Transcript of the video:

Helena Cobban (00:05):

Hi. This webinar is opening to all attendees, and we're gonna give everybody a couple of minutes to come and join us. So as people join, I will share a screen here and it will be, hang on. Something appropriate? Hmm. Okay. I had this all ready to go, and here it is. Okay. Right. So oh, is my screen sharing appropriately or not? No. Oh, I see. Let me stop. I can't even stop. Could somebody else speak while I deal with this? Welcome people say,

Joshua Landis (01:23):

Yes. I will jump in here and say hello to everyone. My name is Joshua Landis and I am a professor at the University of Oklahoma, director of the Center for Middle East Studies. I've lived in Syria for four to five years, off and on since 1981 was the first time I lived in Syria for a year as a Fulbright student at the University of Damascus. That was the year of the Hama Uprising and the Israeli invasion of Southern Lebanon for which I was, I was living at the dormitories, and I've been back many years since there to do research for a dissertation, a senior Fulbright 2005. I would go every summer with my family. My wife is Syrian. She's an Alawite, which is perhaps germane to this discussion because, every connection to Syria, you know, colors you, so you can, you can put that into your calculations.

Joshua Landis (02:31):

And and I've written on Syria, you know, ever since going back and forth, I used to go every summer. I was kicked out of Syria by the government shortly before the uprising began, as someone who was considered to be hostile to Syria. And you know, of course I don't think I was hostile to the government, but I was critical of the government and, and that, and, and ran a blog called Syria Comment, which had opposition voices. I interviewed opposition members, and this infuriated the government. And so at any rate, that's my history with Syria,

Peter Ford (03:14):

And I am Peter Ford. I was British Ambassador in Syria between 2003 and 2006, which were years of opening up. I used to welcome oppositionists into my embassy garden. But of course, things moved on. I myself moved on to work for the UN based in Jordan from where I continued to regularly visit, Syria especially the, the Palestinian refugee camps for there.

Helena Cobban (03:59):

Hi everyone. I'm Helena. Sorry about the technical glitch there. Okay. We have a lot of things to talk about. I wanna really welcome everybody here. First of all, I'm sorry about the, the glitch a little bit earlier, but here we are. So, oh, I'm Helena Cobban. I'm the president of Just World Educational and in these trying days of worldwide pandemic, I'd like to welcome you to the first session of our 10-part webinar series, Commonsense on Syria. I expect that many of us currently have strong concerns over the health of those we care about in our families, our communities, and in different countries around the world. However, I still believe that it is worth our while to invest some time in examining the horrors that have been visited on Syria over the past nine years by a broad range of actors, not just as has often been portrayed in the corporate media here in the West, not just by the Syrian government.

Helena Cobban (05:19):

And I am really heartened by the fact that so many of you seem to agree that this learning project is a worthwhile one to pursue. We have a wonderful large group of attendees today representing a broad variety of people from social justice movements, the anti-war movement, academia, and other fields. So thanks for being here, and welcome, of course, we're all here to hear and learn from our two great panelists, ambassador Peter Ford, and Professor, professor Joshua Landis, who both bring a wealth of experience, knowledge, and judgment to this discussion. But just before we get into the main discussion, I want to explain a few things about how this Zoom webinar platform we're using, which is fairly new to all of us here at Just World Educational as well as I suspect to most of you, this webinar platform has a number of features that let us have the kind of interactive and safe learning experience that we're aiming at.

Helena Cobban (06:25):

If you've taken part in regular Zoom meetings recently, many of the features of this Zoom webinar platform will be familiar to you, but some are different. The webinar platform is designed to replicate to some degree the experience of being in an in-person seminar or panel discussion, but with some enhancements, I expect most of you are attending via a laptop or desktop computer, which really is the best way to do so. If you are watching me speak in one window on your computer, then you can take your cursor down toward the bottom of that window. And as you do so, you'll see a number of options, including a q and a option, a polling option, a raise hand option, and over toward the right hand end, an option to leave the meeting. Please don't click on that one yet. If you are with us on an iPhone, the options are roughly similar.

Helena Cobban (07:24):

What you as attendees don't have is an option to turn on your own mic or to share either your video or your screen. We do that for you when we call on you to speak. When I say we, I mean me and my team of elfs here who are helping out behind the scenes. Chief Elf is our board member, Dr. Alice Rothchild. Big thanks to her and to all of her Elf team. So what we'll be doing here with this webinar is I have compiled a short list of questions that I will ask our two panelists, and the three of us will have as normal a conversation on these topics as we can have, given that I'm here in Washington DC Ambassador Ford is with us from Mecclesfield. UK, I believe, and Dr. Landis is in Norman, Oklahoma.

Helena Cobban (08:18):

And that you will be seeing us all appearing sequentially in a single large box depending on who is talking at that point in time. So a couple of things, a couple of times throughout the meeting, I will be deploying the polls option, which invites feedback from all of you. Attendees here is one that I'm going to deploy now. Let's hope it works. Okay, I am launching a poll, which should appear for you. This one you can answer anonymously at any point in the next five minutes. And at that point, I will get back to you all and tell you what the aggregate of the answer answers is. I have three other polls here, even shorter than that one, that I might deploy at various times throughout the webinar. It's a way for us all to stay engaged. Oh, it's really interesting to see the answers coming in.

Helena Cobban (09:20):

We are going to try to keep our conversation to 30 minutes or so. It'll be a fairly rapid gallup through the first 65 years of Syria's history as an independent nation taking in a bit of sociology and ethology along the way. We think this is really helpful background for when this webinar series turns to looking at the post-2011 events, which we'll be doing this coming Saturday. By the way, if you want to learn more about the texture of daily life in Syria in the lead up to the current troubles, I can highly recommend the book Never Can I write of Damascus by two fine Catholic peace activists who spent eight years in Damascus, 2004 through 2012, and which my company Just World Books had the honor to publish. I was supposed at this point to show you the cover of the book.

Helena Cobban (10:22):

It's called Never Can I Write of Damascus, but I don't want to do any screen sharing right now because last time I did it, everything crashed for me. Anyway, to save time here, I shall not read the long descriptions of the illustrious achievements of our panelists, which I'm sure you should all be fairly familiar with by now, after Ambassador Ford, Dr. Landis and I have had our first discussion of the main themes of Syria's history and society prior to 2011, we'll open the space to your questions, which will meantime be being expertly wrangled by Alice Rothchild and her elves. So I'm gonna end this poll now. Thank you all for your, for responding. It looks fairly interesting. Okay. I'll end the poll. I'll share the results and I will stop sharing the results. Okay. So now without further ado, how can I shut off the polling thing? I, okay. Now, without further ado, Professor Landis, I will turn to you first.

Joshua Landis (11:42):

Well, thank you very much for setting up this meeting. It's great to be here with Ambassador Ford and with you to discuss this now the first question,

Helena Cobban (11:55):

So here's the first question. Can you briefly tell us how Syria came to be independent in 1945, 46, and what were the main political developments between then and 1967?

Joshua Landis (12:08):

Well, let me make there's two major points that I would like to make that I think will help our audience think about the uprising and the Civil War that ensued in Syria that'll help us understand it. And first is, the first is how the Alawites came to power. And the second is really about America's position on Syria and our foreign policy towards Syria, which was set in 1948. The first question is, how do the alloys come to power the French owned Syria and Lebanon as a mandate from the League of Nations at the end of World War I? And that meant it's a quasi colonial setup. It was given this coloration of a mandate and some legal international legalization through the League of Nations, but it was, it was a colonial, imperial setup. And France, in order to rule in Syria, divided the country into a number of sections, including an Alawite, independent Alawite state, in order to control Syria.

Joshua Landis (13:17):

At the end of World War I, the French established an army, an army of the Levant that was drafted from local Syrians. And many Syrians did not want to join the army, particularly Sunnis from the cities because there was a nationalist uprising from 2000, from 1925 to 27, largely dominated by the urban centers and urban nationalists. The French, in order to fight this uprising, created this army. Into it flooded minorities and overrepresented were Alawites, very poor and very disadvantaged and discriminated against. So the real question is, how does this poor minority, 12% of the country, Alawites, get to be the leaders of the country? And the answer is fairly simple, and it's through the military. They were marshaled into the military. They volunteered because they were poor. It gave them three meals a day, and they didn't mind fighting against the Sunni nationalist elite of the urban centers into that army were Druze, other minorities, Christians flooded in, so did Sunnis from the countryside who did, who who, who looked, who felt oppressed by the Sunnis of the cities who were the major landowners.

Joshua Landis (14:41):

So that's how the Alawites got in. By the 1950s after independence in 1946, the Alawites made up, we believe about 60% of the, the non-commissioned officers. There was a series of coups throughout the sixties. And and in those coups, the Sunni officer corp was largely destroyed and, and and eliminated purged, and the Alawites and other minorities rose up through the ranks. And this allowed the Alawites to take power 1966 through the Jadid regime. And then the Assad family took over 1970 and really got a monopoly on the hold of power. And in that way, the Alawites consolidated their power, and they were able to put in the Officer corps, large percent of Alawites, co-religionists, and members of the family of the Assad family, the brother of Hafez Assad, ruled the special forces and, and surrounded Damascus with them to protect the, the crown, if you will. And and that's, so both intelligence military dominated through this alloy minority. Of course, there were other relationships with Christians, with Druzes, but also with rural Sunnis. And through the Baath party, the rural Sunnis were privileged. And, and Peter Ford is gonna talk to you more about that in a second, but that is how the Alawites get to power. And secondly, America, I think it's important to understand that America,

Helena Cobban (16:22):

You know what, Josh, let's leave America for now, and let's sure. Just go over to, to Ambassador Ford, because we are taking these in a slightly different order. And you've taken us through the arrival of President, Hafez al-Assad in 1970. So Ambassador Ford, I'd like to go back and just see, I mean, obviously Syria's politics has been much affected by Israel and by the con, you know, continuing conflict with Israel. Could you describe briefly, you know, the effects that the conflict with Israel has had and also the influx of the Palestinian refugees, two influxes, in essence? Well, and, and this, yes.

Peter Ford (17:07):

Yeah. The whole Palestine issue has been an absolutely crucial element in, in Syria's history for the last 70 years. And both so far as to say that without that element, we, Syria would not be seeing conflict today. Absolutely crucial to any understanding of what happened. We have to remember that Palestine is an amputated province of Belad al-Sham, the country of Sham, which had Damascus as its center in, in Ottoman days. There were no countries like we have them today. But there was a consciousness. And, and to this day, many Syrians felt that provinces were amputated from Syria, not only Palestine, but later on. And, and even more obviously Lebanon. I remember the foreign, former foreign minister of Syria, Farouk al-Sharaa, telling me that Tripoli was just a suburb of Aleppo.

Helena Cobban (18:27):

Peter, sorry, could you speak a little louder?

Peter Ford (18:30):

Yes. so Lebanon was an amputated province. And then during the French mandate, the French simply handed Alexandretta in the far northwest to Turkey. So there is a background which is reflected and repeated in today's Syria and in the eyes of many Syrians. The West has never stopped for the last century trying to parcel up Syria and weaken it. The question of the Palestinian refugees is very important too. Syria welcomed Palestinian refugees in 1947. They gave them more rights than any other Arab country. They were absorbed more into the population, and the Palestinian cause was taken on board in Syrian ideology, national and Baathist ideology. They believed in it, in the Palestinian cause as much as any Palestinian, and they felt some ownership for it. But they paid a price.

Peter Ford (19:50):

They paid a price because they were led into wars. There was a long history of friction and attrition with Israel leading to the '67 War when, for, basically for the sake of the Palestinians Syria first lost the Golan, and then a second war in '73 when Syria ended up losing another slice of territory and felt that it had been betrayed by Egypt, by Sadat, who basically did a, a dirty deal and ended up recovering Egyptian territory. But, but Syria was left stranded. Syria nevertheless continued supporting the Palestinians to the Hill. But unlike the other Arab countries, it supported Palestinian militants. And this was the main reason why western countries were always against Syria. I remember when I was ambassador there being constantly ordered by London to go and bang on the desk of the Foreign Minister about Syria's harboring of Hamas and Islamic jihad.

Peter Ford (21:17):

I always wondered what was the British interest in this, but London never told me. But it, it was a, a crucial reason why the West was always against Syria. So Syria's case, this, this huge price that and feels even today somewhat bitter towards Palestinians. I don't want to go into the recent history too much, but the Syrians never really trusted the Islamist Palestinian movements, which, which they gave home and a base to the, during my time, I discovered that Hamas was not allowed to operate, to organize in the refugee camps. And with hindsight, many Syrians would say that they were absolutely right not to allow this Islamist group to proselytize. And, and as we know in recent times, Hamas turned its back on Syria. So there are many echoes in today's situation of what happened vis-a-vis Israel and Palestine in the past.

Helena Cobban (22:43):

Well, thank you for giving us, I mean, it's obvious that Syria has been much affected by the continuation of the conflict. There have been over time some negotiations between Israel and Syria, and we will come to that in much more detail later. But thanks for that overview. I wanna come back to Dr. Landis, if you could tell us a little bit more about the different religious and ethnic groups in Syria. Just before we do that, I'm going to re-share the the map that I had up before, because people want to see the map. So here it comes, and we can talk while the map continues to show for a little bit.

Joshua Landis (23:28):

Very good. Well, I will just launch in then. The religious makeup of Syria and ethnic makeup is, Syria is largely an Arab country. There is a Kurdish minority of about 10%. There were about 4% Armenians. Most of them have left since World War II. And there are some other small ethnic minorities, but largely it's an Arab state, and it's largely a Muslim state. Now, the Islamic part of it, they're about, there were about 14, 15% Christians after World War II. We believe today that Christians make up only about 5% of the Syrian population. The number you'll see usually is 10%. But I think that there has been a lot of attrition of Christians since those numbers were confirmed last. And then Alawites about 12%, Druze 3%, Ismailis, 1%. These last three I've mentioned are heterodox Muslims.

Joshua Landis (24:30):

And they're not considered Muslim by orthodox theological determination, not by Shiites and not by Sunnis. And this legally, they're considered Muslims by Syrian law. And that's the problem. The problem is there's this big difference between the Syrian law that's largely been imposed by the Assad regime and theology. So once the civil wars broke out, many Islamist groups began to say, these people are not Muslims. And in fact, they're pagans because they deify Ali, for example, as the accusation against the Alawites and Syrian's school books, about which I wrote a, an article a number of years ago, the Islamic School texts state that for pagans and atheists, the only way you can deal with them is by converting them or killing them. And that's the sentence used in the Syrian ninth grade textbook. And once the Civil War began, many opposition groups defined the Alawites as they did Druze and others as pagans. And this meant that they could be killed. And and this made the Civil War, which had many other reasons for it besides religious reasons, economic, tyranny, dictatorship, and so forth. But it, it, it undergirded it with a sectarian coloration that has been very hard to overcome. And we see that same sectarian differences dividing Iraq, Lebanon, Israel. So this is not a problem that's unique to Syria. It's widespread in the Levant.

Helena Cobban (26:19):

Okay. Thank you so much. I just want to come in and say that I found the copy of the book Never Can I Write of Damascus that I do urge people to read if they want to understand more about the sort of the tenor of everyday life. And there's a lot in there given that the authors were, are American Catholic peace activists about the, the, the texture of Christian life in Damascus, which has many Christian churches and patriarchates. And I mean, it was only when I went to Lebanon that I gathered that there is actually a collective noun for a, a collectivity of patriarchs. And, and a lot of those are in Syria headquartered in Damascus. I want to rush through the questions a little bit because we're getting I mean, the questions for the panelists, because we're getting a lot coming in, in the chat box from attendees.

Helena Cobban (27:19):

And I want to in mind attendees that if you wanna submit questions, can you do that through the chat box and not through the q and a? And that's how we are, we are handling them. And actually, while I'm here, why don't I do another poll, another little poll. Okay. Here we go. Quick for everybody, and we're gonna allow the panelists to vote, but that's okay. We kind of know their answers. Okay. So right, coming back into the discussion, a question either of you can answer just quickly. We'll go back to Hafez al-Assad's rule which lasted from 1970 to 2000 when he died. If one of you could tell me the, this two or three most important things about Hafez al-Assad in Damascus. Peter, why don't you take that <laugh>?

Peter Ford (28:26):

I was hoping for the next one about Bashar.

Helena Cobban (28:31):

Well, I, I can talk about president Hafez al-Assad, because kind of, that was when I was in Lebanon. And then I wrote two books about Syria that covered Hafez al-Assad's presidency. When he came in, he was, he was a kind of a stabilizing force, and he, his advent to power was kind of encouraged by the US and, and Israel because he did not help, he was, had been the commander of the Air Force, and he did not help the the Palestinians in Jordan in 1970. So the Palestinians were pretty mad at him. So when I was in Lebanon in the 1970s, there was the whole Camp David peace process, and he stood aside from that, he did not take part in it. And for that reason, he was very strongly condemned and opposed by the US and Israel. And the first sanctions, the first US sanctions on Syria were imposed in 1979. And they have been in place continuously since 1979. Which is kind of outrageous if you think how much their effects have harmed people in Syria. So

Joshua Landis (29:49):

I'd like to jump in and just add a few things on that. And, and that is the Hama uprising and the fight struggle with the Muslim Brotherhood. Almost immediately on coming to power Hafez al-Assad encountered a lot of resistance. And, and, and the, the Alawites coming to power that happened in the sixties and then was consolidated under Assad was infuriating for many of the Sunni elites of the cities. The Alawites were not educated by and large, they, they had been very rural and very underprivileged. The Sunni elites had ruled Syria. They'd ruled it under the Ottoman Empire, which was a Sunni dynastic empire, and they had ruled it under the French. So when these, in a sense, relative to what were viewed by the Sunni elites as peasants from the countryside came in, it was a terrible shock to the Sunni elites. And the Muslim Brotherhood, which had been growing since the 19, late 1930s in Syria, became the dominant opposition force.

Joshua Landis (30:56):

And they saw this as much more than just an annoyance economically, intellectually, and so forth. They saw it as a perversion of a divine order and and saw the Alawites as these unbelievers. So that added an even more difficult texture to it. And they began to mobilize against him with the help of Iraq and Jordan, other countries, and to a certain degree, the United States, and began terrorist activities bombing by 1981. When I was living at the University of Damascus, there were giant explosions going off at the Defense Department and elsewhere, and the Syrian regime was cracking down on Sunnis. And it, the situation was really a prelude to what we've seen today with a very with a, with a terrible massacre in a city of Hama, which rose up, killed the Baathist leadership in the town, and tried to incite jihad through the rest of Syria.

Joshua Landis (31:52):

It was smashed. I visited the town three weeks after the end of hostilities there. And it was, you know, it was devastating. The regime was showing it off in order to let people know that this was what was gonna happen if you, if you oppose the regime. So there was a long, chilly period after that. And it was really only once Bashar came to power that, that in a sense, the, the, the pall of that lifted. And there was in a, a new day in Syria, at least what people believed would be a new day in Syria.

Helena Cobban (32:29):

So that is a beautiful setup for my question to Ambassador Ford about this was the time that you were the ambassador in Damascus largely and Hafez al-Assad's son, Bashar al-Assad assumed power. Can you describe that, the period that followed, which was known as the Damascus Spring and what its main features were?

Peter Ford (32:56):

Yeah. Well, it's been a, a tale of missed opportunities missed opportunities by the West to take advantage of the opening up that occurred in the first several years following Bashar assumption of power. The, the opening up at, at first took the, took a mainly economic form Syria had developed over many years, a a very self-sufficient economy and had very little contact economic or political contact with the outside world. But we saw in, in the early Bashar years an opening up more trade with many other countries than the Eastern block who had monopolized trade before. We saw technocrats joining the government. We saw Western type coffee bars, many economic opportunities for the largely Sunni governing economic class in the division of power that Josh was describing earlier.

Peter Ford (34:20):

I think one can't neglect the, the fact that the, the vast majority of economic power lay in the hands of prominent Sunni merchants who were very resentful when the occasional non Sunni broke into their, their circle. And this is an important part of the subtext of everything that has happened since this Sunni resentment over sharing the economic spoils. After the economic opening up, we saw some timid political moves relief of some political prisoners, salons sprang up, people started to talk more openly. They came to residence garden parties. Some of the most prominent non-violent oppositionists were frequent visitors to my house. And as part of British government policy, I was encouraging all this, obviously, but it all began to turn sour, largely because of external factors Iraq and Lebanon with the invasion of Iraq,

Peter Ford (35:42):

The Syrian government felt rather exposed. It was no secret, but Syria was on the hit list once America dealt with Saddam, and therefore, they, they tightened up domestically. And the, the, the spring evaporated it, it was already evaporating to the fair, but Iraq sounded the death for the the, the timid opening up. And there was a, a new, a new premium on internal security. This increased further over the Lebanon crisis. Syria had lingered in, in, in occupation of, of Lebanon for too long after the Lebanese Civil War ended. This was mainly the fault of half each, could have withdrawn many years before. Bashar inherited this. And it was a very corrupting influence, literally corrupting Lebanon. The, the, the money in involved the, the Syrian officials who ended up literally on the payroll of Rafiq Harri, the very power powerful Saudi backed prime Minister and leading politician of Lebanon for one reason or or another, Harari got assassinated probably by Syria. This overreaction by Syria prompted another big crisis in Lebanon and Syria with mass demonstrations in Lebanon, causing great fear, great fear in Damascus. So, while, while I was there, and more fear of, of Western subversion, because it was known that Hariri had the backing of America and the United States, and was in the Syrian belief preparing to use Lebanon as a springboard to overthrow the government in Syria. So that was the the epitaph for the Damascus Spring.

Helena Cobban (37:58):

Yeah, that, that raises a number of interesting questions that we will obviously be exploring more in the next session and in other sessions. One little note there, from what both of you have said that I think is, is worth mentioning is Saudi Arabia's role, because after president Hafez al-Assad, so brutally suppressed the Hama uprising in, in 1983, a lot of the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood fled to Saudi Arabia, and a lot of, you know, the people associated with them, and they did a lot of organizing there. And I think my understanding is that they were, it became a very different kind of a Muslim brotherhood organization than the ones we are perhaps more familiar with in Egypt and Palestine, where the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas, you know, have participated in elections and have by and large, you know, adopted a non-violence, you know, know participation in, in society.

Helena Cobban (38:58):

Whereas you know, the, the Muslim, the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood as sort of incubated in Saudi Arabia became fairly violent and deeply dedicated to the overthrow of, of the, the government in Damascus. So that, you know, that all came together in 2011 when the the sort of liberal democratizes that Peter is talking about, having that, that small emergence under Bashar al-Assad, you know, they, I think after 2011, those liberal democratizes became completely swamped by the, the people who came back in from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf and, and the Muslim Brotherhood. But we will be looking more that next week. Now Alice Rothchild, I think we have had a huge number of questions going on down in the chat. So could you maybe present us with one or two that you would like to have answered?

Alice Rothchild (40:02):

Okay. So one I'm putting together questions. So one issue is what are the Palestinian economic and political rights in Syria?

Joshua Landis (40:16):

The Palestinians have been treated better in Syria than in most other Arab countries in Lebanon. They're not allowed to have government jobs. They're not allowed to have citizenship. And they've been really many, the refugees have, have been contained in these, in the refugee camps. They, they can't go to the public schools easily. So they've been dependent on UNRWA in Syria, they had all the rights of Syrians except for nationality. And this, it still meant, meant that it was very difficult for them to travel. Jordan, you had to show $5,000 that you had $5,000 and make it a deposit in order to travel to Jordan and so forth. But, but Palestinians had very, a great deal of equality in Syria, because Syria saw itself as one of the sponsors of this, of the Palestinian movement. And because of Arab nationalism in the Baath party. So for Palestinians, life was pretty good in Damascus. And they were, you know, they, they, they could hold government jobs and go to public schools, go to university, and do almost everything else.

Helena Cobban (41:23):

And I think some Syrians joke that the Palestinians have just as few political rights in Syria as Syrians do.

Joshua Landis (41:32):

<Laugh>, absolutely. And that's, that's caused a lot of a splintering of the Palestinian movement when the uprising started, because many of the older Palestinians and Palestinians who had worked with the regime believed that if they turned against the regime, they would end up in Saudi Arabia's hands in America's hands, which would, which would undercut any effort to get a good, better deal with Israel. And so they stuck with the regime, even though many of them understood it's, it, it, it, it's authoritarian and, and it's brutal aspects. But they believed, you know, resistance was the only way to get them ahead. A lot of younger Palestinians joined younger Syrian Sunnis in opposing a regime and thought, you know, we're never gonna get ahead until there is democracy in the Middle East, and therefore we have to fight against Assad, and then we will fight against Israel later on. And th those were the two in a sense, the two poles and Palestines were very divided.

Alice Rothchild (42:35):

So a follow up question would be the

Peter Ford (42:39):

I'm going to Interject, to interject there. I, I wonder what Joshua's evidence is for that last statement. My impression was that many young Palestinian militants joined the opposition simply out of Islamist solidarity, not any special desire to see democracy in Syria first. No, this, this is mainly about suddenly solidarity which I can hardly be over emphasize as a light malif or the, the whole conflict.

Joshua Landis (43:20):

Well, I'm sure that was, that is a very important part. And so there's more than two wings, the Palestinian you know, thinking and, and I was trying to simplify, but you, you're absolutely right. Islamism is an important thread in this.

Alice Rothchild (43:36):

So, a a follow up question is looking at the Golan and asking why Syria didn't liberate the Golan, why it bombed the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp. How does that all fit into this?

Joshua Landis (43:52):

Well, you know, Syria got dragged into the Palestinian 1948 war. There was a, there was a ton of, the Syrians were two weeks to do it. Their army was in shambles in 4'8. But popularly, there was tremendous pressure to jump in on the side of the Palestinians. And to the, the slogan was to keep Palestine for the Palestinians. And Syria got into the war, got badly beaten during the war, although it did capture a few little hunks of, of Palestinian territory. And it turned Syria against the United States because the United States was going to, could not support any country that was gonna go against the emerging Israel. And ever since the United States has been the enemy of Syria, because Syria has been dedicated to this Palestinian cause. Now Syria was weak. And that meant it had to make alliances. Alliances with ultimately Hezbollah with other non-state groups.

Joshua Landis (45:03):

And it failed one time after the next in achieving its aims of delivering Palestine to the Palestinians. And this has caused it a tremendous amount of criticism. And many people have said, you know, look at the Syrians, were more interested in staying in power than they were in conquering Palestine and delivering it to the Arabs, which is undoubtedly true. They've not been able to deliver the Golan, they lost the Golan in '67 to Israel, which has settled it and has now annexed it to Israel. And this has been a tremendous failing on the part of the Assad regime in the eyes of Palestinians. But of course, the alternative is to join the Saudis who have not turned out to be able to deliver Palestine anymore than the Syrians have. And that, that's the dilemma for the Palestinians. There aren't any good choices for them today.

Alice Rothchild (46:03):

And can you speak to the influence of Russian support and their efforts to stabilize, or what is their role here?

Joshua Landis (46:09):

Peter, you want to jump in here.

Peter Ford (46:14):

Well, we're, we're jumping forward a bit. Here are we not Helena this session was meant to be some deeper background. But I will just make one point in relation to this question that, that Syria, and it goes back to the Palestine question that the West has been against Syria, essentially because of of, of the <inaudible> on Palestine and because of its support for Palestinian militants. When I would in my job we were negotiating an EU agreement with Syria which would've helped in the opening up. And it fell largely over the question of Syria's position on, on Palestinian rights and Palestinian militant. It had absolutely nothing to do with Western security interest, economic interest, or anything else. It was pure concern for Israel. And this is the, the missed opportunity that I, I was referring to, that we missed the golden opportunity in Bashar's early years to deflect Syria from populist pro-Russian path onto a pro-western path. But we failed to do so because of our obsession with Israeli security.

Alice Rothchild (47:52):

So there are a number of questions about the US role and its support of various regimes and working with the CIA. Can you comment on those issues?

Joshua Landis (48:08):

Say that once more?

Alice Rothchild (48:09):

There have been a number of questions about the role of the US in this region, and also it's whether it's supporting violent regimes or whether it's the role of the cia, you know, number of questions about US role in the region.

Joshua Landis (48:24):

Well, the role of the CIA, you know, the United States in 1945, there was a meeting of the ambassadors after World War II to figure out what should America's policy be in the Middle East. And, and they agreed that America should concentrate on Saudi Arabia, where it had Aramco and oil, and Syria, because the French should be, were being kicked out of Syria. And Syria was free if a, as they stated it. And the oil pipelines could come through Syria from Saudi Arabia to the Mediterranean, and so America could establish itself through Syria and so forth. And America launched a military mission to Syria and began to try to rebuild the Syrian army under President Quwatli, the, the first the president at Independence. But the '48 War burst into this scene, and immediately there's a, there's a nice letter in the, in the State Department archives from Foreign Secretary Marshall, who said, we have to stop all military help to Syria and, and, and cancel this mission because the Congress will never go along with giving arms or helping the military in Syria, so long as they're against Israel. And so there was an embargo placed on arms and America turned away from Syria. And not only did it turn away from Syria, but of course it allied itself with Israel. And then by 1949, as soon as the war was over, the United States looked for ways to overthrow the Syrian regime, which was stopping the oil pipeline and antithetical to making peace. It didn't wanna make peace with Israel so long as their terms were not met. And so United States, the CIA, approved an attempt to overthrow the democratically elected government of Syria.

Helena Cobban (50:15):

And that was in 1949, the first CIA coup against Syria.

Joshua Landis (50:20):

And it was engaged then in Kus later on, in 49 other ones. And in 1946, 1956 and 57 the United States was involved in other coup attempts, all of which failed, but which served the purpose of de-legitimizing pro-American politicians in Israel and in Syria, excuse me. And that's what caused Syria to lurch towards Nasser and the unification with Egypt and Arab nationalism in 1958 to 1961, when there was a unified Egypt and Syria, the u a r under President Nasser for three years. And that's largely because the CIA a, had undermined the pro western. It was in part because the CIA had undermined, and the growth of Israel, had undermined the legitimacy of this pro-American side of Syrian politics. And ever since then, Syria's been a stepchild in the Middle East, and it had to move towards Russia in order to get arms and get support.

Joshua Landis (51:23):

And it's been a Russian satellite or a Russian ally ever since that that moment. And that was really the over guiding. And, and America has looked at Syria really as a, as, as Ambassador Ford was saying, as a subset of its Israeli policy. And you can see until the present day, until the uprising recently, there were no Syrian specialists in any of the think tanks in Washington DC There were a lot of Israel specialists, and they were, would, they would talk about Syria. But really, Syrian policy for the United States was a subset of its Israeli policy.

Peter Ford (52:09):

And I add the Iranian dimension as well which is also <laugh>, arguably another subset in Washington's eyes of the, the Israel issue. The, the warming up of deepening of relations with Iran began during the Bashar years. I, I think and, and again, we missed an opportunity. I remember one of these technocratic ministers having a private meeting with myself and some other EU ambassadors pleading with us to cut the, the Syrian some slack over the political concessions that we were demanding. He said, why, why are you throwing us into the arms of the Iranians? We don't like Iranian. They have beards. They're islamists. They, they, we are secular. They're Persians, we're Arabs. Why are you forcing us into the arms of these people? And he was absolutely right. Of course, we gave Syria no option but to take help where it was offered.

Helena Cobban (53:25):

I, I will just add a little story and

Alice Rothchild (53:28):

Can you speak more to the role?

Helena Cobban (53:33):

Sorry, I I will just jump in here and,

Alice Rothchild (53:36):

Oh, go ahead. Go ahead.

Helena Cobban (53:37):

Add a story of my own, about the late years of the of the George W. Bush presidency, when I was honored to be part of something called the US-Syria Working Group, which was trying to set up a kind of a back channel of communication between the two governments. Particularly at the time that after Barack Obama had been elected, and we were, you know, hoping to be able to ramp down the, the hostility between the two governments because it was, you know, it was really harmful. It has always been really harmful. These sanctions on Syria that have been maintained for so long, couldn't get a safety avionics for their, for their Boeing airplanes, couldn't get necessary medical isotopes for their hospitals. And, you know, we were trying to do things like that, and we hoped that president Barack Obama would, you know, see the reason for doing this and, and move along this path.

Helena Cobban (54:35):

And almost immediately after he came into power Obama said, no. I mean, I think it was, I don't know whether the policy was made in Hillary Clinton's State Department or made in the White House, but they made quite clear that they didn't want to open up in any way towards Syria, but wanted to pursue the same kind of, at that stage quiet regime change policies that had been instituted by, by President George W. Bush. So, you know, there, there's a lot of background here, and I'm afraid we're getting toward the end of the hour. I want to thank Alice, who's done a fabulous job synthesizing what has been a torrent of questions there in the, in the chat room, and hopefully on, on Saturday when I, when we have our next session we can find better ways than I, I'm sorry about the technical glitch I had at the beginning, but what a rich discussion we've had already. I want to thank all of you who've been with us on this learning adventure including the attendees and participants, our Super elf team under Alice Rothchild, and of course professor Landis, a big thank you to you.

Joshua Landis (55:53):

Well, it's been great to be here and it's been nice to discuss it with you and, and Ambassador Ford.

Helena Cobban (55:58):

Well, great to have you here. And Ambassador Ford, thank you so much for bringing your expertise to us from the UK because it's a, it's a point of view that we hear in the United States. Really don't hear it nearly enough of just before everyone here tunes out I'm gonna do a, oh, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Where are we? Okay.

Peter Ford (56:27):

It's been a pleasure. I just wish we had more time.

Helena Cobban (56:31):

Well, we're gonna have more sessions and maybe we can have both of you back for later sessions, because one of the things I'm going to say is that because we've been organizing this project sort of on the fly, we have the next two sessions set up. And if you go to, hang on, I have a link here. Okay. If you go to this link okay. There, there it is.

Helena Cobban (57:01):

Then you will be able to see the details of the, the sessions as we organize them, we going, we, we still have some flexibility at the back end of the schedule. So one of the things we're going to do is we're gonna send out a little, I think automatically Zoom will send you a, a questionnaire to all the attendees and participants here with your suggestions as to maybe we could tweak the schedule a little bit. And I know somebody has, has expressed that talking about coronavirus in Syria is, could be a very interesting thing for us to do. We are gonna be holding these webinars every Wednesday and Saturday at 1:00 PM New York City time from now through April 25th. And what else did I want to tell you? This whole session has been recorded for us by Zoom. We'll be sending you a link to that recording within the next couple of days.

Helena Cobban (58:06):

We intend that this whole webinar series can be a lasting educational resource of value to educators, community groups, and concerned congregations all around North America and further afield. I have two final appeals to you. If you found this webinar experience valuable, please be sure to tell your friends and networks about it. They can participate and attend the, the upcoming nine sessions, and they can look at this session when, when it's recorded. And finally, we are providing this whole webinar series at no cost to attendees so that we can win the largest possible audience for it. But if you find the project worthwhile, please do send us as generous of a donation as you can. You can donate either online, online or via check by clicking on the donate button at our website, www.justworldeducational.org. Wanna thank all of you for being with us today and hope that you stay safe. And I think I will just leave you with this. Thank you, you and goodbye everyone.

Joshua Landis (59:25):

Cheers. Goodbye, everyone. Hey,

Alice Rothchild (59:27):

Bye-Bye. Bye.

Peter Ford (59:28):

Thanks, Helena.

Helena Cobban (59:30):

Yes, thank you. How do we end this <laugh> <laugh>? Ah, if there's an elf who could end this, I would much appreciate that. Okay, I will, I will end it. <Laugh>.