We knew that the Syrian crisis would be the ultimate test.

However, the Palestinian and Ukrainian issues had already given us the chance to recognize the Orientalism that permeates Western leftist circles. The genocide of our Palestinian brothers and sisters had created a false sense of unity, leading us to briefly believe that the Western left had finally understood the gravity of the colonial struggle. Except for the German radical left, which, trapped in its Christian guilt, could not perceive the presence of Ashkenazi Jews in Palestine as part of the white supremacist colonial project. Yes, German leftists, Zionism was inspired from the very beginning by German supremacist theories, particularly the concept of Lebensraum. Herzl himself wrote in his memoirs that he sought to “civilize” Eastern Jews, whom he viewed as akin to Arabs. Kibbutzim are not exempt from this legacy, even if they label themselves as “socialist.”

But never mind. We thought we were united, yet the heated debates about the “Palestinian resistance” embodied by Hamas soon led us back to discussions about the “Lebanese resistance” represented by Hezbollah. As progressive forces, we had to accept that authoritarian and ultra-conservative factions had become our allies because the settler colonialists imposed apartheid and genocide upon us. As always, just like in Ukraine, the imperialist war forced us into unbearable compromises with obscurantist and corrupt forces, eager to seize power and turn our already colonized societies into fundamentalist nightmares. Our oppressors had, as always, become the axis of resistance to American capitalist evil. Thanks to U.S. imperialism and its wars, we were forced to abandon our fight for liberation in favor of total focus on war. And war is never left-wing.

A side note: let’s not forget the visionary writings of Frantz Fanon.

But Hamas is not Hezbollah. While we do not support Hamas in its exercise of power, we have, in some respects, supported its armed struggle against the settler colonialists. It represents a national liberation struggle waged by Palestinians, for Palestinians, against their enemy. On the other hand, Hezbollah is the product of a nationalist, inter-religious civil war (1976-1990), compounded by double foreign invasions by Israel and Syria, and foreign interference by Iran, which saw Lebanon—and especially its Shiite community—as a key strategic asset. Hezbollah was conceived as Iran and Syria’s mercenary, initially tasked with eliminating progressive and secular Palestinian resistance movements in Lebanon, along with their Lebanese allies.

Recall the massacre of Palestinian refugees at Tal al-Zaatar, with the complicity of the Syrian army.

Recall Yasser Arafat’s anger at Hafez al-Assad and the breakdown of alliances between the PLO and Syria.

Remember the assassination of Druze leader Kamal Jumblatt, a friend and ally of Arafat, by the Syrian Social-Nationalist Party’s henchmen in 1976.

Remember the denial of political freedoms to Palestinians in Lebanon and Syria, enforced by Hezbollah and the Assad regime, from 1980 to today.

And if you don’t remember, please educate yourselves!

We cannot list all the betrayals of the Palestinian cause and the crimes committed against Palestinians and Syrians by Hezbollah, nor their compromises with Western capitalism. However, we encourage you to read Joseph Daher’s enlightening book, «Hezbollah, Religious Fundamentalism and Liberalism».

Joseph Daher is a fellow Arab leftist.

Recall the kidnapping and murder of Michel Seurat in 1985 by Islamic Jihad, affiliated with Hezbollah, on orders from Hafez al-Assad. Seurat, a man of the left and author of «L’État de Barbarie», was married to Syrian writer Marie Seurat. Their daughter, Leila, now an expert on the Palestinian issue, has written «Le Hamas et le Monde», which you should read.

But let’s return to the main issue. The fate of the Syrians and Palestinians, two brotherly peoples, was determined by Iranian and Syrian interventions in Lebanon. Or rather, “separated” by these interventions.

Hafez al-Assad imprisoned progressive left-wing activists for years, followed by his son Bashar in continuing this counter-revolutionary effort.

When thousands of Syrians, including left-wing progressives, rose up against Assad’s fascism, Iran, Hezbollah, and eventually Russia actively joined the counter-revolution, massacring the Syrian people, making thousands disappear in regime-run concentration camps, and proliferating gangs affiliated with Hezbollah and the Syrian Social-Nationalist Party. They turned Syria into a Captagon factory and a narco-state.

When Assad released thousands of Islamists to destroy the people’s revolution, then manipulated them to destabilize local resistance, did you see any of this?

When Assad, the West, and Russia agreed to focus on the Islamist threat, did you not see that the rhetoric against terrorism is always used as a pretext to crush revolutions? Did you not realize that many of the recruits for Al-Qaeda and ISIS were non-Syrians, many of them from the West, recruited within your backyards ?

The Islamic State organized massacres in Paris, then beheaded people on camera in the Syrian desert, yet you ignored the much more widespread atrocities committed by Bashar’s army and Shabiha forces.

There’s an old saying: “When you point at the moon, the fool looks at the finger.” That’s what the West did, and that’s what the Left did: condemning the Syrian revolution, condemning hundreds of thousands of Syrians to death.

Had you supported our revolution, ISIS would have been stopped in its tracks, and the genocide of the Kurds would not have happened.

YOU killed our revolution through your complicity.

Have you read the writings of Yassin al-Haj Saleh?

What about his partner Samira Khalil?

Did you know they were both imprisoned for opposing the regime and their affiliation with the Syrian Communist Party?

Have you heard of Syrian anarchist Omar Aziz, whose model for local coordination committees influenced the Syrian revolution, before he was arrested and tortured to death by regime agents?

Have you heard of Raed Fares and his pacifist efforts organizing Free Citizens demonstrations in Kafranbel?

No, fellow leftists, you haven’t heard of us. You chose not to see, blinded by your campism and ignorance of the specific political realities in the Levant. Like good Westerners, you applied your ideological frameworks to our situation, including your binary analysis: “all the enemies of my enemies are my friends.”

Congratulations, Western leftists, you’ve become the best allies of Eastern fascism and its imperialist backers.

Now, let’s briefly discuss the Palestinian issue.

Have you heard of the Yarmouk refugee camp? Did you know that Palestinian militias, dissident from traditional left-wing Palestinian resistance groups like the PLO, supported Assad in suppressing Palestinian revolutionary movements in Yarmouk? Were you aware that they were complicit in bombing the world’s largest Palestinian refugee camp (with 160,000 residents) starting in 2012, and its subsequent siege from 2013?

Read also about what Assad and Russia offered the Islamists in Yarmouk (Damascus) and the Yarmouk Basin (Deraa) in May and November 2018. Just look at the consequences for the Druze communities in Suwayda.

Educate yourselves, comrades.

If you read further and remove your blinders, you’ll learn that the Syrian regime is one of the few in the world to have consistently banned all pro-Palestinian demonstrations. Even during the genocide, Assad didn’t even attempt to organize a fake demonstration to bolster his pro-Palestinian propaganda. Nothing.

Except in Idlib and Suwayda, the only two regions not under regime control. In both cities, Syrians have consistently supported their Palestinian brothers and sisters.

But you didn’t see it. You preferred to believe that Iran and Hezbollah were the Palestinians’ only hope, even when not a single one of their rockets breached the security of the Zionist regime. Empty rhetoric.

Syrians were never fooled by Nasrallah and Khomeini’s bombastic speeches, grotesque threats, and pitiful fireworks.

But you, the Western left, thought they were the true axis of resistance, the cutting edge of anti-colonial struggles.

And now that Syrians have liberated themselves (and who cares if Turkey played a role, since it has no control over the millions of Syrians liberated from Assad), you’ve joined forces with reactionaries in the West to lecture us on anti-terrorism.

“Be careful, you Arabs, your rebels are jihadists who don’t take responsibility for themselves. They will betray you and destroy you.”

Thank you, white supremacists, for your concern. But on the Syrian issue, you’re no better than the anti-Deutsche Germans were on the Palestinian issue.

We, more than anyone else, know what the Islamist danger is. You discovered it on September 11th and at the Bataclan, and suddenly, the world wept for you. But did you know that over 80% of Islamist victims since the 1980s have been Muslims and Arabs? Did you also know that it was Syrians alone who confronted ISIS on their own soil?

Where were you to protect us, you who now lecture us condescendingly, when Hayat Tahrir al-Sham achieved in a week what we’d given up on dreaming of a decade ago?

Did you read the messages of solidarity and affection from Wael al-Dahdouh, the Palestinian journalist whose entire family was decimated by Israel?

No, once again, you saw nothing. You only saw the potential for Islamism in us. We Arabs are too backward to understand how democracy, socialism, and secularism work…

While Israel has waited for its dear ally Bashar to fall before attacking Syrians in Quneitra, your campism is out in the open, along with

This article, authored by an individual whose personal trajectory has been deeply influenced by his family history, employs a rigorously anti-fascist and anti-authoritarian analytical framework to argue that Zionism is historically rooted in traditions of white and Germanic supremacist thought.

Context

The military operation in response to the bloody attack by the Palestinian resistance on the Israeli settlements adjacent to the Gaza ghetto on 7th October 2023 quickly became the scene of war crimes against the Palestinian civilian population. Let’s start by recalling the true toll of the Hamas attack on several military bases and settlements in southern Israel[1] on October 7, 2023, as well as a music festival: in the course of the armed action, 1,139 people were killed, including 695 civilians (among them 71 foreigners and 36 children) and 373 members of the security forces (305 soldiers, 58 policemen and 10 members of the Shin Bet intelligence service)[2]. Hamas also captured 251 hostages (including numerous military personnel) in order to exert pressure on the State of Israel, in particular to obtain the release of hundreds of Palestinian prisoners, over 1,300 of whom were being held without charge or trial before October 7th[3].

In retaliation, the Israeli army claims to have killed over a thousand Hamas fighters who took part in the attack, while independent investigations, as well as the testimonies of a number of surviving Israeli civilians, also blame the IDF for the death of a significant number of Israeli civilians, among those officially attributed to Hamas. Experts refer to the application of the “Hannibal Protocol”, a 1986 Israeli directive which advocates avoiding as far as possible the need to negotiate the release of hostages, even if it entails killing one’s own nationals held hostage during the planned assault to free them. One thing is certain: this bloody adventure by Hamas has legitimized an unprecedented outpouring of violence by Israel, which has been condemned by the International Court of Justice for acts of genocide against the Palestinians of Gaza.

The rules of conventional warfare were in fact widely violated, first by the proscribed practice of siege, blocking the population’s water, electricity and food supplies, then by the combined use of weapons banned by international conventions (chemical weapons such as white phosphorus), snipers and killer drones targeting unarmed civilians, as well as the carpet bombing of residential areas, refugee camps, humanitarian NGO vehicles and premises, places of worship, schools and hospitals. On the top of that and from the very first weeks of the operation, dozens of humanitarian workers, working doctors and journalists were killed or arrested and transferred to detention centers without trial.

Social media tell the truth

The images produced by the Israeli regime’s and army’s communication services have not sought to conceal the use of inhuman and degrading treatment against the prisoners, who do not benefit from the status of prisoners of war, nor of hostages, either status implying the adoption of specific procedures and negotiations for their continued detention or their release within the framework of negotiations between the parties to the conflict. The IDF soldiers themselves did not stop communicating from the first day of the operation on social media, and in particular on Tiktok and Telegram, boasting almost daily of committing crimes and broadcasting damning videos testifying to their dehumanization of the Palestinians. More on this aspect further on.

War crimes have therefore been fully documented by the international community, NGOs and the media, including the Israeli media. In addition to conventional institutions and structures, social media have also widely reported on these crimes, and must be considered legitimate sources of information insofar as they transmit raw testimonies from an area directly affected. As such, these resources have as much evidential value as the testimonies of victims and civil parties, as well as the confessions of perpetrators in criminal trials, regardless of the subsequent use made of the images thus made public. What’s more, user accounts, as well as the locations and dates of video recordings, can easily be verified and fact-checked by experts and investigators, making it impossible to consider them fabricated or manipulated: the vast majority of the thousands of megabytes of data from Gaza CANNOT be the result of fake news and computer-generated images, as some claim. Societies have evolved, and taking modernity into account means recognizing new information and communication modalities as legitimate, not least because they guarantee a greater diversity of sources than the mainstream and national media.

However, we know how embarrassing it is for governments to have to deal with media that avoid their control, hence their constant efforts to obtain total censorship of critical content shared on social networks.

Self-defense or retaliation?

Once we have ruled out the negationist or revisionist hypothesis, which implies denial of the reality of the crimes committed by the Israeli army against the Palestinians, what remains to be examined is the motivations behind these crimes and their intentional nature.

The notion of intentionality is crucial for several reasons. Firstly, because it makes it possible to distinguish self-defence from revenge or retaliation, and secondly, because it makes it possible to identify the real purpose of the act of violence or crime. Self-defence, a basic rule at the crossroads of natural and positive law, defines the circumstances in which a person can be killed or harmed without fear of punishment. To define precisely the circumstances in which self-defence can be invoked, the law has identified a number of criteria which must be met for self-defence to be deemed legitimate: the threat must be real (not imagined or supposed) and imminent (not prior to the moment of response), the response must be immediate (confined to the source of the threat and without delay, otherwise it would be retaliation), necessary (there must be no other way to avert the threat) and proportionate to the threat (just enough to neutralize the threat). At its origins, this rule was thought to enable the individuals lacking legal authority to protect themselves in the event of aggression, but also to be protected from any sanctions or legal proceedings if they have used violence to defend themselves from others violence. Over the past decade, however, the legal authorities (whom we would like to believe to be legitimate), i.e. the State and its representatives, have progressively changed the discourse and laws to appropriate rules of law reserved exclusively for those subject to the law.

If we take a step back and refer to the overall theoretical context in which these developments took place, we can only draw parallels with the argument mobilized by the State of Israel and its allies to legitimize the relentless massacre of Gaza’s Arabs, based exclusively on its “right to defend itself” following the Hamas attack of October 7th 2023. The highly pragmatic questions the world should have been asking were: Was the threat posed by the population of Gaza to Israeli society a real one? Was the response – the total annihilation of an enclave inhabited by over two million people – necessary and proportionate? If the criteria of imminence and immediacy are indeed met on the surface, it would have been necessary to ask a final question to invalidate Israel’s argument regarding the legitimacy of its response: Was the Hamas attack part of an ongoing context of oppression and colonial violence on the part of Israel, or was it a gratuitous act of aggression responding to no threat to the people of Palestine?

Before answering this question, it is absolutely necessary to recall historical events such as the Warsaw ghetto uprising of 1943 (against Nazi siege) or the Soweto township riots of 1976 (against South African apartheid regime), and to draw the necessary parallels: The state of Israel is neither colonized nor oppressed; it is the colonizer and the oppressor. As such, it can under no circumstances claim self-defense, for if we follow this logic, France would have been legitimated in erasing the entirety of Iraq and Syria from the map following the Islamic State’s attacks on Paris in 2015. And in response, any Arab country would be justified in bombing Western cities whenever NATO armies forcefully interfere in its national affairs. Clearly, the logic legitimizing mass arabicide doesn’t hold water. And yet, this is exactly the logic that led the United States to permanently destroy Iraq between 2003 and 2011, on the pretext of a nuclear threat which the best analysts knew to be totally implausible. The West always has a fallacious motive for destroying Arab societies.

Beyond the violence and horror of the Hamas attack, no one can decently deny the absence of any compelling necessity justifying the annihilation of the Gaza Strip from October 8th onwards, nor the total disproportionality of the means employed to this end, given that the attackers on October 7th were largely decimated or taken prisoner during their attack (1809 fighters according to Israel) and that the 5000 rockets fired by Hamas were largely intercepted, killing no more than five people in all: the main and imminent threat was therefore neutralized by the evening of October 7, and strict self-defence only applied to the Israeli response on the same day. Revenge, on the other hand, is characterized by premeditation and/or moral inflection, i.e. the anticipation or preparation (including mental preparation) of the crime, with the intention of not acting ethically. Lastly, while the real motivation or purpose of armed action is often unofficial, even secret, and therefore open to interpretation, in law there are what is known as “array of presumption”, which makes it possible to establish whether there are criminal motivations, particularly racist ones. In the context of Palestine, these grounds for presumption include acts and public declarations that demonstrate a desire to essentialize the entire population of Gaza and to assimilate it as a whole to a specific group, in this case Hamas. This essentialization involves the use of reductive and simplifying terminology that erases the complexity and diversity that characterizes any civilian population, especially if it includes several thousand people. In the case of Gaza, we’re talking about 2.23 million inhabitants, including a multitude of ethnic, religious and political minorities, as well as thousands of dual nationals and 1.046 million children under the age of 18 (48%).

Hamas is in power in Gaza, but the Gazans are not Hamas

If we go back to the origins of the Hamas movement, we note that it was born late in 1987, almost 40 years after the creation of Israel. Before it, Palestinian resistance had been embodied by nationalist, socialist and secular political movements, including Fatah, founded in 1959. These movements globally renounced armed struggle at the end of the first intifada (1987-1993) to invest in peace negotiations, while remaining in solidarity with popular resistance to the Israeli apartheid regime. The perpetuation of violent oppression of the Palestinians despite the peace talks was the primary reason for the emergence of Islamist forces in Palestine, which coincided with the confessionalization of territorial conflicts in the region during the Lebanese civil war (1975-1990). Israel played an active part in this confessionalization, notably by supporting the Lebanese Christian militias, while encouraging the emergence of Hamas to weaken the socialist and non-confessional Palestinian organizations (PLO: Fatah, PFLP, DFLP, PPP, PLF…).

The imprisonment and death of political leaders involved in negotiating the peace agreements[4], followed by the second intifada (2000-2004) and the Lebanese war in 2006, accelerated the rise of Hamas in Palestine and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Finally, in 2006, Hamas won the elections in Gaza with 44.45% of the votes cast, while the secular nationalist and socialist political forces remained in the majority but divided (Fatah + PFLP + The Alternative + Independent Palestine = 51.32% of the vote). If we look back at these elections in detail, and take into account the abstention rate of 22.82%, then just 32.61% of registered voters chose Hamas. If we consider that 34.17% of the Palestinian population was either not registered to vote or not of voting age, only 11.14% of the 3.95 million Palestinians at the time actually chose Hamas.

Over the following decade, Hamas established itself as a conservative force that is intolerant of criticism and represses all forms of opposition, making itself relatively unpopular, as evidenced by a poll carried out in June 2023 by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research : 73% of Gazans consider that there is corruption within Hamas, 59% believe that Hamas cannot be criticized without fear, 57% would vote for Marwan Barghouti (Fatah) if he were free rather than for the Hamas candidate, while 43% believe that neither Hamas nor Fatah deserve to represent the Palestinians. Furthermore, 47% of Gazans favor peaceful resistance over armed struggle[5]. Finally, since the last elections were held 18 years ago, almost 78% of the current population was not born (48%) or of voting age in 2006 (30%), not to mention the fact that part of the population, and therefore of Hamas voters, has died in the last 18 years. As a result, we can say that the population of Gaza in 2023 has little or nothing to do with the election of Hamas in 2006, nor much to do with the fact that it has held on to power by force ever since.

Hamas: a reactionary movement

What’s more – and this is often overlooked when talking about Palestinian resistance – the process of essentialization also affects Hamas militants themselves. Notably, Hamas’s historical affiliation with the Muslim Brotherhood (and therefore with political Islam) is denied, and it is compared with jihadist currents, or even regularly equated with Al Qaeda or the Islamic State. Numerous intellectuals and specialists, most of whom cannot be accused of being Islamist sympathizers, have written a multitude of university theses and books on the history of Islam, as well as on religious and political currents within Islam. All these studies make it possible to understand why the Muslim Brotherhood is not jihadist, and why the institutionalization of political Islam almost systematically leads these currents to moderate their exercise of power[6]. The orientalism that characterizes the analysis of Muslim and Islamist currents today also clashes with the reality experienced by Arab and Muslim populations confronted with these movements.

What this reality says is that the Muslim Brotherhood is a moderate threat, both to the population under its control and to its neighbors, or in other words just as pervasive as any authoritarian political party or movement in power. Indeed, Hamas’ despotism against the civilian population stems not specifically from its religious radicalism, but more from its desire to maintain a hegemonic hold over the Palestinian society. In the same way as any far-right current in the world, Hamas is an authoritarian party bearing conservative and retrograde values in many respects, but it is not a Salafist or Jihadist movement: Hamas, however violent, does not behead or burn anyone alive. Finally, the motivations behind the commitment of Hamas fighters must also be assessed in the light of the situation of strangulation and continual oppression of the Palestinian population for 75 years, as well as the blockade imposed on Gaza by Israel for 16 years, entailing an unemployment rate exceeding 45% and an overall lack of prospects for young people. Hamas militants aren’t waging jihad, they’re joining the only decolonial armed movement that claims to oppose normalization and build a balance of power with the Israeli apartheid regime. The number of fighters affiliated to Hamas is not known, the only figure given by Israel is 30,000. Given the reality of the region, and in particular the numbers of other Islamist militias (notably Hezbollah), it is unlikely that the real number of Hamas fighters exceeds 20,000 men, which does not indicate massive support for the movement among Gazans.

The anti-terrorist smokescreen

It’s easy to see why Israel, in its efforts to dehumanize the Palestinians and discredit Palestinian resistance, finds it comfortable to use anti-terrorist rhetoric: like all authoritarian and colonial regimes, Israel refers to those who resist its oppression as terrorists. This newly universally accepted semantics reveals not only the ignorance and narrow-mindedness of those who employ it, but also their intention to reduce any armed resistance or radical or revolutionary opposition to a mere threat. Under the guise of protecting the civilian population from a threat to their security – which is not its actual motivation – counter-terrorism is first and foremost a tool of counter-insurgency to protect the security and interests of the state. Henceforth, simply designating a group as terrorist is enough to instantly deprive its members of every right and protection normally guaranteed by the laws of war, humanitarian laws and international conventions for the respect of human rights and dignity.

Moreover, the term “terrorist” has no precise legal definition, making it a vague notion entirely open to interpretation. Thus, in addition to the term “barbarian”, it is used to deprive individuals of their status as human beings, making public humiliation, summary executions, torture, mutilation and bodily harm lawful and acceptable. France in Algeria, the USA in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, Russia in Chechnya and even China in Xinjiang have all contributed to the normalization of cruel practices that are illegal under UN conventions. When Israel crosses the red line even further, it does so by assimilating the entire civilian population of Gaza to terrorism, claiming complicity with Hamas, including under-age children who, as already mentioned, make up almost half the population of Gaza. By encouraging the dissemination of blatant lies about Hamas’s acts of cruelty during the bloody attack of October 7th 2023, and in particular the alleged beheadings of some forty children and serial rapes[7], Israel knew perfectly well that barbarity and terrorism would be the appropriate lexical register to legitimize all the war crimes that were to be committed in retaliation against Gazans. This is part of Israel’s propaganda strategy, the Hasbara, which is part of Zionist lobbying aimed at countering negative discourse delegitimizing Israel.

The demonization of the Palestinians in order to convince the world that their annihilation is justified is thus combined with historical revisionism regarding the way in which the State of Israel was built and imposed by violence, and denial of the crimes committed by Zionist militias before 1948 and by the Israeli army since. For instance, we’re supposed to forget that the Zionist Irgun militia carried out bomb attacks against civilians as well as the British police in the years before the creation of Israel[8], before its leader Menachem Begin became Prime Minister and then Minister of Defense of Israel thirty years later, conveniently cleared of his crimes. The State of Israel is therefore the best showcase of victorious, unpunished terrorism. Thus, the question is: who decides who is a terrorist, and for how long?

Nevertheless, the concept of terrorism is an extremely useful tool for designating popular resistance, whatever its ideological basis. Beyond that, it is the Arab communities as a whole that are targeted. The Arab has become the practical enemy number one, the scapegoat who bears responsibility for any popular resistance to the hegemonic and civilizing will of the West. A single armed attack by a marginal individual or group from Arab-Muslim communities is enough to legitimize the elimination of tens of thousands of Arab lives. Collective punishment has thus become normalized. And we can talk about the slow death of the Palestinians because it’s in the news, but we mustn’t forget that Western interventions in the East since the late Middle Ages have all been guided by the same messianic desire to reclaim the “Holy Land” from the heretic or godless barbarians who inhabit it, that is to say the Arabs[9]. What changed in the second half of the 20th century was the rhetoric, but not the motivations. Ever since the Western nations set themselves up as the enlightened vanguard and promulgated their laws of war and all kind of humanitarian conventions, before granting independence to a number of countries after decades of racial supremacy, colonial plunder and slavery, they have indeed been forced to renew their rhetoric in order to continue justifying imperialist wars waged in the name of the Global Market, particularly where oil and gas abound. And what better theme than the familiar theme of the barbarian from the East? And yet not just any ordinary barbarian, fighting a battle that respects the laws of war, and whose cause is seen as legitimate by a section of the people and the Western left. No, rather it is the paroxysm of the barbarian, monstrous and cruel, who terrifies anyone who imagines him close to them. The West will call this barbarian a “terrorist” for simplicity’s sake. And if it doesn’t exist, we’ll have to help create it, or help it create itself, the crucial thing being that it frightens any ordinary people sufficiently for them to accept its death without further ado. This monster is the Muslim terrorist, who in the Western imagination resembles the vile and brutal Arab embodied by Mohammed Hassan aka Frank Lackteen in American movies of the 1930s-40s, as well as 78% of characters from the Near and Middle East appearing in American TV series[10].

Therefore, as soon as an Arab or Muslim launches a surprise attack or detonates a bomb here or there, it must be clearly understood that this is a specifically odious act, which has of course nothing to do with the attacks carried out by the Resistance to Nazism during the Second World War, the annihilation of Nagasaki and Hiroshima in 1945, the counter-insurgency actions applied by the French army and police against Algerian civilians between 1945 and 1962, the bombing of the American black group Move in the middle of the city by Philadelphia police in 1985, or the targeted assassinations regularly carried out using drones or remote-controlled missiles by the armies of the major democracies[11]. What sets them apart, though, is precisely the racist prism through which the perpetrators of these acts of violence are identified. Some, who can be described as villains, are by nature the aggressors, while the others, who are obviously good guys, necessarily act in self-defense. The former kill indiscriminately to terrorize and generate chaos, while the latter “neutralize targets” to restore peace and security. Beyond the ironic nature of these last sentences, we must realize just how close these caricatures are to the discourse commonly served up by the world’s political and media elites, and adopted by the majority without any real critical suspicion. There are no good terrorists, only bad Arabs and bad Muslims. But when a white man massacres dozens of children in an American school or stabs Arabs in a French town[12], nobody uses the term terrorist. It’s an “appellation d’origine contrôlée”.

Eretz Yisrael, a white Lebensraum in the Wild-East

In Gaza, Israël commits crimes, that has been established. The only thing that does not meet with consensus is the justification/legitimization of those crimes. We therefore need to look at what is known in law as the “motive for the crime”, which brings us back to the “array of presumptions” mentioned above. This requires an analysis of the organic relationship between Israel, Europe and North America. We won’t be going around the bush here: we want to address the ideological proximity of Zionism and German nationalism, both of which combine a colonial project with racial/national supremacism. In addition to considering the defended race or nation as superior or chosen by divine will (messianism/millennialism), both nationalisms agree on the possible – and therefore morally acceptable – subjugation or annihilation of other nations or races deemed backward or inferior. The more moderate versions of these nationalisms[13] are confined to evoking the need to bring progress and development to populations frozen in the past, usually under the guise of modernism. Such is the case with Zionism.

This ideological movement was initiated by the Austro-Hungarian journalist and writer Theodor Herzl (1860-1904) in 1897. Since then, numerous international Zionist congresses have been held, setting up structures to encourage the diaspora to perform its “aliyah” (ascent), i.e. to settle in Palestine, which had been under Ottoman (Seljuk Turkish) rule since 1517, and then under British occupation from 1920. Herzl’s personal views were deeply influenced by German supremacist theories, and he saw his move to Palestine as a hygienic project aimed at civilizing Eastern peoples, including the indigenous Jews. His anti-Zionist detractors, such as Abraham Shalom Yehuda (1877-1951), a Jew from Palestine, and Reuven Snir (b. 1953), a Jew from Iraq, mentioned some eloquent passages in Herzl’s memoirs, published in 1960: “It is God’s will that we return to the land of our fathers, we shall in so doing represent Western civilization, and bring the hygiene, order and pure customs of the West to this pestiferous and corrupt piece of the East […] It is with the Jews, an element of German culture that will approach the eastern shores of the Mediterranean […]. The return of the semi-Asiatic Jews under the rule of authentically modern people must undoubtedly mean the restoration of health in this neglected part of the East”. In this respect, we can draw a clear parallel with the thoughts and writings of Herzl’s contemporaries, the geographer Friedrich Ratzel (1844-1904) and the philosopher Karl Haushofer (1869-1946), and in particular with their theory of “Lebensraum” (living space). This theory largely inspired the supremacist theories developed by Hitler in Mein Kampf, even though Ratzel imagined a colonial settlement of the German people in the heart of Africa (Mittelafrika), rather than in Eastern Europe as advocated by the ideologues of Nazism. In any case, both Ratzel and Herzl placed their colonial and civilizing ambitions beyond the Mediterranean, which makes them similar to many Western imperialists of the 19th and 20th centuries.

What the end of the twentieth century brought was a renunciation of the overtly racialist approach of Western imperialism, and with it, a certain (albeit relative) moralization or weighting of essentialist discourses relating to the populations of the South from the late 1970s onwards. However, the turn of the 1990s and the emergence over the last two decades of Arab[14] and Islamist terrorism have renewed Western supremacist discourse, which, while failing to openly display its racist bias, has imposed the idea that the defense of Western democracy can only be achieved through the suppression of Arab nationalism, which is always conveniently equated with Islamist fundamentalism, even though the two are often opposed. The idea of the besieged citadel and the rampart against barbarism from the East, which has its origins in the pre-medieval period, has found a new lease of life: it is no longer the Roman Empire that is in danger, but Western Democracy in its broadest sense, which implies that the stakes go beyond the safeguarding of European and North American societies alone to become the preservation of the entire “civilized world”, the boundaries of which nevertheless remain very blurred.

Good versus Evil, or the civilization versus the desert

Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) was a German philosopher, political scientist and journalist of renowned reputation, who conducted an in-depth analysis of the forces driving modernity and totalitarianism, based in particular on the experience of Nazi horror. While many know or claim to know her work on the banality of evil, namely that the worst atrocities are often permitted or committed by ordinary, even insignificant people, few actually give due importance to her analysis of the complicity of victims in their own persecution, through cowardice, naivety or wait-and-see attitude. In particular, Arendt had revealed the involvement of the Jewish Councils (Judensräte in German) in the deportation of Jews to Auschwitz, provoking a heated controversy that cost her some of her friendships[15]. Without going into the details of the controversy, which testifies to the inability of most people to put aside their own egos and survive their withering[16] in the face of the revelation of a truth that is painful to hear or facts that are difficult to admit, her writings tell of the impossibility for Western societies to conceive and accept the idea that barbarism has its source largely within themselves. It’s interesting to note that the advance of the desert[17] that Hannah Arendt also spoke of, describing the rise of totalitarianism from within Western societies, can be the result of a population that is in itself a victim of such totalitarianism. In this respect, it is extremely revealing that, having been persecuted for millennia in the West, a considerable part of the Jewish community has become convinced that, by moving beyond its borders, it could not only find peace and security there, but that it would also constitute an outpost of democracy in the face of barbarism, at the very limits between civilization and the desert. It would be nothing less than civilizing the East while re-civilizing the West. In any case, this is how Zionism perceives its presence in Palestine, and how the United States justifies its unconditional support for Israeli colonization: Israel would be the bulwark of the moralized (yet unlivable for Jews) West against the unbridled violence of Arab “Mordor”[18] – which by the way did not take part in the Holocaust. It’s comfortable to imagine an external enemy from which we can separate ourselves with a simple wall, when reality and historical experience demonstrate that more often than not the enemy is within us or among us. In the paradigm inversion represented by the Zionist colonization of Palestine, the conceptual desert of which Arendt spoke is embodied by these settlers from the West, while the natural and inhabited desert facing them is placed in the position of being subjected to their own totalitarianism. The paradox is such that the Zionists, who have come in search of greener pastures elsewhere, find themselves burning down centuries-old olive trees to plant conifers everywhere, contributing to the impoverishment of an entire ecosystem to which they are total strangers[19].

The fanatical settlers who are expanding their presence into the heart of the West Bank under Palestinian authority are making no secret about the fact that they’re setting up more and more – illegal – outposts there, in response to a supremacist imperative that sees Arabs as a population to be expelled or eliminated in the name of a metaphysical battle of Good versus Evil. The expression of this duality takes the form of violently racist rhetoric on a scale not dissimilar to that used by Nazi theorists against Jews. In 2009, Yitzhak Shapira and Yosef Elitzur, rabbis from the settlement of Yitzhar, located five kilometers south of Nablus, published a book entitled “Torat HaMelech” in which they defended the idea that Jews were authorized by religious edicts to kill non-Jews, including children, in certain circumstances. These genocidal writings were supported by Dov Lior, rabbi of Hebron and Kiryat Arba, and charismatic leader of the Israeli Zionist far right, who has also repeatedly justified the murder of non-Jews, inspiring a whole fringe of the Israeli right with his hate-filled speeches. In the same spirit, in 2012 Rabbi Eyal Karim, currently rabbi of the Israeli armed forces, had justified the use of rape by soldiers in wartime, considering the matter in these terms: “Since our priority is the community’s success in war, the Torah has allowed [soldiers] to satisfy their evil urges under the conditions it has stipulated in the name of the community’s success”. The “anti-Goyim” and anti-Arab preaching of these rabbis feeds the racism that justifies the commission of crimes in the name of the survival of the Jewish people, and has an immense influence on hundreds of thousands of Israelis. Since then, the religious fundamentalists who have made the colonization of Palestine a messianic issue have gradually infused their supremacist and fascist ideas into the highest levels of the Israeli state. Their racist, millenarian vision is perfectly illustrated by Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanhayu’s speech, delivered on October 26, 2023 to justify his latest military offensive against the Palestinians of Gaza: “We are the sons of light, they are the sons of darkness, and light will prevail over darkness […] Remember what Amalek did to you” [20]. When he invokes the extermination of the “seeds of Amalek” the reference is not religious but ethnic, insofar as Islam post-dates the period concerned by the use of this notion, designating an ancient people of Sinai in conflict with the Judeans: the Edomites (8th to 5th century B.C.). Beyond that, it’s a promise of vengeance that has its origins in national mythology. At the same time, many other representatives of the Israeli government and parliament have made one racist statement after another, condoning the mass murder of Palestinian Arabs, while the Israeli army has engaged in the deadliest military operation in Israel’s history, ethnically cleansing the Palestinians in Gaza, with no international body or state taking the necessary steps to stop the massacre[21]. But this is nothing new: for many years, the Revisionist Zionist current to which most members of the Netanyahu government claim to belong[22], including himself, has been multiplying public statements targeting Arabs. Long before October 7th, the Israeli right was marching in the streets with the slogan “death to the Arabs”, which has appeared more than once in the last decade on large banners carried by demonstrators. In addition, the practice of “price tag attack” initiated since 2008 by extremist settlers close to the current Minister Itamar Ben Gvir includes the spraying of hate graffiti and the commission of violently anti-Arab acts of vandalism. Ben Gvir, along with Bezamel Smotrich and other representatives of the Israeli government, have constantly called for the destruction of Arab communities, using openly racist rhetoric that has nothing to do with the fight against radical Islam or terrorism[23]. Their inflammatory rhetoric is not aimed at Islam, but very clearly at Arab ethnicity. The Pandora’s box opened by religious eminences and by the Israeli political representatives to whom they are close has legitimized the unbridling of public discourse in Israel, leading a number of public figures to express unmistakably racist and supremacist views without suffering any backlash. One of the most telling examples is TV presenter Tzofit Grant’s statement about Palestinians in Gaza during a TV show in December 2023: she called them “disgusting, stinky losers, walking with flip-flops. Repulsive people.” That says it all. Finally, when Yoav Gallant refers to the Gazans as “human animals”, the choice of lexicon is again socio-ethnic rather than religious. There’s no need to list all the racist statements made publicly by influential Israeli figures to understand that anti-Arab racism is the primary motivation behind Israeli policies.

Israel, the embodiment of white supremacy and anti-Arab racism

If I draw this parallel with the situation in Palestine, it’s because it perfectly embodies all the paradoxes of Northern (Western) societies in their relationship with Arab societies in particular, and of formerly colonized societies in general, but also because the majority of Israelis come from these Northern imperialist societies. As such, they are allochthones, importing into the Middle East an ultra-individualistic, ethnocentric and neoliberal way of thinking typical of Northern societies. Considering themselves to be at the cutting edge of civilization and democracy, the vast majority of Israelis (the Zionists) never conceive of the Arab world as their equal, and deny the very reality of Arab cultures and progressivism: for them, Arabs can be neither modern nor democratic. Arabs are merely an obstacle to capitalist modernity, and as such their eradication alone becomes the guarantee of social order and peace. With the genocide underway in Gaza since October 8th, 2023, Europe’s far right has massively united with the State of Israel, so much so that its approach to Arabs is a model of effective Arabicide. Hatred of Arabs and Muslims has overtaken their historical anti-Semitism, and they seem to have suddenly reconnected with the Jewish part of their Judeo-Christian identity, while denying the Semitic part of Arab identity.

Since September 11, 2001 and the launch of the U.S.-initiated War on Terror, the international community, made up of the most influential states (UN, NATO, G7, G20) and their client-states, have rallied behind the American neo-conservatives and their ideological and military crusade against the Muslim world. It should be pointed out that Arabs are not in the majority in the Muslim world, over 60% of Muslims being Asian (Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh) and 15% sub-Saharan (Africa). However, the Western crusade against “terrorism” is essentially focused on the Arab world and the former Persia (Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran). In any case, the accusation of terrorism is sufficient in itself to legitimize all forms of violence against targeted individuals or groups: administrative detentions without charge, extra-judicial assassinations, torture, sieges and cutting people off from food and resources, expulsions and deportations, as well as “carpet bombings” of residential areas accused of harboring or supporting terrorist groups[24]. The laws of war have been subject to so many derogations that they have become obsolete. War crimes are even legitimized by military doctrines such as the Dahiya doctrine outlined by Israeli Chief of Staff Gadi Eizenkot in 2010, after having been applied by the Israeli colonial army in Lebanon in 2006. This doctrine authorizes the asymmetrical and disproportionate use of force to put pressure on hostile regimes, notably by systematically destroying civilian infrastructure linked to the enemy, even if this bombardment involves the massacre of hundreds of civilians.

There can be no doubt that the strategy employed in Gaza since October 8, 2023 is the strict application of this doctrine, with the cities of Gaza, Jabalia, Deir-el-Balah, Khan Younis, Rafah and their outskirts (2.14 million inhabitants on 365 km², i.e. 5967 inhabitants/km²) having been bombed intensively, inducing the assumed massacre of 40,000 to 200,000 Palestinian civilians who obviously bear no responsibility for the October 7th attack. The very notion of “collateral victim”, which was already unbearable enough, is no longer put forward, as the genocidal Israeli government asserts without trembling that all Gazans are linked to Hamas and that they are “animals”[25]. It is therefore, in the Hebraic sense of the word, a holocaust[26], and therefore genocide.

This racist and genocidal rhetoric, implicitly endorsed by all Israel’s allies, led by all the former colonial powers, echoes the racist and Islamophobic rhetoric commonplace throughout the European political class, from the far right to the center left, and now also by the social democrats and liberals who still call themselves socialists in several countries. What’s more, even the radical left has long since taken up the clichés against terrorism, incapable of offering a serious, intelligent critique of the notion, the way it is used, but above all of the totalitarian slide that the abused use of this notion entails. Ethnocentrism of the Whites (let’s call a spade a spade) means that every time there is an armed attack against their people, their interests or their territory, a sacred union declares the homeland or democracy threatened, even though the main victims of terrorism since the 1970s have been Muslims. Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Nigeria, Burkina Faso, Pakistan, Syria and Yemen have been the worst-affected countries over the past fifteen years. In Iraq and Syria, Islamist groups linked to Al Qaeda and the Islamic State have mostly killed Muslims[27]. And when the international community intervenes militarily in response to terrorism, it destroys civil societies already targeted by armed groups, and thereby sustains the disastrous breeding ground for hatred and fundamentalism. All the more ironic – and this is what societies in the North refuse to understand (or consciously deny) – is that “terrorism” is in reality a self-defense reflex of societies or individuals crushed by capitalism and the imperialism that flows from it.

What this reality continues to successfully conceal is that the motivation and objective of imperialist wars is never the establishment of peace and democracy, but rather the maintaining of a chaotic status quo entirely compatible with capitalist predation and the plundering of resources it entails. In none of the countries where the United States and its allies have intervened since the 1960s has a lasting democratic regime been established – quite the contrary. Any Arab democracy, on the contrary, would threaten the Western economy because it would be accompanied by self-management of its resources and a likely challenge to the economic hegemony of the countries of the North, while allowing its nationals to return home and travel freely, without continuing to constitute a workforce exploited exclusively by the former colonial powers. Conversely, several northern countries, but also the petromonarchies of the Arabic Peninsula, have actively supported Islamist armed groups in central and northern Syria, in the hope of destabilizing the Assad regime and its Russian-Iranian allies, while militarily supporting the Kurds in order to keep safe the oil resources of northeastern Syria, which make up 70% of the country’s total resources. In 2019, US President Donald Trump thus declared: “We’re keeping the oil, don’t forget that. We want to keep the oil. Forty-five million dollars a month.”

Western interventions are part of a colonial continuum whose stakes and objectives have never changed since the 19th century. One eloquent demonstration of this assertion is the international community’s total disinterest in the democratic, non-confessional revolt of the people of the Suwayda governorate in Syria, which began in August 2023 and is still going on more than a year later. The fact that the region is predominantly Druze, a minority that is impossible to associate with Islamism, and that it has no major resources on its territory, makes it a negligible issue for capitalist regimes accustomed to pitting ethnic and religious communities against each other in order to derive economic profit from the disorder engendered. There can be no Arab democratic movement that arouses the interest of Western democracies. For them, “democracy” and “Arab” are an oxymoron. Israel for instance, which presents itself as a democracy and has occupied the Druze villages of the Golan Heights since 1967, does not seem interested in encouraging the emergence of a democratic, non-confessional movement among the Druze Arabs living nearby. All the better.

We can legitimately assume that Israel’s existence is threatened less by the armed attacks of Hamas and Hezbollah than by the establishment of truly democratic Arab regimes on its borders. Indeed, a true Arab democracy could not suffer the presence of the colonial entity and would never cease to question its existence, at the very least out of solidarity with the Palestinians subjected to its violent apartheid regime. Those who believe that Israel promotes peace and democracy in the Middle East are mistaken: war is far more beneficial to it, and that’s why Israel has conscientiously sabotaged the peace agreements with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), encouraging the assassination of its architects Yitzhak Rabin (in 1995) and Yasser Arafat (in 2004), before facilitating the emergence of Hamas with the avowed aim of defeating its moderate, non-confessional opponents from Fatah, notably the very popular Marwan Barghouti, imprisoned since 2002 following two failed assassination attempts. To this day, Israel has never protected democracy, but on the contrary promoted fascism to maintain its illegitimate existence, encouraged by its American and British sponsors, for whom Israel is the best outpost or Trojan horse in the Middle East.

The ongoing wars in the Middle East, but also the policies implemented in Europe and the United States, are thus accompanied by a permanent physical and cultural arabicide under the pretext of fighting terrorism, protecting democracy and defending “Western values”. Israel is part of the logical continuum of this supremacist/imperialist approach. Thus, focusing on Islamophobia rather than racist hatred and multipolar imperialism helps validate Western binary rhetoric and invites its opponents to identify more with specific religious or national groups than with more diverse popular liberation movements.

NOTES 

[1] Many of these settlements are kibbutzim, which doesn’t take away their colonial status.

[2] See the map produced by the October 7th Geo-visualization Project: https://oct7map.com/

[3] As of September 3, 2024, 117 hostages have been released, 100 of them following negotiations with Hamas. 97 hostages are still in Gaza, 33 of whom are presumed dead.

[4] Marwan Barghouti was kidnapped and life sentenced in april 2002 ; Yasser Arafat died in suspicious circumstances in november 2004

[5] https://pcpsr.org/en/node/944 

[6] Read Roy, Olivier; Volk, Carol (1996). The failure of political islam. Harvard University Press

[7] These fake news were debunked by several media, including the Israeli media Haaretz : lies were based on false statements by the Zionist NGO Zaka, which identifies victims of terrorism, road accidents and other disasters in Israel and around the world. It is worth recalling that its founder Yehuda Meshi-Zahav was prosecuted for a series of rapes and sexual assaults committed over several years, as well as embezzlement, before dying in a coma in 2022 following a suicide attempt. 

[8] Between 1937 and 1948, the Irgun carried out 60 attacks against Palestinian civilians and British colonial police, most often detonating bombs in markets, on public transport or in cinemas. The death toll from these attacks was almost 700, most of them civilians. On July 22, 1946, the Irgun detonated a bomb in Jerusalem’s Kings David Hotel, murdering 91 and wounding 46 people, including Arabs, British and Jews. The Irgun has been designated a terrorist organization by the Anglo-American Committee of Enquiry.

[9] The First Crusade of 1095-1096 also attacked the Jews. 

[10] According to the results of a study conducted in 2015-2016 by the MENA Arts Advocacy Coalition (MAAC): https://www.menaartsadvocacy.com/   

[11] These examples have been taken totally at random, but of course the list is much longer. 

[12] On February 1, 2024, two fascist militants from Lyon’s Les Remparts group, Pierre-Louis Perrier and Sinisha Milinov, stabbed three Arab people with twelve knives as they left a nightclub. 

[13] I include the “left-wing Zionism” of the kibbutzim in the category of moderate nationalism. 

[14] “Terrorism“ in the name of Arab nationalism was initiated in the 1970s by the Palestinian organizations Black September, founded in 1970 by members of Fatah, and Fatah Revolutionary Council (Fatah-RC), founded in 1974 by Sabri al-Banna (”Abu Nidal») at the instigation of Saddam Hussein. The former is known for the assassination of Jordanian Prime Minister Wasfi Tall on November 28, 1971, and the hostage-taking and execution of 11 Israeli athletes during the Munich Olympics on September 5 and 6, 1972. The second is held responsible for attacks and targeted assassinations that led to the deaths of over 300 people between 1972 and 1997. 

[15] See the film “Hannah Arendt” by Margarethe von Trotta, 2012. 

[16] One of the main criticisms levelled at Hannah Arendt is that she doesn’t “love the Jews”. In Hebrew, this specific love has a name, Ahavat Israel. 

[17] The desert is understood here as the place where that which constitutes “the world” disappears, i.e. that which connects human beings, namely the set of social relations where politics is born. 

[18] In J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings, Mordor is a region in the far east of Middle-earth, the stronghold of the Dark Lord and the forces of evil. 

[19] The Jewish National Fund paid for the planting of 240 million trees, most of them pines considered invasive by naturalists, who blame them for impoverishing the soil and preventing other plant species from developing, as well as being a major cause of fires. 

[20] Netanyahu’s speech here refers to the Old Testament writings of Deuteronomy 25:17, which mention the attack on the Hebrews by the Amalekites, descendants of Amalek, during their exodus from Egypt. The Amalekites embody in Judaism the archetypal enemy of the Jews‧ives, without their existence as an ethnic or social group ever having been established by historians and archaeologists. And if this were the case, it’s unlikely that they had any connection whatsoever with either the Philistines or the Arabs of Palestine.  

[21] At the time of writing, exactly one hundred days after the start of the war, 40861 Gazans have been killed, including 16164 children and 10399 women, with a further 94100 wounded and 10000 missing. 220 UN employees, 172 journalists, 523 health professionals and 76 members of the civil defense forces were killed. Nearly 2 million Gazans were forcibly and repeatedly displaced in the southern part of the Gaza Strip, with no possibility of leaving the territory. 516,500 homes were destroyed, along with 439 schools, 763 places of worship and 19 hospitals. 

[22] Revisionist Zionism is a movement initiated by the Ukrainian Jew Ze’ev Jabotinsky, founder of the right-wing extremist movements Betar and Irgun. Inspired by Italian fascism, the movement advocated the emergence of a new Jew, the Hebrew, as distinct from the previous Jew, the Yid. In 1934, Jabotinsky founded the Betar naval academy in Italy with Mussolini’s support.

[23] It’s worth remembering that on February 26, 2023, hundreds of Israeli settlers aided by the Israeli army attacked the village of Huwwara, engaging in arson and intentional violence on such a scale that the international press described the attack as a pogrom. The Israeli Finance Minister, Bezamel Smotrich, expressed his wish that the Palestinian village be “razed to the ground”. This was just a foretaste of the racist, supremacist violence that unfolded during the Gaza offensive some eight months later. 

[24] The first examples of “carpet bombing” were the Fascist bombing of Guernica and Barcelona in 1937-1938 and the Japanese bombing of Chongqing (China) in 1938, before the practice became commonplace both by the Nazis (Warsaw, Rotterdam, London, Coventry) and the Allies (Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo) during the Second World War, and then by the American air force in Vietnam in 1964-1965. 

[25] Remarks by Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on October 9, 2023: “We are imposing a complete siege on Gaza. There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything will be closed. We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.” 

[26] The Larousse dictionary states: “Holocaust (Low Latin holocaustum, from Greek holokaustos, from holos, whole, and kaustos, burnt) : In ancient Israel, a religious sacrifice in which the victim, an animal, was entirely consumed by fire; the victim thus sacrificed”. 

[27] My purpose here is not to deny the many Yezidi, Kurdish, Druze, Christian and other minority victims targeted by Islamists, but to compare the total figures in terms of proportions. The eight main jihadist groups (ISIL, Taliban, Boko Haram, Al-Shabaab, Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, Fulani Islamists, Al-Qaeda in Iraq and Al-Qaeda) have claimed almost 100,000 victims since 2000. 

More than ten years after the uprising of 2011, the revolt has resumed in southern Syria. As in 2011, the mainstream media are not reporting much on it, as if popular uprisings in this region were only of interest if they coincided with the interests of the states that have been working to carve up the Middle East since the Sykes-Picot agreements in 1916. This time, the revolt started in Suwayda, the Druze governorate, in the middle of August and spread modestly to other towns, notably in the neighboring governorate of Dera’a. This text offers a contextualization on Syria in general and on Suwayda in particular. It has been written by people from the region who are concerned about the situation there, and who hope that a solution will finally be found for the people, which does not simply consist of choosing their oppressors. No foreign power can propose a viable and satisfactory solution for the Syrians, their land having served as a bloody playground for all the powers that have interfered in their affairs.

The Druze exception

The Druze are a religious community attached to a heterodox belief in Ismaili Shi’ite Islam, which originated in Egypt under the impetus of Imam Hamza ibn Ali ibn Ahmad and Vizir Nashtakin ad-Darazi in the early 11th century. The druze religion, like Sufism, takes a philosophical and syncretic approach to faith, recognizing neither the rigorist precepts nor the prophets of Islam. Note that the Druzes prefer to call themselves Al-Muwahhidun (Unitarians) or Bani Maaruf (People of Goodness). Despite the spread of this belief to Cairo during the Fatimid caliphate of Al-Hakim, who was venerated by the Druzes, they were swiftly subjected to persecution by the rest of the Muslim community following his demise in 1021. As a result, they were exiled to Bilad el-Cham (present-day Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Palestine), specifically to Mount Lebanon and Hawran. However, it was around the beginning of the 19th century that the Druze community of Hawran gained strength after a large part of the community had been expelled from Mount Lebanon by the Ottoman authorities. The Hawran then took the name of Jabel al-Druze.

Today, Suwayda governorate is home to the majority of the world’s Druze community, some 700,000 people. The Lebanese Druze are the second-largest community, numbering 250,000. In Syria, several Druze settlements also exist in Jebel al-Summaq (Idlib, 25,000 people), Jebel al-Sheikh (Quneitra, 30,000 people), and Jaramana (Damascus suburbs, 50,000 people). Finally, outside Syria and Lebanon, the largest Druze communities are to be found in occupied Palestine (al-Juwlan, Galilee and Mount Karmel, 130,000), Venezuela (100,000), Jordan (20,000), North America (30,000), Colombia (3,000) and Australia (3,000).

Following numerous revolts against the Ottoman Empire until 1918, then against the French colonizers between 1925 and 1945[1], the Druze have a reputation for insubordination that describes them to this day and which has enabled them to maintain a permanent balance of power with the Assad regime, based on compromises negotiated between Druze leaders and the regime’s local representatives[2]. After 2011, despite a few sheikhs expressing their support for the regime[3], many Druzes took part in the demonstrations against Bashar al-Assad, mostly supporting the position of the «Men for Dignity»[4], who refused to take part in the war and called on the community to arm itself for the sole purpose of self-defense. The sheikhs took the lead and the initiative by refusing to join the regime’s army with the aim of protecting the region and its youth, but also to prevent the community from being compromised in Assad’s war by taking part in the repression of other communities elsewhere. This defiance of the regime was embodied, among others, by the druze sheikhs Ahmed Salman al-Hajari and Abu Fahd Wahid al-Bal’ous, who both were killed, the first in a car «accident» in March 2012[5] and the second in a bombing that killed 23 other people in September 2015.

Other prominent druze figures got involved in the opposition: Khaldoun Zeineddine, his brother Fadlallah Zeineddine and Hafez Jad Al-Kareem Faraj, all three officers in the Syrian army, from which they defected to join the rebels. Khaldoun Zeineddine formed the Sultan Pasha al-Atrash Battalion within the Free Syrian Army (FSA)[6] [7]. Joined by a number of Druzes, the battalion, however, remained weak and isolated and faced several attacks and kidnappings by Al-Nusra rebels in Dera’a[8] before being finally wiped out and its commander killed in 2013[9]. Its remaining members fled to Jordan, from where they announced the cessation of their activities in January 2014, denouncing a lack of support for the revolution from the Suwayda Military Council and from the Druze community, as well as the hostility toward the Druze on the part of the rebel groups of Dera’a, called «Islamists» and accused of being accomplices of the Assad regime[10].

Generally speaking, the Druze have a very secularist vision of society, and their religious representatives refuse to take charge of the community’s political and administrative affairs. In the conflicts that have shaken Druze and Syrian society, the sheikhs have repeatedly expressed their support and encouragement for the community’s choices[11]. While the Druze community has refused to take sides in the civil war, it has nevertheless always expressed its rejection of the regime, not hesitating to confront the security forces present in the governorate to enforce their demands or free prisoners from the hands of the army[12].

Bashar and his Islamist puppets

Right from the start of the insurrection and repeatedly since, the regime has played the divide-and-rule card, urging the Shi’a and Ismaili religious minorities (to which the Druzes belong) to oppose the FSA because of the «Islamist threat» their Sunni majority component is supposed to represent. In the propagandist rhetoric of the regime and its allies, the FSA rebels are constantly equated with the Al-Nusra Front and branded as Salafists or takfiri, while the useful idiots of the Islamic State are used in a thousand ways to hinder the revolution and to go hand in hand with the regime’s forces for the indiscriminate slaughtering of the Syrian population. In fact, the most radical religious component of the Syrian opposition has been deliberately favored by the regime: between June and October 2011, three months after the first anti-regime demonstrations, Bashar al-Assad released nearly 1,500 Islamist militants from prison, most of whom went on to join jihadist groups affiliated with al-Qaeda and ISIS. Thus, the main leaders of the Jabhat al-Nusra, Ahrar al-Sham and Jaish al-Islam groups, as well as the ISIS section responsible for most of the beheading of foreigners, had previously been released from the notorious Saydnaya prison[13].

Bashar al-Assad’s strategy has paid off, as the outpouring of violence from ISIS jihadists has succeeded in permanently distracting the rest of the world’s gaze from the atrocities committed by the Syrian army, the Shabihas[14] [15] and Iran-backed militias[16], and then from the massive bombing of civilians in the north and east of the country by the Russian air force from September 2015 onwards[17], with this military intervention itself motivated by the «fight against Islamists». Moreover, it has enabled the Kurdish People’s Protection Units and Women’s Protection Units (YPG/YPJ) to distance themselves from the Syrian revolution and focus their forces on the fight against the Islamists, mainly with American help. Finally, because of the terror instigated by the jihadists and out of disinterest in the fate of the Syrian people and their revolution, the «international community» (EU, USA and UN) did not bring substantial support to the FSA, leaving Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey to provide logistical and military support to the FSA components most compatible with their political agenda and confessional interests, so to speak «the Islamists»[18]. The democratic, secular and socialist components of the FSA, abandoned on most sides and threatened from within by the Islamists, then had no choice but to join the sectarian groups in order to survive and continue the fight against the main executioner of the Syrian people: the regime of Bashar al-Assad[19].

In May 2018, Bashar al-Assad’s regime made an agreement with ISIS for their surrender in the Damascus area[20]. Following this agreement, 800 of its fighters and their families (1,800 people) had been evacuated from the districts of Yarmouk and Tadamon (Damascus suburbs) to the desert near Palmyra and to abandoned villages northeast of Suwayda[21], with 40 trucks and cars under heavy guard by the Syrian army. Three months later, on July 25, 2018, ISIS predictably attempted to invade the Suwayda governorate from the east, guided by Bedouins who had a long-standing discord with the Druzes. At dawn, ISIS fighters thus began slaughtering the population of several druze villages on the edge of the desert[22] before taking 42 members of the community as hostages (including 16 children and 14 women[23]) and carrying out four suicide attacks in the heart of the main city of Suwayda[24]. Hundreds of Druzes from Jabal al-Druze (the region of Suwayda), joined by Druzes from Jabal al-Sheikh (located on the border with Lebanon), spontaneously took up arms and threw ISIS back into the desert, putting a stop to its campaign towards the south of the country[25] but also definitively confirming the anger and distrust of the Suwayda Druzes towards the Syrian regime, accused of using ISIS to weaken them[26].

Regime and gangs hand in hand

Although the region has escaped bombardment and military operations since 2011, the people of Suwayda, like all Syrians, have endured the consequences of the war and the regime’s murderous policies: sporadic armed confrontations with gangs and militias affiliated to the regime, assassinations, kidnappings, drug trafficking[27]…

In the spring of 2022, the gang of Raji Falhout, a notorious trafficker, claimed responsibility for the kidnapping of some twenty residents of Suwayda and Dera’a[28] before his men stormed the swimming pool in Suwayda’s al-Maqous district to kidnap its users, provoking an armed confrontation with the residents[29].

Following this incident, an uprising broke out on July 26 in the town of Shahba following the kidnapping of a resident, Jad al-Taweel, by Falhout’s gang[30]. Residents led by the «Men for Dignity» Movement blocked the roads and arrested military intelligence agents affiliated with the local organized crime[31] before taking up arms against the Falhout gang, leaving 24 people dead on the residents’ side and 12 on the gang’s side. The gang’s headquarters in the towns of Salim and Atil were then stormed by residents of numerous villages in the region, leading to the capture of the premises, the release of hostages, and the discovery of Captagon production equipments[32], revealing the Assad clan’s complicity with organized crime, using the 4th Military Intelligence Division and Hezbollah as middlemen[33]. Over the past decade, these regime-affiliated gangs have been responsible for numerous kidnappings and assassinations, causing insecurity and violence to destabilize the region.

After the eradication of the Falhout gang and its affiliated gangs, kidnapping and car theft operations in the Suwayda region significantly decreased[34], and this victory over organized crime has proven the capacity of the Druze community to ensure its own security.

Raji Falhout’s card as a member of the Intelligence Service Division n°2017.

People from Suwayda gathering to raid the Falhout gang

Captagon production

Endemic crisis and seeds of dissent

Over and above the direct consequences of the civil war, and then of the imperialist wars waged in Syria by the major powers (Iran, Russia, Turkey, Israel, the United States, Qatar, Saudi Arabia…)[35], Syria has been in an unprecedented economic slump for ten years. The population was initially subjected to rationing of basic resources and foodstuffs, such as water, gas, petrol, fuel oil, bread, sugar, oil, rice, tea and onions, obtained with the help of a ration card (the smart card), before abolishing this support for essential goods, leaving the population obliged to buy these commodities at market prices. The value of a Syrian pound has risen from $1 = 47 SYR in 2011 to 500 SYR in 2017, and climbed from 2,500 to 14,000 SYR by the summer of 2023, with an above average salary of 200,000 SYR ($14). In summer 2023, the food prices reached unprecedented level: 1L oil = 30000 SYR, 1L milk = 6000 SYP, 1kg flour = 4500 SYR, 1kg tomato = 4000 SYR, 1kg potatoes = 6500 SYR, 1kg onions = 3500 SYR, 1kg cucumber = 4000 SYR, one egg = 2000 SYP. This means that the majority of Syrians have spent their entire salary in less than a week. As for electricity, two years ago it was delivered to the Suwayda region as part of a daily rationing program (three hours on, three hours off), before this short window was reduced to an hour and a half on, versus six or seven hours off, not to mention the numerous power cuts occurring during this time, causing the rapid degradation of electronic devices whose purchase or fixing prices are unaffordable.

In recent years, Russian military police have regularly attempted to act as peacekeepers to ease tensions generated by the economic crisis. Its presence was confirmed in 2021 in Suwayda governorate, when a delegation of Russian officers presented themselves to the population with the intention of recruiting deputies from the population of both governorates[36]. The Russian contingent based in Bosra, located between Suwayda and Dera’a, made several attempts to distribute food aid in 2021 to Shahba and in 2022 to Dhibin, but residents firmly rejected their humanitarian intervention[37].

Between 2020 and 2023, spontaneous and short-lived demonstrations regularly took place in Suwayda, but were either not renewed or were repressed. In February and April 2022, protesters blocked the roads, stormed the governorate building, and set fire to a military vehicle before security forces opened fire on demonstrators, killing one and injuring 18[38]. Nevertheless, in December 2022, protesters managed to storm the governorate building for the second time, while their slogans and protest signs were mainly demanding a «decent life», after the allocations of gas and electricity had been reduced. Throughout the winter and spring of 2023, rallies continued under pressure from Baath Party members actions, who attempted to organize pro-regime demonstrations in order to intimidate the protesters.

Meanwhile, the Assad regime returned to the fold of the Arab League following diplomatic meetings in Cairo on May 7, 2023, and the Arab League Summit in Riyadh on May 19[39], as well as a Chinese-brokered deal to reestablish ties between Iran and Saudi Arabia in order to defuse the proxy war these two countries are waging in Syria and Yemen[40]. In exchange for this return of favor, Bashar al-Assad committed himself to tackling drug trafficking on his borders with Jordan and Iraq[41]. The day after the Cairo agreement, Jordan sent a clear message to the Syrian authorities by carrying out an air strike on the personal home of drug trafficker Marai al-Ramthan in Al-Shaab, south of the Suwayda governorate, killing him, his wife and six children, as well as an Iran-linked (handled by Hezbollah) drug facility in Kharab al-Shahem in the nearby Dera’a governorate[42].

And the fuse caught fire…

On August 5, 2023, a collective emerged in the coastal governorates of Latakia and Tartus, issuing an ultimatum to the regime by August 10[43], demanding reforms and making public a list of demands in application of UN Security Council Resolution 2254 which was adopted in Geneva in 2015. A particular feature of the movement is that it has developed in regions with a strong Alawite community, to which Bashar al-Assad belongs, notably in the towns of Tartus, Latakia, Banias and Jableh, where thousands of leaflets have been distributed[44]. In response, Bashar al-Assad raised civil employees’ salaries by 100% but simultaneously announced the abolition of petrol subsidies and an increase in fuel prices, with the price of a liter of petrol rising sharply from 3,000 to 8,000 Syrian pounds, an increase of 167%, and the price of fuel from 700 to 2,000 Syrian pounds, an increase of 186%. Syrians’ exorbitant transport budgets are making daily life impossible and forcing thousands of Syrians to stop going to work. Faced with the rise in resignations in the public sector, the regime has responded by tightening the conditions of resignation. Meanwhile, the regime has announced its intention to abolish subsidies on all consumer goods by 2024[45].

In the wake of these announcements, a call for a general strike was issued in southern Syria[46]. Since August 16, more than 52 communes in southern Syria have witnessed demonstrations using various types of action: strikes, vigils, blocking roads, closing government institutions, etc.

Demonstrations of support took place in the governorates of Idlib, Dera’a and Aleppo, as well as in Jaramana, the predominantly Druze district of Rural Damascus, reviving the slogans of 2011 for the fall of Assad : «Syria is ours, not Assad’s», «one, one, one, the Syrian people are one» and «the people want the fall of the regime». The demonstrators also expressed their wish to see an end to the Iranian presence in Syria.

On August 25, demonstrations spreaded to Idleb, Aleppo, Azaz, Afrin and Al-Bab. In several places, demonstrators waved the Druze, Kurdish and Syrian Revolution flags together. While the regime’s forces did not overreact in Suwayda governorate, they did open fire in Aleppo and Dera’a, killing at least two people. The Syrian Human Rights Network also reports the arrest of 57 people in connection with the protests, mainly in the governorate of Lattakia et Tartus[47].

Protesters show Syrian Revolution, Kurdish, Shia, Druze, Sunni, Christian and Syrian national flags in the city of Suwayda.

Since then demonstrations in Suwayda’s central square, long since renamed «Dignity Square» (al-Karami) by the population, have been weekly, if not daily, and have grown from one Friday to the next, reaching several thousand people a month after the start of the revolt, on September 22. Baath Party offices and a number of government offices were closed by the demonstrators during the protests, while banners and portraits of Bashar al-Assad were destroyed and burned.

Meanwhile, on September 14, Bashar al-Assad’s cousin, Firas al-Assad[48], published a video in which he condemned the regime and expressed his support for the demonstrators[49]. This video follows that of Majd Jadaan, Maher al-Assad’s sister-in-law[50], fiercely denouncing the crimes of the Assad clan from Jordan and hailing the revolt of the people of Suwayda against the regime[51]. Interviews of actors of the revolt were also made public, such as that of the leader of the «Men of Dignity Movement» in Suwayda, Sheikh Abu Hassan Yahya Al-Hajjar[52], or the activist and lawyer Adel al-Hadi[53].

The governorate building with Hafez al-Assad’s picture set in flames.

In the chaos of the proxy war

Despite twelve years of revolt and civil war, the Syrian regime is still in power. If it has withstood the storms, it is undoubtedly thanks to the interventions of Iran, ISIS and Russia, each of which, in their own ways, helped to make the Revolution so desired by the Syrian people impossible. To this we can add Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey, who for their part have succeeded in creating division within the democratic and secular forces of the Free Syrian Army by favoring, as mentioned earlier, the most reactionary and least democratic forces of the rebellion against the regime.

The United States, for its part, which is responsible for the birth and development of Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, both born on the still-smoldering rubble of Afghan and Iraqi societies, chose in 2011 (the year of its official withdrawal from Iraq) to no longer participate directly with its armed forces in conflicts in the Middle East. For all that, after condemning the repression of the 2011 protests and imposing sanctions against the Assad regime, the United States launched its first air strikes in Syria in September 2014[54] and, from 2015, sponsored the new Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), made up of 25,000 Kurdish fighters from the YPG/YPJ and 5,000 Arab fighters, with the stated aim of halting the advance of the Islamic State. Initially spared, the Syrian regime finally underwent US strikes in 2017 and 2018, in retaliation for the Syrian army’s use of chemical weapons against civilians in Douma (Damascus) and Khan Cheikhoun (Idlib)[55]. That same year, two-thirds of the American troops deployed on Syrian soil were brought back in agreement with Turkey, which then decided to launch an offensive in the Kurdish-controlled border zone in order to establish a «security zone» there[56]. Nevertheless, the United States maintained a strong presence in Syria; in 2021, it carried out a series of air strikes against Hezbollah and its Iraqi allies, including Hachd al-Chaabi, who were held responsible for attacks against «western interests» in Iraq[57].

Russia, which has been one of the Syrian regime’s main military backers since 2015, was diverted by its invasion of Ukraine, which didn’t go exactly as Putin would have liked. It had to withdraw a significant part of its contingent from Syrian territory[58] to redeploy it in eastern Ukraine, while the 250 to 450 Wagner mercenaries operating notably in the Syrian governorates of Homs and Deir ez-Zor, remaining without leadership since the Prigozhine mutiny, were reportedly ordered to report to their base in Hmeimim (Latakia governorate) and return to the authority of the Russian military command[59]. Some of those who refused were possibly sent back to Russia or redeployed to Mali. As a result of the withdrawal of Russian troops, some of the military bases under their control were transferred to the Iranian armed forces, notably the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Hezbollah. However, Russia retains its military forces in Syria and has no intention of relinquishing its share of influence in the region, particularly in the face of Iran, which remains its main competitor there.

Iran, which has been the primary supporter of the Assad regime since the reign of Bashar’s father, Hafez, remains the key player in the Syrian war. Without the military support of Iranian militias, the main one being the Lebanese Hezbollah, the Assad regime would probably not have been able to hold out, not least because of Hezbollah’s involvement in the trafficking of Captagon, one of the regime’s main resources. After denying their presence in Syria, the Iranian regime and Hezbollah ended up openly supporting the Assad regime, calling it both a «jihad against Sunni extremists» and a «necessary intervention to protect Palestine and resist Israel». In the propaganda of Iran and Lebanese Hezbollah, unconditional support for the liberation of the Palestinian people is a mirage that works well, particularly among the Western left[60]. Where one might have expected unanimous support for the Syrian revolution from the majority of revolutionary left-wing forces, a resounding silence responded to the chants of the Syrian demonstrators. In the naive imagination of the left, Iran, Syria and the Hezbollah (and Hamas) militias constitute an indisputable bulwark against American imperialism and Israeli colonialism. In reality, Hezbollah’s main concern is to maintain its quasi-hegemonic hold on Lebanese society while working frantically to keep Syria within Iran’s zone of influence, on which its entire survival depends. Between 2013 and 2018, the Syrian regime’s siege[61] and then violent eradication of the world’s largest Palestinian Yarmouk refugee camp (suburb of Damascus)[62], which can easily be considered an operation of ethnic cleansing carried out with the complicity of Hezbollah and Palestinian movements like PFLP and Hamas[63], is enough to disqualify the latter’s propaganda as to the reality of their struggle for the emancipation of the Palestinian people.

Israel, without intervening militarily on Syrian soil, has never stopped launching drone strikes on Iranian infrastructures in Syria. In fact, not a month goes by without rockets hitting Hezbollah buildings or executives, the militia being the main concern of the Israeli regime. Yet, Israel has never shown any willingness to support the democratic aspirations of the Syrian people. If we look at the situation rationally, we understand that Israel has no interest in the establishment of a democratic society in an Arab country on its borders, as any democratic progress in the region would naturally lead to Arab solidarity with the Palestinians and a threat to Israel’s apartheid regime. In fact, the Assad regime and Hezbollah have largely contributed to restricting the political organization and resistance of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon and Syria[64], which is not to Israel’s displeasure.

What could happen next?

Like the Syrian people as a whole in 2011, the Suwayda demonstrators can hardly win a revolution without external support or a large uprising of the Syrian population in the main other governorates.

As for the Free Syrian Army, it’s hard to expect enthusiastic support for the Druze uprising, given that the aspiration of the majority of the current fighting groups remains the establishment of an Islamic caliphate that is difficult to reconcile with the democratic and secular aspirations of the Suwayda protesters. Nevertheless, in all the governorates, whether under the control of the regime or the rebels, there are still remnants of democratic movements who see the Druze insurrection as an immense source of hope. This is why those who still believe in a non-confessional, democratic society have spontaneously taken to the streets of various towns to express their solidarity with Suwayda, whether they be Sunni Muslims, Alawites, Christians, Syriacs, Arabs or Kurds.

Here again, one would expect Kurdish organizations, which have managed to maintain their autonomous status in a good quarter of the country and proclaim loud and clear that they are driven by a revolutionary, universalist and democratic project, to express more strong and unconditional support for their brothers and sisters in Suwayda. But beyond a communiqué from the women of the Syrian Democratic Council calling for Syrian women to take the political issue into their own hands, we haven’t heard much from the Kurdish revolutionary movements. This suggests that, in accordance to their well-established autonomy, the Kurds don’t feel much concern for what’s happening south of the Euphrates, whether the fate of the rest of the Syrian people or that of the Palestinians. It’s sad to see the extent to which solidarity with other struggling communities is not perceived as a sine qua non for the survival of the project for Democracy in the Middle East. Moreover, recent events in Deir ez-Zor have done little to bolster Arab confidence in the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG): between August 27 and September 7, the Syrian Democratic Forces, largely dominated by the YPG, clashed with local Arab factions affiliated to the Deir ez-Zor Military Council following the dismissal and arrest of an Arab senior commander of the SDF, Ahmed al-Khubail also know as Rashid Abu Khawla. Although the sanctions taken against him were justified in view of the accusations of corruption and drug trafficking made against him by the local population, the arrest fueled the anger of its supporters, who launched an assault on the SDF, resulting in the death of 90 people over the eleven days the fighting lasted[65]. The backdrop to this conflict is the reproach levelled at the Kurds by the local population, who legitimately blame them for their hegemonic control of the area, which is seen as disrespectful considering the Arab majority living there[66].

Among the Druze, there is intense debate about the procedure to be followed. A certain mistrust seems to persist with regard to the autonomist and confederalist proposal. Some people see in the autonomist claim a risk of separation from the rest of the Syrians, unable to grasp the difference between autonomy and independence, while others confuse the means with the end: when they are told about establishing democratic assemblies and struggle committees to organize the revolt in the medium term, they think they are being told about a long-term project for society, and find it hard to believe in the people’s capacity for self-organization without mediators and leaders. As a result, political organization in the context of the popular uprising in al-Karami Square is still struggling to take on the form of the Egyptian Tahrir of 2010 or the Ukrainian Maïdan of 2014, when it would perhaps be sufficient to take up the recipes and positive experiences of the 2011 uprising, and in particular that of the Local Committees described by the Syrian anarchist Omar Aziz[67] and set up in many cities at the time. Unfortunately, if no grassroots’ organizing initiative is put in place, we run the risk of seeing sheikhs and heads of traditional family clans propelled as leaders, to the detriment of lesser-known individuals or collectives driven by more progressive and genuinely emancipatory ideals.

Already, Russian ambassador Anatoly Viktorov has paid a visit to the sheikh of the Druze of Galilee (Israel) Muwafaq Tarif[68], while American representatives French Hill, Joe Wilson and Brendan Boyle have called on phone the sheikh of Suwayda Hikmat Al-Hijri[69], trying to initiate negotiations with the Druze community to ensure that the outcome of the revolt would be in line with their interests in the region. Nor should we doubt that Saudi butcher Mohammed Ben Salman, who is conducting diplomatic dealings on all sides with Iran, China, Israel, the United States and France, will also come to shake up the region’s future, so much does his interest in weaponry acquisition and uranium enrichment outweigh the fate of the people, whether Syrian or Palestinian. For the Saudi tyrant, it obviously doesn’t matter that these peoples remain caged, as long as they are martyred in silence and don’t disturb usual business. And that’s not counting Bashar al-Assad’s recent visit to Beijing at the invitation of Chinese despot Xi Jinping, to break out of his isolation and secure China’s support for a deal to «rebuild» Syria. The very act of all these vultures is enough to generate suspicion and speculation, which cannot be beneficial to the popular movement underway. In view of the chaos that the various states have generated in Iraq and Syria over the last twenty years, we can legitimately say that only solutions implemented by the people for the people can hope to lead to a semblance of peace and democracy. For now, the people of Suwayda have categorically refused to join under any banner that has political or economic interests in Syria.

Let’s hope it will last and succeed in this way!

NOTES

[1] The withdrawal of the French in 1945 was largely due to the fight for independence waged since the 1920s by Sultan Pacha al-Atrach, representing a family of Druze notables, whose feats of arms and resistance to the occupiers are still celebrated by many Syrians.

[2] The regime has no checkpoints inside Suwayda governorate, and the community refuses to send its young people to the army outside the region. Nevertheless, the governorate administration and security services remain present and informed of what is happening in the region.

[3] Among these sheikhs, the notorious ones are the sheikh Jerbo and Nayef al-Aqil from the Dir’ al-Watan faction.

[4] https://yalibnan.com/2012/03/25/anti-regime-druze-spiritual-leader-killed-in-syria/

[5] https://www.meforum.org/5554/the-assassination-of-sheikh-abu-fahad-al-balous

[6] https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/06/22/druze-syria-assad-israel-netanyahu/

[7] https://syrianobserver.com/news/34453/sedition_between_druze_and_sunni_fighters.html

[8] https://www.meforum.org/3463/syrian-druze-neutrality

[9] https://www.zamanalwsl.net/news/article/45392

[10] https://www.zamanalwsl.net/news/article/45392 (AR)

[11] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8HeEzKTmbc (EN)

[12] https://suwayda24.com/?p=20610 (AR)

[13] https://s.telegraph.co.uk/graphics/projects/isis-jihad-syria-assad-islamic/ (EN)

[14] https://npasyria.com/en/53834/ (EN)

[15] https://cija-syria-paramilitaries.org/#investigating-assads-ghosts (EN)

[16] https://syriafreedomforever.wordpress.com/2017/02/26/the-rawr-report-interview-with-joseph-daher-on-hezbollah-and-the-syrian-revolution-02162017/ (EN)

[17] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2015/9/30/russia-carries-out-first-air-strikes-in-syria

[18] The main are Ahrar al-Sham (Qatar, Turkey, Saudi Arabia), Syrian Islamic Liberation Front (Qatar, Turkey), Liwa al-Tawhid (Qatar, Turkey), Jaych al-Islam (Saudi Arabia, Qatar)

[19] https://thisishell.com/interviews/894-leila-al-shami-robin-yassin-kassab (EN)

[20] https://english.aawsat.com/home/article/1275206/isis-militants-evacuated-southern-damascus-desert (EN)

[21] Hamlets called Ashraffieh, al-Saqiya and al-Awara, less than 20 kilometers from the Khalkhalah military base and less than 10 kilometers from the first Druze settlements at the gateway to the desert, al-Qasr and Barek – https://suwayda24.com/?p=2423 (AR)

[22] Villages of Tema, Douma, Al-Kseib, Tarba, Ghaydah Hamayel, Rami, al-Shbeki, al-Sharahi, al-Mtouneh and al-Sweimreh – https://suwayda24.com/?p=4431

[23] On July 31, 2018, the regime negotiated the release of women held hostage by the jihadists, in exchange for an agreement to evacuate more than 200 of their fighters from western Deraa (Yarmouk Basin) to the Badiya region. Refusing the deal, the Islamic State demanded a ransom, before publishing the video of the execution of one of the hostages, Muhannad Touqan Abu Ammar, a 19-year-old Druze resident of al-Shbeki, on August 2, 2018 – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_OhL8bJD2M (AR). Eventually, the remaining hostages were released following agreements reached with the regime in october and november 2018, while 700 to 1,000 jihadists were evacuated to Badiya under a new agreement reached with the regime on November 17 – https://suwayda24.com/?p=19606 (AR) ; https://stj-sy.org/en/946/ (EN)

[24] https://www.hrw.org/news/2018/08/25/syria-isis-holding-children-hostage (EN)

[25] The ISIS offensive affected 10 villages, 263 people were killed (30 by the suicide bombers in Suwayda) and 300 injured. In retaliation for the massacre, on August 7, 2018 local members of the pro-regime Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP) hanged an elderly man they presented as a jihadist at the so-called “Arch of the Hanged” (al-Mashnaqah) in the town of Suwayda – https://suwayda24.com/?p=4711 (AR) ; https://syria.news/179bd6d3-07081812.html (AR) ; https://orient-news.net/ar/news_show/152458 (AR)

[26] The regime’s army intervened only belatedly (after the attack on the Khalkhalah military base located to the north of Suwayda governorate) to track down ISIS into the desert next to the volcanic field of as-Safa, as they were already pushed back by the Druzes’ counter-attack.

[27] Watch “Captagon: Inside Syria’s drug trafficking empire” by BBC World Service Documentaries – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4DaOxf13O0 (EN)

[28] https://www.facebook.com/Suwayda24/photos/pb.100064794576009.-2207520000/2097785973734342/?type=3

[29] https://suwayda24.com/?p=19288 (AR)

[30] https://suwayda24.com/?p=19589 (AR) ; https://suwayda24.com/?p=19611 (AR)

[31] https://www.opensanctions.org/entities/NK-Do5hgZ5JS8hTfGJbyQvr6J/ (EN)

[32] https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=2161930727319866&set=pb.100064794576009.-2207520000

[33] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-66002450 (EN)

[34] https://suwayda24.com/?p=19955 (AR)

[35] Since 2011, over 600,000 people have been killed in the conflict, more than half of them civilians. Five million Syrians have left the country, while almost 8 million have been internally displaced. While Russia and Turkey intervene militarily on Syrian territory, most other powers intervene through militias or by providing financial and material aid to the various armed groups active in the conflict. Iran openly supports the Syrian regime, notably by guaranteeing the support of its militias, the main one being Hezbollah.

[36] https://npasyria.com/en/65789/ (EN)

[37] https://syrianobserver.com/news/75404/widely-condemned-russian-delegation-enters-town-in-suweida-under-pretext-of-aid.html (EN)

[38] https://suwayda24.com/?p=20325 (AR)

[39] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/5/7/arab-league-agrees-to-bring-syria-back-into-its-fold (EN)

[40] https://www.usip.org/publications/2023/03/what-you-need-know-about-chinas-saudi-iran-deal (EN)

[41] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/5/1/syria-agrees-to-curb-drug-trade-in-arab-ministers-meeting (EN)

[42] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/5/8/sohr-attack-that-killed-drug-trafficker-in-syria-was-by-jordan (EN)

[43] https://www.newarab.com/news/who-are-syrias-new-opposition-group-10-august-movement (EN)

[44] https://en.majalla.com/node/297431/politics/alawite-protest-movement-emerging-syrias-coastal-areas (EN)

[45] https://alsifr.org/syria-protests (AR)

[46] https://suwayda24.com/?p=21730 (AR) ; https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/8/21/strike-protests-in-syrias-sweida-enter-second-day (EN)

[47] https://leilashami.wordpress.com/2023/08/26/revolution-reborn/ (EN)

[48] Firas’ father, Rifaat, commanded the armed forces responsible for the Hama massacre in 1982, before attempting a coup against his brother, Bashar al-Assad’s father, in 1984. Exiled to France, he finally returned to Syria in 2021 after being granted an amnesty by his nefew and found guilty by French courts of embezzling and laundering money for the Syrian regime. All his assets were seized, worth an estimated 90 million euros, including two Parisian townhouses, a stud farm, 40 apartments, 7300 square metres of office space in Lyon and a castle.

[49] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmCRl-Hkn94 (AR)

[50] Maher is Bashar’s brother and General commander of the Republican Guard and the regime’s Military Intelligence. He is the regime’s second strongman, directly responsible for the Shabihas militia and the captagon traffic organized by the military intelligence services, in particular the Fourth Armored Division.

[51] https://youtu.be/IobX1vxHkDY (AR)

[52] https://suwayda24.com/?p=20610 (AR)

[53] https://hawarnews.com/en/haber/developments-in-as-suwayda-to-where-h37625.html (EN)

[54] https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2014/09/23/statement-president-airstrikes-syria (EN)

[55] https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/Timeline-of-Syrian-Chemical-Weapons-Activity (EN) ; https://www.opcw.org/media-centre/news/2023/01/opcw-releases-third-report-investigation-and-identification-team (EN)

[56] https://www.kurdistan24.net/en/news/fff9400a-a0b3-4ff4-be05-e18d00a046cf (EN)

[57] https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/us-carries-out-air-strikes-against-iran-backed-militia-iraq-syria-2021-06-27/ (EN)

[58] By 2020, Russia had control over 75 sites in Syria, including 23 military bases, 42 points of presence and 10 observation points. While an estimated 63,000 Russian military personnel were deployed in Syria between 2015 and 2018, on the eve of the war in Ukraine this number appears to have fallen to 20,000 – https://daraj.media/108925/ (AR) ; https://www.arab-reform.net/publication/russian-forces-in-syria-and-the-building-of-a-sustainable-military-presence-i/ (EN)

[59] The main Russian military bases in Syria are located in Tartus, Hmeimim (Latakia) and since 2019 in Qamishli (Al-Hasakah).

[60] https://alsifr.org/syria-protests (AR)

[61] See the film “Little Palestine”, by Abdallah al-Khatib – https://youtu.be/GbpxMFNuYVY (AR / FR)

[62] Before 2013, the Yarmouk camp was home to over 160,000 Palestinian refugees.

[63] Hamas militants in Yarmouk initially fought the Assad regime until 2013, when Hamas timidly criticized the intervention against the Yarmouk camp, before maintaining a position of neutrality, due to its financial and military dependence on Hezbollah. Hamas also maintains its headquarters in Hezbollah’s stronghold in Dahiyeh, Lebanon.

[64] https://alsifr.org/syria-protests (AR)

[65] It was finally under US pressure that a withdrawal and ceasefire agreement was initiated by the FDS, motivated by the fear that ISIS cells, regime forces and pro-Iranian militias would take advantage of the situation to regain ground in the region.

[66] https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/syria-deir-ezzor-sdf-fights-arab-tribes-control (EN)

[67] https://www.fifthestate.org/archive/397-winter-2017/the-legacy-of-omar-aziz/ (EN) ; https://www.syria.tv/عمر-عزيز-يدخل-غيابه-العاشر

[68] https://www.aljazeera.net/politics/2023/9/21/انتفاضة-السويداء-مستمرة-اتصالات

[69] https://syrianobserver.com/news/85155/american-senator-reaches-out-to-sheikh-al-hijri-in-suweida.html (EN) ; https://www.thenationalnews.com/world/us-news/2023/09/21/us-politicians-speak-to-druze-leader-sheikh-al-hajari-as-anti-assad-protests-continue/ (EN)

“Jay alek el door ya doctor”

In 2011, it all began when schoolchildren in Deraa (in the far south of Syria), inspired by the uprisings in other Arab countries, dared to dream of the tyrant of Damascus stepping down—Bashar al-Assad. Ironical slogans blossomed on the city’s walls, among them the one that enraged the president most: “Jay alek el door ya doctor” (“Your turn is coming, doctor”—Bashar al-Assad is an ophthalmologist).

Arrested and tortured by Bashar’s henchmen, the children of Deraa unwittingly ignited one of the most beautiful moments of revolt the country had ever known. Across Syria, massive demonstrations erupted. We remember the magnificent messages of hope sent week after week to the entire world by the residents of Kafranbel, barely an hour from Idlib—now the heart of the cyclone, bombarded daily by tons of explosives stamped with the seal of Russian and Western merchants of death.

We remember thousands of people dancing in the glare of floodlights to defy the curfew, and we can still hear ringing in our ears the chants launched by the two birds of the revolution, Ibrahim Qachouch and Abdel-Basset al-Sarout: “Yalla irhal ya Bashar” (“Come on, get out, Bashar”).

The fate of these two men encapsulates what followed. The first was arrested and tortured as early as 2011 by Bashar’s mukhabarat (intelligence services) and shabiha (henchmen), his vocal cords torn out. The second died in June 2019 from his wounds after fighting alongside rebels in the Hama region. Bashar’s torturers also crushed the hands of the cartoonist Ali Ferzat before leaving him for dead by the side of a road.

The revolt of 2011 was annihilated in terror and blood. Images—such as the 45,000 photographs taken by the photographer Caesar and smuggled to Europe by this former regime soldier turned defector—laid bare the regime’s barbarity for the world to see. The uprising fell silent, and those who chose armed struggle continue to be crushed beneath bombs in the north of the country. Many joined Islamist groups, while the least sectarian and most selfless, completely isolated, no longer interest anyone.

With the crushing of the Islamic State (a victory made possible by the armed intervention of the Kurds in the north and the Druze in the south), followed by the Turkish offensive, the ceasefire and joint Turkish-Russian patrols, the pawns placed here and there by the United States and Europe (through NGOs and agreements imposed on the Kurds), and the quiet invasion of Syrian territory by Russian forces and Hezbollah (with Bashar’s consent—perhaps believing this would secure his power and safety), Damascus now seems isolated at the center of a vast country where the president, with his small empty head perched on a long neck, controls very little anymore.

What has fundamentally changed is that he no longer enjoys the same footing as before. For several weeks now, a fratricidal conflict has pitted him against his cousin Rami Makhlouf, and everywhere the Russians occupy the territory—including Kurdish regions—as if they were slowly preparing to take full control of the country. And stubbornly, Bashar continues to flatten the north under bombs, as though his power still depended on it.

“Yalla irhal ya Bashar!”

But in 2020, the combination of international sanctions and the pandemic brought an end to years of resignation and fear: Syrians are starving.

Since the beginning of the year, the Syrian pound has suffered an unprecedented collapse. From 500 pounds per dollar in January 2020, the exchange rate passed the 3,000-pound mark on June 8. In one year, the currency lost 130 percent of its value. The price of onions rose by 97 percent in two months; lentils by 64 percent; bread by 54 percent; flour by 46 percent; pasta by 44 percent; and rice by 33 percent. With an average salary of 30,000 pounds and a family meal costing between 3,000 and 5,000 pounds for a typical household (two or three children), a full month’s wage barely covers food for ten days at the rate of one meal per day. Some families can no longer even afford olive oil or tea. Grocers now choose to open only a few hours a day, unsure what prices to charge as the dollar climbs by 200 Syrian pounds daily. Banks are beginning to shut down their ATMs.

Since Friday, at first timidly and then with growing fervor, the population has once again dared to defy the authorities, taking to the streets and chanting the refrain that so infuriated the idiot who has served as Syria’s president for far too long: “Yalla irhal ya Bashar!”

Those who, in their cynicism and indifference, would like to see the Islamic State wiped out and Syrian refugees return home by the grace of the Holy Spirit or by sheer brute force should understand this: the balance of the world depends on the fall of regimes steeped in virile authoritarianism and greed, wherever they may be found. The threat does not come from popular uprisings or exile, but from elites who believe human beings can be moved about like pawns on a black-and-white chessboard.

As the world enters a period of unprecedented upheaval, as systemic racism and authoritarianism are on everyone’s lips, we invite the world to take up once more the chant of the Syrian revolt—to finally bring down all the useful idiots of the system who pass themselves off as our leaders.

The liberation of peoples rhymes with the end of capitalism (and its imperialism).

Insurrection can only be global, carried by the people, for the people.

We express our full solidarity with the Syrian people.

At the end of June 2014, I traveled to Palestine for the second time, less than nine months after having to interrupt my previous trip to see my father before he died. Little did I know that just a few days after my arrival, a new war would break out. Here is my account.

I’ve barely arrived and the war begins.

Traffic jams and clashes in Qalandiya

Qalandiya—known to everyone for its checkpoint, the wall plastered with Barghouti’s portrait, and the charred watchtower—is the main crossing point between Jerusalem and the West Bank and, above all, a symbolic site that embodies the humiliation of controls, apartheid‑like restrictions, and the inability of many Palestinians to leave their own territory. In Arabic it is called hajez. Israelis control everything that passes into Israel there.

Qalandiya is also something of a knot at the heart of Palestine. Directly below the checkpoint stretches the refugee camp, and between the two runs Route 60, which links Jalame (north of Jenin) and Meitar (south of Hebron), the two checkpoints that bookend the West Bank. It is a bottleneck that rarely clears: cars crawl forward, honk, turn around, and seem to overlap each other in an almost suffocating jam. White and green buses may cross into Israel, as can vehicles bearing yellow Israeli plates. All others—yellow “services” and cars with the green‑white Palestinian plates—must stay within the West Bank. Like all Palestinians without Israeli residency permits, they are barred from their own land.

Young men, armed and exuding a swaggering contempt, carry out the security formalities. Passports and visas, Palestinian ID cards, and residence permits are mandatory. Pedestrians pass through grids that resemble cattle‑holding corridors. Turnstiles constantly jam, opening only at the whim of the adolescent‑looking soldier conducting the checks, while queues can stretch indefinitely. Above each turnstile sit two lights—a red and a green—but a green light does not necessarily mean the gate is open. The endless cycle repeats: you pass, you pass again, you set your bag on the scanner and press your passport against the armored glass. Changing buses costs five shekels; a bus ride from Ramallah to Jerusalem (Damascus Gate) is eight shekels.

Over the checkpoint stand three of those familiar watchtowers that punctuate the Palestinian landscape. The one overlooking the entrance to the refugee camp is blackened with soot. Tires were set ablaze at its base during clashes that, in that spot, occur weekly—and, since the death of Mohammed Abu Khdeir, daily. During Ramadan they usually begin after Iftar, the evening meal that breaks the fast.

I found myself caught in one of those confrontations on my way to Shu’afat. At moments the soldiers moved close to the Palestinians to launch stun grenades, or hid behind barrels on the left sidewalk to fire live rounds. A sniper crouched behind a blue water tank, adjusted his aim, and fired repeatedly—whistling and a faint metallic crack. On the Palestinian side there were about forty people armed with stones and slingshots—the inverted myth of David versus Goliath, minus the victory. In the end, two Palestinians were wounded by gunfire.

Taking advantage of a lull, I slipped away to rejoin the road to Shu’afat…

East Jerusalem rises up following the death of Mohammed Abu Khdeir

After the kidnapping of three young Gush Ezion settlers, Israel’s government—ever quick to blame Hamas—still could not locate Eyal Yifrach, Naftali Frankel or Gilad Shaer alive. The Shin Bet (Israel’s internal security service) now has to admit its failure. The three were found dead in Halhul, north of Hebron, and buried in Modiin on July 1.

The discovery ignited a wave of fury. Within 24 hours, hundreds of extremists flooded the internet with calls for the murder and genocide of Arabs, despite the victims’ parents urging restraint and reminding skeptics that “the same blood runs in the veins of Arabs and Jews.”

On the dawn of Wednesday, 16‑year‑old Mohammed Abu Khdeir was seized by three men outside a shop in Shu’afat. His charred body was later recovered in a nearby forest; the autopsy showed he had been burned alive after being beaten. The next three days saw Shu’afat and several East‑Jerusalem neighborhoods—Beit Hanina, at‑Tour, Silwan, Ras al‑‘Amoud and al‑Eesawiyya—rise in protest.

July 4, the first Friday of Ramadan, was marked by massive funeral rites for Mohammed in Shu’afat, drawing more than 10 000 mourners. Israel barred the ceremony from Al‑Aqsa Mosque, which for weeks had endured violent incursions by Israeli fanatics accompanied by soldiers.

That night, roughly 200 demonstrators clashed with Israeli special forces at the Beit Hanina–Shu’afat junction. Molotov cocktails, stones, rubber‑bullet fire, tear‑gas grenades and water cannons were exchanged. Unlike the earlier episode at Qalandiya, where a sniper perched behind a water tank appeared ready to add another name to the growing list of Palestinian martyrs, the special forces reportedly refrained from using live ammunition.

The Veolia‑Alstom tram line was not spared. Protesters cut the tracks and toppled two poles on the line that connects Jerusalem to the illegal settlements of Giv’at‑Ha Mivtar, Pisgat Ze’ev and Neve Ya’akov, depriving more than 50 000 settlers of tram service. Simultaneously, incidents multiplied across the West Bank: army raids and skirmishes in the Old City of Hebron, the Al‑Arroub refugee camp (Hebron district), the villages of Barta’a ash‑Sharqiyya (Jenin district), Al‑Asakra, Jouret ash‑Sham’a and Um Salmouna (Bethlehem district), leading to further abductions.

From the settler side, new violent episodes were reported: in Osarin (Nablus district), 22‑year‑old Tareq Ziad Odeily was seized by two Israeli vehicles, beaten and left for dead near a field; in Keesan (Bethlehem district), 17‑year‑old Ala’ Mousa Obeyyat was deliberately run over by a settler’s car; and in Sha’aba (Hebron area), 30‑year‑old Bashir Sobhi al‑Mohtaseb was beaten by a group of Kiryat Arba settlers.

A conversation with a group of young Karmi Zur settlers camping outside Halhul revealed once again how misinformation and hatred shape their worldview, prompting them to see every Arab as a butcher and terrorist. Their interaction with me was surprisingly cordial—they even offered chocolate. During our talk I heard them claim that Palestinians have no reason to complain because Israel “generously gave them the Gaza Strip—now full of luxury hotels—and provides water and electricity for free.” They also asserted that Arabs are educated from childhood to kill Jews and that the proportion of fanatics in Israel is infinitesimal. The settlers believe they alone live in fear and view each new settlement as a way to further bind Jews in the occupied territories for protection against Arab aggression. They do not even recognize the label “settlers” applied to them.

When they invited me to wait for a gathering that would be guarded by soldiers for our safety, I declined. I preferred to leave before engaging in any deeper debate with the Israeli forces, opting instead to spend the early evening on a bus packed with “dangerous Palestinians” on my way back to Ramallah.

Mounir Ahmad Al Badareen: a dove has fallen

July 14, pre‑dawn – Between four and five a.m. in the village of As Samuʾ (Hebron district), Israeli army jeeps rolled into the town.

Violent clashes erupted when residents tried to drive the intruders away, pursuing them to the edge of Route 60 at the western tip of the village. The road slices the hill there like an open wound in the landscape, linking the settlements of Otni’el and Shim’a before continuing toward Beersheba beyond the “wall of shame.”

Mounir Ahmad Al‑Badareen, 19, was among those who attempted to resist with stones. Stones against rifles—​the drama and tragedy of an unarmed youth risking his life daily to shake off oppression.

Palestinian projectiles ricocheted down the road; their impact marks were still visible two days later. The youngsters were exposed, standing too close to the road’s lip. A soldier fired two .22 calibre dum‑dum rounds—​ammunition banned under the Hague Declaration of 1899 and prohibited in 2001 for crowd control by the Israeli army’s chief legal officer—​into Mounir’s torso. His friends fled.

Witnesses later described the routine brutality of the adolescent soldiers, who mishandled Mounir’s wounded body and blocked a Red Crescent ambulance from reaching him while his blood drained away. It took forty minutes for him to become a shaheed, a martyr for a desperate cause.

The following day, Ahmad Hamdan Al‑Badareen, an English teacher and Mounir’s father, spoke with humility about his son’s fate. He shared his broader view of the Israeli occupation and his unconditional wish for a just peace—​a vision far removed from the revenge narrative often ascribed to Palestinians. In his view, a fair peace can exist only when walls fall: “No peace without freedom; no freedom without struggle.” The father and the slain son’s memory seemed to converge on that sentiment.

That evening, Mounir’s family welcomed me into their home as if I were one of their own, despite our differences and their grief. Sitting among them in the communal hall, I witnessed a ceremony attended by hundreds of locals and outsiders who came to offer condolences.

Mounir kept a pigeon loft. By killing him, the Israeli soldiers struck at a symbol of freedom itself.

The Palestinian Authority at the service of the settler

Israel appears able to lean on the Palestinian Authority to suppress any spark of popular revolt. Historically, the Palestinian people have been split between those who see a necessary uprising as inevitable and those who cling to the hope of a peace brokered through diplomacy—even at the cost of unbearable compromises. It seems that the prospect of securing crumbs from endless negotiations with the White House motivates Mahmoud Abbas to polish the shoes of the Israeli colonial state.

Fatah’s strategy since Yasser Arafat’s death has shifted dramatically. The comfortable Palestinian elite now seems to have nothing to gain from armed struggle and prefers pacification and compromise. This collaboration between the Palestinian bourgeoisie and the occupier, once again, appears to be a prerequisite for the creation of a new state.

While the Israeli army multiplies operations aimed at decapitating Hamas in the West Bank—carrying out arbitrary nighttime arrests across cities and villages in the occupied territories—the Palestinian Authority assists the occupier in its effort to choke resistance.

Since the beginning of the week, wherever Palestinian youth traditionally take up arms against the occupation, the Palestinian police have intervened to prevent conflict, forcibly interposing themselves between protesting civilians and Israeli soldiers.

That is exactly what happened last night in Al Bireh, when Palestinian anti‑riot forces blocked the road leading to the settlement‑garrison of Beit El, and similarly in Qalandiya, where the Authority’s police took over from the Israeli army to violently suppress rioters.

Following the sniper‑kill of Mahmoud Ismael Atallah in central Ramallah on 22 June, the Palestinian police opted for repression, quashing any uprising in the city. That intervention culminated in an attack on the police station by residents. Palestinians are not fooled.

What does the Palestinian Authority hope to achieve? If Abbas pushes collaboration with Israel as far as he wishes, no peace will ever be acceptable without the dismantling of all West Bank settlements, the implementation of the right of return for refugees, unrestricted movement for all Palestinians, and the removal of the apartheid wall. Conversely, if the Authority stubbornly persists on a path of compromise, it will reap the opposite of what it claims to seek—and a third intifada could prove fatal to it.

Overview of the clashes around Ramallah

The bloody toll continues to climb in the Gaza Strip: 583 Palestinians killed and 3,640 wounded (including many amputations) since July 8. The United Nations even publishes morbid charts, assigning a tiny silhouette to each victim. Every day the local media are flooded with horrifying images—bodies torn apart, videos of snipers executing people live—followed by the unspeakable comments of genocide supporters. The war is waged online as well as on the ground.

Meanwhile, Israeli demonstrators shout loudly for murder in the streets, erecting anti‑Arab, anti‑left checkpoints in Haifa and Tel Aviv. The idea is to force motorists to chant “death to the Arabs,” under penalty of being beaten. The atmosphere is nauseating.

On the other side of the wall, clashes with the Israeli army are daily, and the number of injured is staggering. Israeli soldiers fire live rounds, hitting targets multiple times per hour. In the Ramallah suburbs I have watched stone‑throwers fall one after another, crouching or sprinting from cover to cover. Stones and Molotov cocktails rarely reach their targets, while bullets seem to pierce everything. Rifles sweep the darkness, a metallic snap follows, and a whizzing bullet flies—life and death reduced to a coin toss.

Around Ramallah, several hotspots heat up every night after the evening prayer (Isha), roughly from 10:30 p.m. until three or four in the morning:

OFER – The town is actually called Betunia, but the fighting takes place a few hundred metres from the Israeli Ofer prison and its checkpoint. Ofer, together with Megiddo and Ktzi’ot, is one of the three main Israeli detention facilities holding between 800 and 1,200 Palestinian prisoners. The prison looms in the background; in the foreground a narrow road leaves Betunia toward the checkpoint, where an expansive vacant lot offers no shelter. Atop a hill stands a factory owned by businessman Yasser Abbas—son of Mahmoud Abbas—who manufactures cigarettes. The enterprise, built on wealth accrued since the Oslo accords, underscores how little the Abbas family seems to care about the peace process. Yasser, a Canadian citizen, watches the clashes from a small balcony while his security detail observes. Palestinians use the steep slopes near the factory for cover, hurling stones at vehicles that shuttle back and forth across the vacant lot. They also try to approach the eastern flank of the hill, which looks directly onto the Wall, where soldiers keep a gate ready for counter‑attacks.

QALANDIYA – I have described this site previously. Its terrain is treacherous. The checkpoint is fortified with concrete blocks, behind which soldiers take up firing positions. On either side of the perpetually congested road lie cramped stalls with virtually no shelter. To the right, a massive embankment shelters a restaurant, a metal shed, and construction equipment that can be used as cover. In the centre, traffic streams continuously through the fighting as if nothing were happening. To the left, a covered sidewalk runs past shuttered shops. Clashes usually begin with piles of tires set ablaze on the road, then shift up the hill that skirts the Wall. The layout rarely allows anyone to get closer than 150 metres to the checkpoint—beyond that range only slingshots have a chance of hitting anything.

BEIT EL – What is commonly called Ramallah actually comprises two adjacent towns: Ramallah to the west and Al Bireh to the east, linked by Route 60. Leaving the city at a roundabout, a massive concrete flagpole rises, topped by a Palestinian flag—a defiant banner to settlers and soldiers across the street. To the east, two settlements—Psagot and Beit El—overlook the town; the latter shares half its territory with a military base. Most of the clashes occur near that base, north of the Ramallah‑Al Bireh corridor, behind a cluster of houses and an Al‑Huda gas station. The terrain is largely exposed; only the houses and their low walls provide any cover. On July 20 the fighting there reached a particularly violent peak.

AR‑RAM – This town sits directly above the Qalandia checkpoint to the south. Its main entrance is a wide roundabout on the winding Route 60 that leads to Bethlehem. It was here that 20‑year‑old Mahmoud Hatem Shawamra was killed on July 21. Accounts of his death diverge: some say a settler shot him, others claim Israeli soldiers fired at his back. He died in a military ambulance bound for nearby Hizma. Youth gathered at the spot where he was allegedly shot, surrounded by discarded Israeli medical gear. No evidence confirms a settler’s involvement; the location is precisely where clashes regularly erupt, at the entrance to Ar Ram.

From there a protest marched after news of his death, first toward the center of Ar Ram and then toward armored Israeli units that had been positioned for hours opposite the town’s roundabout. To reach the soldiers, protesters first had to exit the town and get onto the road, but the troops were entrenched behind a concrete barrier and quickly repelled attacks with well‑lit gunfire.

Beyond the Ramallah district, daily clashes are reported from Hebron, Halhul, Beit Umar and Al‑Arrub, where the population endures regular army incursions. Yet the conflict is not confined to a handful of towns or villages that bear the torch of Palestinian resistance; wherever Israeli soldiers set foot, locals respond with stone‑throwing. The intense events of the past month have reignited the anger of a population pressured far too long.

Some Western observers see the non‑violent Friday protests in Bil’in, Ni’lin, Nabi Saleh, Al Masara and Kufr Qaddum as the future of Palestinian insurrection. In reality, everyday resistance is far less visible and receives far less media coverage outside local outlets. Most of it unfolds after dark.

Occupying forces do not like witnesses

Friday, July 18, proved especially tense between Palestinians and the Israeli army. As on many Fridays across the occupied territories, Palestinians stormed Israeli forces and installations—not with weapons, but with the almost suicidal determination that has become their hallmark. Yesterday’s resolve was sharpened by a desire to show solidarity with Gaza’s residents, who have been massacred for weeks by Israeli troops.

In the afternoon I first made my way to Ofer.

The clashes there meet an often disproportionate Israeli response; soldiers do not hesitate to fire live rounds when tear gas and rubber bullets fail to achieve their aims. During these displays of force, the Israeli army frequently makes no distinction between rioter, medic, passerby or journalist. On that day I witnessed a deliberate hunt for journalists. Military jeeps repeatedly approached reporters in a threatening manner, forcing them back into their vehicles before deliberately tossing gas grenades at their feet. Later, a water cannon was used to “clean” the journalists present.

I experienced that targeted violence firsthand. While standing alone ahead of an armored army vehicle, a rubber‑bullet struck me squarely in the chest, even though I was holding my camera at eye level. It is indisputable that, as a witness, I was the direct target of that shot, and the soldier firing from the vehicle’s door clearly knew the projectile would hit me just centimeters from my face.

Late that evening the fighting broke out near the Qalandia checkpoint. Arriving with a photographer friend and trying to get as close as possible to the Israeli soldiers while gunfire raged, we found ourselves alongside Palestinian television journalists under heavy Israeli fire. One of the journalists, Fadi Al Jayoussi, was hit in the leg.

Israel once again displayed blind, indiscriminate violence, even as the Gaza operation—condemned worldwide—has already claimed 316 lives and injured more than 2,200 people, the majority of them children.

Enough is enough: Israel fires on crowd at Qalandiya

On July 24, a collective called for a demonstration to mark the Nakba—the destruction of roughly 400 Palestinian villages and the forced exile of 700,000 Palestinians during the founding of the State of Israel. The protest was slated to depart from the Al‑‘Amari refugee camp, force its way through the Qalandia checkpoint, and continue on to Jerusalem and the Al‑Aqsa Mosque, which had been closed to anyone under 50 for several days even as Muslims prepared to celebrate the end of Ramadan.

Posters posted throughout Ramallah announced a 21:30 start time. Yet thousands of Palestinians were already gathered on Route 60 well before the hour, forming a sea of Palestinian flags and keffiyehs. With a photographer friend I set out to join the head of the march, but it took an hour to catch up with the procession. By then the front of the march had already reached Qalandia, where the Israeli army had, for hours, sealed the checkpoint with concrete blocks and steel grates, waiting resolutely.

The Israeli forces were invisible to us, blinded by a massive floodlight mounted on one of the watchtowers that bathed the entire scene in blinding glare.

The clash had been underway for some time; hundreds of stones already littered the ground. As we arrived the crowd grew denser and dozens of ambulances were already making their frantic rounds. Black clouds billowed from burning tires, and in front of us dozens of Palestinians hurled projectiles at the Israeli convoy, taking cover behind scant obstacles—a central median wall, a tired warehouse, a garbage bin and a metal barbecue grill. Hundreds of people crouched in tight groups, trying to avoid Israeli fire.

From the front of the scene we were thrust straight into the horror: a stretcher carried in the body of the first martyr, his forehead pierced by a bullet. Every two minutes another group pulled a wounded person toward awaiting ambulances. Repeated pleas for medics, thick plumes of black smoke, the crack of gunfire, fireworks and ambulance sirens created an apocalyptic tableau. The Arabic word “SA’AF!” (paramedic) echoed over the chaos.

Having lost sight of my friend, I moved around the battlefield—right beside the separation wall, left onto rooftops, and in the middle of the road—spending about fifteen minutes lying flat against a wall with dozens of others while Israeli shooters fired just above our heads. The green laser sights of Israeli rifles and the high‑pitched whine of bullets were terrifying.

There were a few instances of live fire from the Palestinian side, met with whistles and applause, but overall the fight was waged with stones, Molotov cocktails and fireworks. Repeated Palestinian assaults, shouted with “Allāhu Akbar!”, were answered by bursts of gunfire, bullets whizzing through the crowd and striking moving bodies. The clash left roughly 287 injured and two dead, figures that should soon be confirmed by doctors at the Ramallah hospital. Many of the wounded—and likely one of the fatalities—came from the Al‑‘Amari refugee camp.

I would later find out the identity of the young man I saw on the stretcher: Muhammad al-A’raj, from Qalandiya, killed at the age of 17.

I left the battle around 3 a.m., when the crowd had thinned and staying any longer grew increasingly dangerous. I, like many here, had hoped the march would force the checkpoint open, but the struggle was starkly uneven. Despite the unwavering determination of hundreds of young Palestinians daring to face the bullets, the assault lacked organization: no shields, virtually no barricades, and almost nothing to protect the demonstrators.

Back in Paris, my mind is still on fire

I returned from Palestine this Monday and am trying to put my thoughts in order, to revisit what I saw, the conversations I had, and the sensations I experienced during the 45 days I spent in Israel and the West Bank.

Putting aside Orientalist or exoticising lenses, I found among the Palestinians an incredible hospitality and an openness of mind that is hard to comprehend. After so many years of deprivation and violence, it is astonishing that the Palestinian people can still summon the strength to love the Other and open their doors to strangers. One might expect that a people whose lives are strewn with tragedy would inevitably be driven by their darkest emotions, that a wounded nation’s destiny is to unleash itself in adversity and terrorism. But that is not the case.

Martyrdom is part of Palestinian life, and dying at the hands of the enemy is regarded by the families of shaheed both as a tragedy and an honor. Yet I did not encounter the fanaticism that some attribute to all Palestinians or the assumption that every Palestinian supports suicide attacks.

At the same time, I must admit that I feel neither contempt nor indifference toward those who have chosen to give their lives for freedom, whether out of anger, despair, or hatred. Putting one’s life on the line is never a simple choice; it is often the culmination of a long descent into hell, a slow awareness of life’s futility in contexts where everything obstructs happiness and joy. Israel has created the conditions for its own destruction by continually crushing an entire people under a steel heel, under the pretext of fighting terrorism, while the root of that terrorism lies in the very origins of Israel’s creation: without the demolition of hundreds of villages, without the assassination and expulsion of thousands of Palestinians from their lands, and without the occupation, there would be no terrorism.

In Palestine I was never afraid. The only moments I felt fear were when I was in contact with settlers and Israeli soldiers. They are as fearful as they inspire fear because they are made of fear. Confined to residential enclaves surrounded by walls and barbed wire, armed with automatic weapons and accompanied by armed men, they express distrust and contempt and have forgotten their humanity. Their aggression often extends even to non‑Palestinians. The excuses they might offer to justify their closed‑off stance are false: they are not in danger. A simple comparison of Israeli and Palestinian death tolls since 2000 shows that they are not the ones who need protection and security the most.

But when you speak with them, it quickly becomes clear that they are steeped in myths and prejudices, convinced from a young age that the Arab is a murderer and a liar who only wants the destruction of Jews. Among settlers, it is said that Arab children learn to kill at school, that the notion of peace does not exist for them, that Arab civilization lacks faith and law, and that the Qur’an teaches only violence. Talking with settlers made me hear things I never imagined could come from a people long persecuted and victimised by racism. These Jews have forgotten.

During my month in Palestine I discovered that Israeli societal racism is extreme, capable of taking the form of pogroms comparable to those that caused the deaths of thousands of Jews in Russia between 1880 and 1945. I saw large groups of young Israelis descend into the streets shouting “death to the Arabs,” beating their detractors, expressing murderous desires, and openly insisting on targeting children and pregnant women so that the Arab race would not reproduce. Israeli elites may claim these are marginal positions, but the statements of public figures, the state’s tacit approval of settler violence, and the propaganda surrounding the massacre of Gaza’s population all send encouraging signals to Israeli fascists.

Nevertheless, there are many Israeli voices opposed to the state’s policies: Jewish peace organizations, anti‑Zionist Orthodox Jews, left‑wing activists, anarchists against the wall. They, too, face unparalleled violence, accused of betraying their people and of playing into antisemitic narratives, even though they are merely denouncing Jewish nationalism.

Palestine is undeniably a land of contrasts and dissonances. When I trace the events of the past month, the inconsistencies pile up. Nothing today clarifies, for example, the circumstances of the deaths of the settlers Gilad Shaer, Naftali Fraenkel and Eyal Yifrah, whose bodies were found almost intact after two weeks under a pile of rocks in full sun. Israel rushed to accuse two young Palestinians from Halhul—never located—before demolishing their families’ homes and arresting their relatives. Military operations across numerous West Bank towns, settler violence, the assassination of the young Palestinian Mohammed Abu Khdeir in Shu’afat, and the bombing of Gaza have resulted in weeks of daily clashes in which hundreds of Palestinians have been injured and about twenty killed in the West Bank.

Who bears responsibility? What will become of the fanatics who burned Mohammed Abu Khdeir alive? They have already been released under judicial supervision. What will become of the soldiers who, deliberately, with their advanced weaponry, shot Palestinians armed only with stones? They are praised; they have done their job. Israel thanks its assassins.

Meanwhile in Gaza, the toll stands at 1,422 dead (23 % children) and 8,265 injured as of 31 July—surpassing the casualty counts of previous operations. Israel does not defend itself; it exterminates. Some speak of genocide, a term that should not be used without UN endorsement.

I left Palestine as the Al‑Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades—the armed wing of Fatah—launched targeted attacks against Israeli forces and settlers in the West Bank, in solidarity with Gaza and in support of Hamas actions. Suffice it to say, the summer is far from cooling down.

In 2013 I traveled to Palestine for the first time. I didn’t know anyone there, but I had prepared the trip as an initiatory journey into a colonial reality I’d read extensively about in books and articles and watched in countless documentaries. Stepping beyond the wall reshapes one’s entire worldview.

October 24, 2013 – Jerusalem

A military ceremony takes place in front of the Western Wall. Men and women in austere uniforms mourn, devout youths dance in Israel’s honor, teenagers brandish weapons, and some men dress as scarecrows. Arab children hurl stones at me and threaten with sticks. A pious man grabs my hand, murmuring prayers in hopes of a donation; beggars wave their coin‑filled cups as frivolous teens pass by.

“I’m in Israel,” I think, confronting stark contrasts. Violence hangs in the air, ready to erupt. An UN officer crosses my path, shedding his sky‑blue bullet‑proof vest. An Arab vendor clutches at me, urging me to buy a bag priced three times its worth. A child—Jewish or perhaps Arab, I can’t tell—spits on me as I turn away. A caravan of Russian pilgrims, dressed like Mormons, storms past, their dark wooden crucifixes a reminder of a past that still haunts.

Tomorrow I head to the West Bank for a protest marking seven years of struggle at Al‑Ma’sara, southwest of Bethlehem. Tear‑gas looms. Two Frenchwomen have offered to travel together from Jerusalem, departing at 09:30 through the Damascus Gate.

I’ve just finished Maintien de l’Ordre by David Dufresne and will start Stephen Graham’s Villes sous contrôle. The militarisation of urban space feels especially pertinent.

October 25, 2013 – Bethlehem

The Al‑Ma’sara demonstration embodies paradox. Arriving early, we encounter Mahmud, a leader of the Popular Committees, deep in conversation with a German volunteer working three months for the AIC. He delivers a compelling talk on non‑violence—a tactical approach far removed from the “bobo” civil‑disobedience theories popular in Europe. Here, the goal isn’t to dodge physical confrontation but to stay perpetually on the defensive, reacting rather than initiating attacks. It’s a form of popular self‑defence.

Yet media narratives and symbolic speeches dominate the scene, eclipsing direct resistance. These participants are undeniably resistors, but not fighters; they exist only through the lens of “militant tourists,” NGO volunteers, left‑wing politicians, and a few lost anarchists like myself who wish to help yet end up as mere witnesses.

I won’t criticize further; I haven’t lost loved ones, I’m not crushed by occupation, nor do I live in constant fear of soldiers dragging me from my bed.

The protest—largely composed of foreigners with cameras—advanced toward the village entrance, aiming for the Efrat settlement, before being halted by an Israeli soldier cordon. Minor scuffles erupted: Arabic and English chants, a few kicks and elbows against shields, followed by performative speeches for the guests. Some determined Palestinians and foreign activists tried to slip through olive groves; soldiers redeployed below, chasing stone‑throwers in a jeep as if it were a folkloric ritual. Tear‑gas was deployed, though most foreigners had already fled. The ensuing gunfire angered nearby villagers, who turned on the demonstrators. Both sides exchanged stones and punches before calm returned.

Foreign participants eventually left; the show ended. That evening I arrived in Ramallah, opting not to spend Shabbat in Jerusalem.

October 28, 2013 – Ramallah

After a night in a youth hostel filled with tourists, Mohammad escorts me to the Al‑Amari refugee camp—a village within the city populated by people displaced from villages now erased inside modern Israel. Everyone knows each other; the atmosphere is warm. I quickly forge contacts, aware of their fleeting nature. Tomorrow I’ll be gone.

I spend a day walking along the separation barrier: Beit’ur at Tahta, Saffa, Bil’in. The arid landscape stretches toward settlements and their war‑like apparatus—fences, walls, watchtowers. An Israeli jeep roars down a road reserved for Israelis, then silence returns, punctuated only by sun‑baked olive trees. A young Palestinian warns me of stray dogs. A red sign on the barbed wire warns anyone attempting to cross that their life is at risk.

Palestine lives in a paradox: peace and war coexist daily. Local news constantly reports incidents—assaults, arrests, settler raids sometimes with army complicity. Settlers wage an annihilation campaign for a “lebensraum” of Jewish Israelis, expanding their vital space by eradicating anything that stands in their way. Their logic is ruthless; they level Palestinian olive groves—a potent symbol.

November 1, 2013 – Nablus

Green‑khaki IDF uniforms dominate every corner of the occupied territories, kicking up dust behind roaring jeeps. Checkpoints and patrols, stone‑thrower chases, perpetual enforcement of Arab population control—don’t forget the green card, the AWIYYA.

In the towns, bustling street vendors, young men leaning against walls, university girls in colorful hijabs create a lively rhythm that momentarily masks the fact that we’re in an occupied zone. It feels alive, breathing. “Welcome! What’s your name? How are you?” Children and elders alike greet the passing Westerner traveling through the land of Arafat, intifada, and the separation wall. Hospitality remains warm; lingering in the streets is a daily pleasure.

Still, one must stick to main routes, avoiding side roads near settlements and the wall. Not forbidden, but certainly discouraged. Even when Qalandia gate is open, we weren’t invited in.

Kufr Qaddum, Qaryut, Ras, Beit Ummar, Halhul, Susiya, Yabad—the list of villages scarred by recent Israeli‑Palestinian violence keeps growing.

Crossing into a settlement—Gilad Farm or Yitzhar—IDF presence is never far, reminding intruders they have no business there. Green uniforms seize the “intruder” and process him at the settlement’s police station in Ariel. That’s exactly what happened to me after entering Yitzhar. I learned that Palestinian towns are deemed dangerous, Arabs labeled killers, and the army is there to protect Israeli citizens. Against the very violence they generate, welcome to the land of paradoxes and contrast!

During five hours of “detention,” confined within the police station, I witnessed a juxtaposition of the mundane and the violent: stone‑throwing Palestinians, an Israeli parent of a recalcitrant teen, jovial officers, heavily armed soldiers, and two blindfolded Palestinians with hands bound behind their backs, forced to lower their heads and sentenced to long prison terms for allegedly attacking a soldier with a knife.

“Why did you come to Palestine? Which cities have you visited? Where will you go next? When are you leaving Israel? Where are you staying? Will you attend protests? Do you understand the Israeli‑Palestinian conflict? Are you in contact with NGOs?” The same security questions repeated—from the Yitzhar settlement guard, to an IDF captain, to a police officer, and finally to a military intelligence (AMAN) employee over the phone. A security mantra of a nation living in fear and paranoia. Absurd, if not dramatic. Adults behaving like children, playing Indians, cowboys, cops, thieves, good guys, and terrorists. One could laugh—if not for the dead and imprisoned Palestinians lurking behind the scenes.

November 2, 2013 – Jenin

Inside a quiet teachers’ lounge at Zabda school, I discover the familial rhythm of a small village school, reminiscent of Russian classrooms. Children from around the world share the same curiosity; teachers are young, smiling, eager to learn about the world beyond. It contrasts sharply with Western individualism. Sunlight filters through curtains. Tobacco grows near the school, a regional hallmark. Moving from class to class, kids bombard me with questions—delightful, revealing the nuances of a Palestinian childhood.

After school, on the road to Yabad, we stop between two hills at a charcoal‑making site. A late‑19th‑century tableau, Germinal reenacted in Jenin. Workers, faces blackened with soot, pile imported wood—dubbed “occupied Palestine”—into mounds, cover them with straw and ash, then set them alight from the top. The flames consume the piles for hours, releasing thick black smoke. Thus is born Yabad charcoal, a guaranteed recipe for lung cancer.

November 4, 2013 – Express departure

My father’s cancer resurfaces in my thoughts. I must leave Jenin, Ahmad, and his school to return to France before it’s too late. I bring back sacks of a Jenin herb that supposedly cured Mohammed, an elderly man from Tura. After his sheep recovered from illness, he boiled the plant into a decoction. Four months later, his cancer vanished. Journalists and scientists swarmed his doorstep, eager to unravel the mystery of this medicinal plant. I now play magician, hoping the trick works.

On the roof of the Citadel Hotel in Jerusalem I await the muezzin’s call before heading to Tel Aviv, praying the checks won’t drag on. Mosques chant as the first transports depart.

November 5, 2013 – The Border

Chaos reigns. It took two full hours of scanning, rescanning, and scanning again every nook of my backpack for a phantom explosive. Headaches mount; the wait drags. Every item is examined, then I’m examined. I open the bag, remove shoes, unzip trousers, strip my sweater, empty the pack. The inspecting officer looks younger than me, clinging to my sleeves, escorting me to check‑in, then passport control. Another officer asks why I’m in Israel; a second repeats the same trio of questions: where have you been? Do you have friends or contacts here? How long have you stayed? Where did you sleep?

They wield a small blue scoop‑shaped probe, sliding it between every fold of my luggage. Paranoia.

Back to the West, back to normal: folly, fear, xenophobia, low‑intensity warfare. I’m on familiar ground—that’s what worries me. Tomorrow I’ll see my father.

NOTES:

[1]  Maher Alloush (1976, Homs), writer and researcher specializing in political, social and economic issues, as well as Transitional Justice, Hassan al-Daghim (1976, Idleb), graduate in Islamic studies and comparative jurisprudence, Mohammed Mustat (1985, Aleppo), graduate in electronic engineering, political science and Islamic studies, Youssef al-Hijar, Mustafa al-Moussa, pharmacist and member of HTS, Hind Kabawat (1974, India), Master’s degree in Law and International Relations and Houda Atassi, civil engineer with degrees in Architecture and Information Technology.

[2] Abdul Hamid al-Awak, PhD in Constitutional Law; Yasser al-Huwaish, recently appointed Dean of the Faculty of Law at Damascus University; Ismail al-Khalfan, PhD in International Law; Mohammad Reda Jalkhi, PhD in International Law; Bahia Mardini, the only female journalist with a PhD in Law.

[3] Anas Khattab (1987, Rif Dimashq), Minister of Interior; Murhaf Abu Qasra (1984, Hama), Minister of Defense; Asaad al-Shaibani (1987, Al-Hasakeh), Minister of Foreign Affairs and Expatriates; Mazhar al-Wais (1980, Deir Ez-Zor), Minister of Justice; Mohammed Abu al-Khair Shukri (1961, Damascus), Minister of Awqaf; Marwan al-Halabi (1964, Quneitra), Minister of Higher Education; Hind Kabawat (1974, India), the only woman, Minister of Social Affairs and Labor; Mohammed al-Bashir (1984, Idleb), Minister of Energy; Mohammed Yisr Barnieh, Minister of Finance; Mohammad Nidal al-Shaar (1956, Aleppo), Minister of Economy and Industry; Musaab Nazzal al-Ali (1985, Deir Ez-Zor), Minister of Health; Mohammed Anjrani (1992, Aleppo), Minister of Local Administration and Environment; Raed al-Saleh (1983, Idleb), Minister of Emergency and Disaster Management; Abdul Salam Haykal (1978, Damascus), Minister of Communications and Information Technology; Amjad Badr (1969, As-Suwayda), Minister of Agriculture and Land Reform; Mohammed Abdul Rahman Turko (1979, Afrin), Minister of Education; Mustafa Abdul Razzaq (1989), Minister of Public Works and Housing; Mohammed Yassin Saleh (1985), Minister of Culture; Mohammed Sameh Hamedh (1976, Idleb), Minister of Youth and Sports; Mazen al-Salhani (1979, Damascus), Minister of Tourism; Mohammad Skaf (1990), Minister of Administrative Development; Yaarub Bader (1959, Latakia), Minister of Transport; Hamza al-Mustafa, Minister of Information.

[4] Except by proxies.

[5] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/deal-for-joint-military-action-with-us-in-syria-could-elevate-russia-as-well-as-defeat-isis-a7237256.html

[6] https://www.middleeasteye.net/fr/news/russia-and-turkey-agree-deal-coordinate-strikes-syria-1427197601

[7] https://arabcenterdc.org/resource/jordan-and-the-us-russia-deal-in-southern-syria/

[8] https://www.dohainstitute.org/en/PoliticalStudies/Pages/Israel-Reacts-to-US-Russian-De-Escalation-Agreement-in-Syria.aspx

[9] See the history of Ahmad Al-Awda’s 8th Brigade – https://middleeastdirections.eu/new-publication-med-the-eighth-brigade-striving-for-supremacy-in-southern-syria-al-jabassini/

[10] He is currently still in charge.

[11] Between 4356 and 6456 civilians killed according to airwars.org; 8763 civilians killed according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

[12] Zahran Alloush (founder of Liwa al-Islam in September 2011, which became Jaysh al-Islam in 2013); Ahmad Issa al-Sheikh (founder of Suqour al-Sham in September 2011); Abu Khalid al-Suri and Hassan Aboud (founders of Ahrar al-Sham December in 2011).

[13] Anas Hassan Khattab is also said to be a liaison officer for the Turkish intelligence service (MIT). He is believed to be operating under the control of MIT officer Kemal Eskintan, known to jihadists under the pseudonym Abu Furqan, himself under the orders of Hakan Fidan, then Ibrahim Kalin, heads of Turkish intelligence from 2010 to 2023 and since 2023. After 15 years of close collaboration, Ibrahim Kalin and Hakan Fidan were the first foreign officials to visit Damascus after the fall of the Assad regime. The former was seen praying with Al-Sharaa at the Umayyad Mosque on December 12, 2024, while the latter celebrated Turkey’s victory with Al-Sharaa on the heights of Qassiun on December 22, 2024.

[14] Opposition leaders present in Astana include Mohammed Alloush (Jaysh al-Islam – Army of Islam), Fares Al-Bayoush (Jaysh Idleb al-Harr – Free Army of Idleb), Nasser al-Hariri (Syrian National Coalition of Opposition Forces and the Syrian Revolution), Abu Osama Joulani (Southern Front, made up of 58 rebel factions). Eleven other groups are taking part in the negotiations.

[15] Abdul Rahman Hussein al-Khatib a.k.a. » Abu Hussein al-Urduni » (Jordanian, General de brigade) ; Omar Mohammed Jaftashi a.k.a. » Mukhtar al-Turki » (Turc, General de brigade) ; Abd al-Aziz Daud Khudaberdi a.k.a. » Abu Mohammed al-Turkistani » ou » Zahid » (Chinese ouïghur, General de brigade) ; Abdel Samriz Jashari  a.k.a. » Abu Qatada al-Albani » (Albanais, colonel) ; Alaa Muhammad Abdul Baqi (Egyptian, colonel) ; Moulan Tarson Abdul Samad (Tadjik, colonel) ; Ibn Ahmad al-Hariri (Jordanian, colonel) ; Abdulsalam Yasin Ahmad (Chinois Ouïghur, colonel) …

[16] The leaders of these groups are, respectively, former Assad Republican Guard commander Moqdad Fteha, former head of the Syrian Arab Army’s 4th Armored Division Ghiath Dalla and Mundir W.

[17] Realizing the scale of voluntary participation in the offensive – and no doubt the genocidal chaos that ensued from the very first hours of clashes – the Authorities subsequently announced that this support was no longer necessary.

[18] Figures vary according to the two main sources: Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) and Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR).

[19] Hussein al-Salama as head of intelligence, replacing Anas Khattab, Amer Names al-‘Ali as chairman of the Central Control and Inspection Authority (anti-corruption) and Sheikh Rami Shahir al-Saleh al-Dosh as head of the Supreme Council of Tribes and Clans. All three hail from the town of Al-Shuhayl in the governorate of Deir Ez Zor, which has a population of less than 15,000.

[20] Which are nothing other than an Arab-Muslim version of European fascism.

[21] The chabiha are the regime’s supporters, henchmen and mercenaries, most of whom have been integrated into the National Defense Forces and other paramilitary groups.

[22] In the words of Syria’s new Foreign Minister Asaad al-Shaibani during his speech at the 9th Donors for Syria Conference in Brussels on March 17, 2025.

[23] The Murshidis are a recent religion founded in 1923 in the Latakia region by Salman al-Murshid. This religion derives from Alawism, and its members exist only in Syria, where they are estimated to number between 300,000 and 500,000.

[24] See our mapping of incidents listed by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights on the home page of our website: https://interstices-fajawat.org/fr/accueil/

[25] As is already the case for the Jaysh al-Islam faction, whose members Majdi Nema aka Islam Alloush and Essam Al-Buwaydani aka Abu Hammam were arrested and prosecuted in international legal proceedings before being granted diplomatic immunity.

[26] https://english.enabbaladi.net/archives/2025/02/transitional-justice-in-syria-steps-to-diffuse-tension/

[27]  https://english.enabbaladi.net/archives/2025/02/former-syrian-interior-minister-mohammad-al-shaar-surrenders-to-authorities/

[28] In the wake of this controversial visit, General Security quietly arrested the commander of the local branch of the National Defense Forces, Ghadeer Salem, then – with more media noise – three of his subordinates, Mundhir Al-Jaza’iri, Somar Mohammed Al-Mahmoud and Imad Mohammed Al-Mahmoud.

[29] These include : Farhan al-Marsumi, chief of a Bedouin tribe in Deir Ez Zor, actively involved in drug trafficking to Iraq in collaboration with Maher al-Assad’s 4th Division and Iranian militias; Agnès Mariam de la Croix, Mother Superior of the Carmelite monastery of “Saint-Jacques le Mutilé” in Homs, an accomplice and active propagandist for the Assad regime; Dr. Tammam Al Yousef, cardiac surgeon and brother of Brigadier General Ali Mu’iz al-Din Youssef al-Khatib, head of the Idleb air force intelligence service, suspected of corruption and embezzlement in cooperation with the Assad regime; Safwan Khair Beyk aka “Safwan Shafiq Jaafar”, mafia boss from Jableh and leader of the National Defense Forces, linked to the Assad family through Bashar al-Assad’s cousins, Mundhir al-Assad and Ayman Jaber – Source: Zaman al-Wasl – https://www.zamanalwsl.net/

[30] The number of missing is estimated between 96,000 and 158,000, including enforced disappearances attributed to the Assad regime, the Islamic State, the Syrian Democratic Forces, armed opposition factions, the Syrian National Army and Hayat Tahrir al-Sham.

[31] It was only through public appearances and rallies in the three months following the fall of the regime that the families of the disappeared represented by The Syria Campaign obtained an appointment with Al-Sharaa in February 2025 – https://diary.thesyriacampaign.org/my-father-is-still-missing-join-wafas-struggle-to-uncover-the-truth-about-syrias-disappeared/

[32] As early as December 20, 2024, the Association of Detainees and Missing Persons in Sednaya Prison (ADMSP), Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the Independent International Commission of Inquiry set up by the UN Human Rights Council urged the transitional government to take steps to protect the archives and evidence of mass atrocities – https://reliefweb.int/report/syrian-arab-republic/syria-preserve-evidence-mass-atrocities-enar

[33] The hallali is the decisive moment in hunting when the impatient or excited herd of hounds rushes to the exhausted prey to put an end to the hunt.

[34] Withdrawals from ATMs have been frozen, while a large number of civil servants are no longer receiving their salaries.

[35] The exchange rate fluctuated between 10,000 and 12,000 pounds per dollar during the first four months of 2025, compared to a rate of 14,750 pounds before the fall of the regime, 15,000 the day after and an exceptional drop to 8,000 at the beginning of February – ttps://www.sp-today.com/en/currency/us_dollar/city/damascus

[36] https://english.enabbaladi.net/archives/2025/02/turkish-goods-undermine-local-products-in-syria

[37] The Turkish embassy in Damascus reopened on December 14 after a 12-year interruption in diplomatic relations, and its foreign minister, Hakan Fidan, officially visited Al-Sharaa on December 22, on the eve of Qatar’s visit.

[38] Syria’s relationship with Turkey must be distinguished from its relationship with Qatar and Saudi Arabia. While the former is characterized more by a form of military and strategic dependence, implying a form of colonial extension and Turkish security hold over Syria, the latter is primarily economic.

[39] The Deir Ali power plant is expected to generate 400 megawatts daily by burning natural gas supplied by Qatar via Jordan.

[40] Ahmad al-Sharaa remains on the international terrorism list with his war name of “Abu Mohammed al-Jawlani”, but the promise of a $10 million reward for his capture has been revoked by the USA.

[41] The main importers of Syrian crude oil in 2010 were Germany (32%), Italy (31%), France (11%), the Netherlands (9%), Austria (7%), Spain (5%) and Turkey (5%).