The Ways of Syria

Author Itamar Rabinovich

Publisher Vallentine Mitchell

Year 2008

Pages 365 pp.

Price $49.95

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In one of his sweeping insights, Henry Kissinger once captured the forces at play in Syrian history. "Damascus is at one and the same time the fount of modern Arab nationalism and the exhibit of its frustrations," he wrote. "Syrian history alternates achievement with catastrophe. . . . The injustice of foreigners is burned deep into the Syrian soul." A big and commanding new book of history and diplomacy by the Israeli scholar Itamar Rabinovich takes readers deep into the world of the Syrian state -- and into that mix of pride and injury that has shaped its modern history. Rabinovich tracks the twists and turns of Syria's political journey in recent decades, its transformation from the plaything of outside powers into a player of consequence in the Levant. No other writer has dug as deep into such material as Rabinovich has in this book, a distillation of a lifetime of concern with the ways of Syria.

What the great historian Edward Gibbon once called "the most disgusting of pronouns" -- the writer's "I" -- hardly appears in this rich and luminous book of essays. Yet although it draws on historical material, including memoirs and archives, in Arabic, English, French, and Hebrew, it is also enriched by personal experience. In 1993, the late Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin gave Rabinovich the opportunity of a lifetime: he pulled him out of the academy and appointed him ambassador to Washington and also (and more important for the purposes of this book) chief negotiator with Syria.

To my knowledge, Rabinovich has not walked the streets of Damascus and Aleppo. But his passion for Syria's life runs through this volume. For Rabinovich, who wrote his doctoral dissertation on the Syrian Baath Party, Syria has always been achingly close yet a forbidden land across a hostile border. His four decades of scholarly and policy work, it could be said, have been a relentless quest to document and understand the puzzle of Syria.

FATHERS AND SONS

The rogues and coup makers whose conspiracies have wrecked Syria's history walk out of Rabinovich's pages. Rabinovich provides a full and vivid chronicle of the way the French mandate in the interwar period tried -- and failed -- to shape and order the Syrian state. Other writers may tell in the most general of ways how the Alawis, a community of heterodox, historically marginal mountaineers, emerged as the masters of this fragmented land. But Rabinovich carefully reconstructs their odyssey, as they rode on the coattails of France through service in its colonial troops, then made their way through the Baath Party and the military to the commanding heights of the political order.

In 1970, an Alawi peasant-soldier, Hafez al-Assad, emerged from a rapid succession of coups d'état. On the face of it, there was nothing to suggest that this coup maker would succeed where others before him had failed. But he was to rule for three decades and bequeath to his son Bashar a political kingdom. Rabinovich provides a subtle portrait of Assad senior, no doubt the last century's most consequential Syrian leader.

To most of Syria's proud urban Sunni community, the Alawis are a people of dissimulation and concealment, and Hafez al-Assad was thought to be an embodiment of his community's ways. He was "deliberate, patient, and cool-headed," Rabinovich observes. As a "grey, slow, somewhat awkward politician," he would tame his once-turbulent and difficult country -- and put in a serious bid for hegemony over the Lebanese and the Palestinians as well. He built his authority "stone by stone," getting what he wanted "by stealth." Rivals were struck down, and many perished in Syria's notorious prisons.

Assad died in 2000, at a ripe old age, and was laid to rest in his ancestral village. The vast majority of his people had known no other ruler. They wept for him, and no doubt for themselves as well: he had given them stability.

But that stability was bought at a terrible price. A country of deep and rich traditions -- Greco-Roman, Islamic, Mediterranean -- had become a cultural and intellectual backwater. To rule Syria, Assad had broken its spirit, denied it the culture and possibilities of modernity. The Baathists had once been dreamers at war with the economic and political hierarchies of the Fertile Crescent. Yet the world that Assad left to his son Bashar was mired in sectarianism: a minority of Alawis ruling a resentful Sunni majority.

The very dynasticism of the succession was a rebuke to all that the Baathists had once thought about themselves. The succession would stick, but the son, a pampered child of privilege, lacked his father's touch. His coming-out, the defining act by which the outside world came to know him and his style, was the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, in February 2005. In the days leading up to Hariri's brazen murder, which happened in broad daylight, outside Beirut's seafront hotels, Bashar and his principal lieutenants had openly bullied and threatened Hariri.