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Alawi Tribal Politics and Syria's Future

(Jerusalem Post) Mordechai Nisan - For the past 40 years, a small, historically marginal religious minority has dominated and ruled Sunni-majority Syria. This Alawi people, never considered to be Arab, adhere to a religious stream so divergent from Islam that its members were not considered Muslims. Indeed, they turned mosques that intermittent alien Muslim rulers imposed upon them into horse stables. They did not fast during Ramadan, or go on the haj to Mecca. Yet the Alawis, only 12% of Syria's population, seized power in Damascus in 1966, holding it until today. The disintegration of the Alawi tribal state in Damascus could unleash the forces of centrifugal fragmentation in Syria to encompass, in addition to the Alawis based in northwestern Syria, the Druse in the south and Kurds in the northeast. The "Zionist virus," as the Arabs call it, would then spread and grant liberty to small peoples on the model of the Jews of Israel. Buoyed by a dialectical twist of history, the political transformations would serve Israel's strategic benefit. A tamed or divided Syria would neutralize Israel's last major Arab protagonist, after Egypt and Iraq, from active aggression.
2005-12-23 00:00:00
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