Snigdhendu Bhattacharya
Outlook India / January 13, 2025
Gilbert Achcar, professor at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), talks about how Western powers’ unconditional backing of Israel in its offensives against Gaza, Lebanon and Syria has destroyed all Western pretence of the Rule of Law
On October 7, 2023, Gaza-based armed group Hamas launched a surprise attack on Israel, killing approximately 1,200. They demanded that Israel free Palestinian prisoners from its jails and withdraw its settlers from Palestinian land. This flare-up in a chain of decades-long conflict led to another chain of reactions, with Israel’s all-out war on Gaza killing more than 50,000 Palestinians, mostly civilians, including an overwhelming number of women and children from October 2023 to December 2024.
The conflict has gone beyond the borders of these two countries and the cry of the Gazan people has emerged as the biggest question mark rising on the horizon of the global community and the so-called civilisational conscience.
Gilbert Achcar, a Lebanese professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, is known for his deep understanding of West Asia’s geopolitics and the international interferences that often drive them. Speaking to Snigdhendu Bhattacharya on the current state of turmoil and uncertainty that the region is passing through, Achcar discusses issues ranging from the fall of the al-Assad dynasty in Syria and its implications on the Palestinians’ struggle to the hypocrisy of Western powers reflected by their contrasting role vis-a-vis the Russia-Ukraine war.
How do you see the implications of the regime change in Syria ?
I wouldn’t call that a regime change because regime change is an expression that has taken a very specific meaning, especially since the US-led invasion of Iraq. It now means some external force working to change a regime. In Syria’s case, I would rather call it a real collapse of the regime in the same way as the collapse of the Kabul regime in 2021, when the US forces started leaving the country.
It is, of course, an event of huge importance because of the role that Syria played as a major platform for Iran, in particular, and also some other countries. You had five foreign forces on Syrian soil. The first of them is Israel, which has occupied the Golan Heights in the south of the country since 1967. The Iranian and Russian forces intervened in 2013 and 2015, respectively. The Turkish troops invaded in 2016 in some parts of the north. The American troops are in the northeast, the Kurdish region in particular.
Therefore, it is obvious that the collapse of the Assad regime, which Russia and Iran shored up, has a major strategic significance. That is why it is also a stunning event.
The day after Assad’s exit, Syrians, including refugees, celebrated in every single city. But the very event pushed Palestinians into deeper anxieties as they feared Assad’s fall could embolden Israel. Then, the Syrian celebration was cut short by Israel. Of course, Turkey and the US also bombed Syria but mostly it was the Israel factor that spoiled their celebration. Can you elaborate on the complexity of this geopolitical situation ?
The humanitarian crisis was already there. In the last few years, Syria already witnessed an economic collapse before the political collapse. A mafia-like economy, controlled by the regime, developed around drugs. For the rest of the population, the economic situation was extremely dire. The local currency collapsed and people’s purchasing power collapsed with it. The average civil servant would get something like the equivalent of $25 or $30 per month. Even in the poorest countries, this is extremely low. So, you had a humanitarian situation already developing.
The collapse of the Syrian regime has been a huge relief. Hundreds of thousands of people had been incarcerated and tens of thousands disappeared and were killed in the jails during the brutal, tyrannical regime of the Assad family. But as happens frequently in such cases, when you have such a quasi-totalitarian regime collapsing, in the absence of a readily present alternative, you have a lot of anxiety about how things will go. Several forces are still active in Syria, including local and foreign ones. We more or less know the projects of each force but no one knows who is going to prevail. However, at the very least, people can breathe free for now. They are trying to organise. Civil society is trying to get alive again. And that’s the most positive element in the present situation.
Israel has seized this occasion to grab more Syrian land in the Golan Heights. But even more importantly, Israel launched hundreds of air raids in a very few days, destroying, according to Israeli sources themselves, 80 per cent of the Syrian military potential. It is the country’s official or regular military potential, not of fringe rebel groups. Israel destroyed the Syrian naval force, the air force, anti-aircraft machines, and so on. This is a total destruction of the military capability of one country by another in almost complete global indifference. It is amazing that this drew very little objection or protest.
Israel is continuing on a very aggressive course that it has embarked on, especially since October 2023, first with the war on Gaza, followed by attacks on Lebanon and Syria. The Israeli armed forces are now in the business of destroying three territories to a certain extent, including two supposedly sovereign countries—Lebanon and Syria.
For Palestine, Hamas looked at the Syrian regime as part of the so-called Axis of Resistance dominated by Iran. Even though Hamas had been at odds with the Assad regime for several years because they supported the anti-Assad uprising of 2011, they ended up mending fences with the regime. This was also part of their bid to re-establish the alliance with Iran. When they launched their operation on Israel on October 7, 2023, they appealed to Iran and the so-called Axis of Resistance to join them in the battle to liberate Palestine.
Now, with the collapse of the Assad regime, we have seen Hamas congratulating the Syrian people. So, they are changing tack again. They are now betting on the Islamic forces that played a key role in Assad’s downfall. Some of these groups are linked to the Muslim Brotherhood. Hamas itself is the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is a regional organisation. At this level, we don’t know what kind of political power will emerge in Syria and what would be its position on Palestine. But one thing is sure, the destruction of the military potential of the Syrian State weakens very much all opposition to the Israeli state.
What about the Lebanon-based Hezbollah ?
Hezbollah is a major casualty. Israel dealt them very severe blows since launching its offensive in September 2024. Until late November, for about a couple of months, there have been intensive attacks by the Israeli forces on Hezbollah, which went far beyond anything that we have seen in Lebanon before, far beyond the 2006 Israeli onslaught on Hezbollah. This time, unlike 2006, the Israeli attack managed to deal a very heavy blow to Hezbollah. They completely decapitated the organisation. The secretary-general was assassinated.
Practically, the vast majority of the key leaders of the organisation were killed and the military capacity has been destroyed to a large extent. Now, with the downfall of the Syrian regime, which was the conduit through which Iran could send weapons to Hezbollah, the prospect of Hezbollah being rearmed, as happened after 2006, is practically thin, if not impossible. I can’t see or imagine how Iran could rearm Hezbollah. Iran has lost a lot in all this.
How is Iran impacted ?
This happened just when Donald Trump was elected for a second term in the US. We know how hostile Trump was to Iran during his first term. We know that he is surrounded by people who are very much anti-Iran. Therefore, Iran has good reason to fear an attack, either a US-Israel combined attack or of the US alone under Trump, targeting its nuclear installations in particular. This has become very possible, very likely. Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, will push hard, very hard, for an attack on Iran. This is something that he has been wishing for long. He can’t do it alone. Israel needs the US for that. And now is the time for that in the mind of Netanyahu, with his friend Donald Trump back at the White House.
Do you see the possibility of the emergence of any other Axis of Resistance, or whatever that may be called, developing against the US-Israel alliance ?
There are only two Iranian allies that are still there with some capacities. One is the pro-Iran Shia militia in Iraq. However, their effectiveness regarding Israel or the US is very limited. Every time they tried to strike at US forces, they faced powerful retaliation. And then you have the Houthis in Yemen. They have been launching missiles in the Red Sea and also on Israel. Now, most of these missiles, especially those launched on Israel, are intercepted. But every now and then something goes through. Israel very recently escalated its retaliation against the Houthis in Yemen. And, they would probably go beyond that if this carries on. So, I mean, the militias in Iraq or the area of the Houthis in Yemen, or to the Hezbollah, which is very weakened—none of this represents any strong deterrence for Israel or the US. Iran stands strategically weakened. It’s a strategic defeat. And, they are now in a much weaker position at a time of heightened danger for them.
We, therefore, find the Palestinians all the more vulnerable right now, much more vulnerable than they already were. Despite Iran, Israel could launch and wage a genocidal war in Gaza for over a year, with impunity. They destroyed Gaza. They committed a real genocide, as is now exposed and denounced by all human rights organisations like Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and Doctors Without Borders, besides the International Court of Justice, and the International Criminal Court. Yet, they have been carrying on for 14 months. The Palestinian Authority in the West Bank is reviving its role as kind of a proxy for the (Israeli) occupation. And that is quite dangerous for the future of the Palestinian people.
You mentioned the possibility of the US under Donald Trump trying to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities. This reminds me of the George Bush-led US invasion of Iraq on the false charge that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. To many observers, that was the point that pushed West Asia into chaos. Who will hold America responsible for what they did to Iraq ?
There is a major difference between the cases of Iraq and Iran. Iraq had zero weapons of mass destruction when the US led the invasion of the country in 2003. They searched everything and couldn’t find any trace of those weapons of mass destruction. The Bush administration blatantly lied. However, in the case of Iran, first of all, there are nuclear installations. There is an important nuclear production potential in the country. There have been agreements with the International Atomic Energy Agency for some control of these facilities. That was part of the nuclear deal the US under the Barack Obama administration cut with Iran in 2015.
However, Trump, during his first term, repudiated this agreement. So, Iran felt freed from its commitment not to enrich uranium beyond a certain limit. And they have been producing highly enriched uranium, which, of course, normally can serve only one thing, which is the production of nuclear weapons. Even the International Atomic Energy Agency has been pointing to that and warning Iran about it. We might see something like a race in Iran now, prompted to accelerate the production of a nuclear weapon as a deterrent against an attack. And the attack we are talking about is not a matter of years. It’s a matter of maybe months. Either the Iranian leadership completely capitulates and allows real inspection of its facilities, or it is quite possible that the US would strike at these facilities.
From that perspective, this is much more dangerous than the invasion of Iraq. You won’t have an invasion of Iran. It would be just an airstrike. But it has the potential of igniting the whole region, which is a powder keg already, and then an oil barrel. It’s like sending a rocket into a huge oil barrel. All huge oil reserves. And that’s what you could get.
How do you see the role of the Western powers ?
The Western powers are an integral part of the Israeli onslaught on Gaza. This is the first joint US-Israeli war ever. If you take all the wars in the history of the Israeli State since 1948, when it was founded, this is the first one that can be described as a fully joint war by the US and Israel. The only thing that is missing is the troops on the ground.
The United States is not part of the attack on Gaza but it has armed them, especially by providing the bombs that destroyed the Gaza Strip. It has funded, condoned and defended Israel politically. It has defended Israel militarily by deploying its troops in the region against any potential action by any enemy of Israel. And, it has blocked any calls for a ceasefire. That is a full endorsement combined with a full participation, materially, in the war.
Recently, some of the European states took what could be described as relatively righteous positions—just positions. Ireland went to the point of cutting its diplomatic relations with Israel. Countries like Spain and Belgium took positions closer to the international laws. But for most others, especially Germany, the position has been one of full endorsement, unconditional. And the US attitude has completely shattered the Western pretence of rules based on liberal international order, as they call it. When you compare their reaction to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the Israeli invasion of Gaza, the huge difference destroys all pretence of respect for international laws, equity, human rights, and all of that.
In that sense, I believe that what we have seen is the final nail in the coffin of the Western liberal pretence. That’s not to say that the alternative is better. It is just to say that the world in which we are is more and more, unfortunately, a world ruled by the law of the jungle, that is, the law of the strongest.
Do you have any message for people in general ?
A global catastrophe has begun. It reminds us of what happened a century ago over Nazism and Fascism. Now, we additionally have a climate disaster looming large. If the people do not rise up and fight for the defence of democracy against the far-right trends that we see worldwide, and for peace, for reviving a world based on the UN charter on international law and a world where instead of spending trillions of dollars on weapons, the money could be spent on the fight against climate change and poverty, then our humanity is facing a terrible, terrible fate.
The world is on the brink of a major, major disaster. The journey has begun. We are hearing more about the use of nuclear weapons than we used to hear even during the Cold War—I mean, aside from the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. We are hearing this regarding the Russia-Ukraine conflict and the possible US-Iran conflict. We are facing a catastrophe and I’m not exaggerating at all.
