Hey everyone, it’s Isaac. It’s been a while.
I want to start this off with several deep apologies, and to beg your forgiveness. I promised content that I didn’t deliver, and I’ve been generally inactive. There’s several reasons for this, though they may not be particularly satisfying.
Firstly, I have been extremely busy with my personal life. My job has me working 50-60 hours a week, which leaves me incredibly exhausted by the end of the day. With the other obligations I have, I usually end up with 14-15 hour days, leaving my house around 6:45am, and not getting home until 8:30pm, sometimes 9pm. I also am expected to work on certain Saturdays, and even when I don’t work on a Saturday, I am so exhausted that I barely am able to get out of bed to make breakfast, let alone dedicate time to study and writing. I’m writing the script for this episode around 9:30 on a Saturday night and the episode probably won’t be published for another hour or so. I just got home an hour before, and you can probably hear in my voice how tired I am, but I really felt the need to get this out. I will do my best to continue this podcast, and to write episodes, and to publish them. I thank you for your continued support, truly I do, from the bottom of my heart.
Secondly, I frankly have been incredibly despondent about the current situation in the Middle East. Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, all of it. The timeline of events over the past 17 months has been beyond depressing for me. To speak quite honestly and personally, I have had little sleep over it all. I am constantly going through a whole swath of emotions: deep anxiety, fiery rage, total despair, general apathy, and suffocating loneliness. When I’m not scared out of my mind that my mother will call me to say that the IDF or settlers attacked and killed our family in East Jerusalem, I generally have this feeling of little to no hope for the future of the Levant. I fear the genocide in Gaza will be repeated in the West Bank, and will culminate in a final catastrophe, a final Nakba that will destroy the Palestinians once and for all, scatter them into the wind like dust.
I also feel, amongst all these other emotions, a deep, penetrating, shame and humiliation. If you follow me on Twitter (I refuse to call it X), or on Instagram, you’ll likely have noticed my posts, retweets, and stories, talking mostly about the Syrian crisis. This has been the source of my deep shame and humiliation. Essentially, I feel deeply humiliated and ashamed to be an Arab. I think maybe the best way to describe this is to relate to how Russians felt in the mid 90s as they barely survived Yeltsin, the the ruble collapse, the Chechen wars, or how Serbs felt after the defeat by NATO and the balkanization of Yugoslavia around 1999-2000. It’s this feeling of defeat: a part of your pride, or who you are was ripped away from you, your faith in your people was shattered by this utter and total defeat by your enemies. You are no longer mighty and proud, but you feel meek, whimpering, begging for mercy from those who seek your destruction. But maybe my feelings are deeper, because while Russia was destroyed by oligarchs who looted the nation, and Serbia was defeated by external enemies, the Arabs defeated themselves. As a whole, the Arabs brought this upon themselves. I’ll explain.
On the 27th of November, Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS), a militant group that was formed out of ISIS, AL-Qaeda, and other radical Salafist groups (lead by a man named Abu Mohammad Al-Joulani), funded by Qatar, armed by Turkey, (with likely support from America and Israel), launched an offensive against the city of Aleppo. The city quickly fell, as the Syrian Arab Army simply retreated. As the Syrian army retreated further and further, on December 5th, HTS took control of the city of Hama, and two days later they seized Homs. By December 8th, Damascus fell, and Bashar Al-Assad, alongside his family, fled to Moscow, marking the end of 54 years of Al-Assad rule of Syria. It also marked the end of Syria, the last sovereign and independent Arab nation in the Middle East.
When the Syrian Army fell apart, two things happened: firstly, HTS, as Salafist militants tend to do, began engaging in a mass looting and killing spree. Since the 8th of December, I have seen video after picture after testimony on Twitter and Telegram of Salafist militants killing, kidnapping, and stealing the property of every non-Sunni they see. Shia, Alawites, Christians, Druze: everyone that isn’t a Sunni has been brutalized in some way or another. Some of the videos and pictures and beyond disturbing and graphic: executions by firing squad, people beaten to death, and at least one beheading. People forced out of their homes for the audacious crime of not being a Sunni, Syrian Army soldiers being executed after being promised amnesty and forgiveness if they surrendered. HTS opened up all the prisons in Syria, and with the fall of the government came the collapse of law enforcement and most first responders, so looting and random acts of violence from gangs and violence prisoners became common. The country collapsed and fell to chaos and murder quite quickly.
The second thing that happened was the the decisive Israeli response: within days of Damascus’ seizure, the IDF launched its largest air campaign in its history. within the span of 48 hours, they destroyed the entirety of the Syrian Arab Army: it’s Air Force, military airfields, research sites and laboratories, air defense, the navy, the military shipyards, the strategic weaponry and munitions depots, armored vehicles, tanks… all of it. The entirety of Syria’s military infrastructure vanished within hours, leaving the nation defenseless, and HTS entirely dependent on outside forces for munitions and arms (and security guarantees). Israel then physically invaded Syria, seizing the entirety of the Golan heights, including Mt. Harmon, the highest point in the Levant, and the most strategic point as well. If the Israelis build an early warning site on the mountain, they will be able to locate and intercept anything thrown at them. What is odd, however, is Al-Joulani’s (now going by his birth name Ahmed Al-Sharaa when he asserted himself as Syria’s new president) lack of acknowledgment of any of this. As of now, the IDF has occupied as decent chunk of southern Syria, and are planning to seize the town of Jamarana, under the guise of ‘protecting Druze residents’, which would put them within 3 kilometers of Damascus. As they’ve done this, they’re currently building several military bases within Syria, set on occupying Syrian land for the long term. What is most interesting, is that while the guns of HTS militants seem to work just fine when aimed at Alawite, Druze, and Christian women and children, they don’t seem to function at all when aimed at the IDF.
The fall of Syria was the nail in the coffin for the end of the Middle East. It was through Syria that the resistance in Lebanon and Palestine was armed and supplied. It was Syria that was the bulwark against Israeli expansion. Syria was the last sovereign Arab nation: now it has been fractured and destroyed. Already the Druze are creating military councils, feeling pressured to ally with the Israelis as HTS brutalizes them. The Alawites on the Syrian coast are speaking of creating their own independent state, and the Kurds still control northeastern Syria. HTS has attempted to invade Lebanon, but were repelled by Shia clansmen who took up arms and defended their villages from these Salafist animals. Al-Joulani barely controls Damascus and the surrounding areas. Turkish regular forces have reached the northern Aleppo countryside, and now the IDF seem to be bombing and attacking Salafist militants and leaders, the purpose of which I’m not sure: to weaken HTS? Or maybe to get rid of Al-Joulani’s potential rivals? The Syrian Pound is completely worthless. Electricity and water is barely functioning, breadlines are growing in number, and protests against HTS are amassing, with at least one protest shutdown through violent gunfire by HTS. The now martyred leader of Hizb’Allah, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, once said clearly: ‘If Syria falls, Palestine will fall’. Last week, the IDF launched its largest military operation in the West Bank: tanks have entered the West Bank for the first time since 2002, all aimed at breaking Jenin. As I type this, and later record this, the IDF is destroying the refugee camp in Jenin, and have displaced 40,000 Palestinians. Their plans are to be in the West Bank for at least a year, and this is likely the first step in the full annexation of the West Bank, and the destruction of the Palestinian people.
I want to read something to you. It’s a section of a document written by Oded Yinon, an advisor to Ariel Sharon while he was the defense minister of Israel in the early 1980s. It’s known as the Oded Yinon plan. Here it is:
The dissolution of Syria and Iraq later on into ethnically or religiously unique areas such as in Lebanon, is Israel’s primary target on the Eastern from in the long run… Syria will fall apart, in accordance with its ethnic and religious structure, into several states such as in present day Lebanon, so that there will be a Shi’ite Alawi state along its coas, a Sunni state in the Aleppo area, another Sunni state in Damascus hostile to its northern neighbor, and the Druzes who set up a state, maybe even in our Golan, and certainly in the hauran and in Northern Jordan. This state of affairs will be the guarantee for peace and security in the area in the long run, and that aim is already within our reach today.
I’ll link the full text of document for you to read yourself. We are already seeing this come into fruition. What is more, is that as the Kurds are set to set up their own enclave in the Northeastern Syria, the Israelis have proposed creating a ‘corridor’ along the southern border of Syria, to connect the Druze sections of southern Syria with Kurdish-held northeastern Syria, meant to ‘allow for humanitarian and economic flow’ between both regions. If you’re reading the transcript of this episode on my Substack, you’ll be able to see the proposed partition and the corridor below.
You can see how the corridor looks very similar to the boundaries and borders that connect Iraq and Jordan: the eastern most and western most bounderies create a corridor shape, which while strange looking, was intentional: when both states were created, they were created as Colonial mandates to be ruled by the British, and these boundaries were created specifically to protect and facilitate their oil pipeline from Baghdad to Haifa. This was very much the goal of the Sykes-Picot agreement that divided the Middle East, and what we are witnessing is a second Sykes-Picot arrangement: further division of the Levant into petty little ‘tribes with flags’, meant to weaken and divide the people of the Levant. The difference this time is that instead the British getting an oil pipeline from Baghdad to Haifa, Israel will get gas and oil pipelines from Azerbaijan, through Turkey, southern Syria, and eventually Haifa. Or Tel-Aviv. Or maybe even Gaza, if they annex it, ethnically cleanse the Palestinians, and build a Jewish city atop the ruins and corpses.
The division of the Middle East into mandates that would be ruled by the French and the British in 1919 was the beginning of what was called, the ‘century of humiliation’ for the Arabs. It was a humiliation because it was a betrayal: the Arabs had pledged their willingness to fight the Ottoman Turks on behalf of the British, with the clear promise that they would be given an independent nation, something they had wanted for centuries. Instead, their lands were taken, divided into mandates, and they were subjugated, brutalized, and ruled by the French and the British, so that both could exploit the Middle East for their interests, and so that the British could help Zionist Jews realize their ambitions for a nation, at the expense of the native Palestinians. Since 1919, the Arabs have tried, and failed, on repeated occasions, to assert their sovereignty against western and Israeli rule and influence . The fall of Syria marks, in my opinion, the beginning of the second century of humiliation for the Arabs. What makes this worse, is that this time, the betrayal did not come from without: it came from within.
The Arabs of the Levant betrayed themselves. They tossed aside their dignity and sovereignty to ultimately become vassals of the Turks, the Gulf Arabs, and Israel. So fueled they were by sectarian hatreds (this war against Al-Assad had as much, if not more, to do with the fact that he is Alawite than it did with his authoritarian rule) that they were willing to get on their hands and knees, and let the Turks, Israelis, and gulf Arabs mount them like women, and for what? For Israel to annex swathes of southern Syria? To divide the Levant further into bickering states that amount to little more than ‘tribes with flags’? To ultimately cause the destruction of Palestine? How many times have we allowed the west to meddle in our affairs, only for them to exploit and betray us? Not just a century ago, but in recent memory: Iraq in 2003, Libya in 2011, Sudan in 2013, The slaughterhouse that was the Lebanese civil war from 1975 to 1990, and so on. How many times will we let these people quite literally rape us, in every sense of the word, until we learn the lesson: you can never trust them. The Turks, Israel, the West, the gulf Arabs, they all despise and loathe us, and wish to make into subservient vassals, and they have finally succeeded. The ‘Ummah’, the so-called global Sunni community, has once again betrayed the Arabs of the Levant. Crazed fighters from every part of the Sunni world: Chechens, Pakistanis, Afghans, Tajiks, Uzbeks, Uyghurs, Turks, all were willing to wage brutal and bloody jihad against a heretical non-Sunni leader in the Middle East, but not so willing to defend their so-called ‘newly freed country’ against Israeli imperial aggression, let alone help their fellow Sunni brethren in Palestine. Somehow, when it comes to waging jihad against Shia, Christians, Druze, Alawites, the Ummah is more than willing and able! It is the will of Allah that we come together and act in accordance to what is right, and bring down the evil Al-Assad regime, and toss out those terrible Shia Iranians as well. But when it comes to liberating Palestine? Oh, well the Ummah can’t, we’re too weak, we cannot, we must ‘Tawakkul Ala Allah’ (have faith in God), that somehow magically he will come and free the Palestinians. The Syrians get their jihad now, us Palestinians have to wait for the Mahdi to come and liberate us.
We betrayed ourselves for nothing. Instead of uniting as Arabs to defeat our oppressors, we colluded with them to kill each other. Instead of doing the work to move past sectarian differences, we dug deeper into them, and allowed ourselves to be exploited. Always, always, your own despots, no matter how brutal you think they are, are better than foreign groomed and picked puppets. Al-Joulani was groomed by our enemies, HTS is the product of gulf Arab, Turkish, American, and Israeli machinations. We have destroyed ourselves. We have given the Israelis everything they could have ever wanted, exactly as they laid it out in the 1982 Oded Yinon plan. It's poetic in its absurdity: Arabs will about Israel's master plan to create Greater Israel, while simultaneously playing right into that blueprint by throwing their weight behind every jihadi group funded by the same puppet masters they claim to oppose. They'll post the maps, the quotes, the outrage all over social media, share them and comment about how terrible it all is, but when it comes time to act, they hand the keys over to the imperial power themselves, sabotage their own stability, and call it resistance. It's like setting fire to your own house, raging over the smoke and flames, and when you evacuate the house and look at the ruins, you shrug your shoulders and say, ‘tawakkul Ala Allah, he will provide’. As you didn’t cause your own destruction.
There’s a scene at the end of the famous film, Lawrence of Arabia, where T.E. Lawrence, who famously helped the Arabs rebel against the Ottomans, in which all the Arab leaders meet in a building and are bickering and arguing amongst themselves over who should lead and rule. There’s a similar scene at the end of the film The Green Zone, in which the main character, an American soldier in Iraq played by Matt Damon, watches as Iraqi Arabs argue and bicker amongst themselves over the governance of Iraq. Both scenes are complete fiction: the Arabs were willing and ready to be ruled by Faisal Al-Hashim in the new Arab state they were promised. I always hated the ending scene in Lawrence of Arabia, because it was specifically meant to absolve the British of their betrayal, and in particular to was meant to portray the Arabs as a stupid, short-sighted people, willing to fight each other before they will fight their enemies. But the more I think about that scene, the more it feels true, and this is the source of shame: we have allowed ourselves to become the stereotypes that we rail against. How can the world respect us if we do not respect ourselves? When we do not kill each other, we welcome with open arms those who have facilitated our destruction: Lebanon welcoming then Secretary of State Condelizza Rice in 2008, after she had helped Israeli destroy Beirut, and now Syrians praising and exalting American politician Joe Wilson, an ardent Zionist who has had no qualms with Israeli annexation of Syrian territory.
When Ismail Haniyah, the political leader of Hamas, was assassinated, I was heartbroken, but I still held out hope. When Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah was killed, subconsciously I understood that it was the beginning of the end, but I was still coping, believing that his death would unite Arabs to fight against the Zionists and their allies. But the destruction of Syria opened my eyes to the truth: it’s over. Men like Hassan Nasrallah come once every hundred years. It takes just as much time, if not longer, for a nation to establish itself and truly become sovereign and independent. If there is any hope for the liberation of the Palestinians, or the Levant as a whole, I have come to the grim, depressing, and tragic realization that it will not happen in my lifetime. I truly hope I am wrong.
Several days ago, the funeral of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah was held. 1.2 million people attended, from all over the world, to pay respects to one of the greatest Arab leaders of the modern era. I took some time to reflect on the past 17 months after his funeral was over. The funeral really made my realization much more apparent to me, but it also made something else clear: no matter what happens, the story of the Palestinians must be told. When I first began this project, I did so with the naive belief that it would be the record of a people who though they had suffered decades of tragedy, would eventually be liberated. Now, this project will continue as a way to keep the memory of Palestine alive, a memory I fear will be erased soon. I cannot promise consistency, my personal schedule is beyond my control, but I will continue with this project. There will be a second episode, and I will tell the story of Palestine, the story of her history, her people, and the Unending Catastrophe that has befallen her. I thank you for listening to this update, I hope that you will like it, comment, share it on your social media, and subscribe to this Substack. More will come, that I promise. Thank you again for all your support. Good night, and Good Luck.
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