Yesterday, Israel reportedly struck a car traveling to the Damascus airport, killing the Hizballah officer responsible for coordination with the Syrian military. Meanwhile, the rebel offensive begun last week continues, and various other anti-regime militias have made gains elsewhere in the country. Brian Stewart looks at the big picture:

The Assad regime has always gambled that its power would be best preserved, not by political or economic reform, but by fomenting armed resistance to America and Israel. This bellicose posture was based on the calculation that the Arab masses would tolerate oppression and cruelty, but that the regime could not survive if it gave up its permanent war with the Jews. In his first-rate book The Syrian Rebellion, the late scholar Fouad Ajami summarized this destructive attitude with the words: “Let them eat anti-Zionism.”

While this strategy may have worked under Bashar al-Assad’s father Hafez, it has collapsed over the course of the last decade—as evidenced by videos of Syrians celebrating the recent defeats Israel dealt to Hizballah, which joined Assad in the bloodstained repression of the revolt that began in 2011. Stewart also considers the American role:

Syria was a terrible casualty of President Obama’s grand strategy for the Middle East. During his second term, it became clear that his objective was to create a “geopolitical equilibrium” that would balance traditional American partners like Saudi Arabia and Israel with the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Successive U.S. administrations have accepted the proposition that, if he fell, Assad would either be replaced by a Sunni Islamist regime or a failed state. In either scenario, the prevailing view in Washington was (and remains) that Syria would become an even more dangerous and tormented country, more likely to export violence abroad. The more prudent course of action was therefore to stick with the devil we know.

That analysis never withstood scrutiny, and it looks downright fanciful today.

In fact, Presidents Obama, Trump, and Biden didn’t try to counter Assad and his Iran- and Russia-backed allies for fear of empowering Sunni jihadists, leaving Christian communities vulnerable, and fomenting further instability—and nonetheless Sunni jihadists grew powerful, Christians were slaughtered, and instability spread.

Addressing a recent meeting of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Central Committee, Mahmoud Abbas criticized Hamas more sharply than he has previously (at least in public), calling them “sons of dogs.” The eighty-nine-year-old Palestinian Authority president urged the terrorist group to “stop the war of extermination in Gaza” and “hand over the American hostages.” The editors of the New York Sun comment:

Mr. Abbas has long been at odds with Hamas, which violently ousted his Fatah party from Gaza in 2007. The tone of today’s outburst, though, is new. Comparing rivals to canines, which Arabs consider dirty, is startling. Its motivation, though, was unrelated to the plight of the 59 remaining hostages, including 23 living ones. Instead, it was an attempt to use an opportune moment for reviving Abbas’s receding clout.

[W]hile Hamas’s popularity among Palestinians soared after its orgy of killing on October 7, 2023, it is now sinking. The terrorists are hoarding Gaza aid caches that Israel declines to replenish. As the war drags on, anti-Hamas protests rage across the Strip. Polls show that Hamas’s previously elevated support among West Bank Arabs is also down. Striking the iron while it’s hot, Abbas apparently longs to retake center stage. Can he?

Diminishing support for Hamas is yet to match the contempt Arabs feel toward Abbas himself. Hamas considers him irrelevant for what it calls “the resistance.”

[Meanwhile], Abbas is yet to condemn Hamas’s October 7 massacre. His recent announcement of ending alms for terror is a ruse.

Abbas, it’s worth noting, hasn’t saved all his epithets for Hamas. He also twice said of the Americans, “may their fathers be cursed.” Of course, after a long career of anti-Semitic incitement, Abbas can’t be expected to have a moral awakening. Nor is there much incentive for him to fake one. But, like the protests in Gaza, Abbas’s recent diatribe is a sign that Hamas is perceived as weak and that its stock is sinking.