The sudden, rapid and unanticipated collapse of Assad’s Ba’athist regime in Syria a few days ago is an historic episode that demonstrates the limitations of force in politics. A brutal regime that had crushed dissent for decades by using military and police violence, torture, incarceration and mass executions of opponents imploded in a matter of days. Yes, it did so in the face of an armed offensive by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham in the north of the country whose success soon prompted other armed rebels against the dictatorship to join in, notably the Southern Operations Room which seized control of Damascus. There were some battles on the roads to Aleppo, Hama, Homs and Damascus, but the key development was the melting away of the military might available to the regime. Soldiers stripped off their uniforms, abandoned their weapons and blended into the civilian population. The regime’s main ally, the Iranian government, evacuated its personnel because the Syrian government forces had no will to fight. The story here is that the seemingly formidable power of the regime vanished.
It is not surprising that some compared the regime’s collapse to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, when German civilians demolished some of that symbol of the Soviet regime. These episodes in which regimes that rely on force and violent repression dissolve seem miraculous. Yet they are apprehensible according to theories of power that grasp that political power and obedience ultimately come from below, from the consent of those who are ruled. In Gene Sharpe’s approach to these theories, which were part of the playbook for the democratic movements of the Arab Spring, the emphasis is on non-violence as the appropriate strategy to bring down repressive regimes.
That was not quite the case in Syria, but the essence of the theory still pertains. Repressive regimes such as Assad’s dictatorship work only so long as the people believe the regime is to be feared and so long as the government’s agents believe that the people are afraid of them. Without the mantel of fear, statues of Assad, like the idols in Abraham’s father Terah’s shop, are just lumps of stone and metal. When the compact of fear fails for significant numbers of people, the repressive emperor has no clothes. The soldiers’ uniforms no longer signify that they command fear from the population, so they take them off and flee, afraid themselves that what they have done to others will be done to them. And hence the latest episode in the long struggle against Assad’s regime was relatively bloodless.
Other autocratic regimes in the Arab world would do well to heed the warning about the limitations of violent repression and follow the example of those who have taken some steps towards democratic reform. But there is another regime in the region that relies on force and violent power, one which has never even sought to make itself legitimate in the eyes of its subjects. The Israeli occupation of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza has at best offered some crumbs of its own economic prosperity to non-citizen Palestinians under its rule in return for acquiescence. It has never given them any grounds to consent to Israeli rule, to appropriation of land and resources, restrictions on movement, denial of rights, other than fear of the consequences of resistance, whether armed or non-violent.
The apartheid character of the Occupation becomes daily more evident, more nakedly an assertion of alleged Jewish rights and disregard for Palestinian rights. The Occupation regime becomes ever more dependent on bare force. Ironically, it is Israelis who tell each other that “they” (Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims) only understand force, while subjecting Palestinians to rule that will last only as long as occupied and occupier believe that brute force can sustain Occupation. “We will always live by sword,” repeats Netanyahu and as his words are echoed and enacted, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. As Palestinian historian Rashid Khalidi put it in a recent interview with Ha’aretz, when asked if Israel had a real opportunity to break out of the cycle of bloodletting: “It’s been the Iron Wall since Jabotinsky. Force and more force. You’ve been trying to impose a reality that has sent shock waves throughout the Middle East since the 1920s.”
The Israeli government’s response to the toppling of Assad’s regime has been a massive unleashing of military violence to destroy as much as possible of Syria’s military capacity. Israel has also occupied the demilitarized buffer zone between Israeli and Syrian positions established by the 1974 armistice agreement between the two countries. Other governments are opening channels of communication with the new rulers in Damascus, but the Israeli government assumes that Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and its partners will use military force against Israel if they have the means or let them fall into the hands of others who will, such as Hezbollah. We don’t have the luxury of others to get to know these people, an Israeli spokesperson tells Channel 4 news, so first we bomb them. He might as well add: we only understand force.
There is no guarantee of if or when force will cease to work as the compact between occupier and occupied. So far in this phase of violence since October 7th 2023, only a few Israelis such as Soul Behar have refused to put on their uniforms. Most are too afraid that what they have done to others will be done to them, a fear which has also been brought from other places where terrible things were done to their ancestors. Palestinians under Occupation have already shown that they are no longer afraid of the force wielded by the occupiers, notably at the start of the First Intifada when most of the resistance to Occupation was non-violent or unarmed. But what if more Israelis begin to see themselves as Palestinians see them, as inflicting force as violent, merciless and devastating as the Assads’ assaults on their own people? And what if more Palestinians who have survived the violence and are subject to Occupation can see that competing with Israeli violence is not a winning strategy? Assad’s regime has fallen because of the limits of force in politics. The Occupation will end for the same reason.
