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The al-Assad dynasty has collapsed, and Syrians have experienced their first days of freedom from a 54-year brutal military dictatorship.

While the vast majority of Syrians celebrated this historic moment, certain narratives continue to circulate portraying the fallen regime as a formidable adversary to Israel, or at least a preferable ally to the Palestinian cause compared to potential alternatives.Ìę

These claims have long been a cornerstone of Assad’s propaganda, but they crumble under historical scrutiny.

For decades, the al-Assad dynasty prioritised domestic control and regional ambitions over resistance to Israeli occupation, and this has often come at the expense of Syrian and Palestinian lives.Ìę

The fall of the al-Assad regime offers a rare and transformative opportunity for Syria to rebuild its politics of resistance on new foundations, free of authoritarian agendas and rooted in mutual freedom and dignity.

How Hafez al-Assad established a structure of war

Hafez al-Assad rose to power in November 1970 through a military-backed coup within the Ba'ath Party, ascending amid an Arab world fractured by defeat in the 1967 War.

As pan-Arabism faltered under the weight of its unfulfilled promises, Hafez was determined to confront the Zionist entity and reclaim the lost Golan Heights.

This stance enjoyed broad national support in Syria, where memories of colonial domination and the desire for liberation remained deeply ingrained.

Assad’s resolve culminated in October 1973, when Egyptian and Syrian armies launched coordinated assaults into the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights respectively, igniting the 1973 war.

The Arab armies achieved major early gains in the first week of the war, but they were soon reversed by Israeli counterattacks, pushing Arab forces back beyond pre-war lines. By the October 25 ceasefire, Israel had extended its territorial control in both Egypt and Syria.

In May 1974, following disengagement negotiations, Israel agreed to withdraw from the areas it had captured during the 1973 war and the city of Quneitra, but it retained the remainder of the strategically significant and resource-rich Golan Heights.

Despite Syria's military defeat and minimal territorial gains, victory narratives proliferated across the country.

They celebrated Assad's leadership and praised his "brave confrontation" of external threats, framing the war as a symbol of resilience and national pride.

For Hafez al-Assad, the 1973 war had served its purpose: to establish a narrative of everlasting war with Israel and to position himself as the indispensable leader for this struggle.Ìę

The idea of perpetual war became a key pillar of Assad’s regime, maintaining a state of exception and suppressing political life.

Pluralism in political thought was relegated to the past, dismissed as a luxury that could only exist in the absence of Israel's aggression.

The foreign “conspiracy” against the nation necessitated that the country stand “united under the wise leadership of Hafez al-Assad” to thwart the plans of its enemies.

Hafez invested heavily in the country’s security infrastructure and intelligence networks to ensure domestic control, while also embedding his power within social and cultural institutions.

In line with Gramci‘s conception of hegemony, schools and cultural organisations became vehicles for glorifying Assad’s leadership, while labour unions and professional associations were dismantled or repurposed to serve the state’s agenda.

Hafez al-Assad transformed Syrian civil society into a mere extension of his regime, embedding his authority into the very fabric of public life.Ìę

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While publicly espousing secular nationalism, Hafez al-Assad weaponised sectarianism to consolidate his power further.

Hafez heavily on Alawite officers in key military, intelligence, and bureaucratic positions, creating a power base tied directly to his survival through shared sectarian loyalties.

And rather than empower the Sunni-dominated private sector, Hafez al-Assad co-opted select figures through clientelistic networks, granting them access to state resources in exchange for absolute loyalty while marginalising the broader economic class.

By intertwining sectarian loyalties with patronage networks, Assad constructed a deeply personal and exclusionary system of power that institutionalised sectarian divisions.

Grievances were managed from the top down to present the regime as a guarantor of stability while simultaneously suppressing civil society organisations that could potentially address them from the grassroots level.Ìę

Hafez al-Assad’s state, as by Yassin al-Haj Saleh, embodies the modern sultanic model, where state sovereignty — authority, monopoly on violence, and control over public resources — merges with familial and sectarian power.

Redeveloping Abdallah Laroui’s concept of the traditional sultanate, Saleh highlights how this fusion dissolves the distinction between the ruler and the state, embedding private interests within public institutions to transform governance into a vehicle for elite domination. Unlike traditional sultanates, the modern sultanic state relies not only on coercion but also on manipulating societal structures like sectarianism.

The October War served as a foundational myth for Assad’s authoritarian rule, establishing a perpetual state of emergency. Yet, Hafez al-Assad avoided direct conflict with Israel from 1973 until his death in 2000. Resistance to Israel’s occupation of Syria and Palestine was severed from wider society and ordinary Syrians.

It was monopolised by the regime, transformed into a top-down project for domestic control rather than a shared societal endeavor. Institutions that could have fostered grassroot engagement or collective action were instead co-opted to serve the regime.

Meanwhile, Syrian society became more divided along sectarian and class lines, engineered by Assad’s policies. Assad’s decision to leave Quneitra in ruins after 1974 epitomises his approach, turning the city into a stark reminder of unresolved conflict rather than a site for recovery and collective resistance.

Ambitions over alliances

Having consolidated his rule domestically, Hafez al-Assad looked to expand his influence in the region by intervening in the Lebanese civil war — an episode that plainly demonstrated his disregard for Palestinian lives or the strength of the Palestinian movement.

In the summer of 1976, the Syrian army ostensibly entered Lebanon to fight right-wing Phalangists, aligning with the Lebanese National Movement under Kamal Jumblatt and Palestinian factions led by Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO).

However, as the PLO and its allies gained the upper hand early in the conflict, Assad shifted alliances to curb their growing influence and assert Syria’s control over Lebanon. Assad relied on Syrian-backed Palestinian factions like Ahmed Jibril’s Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine — General Command (PFLP-GC) and Zuheir Mohsen’s As-Sa’iqa to rival the PLO and act as an extension of Syrian military objectives in Lebanon.Ìę

In January 1976, Assad’s forces supported Lebanese right-wing militias in besieging the Tel al-Zaatar refugee camp housing over 50,000 Palestinians. The siege escalated into a full-scale assault in June, culminating in a massacre on August 12 of an estimated 3,000 Palestinians.

While Lebanese militias led these attacks, Assad’s forces were deeply complicit. Palestinian leaders, including George Habash, remarked that Assad’s role in the massacre resulted in more Palestinian deaths than Zionist actions in preceding years. Between 1985 and 1988, Syrian forces also supported the siege of both the Bourj al-Barajneh and the Sabra and Shatila camps, leading to widespread destruction and thousands of Palestinian casualties.Ìę

Hafez al-Assad’s policies in Lebanon were shaped by his ambition to assert his regional dominance, even if at the expense of Palestinian lives or the unity of the Palestinian movement. His actions deepened divisions within the Palestinian movement and left a devastating legacy of violence that undermined the broader cause of liberation he claimed to champion.

By 1990, approximately 2,500 Palestinian political prisoners were detained in Syrian prisons. Walid Barakat, a Palestinian detained upon entering Damascus in 1982, his first breaths of freedom only this month, when the Assad regime collapsed.Ìę

Passing the mantle

Upon Hafez al-Assad’s death in 2000, the mantle of leadership passed seamlessly to his son, Bashar — a succession engineered to appear modern yet steeped in dynastic tradition. Bashar’s presidency carefully cultivated an image of progressiveness designed to appeal to the West. This included polished public appearances and high-profile interviews with Western outlets, often joined by his wife, Asma al-Assad.

Economically, Bashar declared a transition to the more liberalised "social market economy" model, privatising certain sectors of the economy and expanding foreign trade.

The regime adopted this “modern” aesthetic to project an image of reform, signalling to international audiences that Syria was embracing change. However, beneath this facade lay an authoritarian system fundamentally unchanged.

Grassroot calls for freedom or reform were violently , as became clear during the Damascus Spring of 2001. And the economic “transformation” predominantly entailed a calculated transfer of public resources into the hands of a new class of loyal business elites.

Bashar’s approach exemplified what Antonio Gramsci described as a passive revolution — a process of limited, top-down changes designed to adapt to pressures for reform while preserving the power of the ruling elite.

As part of these changes, Bashar al-Assad also adjusted his discourse on war. While Hafez al-Assad relied on the rhetoric of resistance against Israel to sustain his rule, Bashar recalibrated his focus to align more with the global war on terror. His regime’s embrace of this rhetoric offered a new framework to justify repression and consolidate power in Syria.

The ‘Palestine’ Branch, a notorious prison operated by Syrian Intelligence, symbolises this shift in stark terms. Originally established in 1969 to liaise between the Syrian government and Palestinian factions operating in Syria, the branch’s role dramatically after the September 11 attacks, when it became a destination for detainees rendered by foreign governments under the pretext of counterterrorism.Ìę

Throughout the 2000s, the rhetoric of resistance against Israel was invoked when appropriate, but Syria’s border with Israel remained peaceful. The regime made no real attempt to challenge the occupation of the Golan Heights. Bashar al-Assad, like his father, focused instead on consolidating power domestically, where civil society organisations, labour unions, and political parties remained either co-opted or banned.Ìę

Fractured sovereignty

The shift in rhetoric towards the war on terror was heightened following the start of the Syrian uprising. This narrative allowed Bashar to better compensate for his declining legitimacy by presenting himself as indispensable to regional and global stability.

In April 2011, the regime abolished the decades-long state of emergency tied to the war with Israel, only to replace it with anti-terrorism laws that were, in practice, even harsher.Ìę

Bashar’s alliance with Iran continued the illusion of his commitment to resisting Israel, but nowhere was his regime’s disregard for Palestinian lives more evident than in the plight of Palestinians in Syria, particularly in the Yarmouk camp. Once home to the largest Palestinian community outside Palestine, Yarmouk became a of unfathomable suffering after the regime imposed a brutal siege in July 2013.

A once vibrant hub of Palestinian life was reduced to rubble as the Assad regime carried out indiscriminate bombardments under the guise of fighting terrorists. By 2014, the camp had descended into a humanitarian disaster, with residents facing starvation and a severe lack of medical supplies.

Over 140,000 Palestinians were displaced from Yarmouk, continuing the pattern of violence against Palestinian communities that Bashar al-Assad inherited from his father, and further cementing the regime’s disregard for the very people it claimed to champion.

As the war endured, Bashar al-Assad’s regime came to embody a state reduced to survival through its paradoxical external alliances. After Syria’s suspension from the Arab League in 2011, the UAE played a leading role in bringing Assad back into the Arab fold.

While the regime maintained its alignment with Iran through the axis of resistance, it simultaneously engaged with the axis of normalisation, trading promises of distancing from Iran or curbing Captagon production for diplomatic and economic reintegration.

These alliances eroded Bashar’s control over his own state’s affairs, and silence over Israel’s actions in Syria or the region became more a matter of sovereign deficiency rather than a deliberate choice.

Bashar thus inherited the structure of the modern sultanic state but presided over its fragmentation, as external dependencies increasingly replaced the hegemonic control over the country that characterised his father’s rule.Ìę

From Israel’s perspective, Bashar al-Assad’s regime in the post-2011 landscape offered a weak yet predictable partner. According to former Mossad Chief Efraim Halevy, Bashar followed his father’s footsteps in keeping the border quiet, him as “Israel’s man in Damascus.”

After 2015, with Russia as mediator, coordination between Israel and Syria increased. In 2018, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly expressed no objection to Assad regaining control over Syria, pointing out that the border had been peaceful for 40 years.

Reports that Russia mediated agreements to protect Israeli security interests, such as granting Israel flexibility to target Iranian installations in Syria, in exchange for tacit support of Assad’s stabilisation — a strategy that involved discussions with then-US President Donald Trump as well.Ìę

Such compromises highlight the extent to which Syria’s sovereignty had been eroded, as its state apparatus acted less as an independent actor and more as a broker of foreign interests.

The regime’s deafening silence on Gaza during the ongoing genocide since October 7 underscores this reality.

The Assad regime, which once positioned itself as a champion of resistance against Israel, ultimately crumbled under the weight of its lies, contradictions, and decades of brutal violence.Ìę

Charting a new politics

Since the collapse of Assad’s regime on December 8, 2024, Israel has undertaken significant military operations within Syrian territory, invading Syrian territory beyond the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights for the first time in over 50 years. Israel has also unleashed a devastating bombing campaign, over 600 airstrikes on Syrian military infrastructure across the country.Ìę

Israel’s aggressive military actions and disregard for the rule of law reinforce its role as a destabilising power in the region, thriving on a state of exception and perpetual conflict.

These operations are part of Israel’s regional strategy of ensuring that neighbouring states like Syria remain weak, divided, and incapable of collective resistance. Therefore, a strategic focus on resisting Israel is not only a matter of moral responsibility, but essential for Syria’s future because of Israel’s role in perpetuating instability and fragmentation in the region.

Hannah Arendt describes action as the foundation of the political realm. Action is the capacity to begin something new, to come together in plurality and create spaces where freedom, debate, and collective agency thrive.

The fall of the Assad dynasty is not only an opportunity to rebuild Syria’s institutions and sovereignty, but also to renew Syria’s politics of resistance against the Israeli apartheid state along Arendt’s vision.

It is an opportunity to restore public spaces and centre the politics of resistance around society itself, where individuals can act not as silenced subjects but as active participants in shaping it.

With this approach, resistance evolves from a state project into a societal movement, driven by the lived experiences and aspirations of people across the region.

JadÌęBaghdadiÌęis a PhD candidate of political economy and Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford. His research intersects with a wide set of topics, including state formation, capitalist networks, and sectarianism.ÌęJadÌęteaches Middle East Politics in Oxford and has previously worked in research positions for several institutions, including The Economist, the LSE Middle East Centre, and the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.

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