Palestine and the Syrian revolt

IN APRIL of 2011, a famous megastar Egyptian blogger told Syrian revolutionaries that they needed to raise Palestinian flags during Friday demonstrations just to prove that they support the Palestinian resistance and to deny the narrative by the Assad regime that it supports the Palestinian cause.

Now I asked myself then, "Do Syrians have to do that?" Do Syrians have to raise the Palestinian flag just to prove that they support Palestine? Do Syrians have to show their nationalist credentials so the world supports their cause? And the answer was clear to me then: No, Syrians do not have to do that.

A Syrian friend told me at the start of the uprising that they avoided raising Palestinian flags and talking about Palestine not because they don't support the Palestinian cause, but because this cause was exploited by the regime to a degree that turned it into just a political tool. We love Palestine, my friend explained, so much that we don't wish to turn the cause into a political tool, and this is why we avoided using it. Syrians do not have to wave a Palestinian flag to prove that they support us, because Palestine is not a flag. Palestine is definitely much more than that.

Palestine is the refugees in Yarmouk camp who supported the revolution from the first days, who aided displaced Syrians and who participated in protests, who documented the uprising and helped as much as they could. The revolution is also the Palestinian refugees in al-Raml refugee camp in Latakia who took a hard beating by the regime and had to deal with a heavy crackdown starting from July 2011.

The revolution lives not in the palaces of the regime, nor in the speeches of a resistance leader who thinks that just because he leads a resistance movement, this gives him the right to speak in the name of Palestinians--and to kill innocent people in Syria, not just in the name of resistance, but also in the name of Palestine. So this is why I think that Syrians do not have to prove anything to anyone.

Secondly, even if we suppose that the Syrian regime does, in fact, support the Palestinian resistance, does it mean this allows the Syrian regime to control Syria, to prevent people from expressing their opinions, to kill and torture hundreds of thousands of Syrians just because they dare say no to more than 40 years of oppression, to more than 40 years of injustice?

Of course not. Even if Bashar al-Assad was the only person capable of liberating Palestine, I would not support him, and I'm sure that many Palestinians would not do so either--because our liberation cannot be established on the enslavement of another people, particularly when this enslavement is an enslavement of our sisters and brothers in Syria.

THE TRUTH is that the Syrian regime has never truly supported Palestine. For the Syrian regime, Palestine has always been a fig leaf and a political tool.

It started in the 1970s when the Syrian regime helped other militias in Lebanon to crack down on the refugees in Tel al-Zaatar. The siege and massacre in Tel al-Zaatar cannot be forgotten. And the massacres that the regime helped the Amal party in Lebanon commit in the 1980s also against refugees in Lebanon and against the PLO cannot be forgotten either.

And the siege the regime is imposing on Yarmouk refugee camp, preventing people from getting medical aid or baby milk, preventing people from going in and out of the refugee camp, cannot be tolerated and cannot just be ignored, as many are doing--unfortunately--just because they think that this regime is for resistance, and this regime is for the human rights of Palestinians.

In my opinion, it is very clear that this revolution was a revolution for freedom and dignity. But unfortunately, for many here in Palestine, because there is a polarization among Palestinians, as is the case in many other Arab countries, about the Syrian regime, we had to say it over and over again and try to convince our comrades--or our former comrades--that they need to stop supporting the Syrian regime, that all we hear about the Syrian regime's support for resistance is nothing but propaganda.

Now unfortunately, it didn't really help. People mostly stick to their opinions regarding the regime. If we want to talk about what the reaction of Palestinians toward the Syrian revolution is, it varies. Unfortunately, the left, mostly the mainstream left, supports the Assad regime.

And here lies the irony, because one of the most supportive parties of the regime is called the Israeli Communist Party, and it supports the regime because, it says, "This regime is against imperialism." But at the same time, these people had absolutely no problem in participating in protests alongside Zionists in Tel Aviv, liberal Zionists for instance. So how can you say that you support the Syrian regime because it is against imperialism and on the other hand participate in protests with Zionists?

There are others who say that we supported the Syrian Revolution when it was nonviolent, but then after it got violent, we couldn't support it anymore, and it was hijacked. So yes, the Syrian Revolution was indeed hijacked, and we know that there are many Salafis, many jihadists and many other groups, and many pro-American and pro-imperialist groups that tried to hijack the Syrian Revolution.

But that does not by any means tarnish the Syrian Revolution, and it also doesn't mean that just because a revolutionary movement was hijacked, we should stand on the sidelines and stop supporting it.

There are still many revolutionaries working on the ground, many of them are nonviolent, and there are even many nonsectarian, armed brigades that we cannot ignore. If the revolution was hijacked, we don't just go and start blaming the people for it being hijacked. We actually do everything to side with the people in order to get the revolution back on the right track. And this is what many leftists can't understand.

NOW ON the other side of the spectrum, you have the right-wingers and the Islamists who support the Syrian Revolution, but not because they believe in the right to freedom and dignity, but because they think that it is a Sunni uprising against an Alawite regime.

This is why it was very hard for me to participate in protests organized by Islamists in support of the revolution, because for me, although of course there are religious movements inside the revolution, it is still a revolution for freedom, equality, social justice and dignity. And this is why I cannot agree with the line of the Islamists here in Palestine who support the revolution just because they see it as Sunni versus Alawite.

Now there is a small section among the Palestinian left that supports the Syrian Revolution that doesn't lecture Syrians about what they have to do and how they failed. And we managed to organize a few protests--in Haifa, for instance, in Jeruslaem, and in other places in Palestine. Although they were small protests, I think it meant a lot for us to show the Syrian people that, yes, there are people in Palestine who stand with you, and there are people who don't buy into the regime's propaganda.

It says a lot that in Syria right now, there is an intelligence branch, one of the most notorious intelligence branches in Syria, called "Palestine." That means that there are people being tortured, including Palestinians, by the way, in the name of Palestine, in the name of our country, in the name of our cause, because we believe it is a cause for freedom.

To those Palestinians and to those people who believe that the Syrian regime is truly supportive of Palestine, to those who do not support the revolution, who stand on the sidelines and say, "No, we don't want to support the revolution," or who remain neutral, I say: You have a Palestine, and I have mine.

Your Palestine is an intelligence branch in Damascus that kills and tortures people, while my Palestine is Khaled Bakrawi, the martyr from the Yarmouk refugee camp who was arrested and tortured to death. Your Palestine is a speech by Bashar al-Assad, while my Palestine is the chants of Syrian freedom fighters in Hama. Your Palestine is just empty rhetoric, while my Palestine is people in Bustan al-Qasr raising the picture of Samer Assawi, the hunger-striking prisoner.

My Palestine is people from the north to the south, chanting in solidarity with Gaza during the war on Gaza last year and saying, "Oh Gaza, we are with you 'til death." They did it when they were bombarded by the Assad regime and they were shelled. My Palestine is that of the Syrian Revolutionary Youth in Damascus who raised a pamphlet in solidarity with the Palestinians in the Nakab and said, "Prawer shall not pass!"

So Syrian revolutionaries, even when they face the most terrible cases of torture, of persecution and of crackdown, still remember their sisters and brothers in Palestine, they still chant in solidarity with them and do not forget about the prisoners.

So I think it is very important to remember that--and to remember the hundreds of thousands of Syrians and Palestinian prisoners who still languish in regime jails. For example, Ali Shihabi, the communist Palestinian who has been detained in the Syrian regime's jails for almost a year. And Maher al-Jajeh, another youth activist from Yarmouk refugee camp detained by the Syrian regime for more than a year--and no one knows what is going on with his case now. And we will not forget the martyr Anas Amara, who was murdered because he was trying to get aid into Yarmouk refugee camp and trying to break the siege.

My Palestine is that also of Jihad Asad Muhammad, the Syrian journalist who even prior to the Syrian Revolution was always writing in solidarity with Palestine and who, like many others, did not believe that this Palestine is Bashar al-Assad's Palestine, but this is a cause that interests all Arabs.

I ASK one last thing: I ask people who think that Bashar al-Assad supports Palestine or still believe his propaganda to go over their history a little bit, to read more about what he and his father did to Palestine and to the Palestinian camps. And even if you are not convinced, don't let this fact, don't let political gains affect your support of the Syrian revolution. Because it is obviously not about geopolitics.

We do not know, if the revolution wins in Syria, how that will affect the Palestinian cause. It might indeed damage us--I do not know. But I do not care on the other hand. Because my support of the Syrian Revolution is unconditional.

And I do believe that even though it is getting more and more complicated, and despite all the terrible groups trying to hijack the Syrian Revolution, especially the Islamic State of Syria and Iraq, which we obviously oppose like so many Syrians, the same Syrians who started the protest against the regime are also protesting against the Islamic State, so I have faith in these people.

I have faith in a woman like Souad Nofal, I have faith in those who are so resilient and steadfast in Damascus and in Daraa, birthplace of the revolution, and in Aleppo and in Salamieh, the fantastic city that has been protesting since the first days of the uprising.

So I have faith in these people, that even though things are getting more and more complicated, that they can manage to keep the uprising going, and even if this means bad things for my cause, I really do not care. What I care about is the freedom and dignity of my Syrian sisters and brothers, and to refuse to allow my name or my country or my cause to be used or coopted by the Syrian regime to kill and persecute my sisters and brothers in Syria.