Restoring Syria, Stabilizing the Middle East

"[Syria is at a] turning point [as is the rest of the Middle East]."

"If we can now all come together to support the Syrian people and the Syrian government in actually taking charge, and building a prosperous stable secure Syria, that will impact all of the region."

Prince Faisal bin Farhan, foreign minister of Saudi Arabia 

 

"[Gulf countries see an opportunity to] reshape the regional order, [as Syrians devote  themselves to rebuilding lives for themselves out of the rubble of 14 years of civil war]."

"[We still have Yemen that's in trouble -- Sudan, Libya -- but for one time in many years, one story is not one of blood and war and destruction and that's where we want to go."

"A healthy region means a healthy Gulf."

Bader Al-Saif assistant professor of history, Kuwait University 

Ahmed al-Shara and his delegation welcomed in the UAE  Stimson

 

While now-ousted Alawite Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was still barrel-bombing and chemical weapons-spraying majority Sunni Syrians, the Arab League which had banished him from their midst, did a U-turn and welcomed him back to be seated amongst them as a member in good standing. This, while Assad continued his loyalty to the Islamic Republic of Iran which sponsored Syria's persecution of its defiant majority Sunni population, when Russia had entered the civil war to aerially bombard Sunni strongholds in Syria.

 

The sectarian violence that internally displaced millions of Syrians, with millions more becoming refugees reflected traditional violent antipathy between the two major branches of Islam, Sunni and Shia. While Iran established its two-pronged 'axis of resistance' by cultivating, training and arming proxy militias in Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen and Gaza for its long-range aspiration of Shi'ite conquest of the Middle East, its plans also included the destruction of the sole non-Muslim state in the region, the Jewish state of Israel.

 

When Hamas took agency to invade southern Israel with thousands of its terrorist operatives to launch a massive bloodbath among Israeli farming communities near the Gaza border, deliberately and with detailed planning to impose a horrendous savagery of mass rape, mutilation, and widespread carnage that saw entire families burned to death in their  homes -- children, the elderly, women and foreign farm workers violently abducted to serve as hostages, an unprepared Israel while mourning its losses responded by invading Gaza to root out and destroy the Palestinian terror groups to completely neutralize their functionality.

 

Iran's related terror proxies attacked Israel in defence of Hamas; Hezbollah on the northern border, and the Houthis from Yemen. Shia militias in Iraq, and Assad's Syrian forces as well as the Islamic Republican Guard Corps al Quds division driving Iran to send missiles into Israel posed a pincer threat to the Jewish state. The Israeli military fought them all, and decimated both Hezbollah and Hamas, targeting their leaders, their command posts and their weapons caches, leaving them utterly diminished as organized fighting forces. 

 

The Israeli aerial bombardment of Iran neutralized many of the terror state's primary political, scientific and military figures, targeted military bases destroying missile production sites, and bombing the country's nuclear sites and facilities with the intention of destroying its capacity to further enrich uranium to weapons-grade state. Israel, in the course of several years militarily responding to the Hamas imposition of conflict was able to dismantle and neutralize the rabid threat of Islamist terrorism cultivated by Iran.

 

An opportunity that was grasped by a coalition of Syrian 'rebels' comprised of Syrian Islamist groups that were themselves terrorists, events leading to Bashar al-Assad fleeing to Russia for haven, and a former terrorist linked to al-Qaeda and ISIL, Ahmed al Sharaa, ensconced as Syria's new president, seeking to present as a moderate, a reformer, to take Syria into a new direction and restore it as a fulcrum of the Middle East, taking its place among the other nations with full accreditation. 

"I am 'ordering the cessation of sanctions against Syria to give them a fresh start'." 

"It gives them a chance for greatness. The sanctions were really crippling, very powerful." 

"I felt very strongly that this would give them a chance. It's not going to be easy anyway, so gives them a good strong chance. And, it was my honour to do so."

"We made a speech last night, and that was the thing that got the biggest applause from the room."

U.S. President Donald Trump at Gulf Cooperation Council

In this photo released by the Saudi Royal Palace, Syria's interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa, left, shakes hands with U.S. President Donald Trump in Riyadh. (Bandar Aljaloud/Saudi Royal Palace/The Associated Press)

 

Saudi Arabia and Qatar paid off Syria's $15.5 million World Bank debt, a pittance for them, but enabling Syria to be once more eligible for grants to fund reconstruction. The Mediterranean port of Tartus in Syria once handed to Russia as a naval base, is now to be developed by D World owned by the gulf emirate of Dubai. Once an integral part of Tehran's 'crescent of influence' along with Iraq and Lebanon, Syria is now poised to return to the Sunni Islam majority world of the Middle East. 

 

The hostility between the Sunni states and Iran, fearing that the Islamic Republic's brand of Islam could penetrate their own minority Shia populations with its  revolutionary ideology zeal leading to mass instability is being put to rest. As is the fear that Iran could succeed in its conquest aspirations to become the premier influence in the region. Iran's interference in Saudi Arabia, bombing its oil fields, its missiles shot at Qatar to hit American bases there, signed its influence death-warrant.

 

And now that the Arab majority Sunni Muslim states recognize Israel's critical role in vanquishing the aspirations of the Persian Shi'ites, and greater cooperation leading to normalization between them with Israel through membership in the Abraham Accords has been accepted, their mission to restore relations within the Arab League and to establish opportunities for economic development and political stability has sprung into action.  

 

In this photo provided by the Saudi Ministry of Media, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman greets Syria's interim President Ahmad al-Sharaa, left, during his arrival at the royal palace in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Sunday, Feb. 2, 2025. (Saudi Ministry of Media via AP)

 

"To all of Israel's friends in the Middle East – those who are with us today and those who will join us tomorrow – I say, salaam aleichem, peace unto thee, shalom."

"[This day] brings hope to all of the children of Abraham."

"The blessings of peace that we make today will be enormous,” he continued, “first because this peace will eventually expand to include other Arab states, and ultimately, it can end the Arab-Israel conflict once and for all."

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, 15 September 2020

 

L to R: Bahrain’s Foreign Minister Abdullatif Al Zayani, Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, US President Donald Trump and United Arab Emirates (UAE) Foreign Minister Abdullah bin Zayed participate in the signing ceremony of the Abraham Accords. September 15, 2020   (photo credit: REUTERS/TOM BRENNER)

"[The accord will] change the course of history, [it marks] the dawn of a new Middle East."

"Together these agreements will serve as the foundation for a comprehensive peace across the entire region, something which nobody thought was possible, certainly not in this day and age."

"These agreements prove that the nations of the region are breaking free from failed approaches of the past. Today's signing sets history on a new course and there will be other countries very very soon that will follow these great leaders."

U.S. President Donald Trump

The United Arab Emirates and Bahrain were never at war with Israel. Their military arms never formed a coalition with Middle East Arab nations like Syria, Egypt, Iraq and Jordan to march on Israel with the intention of destroying it. And while most Arab countries expelled their Jewish citizens and confiscated their properties when Israel we re-formed as a nation in 1948, neither of the Gulf countries removed citizenship from their Jewish populations. Bahrain had a Jewish parliamentarian, Houda Ezra Ebrahim Nonoo.

 

As a Bahrainian parliamentarian she was appointed Ambassador to the United States from 2008 to 2013, by decree of Foreign Affairs Minister Khaled Ben Ahmad Al=Khalifa. Civil relations between Israel and the UAE and Bahrain through behind-the-scene arrangement has been ongoing for years. What their successive and simultaneous peace accords with Israel succeeded in doing was formalizing a warming relationship into a universally recognized position of neighbourly acceptance.

 

The accord, named the Abraham Accord, takes its name from the historical Biblical recognition that Arabs and Jews emerged from the same source in the Middle East. The Old Testament patriarch Abraham and his wife Sarah in their old age finally bearing a son, Isaac, and an already-existing son of Abraham and a handmaiden of Sarah's, Ishmael, becoming the forbears of Jews and Arabs respectively. And that out of monotheistic Judaism came Christianity with the birth of the Jewish sage Jesus, and then the latecomer religion Islam. All three make up the Abrahamic trio.

 

Equally behind-the-scenes interventions and guidance by the Trump administration working to develop further a formal acknowledgement of acceptance of Israel  and peace between neighbours has resulted in the two Gulf nations agreeing to sign a formal concordance of peace, partially symbolic, and wholly reflective of the fact that the region needed to move away from its tradition of hostility to the presence of the historical-to-the-present position of the State of Israel. The Trump administration succeeded where previous administrations all failed to achieve that goal.

 

A group of paratroopers surrounds then-IDF chief rabbi
Shlomo Goren at the Western Wall on June 7, 1967.

 

And they did so by abandoning the expectation that no Arab country would take measures to normalize their relations with Israel until the issue of Palestinian statehood alongside Israel materialized, other than the peace agreements signed between Israel and Egypt on Israel's return of the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt, captured in the 1967 war when Egypt marched with Jordan and Syria against Israel as part of a combined Arab army. Jordan followed years later. Israel retains the Golan Heights from which Syrian forces had continually attacked Israel from above.

 

 

The only non-Arab Muslim country in the Middle East, Shiite Iran, whose brand of Islam seeks ascendancy over the majority Sunni Muslim Arab nations, has become a threat to the balance of power and the security and stabilization of the Middle East. The Islamic Republic of Iran's interference in Arab nations, from Lebanon where it established Shia Hezbollah, to Syria where it supports the Alawite Shia minority regime against the Sunni majority, and Yemen where Houthi Shia rebels have torn the country apart, and its dedication to achieving nuclear supremacy concerns their Arab Sunni and Jewish Israel neighbours mightily.

Concerns that have brought Arab countries like Saudi Arabia and Oman a little closer to Israel, viewed as a strong opponent of Persian Iran's agenda. The Palestinian agenda has gradually receded into the background in the face of the perceived threat from Iran and the need to present a united opposition to its plans, opposing Saudi Arabian stewardship of Mecca and Medina for one thing. For another, the failure, one after another, of the Palestinian Authority and its predecessor Yasser Arafat, to make good on their professed wish to achieve nationhood -- by accepting their Jewish neighbour unconditionally.

All of which conspired over time to reduce the fixation of the Arab League in its violent hostility to Israel's presence, in ostensible support of the Palestinian 'cause'. A cause which has proven time and time again that it is not peace with Israel that consumes its attention to the future, but the destruction of Israel to enable the Palestinian leadership to claim the heritage geography on which Israel sits as 'Palestinian', including the ancient Judean city of Jerusalem.

President Trump's negotiations with other Arab nations appears to be bearing fruit, with rumours of other Arab states like Morocco in North Africa reaching the decision-point of agreeing it to be past time to part with the antipathies of the past and welcome a future of shared geography, trade opportunities, sharing of future technologies to benefit and enrich the experience of all nations in the region. While the Palestinian Authority and Hamas fume and threaten both Israel and those whom they claim have betrayed them, they betray their own existential interests.