareness that British military power is deployed in support of an ongoing genocide breeds a certain scepticism about our leaders’ claims to deploy it in defence of freedom and democracy elsewhere.
Our response must be to maintain our unity. Palestine is still the issue. British imperialism is still the enemy. We must not be divided.
