Remembering David Pryce-Jones

Posted on December 8, 2025 by jonathanspyer

8/12

I was sad to learn last week of the death of David Pryce-Jones at the age of 89.   David was a fascinating man.  When you met him, you were immediately struck by an odd combination: his manners and style were British aristocratic, and this made the first impression.  The sense that swiftly followed, however, was one of a kind of steely moral authority that I at least don’t connect to people of that type, who usually like to affect a kind of light, amused attitude to people and human affairs.  I was struck by this unusual combination, and liked it a lot.  Later, when I learned more about David’s background, and the unique mix of Central European Jewish Haute Bourgeoisie and British (specifically Welsh) upper class from which he came, it made sense. 

I first saw David in I suppose 1989, when I attended a talk he gave to a Jewish audience in north London  about his book ‘The Closed Circle: an Interpretation of the Arabs.’  The book was remarkably prescient regarding the difficulties of making long-term, contractual peace in the Arab world, the important and largely ignored role of tribal and clan norms in Arab politics, and the implications these had for Israel’s position in the region and the prospects for historic compromise between Jews and Arabs.  The book was a characteristically brave venture, also, even back then. The audience, largely secular and liberal Jewish, was baffled I think by his argument, but few tried to take him on.  Those that did were met by that combination of exquisite manners and utter frankness and refusal to compromise on any point of principle which characterized David. 

I met him properly much later, when I was in the process of writing my first book, ‘The Transforming Fire.’  David was a friend of the late Barry Rubin, for whom I worked at the time.  Barry suggested I go to meet David when in London, to get some advice and see if he’d be amenable to writing a blurb.  I turned up at David’s elegant home in one of the best parts of central London.  In the course of the meeting, I committed two notable and ridiculous gaucheries.  The first was when I received my cup of tea-with-milk, with the teabag still in it.  As we were speaking, I, without thinking, picked out the teabag with my hands and began squeezing the last bits of strong tea from it into the cup.  I looked up to see David concealing a slight look of alarm.  The second, deeper embarrassment came when David asked me what kind of book I was writing.  ‘Well, it’s kind of along the lines of Arthur Koestler’s ‘Scum of the Earth’,’ I said, by which I was trying to say that it was a combination of reportage, personal memory and political analysis.’  I had forgotten that David Pryce-Jones had been a personal friend of the late Koestler.  He replied with a non-committal ‘Arthur did have a certain genius, you know…’  I managed tho barely to avoid being swallowed up by the earth.  But I think he was amused by me and wrote  a very nice blurb for the book. 

I met him a couple of times after that.  He would often stay at the Dan Tel Aviv hotel when in Israel.  The last time I saw him was in mid-2008.  It was shortly after the killing of the Hizballah military chief Imad Mughniyeh.  We agreed that to have taken part in an operation like that should be enough in itself to justify one’s presence on the earth, enabling a relaxed and pleasure seeking lifestyle thereafter.  I think he enjoyed the conversation.  I didn’t see him again but I carried on reading his work.  The Closed Circle and another work he wrote called ‘The Face of Defeat’ still have prominent places on the bookshelf next to my desk. 

David Pryce-Jones was a man very much of the twentieth century, born into and forged by the horrific events of the middle part of that century.  I read obituaries saying that he never fully resolved the contradictions of his background, but I don’t think that’s quite right.  He had resolved them into a unique blend, into which the best parts of both seem to have been combined. 

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Some Reflections on Two Years of War in Gaza

Posted on October 18, 2025 by jonathanspyer

Australian, 18/10

At the Gama Junction, a few kilometers from the Gaza border,  I met Gadi Mozes.  Among the crowd of people waiting to greet the convoy bearing the last 13 of the living Israeli hostages from Gaza.  Gadi, who is 80 years old, is a member of Kibbutz Nir Oz.  He was standing amid a group of residents of the kibbutz.  They had a banner bearing the name of their community and a Hebrew message saying “We aren’t tired – we are the pavers of the path.” 

Tiny Nir Oz was the community perhaps hardest hit of all in the massacres of October 7.  47 of its 400 residents were killed on that day, and another 76 taken hostage.  Gadi’s long term partner, Efrat Katz, was among those murdered.  Gadi was held as a hostage for 482 days, most of it in solitary confinement, by Palestinian Islamic Jihad.  He met my gaze steadily when I approached him after recognizing him, and politely declined to be interviewed.  “You can photograph me, though,” he said, so I did.  I was lucky because Gadi’s son made a joke just before I pressed the shutter, so he’s smiling warmly in the photograph.  That isn’t what he looks like most of the time. Mostly, there was that unreachable gravity about him that people who have suffered the unimaginable often have. 

A few minutes later, the convoy bringing the 13 hostages came down the road.  The shouting was unexpectedly loud.  I stood at the front to get a clear line for photographing, so I couldn’t see people for a moment, and it was like a great wave of sound behind me. A sort of wall of cheering and applause.  “Youre heroes,” someone called out.  It was over quickly and the convoy moved on, on its way to Tel Aviv.  It occurred to me that we had just witnessed the last act of the two year war between Israel and Hamas. 

It affected me more than I had expected.  Perhaps it was the ride down from Jerusalem, and the point at which we entered what I think of, like Paul Simon says in ‘Graceland’ as the cradle of the war.  The names, once just nondescript Hebrew locations, have now become signifiers of something monumental and somber, that is already solidifying into history.  One after another.  Kibbutz Beeri, the scene of one of the most terrible massacres.  And then Alumim, which the Hamas men failed to enter.  A desperate attack by a few self-mobilized men from the air force commandos held them up, and bought time.  One of the commandos, who was killed in that fight, was Ido Rosenthal, a relative of some  good friends of mine from Jerusalem.  I remembered him from when we were younger.  A preternaturally calm man, with the unmistakable look of an elite fighter, and no interest whatsoever  in making a thing out of it.  Except when it mattered. 

And then, further south, the site of the Nova festival.  This has already become a kind of shrine.  There are portraits and little messages about many of the people killed there, all arranged in what was the main dancing area of the festival, where much of the slaughter took place.  Mainly you’re struck by how impossibly young they all were.  Some of the messages have a kind of sweetly exhortary tone which for those who know the country well is immediately identifiable as quintessentially Israeli.  Not the Israeliness that gets talked about and that people think they know, but another element.  The memorial for Dor Hanan Shafir, for example, exhorts the reader to “do good deeds, which were characteristic of Dor, in his memory:  1. Check in on a friend, especially if they are going through a tough time. 2. Complete tasks fully.  3. Honor your parents.”  Shafir, who was 30, and his fiancée Savyon were both murdered at the Nova site. 

The arrival of the last 13 living hostages to Israel effectively brings the curtain down on the war that the massacres of October 7 initiated. 

The conflict has been of monumental dimensions.  Western coverage has concentrated on Gaza, and on the plight of its civilian population.  At its height, however, in the 15 month period between April 2024 and July 2025, this was a region-wide, state to state conflict.  Gaza was the spark that ignited it.  The narrow coastal strip then formed a single front within the larger picture, before returning to be the sole arena of combat in the final months.   The region wide conflict came about because of the alliance system of which Hamas was and is a part, namely the group of states and movements aligned with and supported by the Islamic Republic of Iran.  The most immediately striking outcome of the war is the very significant weakening of this alliance, though not yet its destruction. 

Evidence which has emerged since October 7 suggests that the attacks were not part of a coordinated effort by Iran and its allies.  Rather, Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar chose to act alone.  So from Hamas’s point of view, October 7 was something of a leap in the dark.  A handwritten document authored by Sinwar and recovered by the IDF during the fighting in Gaza indicates that the Hamas leader expected, without knowing for sure, that bold action by his movement would launch a much wider regional conflagration.  It also appears that he expected that the attacks would trigger a wider uprising west of the Jordan River, bringing in both West Bank Palestinians and Arab citizens of Israel. 

A passage from the document reads “There may be indications of enemy collapse already at the outset, and the movements of our people “inside” in Jerusalem and the West Bank, as well as Hezbollah’s attack, may encourage this. Therefore, we must be prepared to expand the attack to the maximum.”  Elsewhere, Sinwar writes of the need for images “which will trigger a surge of euphoria, frenzy, and momentum among our people, especially among the residents of the West Bank, the “internal” [Israeli Arabs], Jerusalem, and our entire Islamic nation.”

Sinwar got his images, all right, but they didn’t produce the results he expected, or hoped for.  In the event,  there was no joining of the fray by Arab Israelis or Arab Jerusalemites, or West Bank Palestinians.  The Hamas leader’s hope wasn’t absurd.  In the events of May, 2021, there had been some stirrings in these areas in sympathy with Gaza and the supposed defence of Al Aqsa Mosque.  But not this time. 

The regional response, Sinwar’s ‘Hizballah attack’ did come, but it came late, and piecemeal.  This appears to have been the product of the Hamas leaders’ decision to go it alone, without seeking the prior assent or approval of their allies. This left the allies in the position of either being seen to desert Gaza in its hour of need, or risking entry into a major war with Israel before they were completely ready (ie mainly before Iran had gone nuclear, but also before their various assets and forces had reached the needed levels of capacity and power). 

The result: Iran and its allies tried to split the difference, entering the war, but not, they hoped, to a level that would bring down major Israeli retribution.  They also seem to have failed to coordinate their response.  The result was that Israel was able to focus on each of the component parts in turn, rather than being forced to deal with all of them simultaneously. 

Hizballah in Lebanon entered the war as early as October 8.  Israel responded defensively for a year, even as 70,000 Israelis were forced to leave their homes in the north.  A major operation began against the organization in September, 2024 and by the end of the year Hizballah was pulverized, its leadership dead, with the IDF deployed in five outposts north of the border. 

The Yemeni Ansar Allah (Houthis) organisation began its attacks on Israel on October 19, 2023.  The Houthis achieved their main successes, however, against international shipping on the Gulf of Aden-Red Sea route.  They hardly penetrated Israeli airspace.  Israel, in response, destroyed large swathes of infrastructure in the Houthi controlled part of Yemen, killing also the Houthis’ prime minister and a large part of his Cabinet. 

Iran itself chose to enter the war in April, 2025, with a ballistic missile and drone attack on Israel, repeated in October of that year.  Israel’s major response came in June, 2025, in coordination with the US, causing massive damage to Iran’s nuclear sites, destroying its air defenses and killing a number of senior officials, before Teheran accepted a ceasefire. 

In a historically significant by-product of the weakening of the Iran-led axis, the weakened Assad regime in Syria was finally over-run in December 2024 by the Islamist insurgency under way against it since 2012. 

Finally, with the war once more reduced to a single front, Hamas in October 2025 agreed to a ceasefire which would include the release of  all Israeli hostages, while leaving Israel in control of part of Gaza. 

From this quick tour, it’s plain that the main result of Sinwar’s decision to launch the October 7 attacks has been the decimation of the area he controlled, and the profound weakening of the alliance of which he was part.   

In the specific context of Gaza, however, Israel has not achieved a complete victory.  Hamas is already re-emerging in the 47% of the Strip from which the IDF has withdrawn.  The organisation still musters somewhere around 20,000 fighters.  The clan based Palestinian militias operating in cooperation with Israel will seek to stand against them.  This means that the reassertion of de facto control in part of Gaza by Hamas, or renewed strife as other elements seek to prevent this looks likely.  The ‘International Stabilisation Force’ envisaged by President Donald Trump’s plan does not yet exist.  In the meantime, other forces will fight in the vacuum.  Hamas has not surrendered or disarmed, and will not do so of its own free will. This matter remains to be settled.

So the outcome of the war on the ground, across the region, is very favourable for Israel. The country, its defence forces and its civil society recovered quickly from the shock of October 7, re-sealed the border, and went on to deliver crushing, tho not yet terminal blows against a regional axis arrayed against them.  That’s the way it looks from the Middle East, where hard power and its uses are understood by both friend and foe. 

On the diplomatic and international stage, the picture is different.  Western media coverage concentrated on Gaza throughout the war. The framing of the coverage often, somewhat surreally, depicted events as a kind of senseless assault by Israel on a civilian population.  This picture bears no resemblance to the truth. Israel’s Gaza operations in many of their details and in their results resembled the global coalition’s war against the Islamic State.  I say that not as a passive observer, but as a correspondent who covered both those wars on many occasions from the front lines.

But the extent to which this false depiction has penetrated large swathes of public consciousness in the west gives reason for pause.  The crowds of thousands in western capitals calling for the destruction of Israel, and the strong support afforded those crowds by powerful political forces up to and including governments in the west, and up to and including rewarding Hamas with recognition of a Palestinian state, all form troubling elements of the picture of the last two years. 

There is a point at which this shades into the area of the intangible.  Why does a disproportionate, furious anger against the Jews seem to re-surface, in altered form, generation after generation?  But there is also something deeply tangible here.  It is the growth of Islamist political power, as a result of ideological currents and demographic changes, in a series of western countries.  This phenomenon, and its alliance with a part of the political left, lies behind these developments in the west.  Israel needs, and has lacked, a diplomatic and political strategy for addressing these matters.  Perhaps, now there is time, such a strategy may be assembled. 

The rise of anti Israel and anti Jewish sentiment in the west, the emergence of Hamas as a force, and the Iran-led alliance are ultimately products of the same source.  This source is the revolutionary political Islam which has erupted to prominence over the last half century.  When seen from this point of view, it is clear that the root cause that led to the October 7 massacres has not yet been vanquished, even if some of its manifestations have been severely weakened.  So there are undoubtedly many chapters to come.  But this is a chapter now concluded, with considerable success and achievement, from the Israeli point of view. 

The day the last hostages came home was the festival of Simchat Torah.  Two years exactly in the Jewish calendar from the day of the massacres in 2023.  The first day of the war, and its last.  I came home from reporting on the Gaza border to my neighborhood in Jerusalem.  At the local corner store, Max, the owner, a veteran immigrant from Kharkov in Ukraine was giving out free drinks of some powerful smelling spirit, poured in plastic cups, to his customers.  “My father’s moonshine,” he answered, when I asked what it was.  “He makes it out of sugar, with aniseed, and a bit of ginger.”  I drank a shot of it and departed.  Further down the road, at one of the neighborhood synagogues, I watched through the window for a while as the young, black bearded Rabbi and some of his congregants danced with the Torah scrolls, in the brightly lit room, as is customary on this festival. 

I remembered a time, a few days after October 7, 2023, when this rabbi and I had taken part in a hurried meeting at an apartment in the neighborhood.  The meeting was about efforts to form an emergency response unit, in case the late Yahya Sinwar’s vision of inter-communal war began to look like coming true in our seam-line neighborhood of Jerusalem. They were looking for people with the right military background, to register a local unit of this kind.  After the meeting, the rabbi and I and four or five others had walked around the neighborhood, mapping out places where such a unit might deploy in the event that an October 7 type attack erupted here.  I remember the urgency and the strangeness of it all. Two years later, almost to the day, the rabbi is dancing with his Torah scroll, and  I’m drinking Max’s father’s homemade vodka.  There will be further chapters to be written in this, no doubt.  Good that this one’s over, anyway. 

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Reflections on the rumors of imminent civil war in the UK

Posted on September 3, 2025 by jonathanspyer

There has been much online talk in recent months about the possibility of ‘civil war’  in the UK.  The instinctive response to such talk, or my instinctive response, anyway, is to dismiss it as absurd. The United Kingdom is an old, well established state. Its institutions and its political ways have deep foundations. In particular, a certain habit of political moderation and pragmatism has long been one of the country’s most notable characteristics. Observing recent developments in Britain, however, I think that this response, alas, might need to be retired.  Brits won’t be putting on Cavalier or Roundhead outfits and running at each other in a field any time soon.   Nevertheless, amused bemusement, while enjoyable, is probably no longer sufficient, or advised. 

I think that there are two emergent and growing camps on opposite sides of the political divide in the UK, the first of which has lost or never had any commitment to the norms of democratic politics, and the second of which is increasingly disillusioned with the idea that adherence to these norms can produce anything, because the game is rigged. The question of whether serious civil strife will take place in the UK I think depends on whether these camps will grow, (a very real possibility), or conversely, whether the center can hold, because the issues that have caused the growing polarization will be addressed in whole or in part by the political mainstream. On the one hand, because of the long history of political stability in the UK, it feels inevitable that the latter course of events must take place. On the other hand, there is a growing sense, and not only regarding the UK, that we have entered a new political age in which it would be foolish to feel secure in such assumptions.  

The first of the aforementioned camps consists of mobilized adherents of political Islam, and their supporters from within the UK’s Muslim communities, in alliance with elements of the white radical left.  The cause of Hamas in Gaza and support for the destruction of Israel is the ‘flagship’ issue for this camp, but Gaza is a mobilizing tool rather than the substantive core of this alliance.  Anti Jewish sentiment is currently being expressed increasingly openly in the discourse of this camp, usually in the form of criticism of perceived ‘Jewish supremacy,’ replacing the previous coded attacks on ‘Zionism.’ 

The Islamists are in the business of establishing a sectarian logic to British life, in which Islam will come to demand a sort of cultural and political autonomy. Once this is formed, the issue will be to extend its boundaries both literally, in terms of areas of de facto control at street level, and figuratively, in terms of developing a Muslim power bloc in the politics of the country. 

The radical left aligns itself with this dynamic camp, because it sees it as an instrument which can damage and deplete the existing power structure in the UK, to which the radical left is centrally opposed.  The radical left, whose adherents are delusional, doesn’t realise that the existing power structure is also its own defense against the intention of the Islamists to introduce norms currently prevalent in Afghanistan and Pakistan. It will realize this, if at all, only the way that the leftist fellow travellers of the Islamic Revolution of Iran in 1979 did: ie when its too late. Still, there now exists at the more extreme  edge of the left a burgeoning subculture committed to political violence, as may be witnessed in the actions of the now proscribed Palestine Action group over the past year.  This may I think be compared in its nature to those parts of the ‘New Left’ of the late 1960s and 70s who in the first years of the 1970s began to engage in political violence.  The most notable places in which this phenomenon took root were Germany and Italy, to a much lesser extent in France and the US, and in Britain at that time hardly at all. This does not however, indicate a kind of  permanent immunity in the UK from phenomena of this kind.  Regarding the Islamists, elements within this camp have an existing pattern of murderous political violence which has included a number of major acts of terror on British soil in recent years. 

On the opposing edge of British political life, there is an emergent reaction reflecting the perception that the existing elites are not sufficiently defending against the advance of the Islamist/radical left camp.  The issue of uncontrolled illegal immigration, mainly from the Islamic world, has become the central mobilizing cause for this group, along with the perception that the current government is biased in favor of the Islamists/left and against their opponents and is prepared, either because of fear of the Islamist/far left camp or partial identification with it,  to use law enforcement as a tool in silencing dissent. 

I think the signs are already clear that this camp will take the form of a kind of British ethnic nationalism (ie a nationalism seeking to bring together the indigenous English, Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish populations).  I recall a statement by one articulate online voice from within this gathering who said that he judges membership of the English community by ‘whether your face would have fitted in the shield wall at Senlac Hill.’   This is powerful, evocative language, designed to appeal to ethnic identification.  Anyone who knows the British Isles knows exactly which faces the speaker is talking about, and which he is excluding. Sentiments of this kind are likely to be at the heart of this trend.  (ie atavistic appeals to indigenous identity, rather than commitment to this or that political arrangement). This at its more radical end is likely to involve bigotry against all non-indigenous populations and it is already possible to find examples of antisemitism in the statements of some parts of this camp.  It will be at the most radical end of this group that one will find the possibility of reactive political violence directed against the other side, or possibly also against illegal immigrants. 

I should make clear that I am not arguing for the moral equivalence of these two camps.  Its clear that the Islamist/radical left group represent an attempt to subvert and destroy a particular cultural and political space and to replace it with something else.  That is, it is this camp which is the ‘aggressor.’  The other one is an attempt at defense.  Having said that, this defensive status doesn’t mean that one should ignore the various elements gathered around these particular colours, including ones whose ascendance may mean the worst for well-established non-indigenous minority groups, including the Jewish community. 

 It isnt by any means certain that the center will collapse or significantly further erode in the UK. For the last three hundred years, British ruling elites have excelled at co-opting radical trends and inducing them to play within the system, rather than against it. This is the ‘sweet moderation, heart of this nation’ that Billy Bragg sang about, not as fatuously as it might first appear, a generation ago. Still, erosion  is a possibility and if it does happen, then the prospect of significant internecine violence by members of these camps exists.  So ‘Civil war’ isn’t I think around the corner in the UK, but the prospect of home grown, possibly severe political violence emerging from the clash between these two growing gatherings seems to me to be a very realistic one.  Indeed, to slightly mis quote England’s best poet of the post 1945 period, I tend to think this may well happen, and soon.  

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Jebalya, Shani Louk and the Conceptzia

Posted on August 30, 2025 by jonathanspyer

I remember the light in the Valley of Ela on the day of Shani Louk’s funeral.  It was late springtime, clear light, of the kind that you get in Jerusalem.  I didn’t get enough time to travel round the villages and the moshavim close to the city at that time, and so I wasn’t used to seeing this light reflected on greenery, rather than on stone.  There was a great silence.  Of a kind you don’t really expect in Israel, and especially not in large crowds.  And especially not at gatherings of mainly very young people, as this perforce was.  Shani had been 22 at the time of her murder by Hamas, and many or most of the people at the funeral were her close friends.  There were people from the trance scene in Israel, of which she had been part, and of which the Nova festival where she was killed had been connected.  There were young men in military uniform also.  Some in that new style combat dress that came in during the war in Gaza,  that at first looked slightly foreign and incongruous to our older veteran’s eyes.  Some bearded and with stronger tans, I suppose, from the harsher sunlight in the Gaza Strip. 

Moshav Srigim is located south of Beit Shemesh, and south west of Jerusalem,  less than half an hour’s drive from the city. The Valley of Ela, famously, is where the battle between David and Goliath is held to have taken place.  Shani Louk was born in nearby Moshav Aderet and then raised at Srigim. 

Before the funeral, I saw the house of the Louk family in the moshav.  A journalist friend of mine by chance lived almost opposite and knew the family well.  Nissim Louk, Shani’s father, was the son of Amram Louk, who had been a prominent local politician for the Labor Party in the area.  Her mother, Ricarda, was a German Catholic who converted to Judaism. 

I was aware of a kind of generational gathering, of something pivotal in the air.  Shani Louk had become a symbol for those lost at the Nova festival, in the massacre carried out by the Islamist gunmen on October 7, 2023.  There had been rumors that she might be alive in Gaza, in the first months following that day.  Then it had become clear that this was not so, after a fragment of her skull was found near the Mefalsim Intersection. And then she had straightforwardly come to symbolize for many people the tragedy of the loss of so many very young people.

 Symbols aside, tho, Shani’s family, though, were grieving like other families do, and the funeral ceremony had the usual awkward aspects.  There was that incongruity that is common at funerals where the chief mourners try to put on smiles, while the peripheral visitors do a performance of profound sadness.  Speaking to the mourners at the funeral, Nissim Louk said that “’“The blood of the murdered ones, and Shani among them, was not abandoned and cried out from the ground.”  This phrase is a biblical one, and is both poignant and disturbing.  In Hebrew it sounds less elevated than it does in English. More literal.  It comes from the story of Cain and Abel.  “Your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground,”, and the second, less well known part:  “like a voice calling for revenge.”  In the case of Shani Louk, it also had a more direct meaning. 

The murdered ones.  Shani Louk was killed execution style as she sought with her friend Orion Hernandez Radoux to escape the site of the Nova festival, where a massacre of Israeli Jews and their friends was taking place on the morning of October 7, 2023.  They were killed at the Mefalsim Intersection, as they tried to head north east, away from Gaza.  Shani was shot in the head and died instantly. Orion Radoux was taken captive.  Shani’s body was then taken to Gaza in the back of a van, paraded through the streets, and spat on and abused by the people there.  Her remains were found, under the ground, in a fetid tunnel beneath a house in the Jebalya refugee camp in northern Gaza, six months later.  The bodies of three other Israelis, Amit Buskila, Ron Binyamin and Yitzhak Gelernter, were laid beside her.  Orion Radoux’s body was found in a different location a few days later. And their blood cried out from the ground. 

A couple of days after Shani’s funeral, I was invited along with some other journalists to travel to the place where the bodies were found, and to interview members of the units that had made the discovery.  Jebalya in the spring of 2024 was a place of destruction, rubble and collapsed buildings.  Battalion 202 of the IDF’s Paratroopers’ Brigade was the unit operating in the area where the bodies of Shani and the others were located.  Captain Roi Beit Yakov, aged 22, from Eli in the northern West Bank was the one on the ground responsible for finding the bodies of the four murdered people. Roi Beit Yaakov was a squad commander in the 202nd.  His squad were operating there and they entered the house where the bodies were located.  It’s not clear if they had prior intelligence about the area and what might be found in it.  It must have been pitch dark, humid and full of dust in the house.  The entrance to the tunnel where the bodies were located was underneath a rug, in a side room.  Beit Yaakov moved the rug and identified the entrance to the tunnel.  He reported his find to his company commander, Major Gal Shabbat, aged 24,  from Tel Aviv. 

The paratroopers then called in assistance from a specialized unit of the Combat Engineers to further investigate.  This unit, called ‘Yahalom’, (Diamond) in Hebrew, has particular expertise in dealing with tunnels.  Its abilities were in high demand in Gaza, where Hamas spent the 16 years between 2007 and 2023 building one of the largest tunnel networks to have been constructed anywhere.  The Yahalom team uncovered the tunnel lid and descended.  About 10 metres down, they entered the tunnel.  A short way into it, they discovered the bodies of the four. 

The story of all this was told to us that day by Almog, commander of the 202nd battalion, and by an un-named officer of the Engineers’ commando team, who wore a balaklava when he spoke to us.  It wasn’t possible to speak to any of the principle characters involved in the discovery of the tunnel.  A few days after the bodies of Shani and the others were located and returned, Roi Beit Yaakov was killed while operating in Jabalya.  He wasn’t killed by Hamas, or at least not directly so.  Roi Beit Yaakov along with five others from the 202nd battalion died in a friendly fire incident.  Then, later on the same day, Gal Shabbat was killed by a Hamas sniper while operating in the area. 

So the circle was closed on the three principal characters in one of the myriad of tragedies that was the war.  The young woman killed and her body subjected to abuse and outrages.  The commander who, in the words of Shani’s father, heard her blood crying out from the ground.  And the officer who, alerted, began the process whereby her body was redeemed and returned to her family for burial with decency and respect.  Not one of them over the age of 25. 

Shani Louk and Roi Beit Yaakov came in many ways from opposite corners of Israeli society.  Shani was, according to relatives interviewed after her death, of ‘pacifist’ outlook. She had obtained a deferment from military service.  She had been living in Tel Aviv at the time of her murder, working as a tattoo artist.  Roi Beit Yaakov was from Eli, in northern Samaria, a stronghold of religious Zionism and of the settlement movement. 

I don’t know what they would have had to say to each other if they had met in a different way.  Perhaps that particular freemasonry that exists among very young people in general and among young Israelis in particular might have enabled them to have found a means of communication.  Now they are like those figures from the volcanic eruption in Pompeii. Frozen forever in particular attitudes.  Joined.   

The Islamist assault on Israel, launched on October 7 was a disaster foretold.  It was a culmination of dynamics that had been building up over the preceding two decades.  The preparations for the October 7 attack were secret, of course, and Israeli intelligence failed to locate them in time.  But the larger forces that led to the attack were all plainly visible.  This was the culminating moment for two related forces which had been growing in plain sight across the Middle East in the preceding years.  The first was Sunni political Islam among the Palestinians.  The war came at a moment when Sunni Islamism appeared defeated, and many analysts of the region had written it off. All the projects which Sunni political Islam had raised up in the region in the preceding decade had gone down to apparent defeat.  The series of uprisings and insurgencies collectively mis-named the ‘Arab Spring’ by the western media had, one by one, been thwarted.  In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood, finally reaching the apex of power after 80 years of trying, lasted only a year in government before being replaced by the return of military power.  In Tunisia, after early electoral successes, the Nahda party was eclipsed by the return of authoritarianism in the person of President Qais Saed.  In Syria, the Sunni Arab uprising, dominated from the outset by Islamists, appeared to have been crushed by the Bashar Assad regime.  In Iraq, the Islamic State organization, which emerged from the al-Qaeda branch in that country, had triumphed briefly, before being destroyed by a US led coalition. 

Even Hamas itself, which had won the only free elections ever conducted in the Palestinian territories, in 2007, found itself boxed in, in its Gaza fiefdom.  Analysts had begun to consider that it was co-opted, corrupted, a secondary player. 

These conclusions, as it turned out, were premature.  Political Islam remained the choice, overwhelmingly, at the popular level in the Sunni Arab world.  It was never likely that the Arab Sunnis would quietly accept their newly found irrelevance on the political and strategic stage of the Middle East.  These facts combined meant that there was always likely to be an eruption from somewhere, at some stage. 

Israel, paradoxically, did not fail to guard against Hamas because of naivete, or because of a belief that the time of conflicts in the region was over.  Rather, the Jewish state thought that Hamas had been pacified by financial inducement.  Israel was anyway focused on a different, if related threat.  Namely, that of the Islamic Republic of Iran and its bid for regional domination.  The Iranian nuclear ambition was first and foremost among challenges in the minds of Israeli strategists and senior officials.  Indeed, it was the bon ton among some in those circles to assert that attention paid on anything else was a distraction and a waste of time and resources.  A certain shift had occurred in the course of 2023, in that it had become increasingly apparent that the array of Islamist proxy organizations that Iran commanded across the Arabic speaking world could not be ignored.  But even here, the focus was on the more powerful Lebanese Hizballah. Hamas in Gaza was regarded as a backwater, a sideshow, its leaders bought off and interested in maintaining quiet. 

In reality, the two phenomena  – the continued vitality of Sunni Political Islam, and the potent threat of the Iran-led regional alliance – were linked.  Linked in their origins, because the founders and originators of the Shia political Islam which came to power in Iran in 1979 were influenced by and had learned from their Sunni counterparts.  And of course linked organizationally, because Hamas was one of the relatively few non-Shia clients of Teheran, its military capacities largely the product of this link.  So the two challenges were branches of the same tree. 

But, and this is the crucial point, the Israeli system wasn’t looking.  There is a built in hostility to ideas and to conceptual thinking in the Israeli security structure.  That’s not how you’d imagine a defense structure created and manned by Jews would be.  But that’s how it is.  The disaster of the opening stages of the Yom Kippur War in 1973, for example, is attributed to something called the ‘conceptzia.’  The conceptzia, or concept in question, was the notion that the Egyptians would not seek to attack Israel for as long as total victory was clearly beyond them, or more specifically until they had integrated the means to carry out deep penetration bombing of Israel.  This concept was indeed flawed.  But the response in Israeli thinking is to find conceptual thinking of any kind to be a kind of taboo.  So after October 7, the new ‘conceptzia’, according to which Hamas had been deterred, was held up for general vilification. 

In contrast to these failed conceptions, plain, empirical thinking is held up as the ideal.  But of course, a species of supposedly non-ideological thinking had in fact given birth to both the pre-1973, and the pre-2023 conception.  In both cases, the mistake was precisely to ignore or misinterpret the conceptual thinking taking place on the other side.  In the 2023 instance, this derived from a lack of curiosity or failure to adequately grapple with Islamist ideas, and their nature, strength and depth.  In place of an ordered exploration of these ideas, and the political behavior they were likely to produce, a supposedly pragmatic outlook concluded that the Gaza Islamists were as susceptible as anyone else to material inducements and physical deterrence, and therefore a judicious and measured mix of the two could induce quiescence on their part.  This was the basic thought mistake, from which flawed policy followed.  It ended in the presence of just under 700 IDF soldiers stationed along the border on the morning when over 3000 jihadi gunmen began their assault from Gaza.  The remedy to it would have been a proper assessment as to the nature of Hamas as an ideological movement.  But this, in a system given to amused cynicism regarding the enemy and his motivations, never took  place. 

The Hamas assault, when it came, rapidly turned into a clash between societies, rather than simply between armed forces.  Because of the particular positioning of Hamas as both a Sunni Islamist group and an ally of Iran, the Iran led regional bloc mobilized, albeit in a partial and piecemeal fashion, in support of its ally.  Despite this, the October 7 massacres were a Sunni Islamist event par excellence, resembling in their details similar rampages by related forces elsewhere in the region, specifically in Iraq and Syria.  Again, the distinction is artificial.  Political Islam is one phenomenon, not two, though its manifestations may differ in the details. 

It was the younger generation in Israel who bore the brunt of the casualties, the sacrifice and the defense of Israel in the days that followed.  The Hungarian Jewish writer Arthur Koestler, in a strange phrasing, says in his autobiography ‘The Invisible Writing’ that ‘ the gods save their worst torments for the ones they love most: the innocents.’  This phrase comes to mind when one thinks of the young people who faced the worst of the October 7 massacres, and who led the way and paid the price in  dreadful fighting in the built up areas of Gaza which followed.  Both Shani Louk and Roi Beit Yaakov, in their different ways, were innocents, I think. Each of types familiar to anyone who  knows the sociological landscape of Israel.  The Tel Aviv tattoo artist and the airborne infantry officer from northern Samaria.  One should speak in sorrow for their loss, but also relate how others like them who remained went on to deliver telling blows to those who killed them.  It is my contention that the details both of the nature of the phenomenon which attacked Israel in 2023, and of how it was turned back (tho not yet destroyed) are of relevance far beyond Israel itself.  This enemy, after all, threatens not only Israel but the Middle East region and Europe also, and is part of a larger global challenge. 

To understand the dynamics and likely direction of events, one must study ideas, and the societies that adhere to those ideas, and not only military systems.  This was Israel’s mistake before, and it was its mistake in 2023, too.  But the Jewish state was hardly alone in this error.  In the west, where supporters and apologists of political Islam have been permitted to burrow deep into the key systems of political power and of the formulation and dissemination of ideas, the problem is yet more acute.  Israel may have been gravely in error and allowed itself to be attacked.  But the society that could produce people like Roi Beit Yaacov, and Gal Shabbat, and Shani Louk too possessed the vitality and cohesion to mobilise effectively in its own defense.  In the case of the west, partly as a result of the years of neglect, it is not at all clear that the same can be said.  In any case, capacities like those displayed by the 202nd battalion of the paratroopers brigade in Jebalya, with the heavy price incurred, are of the type which only need to be deployed when something has gone terribly wrong.  The failure to take an interest in the enemy and his mode of thinking was what began the road to October 7.  The west should learn from this as well as Israel, and with no less urgency.   The old slogan of the Polish patriots was ‘For your freedom and ours.’ 

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Searching for the Last Jews of Damascus: A Journey Through Memory and Ruins

Posted on February 9, 2025 by jonathanspyer

Jerusalem Post, 24/1

In Damascus again after a hiatus of nearly eight years, I decided to see what remained of the city’s once flourishing Jewish community. The dictator was gone. The new Islamist rulers had yet to fully stamp their authority on the city and the country. It seemed an ideal time.

The Jewish Quarter of Damascus is located in the old city. There were 50,000 Jews in Syria at the beginning of the 20th century – an ancient and historic community dating to antiquity.

The Jews of Syria were divided by city origin, with two old communities – Damascus and Aleppo – maintaining a rivalry. A third, newer community had been established later in Qamishli, in the Kurdish-majority northeast.

The Jewish community was further subdivided into descendants of Sephardim who arrived after 1492, Jews of Italian descent, Kurdish Jews, and “Musta’arabin” (Arabized) or Mizrahi Jews, whose families never left the Levant.

Of these, the Jews of Aleppo and Qamishli have departed in their entirety. The seven or eight elderly Jewish residents of Damascus are the last remnant. (The exact number is disputed).

My friend Firas and I set out from Bab Touma one Saturday morning to see what we could find. Firas is a Syrian Kurd, a former YPG (People’s Defense Units) fighter, and a former resident of Damascus.

I had read that one of the three synagogues of the neighborhood, the Elfrange, still had services. I had the vague idea that I might arrive for the Saturday morning prayers and make the acquaintance of whomever I might find there.

It took us a while to find the entrance to the synagogue. When we did, the door was padlocked. No one was around. We asked a neighboring shop owner what he knew about the “Jewish synagogue.”

“Abu Ibrahim has the keys,” he replied. “He runs a school here. But he isn’t here today. Give me your phone number and I’ll pass it on to him.” We did so without much hope.

“Do you know where we could find any of the Jews still living in the city?” I asked

The shop owner considered for a moment. “There’s an old woman living close by. But she’s lost her mind and can’t tell you much. Then there’s another old woman, two doors down from here. You see that black iron door? That’s where she lives. I think she’s there now. Go and knock and maybe she’ll answer.” So we did. No answer again.

Dejected, and with a growing sense of absurdity, we wandered past the dilapidated houses, asking various passersby for clues. “There’s a Jewish man living in that street right there,” a woman told us, pointing to a street on the left. “His name’s Ibrahim.”

We went down the small, dusty street and asked the owner of a small hummus restaurant whether he knew which house was Ibrahim’s. Our question caused an argument between the young man and his friend who was with him. “Don’t know,” the friend told us. “No idea. Don’t know.”

Damascus is a city of deep suspicions, covered by a layer of slightly too-sweet politeness. But in this case, the young hummus restaurant owner took pity on us, and pointed to a ramshackle house opposite. “He’s there. He lives there alone. But he might not answer.”

“He doesn’t want to speak to anyone,” his friend added.

WE WENT over and Firas hammered on the door. Once. Twice. And then, more or less despairingly, a third time. As we were about to leave, a small, elderly man appeared on the balcony facing the street.

Firas shouted that I was a Jewish journalist who had come to find out about the Jews of Damascus. After a long pause, the old man pulled a string on the balcony that was attached to the front door and it clicked open.

Inside, we found everything in an astonishing state of dereliction. Old bicycles, clocks, and ornaments, and rotting carpets and packing cases were all piled up in the courtyard and the adjoining rooms.

This had very obviously once been a house owned by a wealthy family. Nothing remained of that. The old man motioned to us to come upstairs. We sat with him next to the balcony.

While speaking Damascus Arabic, laced with Hebrew words here and there, he produced a phone with a Channel 11 report on the Jews of Damascus on it. He motioned to me to read the Hebrew. I did so and, satisfied, he began to tell us about himself and his family, the Hilwanis of Damascus.

His name is Fuad Hilwani. Most of the family had left in 1992, he said, when Hafez Assad chose to allow the remaining 4,000 Jews in Syria to depart. He described the severely curtailed lives they had lived up to that point, under the pervasive surveillance of the regime’s intelligence branches.

Jews needed permission even to leave the neighborhood. He had stayed to look after his ailing mother, who died a few years later. He had a brother in New York, and one in Israel.

I congratulated him on his family’s house, saying it must have been illustrious at one time. He gave me a searching look, as though suspecting me of mockery. Then he said: “This wasn’t our house. It belonged to the Totah family. I’m just watching it so that Abu Ibrahim and those behind him don’t come and take it.”

Then he launched into a complicated account of efforts by a power structure connected to the old regime to move in on remaining Jewish properties in the city. He then mentioned a general connected to Maher Assad’s notorious 4th Division, a by-word for criminality and cruelty under the Assads. (Maher is former president Bashar al-Assad’s younger brother.)

There had been violence and intimidation, and even an act of murder. I haven’t been able to fully verify these claims, so I won’t repeat them. At the end of this, Hilwani offered to read our fortunes, and following this bade us goodbye. “Shabbat Shalom,” he wished me, as we stood on the stairs.

Back at my hotel in Bab Touma, I searched for anything I could find on the Totah family and their properties in the Jewish Quarter. On a site that collects memories of the vanished Jewish communities of the Arab world, I found the following description:

“The Beit Tuta (also known as Beit Totah) was an opulent Damascene courtyard house owned by the Tuta family from the mid-19th to early 20th century. It boasted both traditional, open-air reception rooms and Western-style reception rooms.”

I thought of the junk piled high in the courtyard and the rooms around it, and the old Jewish man, alone, its curious sentinel.

THERE WAS still one synagogue I wanted to see – the Eliyahu Hanavi, in the neighborhood of Jobar, a couple of kilometers from the old city. It is described by the 13th-century Jewish traveler Samuel ben Samson as a “beautiful synagogue situated outside the city” and by Israel Joseph Benjamin in 1864 as “supported by 13 marble pillars, six on the right and seven on the left side, and everywhere inlaid with marble.”

However, the synagogue was destroyed in 2014 during the Syrian civil war by a regime artillery shell. We found a local Jobar man to take us there, but there wasn’t much to see except rubble. Part of a single wall is still standing. I had heard that the area where the synagogue had stood was mined, but our guide immediately clambered up on it, so we followed suit.

I saw that there was an UNRWA school close by, and I remembered that the Assad regime had a practice of housing Palestinian refugees close to traditionally Jewish areas of Damascus.

After a couple of minutes, we had company. A motorcycle roared up. Two young men, both in black, one with a long black beard, the other wearing a leather jacket, climbed off. Representatives of the new regime. They climbed up to the highest point of the rubble that once was the Jobar synagogue and called us to join them. Out of breath, we did so.

“You can’t film there,” the bearded young man told us matter-of-factly. “And no photos. This is a Jewish religious site. And of course, we respect all religions.”

“Who are you?” asked Firas, though it was obvious. “We’re from the ‘organization’ [haya in Arabic, referring to Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham],” the bearded young man replied. “And if you want to photograph, you should go to the Air Force Intelligence building at the Abbasin Circle, and get permission.”

It wasn’t quite clear why having respect for all religions involved forbidding photography of a ruined synagogue. But we didn’t contest the point.

After escorting us about 45 meters from the ruin, the two climbed back on their motorcycle and roared off through the dust.

So that was the “mukhabarat” (secret police) of the new regime, it occurred to me. Still learning the trade. The old lot would have checked my camera to see if I had already taken some pictures. They would learn quickly, no doubt.

Fuad Hilwani had scoffed at my question whether he thought that the fall of Assad would change anything. Abu Ibrahim, he had said, would make a deal with the new regime, that was all. Fifty-fifty (i.e., of mutual benefit – to the new regime and to Abu Ibrahim).

Seven old Jews, a locked synagogue, and a ruin. That’s what remains of the Jewish community of Syria

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On the Road to Damascus

Posted on February 8, 2025 by jonathanspyer

Weekend Australian, January 24, 2025

Kobani

“You can’t extinguish fire with fire. You can’t address a mistake with another mistake. You have to correct the situation in Syria,” Mizgin Khalil tells me, as we sit in her office in Kobani, north east Syria. Khalil, a member of Syria’s Kurdish minority, is the Deputy Chair of the Kobani Executive Council, which administers this border town on behalf of the Kurdish dominated authority that currently rules Syria east of the Euphrates. 70 kilometers west of where we’re meeting, war in Syria is not over, and fighting is ongoing between forces loyal to Mizgin Khalil’s employers, and Islamist militias backed by Turkey. Kobani, which became famous a decade ago as the fulcrum of resistance to the advance of the Islamic State, is not a bad place to start if you want to listen to concerns about the direction that Syria is taking, post Assad.

I have come to Syria looking for answers. I spent the years of the Syrian civil war reporting from all sides of the conflict. Regime, rebels, Kurds, jihadis. During that time, I came to be fascinated by the country, its history, but also its sights, sounds, peoples, histories. The apparent victory of the Assad regime by 2020 or so, however, had sealed off large parts of the country to me. At the height of the war, the Assad regime had closed its areas of control to all but its most devoted supporters in the outside world. This had impacted on the picture the world received, enabling the regime to project an image of strength not subject to close examination. To get round this restriction, in 2017 I had posed as a passionate supporter of the Assads, and thus obtained an entry visa. I had observed the poverty and hollowness of the regime from close up, and had then reported on this. The Assad regime was not noted for its forgiving attitude. Threats of various kinds followed. I had resigned myself to the fact that I would never see Damascus again. The unexpected victory of Hayat Tahrir al Sham opened up a perhaps fleeting window. I was keen to take advantage of it.

There was little time for mulling over the past. A key question needed to be addressed: The old dictatorship was gone. But was a new, Islamist regime in the process of being formed? And if so, what were the implications of its emergence, both for Syrians themselves and for the wider world?

“Most of the current transitional government come from Idlib,” Mizgin Khalil continued. “Hayat Tahrir al Sham have ruled there since 2017. And recently a video emerged showing the current justice minister Shadi Waisi presiding over the executions of two women there…the current government is trying to apply Islamic Sharia law, and to return the situation to the time of the Ottomans. But Syria is not like Afghanistan. Its society is diverse.”

The video that Mizgin Khalil was referring to dates back to 2015. It depicts Shadi Waisi, who serves as justice minister in Syria’s current transitional government, managing the public execution in then rebel-controlled Idlib province of two women convicted of ‘prostitution and corruption.’ The video has come to serve as a focus for concerns that Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the Islamist movement whose astonishing march from Idlib to Damascus late last year brought it to power in Syria, may be in the opening stages of creating a repressive Islamic dictatorship in the country.

HTS has controlled Idlib, the devout northern province from which it began its march to Damascus, since 2017. The regime it established there, which it called the Syrian Salvation Government, may well offer clues as to the likely direction of Syria under its rule. The evidence is not encouraging. Governance was and is conducted in Idlib according to ultra-conservative interpretations of Islamic law – up to and including public executions. Women and non-Muslims cannot hold office in the representative bodies established by HTS. Alcohol and most types of music are banned. Hijab is compulsory for women.

But while undoubtedly deeply repressive, HTS governance has notably differed from the most extreme manifestations of Sunni political Islam witnessed in Syria over the last decade. HTS avoided many of the insanities of ISIS. There was no attempt at genocide of non-Muslim populations, there was no cannibalism. HTS did not formally reintroduce the practice of slavery (though Idlib did serve as a place of refuge for ISIS members bringing enslaved people from their own areas of control.)

This combination – ultra-hardline political Islam combined with a certain strategic patience and caution – is what has most characterized HTS and its leader Ahmed Sharaa throughout the organisation’s remarkable trajectory. It is also what underlies the current ambiguity as to where Syria may be heading.

Al-Hawl

At the al-Hawl camp, which houses 39000 people, there is little doubt among both residents and staff that Syria is on its way to a new Islamic dictatorship. The former welcome this prospect. The latter contemplate it with dread. The camp houses the families of ISIS fighters from Syria, Iraq and a variety of other countries. For these people, HTS’s victory brings with it the promise of imminent liberation. The two organisations spring from the common root of the al-Qaeda network, their paths diverging only 12 years ago.

“The Syrians and the foreigners were especially enthusiastic,” Jihan Hanan, a senior administrator at the camp, told me. “Some of the Iraqis of non-ISIS background were concerned, because they know the background of (HTS leader) Jolani and what he did in Iraq.” The HTS leader, who nowadays goes by his original name, Ahmed Sheraa, began his career as an al-Qaeda fighter in Iraq.

“But the majority were preparing to be released. They were telling NGOs – ‘now youre helping us voluntarily, but in the next days you’ll be forced to, because we’ll take over the region. We’ll be released now.’ We have intelligence from the coalition of an attack from ISIS sleeper cells. Everyone is expecting an attack at any moment. There’s been a big increase in smuggling, and in attempts to escape. None successful so far, though.”

We wandered in the market at the camp, observing the women members of ISIS, covered head to toe in the shapeless black garments that the movement requires of its female devotees. “Since the regime fell, they like to come up to us here and whisper ‘Qariban, qariban.’ It means something like ‘its coming closer,’, or ‘its almost here,’” my translator told me. Observing the ISIS women as they bought their fruits and vegetables amid the dust and noise of the camp, I remembered Raqqa and Mosul and the testimonies of those who lived there under Islamic State rule. And I recalled also the faces of some of the many people who I knew who had died in the long fight to destroy the Islamic State Caliphate, just a few years ago. Keith Broomfield from Massachusetts, Majdid Haraki, Faisal Saadoun ‘Abu Leyla’ and the others. Was the final outcome to be a sort of belated victory for the people they fought against?

“I see no difference between ISIS and HTS,” Jihan told us, by way of parting. “The women that you see there in the market, maybe their husbands are in Damascus now.”

Damascus

To get to Damascus from eastern Syria, you must take Highway 42 across the desert. It’s a long way to travel, but it has its advantages. The route enables a close look at the ruined debris left by the old regime. It also showcases the still very provisional, partial nature of the new government’s authority.

A large section of the desert between the Tabqa Dam and the city of Homs is now bereft of any ruling authority. HTS doesn’t yet have the manpower to extend its hold that far eastwards. And the Kurdish dominated Syrian Democratic Forces aren’t interested in territorial expansion. This means you have to drive, very fast and preferably not alone, through about 200km of ungoverned desert between the last SDF checkpoint and the first HTS one.

All along the way, you pass through the abandoned positions of the vanished old regime. The Assads liked flags, so the huge structures where their soldiers used to control entry and exit to Syria’s main cities are painted endlessly in the regime’s colours. It occurred to me as we drove through the deserted checkpoints that the Assad flag has now passed into the small and inglorious club of the banners of fallen regimes. A very short time ago, its appearance carried force, and the threat of terrible violence behind it. That was how it had been, whenever I had visited Syria before. The Assads ruled by a fathomless cruelty. Some of the details are only just now becoming available. Others were visible all the way through, but largely ignored. And now, here are their flags, and the great portraits of Hafez the founder and his hapless son Bashar. Their power to terrify drained away. Their flag gone to join the banners of the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, the DDR, the Confederate States of America in the club of formerly terrifying, now empty signifiers.

This absence is felt in Damascus itself. We hit the first checkpoints of HTS around Homs. There was a security operation of some kind going on in the city. The jihadis on the checkpoints But once we were through this little cluster, the new regime didn’t bother us again all the way into the capital. I had last been in the city in 2017. I have never been in an urban space more closely and tightly covered by the organs of state security than Assad’s Syria. Its presence, everywhere, had been pervasive. Visible representatives of its authority had been ubiquitous, both in uniform and not. And now? The new rulers, very clearly, lack the manpower to impose any such hold, even if they wished to. Instead, the city seems largely left to its own devices, the new rulers, for now, existing alongside, rather than within it. HTS fighters were everywhere, in their tatty uniforms and carrying AK47s. But mostly, they seemed to be off duty, in ones or twos, still partaking of the celebrations associated with victory. Their own use of flags tells something about their intentions. By Umayyad Square, we saw an improvised procession of HTS men and their vehicles. They were flying the white jihadi ‘Tawhid’ flag proclaiming the oneness of God. Beside it, HTS has adopted the old flag of the Syrian republic, which the rebellion against Assad made its own.

Some former civil society activists with the opposition prefer to notice the latter, rather than the former, maintaining a cautious optimism regarding the emergent regime. My friend Mohamed Issa, who was jailed for 20 days in the infamous Palestine Branch of Military Intelligence during the civil war, is among them. As we sat in the main room of his apartment in one of the city’s suburbs, he assured me that HTS in its ‘new form’ has shown a ‘great ability to change.’ HTS, Mohammed suggested, had so far kept to ‘the pledges it made to the international community – to Turkey and the United States. Looking ahead, what needed to happen was ‘internal peace among the components of society that were demonized by the defunct regime,’ on the basis of a shared citizenship.

One can only wish success to such sentiments, of course. Still, it occurs to me that the problem facing authentic secular liberals (which Mohammed Issa is, and there are others) in Syria is that in a reality in which the currency of power has long been guns and ammunition in the hands of young men, the liberals lack the organized capacity for force. The result is that while rejoicing at the fall of the Assad regime, they can do little but hope for the best regarding its successors.

Does the situation in Damascus offer a basis for such hopes? As of now, HTS has yet to implement in the city many of the more stringent elements imposed in its Idlib fiefdom. Under the guidance of Turkey, and with the need for foreign investment, it may hold off for a while. Yet the general trend appears clear, and it is one direction. The top positions in the transitional government, including the post of prime minister, are all held by old HTS comrades of Ahmed Sharaa from the Idlib days. Norms of Islamic governance HTS style are slowly being introduced also into daily life. The latest move is the segregation of the sexes on public transport, men at the front, women at the back. Sharaa has said it will be four years til elections.

Syria is a country that defies prediction. And as one watches the HTS fighters and their Idlib friends around Jebel Qassoiun, Hamidiyeh Market and all the other landmarks of Damascus, still congratulating each other and themselves on their astonishing victory, it’s worth remembering that at present, HTS’s seizure of power in Syria is not yet complete. This is so not only with reference to the slow imposition of its preferred Islamic norms in the areas it controls. It also does not yet hold uncontested power across the entirety of the country.

In some ways, a historical parallel might be drawn with the Russian revolution. In early 1918, the Bolsheviks had secured power in Moscow. But Russia was still full of a variety of militias, pledging loyalty to a number of foreign governments. It would take a further half decade of strife before communist rule was clamped on to all of Russia for the next seventy years.

Similarly, Ahmed Sharaa and HTS hold Damascus. But as we have seen, beyond the empty deserts, the secular and anti-jihadi Syrian Democratic Forces still control the country east of the Euphrates, (along with thousands of Islamist captives who await HTS’s arrival). To the south of the capital, a Druze militia, the Rijal al Karameh, hold Suwaida province. Next to them ,in Deraa, an Islamist commander called Ahmed Oda has 15000 men under command, and reputedly enjoys the backing of the United Arab Emirates. In the western coastal area the Alawis, the group who the Assads themselves emerged from, are facing a concerted campaign of retribution at the hands of Sunni elements loyal to the new government. There are indications that they also are organizing to respond. On a number of occasions in recent days, HTS fighters in Latakia province have been ambushed and killed by gunmen who have then melted away back into the Alawi dominated countryside.

The challenge facing the new rulers of Damascus will be to advance along their preferred route of societal Islamisation in a form and at a pace that does not alienate either international backers or the Syrian people themselves, (or their own militants, who will want to force the pace), while working to draw in those parts of the country that are not yet under their control. They are likely to face resistance from a variety of directions on both these fronts. Syria, at war now for 14 years, is not yet at peace.

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What Al-Jolani’s Past Can Reveal About Syria’s Future

Posted on December 14, 2024 by jonathanspyer
An Islamist rebel fires into the air to celebrate the overthrow of the Assad regime in Damascus; Dec. 8, 2024.
An Islamist rebel fires into the air to celebrate the overthrow of the Assad regime in Damascus; Dec. 8, 2024.

Spectator, 13/12

In late February 2012 I was travelling through Syria’s Idleb province. I stayed for a few days in a town called Binnish, not far from the province’s capital. It was, at that time, under the tentative control of the newly hatched insurgency against the regime of Bashar Assad.

The young host of the place I was staying – I’ll call him ‘D’ – was connected to the fledgling structures of what at that time was widely known as the ‘Free Syrian Army’. But through a cousin of his he also had links to another group of fighters just getting organised in the town. These men were a little older than the FSA members, and were more obviously Sunni Islamist in their appearance and their orientation. D told me at the time that ‘this thing [the civil war] started in Idleb, and it will end in Idleb too’. It seemed an absurdly self important statement at the time. Assad’s army were still in control of the greater part of the province. The insurgents had just a few rifles to put up against the dictator’s military machine.

As it turns out, though, D was right. Not just in his general sentiment that the insurgency would be victorious. But in his precise prediction that the Islamist circles organising in Binnish at that time, who were a very early iteration of what would eventually become Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS), would be the ones to bring victory. Because, of course, contrary to all predictions, it was from the province of Idleb, long forgotten by the world, that the Syrian Sunni Islamist insurgency erupted in late November to make its final triumphant run through Syria’s cities to Damascus.

As a result of that bold move, HTS leader Ahmed Sharaa/Abu Mohammed al-Jolani is now the de facto ruler in the Syrian capital. Western media and governments are weighing his every utterance in an effort to understand what may lie in Syria’s future. Has he moderated? Is he still a jihadi? Are there hopes for more representative government in Syria?

But there is a better way than textual analysis of al-Jolani’s every sentence to try and grasp what may now lie ahead. In the period between 2017 and 2024 al-Jolani and his movement were the de facto rulers of Idleb province. So close observation of how they governed there is likely to yield more clues to the direction of events now than parsing of the PR-savvy al-Jolani’s statements over the last week.

What does HTS’s governance record tell us? Before looking into this, it is perhaps important to give a nod to the man who made HTS governance in Idleb possible in the first place, and who in so doing turns out to have achieved a strategic masterstroke. The one who deserves credit for this is not al-Jolani, but Turkish president Recep Tayepp Erdogan.

It was Erdogan’s stubborn refusal to ever pull the plug on the seemingly defeated insurgency, and his determination to maintain a tiny corner in north west Syria for it, which was the necessary condition for everything which has now followed. Western governments saw the Turkish leader’s decision as a bizarre refusal to accept an obvious reality. Russia and the Assad regime, meanwhile, were happy to take advantage of it. Insurgents in other parts of the country who refused ‘reconciliation’ with the regime were bussed up to the small Turkish enclave in the north west. It became a convenient dumping ground for the irreconcilables. Moscow and Assad assumed that these men would live on in obscurity and irrelevance. Instead, this incubator was where HTS erupted from in late November.

So, what can be learned from HTS’s seven year experiment at governance in Idleb? An Israeli researcher, Alex Grinberg has made a close study of the record in work soon to be published by a Jerusalem think tank. What did he find?

Firstly, what’s important is what is not there. HTS in Idleb did not go in for the mad excesses of their rival jihadis in the Islamic State (IS) organisation. There was no enslavement of non-Muslim women (that’s actually not quite true. A few slaves of the IS, still held by families who made their way into Idleb after the Islamic State’s fall, have been found. But the institution of slavery was not officially approved by HTS). There was no cannibalism, no effort at the mass slaughter of perceived devil worshippers. None of the lurid insanity associated with the name of IS.

On the other hand, what was established was a repressive, authoritarian statelet ruled in accordance with Islamic Sharia law. Women were required to wear the hijab, music and alcohol was banned. No opposition was permitted to the edicts of HTS. Non Muslims and women were not allowed to be present in the representative bodies established. Al-Jolani, the organisation’s leader, was essentially the de facto dictator of the province. In his prisons, incarceration without trial and the practice of torture were routine.

There is every reason to believe that the system developed by al-Jolani’s ‘Syrian Salvation Government’ in Idleb will now be installed throughout the country, or at least in those parts of the country he controls (30 per cent of Syria remains in the hands of the Syrian Kurdish forces). This week he even appointed his ‘prime minister’ from those days, Mohammed al-Bashir, as the interim prime minister in Damascus.

In terms of the ideas that underlie HTS’s administration in Idleb, the organisation’s highest religious authority is Abd al-Rahim Atoun. Atoun’s attitudes toward governance may be gleaned from the fact that in September 2021 he delivered a lecture in Idleb entitled ‘Jihad and Resistance in the Islamic World: the Taliban as a Model’.

Elsewhere, in reference to the 7 October attacks of last year, Atoun said that ‘what the mujahideen are doing for the sake of Allah Almighty in the Battle of the Flood of Al-Aqsa is the greatest act of Islam in this era, and it is a blessed jihad to repel aggression and defend religion’. Atoun compares HTS’s march from Idleb to Damascus to the 7 October attacks, and requests ‘the Almighty to disgrace the Jews, suppress them, and curse them and those who support and back them against the mujahideen’.

Atoun is the highest religious authority of HTS and may therefore be considered al-Jolani’s guide in these matters. This organisation, and this outlook, is what D was referring to as the force that would both start and end the Syrian civil war in Idleb – as in fact happened. This is the force that, thanks to Erdogan’s impressive strategic foresight, incubated over seven years in the province.

As has been widely reported, the government of Israel has been engaged in recent days in preventing the emergent Islamist regime in Damascus from possessing any but the most rudimentary military capacity. Some have questioned the motivation for this action. In this regard, it may safely be assumed that what the civilian researcher (and former IDF military intelligence officer) Alex Grinberg knows, the government of Israel also knows. What HTS started and finished in Idleb is now in Damascus. Israel’s decision to disarm it as far as is possible is likely to yet be considered prescient.

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In the Heart of Darkness

Posted on October 18, 2024 by jonathanspyer

Jerusalem Post, 18/10

A Yezidi former slave rescued from Gaza Reveals Her Horrifying experiences in Jihadi Captivity

It is now two weeks since the rescue of the Yezidi hostage Fawzia Amin Sido from captivity in Gaza by the IDF, in a joint operation also involving the US Embassy.  Fawzia has been returned to her family in the Sinjar area of northern Iraq.  This week, she sat for her first filmed interview since her liberation. 

Alan Duncan, a former British soldier and volunteer fighter with the Iraqi Kurds who is now a documentary film-maker, was part of a small group of people in Israel made aware of Fawzia’s plight in July.   He was involved in subsequent efforts to lobby the Israeli authorities to act to free her. (full disclosure: I was also a part of this group).  Because of this involvement, the Sido family decided to grant Fawzia’s first recorded interview to Duncan. 

 Parts of the interview were published by the Sun newspaper based in the UK this week. Because of my own involvement on the matter, I have also been able to view the full two hour recording of the conversation between Alan Duncan and Fawzia Sido. 

It contains new details of her story which are immensely informative both regarding Fawzia’s personal plight, and with regard more generally to the experiences of the Yezidi children enslaved by the Islamic State organization in 2014. 

Throughout the interview, Fawzia Sido’s tone is calm and matter of fact. She relates, nevertheless, as will be outlined here, details of an encounter with evil of a nature almost beyond the ability of the human mind to process.

At certain times during the interview Duncan, a former combat soldier and veteran of more than one war, is almost unable to continue.  Fawzia remains calm throughout, pausing to share jokes with members of her family. 

Fawzia Sido, aged 9, was captured with two of her brothers by Islamic State in the summer of 2014.  Following their capture, she and one of her brothers, Fawaz, were made to take part in a forced march from Sinjar to Tal Afar, at that time under the control of Islamic State.  The journey took three or four days, during which time the  Yezidis were given no food by their captors. 

On arrival to Tal Afar, according to Fawzia, ‘They told us that they would give us food.  They made rice and they gave us meat to eat with it.  The meat had a weird taste and some of us had stomach aches afterwards.’

“When we were done, they told us that this was the meat of Yezidi babies.”

“They showed us pictures of beheaded babies, and said ‘these are the kids that you ate now.’  One woman suffered heart failure and died shortly after.  The mothers of these babies were there also.  One mother recognized her own baby because of its hands.”

And to the interviewer’s mute sounds of horror, she continues “It’s very hard, but it wasn’t our fault.  They forced us.  But its very hard to know that it happened.  But it was not in our hands.”

The accusation that Islamic State fed human meat to Yezidi captives has been made before, though this has never become one of the widely known elements of the ISIS story in the west.  Perhaps the human mind simply and instinctively recoils from such depravity, and as a result it goes un-recorded. 

Vian Dakhil, a Yezidi member of the Iraqi parliament, was the first to reveal details of this practice by ISIS, in 2017.  Dakhil related a testimony she had collected similar in its details to that given by Fawzia Sido.  Dakhil revealed these details in an interview given to the Egyptian ‘Extra News’ Channel, which was then translated by Memri. 

After Tal Afar, Fawzia’s story conforms more closely to the known details of the experiences of Yezidi female children in the hands of ISIS.  She was held for 9  months in an underground ‘jail’ along with around 200 other Yezidi women and children.  Some of the children held there died from drinking contaminated water, she tells Alan Duncan. During that time, she had no contact with her jihadi captors, except that she remembers that from time to time, they would come and take older girls who they evidently found attractive from the vault. 

After nine months, she was taken to a building that she remembers resembled a school.  From there, she and four other Yezidi girls were purchased by a man named ‘Abu Mohammed al-Idnani.’  The girls were then forcibly converted to Islam.  Beatings were administered to any who refused to obey. 

Fawzia was given to a man who first raped her when she was 10 years old.  She remembers being sold on five times, to ‘a Syrian, a Saudi, another Syrian,’ and then finally to the Gazan jihadi fighter who ‘married her’.  She knew him by his nom de guerre of ‘Abu Amar al Makdisi.’  ‘Makdisi’ is the generally preferred term among the jihadis for a Palestinian Arab Muslim.  It relates of course to the Islamic term for Jerusalem ‘Bayt al Makdis.’   Fawzia’s ‘husband’, however, was a Gazan, not a Jerusalemite. 

Fawzia seems to have been 15 or 16 when married to the Gazan jihadi.  As a result of repeated rapes, she bore him two children, a boy and a girl.  Contrary to earlier reports ‘Abu Amar al-Makdisi’ was not killed in the Islamic State’s last stand at Baghouz in the lower Euphrates River Valley, in 2019.  Rather, he was captured by Coalition forces, and imprisoned in one of the jails run in Syria by the US aligned Syrian Democratic Forces. 

Fawzia and her children were taken to the SDF controlled prison camp for IS families at al-Hol.  From there, the jihadis transferred them in an escape to Islamist controlled and Turkish supported Idleb Province.  She and her children were then taken through a tunnel from Idleb into Turkey.  There, the Islamic State network issued her with a false Jordanian passport, and she and the children were taken by her ‘husband’s’ family to Cairo, and then into Hamas controlled Gaza. 

In Gaza, Fawzia was kept as a kind of domestic slave by her ‘husband’s’ family.  She appears at a certain point to have been ‘married’ to one of his brothers, who was later killed in the fighting between Israel and Hamas. 

For a while, she was resident with other young women at the Shuhada al Aqsa Hospital in Dir al Balah, in central Gaza, a facility controlled by armed Hamas men, according to her testimony.  Finally, as is now well known, thanks to the efforts of her family, a Canadian Jewish philanthropist, her supporters in Israel, and the IDF, she was rescued in early October and returned to her family in Iraq.   

Her children remain with al-Makdisi’s family in Gaza, where they are being raised as Arab Muslims. 

Fawzia concludes her testimony in simple and clear terms; ‘Until I got back to Iraq, I was all the time a ‘Sabaya,’ also in Gaza.’  Sabaya is an Arabic term referring to a young woman held captive and exploited sexually. 

Fawzia appears on all the occasions I have seen her speak to be a young woman of exceptional strength and dignity. Chaim Nahman Bialik, writing in response to the Kishinev pogrom in 1903, recorded famously that ‘revenge for the blood of a child, Satan himself has not yet invented.’  Appropriate vengeance for the things Fawzia Sido experienced and witnessed must surely lie hidden yet further, and deeper. 

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Notes from a Long War – Israel, a year on from October 7

Posted on October 10, 2024 by jonathanspyer

The Australian, 6/10

‘We have sat, an easy generation, in houses held to be indestructible,’ wrote the German poet Bertolt Brecht, of himself and his countrymen, in 1925.  These words have returned to me on a number of occasions in the course of the past year.  There was a general sense,  in the Israel before October 7, 2023, that the foundations of the house were secure.  Manifold dangers outside, to be sure.  But it was widely believed that the painstakingly constructed fences and barriers carefully built and maintained over the years would prove sufficient to their task.

Israel was a ‘villa in the jungle’ in the not particularly elegant phrase coined by former prime minister and chief of staff Ehud Barak.  It had evolved, in the preceding years, a whole mode of life which involved a general incuriosity to the catastrophic political and societal failure all around it.  A relatively narrow caste of people involved in national security took care of ensuring the viability of the barriers.  The rest of the society got on with being the ‘start up nation,’  hooked into the 21st century and all its manifold possibilities.  ‘As long as the fence is good,’ as one national security professional told me at a conference in Tel Aviv, ‘its not really so important what’s on the other side of it.’  This statement seemed to me to capture the prevailing ethos with admirable succinctness. 

Beyond the fence, what was advancing , across the wastelands of the broken countries – Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Gaza – were two twin and allied phenomena.  These were: the unmatched ground-level vigor and popularity of political Islam, and the mobilisation of Islamist forces by the state power and capacities of the Islamic Republic of Iran. 

Teheran was and remains committed to Israel’s destruction.  It also seeks the more general domination of the region.  The Israeli national defence system, it’s important to remember, was never complacent or indifferent regarding this threat.  It was acutely attuned to it.  The complacency, and hence fatal indifference, was local, directed only towards a single potential front.  Namely, the Hamas controlled Gaza Strip.  Among those watching the region, there was a sense of foreboding, rather than complacency, in the months that preceded October 7.  But the northern front, and specifically Lebanon, was the place from where people thought the fire would erupt. Gaza, as a result, largely slipped off the radar, with terrible consequence.    

Phase 1: Shock and Mobilization

The ‘return of history’ is a common cliché in writing on foreign affairs.  It is usually rolled out to further flay the already dead horse of the ‘end of history’ idea that was prevalent for a moment twenty five years ago, in the brief moment of euphoria that followed the end of the Cold War. 

History, of course, can mean many things.  For some nations, its return might mean a return to glory, to advancement, to purpose.  October 7, 2023, very specifically, was the return of Jewish history.  That is to say, as a good friend told me at the time, it was the second time in 80 years that female members of his family under the age of 10 had to be taught, and taught very quickly to remain absolutely silent in a darkened house, so that the armed men passing through their village would not hear, and would not come to slaughter them.  The first time was in Belarus, in 1941. 

For me, it was a closer history that had arrived through the portal of Islamist controlled Gaza.  I had witnessed as a reporter the rampage of the Islamic State organization across the Sinjar and the Ninawa Plains in 2014.  All the same details were there – the slaughter of civilians, the taking of slaves, the rapes.

I was in the Gaza border area early on October 8.  The clearing up had hardly started.  As we now know (we didn’t, then), there were still groups of gunmen active on the Israeli side of the border.  There were bodies strewn around here and there, of dead Hamas men, and broken cars.  And mostly there was a deep silence, numbness, a sense of shock.  But there were already signs of the mobilization ahead.  A young soldier of the Armored Corps, standing on the hull of a Merkava 4 tank, told us ‘this is our Yom Kippur.’  The return of history, all right.  In his telling, the particular history in which two Arab armies attacked Israel by surprise, fifty years and a day before October 7, in October 1973, and in which Israel mobilized, and fought back, and survived. 

In the weeks that followed, I remember that there was a kind of undercurrent of weeping in the country.  In one on one encounters with many friends and acquaintances, men and women, I recall that people would begin to cry, often silently, without explanation, and no explanation needed.  From such an encounter, I learned the story of Ido Rosenthal of Mevasseret Zion, from one of his relatives. 

Rosenthal, 45 at the time of his death, was a commando from the Shaldag, the air force special forces unit.  When much younger, he and I had been around the same crowd, in Jerusalem.  I remembered him as an understated, humorous and powerful personality.  He was one of the many people on October 7 who didn’t wait to be formally mobilized, but who simply took their personal weapons, joined up with hastily assembled groups of friends and comrades, and made their way down to the border area, to do what they could.   

Rosenthal, with four other Shaldag men, ignored the roadblocks and barrelled forward until they collided with Hamas, which was busily engaged in the slaughter of civilians at Kibbutz Be’eri.  Vastly outnumbered, they attacked a force of 30 terrorists making their way to Kibbutz Alumim.  They gained time and the kibbutz was saved, but Rosenthal was killed in the ensuing firefight.  He was a father of three children, living in Moshav Ben Shemen at the time.  His wife, Noga, became well known in Israel in the following weeks, because of animated drawings she published in the paper. These depicted Ido as an irascible and amusing presence still hovering above their lives.  October 7 is remembered, rightly, mainly for the failure of Israel’s security systems, and the barbaric cruelties of the attackers.  But there are many stories like that of Ido Rosenthal, too.  They were an early sign of the society’s capacity for rapid change and adaptation, and of its underlying vigour. 

Phase 2: Strikeback

On October 21, after rapid preparations, the IDF rolled into Hamas ruled Gaza.  The initial maneuver was a fast drive forward by two IDF armoured divisions, the 36th and the 162nd, from the east and from the north.  The intention was to bisect the Strip.  I first reported from inside Gaza in December, with the 36th Division, when the push forward was still ongoing. 

The scale of the destruction was terrifying.  The force was still moving quickly forward, so not all areas were secured and we were rushed and stumbled through the rubblestrewn streets to the houses for our meetings.  The tanks were moving through the twilight and the ruined landscape.  Colonel Oded Adani, deputy commander of the 188 Armored Brigade, was asked by one of the reporters about his battalion’s loss of three soldiers in the preceding days.  Tuval Sasnani, Eitan Fisch, and Yakir Shinkolevsky were the names of the dead men.  I had expected a few words about sacrifice and remembrance and a brisk return to business from Adani.  Instead, he paused for a long moment, said ‘Its difficult.  We’re in touch with the families,’ and then with a wave of his hand ended the interview. 

A strange army and a strange society, it occurred to me.  And it isn’t difficult to see how this extreme sensitivity to losses that is a characteristic of Israel might be interpreted as a weakness by enemies.  Indeed, the whole rationale of the attacks of October 7, it seems to me, was predicated on the exploitation of this sensitivity.  The fear of losses, both Israel’s enemies and many of its regional friends calculated, would prevent the necessary  determined, ongoing Israeli push on the ground.  And the taking and holding of hostages for a political ransom would frustrate any Israeli determination to wipe out the Gaza regime that had begun the war.  That is, once Israelis understood that their house was not indestructible, they would find little in themselves to defend it. 

Such conclusions are quite understandable.  They also, as it turns out, are wrong. At Moshav Srigin, in the Valley of Ela, in May 2024, I attended the funeral of Shani Louk.  The valley is the place, according to the Bible, where David fought Goliath.  Shani Louk was the young woman who became famous because of the nature of her murder on October 7.  She had attended the Nova music festival that was attacked by the jihadis.  In pictures that shocked the world, her body was then paraded through the streets of Gaza, spat upon and abused.  Mercifully, we now know that she was already dead when this happened, and knew nothing of it. 

Her body was subsequently discovered in Gaza by soldiers of the IDF’s 202nd Paratroopers Battalion.  At her funeral, her father Nissim Louk said ‘“The blood of the murdered ones, and Shani among them, was not abandoned and cried out from the ground.”  Mainly I remember the very young people gathered there, in the late spring light.  Shani was 22 at the time of her murder.  One felt that these young people had learned far too soon about the extreme fragility of all of us.  And yet there was neither despair, nor anger.  Only a kind of quiet sadness and resolve.

A few days later I visited the 202nd battalion, still in Gaza, in the Jabalya refugee camp where Shani Louk’s body had been located.  Lieutenant Roi-Bar Ya’acov, also 22, had discovered the shaft in a private house that led to the tunnel where Shani’s body and those of two others had been stored.  I couldn’t talk to Roi Bar-Yaacov though, because he had himself been killed a few days after the discovery of the bodies.  His own commander, Major Gal Shabbat, to whom he reported the discovery of the bodies, was himself killed a week later. 

Among the airborne infantrymen of the 202nd, very young men and overdue for some leave, the same strange and quiet determination that I had witnessed in Ela.  I had no one to talk to from the immediate circle of the story.  So I spoke to Almog, the commander of the 202nd, who told me ‘It’s a long war. No one thought it would finish quickly. We started in winter; now it’s summer. And if we have to fight again in winter, that’s fine.’ 

Phase 3: the long war

The conflict in which Israel is now engaged has long since transcended the narrow area of Gaza. Israel responded with a desperate, improvised defence on October 7, then carried out an invasion to destroy the Hamas authority which had launched the attacks. Today, the focus is shifting. There is war on five fronts: Gaza, Lebanon, the West Bank, Syria, Iraq and Yemen. 

From the perspective of a year, the October 7 massacres were the spark that lit the fire, rather than the fire itself.  The fighting in Gaza, indeed, is now largely concluded, the Hamas force that faced Israel there is broken. What remains is  a sporadic resistance.  The main arena is now to the north, to Lebanon, and perhaps soon also to pro-Iran forces in Syria and Iraq.

This war was launched to test a thesis, according to which the Israeli society that preceded the attacks, the satiated, sometimes complacent collectivity that indeed held its house to be indestructible would prove unable to mobilize to defend its home, and would thus collapse.  This thesis, as demonstrated a little by the preceding accounts, has been disproven. At a very high cost.  Since its nearly the Jewish New Year, allow me to phrase that in the appropriate way: the nation had set before it life and death, and blessing and curse. And it chose life.  The long war thus birthed, alas, is far from over, and may not have reached its height.  

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Israel is Likely to Hit Back Hard against Iran

Posted on October 3, 2024 by jonathanspyer

Spectator, 2/10

The Iranian launching of 181 ballistic missiles at Israel on Tuesday night followed a similar pattern to the attacks of April 14.  Israeli and allied air defences appear to have performed extremely effectively.  The damage to the military and civilian sites targeted is minor  to non-existent.  One Palestinian Arab man was killed in a village near Jericho, not from the Iranian missiles, it appears, but from debris from an interceptor. 

I live in a Jerusalem neighbourhood on what’s called the ‘Seam Line’ between the Jewish and Arab populations.  We generally have cordial relations with our Arabic speaking neighbours, and as I stood outside my front door last night trying to get some pictures of the missiles flying over in the night sky, I was entirely unsurprised to hear the honking of car horns and shouts of celebration from the Arab houses a little further down the street.  So it goes, and so far, so predictable. 

The question now  is what comes next.  The Israeli response following the April 14 attacks was small, and largely symbolic.  President Joseph Biden at that time advised Israel to ‘take the win’, referring to the successful mobilization of a region-wide, US-led air defence system that was mobilized for the first time on that night.  Israel sufficed with a  symbolic attack on an Iranian air defence system, largely to prove to Teheran that it could do a lot more than that.  And there the matter was left. 

This time, the response is unlikely to be merely symbolic.  The reason is that, the Middle East being what it is, if Israel again suffices with a little nudge to Iran indicating what it could do if it really tried, this is likely to be interpreted as hesitation, and hence weakness.  It will transmit to the Iranians that they can now see it as part of the rules of the game that every time Israel takes major action against an Iranian proxy in the context of the current war, (such as the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh or the killing of Hizballah leader Hassan Nasrallah), or makes a move against an Iranian official, a massive Iranian missile response must be factored in. 

This is not a ‘norm’ that Israel can accept.  Hence, it must seek now to signal to Iran that such aggression will be met with a determined, escalatory response.  Such a response is now likely.  The natural next question is what form might that take? What assets does Israel have to hand, which could deliver the appropriate message to Iran, and what are the Iranian vulnerabilities which might be exploited?

In terms of the assets which Israel could bring to bear, there are two immediately apparent instruments which Israel possesses which can be mobilized. 

The first is Israeli air superiority.  Israel’s raid on the Hodaidah and Ras Isa ports in Yemen last week was the latest demonstration that the Israel Air Force is able to effectively project power to distances which bring targets within Iran to well within its range.  This was also demonstrated, of course, in the pinpointed response to the attacks in April.  Israel’s F15, F16 and F35 fighter jets, together with its refueling planes, have the capacity to reach any target in Iran. 

Nor does a response using air power need to be limited to the realm of piloted aircraft, with the attendant possible dangers to personnel.  Israel is a pioneer and a world leader in the use of drones.  Its Heron TP, Hermes 900 and Shoval systems could all if desired be employed against targets in Iran. 

Its also worth noting that while Israel’s missile  defence systems are better known, Jerusalem also, in the Jericho 3 system possesses a ballistic missile capacity of its own, also capable of reaching Iran.

Regarding the second set of available instruments: ample evidence exists to suggest that Israel possesses an irregular capacity on Iranian soil, which is available for activation when needed.  It is almost certain that this capacity includes the involvement of Iranian citizens.  The regime in Teheran is not popular, and finding individuals willing to work against it isn’t difficult, though of course details in this regard are elusive. 

The existence of this Israeli capability is apparent mainly from the results: sudden deaths suffered by scientists and officials involved with Teheran’s nuclear programs, mysterious explosions and power outages, theft of materials and so on.  If needed, it could presumably be engaged as an element in the current war.  In this regard, it’s worth noting that while this capacity has most notably been used in recent years against people involved with the nuclear program, it could also theoretically be used against other Iranian officials and individuals associated with the regime. 

What are Israel’s potential targets, should it choose to respond?  Of course, facilities related to the Iranian nuclear program should be noted here, but it is more likely in the current stage that Israel would focus on strategic targets essential to the functioning of the Iranian economy. The oil sector would be one vulnerable area in this regard.  The oil terminal on Kharg Island and the Bandar Abbas port would be two sites that may well appear in Israel’s target bank related to this sector and to Iran’s vulnerability regarding its export capacity. 

The key need deriving from the October 1 attacks is for a shift in perception with regard to the current situation in the Middle East.  The competition between the Iran-led regional bloc on the one side, and Israel and its western and pro-western allied countries on the other has long dominated strategic affairs in the region.  For the last two decades, this contest has largely been played out through feints, the use of proxies, clandestine and intelligence warfare, and diplomatic stratagems.  That chapter in this long and historic battle of will now appears to be drawing to a close.  A phase of open confrontation looks set to take its place.  

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