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How
the Syrians Overthrew the Christian Sovereignty in Lebanon
Mordechai Nisan
The struggle of Lebanon to preserve its
national identity and political independence has, in particular, faced the
hegemonic ambition of Syria. Since the 1970s, Damascus has succeeded to
implement an incremental yet systematic policy of occupation over Lebanon
that has transformed the political, social, and economic character of the
country. The Syrian occupation, calling it by its proper appellation, was
consummated in 1989 with the Taif Accord and in 1990 with the removal of
General (and Prime Minister) Michel Aoun from the Ba'abda presidential
palace and with the full conquest of Beirut the capital.
Syrian occupation employed a wide range of
policy means to transform Lebanon into a "client state" and a Syrian
political satellite. By means of military control and political
penetration, media repression and alien colonization, Lebanon has lost its
independence. Under foreign rule within the matrix of a
foreign-manipulated police state, the Lebanese suffer from Arabization and
Syrianization that deny the people, especially the Maronite Christians,
their freedom and dignity. Many have been forced into exile across the
countries and continents of the Lebanese diaspora.
Syria's occupation regime in Lebanon
suggests comparison with the Anschluss of 1936, the Munich capitulation of
1938, and the setting up of the Vichy regime of 1940. Stalinism as a
terror state model is also evocative of Lebanon's pitiful subjugation
about which, however, the international community shows hardly any
concern.
The collapse of a free Lebanon is part of
the expanding sweep of Islamic power and the decay of Christian
civilization in the Middle East. Perhaps, under circumstances of upheaval
in Syria, Israeli military policy, and revivalism among the Lebanese,
foreign occupation of Lebanon may come to an end.
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The Collapsing
Syrian Economy
Steven Plaut
Syria is one of the last surviving
communist countries – communist not formally but in its economic
structure. The ruling Ba'th Party of Assad plays a role similar to that of
the Communist Party in the Soviet Union and Syria's economy resembles that
of Russia before perestroika and glasnost. Its economy is centrally
planned, rigid, backward, impoverished, dilapidated and shrinking. An
all-powerful central planning bureaucracy fixes prices and owns the bulk
of industry in the country. As in the Soviet Union, Syria operates under
five-year plans that are often formulated two or three years into the
plan’s five years. Also similar is the fact that the military-political
elite ultimately operates the Syrian planning apparatus.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) says
that Syria has the worst array of harmful government controls over its
economy in comparison to any other Mediterranean country. The central
government controls resources, operates large governmental monopolies,
prints oodles of money, serves as the main employer (40% of the labor
force), controls all of the imports and exports of the country, owns all
banks and insurance companies, regulates every financial and most
commercial transaction, owns all big industry and much of the small
industry, controls ordinary wholesale and retail trade, and controls
agricultural markets.
It is a pariah country due to its
extensive involvement in terrorism and drugs trading. It is on poor terms
with all of its neighbors (except the one it occupies militarily –
Lebanon). Its Russian-supplied military equipment is rusting even as it
becomes increasingly obsolete. It is backward technologically and has yet
to introduce credit cards, cellular phones, or a stock market. It has yet
to open its first business school. It has outlawed access to the internet
except for the closest cronies of the regime.
Syria’s economy produces a level of GDP
per capita that lies somewhere between $600 (well below Egypt’s) and
$1,200, depending on source. No one – at least no one outside the CIA –
seems to believe the Syrian regime’s own claims that its GDP is in excess
of $6,000 per capita. In any case, nearly 70% of Syrian workers earn less
than $100 per month. At the same time, Syria’s external debts are huge
relative to its GDP and growing. Most of these are in arrears, and Syria
has been cut out of the international financial markets altogether. The
current debt level is equal to about 5½ years worth of Syrian export
earnings; just paying the interest service on this sum of money would take
up perhaps a third of Syria's export earnings.
Syria is finding it increasingly difficult
to feed itself. Its agriculture sector is low-tech and primitive. Only 20%
of its farmland is irrigated, this in a country with long rainless summers
and frequent droughts. The World Health Organization estimates that 28% of
Syrian children suffer from stunted growth, in large part due to
malnutrition. Syrian forests are being systematically destroyed and an
ecological disaster is in the making.
Any look at its internal living conditions
shows Syria to be a brutish impoverished country, often near the bottom of
the Third World. The proportion of babies who are born in any sort of
health facility is only 37%, one of the lowest rates in the world outside
sub-Saharan Africa. Only 33% of mothers have any medical care during
pregnancy, and only 61% have care during delivery. The proportion of
infants receiving ante-natal health care is only 13%, again one of the
lowest outside Africa. The number of hospital beds is one bed per 832
Syrians; Botswana has twice as many. (The comparable number in Israel is
one per 165.) The number of physicians is one per 1,221 Syrians,
comparable to the lower ranges of the Third World. (In Israel the number
is one per 206 people.) Syria has just 10 nurses, 3 pharmacists and 3
dentists per 10,000 people.
Syrian infrastructure is undeveloped and
primitive. Much of the water is unsafe, many Syrians have no sewers,
electricity supply is primitive and unreliable. Rates of ownership for
cars and major appliances are at levels similar to the bottom of the Third
World, as are rates for newspaper and magazine distribution. Of the 40,000
kilometers of highway in the country, 31,000 or about three-quarters are
unpaved. Only 866 kilometers are expressways. Of the 104 airports in the
country, 80 of them have unpaved runways. Rail passenger service in Syria
has all but collapsed, dropping by 62% between 1991 and 1995. The civil
aviation sector in Syria as measured by passenger miles is just slightly
larger than in Namibia or Zimbabwe.
The level of Syrian education and
scientific training resemble those in darkest sub-Sahara Africa. College
attendance is extremely low. Illiteracy is still widespread in Syria. Half
the women in the 20-24 age group nation-wide are illiterate. The
Statistical, Economic and Social Research and Training Center for Islamic
Countries (SESRTCIC), a database for Islamic countries, puts the overall
illiteracy rate in Syria at 32% for the entire adult population (1992).
The comparable illiteracy rate in Zimbabwe is estimated at 15%.
In science, Syria has yet to get started.
Syrians applied for a total of 55 patents in 1995, about the same as
Botswana. The comparable number in Israel was 4,425. Emigration of skilled
Syrians and technicians is thought to be considerable, almost as common as
the capital flight of Syrians stashing their savings abroad.
A Syria whose economy is contracting may
be one that can be deterred by an Israel willing to engage it in an
economic race, or – more specifically – an arms race. This means that
Israel need not hurriedly accommodate Syria. If anything, it should sit
back and await Syria's collapse to proceed, for the economic situation is
getting worse with time.
The United
States won the Cold War by letting the Soviet empire collapse under its
economic dead weight, with no military confrontation. Why should not the
same strategy work with Syria? A rush by Israel to reach agreement with
Assad makes about as much sense as there would have been in the United
States rushing in 1989 to reach agreements with the Soviet Union. With
each passing year Syria will be less capable of feeding and arming itself,
and more susceptible to outside economic threats and pressures from the
West. Western states can help things along by imposing economic sanctions.
With a bit of determination, this could lead to a collapse of the
totalitarian regime in Syria and that, in turn, would redraw the strategic
map of the Middle East, most likely in a direction that would benefit
Syrians, Turks, Jordanians, Israelis, and everyone else.
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Chemical and Biological Weapons in Syria
Dany Shoham
For about two decades, Syria has had a
consistent policy of chemical and biological arms acquisition that is
systematic and determined – and that has never been actually denied by
Syria. More than any other country, Syria has a policy of seeking
strategic parity with Israel which, in military terms, means obtaining
biological and chemical weapons, given that nuclear weapons are not
attainable for now. This pattern was shown by the chemical weapons
procured by Syria from Egypt in their joint preparations for the October
1973 Yom Kippur War, and even today, Assad, Mubarak and other Arab leaders
coordinate positions on refusing to adhere to the Chemical and Biological
Weapons Conventions.
Moreover, Syria possibly cooperates with
Egypt in biological and chemical arms acquisition today, and it certainly
does with Iran and probably with Libya. It has been aided - although not
necessarily through institutionalized channels – by Russia, China and
North Korea, in efforts to enlarge its longer-range surface-to-surface
missiles that carry operational chemical and biological warheads, among
them the Scud-C, the M-9 and the No-Dhong. Assistance in upgrading and
scaling up its chemical-biological capabilities is given also by other
formerly Soviet countries, India and, still, European firms. Several
facilities located in different sites in Syria are involved in these
efforts and are in part disguised as civilian buyers.
During recent years Syria has switched
from above-ground missiles and non-conventional weapons facilities to
underground storage and production, thereby significantly limiting
Israel’s ability to monitor and destroy those strategic facilities.
The first, and so far, only Syrian
employment of a chemical warfare agent took place in 1982 - it was the
lethal cyanide gas used by the Syrian regime in the slaughter of some
18,000 Sunni residents of the city of Hama, in Syria itself.
Ever since
then, Syria has made a very significant progress in the area of chemical
and biological weapons, which has various implications of major
importance. It built up an elaborate, large arsenal of sarin and VX nerve
agents containing aerial bombs and missile warheads, and formed a delivery
realignment that is capable of instantly launching those deadly weapons at
a variety of targets and objects in Israel, both strategic and tactical.
Biological warfare agents - anthrax, botulinum and others - have recently
been added to the Syrian inventory.
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The GSS -
Popping Open the "Champagne"
Eliav Shochetman
In a
recently published book on the subject of The Truth about
the Assassination of the Late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, author
Avraham Rotem, former head of the Personal Protection Unit of the General
Security Services, attributes the tragic event, of which there has been no
graver in the history of the state, to the defective functioning of the
heads of the GSS in general, and of the personal protection arrangements
of the GSS in particular. The question that arises is whether this is a
case of system breakdown and poor appointments alone, or a case of
something much graver, since many of the questions that were left hanging
and still remained after the publication of the report of the Shamgar
Commission, which investigated the Prime Minister’s assassination,
continue to remain, and to disturb, after the publication of Rotem’s book.
One of the difficult questions, to which Rotem’s book as well does not
provide a persuasive answer, concerns the meaning of the cries: “Blanks,
blanks!” that were heard at the scene of the murder immediately upon the
sound of the shots. Does this not lend credence to the theory that an
attempt was made here at the staging of an assassination – an attempt that
was foiled by the murderer of the Prime Minister, who fired real shots?
Another question involves the episode of Shlomo Halevi, who several months
before the assassination conveyed partial information about Yigal Amir’s
intentions, without providing his exact identity – information of which
the GSS made no use. Additional questions concern the use of the GSS agent
Avishai Raviv, who was on constant surveillance of Yigal Amir even though
this did not prevent the assassination. There are also various indications
of the apparent involvement of the GSS in sundry acts of provocation by
Raviv. For these questions Rotem’s book fails to offer any satisfying
explanations, and hence it seems that, even though Rotem’s book is an
important document for understanding the background of the deterioration
of the GSS, the entire truth about this terrible episode has not yet been
uncovered.
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The
Israeli Period of Hebrew Literature
Yosef Oren
In his position paper, the critic and
scholar of Israeli literature, Yosef Oren, suggests that we mark the
establishment of the state in 1948 as the beginning of a new era in the
history of Hebrew literature – the era of renewed sovereignty. The Israeli
period in the history of Hebrew literature reflects the reality of
sovereignty in various facets: in the conceptual domain – the replacement
of the secular stance that defied Judaism (during the three phases of the
era of the New Hebrew literature: the Haskalah, the Renaissance,
and the Zionist Immigrations) with a sovereign stance that redirected the
defiance to the Zionist ideology. In the thematic domain – the addition of
the dimension of the issues of sovereignty, the dimension that deals with
issues of the “Israeli condition”, to the two dimensions with whose issues
Hebrew writers had been concerned during the era of the New Hebrew
literature: issues of the “Jewish condition” and of the “human condition.”
In the domain of the image of the hero of each phase – replacement of the
images of wholeness that crystallized in each phase of the era of the New
Hebrew literature (the maskil, the recluse, and the pioneer) with
the image of the sabra, which with its earthiness and spiritual
qualities represents the native of the Land. And in written language – a
rapid abandonment of the language of the literary sources that form the
treasury of Hebrew culture in exchange for the language of sovereignty,
spoken Hebrew as the language of life in the state of Israel.
Yosef Oren’s proposal rejects the existing
tendency in scholarship to downplay the influences of sovereignty on the
Hebrew literature that has been written during the years of statehood. The
prevailing scholarship reflects this stance by making Israeli literature,
in its first fifty years, part of a continuum with the preceding two
hundred years – the era of the New Hebrew literature. Yosef Oren stresses
the ideological-political motives underlying this tendency in scholarship
to belittle, in this fashion, the manifestations of sovereignty in Israeli
literature. In addition to his basic thesis, Yosef Oren suggests
distinguishing four camps that are active today in Israeli literature: The
camp of "the generation of the Land", the camp of "the new wave", the camp
of "the disillusioned", and the camp of "the new voices". Likewise, he
points to the more salient trends today in Israeli fiction (which have
parallels both in poetry and in drama): The intellectual trend, the
political trend, the ethnic trend, and the trivial trend. In his
conclusions, the author proposes examining the literature of renewed
sovereignty that has been written during the years of statehood against
the background of the literary-cultural level of Hebrew literature over
the generations, and particularly the preservation of
visionary-ideological fervor and of uniqueness through avoidance of
excessive openness to the influences of global literature, which
throughout the world tends to obscure the sources of national cultures.
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The
Narcisism of the "Sabra" and Anti-Semitism
Amnon Lord
The roots of the current Israeli Left can
be traced to three main sources symbolized by three personalities. The
first, Joseph Stalin, whose worship by the MAPAM and Communist parties was
of enormous importance during the first two decades of the Jewish state.
The second is Uri Avneri, an embodiment
anti-Jewish ideologies, who traded fascism for PLOism.
The third is the Hebrew author, Yizhar
Smilansky (S. Yizhar), who represents a fundamental anti-Jewish
Sabra-nativism. His writings betray a deep-seated negation of anything
Jewish among native Hebrew-speaking Israelis. His magnum opus, The Days of Tzkiklag, can be identified as the ultimate encyclopedia
of the Sabra psyche. For many years Yizhar, a Laborist Knesset member was
identified with a Ben-Gurionist policy. But as the Left lost ground
following the rise of the Likud in 1977, he took to expressing his
anti-Jewish emotions in op-ed articles. In his writings he uses classic
anti-Semitic expressions.
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War and Post-War Dutch Attitudes Toward the Jews: Myth and Truth
Manfred Gerstenfeld
The more than 100,000 Jews from The
Netherlands murdered by the Germans in World War II represented a higher
percentage of Jews killed - 75% - than in any other Western European
country. Dutch Nazi collaborators outnumbered those active in the
Resistance. The common international image of help given by the Dutch to
the Jews during the war concerns a very small part of the population: most
Dutch accommodated themselves.
Preparing for the extermination of the
Jews living in The Netherlands, the Germans could count on the assistance
of most of the Dutch administrative infrastructure. With respect to Dutch
collaboration, Eichmann said: “the transports run so smoothly that it is a
pleasure to see.” Systematic looting of Jewish property began before the
deportations to the east. The government in exile in London did not even
do the little it could for the Jews. The queen devoted five sentences in
five years in her radio speeches to the fate of Dutch Jews under
occupation.
The first post-war Dutch governments made
no particular effort to help the Jews, even though their plight was much
worse than that of the average Dutchman. Denigrating remarks about
restitution to the Jews were made in private by the first post-war Dutch
prime minister, Schermerhorn.
In 1999 values, the possessions stolen
from the Jews during the war and not returned are worth many billions of
dollars. Even in the most optimistic assumption, the present public
investigations will lead to the return of only a minor part of this. The
commissions of inquiry will not address key issues such as the moral and
legal responsibility of post-war Dutch governments for the fate of the
Jews they could not protect during the war, and the moral dimension of the
post-war restitution laws. The danger that history could be distorted in
exchange for money must be prevented.
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The Religious-Secular Conflict with Particular Reference to
Israel (II)
Ervin Birnbaum
This study is based on the
recognition that Israel has been increasingly turning into an arena of
conflict between those terming themselves “religious” and those referring
to themselves as “secular”. Since the religious-secular conflict in
Israel could be very dangerous to the very survival of the Jewish State,
it needs to be minimized. On the premise that the world is interactive it
can be assumed that:
a. Israel could not isolate
itself and escape the waves of similar conflicts in other parts of the
globe, and
b. Israel could possibly
benefit from the lessons of religious-secular conflicts in other countries
and apply them for a better understanding and amelioration of its own
situation.
The above premises set the
framework of this study. After a brief introduction about the role of
religion in Western society, we turn our attention to the practical impact
of religion in its conflict with the State, and an all too brief review of
the types of models of Church-State relationships that evolved from that
conflict, beginning with the French Revolution. The first three models -
France, Germany and Italy - are chronological. Then we turn out attention
to an efficient model of separation of Church and State, the United States
of America, followed by an efficient model of non-separation, England.
Brief remarks are added about a scattering of other interesting models.
All of them are of democratic countries. Hence, from the Middle East only
Turkey is touched upon.
The next part deals with
possible lessons Israel could derive from the models presented, in the
light of its own unique situation. Focus is placed on the value of the
“status quo”, the need of unconditional acceptance of the State, and on
the advantages of depoliticizing religion - a process for which four
channels are examined, though not necessarily recommended:
1. Possible dissolution of
religious political parties,
2. Stopping political
blackmail in the Knesset in return for religious support,
3. Changing attitudes and
expectations, and
4. Separation of religion and
state.
The final part deals with
perspectives of the “religious” vs. “secular” dispute.
The study of human thought
makes it abundantly clear that religions cover an extremely wide spectrum
- from the belief in One God to many gods, or from an intimately personal
and personalized God to an absolutely depersonalized abstract Power, or
from the acceptance of a strict doctrine that regulates every step in life
to subordination to certain principles intended to serve as a moral and
ethical guide in life. The author makes a valiant attempt not to sit in
judgment over any aspect of religion, be it fundamentalist or secular. If
he failed at any point, the reader can rest assured, it is purely
unintentional and will find it easier to forgive by remembering: the sole
intention is to enlighten, not to upset.
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