COMMENTARY: By Eugene Doyle

What we are witnessing is not just the end of a regime but quite possibly the destruction of the Syrian state.

We are being told by the Western media that we should join Benjamin Netanyahu, Joe Biden and the Europeans in celebrating what risks being the creation of yet another failed state in the Middle East/West Asia.

I shed no tears for Assad — nor would I if any of the US’s preferred family dictatorships in the region fell. I’m happy for the prisoners who have been freed; could we also free those in Guantanamo Bay, Israel and all the US torture/black sites in places like Jordan, Thailand, Poland, Romania, Lithuania and Kosovo?

When I see that most of the destruction to the country has occurred after Assad has left and that Israel is in the lead in destroying the military and administrative foundations of a viable state, there seems little to give me hope that Syria will be united, sovereign and free any time soon.

Political scientists say that “state monopoly on violence” — the concept that the state alone has the right to use or authorise the use of force (and has the means to ensure compliance within its territory) — is a sine qua non of a viable state.

Assad has fled, the armed forces have vanished yet the Israelis, in particular, by their massive ongoing air strikes on the country’s navy, air force, military installations and arms depots, are ensuring the incoming government will struggle to defend itself against aggressors foreign or domestic.

Permanent dismemberment could easily follow, with Israel already over-running the UN buffer zone and taking territory in the south, and the US and its Kurdish allies holding a huge swathe of the northeast.

The extent of Turkish ambitions is unclear and whether the Russians hold on to their bases in Tartus and at Khmeimim is unresolved. The fate of the two million Alawites and other minorities is also unsure. The country is awash in arms and factions.

People liberating themselves from a dictator is admirable; state destruction, in contrast, is a grave crime against humanity because it robs millions of people of the ability to meet even the most basic needs of existence.

Israeli tanks invade Syria.     Video: Kanal 13

Look at Libya.  In 2011, the US-NATO bombing campaign turned the tide against the Gaddafi regime. US drones spotted Gaddafi’s motorcade fleeing Sirte and signalled to French jets to strike the convoy.  Locals finished the job.

As Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State, said with a chuckle during a TV interview hours afterwards:  “We came. We saw. He died.”  A sick variant of “Veni, vidi, vici” (I came, I saw, I conquered), Julius Caesar’s cocky phrase for one of his swift victories.

There was nothing swift for the Libyans, however, other than their fall from being one of Africa’s wealthiest societies with excellent health, education, housing and infrastructure to being a zone of endless civil war, criminality, desperate poverty and insecurity from 2011 to the present day.

And here we are, yet again, the amnesiac West celebrating another lightning quick victory — like the fall of Kabul, the fall of Tripoli and the fall of Baghdad. Mission Accomplished.

Talking of Julius Caesar and cocky imperialism, the US named their highly-successful, crushing economic, energy and food sanctions against Syria “The Caesar Sanctions”.  Imposed and maintained since 2019, they helped hollow out the Syrian economy, making it easy meat for hyenas, such as the Israelis, to work on the carcass.

A couple of years ago I listened to Dana Stroul, the US Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East talking to an audience at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. Perhaps because she was in a friendly place Stroul was remarkably candid, boasting that the US “owned” a third of Syria — which they do to this day.

During the “civil war” America seized the wheat and oil fields in Northern Syria and are unlikely to give them back anytime soon. This, perhaps more than any single factor, is the root cause of the collapse of the Assad regime.

Most people in the West don’t even know that the US holds this chokehold on the country. It uses a Texas oil company to pump Syria’s oil out of the ground, sell it on the international market and use the proceeds to pay their Kurdish fighters.

By seizing the breadbasket of Syria and its oil, the US gained what Stroul described as “compelling leverage to shape an outcome that was more conducive to US interests”.

“But it wasn’t just about the one-third of Syrian territory that the US and our military owned,” Stroul said. The US was isolating the Assad regime, preventing embassies from returning to Damascus and blocking reconstruction.

The US used some of the looted oil money for civil projects in northern Syria but Stroul boasted: “The rest of Syria is rubble. What the Russians want and what Assad wants is economic reconstruction — and that is something that the United States can basically hold a card on via the international financial institutions and our cooperation with the Europeans.”

That’s called saying the quiet part out loud: the US and the EU prevented measures to improve the lives of millions of Syrians and ensured millions of refugees could not return home, all in order to weaken the regime and ensure popular discontent remained high. Nice.

There are more than 10 million Syrian refugees — most are hated “Others” in Europe and Turkey.  The war, with so much blood on Assad’s hands, was in part fuelled and funded by the US and the EU to weaken a geostrategic adversary.

It created the largest refugee and displacement crisis of our time, affecting millions of people and spilling into surrounding countries.  More than 15 million Syrians needed emergency assistance in 2023, more than 90 percent live below the poverty line and some 12 million suffer food insecurity, but the US has the chutzpah to view Syria as a geostrategic success story because it robbed the country of any chance at reconstruction over the last several years.

Interrupted …:)

Syria’s rebirth hinges on inclusivity, democracy, and sovereignty: Marwa… https://t.co/8QJrCbubFl via @YouTube

— Marwan (@marwanbishara) December 12, 2024

For the moment the Western media is promoting Abu Mohammad al-Jalani, the leader of Hayʼat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), whose forces took Damascus last weekend, as a kind of Woke Al Qaeda leader who has embraced Western values.  More cynical commentators like Pepe Escobar refer to him as “an Al-Qaeda head-chopper with a freshly-trimmed beard and a Zelensky suit”.

I have no opinion either way; time will tell.

I’m perplexed, however, that within hours of his Turkish-trained, Qatari-funded, Western armed troops crossing out of Idlib province, al-Jalani was on CNN; it smacked of a K Street/Washington PR exercise. Clearly al-Jalani is astute enough to know that being friends with America is a sensible survival strategy for the time being.

He may even have had his own Road to Damascus moment. Let’s hope.

Hayʼat Tahrir al-Sham is still designated a terror group by both the UN Security Council and the US, the latter posted a $10 million bounty on al-Jalani’s head some years ago.  But that didn’t stop the US keeping close contact with him via diplomats like James Jeffrey, Special Envoy to Syria from 2018-2020, who described HTS as a US “asset”.

From the Obama administration onwards, the US poured arms and dollars into al-Qaeda and other Islamist groups, via secret multi-billion dollar programmes like Operation Timber Sycamore. The jihadists were the most effective fighters undermining the Assad regime.  Back in 2012 Jake Sullivan wrote to his boss Hilary Clinton to famously clarify that “AQ [al-Qaeda)] is on our side in Syria.” Thanks, again, Wikileaks.

President Biden, like Netanyahu, says that his country played a vital role in bringing down the Assad regime.  Fair enough: then apply the Pottery Barn Rule: If you break it, you own it — and you should fix it.

Several hundred billion dollars in reparations, and the return of the oil and wheat fields would be a start. In reality, I think peace will only come to the region once the Americans and Europeans are driven out.

I hope Hayʼat Tahrir al-Sham lives up to its promise to respect other ethnic and religious groups. I hope Israel withdraws. I hope for lots of good things for Syria but I’m not optimistic, despite being told daily by BBC, The Guardian, The New York Times and others that something wonderful has just happened.

Balkanisation — the fragmenting of the country into hostile statelets —  is the great risk for Syria. Let’s hope for something better for the Syrian people — that they are allowed to form a state that is united, sovereign and free.

Eugene Doyle is a writer based in Wellington. He has written extensively on the Middle East, as well as peace and security issues in the Asia Pacific region. He hosts the public policy platform solidarity.co.nz and contributes to Café Pacific.

This article was first published on Café Pacific.

Western publics are being subjected to a campaign of psychological warfare, where genocide is classed as ‘self-defence’ and opposition to it ‘terrorism’. Jonathan Cook reports as the world marked the International Day to End Impunity for Crimes against Journalists at the weekend.

ANALYSIS: By Jonathan Cook

Israel knew that, if it could stop foreign correspondents from reporting directly from Gaza, those journalists would end up covering events in ways far more to its liking.

They would hedge every report of a new Israeli atrocity – if they covered them at all – with a “Hamas claims” or “Gaza family members allege”. Everything would be presented in terms of conflicting narratives rather than witnessed facts. Audiences would feel uncertain, hesitant, detached.

Israel could shroud its slaughter in a fog of confusion and disputation. The natural revulsion evoked by a genocide would be tempered and attenuated.

For a year, the networks’ most experienced war reporters have stayed put in their hotels in Israel, watching Gaza from afar. Their human-interest stories, always at the heart of war reporting, have focused on the far more limited suffering of Israelis than the vast catastrophe unfolding for Palestinians.

That is why Western audiences have been forced to relive a single day of horror for Israel, on October 7, 2023, as intensely as they have a year of greater horrors in Gaza — in what the World Court has judged to be a “plausible” genocide by Israel.

That is why the media have immersed their audiences in the agonies of the families of some 250 Israelis — civilians taken hostage and soldiers taken captive — as much as they have the agonies of 2.3 million Palestinians bombed and starved to death week after week, month after month.

That is why audiences have been subjected to gaslighting narratives that frame Gaza’s destruction as a “humanitarian crisis” rather than the canvas on which Israel is erasing all the known rules of war.

While foreign correspondents sit obediently in their hotel rooms, Palestinian journalists have been picked off one by one — in the greatest massacre of journalists in history.

Israel is now repeating that process in Lebanon. On the night of October 24, it struck a residence in south Lebanon where three journalists were staying. All were killed.

In an indication of how deliberate and cynical Israel’s actions are, it put its military’s crosshairs on six Al Jazeera reporters last month, smearing them as “terrorists” working for Hamas and Islamic Jihad. They are reportedly the last surviving Palestinian journalists in northern Gaza, which Israel has sealed off while it carries out the so-called “General’s Plan”.

Israel wants no one reporting its final push to ethnically cleanse northern Gaza by starving out the 400,000 Palestinians still there and executing anyone who remains as a “terrorist”.

These six join a long list of professionals defamed by Israel in the interests of advancing its genocide — from doctors and aid workers to UN peacekeepers.

Sympathy for Israel
Perhaps the nadir of Israel’s domestication of foreign journalists was reached last month in a report by CNN. Back in February whistleblowing staff there revealed that the network’s executives have been actively obscuring Israeli atrocities to portray Israel in a more sympathetic light.

In a story whose framing should have been unthinkable — but sadly was all too predictable — CNN reported on the psychological trauma some Israeli soldiers are suffering from time spent in Gaza, in some cases leading to suicide.

Committing a genocide can be bad for your mental health, it seems. Or as CNN explained, its interviews “provide a window into the psychological burden that the war is casting on Israeli society”.

In its lengthy piece, titled “He got out of Gaza, but Gaza did not get out of him”, the atrocities the soldiers admit committing are little more than the backdrop as CNN finds yet another angle on Israeli suffering. Israeli soldiers are the real victims — even as they perpetrate a genocide on the Palestinian people.

One bulldozer driver, Guy Zaken, told CNN he could not sleep and had become vegetarian because of the “very, very difficult things” he had seen and had to do in Gaza.

What things? Zaken had earlier told a hearing of the Israeli Parliament that his unit’s job was to drive over many hundreds of Palestinians, some of them alive.

CNN reported: “Zaken says he can no longer eat meat, as it reminds him of the gruesome scenes he witnessed from his bulldozer in Gaza.”

Doubtless some Nazi concentration camp guards committed suicide in the 1940s after witnessing the horrors there — because they were responsible for them. Only in some weird parallel news universe, would their “psychological burden” be the story.

After a huge online backlash, CNN amended an editor’s note at the start of the article that originally read: “This story includes details about suicide that some readers may find upsetting.”

Readers, it was assumed, would find the suicide of Israeli soldiers upsetting, but apparently not the revelation that those soldiers were routinely driving over Palestinians so that, as Zaken explained, “everything squirts out”.

Banned from Gaza
Finally, a year into Israel’s genocidal war, now rapidly spreading into Lebanon, some voices are being raised very belatedly to demand the entry of foreign journalists into Gaza.

This week — in a move presumably designed, as November’s elections loom, to ingratiate themselves with voters angry at the party’s complicity in genocide — dozens of Democratic members of the US Congress wrote to President Joe Biden asking him to pressure Israel to give journalists “unimpeded access” to the enclave.

Don’t hold your breath.

Western media have done very little themselves to protest their exclusion from Gaza over the past year — for a number of reasons.

Given the utterly indiscriminate nature of Israel’s bombardment, major outlets have not wanted their journalists getting hit by a 2000lb bomb for being in the wrong place.

That may in part be out of concern for their welfare. But there are likely to be more cynical concerns.

Having foreign journalists in Gaza blown up or executed by snipers would drag media organisations into direct confrontation with Israel and its well-oiled lobby machine.

The response would be entirely predictable, insinuating that the journalists died because they were colluding with “the terrorists” or that they were being used as “human shields” — the excuse Israel has rolled out time and again to justify its targeting of doctors in Gaza and UN peacekeepers in Lebanon.

But there’s a bigger problem. The establishment media have not wanted to be in a position where their journalists are so close to the “action” that they are in danger of providing a clearer picture of Israel’s war crimes and its genocide.

The media’s current distance from the crime scene offers them plausible deniability as they both-sides every Israeli atrocity.

In previous conflicts, western reporters have served as witnesses, assisting in the prosecution of foreign leaders for war crimes. That happened in the wars that attended the break-up of Yugoslavia, and will doubtless happen once again if Russian President Valdimir Putin is ever delivered to The Hague.

But those journalistic testimonies were harnessed to put the West’s enemies behind bars, not its closest ally.

The media do not want their reporters to become chief witnesses for the prosecution in the future trials of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant, at the International Criminal Court. The ICC’s Prosecutor, Karim Khan, is seeking arrest warrants for them both.

After all, any such testimony from journalists would not stop at Israel’s door. They would implicate Western capitals too, and put establishment media organisations on a collision course with their own governments.

The Western media does not see its job as holding power to account when the West is the one committing the crimes.

Censoring Palestinians
Journalist whistleblowers have gradually been coming forward to explain how establishment news organisations — including the BBC and the supposedly liberal Guardian — are sidelining Palestinian voices and minimising the genocide.

An investigation by Novara Media recently revealed mounting unhappiness in parts of The Guardian newsroom at its double standards on Israel and Palestine.

Its editors recently censored a commentary by preeminent Palestinian author Susan Abulhawa after she insisted on being allowed to refer to the slaughter in Gaza as “the holocaust of our times”.

Senior Guardian columnists such as Jonathan Freedland made much during Jeremy Corbyn’s tenure as leader of the Labour party that Jews, and Jews alone, had the right to define and name their own oppression.

That right, however, does not appear to extend to Palestinians.

As staff who spoke to Novara noted, The Guardian’s Sunday sister paper, The Observer, had no problem opening its pages to British Jewish writer Howard Jacobson to smear as a “blood libel” any reporting of the provable fact that Israel has killed many, many thousands of Palestinian children in Gaza.

One veteran journalist there said: “Is The Guardian more worried about the reaction to what is said about Israel than Palestine? Absolutely.”

Another staff member admitted it would be inconceivable for the paper to be seen censoring a Jewish writer. But censoring a Palestinian one is fine, it seems.

Other journalists report being under “suffocating control” from senior editors, and say this pressure exists “only if you’re publishing something critical of Israel”.

According to staff there, the word “genocide” is all but banned in the paper except in coverage of the International Court of Justice, whose judges ruled nine months ago that a “plausible” case had been made that Israel was committing genocide. Things have got far worse since.

Whistleblowing journalists
Similarly, “Sara”, a whistleblower who recently resigned from the BBC newsroom and spoke of her experiences to Al Jazeera’s Listening Post, said Palestinians and their supporters were routinely kept off air or subjected to humiliating and insensitive lines of questioning.

Some producers have reportedly grown increasingly reluctant to bring on air vulnerable Palestinians, some of whom have lost family members in Gaza, because of concerns about the effect on their mental health from the aggressive interrogations they were being subjected to from anchors.

According to Sara, BBC vetting of potential guests overwhelmingly targets Palestinians, as well as those sympathetic to their cause and human rights organisations. Background checks are rarely done of Israelis or Jewish guests.

She added that a search showing that a guest had used the word “Zionism” — Israel’s state ideology — in a social media post could be enough to get them disqualified from a programme.

Even officials from one of the biggest rights group in the world, the New York-based Human Rights Watch, became persona non grata at the BBC for their criticisms of Israel, even though the corporation had previously relied on their reports in covering Ukraine and other global conflicts.

Israeli guests, by contrast, “were given free rein to say whatever they wanted with very little pushback”, including lies about Hamas burning or beheading babies and committing mass rape.

An email cited by Al Jazeera from more than 20 BBC journalists sent last February to Tim Davie, the BBC’s director-general, warned that the corporation’s coverage risked “aiding and abetting genocide through story suppression”.

Upside-down values
These biases have been only too evident in the BBC’s coverage, first of Gaza and now, as media interest wanes in the genocide, of Lebanon.

Headlines — the mood music of journalism, and the only part of a story many of the audience read — have been uniformly dire.

For example, Netanyahu’s threats of a Gaza-style genocide against the Lebanese people last month if they did not overthrow their leaders were soft-soaped by the BBC headline: “Netanyahu’s appeal to Lebanese people falls on deaf ears in Beirut.”

Reasonable readers would have wrongly inferred both that Netanyahu was trying to do the Lebanese people a favour (by preparing to murder them), and that they were being ungrateful in not taking up his offer.

It has been the same story everywhere in the establishment media. In another extraordinary, revealing moment, Kay Burley of Sky News announced last month the deaths of four Israeli soldiers from a Hezbollah drone strike on a military base inside Israel.

With a solemnity usually reserved for the passing of a member of the British royal family, she slowly named the four soldiers, with a photo of each shown on screen. She stressed twice that all four were only 19 years old.

Sky News seemed not to understand that these were not British soldiers, and that there was no reason for a British audience to be especially disturbed by their deaths. Soldiers are killed in wars all the time — it is an occupational hazard.

And further, if Israel considered them old enough to fight in Gaza and Lebanon, then they were old enough to die too without their age being treated as particularly noteworthy.

But more significantly still, Israel’s Golani Brigade to which these soldiers belonged has been centrally involved in the slaughter of Palestinians over the past year. Its troops have been responsible for many of the tens of thousands of children killed and maimed in Gaza.

Each of the four soldiers was far, far less deserving of Burley’s sympathy and concern than the thousands of children who have been slaughtered at the hands of their brigade. Those children are almost never named and their pictures are rarely shown, not least because their injuries are usually too horrifying to be seen.

It was yet more evidence of the upside-down world the establishment media has been trying to normalise for its audiences.

It is why statistics from the United States, where the coverage of Gaza and Lebanon may be even more unhinged, show faith in the media is at rock bottom. Fewer than one in three respondents — 31 percent — said they still had a “great deal or fair amount of trust in mass media”.

Crushing dissent
Israel is the one dictating the coverage of its genocide. First by murdering the Palestinian journalists reporting it on the ground, and then by making sure house-trained foreign correspondents stay well clear of the slaughter, out of harm’s way in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.

And as ever, Israel has been able to rely on the complicity of its Western patrons in crushing dissent at home.

Last week, a British investigative journalist, Asa Winstanley, an outspoken critic of Israel and its lobbyists in the UK, had his home in London raided at dawn by counter-terrorism police.

Though the police have not arrested or charged him — at least not yet — they snatched his electronic devices. He was warned that he is being investigated for “encouragement of terrorism” in his social media posts.

Police told Middle East Eye that his devices had been seized as part of an investigation into suspected terrorism offences of “support for a proscribed organisation” and “dissemination of terrorist documents”.

The police can act only because of Britain’s draconian, anti-speech Terrorism Act.

Section 12, for example, makes the expression of an opinion that could be interpreted as sympathetic to armed Palestinian resistance to Israel’s illegal occupation — a right enshrined in international law but sweepingly dismissed as “terrorism” in the West — itself a terrorism offence.

Those journalists who haven’t been house-trained in the establishment media, as well as solidarity activists, must now chart a treacherous path across intentionally ill-defined legal terrain when talking about Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

Winstanley is not the first journalist to be accused of falling foul of the Terrorism Act. In recent weeks, Richard Medhurst, a freelance journalist, was arrested at Heathrow airport on his return from a trip abroad. Another journalist-activist, Sarah Wilkinson, was briefly arrested after her home was ransacked by police.

Their electronic devices were seized too.

Meanwhile, Richard Barnard, co-founder of Palestine Action, which seeks to disrupt the UK’s supply of weapons to Israel’s genocide, has been charged over speeches he has made against the genocide.

It now appears that all these actions are part of a specific police campaign targeting journalists and Palestinian solidarity activists: “Operation Incessantness”.

The message this clumsy title is presumably supposed to convey is that the British state is coming after anyone who speaks out too loudly against the British government’s continuing arming and complicity in Israel’s genocide.

Notably, the establishment media have failed to cover this latest assault on journalism and the role of a free press — supposedly the very things they are there to protect.

The raid on Winstanley’s home and the arrests are intended to intimidate others, including independent journalists, into silence for fear of the consequences of speaking up.

This has nothing to do with terrorism. Rather, it is terrorism by the British state.

Once again the world is being turned upside down.

Echoes from history
The West is waging a campaign of psychological warfare on its populations: it is gaslighting and disorientating them, classing genocide as “self-defence” and opposition to it a form of “terrorism”.

This is an expansion of the persecution suffered by Julian Assange, the Wikileaks founder who spent years locked up in London’s Belmarsh high-security prison.

His unprecedented journalism — revealing the darkest secrets of Western states — was redefined as espionage. His “offence” was revealing that Britain and the US had committed systematic war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Now, on the back of that precedent, the British state is coming after journalists simply for embarrassing it.

Late last month I attended a meeting in Bristol against the genocide in Gaza at which the main speaker was physically absent after the British state failed to issue him an entry visa.

The missing guest — he had to join us by zoom — was Mandla Mandela, the grandson of Nelson Mandela, who was locked up for decades as a terrorist before becoming the first leader of post-apartheid South Africa and a feted, international statesman.

Mandla Mandela was until recently a member of the South African Parliament.

A Home Office spokesperson told Middle East Eye that the UK only issued visas “to those who we want to welcome to our country”.

Media reports suggest Britain was determined to exclude Mandela because, like his grandfather, he views the Palestinian struggle against Israeli apartheid as intimately linked to the earlier struggle against South Africa’s apartheid.

The echoes from history are apparently entirely lost on officials: the UK is once again associating the Mandela family with terrorism. Before it was to protect South Africa’s apartheid regime. Now it is to protect Israel’s even worse apartheid and genocidal regime.

The world is indeed turned on its head. And the West’s supposedly “free media” is playing a critical role in trying to make our upside-down world seem normal.

That can only be achieved by failing to report the Gaza genocide as a genocide. Instead, Western journalists are serving as little more than stenographers. Their job: to take dictation from Israel.

Jonathan Cook is an award-winning British journalist. He was based in Nazareth, Israel, for 20 years and returned to the UK in 2021. He is the author of three books on the Israel-Palestine conflict, including Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (2008). In 2011, Cook was awarded the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism for his work on Palestine and Israel. This article was first published in Middle East Eye and is republished with the author’s permission.

This article was first published on Café Pacific.