Just Another Saturday Night in the Middle East

As I arrive at the synagogue in Jerusalem this morning one of my co-religionists greeted me with the words, “Well, just another quiet Saturday night in the Middle East.”

Well, it was, of course, anything but quiet.

Here in Israel, terrorists tried to ram a military vehicle near Hebron injuring three members of the Israel Defense Forces, one now in hospital in serious condition.   The terrorist, as is the custom here, was neutralized. Events like this seem to happen regularly now throughout Judea and Samaria, commonly referred to as the West Bank.

In Syria it appears that the rebel forces that took control of Aleppo last week, continued their drive to wrest control of the country from the Assad regime.  Yesterday they were also able to take control of the city of Homs and were about to enter Damascus as well. In a shocking announcement on official Syrian radio, the Syrian military announced last night that the 54 year old Assad regime had ended and that President Assad, who had been in charge for the last 24 years, had flown out of the country to an undisclosed destination.

Today rebel troops have implanted themselves in the center of Damascus and have seemingly taken over the country with little resistance from the military or from the traditional supporters of the Assad regime, the Russians, Iranians and Hezbollah.   Russia is, of course, busy with a war in the Ukraine which has killed close to 150,000 of its troops, Hezbollah has been decimated by our Israeli military and Iran started pulling their people out of Syria already last week. The events of the past week will, hopefully, mark the end of the 13 year old Syrian civil war.

It is not clear at this point whether the fall of Assad is good for us here in Israel or not but the IDF has moved additional troops into the Golan Heights as a precautionary measure given a shared border there with Syria. The rebel army, now known as HTS was, at one time associated with Al-Qaida and ISIS but has since disavowed that connection. But time will tell how that plays out for us here.

Nevertheless, we have heard jet aircraft overhead here in Jerusalem all day and Israel news is saying that a chemical weapons production plant in Syria was destroyed as we did not want the rebels to get their hands on that facility.

Thankfully the cease fire with Lebanon is, more or less, holding while the rumor is that progress is being made on the effort to effect a cease fire and hostage release with Hamas as well. Qatar is once again hosting those talks, after walking away from that responsibility a few weeks ago. This time Hamas has actually sent a negotiating team to Doha as well, something they had not done in previous rounds of talks.

As I wrote at the beginning, just another quiet Saturday night in the Middle East. Let us hope that it is the beginning of a new era for Syria whose progress has been negatively affected by the Assad regime’s 54 years in power. Perhaps the rebels who have seized power will actually figure out a way to build a country rather than another vassal state under Russian influence