The Syrian people’s uprising began as a struggle over social and economic conditions, a fight for democracy in place of repression. Now it has been hijacked by regional and global conflicts.

If there is a constant in the history of the countries of the Levant, it is the conflict between the aspirations of their inhabitants for freedom, and the realpolitik that has led to the sacrifice of those aspirations to the geostrategic interests of foreign powers. Napoleon’s Egyptian expedition of 1798-1801 started a long struggle between France, Britain and Germany over the territory of the declining Ottoman Empire. The greatest trauma, however, came at the end of the first world war. The Arabs had been incited to revolt against the Turks by T E Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) — and especially by a letter from the British high commissioner in Egypt, Sir Henry McMahon, to Sharif Hussein bin Ali of Mecca, promising to create a unified Arab kingdom. They watched powerless as that promise was broken and further betrayed by the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916, which divided the region between France and Britain, and the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which declared the creation of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine.

At first Syria was divided into four states under French administration. After the second world war, it won independence, but the new parliamentary democracy did not last: in 1949 Colonel Husni al-Zaim seized power in the Arab world’s first military coup, assisted by the US embassy and the CIA.

This helps to explain the Syrians’ nationalism and deep-rooted suspicion of the manoeuvres of foreign powers. It explains too why Bashar al-Assad’s regime was faced with a huge popular rebellion (initially peaceful and spontaneous like those in Tunisia and Egypt), it tried to justify the brutality of its repression of the rebellion by appealing to anti-imperialist sentiment. This strategy allowed it to retain the support of some (authoritarian) nationalist movements and a small section of the Arab left.

Despite all this, the Golan Heights (occupied by Israel since June 1967) have been an oasis of stability and the Israeli-Syrian border has remained (...)