In this article first published at <a href="https://www.newarab.com/opinion/syria-palestine-liberation-comes-below">the New Arab</a>, Joseph Daher explains why the Assad regime’s toppling in Syria is important to liberation efforts across the region, especially for the Palestinian struggle.
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Prior to the toppling of <a href="https://www.newarab.com/news/fall-damascus-how-syrian-rebels-toppled-assad-11-days">Bashar al Assad’s regime</a> in Syria, divisions within the international Palestinian solidarity movement had started to form when news hit that Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and the pro-Turkey “Syrian National Army” (SNA) had captured Aleppo and other territories. Some argued that this military offensive led by “Al-Qaida and other terrorists” was a Western-imperialist plot against the Syrian regime, in order to weaken the so-called “Axis of Resistance” led by Iran and Hezbollah.
These states, they claimed, were allies of the Palestinians, and undermining them meant weakening the struggle for the liberation of Palestine. And, that the military offensive by HTS and SNA took place only one day after the conclusion of a ceasefire between Lebanon and Israel, was deemed suspicious.
However, this entire description of the context has many shortcomings, and if anything, it shows a lack of understanding of Syrian and regional dynamics.
The real context
<a href="https://tempestmag.org/2024/12/understanding-the-rebellion-in-syria/">The military offensive led by HTS and SNA</a> took place at a time when the main allies of the Syrian regime were weakened. The Russian military forces had been focusing on their imperialist war against Ukraine, while Iran and Hezbollah had taken a blow following Israel’s war in Lebanon. This all reflected the overall structural weakness of the Syrian regime militarily, economically and politically, hence why it collapsed like a house of cards.
The Turkish government most likely assisted the military offensive against the regime in one way or another. Certainly, Ankara's initial objective was to improve its position in future negotiations with the Syrian regime, and with Iran and Russia in particular. However, with the fall of the regime it stood to play an even bigger role. Through the territories conquered by the SNA it also sought to weaken the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) which are dominated by the armed wing of the Kurdish party PYD (the sister organisation of the PKK).
After the SNA <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/rebels-take-north-syria-town-us-backed-group-turkish-source-says-2024-12-09/">captured</a> the Tal Rifaat and Shahba areas in Northern Aleppo and of the city of Minbej—previously under the governance of the SDF—this led to over 150,000 civilians being displaced and many violations of human rights against Kurds, including assassinations.
In the lead-up to Assad’s toppling, HTS had relative autonomy vis-à-vis Turkey. The successful seizure of Aleppo showed its evolution into a more disciplined and structured organisation that has brought together a number of military groups under its wing over the years. Whilst it was considered a terrorist <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce313jn453zo">organisation by the UN, US, Turkey and other countries</a>, since its rupture with al-Qaeda in 2016, it was attempting to project a more moderate image as a rational and responsible actor.
However, it remains an authoritarian organisation with an Islamic fundamentalist ideological orientation and foreign fighters within its ranks. Many <a href="https://blogs.eui.eu/medirections/the-present-crisis-in-hayat-tahrir-al-sham-interactions-and-scenarios/">demonstrations</a> took place in Idlib denouncing HTS’ rule and its violations of political freedoms and human rights. Both SNA and HTS are threats to a democratic Syria.
Neither the US nor Israel had a hand in these events; in fact, they were worried about the events leading up to now. Israeli officials, for example, declared that the “collapse of the Assad regime would likely create chaos in which military threats against Israel would develop”. Moreover, since 2011, Israel has never really been in favour of the Syrian regime being overthrown.
In July 2018, Netanyahu had no objection to Assad taking back control of the country and stabilising his power. He said Israel would only act against perceived threats, such as Iran and Hezbollah’s forces/influence, explaining, “We haven’t had a problem with the Assad regime, for 40 years not a single bullet was fired on the Golan Heights”.
As this stable actor is no more, Israel took matters into its own hands. Indeed, in the days following the fall of the Syrian regime, the Israeli occupation army invaded the Syrian part of Mount Hermon, in the Golan Heights. It sought to prevent the rebels from seizing the area, and <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israeli-incursion-into-syria-reaches-25-km-southwest-damascus-security-sources-2024-12-10/">carried out over 350 strikes</a> on anti-aircraft batteries, military airfields, weapons production sites, combat aircraft and missiles. Missile vessels struck the Syrian naval facilities of Al-Bayda port and Latakia port where fifteen Syrian naval vessels were docked.
These raids aim to destroy Syria's military capabilities to prevent them being used against Israel. It is also seeding the message that the Israeli occupation army can cause political instability at any time, should the future government adopt a hostile position that doesn’t serve Israel’s interests.
“Axis of Resistance” versus struggle from below
Alongside ignoring the agency of local Syrian actors, the main issue with the argument promoted by the supporters of the so-called “Axis of Resistance” within the Palestinian solidarity movement, is that it suggests liberation of Palestine will come from above. These states, despite their reactionary and authoritarian nature, and neoliberal economic orientation, will somehow deliver freedom.
This ignores that their foreign policies are shaped by the need to protect their own political interests, and that regional authoritarian states have repeatedly betrayed and repressed the Palestinians.
While rhetorically supporting the Palestinian cause and funding Hamas, since 7 October 2023, Iran has sought to improve its standing in the region in order to be in the best position for future negotiations with the US. It is therefore keen to avoid any direct war with Israel. Its main geopolitical objective in relation to the Palestinians is therefore to use them as leverage.
Similarly, Iran’s passivity towards Israel’s attacks on Lebanon—which was particularly visible following the assassination of key Hezbollah cadres—has demonstrated its first priority is protecting its own geopolitical interests. Not to mention, Iran didn’t hesitate to <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/09/hamas-iran-rebuild-ties-falling-out-syria">reduce its funding to Hamas</a> in the past when their interests did not match: like when uprisings erupted in Syria in 2011 and the Palestinian movement refused to support the Assad regime’s murderous repression of protesters.
Similarly, the Syrian regime didn’t respond to Israel’s war on Gaza, despite also facing attacks. Indeed, it has been avoiding any direct confrontation with Israel since 1974.
The regime has actually <a href="https://anticapitalistresistance.org/the-syrian-rebellion-and-palestine/">historically repressed Palestinians in Syria</a>, and killed many since 2011. It also destroyed Yarmouk camp in Damascus, which was home to a considerable Palestinian refugee population. In the last few days, 630 Palestinian political prisoners were released from Sednaya prison alone.
The regime also attacked the Palestinian national movement.
Furthermore, in 1976 <a href="https://merip.org/2005/09/syria-and-lebanon-a-brotherhood-transformed/">Hafez al-Assad’s regime intervened against Palestinian national movement and Lebanese left-wing organisations</a> to support far-right political parties in Lebanon. It also carried out military operations against Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut in 1985 and 1986. In 1990, approximately 2,500 Palestinian political prisoners were detained in Syrian prisons.
Supporters of the “Axis of resistance” are also ignoring or refusing to accept the <a href="https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20241209-hamas-congratulates-syrians-on-ending-assads-rule/">statement</a> by Hamas that congratulates the Syrian people for achieving their “aspirations for freedom and justice” after toppling Bashar al-Assad.
Liberation for all
The list of historical crimes against Palestinians by the Assad regime do not, of course, undermine the fact that US imperialism remains exceptionally destructive and deadly. However, supporting authoritarian and despotic regimes undermines the objective liberating of Palestine. It is accepting that oppression will continue in other parts of the region in the name of freeing one people, which is neither what the Palestinian struggle calls for, nor could it actually deliver the goal.
What happens in the region is ultimately directly linked to the future of Palestine.
A considerable majority of the MENA region’s popular classes identify with the Palestinian struggle and see it as linked to their own local battles for democracy and equality. It is important that those organising in solidarity with Palestine understand that Palestinian and regional popular classes are central social forces capable of creating the conditions required to achieve liberation, with their support.
When Palestinians fight, this triggers a regional liberation movement, and the regional movement in turn fuels that of occupied Palestine.
Far-right minister Avigdor Lieberman recognised the danger that popular uprisings in the MENA posed to Israel back in 2011, when he said the Egyptian revolution that toppled Hosni Mubarak was a greater threat to Israel than Iran.
This is not to deny the right of resistance of Palestinians and Lebanese against Israel, but to explain that the united revolt of popular classes has the power to transform the entire region, topple authoritarian regimes and expel the US and other imperialist powers.
The main task of the international solidarity movement for Palestine, particularly in the West, is to denounce the complicit role of our ruling classes in supporting the racist settler-colonial apartheid state of Israel. We must pressure them to break off any political, economic, and military relations with Tel Aviv. This is the only way that Israel weakened, and in turn the path to the liberation of Palestine and the region more widely can be paved.
As a Syrian revolutionary wrote from the Israeli-occupied Syrian Golan Heights in the summer of 2014: “freedom—a common destiny for Gaza, Yarmouk and the Golan”. This slogan holds out the hope of regional revolutionary transformation, the only realistic strategy for liberation.
First published at <a href="https://www.newarab.com/opinion/syria-palestine-liberation-comes-below">the New Arab</a>. Joseph Daher teaches at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, and the University of Ghent, Belgium. He is the author of Syria after the Uprisings, The Political Economy of State Resilience; Hezbollah: the Political Economy of Lebanon’s Party of God and Marxism and Palestine.

Joseph Daher

From Syria to Palestine, liberation comes from below

The ultra-reactionary movement Daech (known as the Islamic State) on 20 July targeted the cultural centre of Amara in the city of Suruc in Turkey. Amara hosted a meeting of 300 young Kurdish leftists, members of the Federation of Socialist Youth Associations (SGDF, by its initials in Turkish), who were preparing to go to Kobani, Syria, to participate in its reconstruction.
These young revolutionaries had left Istanbul the day before the terrorist attack, to present themselves as “children of Gezi”, children of the protest movement that began in Istanbul in June 2013. In a video of their campaign, a socialist youth of the SGDF said:
“We will plant 500 trees in the name of revolutionaries who were killed in the resistance against the Islamic State in Kobani. We will also plant fruit trees in the name of Berkin Elvan [who was killed during the Gezi protests at the age of 15], reconstruct the war museum in Kobani, rebuild the library and nursery at the cultural centre, build a playground, and join the cleaning efforts in the city centre.”
These young people were bringing books, toys, clothes and young trees to plant. The terrorist attack caused the death of more than 30 and injured hundreds. Meanwhile, Daech also attacked Kobani at the same moment.
These new, barbaric crimes of Daech come in addition to the numerous crimes and massacres of the ultra fundamentalist movement in Iraq and Syria and also across the Middle East region and North Africa. Its totalitarian and reactionary project targets all the peoples of the region without exception. In Syria, Daech has particularly attacked and targeted Syrian revolutionaries.
This terrorist attack must nevertheless be understood as a consequence of AKP [Justice and Development Party] government policies, in collaboration with the Turkish “deep state” dominated by the Turkish military command, since the beginning of the revolutionary processes in the region in late 2010 and early 2011.
These two reactionary forces have steadily come to a rapprochement and collaboration in recent years, despite significant opposition between the two actors when AKP reached power in 2002, as we have seen during the Gezi protests in the summer of 2013.
In addition to this, the strengthening of the authoritarianism of the AKP’s government in the past last years: multiplication of draconian laws and others giving more weight to security and police forces; violent repression of popular movements such as the Gezi protests in 2013, Gay Pride, May Day and labour strikes; use of sectarian rhetoric against Alevis [a branch of Islam]; conservative and reactionary discourses against women, notably president Recep Erdoğan stating that gender equality is against nature; corruption; and strengthening the hold of the executive over the judiciary and other manipulations of the judiciary – especially when four Turkish senior prosecutors, who had instigated corruption investigations against AKP high personalities in the winter of 2013 and 2014, were removed from office for disciplinary reasons.
As highlighted rightly by numerous Turkish progressive activists, it is also strange that the Turkish army – so effective at turning away Syrian civilians fleeing the bombing of the Assad regime or attacks from Daech – are unable to provide security to a gathering of 300 people in a cultural centre. Moreover, the buses of young socialists were followed from Istanbul by plainclothes police.
Also, the governor of Urfa in June ordered a stop to journalists who asked him questions about the presence of members of Daech in his city. The Turkish police in Istanbul also repressed the demonstrations in solidarity with the victims of Suruc on the same evening of the terrorist attack.
The AKP government has actually supported in Syria Islamists and jihadists against Syrian and Kurdish democratic forces of the revolution. For example, the leader of the army of Islam Zahran Alloush – located in the countryside of Damascus and guilty of numerous exactions against Syrian activists and the kidnapping of revolutionaries such as Razan Zaytouneh – was able to visit Istanbul without any problem to get to a conference of clerics.
The Turkish government has gone blind to the passage of jihadists to Syria from Turkey, turning the latter into a transit zone for jihadists from around the world. Collaborations between the Turkish army and some Islamist and jihadist groups were also discovered.
In May, former prosecutor of the Adana region, Bagriyanik Suleyman, and his deputies Ozcan Sisman, Aziz Takci and Ahmet Karaca, were arrested by the Turkish authorities and appeared before the Adana court. Former colonel Ozkan Cokay was also arrested. The four prosecutors were transferred and suspended after having ordered the search of several trucks and buses in the provinces of Adana and Hatay, bordering Syria, in January 2014. They suspected them of smuggling arms and ammunition to Syria.
In the autumn of 2014, when Daech was besieging the town of Kobani, causing the departure of about 200,000 people, the AKP government refused to help the Kurds or to allow PKK [Kurdistan Workers’ Party] fighters to cross the border to fight the jihadists. During this period, tents to accommodate refugees were destroyed and a human chain of peace activists along the border was attacked with tear gas at Kobani.
President Erdoğan said that the PKK was worse than the terrorists of Daech. The Turkish authorities imposed at this time a curfew for the first time since 1992 in six provinces in the predominantly Kurdish regions. This followed large demonstrations by members of the Kurdish people against the AKP government.
The main goal was and is for the AKP government to prevent any form of autonomy of the Kurdish people in Syria, while supporting fundamentalist movements in Syria which have ideological and political affinities with and connections to the central government in Istanbul and which are hostile to any form of autonomy for the Kurdish people.
These policies, and the chauvinistic discourse of Erdoğan, make difficult any continuation of the peace process begun with the PKK in 2013.
During the last legislative election campaign, the HDP [People’s Democratic Party], which achieved a historic vote of 13.1 percent and obtained 80 deputies, was also the target of many aggressive intimidations by the AKP and particularly of the president. There also were physical attacks by Turkish far right nationalist movements and bomb attacks against election meetings of HDP.
This party, which is majority composed of and based in the Kurdish population, has managed to broaden its appeal beyond the Kurdish population (20 percent of the population in Turkey) by pursuing a democratic and progressive political program that recognises the Armenian genocide, defends the rights of LGBTQI people (it has the first openly gay member of parliament) and defends the rights of religious and ethnic minorities. More than 40 percent of its elected deputies are women.
The Turkish state historically has discriminated and repressed the Kurdish people, whose identity is still in many ways denied despite some advances, whether on the cultural, socio-economic and political level.
In this context, the movement of the PKK and its members have been criminalised. There are more than 8,000 Kurdish political prisoners in Turkey. It is necessary to condemn the PKK’s inclusion on the lists of terrorist organisations, such as the EU list – although the PKK is not above criticism.
The AKP government and the Turkish “deep state” dominated by the military have a responsibility for this barbaric massacre committed by Daech. That is why we oppose these two actors. These two reactionary forces have to be combated in order to hope for a radical change in Turkey and to move towards greater democracy, social justice and equality for all popular classes in Turkey, for the right to self-determination of the Kurdish people in Turkey (as well as in Syria, Iraq and Iran) and the recognition of the Armenian genocide and other popular causes.
[First published at <a href="http://www.internationalviewpoint.org/">InternationalViewpoint.org</a>. Edited for length.]

From Syria to Palestine, liberation comes from below

Turkey implicated in Islamic State terrorism

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