With Donald Trump Just Days Away from Retaking Office, What Lies Ahead for Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine? Three Philadelphia Scholars Weigh In
Lauren Abunassar
A brief survey of the Levant and it’s not hard to see the region is in a state of both turmoil and transformation. Israel has waged its genocide in Gaza for over a year, with The Lancet medical journal recently releasing a study that the Palestinian death toll, currently reported at 46,600, has been undercounted by 41 percent. Over 1.3 million Lebanese civilians have been displaced as a result of Israeli airstrikes and bombings. And, following the early December fall and exile of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, Israel has gone on to bomb Syria 480 times with Netanyahu doubling down on goals to “[change] the face of the Middle East,” as reported by CNN.
With Donald Trump just days away from retaking office, and potentially implementing substantial foreign policy changes, Al-Bustan News wanted to know what questions we should be asking and whether or not we can consider this era of chaos, devastation, and transformation symptomatic of a watershed moment in our understanding of the MENA region or simply a continuation of patterns of turmoil.
To find answers, we reached out to three regional experts: Samer Abboud is an associate professor of global interdisciplinary studies at Villanova University, just outside Philadelphia. He is also co-editor of Jadaliyya’s Syria page and penned Syria (Polity, 2018). We also spoke with Sean Yom, an associate professor of political science at Temple University, a senior fellow at Foreign Policy Research Institute, and the author of From Resilience to Revolution: How Foreign Interventions Destabilize the Middle East (2015) and Government and Politics of the Middle East and North Africa (2019). And finally, Sumaya Malas, a PhD candidate in political science at the University of Pennsylvania, also weighed in. Malas focuses on post-conflict reconstruction and politics of the Middle East and North Africa. She was a 2019 Herbert Scoville Jr. Peace Fellow and worked as a field translator in Al-Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan.
In an interview with Al-Bustan News, Yom said he has a hard time envisioning just how much worse the state of the MENA region could get.
Sean Yom, associate professor of political science at Temple University, is the author of Government and Politics of the Middle East and North Africa, pictured above.
“We should not expect things to get much worse under Trump because things are already so bad and it’s harder to go lower than the bottom floor,” said Yom, who participated in a public discussion at Temple University in November about Trump’s potential impact in Gaza and Lebanon.
“In the lame duck era of Biden before Trump, if we’re already talking about Iranian nuclear weapon strategy, genocide in Gaza, the dispossession of the Lebanese in both Southern Lebanon and the suburbs of Beirut, if we’re already talking about the death of the two-state solution implanted by the Oslo Peace Accords, and we’re already talking about missiles flying over Jordan on their way to Israel or vice versa (from Israel on their way to Iran), if we’re already talking about the Houthi movement blocking traffic in the vital Red Sea and dragging Egypt into the conflict, that’s already all the status quo…” Yom said, adding, “Short of Trump coming in and dropping a bomb on Iran, there is nothing he could do to make it so bad because Biden, through his complicity and active participation, has already made it this bad.”
Yom pointed to the geopolitical context established by not just Trump’s first term, but by the Biden, Obama, and the Bush administrations. He emphasized how these precedents must factor into our considerations of the future. “As repugnant as some of [Trump’s] more racialized and xenophobic … ideology sounds, [his] anti-interventionist and fairly isolationist stance was not remarkably unlike Obama’s argument that in terms of the Middle East, the time had passed for the U.S. to truly get involved.” He predicted this stance to continue into Trump’s second presidency and it’s something that might undercut expectations that he will exacerbate turmoil in the region.
While Malas, who has traveled extensively in Syria, Lebanon, and Jerusalem, agreed that Trump is typically more of an isolationist, she pointed out that there are scholars who argue that some engagement in the region is necessary to ensuring Syria’s ability to build a new government, in preventing Israel’s expansion into Syria, in continuing to fight for a ceasefire in Gaza. “With Trump coming into office, no one was under the illusion he was the ‘better candidate’ for the Middle East,” Malas told Al-Bustan News. “You would hope that [U.S.] initiatives would be focused on expanding or improving domestic stability and Palestinian self-determination. All of that will be harder under the Trump administration and I think that’s a lot of the fear people have had.”
Sumaya Malas, a PhD candidate in political science at the University of Pennsylvania worked as a field translator in Zaatari Refugee Camp in Jordan, home to tens of thousands Syrian refugees. Pictured above, children attend a school at the camp in 2016. Credit: UN Photo/Mark Garten.
Abboud noted that Israel has always been an exception to United States’ isolationist policy and wonders what this might mean under Trump’s second presidency. “Unfortunately, you have a president who governs on whims and feelings and how good people can make him feel. Not through any commitment to norms or rules,” Abboud said. “It’s not to say past norms were good. It’s just to say they existed. And so, I think we’re going to see deeper normalization between Arab governments and the Israelis. I think a lot of these countries will be willing to trade their disputes. And that’s really scary. Because it makes envisioning the future even harder.”
One of these “trades” came as recently as 2020 with the Israel-Morocco normalization agreement, when Morocco officially recognized Israeli statehood in exchange for the United States’ recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over the Western Sahara. This agreement serves as an example of one the ways different regional powers may, at the end of the day, continue to work with Israel for their own benefit, despite Israel’s violation of international law elsewhere.
Uncertainty about the future of the Levant is partially fed by rapid changes in the region. On December 8th, a coalition of opposition fighters led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a group that previously ruled Idlib, Syria, successfully stormed the Syrian capital, overthrowing the country’s longtime president, Bashar al-Assad. Assad eventually fled to Russia, marking the collapse of 53 years of the Assad family’s rule and a brutal period of repressive dictatorship in Syria.
The fall of Assad’s regime is being heralded as a historic moment and is, in the words of Malas, “an unequivocal shedding of generational trauma.” Still, Malas emphasized the need to ask important questions in this time of transition, even in the face of Syrian celebration. “Transitional justice is something that a lot of policy spaces — and even some academic spaces — don’t talk about. How do you promote justice for people who have been under that level of oppression?” Malas said. “All of the stories that I’ve been through, that my family has been through, that my friends have been through — it’s all coming out now because before there was this blanket of silence that really prevented anyone from being able to share their trauma… The idea that the walls are watching, the walls are whispering, that was always something in the memory of Syrians that I think is important to address.”
Abboud echoed Malas’ sentiments, calling Assad’s fall both crucial and hopeful.
Samer Abboud, an associate professor of global interdisciplinary studies at Villanova University, is the author of Syria (Polity, 2018) pictured above.
“One of the only silver linings of the Syrian conflict lasting so long is that it gave a lot of people within and outside of Syria an opportunity to dream of what their future could look like without the regime,” Abboud said.
“Now,” he adds, “you have people who have been socialized politically during the conflict to make demands and be thinking in revolutionary terms. That’s important and it does suggest, in the most optimistic sense, that that energy and that potential and those forms of organizing will serve as a check to any transitioning government or to any government now or in the future. That people will continue to protest and make demands. The veil of fear has been lifted.”
Still, Abboud cautioned, public fear could resurface under the country’s new leadership. Abboud pointed to HTS’ rule in Idlib and the fact that it was unable to form significant political agreements with other opposition forces, undercutting the possibility of what he called an “inclusive pluralism.”
While the transitional government may cast itself as a national and revolutionary force, it may very well be an extension of rule in Idlib. “So, the question is, to what extent does this open up to be a much more inclusive political transition?” Abboud said. “There are a lot of people in Syria right now who feel they are owed the fruits of the revolution … How the future government [will] include that many people is the biggest question.”
All of this, of course, begs the question of how to consider Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine in relation to each other. After all, Assad’s collapse did not occur in a vacuum, just as Israel’s strikes on Lebanon — and subsequently on a fragile Syria — have not happened without some connection to the genocide in Gaza. Understanding how the Assad regime fell so suddenly and how chaos in Lebanon has escalated is all a part of understanding the systemic forces at play in the broader regional conflict.
Malas emphasized that the success of the uprising in Syria after so many years is largely due to the fact that Iran is spread thin fighting on multiple fronts and with proxies on multiple fronts, just as Hezbollah is spread thin with Israel’s ongoing assaults. “This all made it so that no one was really able to come protect Assad when the time came and the rebels were knocking on his door,” Malas continued.
At the same time, she has been struck by an emerging argument among some scholars and advocates that Syria’s liberation could be detrimental to the fight for Palestinian liberation, a fear that stems largely from the impression of Assad as a counterweight to Israel’s power and an ally to Iran in what has been called the “Axis of Resistance.”
Malas disagreed with this casting of Assad as a fundamental presence opposing Israeli occupation and the repression of Palestinians.
“There’s a difference between just being anti-American and being pro-Palestinian. Ultimately, Palestinian self-determination and stability all has to be actualized regardless of who it’s against,” Malas said. “Iran has done a really good job of making it so that their whole foreign policy approach was to convince the wider Arab world and the Middle East that that was their goal: to make sure Palestinians would have self-determination because of their policy. But we’ve also seen how Iran’s foreign policy is very much just anti-America, destabilizing Israel, etc. And those aren’t the same thing. Pro-Palestine activists should remember that.”
Still, Israel remains at the forefront of many concerns for the region given how unchecked it has been with its widespread attacks on Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria. According to Abboud, these attacks must be understood by acknowledging Israel as an unabashedly expansionist state in both its conservative and liberal iterations. Syria factors into these expansionist goals, as it has already been the target of Israeli airstrikes.
“[Israel] sees [an] opportunity to begin occupying more and more Syrian land, but at the same time, can’t run the risk of having any sort of stable government emerging in Syria,” Abboud said. “And so, what have the Israelis destroyed? The navy. The airports. The ministries. They were trying to destroy the structure of the Syrian state. What happens if you create chaos [and] instability? You destroy the state and you create a kind of situation like Lebanon or Iraq where the state is actually incapable of providing for its population, incapable of providing security. So, the Israelis were trying to prevent the emergence of a state that could defy it. And we see this. The one thing that the transition government leaders [in Syria] are not doing is saying anything about Israel.”
And though any optimism ushered in by Assad’s fall might be tempered by brutal truths like this, Malas, Abboud, and Yom all found some hope in the tidal wave of global attention towards the Arab world that feels, in some ways, unprecedented. It may not mark a watershed moment in history but it certainly feels like a turning point to the scholars. Malas reflected on how, growing up, even saying ‘Palestine’ felt like a risk.
Yom noted that the expectation that one had to be an “Arab insider” to understand how Palestinians felt no longer stands. “The entry cost to the movement is so much lower now,” Yom said. “It’s as long as you believe in human rights, as long as you want to speak out against apartheid, as long as you want to speak out against injustice. The Palestinian cause is not an Arab cause. It’s not an Islamist or religious cause. It’s not a regional cause… It’s a transnational dilemma of rectifying a claim of injustice that transcends all identities, all cultures, all religions.”
Abboud similarly found hope in the fact that Israeli genocide and apartheid can now be discussed and are no longer considered “fringe” ideas. “Changing the language means you’re changing the kind of question you have, so questions like ‘why can’t they get along,’ and ‘why religion…,’ those questions are so outdated,” said Abboud.
At the same time, he mourned the withstanding reluctance to acknowledge the humanitarian catastrophes. Abboud reflected on all of the people he continues to encounter who defend Israel’s actions as self-defense. “It speaks to the extent to which the Arab has been dehumanized since 9/11,” Abboud said. “I held onto this stupid notion that people thought this way because they didn't know. It’s part of the reason I became a professor [after working as an organizer and activist]. I felt in some way education was a solution. And then you realize, ‘oh no, they’re seeing it and they still don’t care.'"
So what can be done? Where can one cling to hope in the face of such uncertainty, where hope and despair seem to constantly coexist? For Abboud, he turns to history, remembering the way it tells us that the collapse of oppressive regimes is inevitable. But he also turns to the importance of witness.
“I think that we have an archive problem and we have a witnessing problem. What that means for me is that we may have a memory problem down the road,” Abboud said. “What is really important now is that we document the crimes that are committed against us. We document what the world has done and not done. Memory is something we project on the past but it’s being constructed as we speak right now. We need to be engaging in forms of record taking, of archiving, of remembering now so that we never forget what is happening to us in Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine.”
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Lauren Abunassar is a Palestinian American writer and journalist. A Media Fellow at Al-Bustan News, she holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and an MA in journalism from NYU. Her first book Coriolis was published as winner of the 2023 Etel Adnan Poetry Prize.