The prospects for resistance against the Israelis to emerge in Syria are far from lost. It may take some time to emerge and develop, but there is a window of opportunity that is still very much open. (Al Mayadeen English; Illustrated by Mahdi Rtail)

While the recent series of events in occupied Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon have been broadly interpreted as the “defeat” of the regional Resistance, the current situation now presents the opportunity for a re-imagining of the struggle for liberation.

The crisis that now faces Palestine and the rest of the surrounding region is indeed great, this cannot be undermined. It is also indisputable that the path that everyone saw as the most obvious route to liberation is now cut off. Yet, if you are lost in the wilderness and cannot see a clear path forward, you either give up and die or decide to clear another route in spite of its evident challenges.

While it is easy to be dragged into a pessimistic outlook, the people of Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria simply cannot afford to do this. In Gaza, while the official death toll has surpassed 45,000, it is much more likely that the true figure is in the hundreds of thousands. The Lebanese people have also suffered immensely, losing nearly 3,000 people to the last Zionist onslaught.

The supply line to Hezbollah has for now been severed, the Syrian State is currently fractured and loses more land to the Zionist regime daily, while the Israelis eye West Bank annexation and continue to pulverise what infrastructure remains in the Gaza Strip. The plot hatched against Lebanon was enormous and led to the deaths of a large portion of Hezbollah’s senior leadership, including the group's late Secretary General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah.

While the unprecedented loss of civilian life, destruction of infrastructure, blows to Resistance groups and loss of its leaders are all massive wounds, they are also gigantic sacrifices that have been offered in a battle towards a struggle that lives on until it achieves its goals. Giving up is not an option for the Lebanese people who still watch as Israeli soldiers occupy their villages in the South and destroy their homes, nor is it an option for displaced Palestinians who have suffered through 14 months of a genocidal assault, nor is it ultimately an option for the people of Syria; some of whom are now facing occupation and ethnic cleansing.

The Rebirth of Resistance

Looking at the history of armed and popular resistance against US-Israeli tyranny in the region provides a much more sober take on the predicaments of today, which require shrewd political decision-making, creativity, and motivation to achieve its success.

In Palestine, this resistance can be traced back beyond the confines of American involvement. Back in 1936, the Palestinian people launched what was called the “Arab Revolt”, an armed revolution intended to thwart the goals of the Zionist movement and the British Mandate authorities. Eventually, this uprising resulted in a defeat by the year 1939, even contributing to why the Palestinian Resistance was so weak by the time that Zionist militias decided to start ethnically cleansing the land in 1947.

While the Arab Revolt could be interpreted by pessimistic onlookers as having resulted in a net negative, due to the fact that both the British and Zionists had managed to thwart the uprising, dismantling many resistance factions, it ended up providing the inspiration, symbols and ideas for generations of armed struggle to come.

In 1948, the Arab World’s intervention on the side of the Palestinians failed to combat Zionist expansionism in most cases. This came down to a combination of the weakness of Arab forces following a tumultuous period of their own, coupled with deals that were struck behind the scenes and also hesitancy. Although fighters on the front lines confronted the European settler colonial forces valiantly, the newly declared Zionist regime would end up projecting an image of immense strength.

In 1956, Egyptian President Gamal Abdul Nasser had managed to salvage the image of the Arab World to an extent after the failed tripartite invasion of Egypt by the Israelis, French and British forces. Yet, come 1967, the Zionists managed to illegally occupy the Golan Heights, West Bank, Gaza, East Al-Quds and Sinai Peninsula. Why? Because the Israelis launched a surprise attack against the Arab nations that had not developed sufficient defensive or offensive strategies in the midst of a worst case scenario situation.

The next year, the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), alongside elements of the Jordanian army, fought a 15-hour-long battle against the Israeli occupation forces in the town of Karameh. Despite the PLO losing far more fighters than the Israelis did, the mere fact that they had managed to score successes against the Zionist army was viewed as a significant moment in the history of armed resistance. While many had viewed the Israelis as unbeatable, the battle of Karameh began to expose weaknesses and inspire further resistance.

Following Black September in 1970, when thousands of Palestinians were killed during armed conflict between the Jordanian army and PLO, the Palestinian Resistance was expelled and forced to create a new base inside Lebanon by 1971. During this period, Egyptian President Gamal Abdul Nasser died and with him the ideology of secular Arab Nationalism was dealt an enormous blow.

Yet, the Palestinian Resistance continued even after losing the massive Jordanian border space with occupied Palestine from which to launch their assaults. After fighting battle after battle from Lebanon, in 1982 the Israelis invaded Lebanon. The invasion led to the expulsion of the PLO from Beirut, the occupation of southern Lebanon, and the murder of around 20,000 people; most of them civilians.

The PLO were frankly underprepared, failed to anticipate the Israeli assault properly, and following their forced expulsion to Tunisia, the Palestinian refugee camps were left open for the Israelis to use their fascist militia allies to massacre thousands of innocent people. For some time, it appeared as if the Palestinian revolution was slowly fading away and that the Palestinian leadership was too weak to launch any meaningful resistance against the Zionist Entity.

Seemingly out of nowhere, then came the rise of a new era of resistance, the Islamic resistance. In Palestine, the foundations for what later became Hamas and what emerged in the early 1980s as Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), would emerge from Gaza. Similarly, in southern Lebanon, came the rise of Hezbollah.

In 1987, the Palestinian people of the occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza Strip launched a popular uprising, the Intifada, which put the Zionist Entity in crisis mode. The blow to Israeli public relations, economic strain, and distraction of their army forced them to reconsider the agenda going forward and would lead to the Oslo Accords that were signed with the PLO.

While it was clear that the Zionists only intended the Oslo Accords as a means of building a Palestinian entity that would work to achieve their security goals, taking advantage of a weakened PLO, this then led to the Second Intifada. In 2002, through the so-called Operation Defensive Shield, the Israeli army managed to crush the armed resistance that emerged and emanated primarily from the northern West Bank. Yet its 2004 “Operation Days of Penitence" in northern Gaza had failed to crush the resistance forces.

In the end, Gaza’s Resistance endured and managed to grow stronger by the year without receiving much foreign military support. In fact, today the weapons we see used by the some dozen armed groups in Gaza are almost solely manufactured locally underground. It wasn’t until 2021 that the resistance would re-emerge in the West Bank however, but the key point here is that it did begin to revive itself.

In Lebanon, the expulsion of the Israeli occupation in the year 2000 and the successful combating of the Zionist invasion of southern Lebanon in 2006, led to an equation of perceived deterrence. As significant as these victories were, the Israelis never stopped plotting for the day that the war would again open up with Lebanon and this is what the world witnessed earlier this September.

What happens next

The question of Hezbollah’s future is now the subject of great debate, with some even questioning whether it will collapse. The truth with Hezbollah is that it emerged and managed to expel the Israeli occupation forces without the more sophisticated weapons that it later acquired through Syria and currently has its own underground weapons manufacturing capacity.

As long as there is a will to combat the Israelis and their expansionist endeavours, Hezbollah will remain. It is now also possible that the Zionist Entity will choose to use what it sees as a historic opportunity to use its occupation of Syrian lands in order to invade Lebanese territory from the Bekaa Valley area, which could open up new pathways for resistance on both sides of the Lebanon-Syria border.

Hezbollah can successfully combat an Israeli assault that seeks to annihilate it, which could be its next test. Despite it now having to use its sophisticated weapons more sparingly, it now has time to fix a number of more existential problems that it was forced to begin facing following the Israeli pager attacks and assassinations of its senior leadership.

In Gaza, the Resistance groups have managed to survive and continue recruiting new fighters over the span of more than 14 months. The Palestinian Resistance was never even close to the strength of Hezbollah, yet has still not been defeated amidst famine, the destruction of most of the Gaza Strip’s infrastructure, and a full-scale genocidal assault, the likes of which is unique in human history. Therefore, the assumption that Hezbollah is doomed without access to advanced missiles does not carry much weight.

On the Syrian front, it appears that the Israeli occupation forces will continue their advances into the south of the country and will remain in many areas they occupy. Although the current Syrian transitional government led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham has repeatedly stressed that it will do nothing to protect the country from the ongoing Israeli airstrikes and invasion, only talking about how its enemies are Iran and Hezbollah, there is not yet any chance they will do anything in this regard.

Without going too deep into the Syria analysis, the leadership we see emerging will not likely last too long in its current form and even if it wanted to act against the Israelis - which it clearly expresses no interest in doing - it would be swiftly eliminated. Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham is faced with fulfilling the interests of the US, UK, Turkiye, Qatar, and others, which could lead to the current government’s collapse alone. However, the US holds most of the cards here, it dangles sanctions, terrorist designations, access to resources, and foreign aid above the head of HTS leader Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, on top of the fact that a myriad of foreign intelligence agencies could act at any time to kill him and others within his ranks, if they step out of line with their interests.

Yet, the more brazen and aggressive the Israelis become in Syria, the more opportunities will present themselves for resistance against them. Eventually, it is inconceivable that there will not be resistance groups that emerge to fight the occupation forces inside of Syrian territory. In the event that this happens soon, there is little that the HTS-led government will be able to do to stop such resistance too, as the majority of the Syrian population are in favour of combating the Israelis.

The prospects for resistance against the Israelis to emerge in Syria are far from lost. Such a resistance may take some time to emerge and develop, but there is a window of opportunity that is still very much open and even the slightest mistake by the regime in Tel Aviv could plunge it into a new kind of chaos. The situation in Syria could also eventually create friction inside of Jordan, which creates another unpredictable front.

Inside the Zionist Entity, the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu now seems to have completely shifted the regional balance of power. While following October 7, 2023, the Iranian government appeared to be in a position of unmatched power, the Zionists now seem poised to deliver the last blows that will achieve what Netanyahu calls “total victory”. The US-Israeli partnership seeks to launch plots against Iran and Yemen, which would complete their project in response to the defeat they suffered due to the Hamas-led October 7 attack.

Despite the damage inflicted to Iran’s Axis of Resistance in the region, the Israelis are also battered and only currently exist on American life-support. The Israeli economic, society, political system, and military are all in tatters, while there is no clear vision for the future beyond pursuing expansionism and perpetual war. Even in the event that this round of the conflict is put on pause, it will inevitably reignite again. The image of the Zionist Entity has collapsed and it is hated globally on an unprecedented scale for its sheer racist barbarism.

There are a number of ways that this conflict can now go, all of which will involve resistance to the Zionist regime’s endeavours on every front. Even if it takes years to revive any one of the resistance fronts, a terrorised and occupied people will continually struggle for justice.

One thing that the Israelis succeeded at doing for years is presenting themselves as negotiable and rational actors in the region, allowing the impression that “deterrence” could be achieved against them and that they would not act out of line with what were perceived as “national interests”. Deterrence is impossible with the Zionist Entity, because it is not a State, it is a settler-colonial usurper project that acts as an American power projection tool with its own Daesh-type ideology behind it.

If it is going to be defeated, this will take innovative thinking. and whoever opposes it cannot live in a state of comfortability, because no matter how miniscule the role that any nation or organisation plays in combating the Israeli project, it will be targeted for complete annihilation. On the other hand, if the people of the region do not act against it and simply exist in its way, their very existence poses a threat to the Zionist project and therefore they will be a subject of its extreme oppression.

There is no such thing as normalisation, no such thing as being an Israeli ally and no such thing as achieving deterrence. All of these tactics will end in absolute disaster for the people of West Asia, no matter how cozy any regime feels it is with the Zionist Entity.