Damascus, Syria David Rosenberg (The Medi – As the Arab League agreed to go to the United Nations Security Council early this week with a resolution calling for Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad to step down, Russia was reportedly doing a major arms deal with the beleaguered regime.

The $550 million agreement to sell 36 Yak-130 combat aircraft will not do anything to tip the balance in favor of the Al-Assad regime, which has been engaged in a 10-month conflict with anti-government opposition. But Russia is almost certainly providing arms Damascus needs to hold back the rebels as well as mounting a diplomatic defense of its friend at the U.N.

In a rare glimpse into the Russia-Syria arms trade, a ship loaded with ammunition from Russia was briefly detained in Cyprus earlier this month before continuing its journey unmolested to the Syrian port of Tartus. Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has vowed that Russia will veto any sanctions as “unfair and counterproductive.”

“Syria is an important customer for the Russian military industry and the industry is quite keen to maintain the relationship,” Fyodor Lukyanov, editor-in-chief of the Moscow based foreign policy journal Russia in Global Affairs, told The Media Line. “Syria is one of the few remaining customers in the region and it hosts the only military base – a small one but still a base – that Russia still has outside its own borders.”

As the West – now joined by the Arab League – presses the Syrian president ever harder, Russia has emerged as his most important ally. Iran also backs the Damascus regime, but Tehran itself faces growing diplomatic isolation over its nuclear program and doesn’t wield a Security Council veto. China is opposed to Syrian sanctions, too, but analysts say it is likely to follow whatever line Moscow adopts.

Russia’s warm ties with Syria, and more exactly the Al-Assad family regime that has ruled the country four decades, starts with arms sales but it goes much deeper.

In the final two decades of the Cold War era, when the Soviet Union was a superpower competing for global influence with the U.S., Syria was its staunchest ally in the Middle East. Bashar Al-Assad’s father and predecessor Hafez armed his troops with Soviet weapons and advanced Moscow’s interests in the region.

With the collapse of communism and with Syria’s deteriorating economy, the relationship is not what it once was. But Russia maintains a naval base at Tartus and the two governments share a distrust of the West and its motives.

Indeed, the view from Moscow of what is happening in Syria is very different than the one in Washington or Brussels. Where the West sees events in Syria as a popular uprising against a repressive regime, Russia shares Damascus’ take, which sees the rebellion as conspiracy by the Gulf countries to bring down an ally of their foe Iran.

“Saudi Arabia, Qatar and others see this as an opportunity, as a chance to push back Iranian influence,” Lukyanov said. “From Russia’s point of view, it’s part of a geopolitical struggle between Iran and Saudi Arabia, where Syria is just a card.”

For policymakers in Moscow, the situation in Syria looks remarkably similar to the one in Libya last year, where another long-time friend, Muamar Al-Qaddafi, faced what was seen in the West as a popular rebellion against autocracy. Russia reluctantly agreed not to veto a U.N. decision to impose a no-fly zone over the country.

The resolution, as Russia’s leaders understood it, was to prevent Al-Qaddafi from killing civilians with aerial firepower. But the NATO forces that largely enforced the decision, Russians say, used it to level the playing field in the Libyan civil war to Al-Qaddafi’s disadvantage. Moscow lost a friend and customer for its arms and is now out of favor with the successor National Transitional Council.

Zvi Magen, a former Israeli ambassador to Russia, said Russia’s Syria policy is driven by memories of its Cold War rivalry with the U.S.

“There’s an element of business in the arms deals, but it’s mainly a political move to show the flag and to show support for Syria. It’s mainly a function of Russian relations with America than with the Syrian regime,” Magen told The Media Line.

For that reason – and because Moscow realizes that Al-Assad’s days are numbered – it may be prepared to make a deal with the U.S. over Syria, he added.

Nevertheless, analysts agree that the importance of the arms trade as a factor in Moscow’s calculations should not be overlooked. In an economy with few other industrial exports, Russia’s military industry is an important earner of foreign exchange and a powerful domestic political force.

The Voice of Russia radio’s website said in December without citing a source that Russian arms exports reached $11 billion last year, a three-fold increase from 2000. While the country’s biggest customers are India and China, the Middle East had been a growing market until the Arab Spring eliminated Al-Qaddafi and sanctions on Iran removed another customer. Syria alone, according to some estimates, accounted for 7 percent of all Russian arms sales in 2010.

A U.S. government study in 2009 estimated Russia’s share of the Middle East arms market grew to more than 15 percent in the 2005-2008 period, five percentage points more than in 2001-2004 as it offered more creative financing and payment options, counter-trade, offsets, debt-swapping, and, in some cases, licensing production locally.

Russia’s Interfax news agency reported in early December that Russia delivered $300 million of Yakhont anti-ship cruise missiles to Syria.

With numbers like that, it is no wonder that Sergey Chemezov, the head of the state arms export company Rosoboronexport, made clear he had no intention of halting business with Syria.

“There are no sanctions whatsoever regarding Syria,” he told Interfax on Wednesday. “If international sanctions are imposed by the U.N. Security Council, everything will change. And if there are no sanctions, why should we refuse to cooperate with this country? This is business after all.”

Nevertheless, Magen said, Russia is careful not to sell Damascus weapons like S-300 surface-to-air missiles that could alter the regional balance of power.

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Palestinian Territory David Rosenberg / The Med – Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority (PA) president, was on a roll last spring and summer, announcing with great fanfare plans to end the Hamas-Fatah rift and to seek recognition of statehood in the United Nations. Israel was livid and the United States scrambled to create a blocking majority against statehood in the Security Council.

But now the grand strategy seems to be unraveling.

Last week, Palestinians officials admitted off the record that the statehood bid in the Security Council was dead in the water, although the PA might still push for a symbolic vote in the General Assembly. Unity talks have stalled for now on the composition of a joint cabinet of technocrats and personal animosities.

Abbas won Palestinian admission to the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) by a thumping majority and to the thunderous applause of delegates. But membership came at the cost of the organization’s losing its U.S. funding, prompting UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and other officials to call on the Palestinians to refrain from trying to join other international bodies.

Nevertheless, observers of the Palestinian scene say that as much as his strategy is dead-ended, Abbas, popularly known as Abu Mazen, has emerged as an unlikely hero in the Palestinian street. He is seen now as a leader who brought the Palestinian cause back to the world stage and had the gumption to say ‘no’ to the U.S.

“He did his best. He didn’t buckle under tremendous pressure. People give him credit for that. They don’t blame him for the failure,” Daoud Kuttab, a Palestinian journalist and analyst, told The Media Line. “His personal standing has improved.”

Abbas’ standing is critical as he engages in an ideological battle with the Hamas movement in Gaza. Together with the failure to get peace talks with Israel off the ground, his statehood setback has undermined his case for creating a Palestinian state through diplomacy and has given Hamas more evidence that its strategy for so-called armed resistance is the only choice.

Palestinians are not of one mind about how to pursue the goal of a state. A September opinion poll by the Harry S. Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace and the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research found that 83 percent of the Palestinians supported the drive for statehood via the UN. But just over a quarter of the respondents said they supported armed attacks on the Israeli army and Jewish settlers as a way of forcing Israel out of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Last spring, Abbas’ prospects looked promising. Negotiations with Israel never got off the ground despite heavy pressure from the Obama administration, but the onus for the talks’ failure was placed by most on the government of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. The Palestinian economy was booming and the West Bank and Gaza were spared the mass protests exploding across the Middle East.

In April, Egypt brokered the terms for Abbas’ Fatah movement to begin national unity talks with Hamas to end a four-year-old rift that had been extremely unpopular in the Palestinian street. Not long afterwards the PA formally unveiled its bid for statehood and insisted it would settle for nothing less than a Security Council approval. It lobbied hard around the world and won seals of approval for good governance from the UN and International Monetary Fund.

The Palestinians were admitted to UNESCO Oct. 31 in a vote of 107 in favor to 14 against (52 abstained). But in the Security Council, the Palestinians have failed to get the minimum nine votes out of 15 they need. Meanwhile, a Security Council admission committee was unable last week to formulate an agreed stance concerning the Palestinian bid for full UN membership.

Ido Zelkovitz, a lecturer in Middle Eastern history at Israel’s Haifa University, said Abbas had nevertheless scored some important victories along the way.

“The Palestinians won UNESCO membership despite the fact that the Americans opposed it and cut off funding to the organization. That was quite an achievement internationally,” Zelkovitz told The Media Line.

In doing battle with Washington, the Palestinian leader won favor in public opinion by articulating a widely held view among Palestinians that America is an imperialist power that is incorrigibly pro-Israel. Abbas also raised the Palestinian profile at a time when Arab Spring turmoil had directed attention to places like Libya and Syria.

“In last years what was the biggest problem of the Palestinians?” he said. “It was that no one listened to them because the West Bank was quiet and economy was thriving. No one was paying attention to them.”

National unity talks are showing signs of thawing. On Monday, Salam Fayyad, the PA prime minister and a figure loathed by many in Hamas, signaled that he was prepared to step aside if that would bring the two movements together. Abbas is due to hold face-to-face talks in Cairo this month with his arch-rival, the exiled Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal.

Zelkovitz said he is skeptical that Hamas and Fatah will be able to put aside their differences, or more importantly, agree to share the financial resources of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Indeed, Abbas and Fatah leaders fear Hamas might try to wrench control of the PLO from them. But Kuttab is more sanguine.

While Abbas will not resort to violence, he still retains options to pursue his agenda through diplomatic and political means, Kuttab said. The Security Council rotates its non-permanent members every six months and the Palestinians can wait until “the magic nine” votes they need emerge.

“Abu Mazen has instructed his team to look for other options to the UN statehood and independence,” he said. “He’s against violence, so that is off the table. That increases the need for national unity, the need to work for massive non-violent protests and to take advantage of the 100-plus countries that support Palestine to encourage them in a boycott divestment campaign against Israel.”

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