Peace Talks

The Israelis and Palestinians are currently in peace negotiations discussing the possibilities for a two-state solution. This is the latest iteration in a process that began with secret negotiations between Israeli academics and PLO officials in the early 1990s, and the first step culminated in the signing of the Declaration of Principles on the White House lawn in September 1993. Since then we have seen Oslo II, the Hebron Protocol, the Wye River Memorandum, the Camp David talks, the Annapolis conference, etc. In 2008, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert offered Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas the following:

• 93.5% of the West Bank (5.8% of the balance made up in land swaps with Israel and 0.7% in a corridor connecting the West Bank and the Gaza Strip).
• The entirety of the Gaza Strip 
• Sovereignty over East Jerusalem, which would become the Palestinian capital (with the Temple Mount/Haram ash-Sharif placed under the auspices of the future Palestine, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the U.S., and Israel)
• Token amount of Palestinians given the "right of return"- about 3,000. 

Abbas said that he would study the proposal but ultimately never signed it. According to him, "the gaps were wide" between the Israeli and Palestinian positions. Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb Erekat was quoted as saying, "Olmert...said: 'We will take 6.5% of the West Bank, and give in return 5.8% from the 1948 lands, and the 0.7% will constitute the safe passage, and East Jerusalem will be the capital, but there is a problem with the Haram and with what they called the Holy Basin [the Old City, Mt. of Olives, the City of David, and the Arab neighborhood Silwan].' Abu Mazen [Abbas] too [in other words, like Arafat] answered with defiance, saying, 'I am not in a marketplace or a bazaar. I came to demarcate the borders of Palestine - the June 4, 1967 borders - without detracting a single inch, and without detracting a single stone from Jerusalem, or from the holy Christian and Muslim places.' This is why the Palestinian negotiators did not sign..." [note the lack of any mention of Jewish holy places in Jerusalem. That was not by accident.]

The problem is that the Israelis and Palestinians should be "in a marketplace or a bazaar." After all, one negotiates in a bazaar. These should be negotiations, not dictations by either side.

This very brief history shows that one should not be too excited about this latest round of negotiations. Abbas has already come out saying that he will never recognize Israel as a Jewish state, will not permit an Israeli presence in the Jordan Valley, will not accept any interim agreement, never accept an agreement where the Palestinians get less than 100% of East Jerusalem (including the Jewish holy sites), etc. This is essentially the same rejection made by Abbas in 2008, and that the late Yasser Arafat made in 2000. In other words, despite the recriminations of the blame-Israel crowd, Israel has been quite willing to give up land in the quest for peace. The Palestinians have said no. And this time will be no different. 

In order to please the Palestinian Authority, Israel has agreed to release 104 prisoners in four tranches. Israel is releasing the third tranche, which consists of 26 prisoners, as I write these words. The men being released have done nasty things. No one seems to be asking themselves the larger question: if a sticking point of negotiations is for Israelis to release prisoners guilty of stabbing women and old men, and murdering fellow Palestinian "collaborators", that speaks to a deep sickness in Palestinian political culture. No country should be forced to release prisoners of this type: we are not speaking of political prisoners or prisoners of conscience. Rather we are speaking of men who have committed the most atrocious of crimes, many against innocent civilians. Furthermore, these prisoners, like prisoners before them, will be greeted with garlands when they return to their homes (and in official festivities in Ramallah). This is very disturbing, and I would venture to say that it is this mindset, combined with the "all or nothing" Götterdämmerung mentality of Palestinian nationalism, that is the cause for the failure of the peace process, not the construction of settlements in the West Bank. The latter are an irritant, but they are not the cause of the failure of talks. 

However, the international community at large does not see things this way. Our own Secretary of State has suggested that if the talks fail, there very well may be a Palestinian intifada, and implied that it would be justified. So in other words, if the Palestinians enlarge their demands (as they have historically done) and the Israelis consequently say "forget it", the Palestinians will have been implicitly permitted to launch a violent campaign against Israel. The onus, in other words, has been entirely placed on Israel. There is very little reason to believe that any peace agreement will be signed. With the combination of Palestinian/Islamic nationalism, Israeli fears and cynicism, and the lens through which the international community sees the conflict, it is not difficult to see why.

UPDATE: Here is the celebration in Ramallah, attended by Mahmoud Abbas himself.

Another Example of the BDS Movement's Obsession

The American Studies Association, a group of scholars, has voted to endorse a boycott of Israeli academic institutions. As the article points out, this is merely symbolic: it has zero real meaning lacking a support from the broader university or college. As the article also mentions, Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, has come out condemning boycotts of Israel (he supports the boycott of goods produced by settlers in the West Bank). So, looks like the residents of the ivory tower of academia are more radical in this sense than the Palestinian government itself.

This is another instance of the obsessions of the BDS Movement (Boycott, Divest, Sanction), an international group of anti-Israel activists, scholars, and so on. One of its most prominent supporters is Roger Waters, of Pink Floyd fame, who said recently that the Jewish Lobby is "particularly" powerful in the rock n roll industry. This feeds into the martyrdom complex of Waters and others who are similarly obsessed with Israel. He has compared Israeli policies vis-a-vis the Palestinians to Nazi Judenpolitik in the 1930s and even into the war period. His comments about the Jewish lobby (Note: not the "Zionist lobby"; he might have slipped) mark him as an outright anti-Semite, whether he thinks of himself consciously that way or not. He continued in the interview: "I would not have played for the Vichy government in occupied France in WWII, would not have played in Berlin either during this time...There were many people who pretended that the oppression of the Jews was not going on. From 1933 until 1946 [sic]. So this is not a new scenario. Except this time its the Palestinians who are being murdered."

Where to begin?

1. World War II ended in 1945, not 1946. This is obnoxious on my part, sure, but it needs to be emphasized just how historically ignorant this man is. Everyone with even a modicum of education knows this.

2. Jews were not being systematically murdered as early as 1933. Yes, the first concentration camp (Dachau) was established then, but its early prisoner population consisted of left-wingers and at this early stage was not remotely comparable to what the concentration camps later became (and what the concentration camps later became is likewise not comparable to the extermination camps, which were worlds different from concentration camps like Dachau, Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen). This is another quibble, but I get annoyed when people do not know of what they speak.

3. There is, obviously, no systematic extermination of the Palestinians. Rather, their population has increased since they've lived under the Israeli occupation. Certainly, the Palestinians have suffered hardships and, at times, harsh Israeli policies, but seriously: there is absolutely zero parallel between anything the Palestinians have suffered, from 1948 to the present day, and the extermination of the European Jews. The obnoxious, and repetitious, assertions to the contrary do not change this fundamental fact. It is simply outrageous to compare systematic genocide to policies instituted in defense of a people, even if those policies are often harsh.

The BDS movement is much more popular in Europe than in the United States, but it is surely popular among many in academia. The movement is hypocritical, as it does not have anything bad to say about truly nasty governments. Occasionally, there have been token resolutions against the former junta in Myanmar and Mugabe's Zimbabwe. But the overarching purpose of the BDS movement is to delegitimize the State of Israel and to isolate it from the broader international community, including its cultural, educational, and scientific achievements. It sees Israel as morally equivalent to the apartheid regime in South Africa, and it wants the international community to shun Israel the way that it did South Africa. In the past, groups that make up this informal BDS movement have expressed their solidarity with Chavez's "Bolivarian Revolution," hoisted placards of the late revolutionary Che Guevara, and shown absolute, utter indifference to the viciousness of countries in the broader Middle East, such as Syria, Qaddafi's Libya, Sudan (whose government has literally perpetrated genocide), Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Iraq, and other brutal regimes outside of the Middle East. While some universities, such as the University of Johannesburg, have canceled ties with Israeli universities, there has been no change in the status of ties with universities in dictatorial countries such as China. (Oh, and China is also an occupying power; it has occupied Tibet since 1959). The University of Johannesburg had actually issued an ultimatum to Ben-Gurion University to conduct joint research projects with a Palestinian university within six months (which would be done in consultation with UJ); if not, relations would be cut (and they were).

This is another manifestation of the obsessive fixation on the Jewish state, which I wrote about in my last post. These movements write long tracts on Israel's misdeeds against the Palestinians; the very term "BDS" brings up a gazillion hits about Israel but nothing about any other country, because no other country has an international movement designed to "BDS" it; and has been very blunt in its desire to isolate Israel from the world. For example, Britain's University and Colleges Union made Israel the target of a whopping 41% of all international resolutions. For another example, here is a letter written by Mona Baker, an Egyptian professor of translator studies at the University of Manchester who kicked two Israeli academics off the board of her journal:

“My decision [to fire you] is political, not personal. As far as I am concerned, I will always regard and treat you both as friends, on a personal level, but I do not wish to continue an official association with any Israeli under the present circumstances."

I could go on and on. There is no need to hear anything from Israeli academics because of the occupation (even though many Israeli academics are vociferous critics of the occupation themselves). Meanwhile, many of these same BDSers proudly wear the Palestinian kaffiyah (which in its origins was worn by the commoner toiling in the fields, but has become associated with the Palestinian resistance since it was adopted by Arafat), have nothing negative to say about the Palestinian Authority (whose corruption and human rights abuses are atrocious), or even Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad, who have nothing in common with any of these BDSers except for their hatred for Israel. These groups do not even pretend to care about other peoples under occupation or without their own state, such as the Tibetans or the Kurds.

Cultural boycott is disgusting. It goes against the grain of what should be the focus of academia: the fostering and cultivation of knowledge through free and intellectual discourse. Alice Walker, the author of The Color Purple, has long been an anti-Israel activist and BDSer. She even said that she does not want her novel to be translated into Hebrew. She also tried (unsuccessfully) to prevent Alicia Keyes from performing in Israel. Walker's personal biography finds her peculiarly obsessed with Israel, calling Israel "the greatest terrorist in that part of the world." Certainly, she has nothing negative to say about Arafat's legacy or Hamas. She explains away the firing of rockets into Israel (and would certainly do the same for suicide bombing) because it's a "David and Goliath" situation and that is all the Palestinians have.

There is very little rational about the BDS phenomenon. One BDSer, Naomi Klein, has admitted that Israel is easy to pick on because of its small size and dependence on international trade. In other words, she has made it frank that the BDS movement is a bully. What a cowardly way of thinking.

This is yet another shameful episode for those who cherish the freedom of intellectual pursuit and the marketplace of ideas.

The Fixation on Israel

One of the things that most fascinates, and disturbs, me about popular attention on the Middle East is that the vast majority of it focuses on a tiny sliver of land in the southwestern Levant and north of the Sinai Peninsula: namely, Israel and the Palestinian territories.

There are legitimate reasons for this. Modern Israel is home to locations that are holy and important to Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Jesus' family was from Nazareth and he was born in Bethlehem - the former is in Israel proper and the latter is in the West Bank, just south of Jerusalem. Jesus preached throughout what is modern-day Israel and was crucified in Jerusalem. Christians descended upon the Middle East to wrest the Holy Land from Muslims in the Middle Ages. Young men fought their way through Anatolia and southern Europe to secure Jerusalem for Christendom. This is all rather mind-boggling to modern sensibilities, so we say that religion could not possibly have been the motivating factor for the Crusaders: it was greed for territory and for treasures, it was a genocidal hatred for the Muslims. While there were individual crusaders who did set out for land and wealth, and hatred for Muslims certainly did exist, these were not the main motivating factors for the Crusades. The reason was very simple: Jerusalem was holy and by right it belonged to the Christians. It also surely helped that Pope Urban II announced that any Crusaders who died fighting for Jerusalem would receive automatic salvation from God. Westerners have long been fixated on the Holy Land, in other words.

For Muslims, Jerusalem is the third holiest city. It was their original qibla (direction of prayer) and they did much to restore the city, and particularly the Temple Mount, upon their conquest in 638. The Christians, in utter contempt, were using the site of the destroyed Temple as a garbage dump. The Muslims, under Caliph Umar, cleaned this up. In 692, the magnificent Dome of the Rock was constructed at this very spot under the orders of Abd al-Malik, the Umayyad Caliph, whose court was in Damascus. Much of the aesthetically beautiful calligraphy in this shrine is dedicated to sneering at Christianity's notion of the Trinity. The much bandied-about Al-Aqsa Mosque was completed in 705. "Al Aqsa" means "the farther" or "the farthest" in Arabic, and it refers to a Quranic verse, specifically 17:1, which refers to Muhammad's Night Journey: "Blessed is He who took  His servant [Muhammad] by night from al-Masjid al-Haram to al-Masjid al-Aqsa..." "Masjid" simply means "Mosque." Al-Masjid al-Haram is the mosque that surrounds the Kaaba in Mecca.  The meaning of "Al-Masjid al-Aqsa" ("the farthest mosque") was a bit more cryptic. The Quran does not identify this location with Jerusalem or even with Palestine. This identification came later, with the Umayyads, who were the rulers of the roost in Syria. "Syria" at the time encompassed a much greater land mass than the modern state with that name, and Palestine was the southern part of it. The Umayyads sanctified Jerusalem for political reasons: to divert the Muslim hajj (pilgrimage) from Mecca to Jerusalem, which would bring in tax revenues and provide the Umayyads with political legitimacy. The mosque built on the Temple Mount was named "Al-Aqsa" to give retroactive consecration to Jerusalem and the Temple Mount. The Night Journey story in the Quran was interpreted to refer to the Temple Mount: it is there from which Muhammad ascended to Heaven. The importance of Jerusalem to Muslims has waxed and waned throughout history, with significant increase when the city belongs to someone else. Hence, the importance ascribed to the city during the Crusades and now, under Israeli rule.

Palestinians have also been profoundly adept at getting the world's attention to their plight: Yasser Arafat was singularly successful in this goal. While the Palestinians' struggle with Israel was, and is, all over world headlines, struggles in other parts of the globe have been relegated either to the back pages or not noted at all. This is, of course, a function of the importance of the region in Western and Islamic tradition. That was certainly helpful to Arafat's cause.

But there is also something a bit more sinister going on here. Israel is internationally vilified in a unique way. The UN has an unhealthy obsession with the Jewish state, going after it with much more frequency and hostility than any other member nation. The EU only agreed to designate Hezbollah as a terrorist group this past summer, and this only concerns the organization's "militant wing". The Europeans like to deceive themselves that groups like Hezbollah and Hamas have different "wings": militant, economic, social, political, etc. This is a fiction.

There is almost a sense of glee in reporting on Israeli misdeeds, whether real, exaggerated, or entirely fabricated. Hence the media orgy over the death of Muhammad al-Dura or the Jenin "massacre," both of which occurred during the Second Intifada. The same with the war against Hezbollah in 2006 and Operation Cast Lead - there was a sense that the press was salivating. I highly doubt this would be the case if there were renewed fighting between India and Pakistan in Kashmir.

Not to repeat myself, but I do, again, want to give the benefit of the doubt and point out Israel's religious importance. Americans and Europeans are familiar with names like Bethlehem, Jerusalem, Hebron, and Jericho in a way they are not with names like Srinagar, Kigali, Sarajevo, or South Ossetia. However, even with this benefit of the doubt, and with the understanding that Israel/Palestine will be under a stronger microscope, it does not explain the bias with which the conflict is reported. It does not explain why the fixation is on Israel's wrongdoings and not the Palestinians'. I could give reams and reams of examples. Just this morning I read about a disturbing rise in honor killings in the West Bank. The Reuters reporter did not hesitate to lead the analysis with this: "Some activists believe the rise in honour killings indicates social and economic problems are mounting in the territories, where Palestinians exercise limited self-rule but Israel holds ultimate sovereignty, including over commerce." Of course there are "some activists" who would say this, but come on. This is right after the author had just written of honor killings being a "social menace that occurs throughout the Middle East" and had examined the phenomenon in Jordan, which is decidedly not under Israeli occupation. But, yeah, it's still Israel's fault. The Palestinians are not wholly responsible. Even something that is a broader cultural phenomenon and has nothing to do with the conflict is still blamed on Israel. I can see arguments that the Palestinian economy is not as healthy as it could be because of the security barrier. I can also see, but argue the exact converse of, the notion that Palestinian violence is a consequence of Israel's occupation. But what I have just quoted is ridiculous. It just goes to show how determined many in the media are to slip in anything, anything, detrimental to Israel. 

Similarly, last month there was another Reuters article whose headline and lede read that Israelis had killed a Palestinian in the aftermath of John Kerry's statements that, if the peace talks fail, there very well could be a third intifada. Clearly, if one was just browsing, the indication would be that the Israelis had shot some random guy because of their anger at Kerry's remarks. In reality, the man had run at them with a knife. This was absent from the headline and the lede (please note that the article to which I've linked has been updated and its lede is much less biased, and headline less misguiding, than was originally the case). This was a conscious decision that someone made, and the intent is pretty obvious. 

So why the fixation? I think there are several reasons. In no particular order of importance:

1) The importance of what is present-day Israel to global religious traditions.

2) The Palestinian success in garnering world attention, beginning with Arafat and continuing full force. The Palestinians have legitimately suffered, but their suffering has been so fetishized as to elevate it from the (worse) suffering of other peoples in the world. While a lot of it is propaganda, there is also legitimate concern about Palestinian well-being.

3) The Schadenfreude at seeing Jews having the upper hand and using force. This has often been combined with outright distortion to make Israel look even worse. This helps to expiate the guilt that many Europeans feel about the Holocaust, which was planned and primarily perpetrated by the Germans but could not have been carried out without wider European collaboration. "You see, the Jews aren't any better!" To quote psychiatrist Zvi Rex: "Germany will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz."You can substitute "Europe" for "Germany" and it's just as true.

4) The idea that the conflict is racial. Westerners like their conflicts racial because (they think) it makes them easier to understand. Many Americans think they understand the conflict because of our own awful history of segregation. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is territorial, religious, and ethnic, but not racial. If you put an Israeli and Palestinian side by side, with no indicative markers of their identity, you would often not be able to tell them apart. 

5) Anti-Semitism. Let's be real here. In modern parlance, "anti-Zionism" is simply an alibi for anti-Semitism. What anti-Zionists say about Zionists is literally indistinguishable from what anti-Semites say about Jews. The "Zionist lobby" controls our politicians and the media, for example. This is the same thing thought and said about Jews. You never hear of other lobbies (Armenian, Greek, Tibetan, etc) "controlling" Congress or the media. You never hear of other small nations "controlling" American foreign policy. Hmm, I wonder why.

Syria and its Discontents

Sometimes we need a little reminder of what's going on in Syria, which has taken to the back-burner in the U.S. media in recent months. Briefly: the Syrian regime has made headway in the Qalamoun mountains north of Damascus, although it's been contested hotly. Maaloula, for instance, has fallen back into rebel hands. The regime has been successful in capturing Qara, Deir Atiyeh, and is now pushing on Al-Nabk. These are all cities on the strategic Damascus-Homs highway, which the regime seeks to keep open and the rebels hope to cut. The reason for the road's importance is simple: not only does it connect two important urban centers to one another, but it also is the regime's outlet to the Alawi heartland on the Mediterranean coast: the environs of Latakia. The Assad family itself originates in Qardaha, a village not far from Latakia. The regime's clearing of the highway is important because, in the event that the Assad regime falls (this looks less and less likely every day), it's an escape route. The regime, with the significant assistance of Hezbollah, Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and Iraqi Shiites, has also made headway in the suburbs of Damascus and Aleppo, Syria's two most important cities.

The Syrian regime has followed an intelligent strategy in the course of this war. Instead of stretching itself thin and trying to defend everything at once, as it was doing initially, it has concentrated its forces on keeping several important cities, especially Damascus and Aleppo. This has allowed the spread of Islamist groups in other parts of the country, particularly in the northeast, but the regime has been able to hone in on what is truly important. Keep the major cities, clear the major arteries, and, yes, starve the enemy, and innocent people, into submission. I never said the regime was nice, just smart. Assad was able to cross the international community's red line, agree to a deal to destroy his chemical weapons, and move on. As it stands, 99% of the dead in this conflict have been killed with conventional means: gunfire, artillery, helicopter gunships, and so on. While the chemical weapons were always a fear of the West, in this particular conflict, Bashar al-Assad does not need them. If he can starve out the opposition, let them continue to bicker with one another, and maintain his alliance, he should be able to weather the storm. The fact will remain, however, that he will have next to zero cachet among the Syrian people, with the exception of religious minorities, particularly the Alawis; members of his military/intelligence/political apparatus; and members of the business community, including and especially wealthy Sunnis, who he has managed to keep on his side. Syria is, and will continue to be, however, a scarred country and a fractured polity. I honestly wonder if the best solution would not be partition. Syria itself, like many of the states of the modern Middle East, is an artificial state.

It can be broken down into a few important zones:

1. Jabal Druze - "Mountain of the Druze", in the environs of Suwayda in southern Syria bordering Jordan, also known as the Hauran. This region is a volcanic plateau that is, unsurprisingly, populated largely by Druzes. The Druzes are a sect that has split off from Islam. They are intensely exclusivist: there is no conversion, and very little toleration for intermarriage. The Druzes have traditionally sought areas in the Levant where they can hold off more powerful forces (the tried and true practice of the region's minorities), and they now predominate in areas such as the Hauran, the Carmel region of Israel, the Golan Heights, and Mount Lebanon. In order to maintain internal cohesion and prevent the backlash of stronger enemies, the Druzes have a tradition of being loyal to whoever is in power: they are loyal Zionists in Israel, backers of Assad in Syria, awkwardly split in the Golan Heights (because Israel is in power now but what if the Golan is returned to Syria at some point), and they are a perpetual ping pong ball in the labyrinthine politics of Lebanon. Always trying to keep ahead of the curve, Lebanon's Druze leader, Walid Jumblatt, switches his stance on Syria once every few years, even though Hafez al-Assad killed his father in 1977.

2. The Damascus-Aleppo corridor - this is the heart of Syria, and the heartland of its Sunni Arab majority. It contains Syria's four largest cities (Damascus, Homs, Hama, and Aleppo) and represents the industrial and commercial backbone of the nation (Homs is industrial, Aleppo in particular commercial).

3. The Syrian Desert - scarcely populated, but with nice ruins (and torture chambers)!

4. The Golan Heights - in the southwest of Syria, not far from Damascus, this is a Syrian territory currently occupied by Israel. As is well known, it was captured in 1967 and successfully defended by Israel in 1973. It's been quiet since 1974, with a few exceptions of random mortar and gun fire during the current civil war, and when the Assad regime bussed out protesters in June 2011. The region's main city is Quneitra, which the Syrian regime keeps in ruins to showcase "Zionist barbarity" (it is literally a tourist attraction with this purpose). The region is supposedly the focus of the Assad regime, but this is all politics: Assad's "resistance" against Israel was once the card he could play to placate his people; the pining for the Golan was essential to his regime, although not its actual return. Now, I am not sure where that issue stands, to be perfectly honest. It's not like Assad has to worry about placating Syria's people anymore; after all, he has been shooting them like rabid dogs for two and a half years.

5. The northeast - this is part of the Jazira region, which also encompasses southeastern Turkey and northwestern Iraq. The Euphrates River runs through it. It has a heavy Kurdish population and has, in parts, become sort of a Wild West for Islamists. This is particularly the case in al-Raqqa, an important city that is run by the thuggish Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), an Al-Qaeda affiliate. Because of the regime's (intentional) non-presence in northeastern Syria, there is a power vacuum. The Kurds and the Islamists are the main antagonists here, and there have been clashes.

6. The Latakia District - this district, although not the city of Latakia itself, is predominantly Alawi. Brief historical context: the Alawis are a secretive sect that is a spin-off of Islam but also follows Christian rituals, including the taking of the Eucharist and the celebration of Easter. After the First World War, there was briefly an autonomous Alawi territory (from the beginning of the French Mandate, in 1920, until 1936, when the territory was brought back into the larger Syrian fold). The French followed a policy whereby they recruited religious minorities, including Druzes and Alawis, to fight in their colonial forces. This began a tradition whereby the Alawis, traditionally discriminated against and treated like second-class citizens, were able to serve in the military with distinction. Other than being sharecroppers answering to Sunni landlords, or having their daughters serve as maids or prostitutes to the elites, this was really their only avenue. Bashar al-Assad's father, Hafez, followed this path and entered the Homs Military Academy, eventually leading the Syrian Air Force. After a series of coups, Hafez al-Assad became the most prominent of Syria's Baathists (a pan-Arab political group that was supported by many religious minorities because of its emphasis on Arab unity and de-emphasis on Islam). The problem is that Syria remains 2/3 or 3/4 Sunni, and many of them do not recognize the Alawis as Muslims at all. Assad pére was able to attain important political cover in the early 1970s when Imam Musa al-Sadr, an important Iranian cleric in Lebanon, declared the Alawis to be legitimate Shiites. Nonetheless, the Syrian regime has had consistently to be the loudest anti-Israel voice in the Arab camp; it could not afford to be outflanked in this regard. Being the loudest voice was born of the regime's weak claims of legitimacy. A once-despised and -discriminated against people had taken control of Syria, and they would not be letting go, as they very clearly displayed in 1982, when Hafez al-Assad's brother Rifaat decimated the city of Hama, killing anywhere from 10,000-40,000 people. After that, there was basically not a peep of protest until 2011. And here we are. This is a battle to the death, in a region that is not "post-ethnic" or "post-religious" or any of those feel-good things we like to think we are in the West. Assad has nowhere to go. He either stays in power, or he falls, and his people fall with him. In his thinking, if he falls, the Sunnis will commit genocide against the Alawis. And with reliable supporters, the international community off his back because of the chemical weapons deal, and breathing room after his patron Iran signed the nuclear deal with the P5+1, Assad has absolutely zero reason to negotiate.

Because of the artificiality of the state, with so many different sects (in a part of the world where, yes, there are multiple cultures, but no, there are no tingly feelings about it), it sits on a volcano (like next-door Lebanon, which is very similar in many respects). Until the mid-20th century, "Syria" always represented a very broad, vague geographic area: "Bilad al-Sham" encompassed present day Syria, Lebanon, Israel/Palestinian territories, Jordan, parts of Turkey and Iraq, etc. The major port that fed Damascus was Beirut, now inconveniently in a different country. The traditional trade route of Aleppo to Mosul, in northern Iraq, was similarly made inconvenient. The current political actors in Syria, and the region, have a lot at stake in these modern borders, and Assad will not relinquish them and be satisfied as a petty dictator in some tiny Alawi statelet in northwestern Syria. The borders of Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, etc are similarly arbitrary. I am not saying that this is wrong. Most of the world's borders are arbitrary, and it is impossible to draw a line that will leave all of people X on one side and all of people Y on the other. Yet it also helps to clarify some of the issues with which we are dealing when confronting modern Syrian (and regional) politics.