We knew that the Syrian issue was the perfect test.
But already on the Palestinian and Ukrainian questions, we had had the opportunity to detect the Orientalism that penetrates Western leftist circles. The genocide of our Palestinian brothers and sisters had given us an illusion of unity and led us to believe for a moment that the Western left had finally grasped what was at stake in the colonial issue. Except for the German radical left, mired in its Christian guilt and unable to perceive the Ashkenazi Jewish presence in Palestine as the embodiment of the white supremacist colonial project. Yes, fellow german leftists, Zionism was inspired from its earliest days by German supremacist theories, particularly the theory of Lebensraum. Herzl wrote in his memoirs that he wanted to civilize the eastern Jews, whom he saw as Arabs. And kibbutzim are no exception to this legacy, even if they call themselves “socialist”.
But never mind. We thought we were united, but already the heated discussions about the “Palestinian resistance” embodied by Hamas were leading us back to those about the “Lebanese resistance” embodied by Hezbollah. We, the progressive forces, had to accept that authoritarian and ultra-conservative forces had become our allies, because the settler had imposed apartheid and genocide on us. As always, as in Ukraine, the imperialist war forced us to make unbearable compromises with obscurantist and corrupt forces who are only waiting to come to power to transform our already colonized societies into a fundamentalist nightmare. Our oppressors became, as always, the axis of resistance to the American capitalist evil. Thanks to American help, thanks to its imperialism and wars, we had to give up fighting for our emancipation: total focus on war. And war is never left-wing.
Aside: let’s not forget Franz Fanon’s visionary writings.
But Hamas is not Hezbollah. Hamas, which we do not support in its exercise of power, but whose armed struggle against the settler we have in some respects supported, embodies a national liberation struggle waged by Palestinians, for Palestinians, against the enemy of the Palestinians. Hezbollah, on the other hand, is the product of a nationalist, inter-religious civil war (1976-1990), coupled with a double foreign invasion by Israel and Syria, and foreign interference by Iran, which saw Lebanon, and in particular its Shi’ite community, as a major strategic asset. Hezbollah was conceived as the mercenary of Iran and Syria, which began by eliminating the left-wing progressive and secular Palestinian resistance movements in Lebanon, as well as their Lebanese allies:
Remember the massacre of Palestinian refugees at Tal al-Zaatar, with the complicity of the Syrian army.
Remember Yasser Arafat’s anger at Hafez al-Assad and the breakdown of alliances between the PLO and Syria.
Remember the assassination of the Druze leader Kamal Djumblatt, friend and ally of Yasser Arafat, by the henchmen of the Syrian social-nationalist party in 1976.
Remember the deprivation of political freedoms for Palestinians in Lebanon and Syria from 1980 to the present day, imposed by Hezbollah and the Assad regime.
And if you don’t remember, please educate yourself!
We cannot list here the thousand betrayals of the Palestinian cause and crimes committed against Palestinians and Syrians by Hezbollah, as well as their compromises with Western capitalism, but we can invite you to read Joseph Daher’s edifying book, “Hezbollah, Religious Fundamentalism and Liberalism”.
Joseph Daher is a fellow Arab leftist.
Remember the kidnapping and murder of Michel Seurat in 1985 by the Islamic Jihad, affiliated to Hezbollah, on the orders of Hafez al-Assad.
Michel Seurat wrote a reference book on the Syrian dictatorship entitled “L’Etat de Barbarie”.
Michel Seurat was a man of the left, married to a Syrian writer, Marie Seurat. Their daughter Leila is now an expert on the Palestinian question and has written “Le Hamas et le Monde”, which you should read.
But let’s go back. The fate of the Syrians and Palestinians, who are brotherly peoples, was sealed by the Iranian and Syrian interventions in Lebanon. Instead of “sealed”, we should say “separated”.
Hafez al-Assad imprisoned progressive left-wing activists for years, followed in this counter-revolutionary work by his son Bashar.
When thousands of Syrians, including thousands of left-wing progressives, rose up against Assad’s fascism, Iran, Hezbollah and then Russia actively participated in the counter-revolution, massacring the Syrian people and making thousands of Syrians disappear in the regime’s concentration hell, before proliferating gangs affiliated to Hezbollah and the Syrian Social-Nationalist Party, turning Syria into a captagon factory and the regime into a narco-state.
When Assad released thousands of Islamists to destroy the people’s revolution, then manipulated them to destabilize local resistance left and right, you saw nothing.
When Assad, then the West and Russia agreed to focus on the Islamist danger, you all fell into the trap of anti-terrorist rhetoric. Didn’t you know that the fight against terrorism is everywhere and all the time the argument for destroying revolutions? Didn’t you see that the thousands of recruits to Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State were above all non-Syrians, many of them from the West?
The Islamic State organized massacres in Paris, then chopped off heads in front of the cameras from the Syrian desert, and you turned a blind eye to the far more massive exactions of Bashar’s army and chabiha.
There’s an old saying: “When you point at the moon, the fool looks at the finger”. That’s what the West has done, and that’s what the Left has done, condemning the Syrian revolution to death, condemning hundreds of thousands of Syrians to death.
You would have supported our revolution, the Islamic State would have been nipped in the bud, and the genocide of the Kurds would not have taken place.
YOU killed our revolution, by your complicity in the crime.
Have you read the writings of Yassin al-Haj Saleh?
Have you read those of his companion Samira Khalil?
Did you know that they were both imprisoned for their opposition to the regime and their membership of the Syrian Communist Party?
Have you heard of Syrian anarchist Omar Aziz, whose model of local coordination committees influenced the Syrian revolution, until he was arrested and tortured to death by regime agents?
Have you heard of Raed Fares and his pacifist activities at the initiative of the Kafranbel Free Citizens demonstrations?
No, leftist comrades, you haven’t heard of us. You didn’t want to see, blinded by your campism and your ignorance of the specific political features of the Levant. Like good Westerners, you applied your filters and ideological frameworks to our realities, but also and above all your binarity analysis: “all the enemies of my enemies are my friends”.
Congratulations, Western leftists, you have made yourselves the best supporters of Eastern fascism and its imperialisms.
And now for the epilogue, with a brief look at the Palestinian question.
Have you heard of the Yarmouk camp? Did you know that Palestinian militias dissident from the parties traditionally embodying the left-wing Palestinian resistance (PLO) supported Assad in the repression of the anti-Assad revolutionary impulses of the Palestinians of Yarmouk? Did you know that they were complicit in the bombing of the world’s largest Palestinian refugee camp (160,000 residents) from 2012, then in its siege from 2013?
Read also what Assad and Russia offered to the Islamists of Yarmouk (Damascus) and the Yarmouk Basin (Deraa) in May and November 2018? And just look at the consequences for the Druze communities of Suwayda.
Educate yourself, fellow leftists.
If you read on, remove your blindfolds and you’ll discover 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 try to organize a fake demonstration to support his pro-Palestinian propaganda. Nothing.
Nothing, except in Idleb and Suwayda, the only two regions not under the regime’s military control. In both cities, Syrians never failed to support their brothers and sisters in Palestine.
But you didn’t see it. You preferred to believe that Iran and Hezbollah were the Palestinians’ only hope, when not even 1% of their rockets managed to breach the security of the Zionist regime. All talk.
Syrians have never been fooled by Nasrallah and Khomeini’s emphatic speeches, grotesque threats and pitiful fireworks.
But you, the Western left, thought they were the axis of resistance, the cutting edge of anti-colonial struggles.
And now that the Syrians have freed themselves (and who cares if Turkey pushed in from behind, since it has no control over the millions of Syrians freed from Assad), you’ve joined forces with reactionaries of all stripes, especially 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 eat you alive”.
Thank you, White Supremacists, for your concern. But on the Syrian question, you’re no better than the anti-Deutsch Germans on the Palestinian question.
We know better than anyone else in the world what the Islamist danger is. You discovered it at the World Trade Center and the Bataclan, and suddenly the whole world had to weep hot tears 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 the Syrians alone who confronted the religious fanatics of DAESH on their own soil?
Where were you to protect us, you who today are so patronizing towards us, when Hayat Tahrir al-Sham has achieved in a week what we had simply stopped dreaming of a decade ago?
Have you read the messages full of solidarity and affection for his Syrian brothers and sisters from Wael al-Dahdouh, the Palestinian journalist whose whole family was decimated by Israel?
No, once again, you saw nothing. All you saw in us was our Islamist potential. We Arabs are too backward to understand how democracy, socialism and secularism work…
While Israel has waited for its dear associate Bashar to fall before attacking the Syrians in Quneitra (at the time of writing), your campism is out in the open, and with it your complicity with all the foreign powers that use our land as a playground.
Assad has fallen, and a new era has begun for Syrians. Thousands of prisoners, some of whom had been locked up for 40 years, have been released in recent days from the world’s worst prisons.
Let us finally cry and explode with joy, let us finally breathe.
And take care of your own fascists, who are corrupting your comfortable democracies.
We’ll take care of ours. Don’t set us free, we’ll take care of it!