The suicide of the Israel haters

They tried to destroy the Jewish State and ended up destroying themselves. The 7 October effect is extraordinary. Fourteen months after Hamas visited its racist savagery on the people of southern Israel, the so-called Axis of Resistance is in tatters. Hamas is gravely weakened as a result of the ruinous war it started. Hezbollah has been spectacularly humiliated, its leadership almost entirely wiped out by the IDF. And now the Assad regime has fallen. This ‘keystone’ of the Iran-led ‘Axis of Resistance’ is no more. The Iranian regime hasn’t looked this rattled, this isolated, this existentially brittle, since the Iran-Iraq war that followed its Islamic Revolution in 1979. Has there ever been a greater self-inflicted blow in world affairs than 7 October?

The fall of Assad is first and foremost a good day for the people of Syria. People are right to raise questions about what comes next, about what the Islamists of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and their various allies might do now they’ve conquered Damascus. But the staggeringly swift fall of the Assad regime, a testament to its superficiality, should be welcomed by all who love liberty. Bashar al-Assad, like his father Hafez before him, was the cruellest of rulers. He viciously suppressed dissent, jailed his critics, massacred Kurds and invited Russia to help him slaughter tens of thousands of his own countrymen during the civil war. The Syrians dancing in the streets following his spineless fleeing are not doing so because they’ve read every policy statement of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and agree with it all. They’re doing so because they feel the sweet relief of deliverance from Assad’s boot on their throats. It’s their Berlin Wall moment and it should not be begrudged them.

Yet Assad’s fall also speaks to the suicidal dynamic of 7 October. Hamas’s pogrom set in motion a chain of events that proved catastrophic for the pogromists themselves and their apologists. Assad’s scalp is the greatest prize yet in this self-destruction of the Israelophobes. That his shallow government, all-powerful but unrooted, was so speedily put into the history books by the advancing rebels is down to two things. First, and most importantly, the distraction of Russia. Assad’s allies in Moscow are too busy killing Ukrainians to be able help him kill Syrians this time round. Without the brute force of Russian back-up, Assad’s hollow government collapsed overnight. That Syrian soldiers in city after city downed arms as the rebels arrived spoke to the regime’s pathological frailty in the absence of Russian muscle.

The second problem for the Assadists was the gutting of Hezbollah by the IDF in recent months. Hezbollah played a central role in propping up the Assad regime during the civil war. Where Russia slayed rebels from the air, Hezbollah did it on the ground. It both trained pro-Assad militias in the ‘art’ of urban warfare and took part in major clashes, including the Battle of al-Qusayr when Assad forces and Hezbollah militants won back the key supply route of al-Qusayr in western Syria. The Center for the National Interest in Washington, DC went so far as to say that Hezbollah was ‘winning the war in Syria’, using its ‘battlefield acumen’ to re-establish Assad’s rule. In 2024, though, Hezbollah could do precisely nothing to assist its allies in Damascus. Like Russia, it is distracted. In fact, it is virtually defeated.

Where once Hezbollah ‘deployed its well-trained fighters’ to aid Assad, says the BBC, that ‘did not happen this time’ because Hezbollah is ‘preoccupied with [its] own affairs’. That’s one way of putting it. Actually, Hezbollah is suffering one of the worst ignominies of its entire existence as a result of the fallout from the 7 October pogrom it supported. In the days after Hamas’s butchery in southern Israel, Hezbollah started raining missiles on northern Israel in an act of solidarity with the Jew-killers. It was a low-level war for months until Israel upped the ante in September this year. It launched its devastating ‘pagers attack’ and took out Hezbollah leaders one by one, including the secretary-general, Hassan Nasrallah. Last month, Hezbollah agreed to the humiliating terms of a ceasefire deal with Israel that effectively forces it to vacate southern Lebanon and, worse, to submit to the authority of the Lebanese government.

Hezbollah might not be dead, but it is thoroughly degraded. As the former British diplomat, John Raine, put it following the downfall of Assad, Hezbollah is no longer ‘a credible military force at the head of an Axis of Resistance’. Assad had no one. He reaped the whirlwind of both the Ukraine War and the murderous folly of 7 October. The seriousness of Assad’s demise, especially for Iran and its so-called Axis of Resistance, cannot be overstated. As Raine says, his regime was ‘the keystone’ to the ‘Iranian-dominated Shia arc’ in the Middle East. With Hamas tied up in a war it cannot win, Hezbollah on the backfoot and Assad’s paper regime evaporating before our eyes, that ‘arc’ has collapsed. It is momentous: the ‘Axis of Resistance’, beloved not only of the mullahs of Tehran but also of the Israelophobes of Western radicalism, is finished.

The Islamic regime in Iran will be quaking. Hezbollah was the militia embodiment of its unforgiving ideology, the chief outlet for its theocratic ambitions. Hamas was the tool with which it taunted the hated Jewish State. And Assad’s Syria was its one and only state ally in the Arab world. Since Hafez al-Assad struck up an alliance with the Islamic Republic in the 1980s, Tehran used Syria to transport weapons to Hezbollah, to create forward bases for elite members of its Revolutionary Guard and to fortify its power across the region. Now it is all gone. The new rulers of Syria look set to be the Sunni Islamists of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham. They are unlikely to look favourably on the Shia regime to their east.

The theocrats of Tehran put a gun to the head of the Jewish nation yet now that gun is turned on them. Now it is they who must be wondering whether their regime will last. The 7 October effect. We can only hope that the young in Iran’s cities, so hungry for the liberty we too often take for granted, spy in this existential crisis of their rulers an opportunity to strike for freedom. This would be the ultimate, most deserved blowback from 7 October – a pogrom that inflicted Islamist tyranny on the Jewish people giving rise to an uprising against Islamist tyranny in Iran. Might Hamas prove to be the gravediggers not of the Jewish nation, but of themselves and the post-1979 barbarous theocracy that has been the source of such great misery and war in the Middle East?

In a sense, it’s wrong to call it ‘the 7 October effect’. For none of this was inevitable. On the contrary, it derives not only from what Hamas did but from how Israel chose to respond. In defiance of the cries of the Western elites, who demanded from day one in the post-pogrom world that Israel lay down its arms, Israel chose to confront its racist invaders. Then it chose to confront the bombers of its northern territory – Hezbollah – who caused the evacuation of tens of thousands of Israeli civilians and the deaths of 12 Druze kids. It chose to stand up for itself, for the continued existence of this homeland of the Jews, for the values of democracy and security. And these are the consequences: Israel lives while Hamas, Hezbollah and the Assad regime are dying. Or at least gravely wounded.

Another party is wounded, too: the West’s apologists for the armies of anti-Semites that dream of destroying Israel. For more than a year, our cultural elites and activist classes either made excuses for Hamas, Hezbollah and the Axis of Resistance, or outright supported them. They demanded the disarming of Israel, its punishment in the kangaroo courts of global affairs, its ousting from the family of nations. Let’s be clear: if they had got their way, Hamas and Hezbollah would be flourishing, Assad might still be in power, Iranian theocracy would be in the ascendant, and the Jewish homeland would be in dire crisis. What a relief that while too many in the West’s intellectual elites paid heed to these craven calls for Israel to surrender to this modern species of fascism, Israel did not. Its insubordination to Western intellectuals has transformed the Middle East for the better and exposed the institutionalised cowardice of our own societies.

Things remain uncertain. Syria could become a vortex of external powers vying for influence. Turkey is already going hard against the valiant Kurds there. And while the conquerors of the regime might be doing their best to appear respectable before the eyes of the watching world, their Islamist ideology might yet prove lethal for the people of Syria and maybe even neighbouring Israel. Yet even in this potentially dangerous flux, we can see people get a first taste of freedom, and that feels good. It is for the people of Syria to decide their future now, and for Israel to continue to defend its own.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy