The price of ‘victory’ in Syria has come at the expense of a liberated Palestine, Islamic resistance and the rising new world, argues Arzu.
As the shills for the Syrian ‘rebels’ rejoice from London to Tel Aviv, it is clear that any victory in Syria has come at the price of the accelerated genocide of the Palestinians and the undermining of the resistance to US-Zionist intervention in West Asia. Let’s not pretend otherwise.
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In amongst the 2 million marching the streets of London in early 2003 protesting the impending Iraq war, were people who had lost many family members to torture and extrajudicial killings, alongside former prisoners of the Ba’ath regime in Iraq, alongside survivors of the said same regime’s war against the Islamic Republic of Iran. To say they suffered immeasurably under and despised the regime of Saddam Hussain, its institutions, its ideologies, would be an understatement.
Yet they protested the oncoming onslaught from the US, UK, NATO partners and Arab and Zionist regime collaborators.
This was the only – is the only – precedent that applies now, as Palestine is devastated, its people genocided and its multinational, pan-Islamic resistance is attacked from US, UK, NATO partnered, Arab and Zionist regime collaborated forces across West Asia and now directly in Syria. There is no way round this. The advance of Syrian ‘rebels’ against the Ba’athi regime, is an advance against the Palestinians. It is a rerun of 2011/12 but also of 2003.
The failure to think of liberation in ummatic terms, in genuinely transformative ways that bring benefit to all, whatever faith or none, is not an abstract failure. It is being lived out in bloody internecine fighting that benefits in these crisis moments of 2003, 2011/12 and now, the blood soaked US-Zionist alliances of which by design or neglect, our failure to call out the war on Syria is a part.
Real grievances have not simply been instrumentalised by Empire to divide and rule, but the minds of (some of) those oppressed captured by violent exceptionalist discourses of being, made ‘halal’ by some or other ulemas’ ‘Bismillah’.
The capitulation of so-called liberation movements during the ‘Arab Spring’ to US-Zionist agendas was so swift that their lack of ideological coherence was laid naked to the world. But yet some of us – many of us – were confused. There were many very real grievances across multiple settings that required redress, and all said societies requiring restructuring. But then so were the grievances of those marching to oppose the ouster of Saddam and the Ba’athists in Iraq.
They understood that getting justice, and working for a world free of the regime that implemented torture, abuse, systematic rapes, violent discrimination against believers of various faiths and various Islamic denominations, indefinite detentions, mass killings, war crimes (including multiple, verified uses of chemical weapons), could not happen at the hands of colonial powers and their minions. For those that don’t understand why, it is because all that violence and the systems that implemented them find their genesis – practically and ideologically – in the colonial centre.
Working with, or in service of the US Empire, was and still is immoral: whether in Iraq, Syria or elsewhere. To be clear, the alternative that has developed to this, with all its flaws, is the choice we still need to make. For the sake of a liberated Palestine in a liberated world, and for the sake of our own consciences, this is the choice we need to unequivocally make, right now.
Arzu Merali is a writer and researcher based in London, UK.
