Those who stand with the Palestinians should celebrate Assad’s fall
Palestine solidarity activists should stand with the people of Syria against the dictatorship they have just deposed.
Bashar al-Assad would not have been ousted so quickly by militias without there being mass opposition to his regime. Indeed, in the southern cities of Sweida and Daraa, people rose up to push out state officials without needing the intervention of the northern Islamist fighters. The Syrian military effectively dissolved, its soldiers donning civilian clothes and offering no resistance—Assad had no popular support, even within his own army. Likewise, as rebels approached Damascus, government forces crumbled and withdrew. Assad fled.
Across Syria, mass celebrations across all religious and ethnic lines flowed into the streets. Yellow flags of the Kurds and multi-coloured Druze flags flew among the green, white and black flags of the 2011 Syrian revolution. Tens of thousands are being released from Assad’s torture dungeons, people are loudly speaking the many words banned by the regime, and statues of the dictator have been torn down by large assemblies of people all over the country.
Syrian revolution, Assadist brutality
The dictatorship of Bashar, like that of his father Hafez al-Assad, rested on extreme repression. The country was known as the kingdom of silence because of its absence of free speech, its co-option and neutering of all trade unions, and its enormous security state, the heart of which was the network of torture prisons now being prised open by the people.
When the Syrian masses joined those in Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain and across the Arab world rising in a democratic revolution, they were met with massacres. Yet even then, most of Assad’s military defected. Iran’s Islamic Guard and the Lebanese party-militia Hezbollah intervened to rescue the regime, but even they couldn’t crush the popular uprising. In 2015, Russia finally intervened to rescue Assad, barrel bombing entire cities.
Yet, while the country was being bombarded, tens, even hundreds of thousands of people came out into the streets to march with the revolutionary flag during nearly every ceasefire. Some of the local councils, which the revolution had set up, continued. In 2017, activists in the north-western town of Saraqib held Syria’s first genuinely free election since 1954, illustrating the depth of the revolutionary process that had unfolded before Russia and Iran intervened.
Just last year, after almost everyone had written off the Syrian revolution, hundreds of thousands returned to the streets in more than 55 locations to protest against the regime. In Daraa and Sweida, workers launched general strikes. This context is important for understanding the current moment as part of a mass process rather than solely an Islamist seizure of power.
Assad and the Palestinians
Some in the Palestine movement have denounced the overthrow of Assad, arguing that his regime was a bastion of resistance to Israel. Even if that had been true, Palestine solidarity activists would still have a responsibility to stand with the people against Assad’s dictatorship.
But Assad has policed the Israeli border for decades, refusing to challenge the occupation of the Golan Heights. “We haven't had a problem with the Assad regime—for 40 years not a single bullet was fired on the Golan Heights”, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told reporters during a 2018 visit to Moscow. Assad also collaborated with the United States, holding and torturing prisoners for the CIA during its “extraordinary rendition” program after 9/11.
And Assad has persecuted and repressed Palestinians in Syria. In recent weeks, 67 members of the Al-Qassam brigades were released from Sednaya prison, along with 630 other Palestinians. We can only imagine how many Palestinians are among the bodies uncovered in the prisons, having been tortured to death and dumped in graves. Just days before Assad fled, Palestinians in Raml refugee camp in Latakia held a night-time march to call for his overthrow. This was particularly meaningful: 5,000 Palestinians were expelled from the camp in 2011 for joining the revolutionary protests against the dictatorship.
In fact, many Palestinians participated in and aided the Syrian revolution from 2011 onwards. In 2013, Haitham, a Palestinian revolutionary, told a Tunisian audience that the inhabitants of Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp in Damascus supported the Syrian uprising by forming committees to organise the intake of Syrians fleeing repression and to smuggle medical supplies to cities held by the revolution.
“Our first role in the revolution was providing humanitarian and political support to our Syrian brothers and sisters”, he said. The Palestinians in the camp also drove out the Assadists that administered it.
The so-called Axis of Resistance
Other supporters of Palestine insist that Assad’s rule was a pillar within broader regional Palestinian liberation forces. For example, Ali Abunimah and Asa Winstanley write in the Electronic Intifada: “Syria was for decades the backbone of the Axis of Resistance to US hegemony and Israeli settler-colonialism”.
The Iranian and Syrian dictatorships, the centre of the so-called Axis of Resistance, were never going to liberate the Palestinians. The evidence for this is their despotic rule over their “own people”. In the past three years, there have been mass protests and strikes over the Iranian regime’s treatment of women and workers and its massacres of demonstrators. They will never stand for genuine liberation in Palestine precisely because it could inspire workers and the oppressed in Iran to liberate themselves from tyranny.
Max Blumenthal, an American journalist and founder of the news site Grey Zone, declared on X that Netanyahu is the primary winner in Syria, and has repeatedly implied that the rebels are basically Israel’s foot soldiers. Yet Israel has bombed and destroyed arms depots across Syria over the past weeks to keep weapons out of the hands of the rebels. After celebrating Assad’s downfall on X, Netanyahu ordered a sustained bombing campaign to neuter the Syrian military, striking the country at least 480 times and reportedly destroying the country’s naval fleet. Israel never felt that threatened by Assad.
Israel has always taken advantage of instability in the Middle East and North Africa to advance its interests and claim territory, just as the United States has long taken advantage of ruptures in that region, the Asia Pacific, Europe and Latin America. When imperialist nations capitalise on political ruptures to advance their interests, we should not blame the actors who created the rupture in the first place or label those actors imperialist pawns.
When Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal and attempted to block the waterway to all Israeli ships in 1956, Israel responded by occupying the Sinai Peninsula—a significant chunk of territory—for five months. Did giving the Israelis both a pretext and an opportunity to take over Egyptian land make Nasser an Israeli stooge or mean that he should never have nationalised the Suez?
The road ahead
For now, the rebels in Syria have defeated a vile dictatorship that was the enemy of both the Syrian people and the Palestinian liberation movement. Importantly, their offensive unleashed the popular movement again, drawing hundreds of thousands into the streets and squares across the country. Palestine supporters have added reason to watch for mass movements across the Middle East and North Africa: hope for the Palestinians is tied to the success of struggles against dictatorship across the region. Freedom for the Palestinians depends on the Arab working classes defeating their own ruling classes, and on whether they’re organised enough to defeat meddling imperialist powers.
Yet many factors and actors are arrayed against the Syrian people.
First, the imperialist powers—Israel, Turkey and the United States—will all attempt to safeguard their own interests, rather than those of the Syrian people. Second, Hayʼat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which led the insurgency, is an authoritarian Islamist militia with its own agenda. Much of its leadership emerged from Jabhat Fateh al-Sham and Ahrar al-Sham, both of which have played a counter-revolutionary role, pressing back on the popular movement and its attempts to create democratic structures.
After HTS took power in Idlib in 2017 from the locally run councils created by the revolution, it established a new, authoritarian civilian government called the Syrian Salvation Government. Students protested against its closure of the Free Aleppo University; others protested over issues of democracy and living standards, showing some determination to assert themselves on the new government.
Much Western criticism of HTS has focused on the group’s reactionary Islamism. But the key challenge now will not be its religiosity, reactionary or otherwise. The group has made clear that it wants Syria to be run like other countries across the MENA region (and, indeed, the world): a top-down, capitalist government overseeing a country in which business owners dominate workers and the oppressed.
It’s hard to imagine the group governing as brutally as the Assad dynasty. But now that that era is over, a new HTS-led government will be the key obstacle to a just society. Hopefully, the democratic politics of the masses—the opposition to authoritarian rule and religious sectarianism that characterised the revolution—can again come to the fore. It’s also possible that, with Assad gone, there will be more room to reconstruct a political left.
We should not write the revolution out of history or ignore the possibilities offered by the mass participation in the process so far. All the Western liberal media outlets, the regional governments and the imperialists are doing this. Whatever happens, those who stand for liberation must have consistent political principles and highlight the heroic role of the Syrian people in trying to determine their own future.
