Syria DOSSIER: Syria in Israel’s Sights

By Mya Shone

Israel wasted no time after Bashar al-Assad’s fall, CNN noted (Dec. 14, 2024), to bomb Syrian military assets, “striking nearly 500 targets, destroying the navy, and taking out 90% of Syria’s known surface-to-air missiles.” The torrential bombardment created tremors throughout Syria’s coastal region similar to those of a 3.1 magnitude earthquake (measured by the Geographic Survey of Israel’s seismography department).

By the end of its unprovoked attack, Israel had obliterated 80% of Syria’s military capacity and Israeli military units controlled the demilitarized buffer zone in the Golan Heights. (Two-thirds of the Golan Heights had been seized and occupied already by Israel in 1967.)

“The most lasting prize”

“It is Israel’s capture of Syria’s highest peak, the Mount Hermon summit,” CNN noted as well, “that may prove among the most lasting prizes.” “It’s strategically extremely important,” stated Efraim Inbar, director of the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security (JISS). Mount Hermon looms over Lebanon, Syria, and Israel as well.

Economic Future

Occupation of Mount Hermon and the Golan Heights have been part of the Zionist movement’s historic plan aside from any strategic military consideration. They are the greatest geographic resource in the region because melt water from the snow-capped mountains forms the streams and rivers that merge to form the Jordan River, essential for water supply and agricultural production.

As far back as December 1919, Chaim Weizmann, the leader of the Zionist Organization who later served as the first president of Israel, wrote to British Prime Minister Lloyd George that “the whole economic future of Palestine — by which he meant a Jewish state on the land of Palestine — is dependent upon its water supply for irrigating and for electric power, and this water supply must mainly be derived from the slopes of Mount Hermon, from the headwaters of the Jordan, and from the Litany River (in Lebanon).”

Annexation next

Let there be no doubt that Israel intends to maintain control of the Golan Heights. On December 15, one day after the attack and seizure, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that troops would remain — at least through the winter — and that he had approved a plan to expand settlement
building in the Golan Heights.

The West Bank Connection

Annexation of the Golan Heights is tied inextricably to the Zionist plan for incorporating the West Bank. Let us remember what Prosecutor Karim Kahn presented before the International Criminal Court about this fertile agricultural basin (a long narrow 65-mile-long trough that is only six miles wide on the average):

In 1967, 320,000 Palestinians lived in the Jordan Valley. By 2020, only 65,000 remained, confined to less than 10% of the land. The method? Homes bulldozed, olive trees uprooted, wheat fields burned, access to water and electricity denied, along with vast swaths declared closed Israeli military zones all to make way for Jewish settlements.

On the pathway to complete annexation, Israel has transferred 720,000 Jews so far into 156 strategically located settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, creating a Swiss-cheese map of non-contiguous Palestinian towns and villages which the Israeli army and security forces, try to control as virtual prison camps with the assistance of the U.S. and European-sponsored Palestinian Authority.

The last word, however, has not been said. The struggle is far from over. The Palestinian people have never relinquished their century-long quest for self-determination no matter the brutality and genocide unleashed against them. Today, they are joined by ever-expanding numbers of activists and organizations throughout the world.

Organizing Our Opposition

Israel has the fourth largest military in the world built primarily with U.S. funding and arms. It serves to protect U.S. ruling class interests in the Middle East, not only suppressing the Palestinian but other Arab revolutions that would threaten imperialist control of oil and other resources.

That is why our united front movement with the demand to Stop arming Israel must grow. We must continue to pressure governments, corporations and institutions to sever ties with Israel’s apartheid and genocidal regime.

 
Inevitably, our struggle puts us in conflict with the ruling class and the political parties that serve it. As we press our cause and meet opposition, as in all arenas of struggle, we confront the issue of who wields power. The same ruling class that funds the annihilation of the Palestinian people is the same that exploits workers at home and crushes resistance movements worldwide.

 This is our opportunity to strengthen our mass working-class movements, rooted in labor unions and oppressed communities, our efforts that challenge the political system that enables capitalist exploitation, imperialist domination and Zionist expansion. In the U.S., across the world, we must work together to unify our movements so that we are capable of confronting and dismantling this oppressive system.

Let us never forget that the Palestinian struggle is not isolated.

The struggles throughout the Middle East will take center stage at the upcoming International Emergency Meeting Against the Global Imperialist War on March 21-22. There, political and labor leaders and activists from 44 countries will gather to strategize and advance our movement.

We will not be silent. We will not be complicit. We will continue our fight and broaden its reach.

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Fall of the al-Assad Regime Unleashes Intense Activity Among the Masses

Presentation

Less than one month after the fall of the hated al-Assad regime, the Syrian people aspire to improvements in their living conditions.

“Those on top,” the new masters of Damascus – namely, the Islamist militia HTS – are receiving daily delegations from regional powers and imperialist countries who are determined to keep Syria under their boot, while the Israeli occupation continues in the Golan Heights.

On January 9 in Rome, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni welcomed her U.S., German and French counterparts. Then, in Damascus, Meloni’s foreign minister offered her services as a “bridge between Syria and the European Union”, but also to develop “economic cooperation in crucial sectors”. For, in addition to deciding the country’s future for the Syrian people, the major powers are already fighting to enable “their” multinationals to win the reconstruction contracts.

“Down below”, the fall of the regime has unleashed intense activity among the masses – activity that expresses aspirations for the reappearance alive of the 113,000 political detainees who have been “disappeared” in the regime’s jails – and for the punishment of torturers, the desire to rebuild housing and infrastructure in a country destroyed by 11 years of war, and the will to establish a democratic regime.

Syria is a country where 90% of the population is living below the poverty line, while hundreds of thousands of displaced people are crammed into tented camps in the middle of winter.

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“It Is Up to the Syrian People, and Them Alone, to Decide their Future”

After storming the regime’s prisons to free political detainees, tens of thousands of families still have no news of the “disappeared” prisoners.

 Sit-ins are being organized all over the country to demand concrete action on this issue. Many of the thousands of returning refugees are determined to play an active part in rebuilding the country, both materially and politically.

 Countless assemblies, political groupings and elected local councils have been set up to enable the population to manage their own affairs. The head of the new regime, Ahmed al-Sharaa, has declared that he wants to integrate all armed groups under the aegis of the Ministry of Defense, that he plans an “inclusive national dialogue conference”, elections in four years’ time and a new Constitution.

 The president of the “Women’s Affairs Bureau”, Aïcha al-Debs, called on women “not to overstep … their role within the family”, and provoked an outcry of indignation. The new regime stepped up its meetings with delegations of foreign powers: Turks, Americans, Germans, French and British.

Also, while the Israeli army continued its incursions into Syrian territory, the new governor of Damascus sought to reassure the Israeli government: “We have no intention of intervening in a way that would threaten Israel’s security.”

This stance has been the policy of the al-Assad regime for decades.

 The aspirations of the Syrian people are incompatible with the interference of imperialist and regional powers. It is up to the Syrian people, and them alone, to decide their future.

–     Report from our correspondent

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Popular Assemblies and Mass Mobilizations of Families of the “Disappeared”

In Syrian towns and villages, activists who have come out of prison, underground or returned from exile seek to discuss the Syria of tomorrow to which they aspire.

In Masyaf (a town in the west of the country where there was intense revolutionary activity from the 1960s, before the establishment of Hafez al-Assad’s regime), such a debate has just taken place.

In front of a popular assembly, activists from various political currents (Nasserites, communists, Arab nationalists and former officers opposed to the regime) set out their positions. One of the concerns was to ensure coexistence between the different components of the Syrian people, and to combat rumors that artificially pit “communities” against each other. In Homs, a long-standing Communist Action Party activist and former prisoner persecuted by the regime is organizing the campaign to combat these dangerous rumors.

The mobilization of the families of “disappeared” political prisoners, tortured and murdered in the regime’s prisons, and the demand that their executioners be punished, continues unabated. More and more, they are turning to the new authorities, sometimes accusing them of “doing nothing” to ensure that the truth is told.

An extremely moving video message from Fadwa Mahmoud, for example, was seen by tens of thousands of Syrians. A Communist Action Party (PAC) and human rights activist, Fadwa Mahmoud is the mother of Maher Tahan and the wife of Abdelaziz al-Khayer, the latter being one of the PAC’s main leaders.

 Maher, Abdelaziz and activist Iyas Ayyache had been kidnapped by the regime on September 20, 2012, on the road to Damascus airport and, like tens of thousands of others, no one has heard from them since. City walls are covered with portraits of the missing, with contact numbers for anyone who might have news of them.

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