On Saturday, Israeli jets struck two military airbases in Syria, part of an ongoing attempt to prevent the war-torn country from again becoming a strategic threat. Kyle Orton, having recently visited Syria, provides some important background to the most recent upheavals, and specifically the attacks by members of the Sunni Arab majority on followers of the Alawite faith:

The Alawis are an esoteric sect, their doctrines formally kept secret from most of their own community. . . . Alawite theology is a swirl of Neoplatonism, a gnostic-inflected version of the Trinity, and a reverence for the Prophet Mohammad’s cousin and son-in-law Ali as a manifestation of God—a belief that orthodox Muslims regard as plainly beyond the bounds of the faith.

The rise to power in Syria of Hafez al-Assad in 1970, and the subsequent instrumentalization of the Alawis as the backbone of the dynastic regime, above all in the army, challenged what many Sunnis saw as the laws of nature—namely, Alawi subordination. To mitigate this, Hafez drew on the Alawis long-practiced protective mechanism of taqiya (dissimulation), securing a fatwa in 1973 from Lebanon’s Shiite hierarchy declaring Alawism a form of Islam. Hafez’s gambit failed in theological terms, with few Sunnis convinced, but it did contribute to the Alawis’ waning ability to forge an identity independent of the regime.

Bashar took the lessons of the 1970s and 1980s to construct his strategy for survival when rebellion returned to Syria in 2011, setting out to transform the struggle from an uprising against autocracy into a sectarian civil war by deliberately radicalizing the insurgency. In creating space for Sunni jihadists, Assad—and Iran, which quickly took over the regime’s security apparatus—hoped to frighten the Alawis and other minorities (and the Sunni bourgeoisie) into clinging to the regime, and to make international actors like the U.S. wary of supporting the anti-Assad movement.

To make doubly sure of the Alawis’ loyalty, the line between the community and the regime was deliberately blurred even further by a series of regime-orchestrated massacres early in the war, using Alawi civilians, armed with knives and pistols, to murder at close quarters their Sunni neighbors.

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.