Word: syria
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...portrays them as comic relief: when they see dancers gyrating to rock n roll, the clerics mutter, "God protect us!" and "All these new-fangled ideas lead to Hell!" But Chahine was also a nationalist. His 1963 bio-pic Saladin, about the 12th-century sultan of Egypt and Syria, found a clear connection between Saladin's uniting of North African and Mideast Arabs against the Christian Crusaders and Nasser's formation of the Egypt-Syria United Arab Republic to fight Israel. (Saladin was played by Ahmed Mazhar, who had attended the Cairo Military Academy with Nasser and Sadat.) Several Chahine...
Maybe, but maybe not. Of all the Middle Eastern conflicts, the rift between Israel and Syria would appear to be the easiest to mend. Israel would just have to return the Golan Heights, a rocky Syrian plateau that Israel captured in 1967. If Israel had a strong leader with a popular mandate (admittedly a big if) this wouldn't be impossible given that Israeli settlement in the Golan is relatively sparse and the Heights are no longer so strategically important thanks to advances in Israeli defense technology. But the tougher question is what Israel should get in return...
Israel and the U.S. want more than just an end to a state of war between Syria and Israel. They also wants Syria to stop supporting anti-Israeli militant groups in Palestine and Lebanon (Hamas and Hizballah, respectively.) In other words, they want Syria to break away from its strategic partnership with Iran, the senior member of what's sometimes referred to as the Rejectionist Crescent, the arc of governments and militias stretching from Tehran to Gaza that oppose American and Israeli dominance in the Middle East...
...Syria isn't going to abandon Iran, according to figures close to the Assad regime here in Damascus. It's not just that the elite of Iran and Syria have a long history of cooperation going back to 1979, when Syria was the first country to recognize the newly established Islamic Republic of Iran. It's also because Syria has no reason to switch sides just when its team is winning. From the fiasco of America's invasion of Iraq, to Hamas's victory in Gaza and Hizballah's victory in Lebanon, Iranian and Syrian power is on the rise...
Assad only wants a package deal, a grand bargain between Syria and Iran on the one hand, and American and Israel on the other, that would settle the cold war for the Middle East. This means that the United States would have to give up once and for all its project for a "new" Middle East, and its penchant for regime change. That might happen on its own in November if Barack Obama becomes President. But a package deal would also have to solve the Iranian nuclear issue, map out the future of post-American Iraq, solve the Syrian-Israeli...