Notes on Assadism, Zionism, Fascism and Hope
This essay does not end like it begins. I considered dividing it in two but ultimately decided to keep it as is. It starts with a discussion of what Assadism sought to do with the Palestinian cause, and it then goes into a broader exploration of the normalisation of fascism in the West today with a focus on how pro-Israel apologia in the age of the Gaza genocide is accelerating it. Finally, I end on a somewhat hopeful note in which I argue for reclaiming public memory, which requires the collective.
1.
I'd like to address something that I’ve seen even good friends do, which is to concede that Assad apologists have ‘good politics on Palestine’ despite having horrible politics on Syria. It's a concession that is meant to contrast two positions that ought to be contradictory: how could they say they oppose Israeli oppression of Palestinians while downplaying or even denying the Assad regime's decades-long oppression of Syrians and Palestinians? The question is well-intentioned, but the framing it uses is misleading.
Assadists were never ‘good on Palestine.’ The only way that statement is true is if we strip away the meaning of ‘pro-Palestine’ from anything remotely meaningful.
2.
Palestine without Palestinians
The Assad regime deployed multiple discourses in its 54-year-long reign from 1970 until its collapse on the 8th of December 2024. One enduring discourse, particularly when addressing their own supporters, was their supposed crucial role in resisting the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Over the past several years, I've made a number of interventions1 on the role of the Assad regime in crushing the Palestinian and Lebanese resistance to Israel years before ‘the resistance’ would become dominated by the likes of Hezbollah. That these interventions are backed by a ridiculous number of sources has evidently made no difference to those who are already committed to that Assadist discourse on Palestine.
One thing that has become clear to me over these same years is that discourses can be resilient. Not only do they sometimes continue to exist despite evidence to the contrary, but often do so because of the lack of evidence. The reality gap that results from a lack of evidence creates an incentive for all those who were already invested in a given discourse to double down. And the wider that gap, the more it require conspiracy thinking to fill it in, for reality alone could not provide a satisfying story as it contains too many inconvenient details that are better off left out.
3.
This is what the Assadist apologist’s relationship to Palestine was from the beginning. It required adapting to a reality that contradicted what they often claimed to support. For decades, the Assad regime, first father and then son, actively crushed Palestinians, including Palestinian-Syrians. As I wrote in a recent piece here, one of the first things Hafez Assad did just six years after coming to power was invade Lebanon in 1976 with the stated purpose of protecting the rightwing Phalangist militias against Palestinian militias and their Lebanese allies (the LNM - won't get into it again here). It was the LNM that publicly supported the Palestinian cause while also calling for the creation of a secular Lebanese state.
4.
The dual nature of their cause is precisely what threatened the Assad regime and revealed a truth that would be repeated time and time again in the years to come: a movement can call themselves pro-Palestine, as long as they sided with the status quo. That was the Assadist playbook under Hafez, later replicated by Bashar, which is why they preferred to have a fractured and sectarian Lebanon that scapegoats Palestinians and was more vulnerable to Israeli invasions and occupations than a pro-Palestine one that offered some kind of alternative, regardless of what that alternative was. This was always the Assadist playbook. You pay lip service to the Palestinian cause while making sure to keep it as vague as possible - you talk about the cause ‘over there’ (Israel-Palestine), not here - while also making sure to silence those who rejected the Assadist compromise. The only way Palestine was tolerated as a political topic of discussion in Syria was by removing any actionable elements from it. Wave the flag? Sure, sometimes. Insult Israel? Sure, that's easy. Take to the streets and demand that the regime redirects its tanks to liberate the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights instead of shooting Syrian and Syrian-Palestinian protesters? That was a one way ticket to the Saydnaya ‘human slaughterhouse’ prison for many protesters, followed by the siege and destruction of Yarmouk, the rebellious Palestinian camp.
5.
To say that Assadists are ‘good on Palestine’ is to conflate rhetorical opposition to the Israeli state and its genocidal and apartheid project with concrete support for Palestinians who resist that project. Conflating the two is a concession to the Israeli obsession with denying exiled Palestinians their ties to the land as it effectively concludes that one can be pro-Palestine while supporting the crushing of Palestinians, as long as it occurs outside of Israel-Palestine. It creates a hierarchy of worthiness, one which the Israelis have themselves been perfecting for decades.
6.
This brings me to Yarmouk, the Palestinian camp near Damascus and, until Assad destroyed it, the largest Palestinian camp outside of Israel-Palestine. As it happens, Nidal Betare, whose grandfather's house served as the launching pad of the Syrian Baath party, was on The Fire These Times in 2022 to talk to me about how his upbringing in Yarmouk shaped his worldview on both Syria and Palestine. There is something specific about such an upbringing, especially if you commit to a vision of liberation. It necessitates coming to terms with the fact that Israel and Syria under Assad have always had more in common than not, from their mutual rejection of a Lebanon that sympathised with the Palestinian cause to their massacres of Palestinians and/or the Lebanese and Syrians who rejected Zionism and Assadism. It requires a refusal to only recognise the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre, committed by Israeli-backed far-right Christian militias, while ignoring the 1976 Tel Al-Zaatar massacre, committed by some of the same actors, and which was made possible by the Syrian intervention in Lebanon on the side of the far-right Christians.
7.
Assadists could never afford that complexity. To ignore, downplay or justify what Assad did to Yarmouk, as Assadists have often done, is to place the torture and murder of Palestinian bodies as a necessary evil for the liberation of Palestinian lands, furthering separating body from land. This violence runs parallel to Israeli practices of separating Palestinians from their lands as a precondition to colonising those lands and redirecting the stolen resources for their own state-building project.
8.
What's more, to deterritorialise Palestine is to act as if Assad turning the Palestine Branch, initially set up for the regime to liaise with the Palestinian groups they approved of, into a center of torturing Syrians and Palestinians can ever be justified ‘for the greater cause.’ It's to also ignore the fact that the Assad regime, under Bashar, even turned the Palestine Branch into a torture site on behalf of the actual CIA, who abducted people ‘suspected’ of terrorism and sent them to torture sites to countries such as Assad's Syria (look up Maher Arrar's story). I can go on. After the initial invasion of Lebanon in 1976, the Assad regime went after Palestinian factions once again between 1985 and 1988. This was after the Israeli occupation of Lebanon had started, and after the Israelis exiled the Palestine Liberation Organization from Lebanon to Tunisia in 1982. Hafez Assad found the perfect opportunity to get rid of the Palestinians he did not like, so he funded and armed the Amal movement to force Palestinian camps into submission. This was only possible in coordination with the Israeli occupation so as to ensure that Syrian and Israeli troops don't overlap in what would end up being their decades-long co-occupation of Lebanon. There are many more points of comparison that could be made between Assad's Syria and Israel: In 2018, the Assad regime passed Law No. 10 to allow itself the right to designate “land anywhere in the country for redevelopment.” This was quickly used to dispossess and forcibly displace populations deemed undesirable and engineer their replacement with those deemed more desirable, often following a sectarian logic. This followed the 2012 Decree No. 66 passed by the regime which, among other things, gave themselves the right to remove any ‘rubble’, which was effectively used to argue that undesirable residents were living in areas that could be demolished. It bares more than a little resemblance to the Israeli absentee law of 1950 which defined the Palestinians ethnically cleansed by Zionist militias in 1948 as ‘absentees’ with the newly formed Israeli state giving itself the right to their lands and properties. It also echoes the ongoing Israeli practice of destroying undesirable Palestinian homes in the occupied West Bank to make way for the more desirable population of Jewish settlers.
9.
To call such a regime ‘pro-Palestine’ is to argue that Israel's theft of ‘absentee’ property was morally evil in a way that Assad's similar politics could never be. This is a conclusion that is only possible if we concede that the forced displacement of civilians could be rejected or accepted depending on who is doing the displacing rather than the act of forcibly displacing civilians being itself inherently wrong. It is to withdraw the right to narrate from those victimized by such systems and give it instead to such systems’ perpetrators. Zionism could not ask for a better gift than that given how it has always relied on painting Israel's decades-long violence against Palestinians as part of a necessary ‘right to self-defense.’
10.
The similarities between Gaza and Syria, including Yarmouk, are made even more obvious by the fact that so many people have shared videos of Syria thinking they’re from Gaza (not that there aren’t plenty of those). Even people who claimed to support Assad while condemning Israel could not tell the difference between a bombed out neighbourhood in Gaza and one in Yarmouk, Homs, Idlib or Aleppo. Instead of this leading to an obvious conclusion, namely that both Israel and Assad’s Syria enact a policy of collective punishment, which is illegal under international law, apologists for either regime find ways to support one while condemning the other.
11.
To ignore this reality is to argue that the problem with Israel’s genocide in Gaza isn’t that Palestinian children are being murdered but that the ones murdering them are Israelis. Centering civilians is to recognise that the act of killing them - the act in and of itself - is what’s wrong, and that it’s just as wrong when Assad besieged Palestinian camps as part of its war of extermination to crush the rebellion that rose up against it in 2011.
12.
The way Palestine has been turned into metaphors upon metaphors can be useful in understanding how it feels be colonised, or trying to in any case. It is useful to turn places, through the power of language, into abstractions as that can facilitate connections between different contexts. The problem comes when those metaphors take over from the hard realities of the land and its people. The Israeli settler colonial project derives a great deal from metaphors and stories, but it cements its gain through physical violence on both land and bodies. The Assad regime did the same thing, including through forced Arabization of Kurdish lands and bodies, and through the ‘de-Palestinisation’ of Palestinians, both attempts at rendering undesirable subjects into more desirable (read: submissive) ones. The Israelis have had their fair share of similar ‘successes’ over the decades, from the forced ‘de-Arabization’ of those who would later be called Mizrahi Jews to the violent rejection of Yiddish and the diasporist experience, passing by the active separation of non-Muslim Arab populations, most notably the Druze, from the Muslim Arab Palestinian majority. Albeit with some differences, we can also name the similarities in how Palestinian Christian citizens of Israel and Syrian Christians have had to navigate questions of belonging to the land and state based on sectarian calculations imposed by the Zionist and Assadist states respectively.
13.
This is also why the co-occupation of Lebanon by Israel and Assad’s Syria is so instructive, and I suspect this is why it tends to be ignored. It resembles in more ways than one the way apologists of Stalin have never been able to provide a convincing argument to explain why his regime teamed up with the Nazis to invade Poland together. More often than not, it is those sacrificed zones, the Polands and Lebanons and Palestinian refugee camps of this world, that reveal the true nature of authoritarian regimes.
14.
Where do we go from here?
The sheer scale of Israeli barbarism in Gaza today, combined with the downfall of the Assad dynasty, may well flatten the details presented above. It could reasonable be argued now that this just doesn’t matter anymore. That is understandable of course. The situation in Gaza is simply more urgent, ending the genocide should remain our priority. The sectarian nightmares in Syria are another priority problem to tackle, with decades of Assadist sectarianisation fracturing Syrian society into more self-contained and mutually-exclusive sectarian identities, and now being consolidated by the post-Assad Sharaa regime (although there are more complexities to this story that are for another time). With such catastrophes facing our peoples, I don’t expect an intervention such as this text seeks to do to matter that much.
15.
One thing I will say though is that the de-Palestinisation of the Palestinian cause, through the whitewashing of ‘pro-Palestine’ regimes like Assad’s, has a long history of facilitating discursive captures that erase Palestinian agency, most notably Zionist ones. The case of Lebanon is a clear example of this, and the Yarmouk camp even more so. The latter case became an easy card to use by pro-Israel apologists who could comfortably point the finger at a Palestinian camp being destroyed by a state (Assad’s Syria) that is not their own favored genocidal state (Israel) and accuse their critics of anti-Israel bias and antisemitism. While Israel’s apologists do not need facts on their side to create a convenient narrative that exempts them of any responsibilities for the horrors they inflict on the Palestinians, Assadist apologia certainly makes their job much easier than it has to be.
16.
To reject the Assadist discourse on Palestine is to also reject the Zionist one. Both were and are violent projects that stripped people’s basic human rights. The Assad regime learned pretty quickly that it could get away with exterminating the social fabric of Syrian (including Kurdish, Armenian, Alawite, Druze etc) and Palestinian-Syrian lives in an attempt to flatten the many worlds contained within Syrian lands into one that, as the slogan ‘Assad or we burn the country’ perfectly exemplified, subjugated them and moulded them into something more acceptable. The difference with the Israelis is that they have had a longer history of doing just that, and with greater success, owing presumably to the seemingly endless resources that Western nations have been willing to spend on their favourite genocidal state. Unlike with Assadist sectarianisation, which mostly found support in the Western Far Right and the endlessly delusional Tankie Left, Israeli sectarianisation has been able to utilise existing islamophobia and racism in the West to paint the Zionist project as a civilisational necessity, a making-the-desert-bloom compromise that also conveniently offers a blueprint for ethno-supremacist fascists in the West who dream of Zionist-like projects of their own against what they perceive to be their own multicultural societies. That old antisemitic tropes around ‘globalist plots’ have been recycled and thoroughly normalised in societies like the US, the UK, Germany, France, and Hungary, among others, has done nothing to stop the process of priming entire segments of Western societies to enact or at the very least tolerate, if not support, mass violence against racialised and gendered bodies. If anything, this pre-existing blueprint, adapted to modern contexts, has served as a accelerant for fascism.
17.
A lesson we can draw from the Assadist attempt at co-opting the Palestinian cause is that authoritarianism leaves its mark even when it is defeated, depending on the type of defeat. That Assad ultimately lost has led to some of his apologists to abandon ship onto their next grift, while others have since doubled down into interpreting anything that happens in Syria today as part of a grander Israeli plot. Many others, including more passive supporters and even many non-apologists altogether, have inherited the cynicism that dominated Syria for decades. While understandable, it remains as damaging, disarming the potential for organizing for a better world before even starting the process of doing so.
18.
A similar process could happen, and is probably likely to happen, if the Israeli genocide is allowed to be blamed solely on a few individual actors like Netanyahu, rather than as symptomatic of wider societal failures that run deep in Israeli society. In the Syrian case we saw Assad’s extermination campaigns - virtually identical to genocidal violence - normalised in the West, especially after the rise of groups like Al-Qaeda and ISIS and Assad’s ability to portray himself as the secular ‘defender’ of religious minorities (just as Netanyahu is the ‘defender’ of religious minorities, like the Druze, when it suits him.) This normalisation worked perfectly with the demonisation of Syrian refugees, most of whom are Sunnis (because most Syrians are Sunnis), as trojan horses for Jihadism. That’s a big part of how the Far Right ended up admiring Assad. In that way, the Assad regime also provided a blueprint for segments of the Far Right: the undesirable populations, those you loathe with every fiber of your being - well, what if you can just kill them all? It also served to facilitate the normalisation of far right and fascist rhetoric across the political spectrum, shifting the overall overtone window to the right. What used to be the relatively fringe politics of the Far Right is now the norm in Europe, even where the Far Right does not hold power. The speed and apparent ease with which entire states abandoned pretending to care about ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘diversity’ is indicative of that. This is the ‘Syrianisation’ of the world that the Syrian intellectual Yassin Haj Saleh once described.
19.
The impulse to adopt the violent answer to a violent question is one which we are now seeing at an even wider scale with the Israeli genocide in Gaza. Unless Israel is crippled with sanctions, we are likely to soon mark two years since the genocide started, and the fact remains that it would have never been possible without Western complicity. The accomplices are not all equal. The Americans, first under Biden and then Trump, are by far the most culpable, so much so that it would be accurate to describe them as co-génocidaires with the Israelis in this genocide. The Germans have, once again, proven their inability to not commit or be involved in a genocide for more than a generation or two for virtually their entire history as a nation. The Brits, those who most directly led to the creation of Israel itself, have proven themselves cowards in the face of overwhelming evidence, almost reluctantly remaining complicit in this genocide to avoid their seemingly eternal fear of being held accountable for anything they’ve ever done to this world. I can go on. It is accurate to call this genocide as being primarily by the Israelis, but it would not be possible without the West (or Arab states like Egypt, Jordan or the UAE, for that matter).
20.
We may very well see, as France is currently doing, more attempts by many Western governments to apply some of the levers of international law and diplomacy, such as recognising a Palestinian state, to put pressure on the Israelis, or at the very least reputation-launder their own complicity in this genocide. It is still ‘good’ that this is happening, if only because it could increase the cost on the Israelis. But these steps also serve as distractions from the obvious steps that can be taken. Slovenia has become the first EU country to ban all weapons sales to Israel. This is good of course, even though it is largely symbolic as Slovenia doesn’t sell weapons to Israel anyway. The vast majority of weaponry comes from the White supremacist and Christian Zionist USA, with ‘de-Nazified’ Germany in second place. Germany is still able to claim leadership in the EU despite being the most blatant accomplice in the genocide.
21.
I believe that the infrastructures that Israel is relying on are more fragile than they may appear. Israel’s cynical weaponisation of antisemitism and the memory of the Holocaust has shown more cracks in the past couple of years than was ever the case beforehand. Its monopoly on memory is over, and that is something we cannot ignore. This is why, or partly why, I think Germany is in a more precarious position than even its leaders care the admit. This doesn’t mean that accountability is inevitable, but it does mean that we are in a position to enact more and more costs on genocidal nations. We can withdraw Germany’s social license, its claims to being a post-Nazi and ‘reformed’ state can be more readily debunked, not just in the halls of academia but at the popular level too. What this would leave Germany with is a more naked reality, namely that its past is not past, that its annihilation of the Warsaw Ghetto could haunt it once more due to its complicity in the annihilation of the Gaza Ghetto. In other words, as witnesses to the destruction of the Gaza Ghetto, we can reclaim the Warsaw Ghetto as ours. Germany can no longer pretend to have learned from the savagery it inflicted, but we can learn from its hypocrisy, and that makes us stronger. The génocidaires are the same. Different generations, different nations even, but fundamentally the same. The Germans were allowed to paint themselves in a new brush after World War II, but we know enough now to reject whatever attempt they may or may not do in the future to distance themselves from the annihilation of Gaza.
22.
Fascism thrives on disorientation, as my co-conspirator Daniel Voskoboynik put it in a recent episode, and the good news is that we already have the tools to help one another not go mad with the false belief that we are the only ones unable to live our day-to-day pretending that any of this is normal. I can tell you that I have felt this when Israel was bombing Gaza in 2014, and whenever the Assad regime launched its own campaigns of extermination against Homs, Yarmouk, Aleppo, Daraya and so on. If you think it cannot be normal to starve children, you’re not mad. You’re the sober one here, and we need to keep finding one another to remind ourselves of just that.
23.
The act of remembering does not only uplift us as individuals, but it also empowers us to see what is obviously true. It is obviously true that nothing can ever justify starving children. Nothing. There are no exceptions to this. That the world we live in has powerful actors actively seeking to distract us from that brutal fact is indicative of a moral and intellectual rot that runs deep within and throughout our institutions. I see these people for who they are. Cowards, liars, fakes, and they will continue pushing that reality away by making more and more people’s lives miserable. They would rather let the Palestinians of Gaza starve to death than face their own demons, but we can make sure that they are forced to face them.
24.
The hauntings that result from the breaking of humanity in Gaza are ours as well, and we can let them remain front and center in everything we do. It is this anti-memory that I am interested in, a rejection of the relegation of ‘past’ horrors unto illegible language. This is why I said on a podcast a couple of years ago that I am still angry about the Holocaust. The breaking of European Jewry continues to haunt us all today, and I am angry at the fact that ‘post’-war Europe gave itself the permission to abandon its responsibilities towards Never Again, promises that were clearly made with the knowledge that they would never have to be respected as the Holocaust was allowed to become final through the attempted translocation of the Jewish Question in Palestine.
What the cowards do not understand is that the Jewish Question - in other words, European antisemitism - is still with us today. It has just morphed into a dual Jewish and Palestinian Question, two questions in one, inseparable. One thing this means is that just as European Jewish intellectuals were particularly well-suited to understand and expose 20th century fascism, we the Palestinians, the Arabs, their Jewish allies and all racialised untermensch are today particularly well-suited to do the same for the 21st century version of it.
25.
It is up to us to decide how to broaden this ‘we’ as much as possible because we are more interconnected and interdependent than we were in the 1930s and 1940s.
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