On December 8, 2024, Bashar-al-Assad fled Damascus for Moscow.  His ouster from the Syria he had ruled for 24 years, succeeding his dad who had ruled for the preceding 30, was ironically but predictably the result of Israel’s response to October 7, 2023, and the preceding 18 years in which 20,000 rockets and mortars were lobbed into Israel from Gaza and more serious attacks were made by Hezbollah, based in Lebanon, into Northern Israel.

Bashar-al-Assad

Syria awoke that Sunday last month with an opportunity to become a viable and functioning polity.  Still a Muslim theocracy, but one relatively safe and free for some other religions and their faithful.  Ahmed al-Shara (aka Abu Mohammad al-Jolani) the leader of the terrorist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, once affiliated with Al Qaida and still subject to a $10 million U.S. government bounty for his capture, is now de facto the head of what constitutes governance in Syria.  He has asserted that in the new Syria, Christians will enjoy religious freedom.  His declarations have not included any intention to extend that freedom to the many adherents of the Baháʼí Faith in Syria nor the tiny vestige of the once numerous Jewish population.  Al-Shara has declared his and his group’s intention to establish a government something like the one in next door neighbor Jordan.

This is the latest in a series of big opportunities presented to the Arab world to make things better for virtually everyone and certainly for Arabs.  Opportunities that, by and large, Arab leaders and the “Arab Street” have turned to death and destruction.

The last big opportunity before this one was just before 10/7, when Saudi Arabia and Israel were on the precipice of signing “the deal of the century” a phrase coined by Egyptian President Abdel Fatah al-Sisi to describe a treaty in which Saudi Arabia would not only formally recognize Israel’s nationhood but after 75 years of officially calling it “our Zionist enemy” de facto become its’ ally and foremost in alliance against mutual non-Arab/non-Semitic Iran.  And with that all other Arab countries would functionally do the same, recognize and ally with Israel.  Egypt and Jordan ended hostility with Israel in the late 1970s and the UAE has had limited diplomatic relations with the Jewish State since Trump’s first administration.

Israel’s Air Assault

Arab terrorist groups Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah and the Houthis killed the deal of the century, at least for the time being, and Arab leaders went along with that in deference to the Arab Street.  Except Jordan who openly assisted Israel’s defense of the Iranian air assault on April 13, 2024 and Saudi Arabia and UAE that supported that defense with intelligence.  Egypt de facto has supported Israel’s siege of Gaza in the manner it has operated its own border and border crossings with Gaza.

Prior to that delayed, but still gestating, deal of the century, the previous big opportunity screwed up by Arab leaders and Street was the First Arab Spring of 2011.  It began with pro-democracy uprisings in Tunisia, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, Egypt and yes Syria.

By 2012 the nascent democratic and liberal movements had been overwhelmed by the violent and self-destructive acts of both the leaders and the Street.  The former involving widespread violent military responses, and the latter by their equally violent and terrorist replies, including the rise off ISIS.

While hoping for better, I saw and chronicled this in my October 2011 op-ed “A Fall Festival and the Arab Spring” saying that while “[m]ost Americans. . . were rooting for the people on Habib Bourguiba Avenue in Tunis and in Tahrir Square, Cairo. . . Arab tyrants stoke and manipulate religious hatred much in the same way that race hatred was used in America to exploit and keep poor white folks down” and “the revolutionaries have quickly resorted to the old hatreds.  Hundreds of Coptic Christians have been killed.”

The Nag Hammadi Massacre

These persistent tendencies and practices of Arab leaders and Street turned the Spring to shit by 2012, with the violent military responses of the leaders met by equally violent and terrorist replies from the Street.  And in and from the ashes of that Spring millions died throughout the Arab world, especially in Yemen and Syria.  These practices with all its death, destruction and poverty are now widely celebrated on American campuses.

There, right there in Syria, all the elements necessary to build a better life are present and also everything capable of turning it into renewed sectarian violence, destruction, terrorism and death.  What happens will not be a matter of luck or kismet or dictated by Iranian and Russian interests, who have been effectively ousted by Israel’s military campaign.  Choices will be made by Syria’s new leaders and the people in the Arab Streets of Hama, Homs, Aleppo and Damascus.