Speaking of analogies, Berneri's writings on Nazism and fascism show a moral clarity of judgment that today appears like a foregone conclusion but that was by no means obvious back in his time, even among sincere democrats. For say what you want about the Spanish Civil War and the brutality on both sides of its ideological divide, the fact is that the Western democracies stood aside, believing that, distasteful as it was that Franco enjoyed the backing of fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, the possibility of a Communist takeover was infinitely worse.

And what for? In the end, even those who viewed Spanish Republicans as Stalin's proxies and thus unworthy of support had to align themselves with Stalin after June 1941 to fight a bigger threat. Not that Communism was harmless — it was not — but the red scare blinded many to the fact that fascism was no less evil until it was too late. Picking a side was no doubt distasteful — but being a bystander in the face of multiple evils is never a good choice either. Letting two opposite evils determine the course of events guarantees a terrible outcome.

Today Syria is turning into a similar struggle between Sunni radicalism and Iran's proxies. Historical analogies should never be pushed too far-neither side fits neatly the paradigm of Franco and the Popular Front. But there are important lessons to be learned from the Spanish Civil War. One is that Nazi Germany and fascist Italy read Western indifference as defeatism. The absence of consequences for their brazen actions helped to set the stage for the much larger conflagration that followed only a few months after Franco's victory in 1939.

Western indifference to human suffering and the impunity with which they were allowed to commit widespread atrocities also convinced the Nazi and fascist regimes that they could murder on a grand scale and get away with it. It is hard to believe that Assad and his Iranian patrons are drawing any other conclusion from the cowardly pretexts Western leaders are invoking to avoid any kind of interference in the Syrian arena.

There is another element that harks back to the Spanish conflict which offers a sobering lesson for Israel, as the world warms to Iran even as it sends thousands of trained fighters to Syria to support a dictator who has gassed his own people.