I write as a Syrian secular non-religious person who is also to-the-core pro-Palestinian, and anti-Israel as a Zionist ideology, a religious state, an apartheid regime and as an occupying force. I’m also anti-America in that I believe America, as a colonial racist completely immoral capitalist force that is heavily influenced by Zionist Christian tendencies, is the largest source of all evil. I am with Mahmoud Darwish who writes “أمريكا هي الطاعون والطاعون أمريكا.” “America is the plague.”

With that in mind, I wish to say that even ordinary non-educated, non-politically minded Syrian people (and perhaps all Palestinians in Syria) would assert unequivocally that the Assad regime was very damaging to the Palestinian cause and that the fall of this regime can only be a very good thing for the Palestinians.

The Assad regime

The Assad regime has imprisoned, tortured and killed under torture many Palestinians thousands of Palestinians many of whom are members or leaders of Palestinian liberation movements. Those imprisoned include the eminent leader Abu Jawdat Al-Jaloudi of the Al-Qassam Brigades (Hamas’s military wing) who has reportedly just been released from Sednaya prison after nine years in detention, along with, again reportedly (for exact figures almost impossible to obtain at this stage), 630 Palestinian political prisoners from Sednaya alone who have just been released in the last two days (including 67 men from Al-Qassam.)

We have grown up with many intelligence branches for the regime, one of which, a notoriously bad one that perhaps superseded all the others (except that of the Airforce) is called the “Palestine Branch” (“فرع فلسطين”). This branch specialised, although not exclusively so, in dealing with Palestinian dissidents.

The Syrian regime killed many thousands of Palestinians in Syria over the years, including in Tel El-Zaatar in Lebanon in the 1976, and more recently in the Yarmouk refugee camp in Syria in 2016 where it also displaced 160,000 people. The regime starved the Palestinians in the Yarmouk refugee camp, a criminal act well-documented in 2021 by Abdallah Al-Khatib in Little Palestine, Diary of a Siege. This is not dissimilar to what Israel is doing to the Palestinians in Gaza now. The Syrian regime has controlled Palestinian resistance groups in Syria and contained them, therefore stopping them from carrying out their resistance duties.

An instrument of oppression

The Syrian regime has kept the region and the borders with Occupied Palestine quiet since 1973 while it repeatedly trumpeted a false rhetoric that Syria is building a powerful army that will one day take the occupied Golan Heights back from Israel.

We all know what this powerful army has been used for since 2011, and all the weapons that Syrian people paid for in flesh and blood have been used solely to kill Syrian people themselves. Even in the recent war between Hezbollah and Israel, while Hezbollah has been firing rockets on Israeli military bases in the occupied Golan heights, and while Israel has been bombing everywhere in Syria, the Syrian regime did nothing! Nothing at all!

In fact, the regime and the Baath Party used the Palestinian cause to oppress Syrians and to justify this oppression.

The fall of the regime

The fall of the regime on 9 December is a cause for celebration for everyone who cares for humanity, human rights and justice, and most especially for the Palestinians and for those who want to support them. For a starter, it is a victory for oppressed people against oppressors. Don’t be fooled by the BBC telling you they are “Islamist fighters.”

Islamists Hayat Tahreer Alsham (HTS) have been instrumental in the military action, but the majority of the fighters who liberated cities and towns have been the people from these cities and towns who have been in exile in Idlib, and they came back to their homes and their loved ones. This will inspire the Palestinians that a victory against this apartheid regime is possible.

The freeing of many thousands of political detainees in Syria, (some, as in the case of a Lebanese citizen who was arrested aged sixteen, 40 years ago) will inspire Palestinians that their prisoners will one day be out.

Anti-Zionism

Syria is all anti-Zionist, and there will be no regime or government in Syria that will be kind to Israel or will normalise relations with Israel. Israel is an ideological enemy to all Syrians and the very occasional voices that suggest that Israel might need to be placated are quickly shut down and those who promote these views are seen by Syrians as traitors that need to be shamed.

No opposition figure, secular or Islamist (and we know them all), would support positive relations with Israel, and the Palestinian cause is a subject of consensus for all Syrians many of whom are regulars at the Saturday Palestine solidarity march in Manchester.

Islamists are even more “hostile” to Israel and its interest in the region from an ideological standpoint, and this is to do with oppression and justice rather than an antisemitic standpoint as the media would have us believe. A progressive, democratically elected government in Syria which serves the interest of the people can only be an ally of the Palestinian people, because the people are united in their support for Palestine.

In Assad’s Syria, the regime would force us to go on protest against Israel, to maintain its pan-Arab nationalist image and justify its ongoing existence and oppression as mentioned above. However, no one was allowed to organise a protest on their own that the regime had not called for. This was something we tried in Aleppo University (which was bombed last week by the way in a regime airstrike a day after Aleppo was liberated, a strike in which 10 people were killed), and as happened to us between 2000-2003 when we tried to organise independently for Palestine and were interrogated and intimidated by the regime’s intelligence services.

Against conspiracy narratives

As for the fall of the regime being an American or Israeli plan, some leftists had said that about the Arab Spring uprisings, including the Syrian revolution in its early days and later on. These kinds of leftists have either not moved on from a binary way of seeing the world, the mistaken idea that my enemy’s enemy is my friend, and so on, a mistaken idea also voiced in the assumption that “America is bad and therefore Russia is good,” a stupid dichotomy. Some have been so White-centric in their analysis and unconscious biases that they cannot get in their head that Arabs can actually rise against their oppressors, and if they do, it must be America and Israel that is behind what they are doing.

One does not need to be a political analyst to realise that interests of different players can meet, and that Turkey would benefit from what happened in Syria in many ways, and that Israel might see the destruction of the so-called “Resistance Axis” (of Hezbollah-Syria-Iran) as a good thing. But this does not mean that the Syrian opposition was serving Israel’s or Turkey’s agenda or that it was receiving orders from one of these states.

Israel’s response

Israel has been bombing Syria for the last two days, not to target Hezbollah bases or Iran, of which there are none left in Syria, but to target regime weapons warehouses and high logistic equipment in fear that they might fall, the Israeli military claims, into “unfriendly hands.” They never bombed them before, because the hands that were in charge of them were not unfriendly to Israel! We all know that the Syrian regime has only ever used chemical weapons against its own people.

The assumption that Israel might benefit from what has just happened in Syria might be true in the short term, as is the assumption that the fall of the regime in Syria wouldn’t have been possible had Hezbollah and Iran not been weakened lately. Again, this does not mean the very simplistic childish assumption, that what happened was engineered or ordered by Israel or America.

Solidarity

I claim here to represent the views of the vast majority of Syrians in the UK and in Syria. Solidarity. Long live Palestine!