The fall of the Assad regime once again reset the Middle East chessboard in Israel’s favor and to the detriment of Iran

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AS

history approaches its end, events start to speed up. Recent events in Syria certainly bear that out. Already in March 2011, widespread demonstrations against the Assad regime broke out, in the wake of Arab Spring. By mid-2012, Syria was in the midst of a full-blown civil war that would leave an estimated 600,000 dead and 12 million uprooted from their homes.

But over the last four years, the government and multiple rebel militias had settled into an ongoing stalemate, with occasional skirmishes but virtually no shifting of the map, which showed Assad in control of approximately 70 percent of Syria.

Then suddenly on November 27, rebel forces launched a major attack, and within days, they had captured Aleppo, Homs, and Hama, and were headed south to Damascus, the capital. A week after the conquest of Aleppo, government forces put down their arms, and Bashar al-Assad and family were on a flight to Moscow. Just like that, the 14 years of civil war and 53 years of brutal rule by the Assad family, father Hafez and son Bashar, were over.

The fall of the Assad regime once again reset the Middle East chessboard in Israel’s favor and to the detriment of Iran. Syria was the only state actor allied with Iran in the Middle East, and an irreplaceable transit point for Iranian arms being sent to Hezbollah. Without Syria, Hezbollah is effectively cut off.

David Wurmser, a Middle East expert from whom I once had the privilege of a private tutorial on Syria, compared the loss of Syria to Iran to the fall of the Berlin Wall to the Soviet Union. The so-called “ring of fire” that Iran laboriously constructed to surround Israel has now fallen brick by brick. In addition to threatening Israel, that ring of fire was meant to deter Israel from attacking Iran. Now, Iran’s deterrent capacity has been reduced to virtually nothing, and at the same time, Israel has rendered Iran virtually defenseless by taking out its anti-aircraft defenses.

Iran has been stripped of its ability to project power throughout the Middle East, and left humiliated, as Israel has destroyed Hamas and dramatically weakened Hezbollah. The latter, in turn, contributed heavily to the shocking collapse of Assad’s forces. During the earlier fighting in Aleppo, in 2014 and 2015, Hezbollah played a major role in preventing the city from falling to the rebels, and its ongoing presence in the city served as a deterrent to rebel forces. But the substantially diminished Hezbollah of today could no longer deter the rebels. In addition, Israel’s air force made it impossible for Shiite militias in Iraq to enter Syria as reinforcements for Assad.

Wurmser characterized the regime of the mullahs in Iran as traveling on a “downward ramp,” and opined that it is concerned about its own ability to survive. Reportedly, there is serious infighting and mutual recriminations within the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which has the primary responsibility for Iran’s foreign adventures, over responsibility for Assad’s fall.

In the meantime, Israel flew 350 sorties in Syria in the first few days following Bashar Assad’s flight and destroyed virtually Syria’s entire navy, most of its air force, including fighter jets and attack helicopters, and its tank corps. Perhaps the IAF’s highest priority was Syria’s chemical weapons stores, lest they ever fall into the hands of those who mean Israel ill. The IAF spent two days bombing a “scientific institute” near Damascus, used to store and manufacture chemical weapons.

Israel destroyed dozens of weapons production sites, and a variety of Scud missiles, cruise missiles, sea-to-sea missiles, and drones. It has also taken advantage of the vacuum in Syria to seize the entirety of Mount Hermon, and to clear a security border between southern Syria and the Golan Heights.

We are witnessing something like the v’nahafoch hu of Purim. Prior to October 7, Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar envisioned Iran and its proxies destroying Israel once and for all. Now, Sinwar is dead, killed by IDF soldiers in Gaza, and Hamas reduced to a rump military organization and unable to rearm. On October 8, Hezbollah joined Hamas by firing missiles at Israel, and eventually forced 60,000 residents of Israel’s north to evacuate from their homes. Now, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and all his top lieutenants have been eliminated and most of Hezbollah’s missiles destroyed. Syria has fallen, and the Iranian regime fears for its own continued existence.

Surveying this turnaround, I cannot help thinking of something the late Professor Robert Wistrich, the great scholar of anti-Semitism, once told me: There is a pattern in Jewish history of every tyrant who sets out to destroy the Jewish People, from Haman to Hitler to Stalin, almost immediately thereafter embarking on a course of action leading to his own downfall.

DICTATORS IN TOTALITARIAN SOCIETIES depend on terrorizing their own people. And few more so than Bashar al-Assad. Trained in Britain as an ophthalmologist, he proved every bit as ruthless and murderous as his father before him. After a 27-day siege of Hama in 1982, forces under the command of Hafez Assad’s brother, Rafiq, killed up to 40,000 residents of Hama.

Like father, like son. Nigel Jones writes in the Spectator, “There were no limits to [Bashar] Assad’s violence against his own rebellious people. Torture was routine in the regime’s jails, and human rights monitors estimate that 32,000 have died in them as a result.”

Bashar infamously employed poison gas against his own population. When rebel forces appeared on the verge of taking Aleppo in the Syrian civil war, Russian planes came to Assad’s aid by reducing Aleppo’s center to rubble with barrel bombs, which are highly lethal in confined urban areas.

“Joint Russian and Syrian-government air strikes deliberately targeted hospitals and practiced ‘double tap’ strikes, bombing a civilian target and then hitting the same location soon afterward to kill rescue workers,” according to Anne Appelbaum in the Atlantic.

(Somehow, Russia’s targeting of civilian populations in Syria, Chechnya, and today in the Ukraine never seem to rouse American university students.)

Dictators use systematic cruelty and brutality to instill a feeling of utter hopelessness in their populations. Yet they can fall in an instant when the tyrant’s soldiers no longer believe that he can protect them from their compatriots’ wrath. That is what happened in Syria when Assad could not call upon Iran or its Hezbollah proxy or Russia for support.

Another technique of totalitarians of all sorts is called “preference falsification,” by which people are forced to profess belief in things that they know not to be true. The point of the technique is to convince each individual that they alone know that what they are saying is false.

In a brilliant Substack essay, drawing on the work of economist Timur Kuran (Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification), law professor Glenn Harlan Reynolds points out that similar techniques are employed by governments and social movements, even in democratic societies: People refrain from expressing unpopular views to avoid ostracism or punishment.

But just as dictators can fall overnight, so can the bubble pop on ideological conformity when people realize that their views are widely shared. Kuran calls that a “preference cascade.”

And Reynolds argues that Donald Trump’s recent victory, with a majority of the popular vote, is such a moment. Ever since Trump appeared upon the scene, anyone who wanted to be heard among the chattering classes and express heterodox views found it necessary to preface his remarks by stating how repugnant he found Trump to be.

But in the weeks since the election, Trump’s popularity, according to one CBS poll, has increased six points, among both younger and older voters. The widespread imitation of the president-elect’s dance moves suggest that it is no longer the height of intellectual gaucherie to confess that one is supportive of Trump’s policy preferences and his determination to bring them to fruition.

It turns out, Reynolds suggests, that most people never bought into wokeism, but between the constant repetition of its tenets by the media, and the fear of being mobbed and canceled if you begged to differ, many people were afraid to stand up. Trump’s election and Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter and success in turning X into a genuine free speech platform, however, changed all that.

What William Deresiewicz, who formerly taught English at Yale, labels “Academe’s Divorce From Reality” was an effort to impose a cultural revolution from the top down. And the recent election was a referendum on the “politics of the academy.” It did not go well for the academy. From 2020 to 2024, Trump improved his numbers in 2,764 of America’s counties, and all 50 states moved to the right from four years earlier.

Americans, even in bright blue California, have rejected the efforts of progressive Soros-backed prosecutors to decriminalize property and drug crimes. Similarly, they do not want minors too young to buy a beer or vote making decisions about whether to undergo drastic and usually irreversible operations that will affect their future lives, in the name of “affirmative care.” Nor do they want biological men dominating women’s sports.

They reject the vision of America as divided into oppressors and oppressed, with all virtue inhering in the oppressed, and the “social justice” imperative that requires both government and private organizations to discriminate against white men in order to remedy past injustices. By overwhelming majorities, including blacks and other minorities, Americans prefer Martin Luther King’s vision of a “colorblind” society to one in which benefits are parceled out based on group identity.

The incoming president seems intent on fulfilling the wishes of the majority of Americans. Christopher Rufo, the foremost crusader against DEI, has presented Trump with a detailed plan for uprooting DEI from all government offices, by reversing the executive orders of both the Obama and Biden administrations embedding DEI throughout the government, including the military.

And Rufo has similar plans for higher education to encourage all institutions receiving government funding to dismantle their huge DEI bureaucracies, as the University of Michigan recently did by banning all requirements of DEI statements as a condition of hiring or admission. It is a good bet that the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division under Harmeet Dhillon will no longer be spending much of its time harassing states and localities trying to maintain the accuracy of their voter rolls and ensuring electoral integrity, and a good deal more protecting the rights of Jewish students on campus, as was the case in the first Trump administration.

In short, the stage has been set for dramatic and rapid change. Perhaps not as fast or as unexpected as Bashar al-Assad’s fall, but plenty dramatic enough nevertheless.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1041. Yonoson Rosenblum may be contacted directly at rosenblum@mishpacha.com)