Transcribed from the 9 June 2022 episode of The Fire These Times podcast and printed with permission. Edited for space and readability. Listen to the whole episode:
Bashar al-Assad used Russian fighter jets to burn this camp to the ground. He starved this camp for years. More than two hundred people starved to death in Yarmouk camp. I cannot imagine that these stories, that people watched livestreamed on media, on TV—that my people, the Palestinian people, in Gaza, in Ramallah, would think that this is pro-Palestine!
Nidal Betare: My name is Nidal Betare; I am the managing director of People Demand Change (PDC), based in Washington DC. I am a Palestinian refugee originally from the Yarmouk camp in Damascus, Syria. I hold a masters in political sociology, and when the war started, I was working with the Syrian Red Crescent / the Danish Red Cross supporting Iraqi refugees in Syria, and also I was preparing to enroll in a PhD program that never happened because of the war.
Elia J. Ayoub: I read a recent thread of yours mentioning Samir Kassir. I did an episode about him two years ago, on June 2, 2020, because it was fifteen years since he had been assassinated. He was a Lebanese-Palestinian-Syrian intellectual who managed, unlike most people, to bring all three worlds together and saw no contradictions between the three. That interview was with Ziad Majed, who was a friend, colleague, and comrade of Samir Kassir.
Talk to us about that thread on Samir Kassir—what made you want to write it? Because of the subject itself and what Kassir represented, this will allow us to get deeper into the conversation.
NB: It came up during the most recent elections in Lebanon; I could not hide my happiness that some independents could break through the system in Lebanon. For me, and for so many people of my generation who were born in the late seventies and grew up through the civil war in Lebanon: even though we were in Syria, we were very engaged, especially in the Palestinian refugee camps in Syria.
Particularly in the years between 2000 and 2005, when he was assassinated, Samir Kassir had a big impact on our generation, and I think we owe him—and his friends and colleagues who founded the Democratic Left Movement in Lebanon—for opening our minds to understand more what’s going on, the truth about Syrian involvement in Lebanon, to what extent Syria was embedded in the political system in Lebanon, and how changes in Lebanon would lead to changes in Syria.
A major factor of what’s going on in Lebanon is the existence of the Syrian army, Syrian intelligence, and the Syrian political will that forced Lebanon to accept so many agreements through history, and led to civil war in Lebanon between 1975 and 1989. Whatever we do, we cannot drop off the Syrian factor from it. Samir Kassir articulated the narrative of the history of this period in a way that opened our minds to a lot of blind spots we could not see yet.
It’s very important, Elia, to know that Syria did not have open media, satellite or internet, until the beginning of the 2000s. Before that, it was limited to certain classes in Syria; it was not available for everyone. We were living in a very closed society, and were closed into our neighborhoods, and only know what we were told in our neighborhoods.
To add to that, there is a huge machine of supervision and monitoring for all publications in Syria, including An-Nahar, where Samir Kassir used to write. The reality is, when An-Nahar used to come to Syria sometimes, the Syrian government used to rip out the pages they did not like, like with other newspapers and media outlets at the time. But with the internet and satellite that started to enter every house in Syria in 2002-2003 and after that, it helped people to know more.
For us in the University of Damascus especially, Samir Kassir was always there. We used to talk a lot about his articles and opinions. He started a movement within a younger generation of the Syrian opposition about the reality of the Syrian army in Lebanon. This is when we started to call it the “occupation.” Before that, it was the Syrian army “helping Lebanon stabilize” after the civil war.
Our generation owes him a lot. Samir Kassir’s legacy did not die when he was assassinated. His legacy was revered more after he died, and the Samir Kassir Foundation did an amazing job helping Syrian activists who fled Syria, and I was one of them.
EA: Kassir is still very relevant. I wrote an article with a Syrian friend in 2019 which was published in Al-Jumhuriya in the context of the uprising in Lebanon at the time. It was about Syrian melancholy in the Lebanese revolution. A lot of the Syrians I was speaking to recognized some of the chants, obviously, because a lot of those chants were first chanted in Syria: “Yalla erhal ya Bashar” was just changed into “ya Aoun,” and so forth. And the image I used in the article is a mural that a person who calls himself “Syrian Banksy” did in Idlib, of a quote in one of Samir Kassir’s last articles before he was killed: “When the Arab Spring blooms in Beirut, it announces the time of roses in Damascus.”
This was in 2005, before what we later referred to as the Arab Spring. He was one of the few people who did not see a contradiction between calling for freedom in Syria, fighting against sectarianism in Lebanon, and calling for freedom in Palestine. He very much saw these infrastructures of oppression as interlinked.
You mentioned the New Democratic Left. To this day, we have good indications of something going that direction, and hopefully it continues that way—we’ll see. But there hasn’t really been something like it since, largely because it was killed off. Him and George Hawi both assassinated, and other comrades either forced into exile or some kind of de facto self-censorship for protection. I won’t say who, but I was with one of his comrades and we were sitting at one of the hotels where the New Democratic Left had isolated themselves after Samir Kassir was killed in June 2005.
NB: And then George Hawi was killed two weeks later.
EA: In that period of two weeks, members of that group were basically hiding in this hotel; they didn’t leave. Then George Hawi left at some point and he was assassinated that day. After that, the same people in that circle either went into exile or into hiding.
It’s very important to talk about this period between 2000 and 2005. On February 14, 2005, [Lebanese prime minister Rafik] Hariri was assassinated, which was followed by a massive uprising (to this day not really rivaled, with the exception maybe of the October uprising in 2019), later called the Cedar Revolution, calling for the expulsion of the Syrian regime and soldiers. It was a cross-section of society; this was before the March 14 coalition became a thing, and then it became sectarianized. This was the initial few months, when anyone who was opposed to the regime’s presence in Lebanon went to the streets.
They came from all walks of life. George Hawi, as you mentioned, was a communist; Samir Kassir was a communist and then a socialist; others were on the left, then there were people in the center and some people on the right, conservatives and liberals—there was just this one goal, nothing as to what follows, with the exception of people like the New Democratic Left who had a vision of Lebanon as a secular social democracy.
This is why it’s so important. So much happened after 2005, obviously: the assassinations, and then the war in 2006, and then another smaller war in 2008, and everything that followed. It’s very difficult to stop and take stock of the changes that were happening in just those few years. It’s also in those few years that there were exchanges between Lebanese intellectuals and writers, and Syrians and Palestinians, in both Lebanon and Syria (and to some extent in Palestine as well, though there was the security aspect there that would make it more difficult).
I later found out—I didn’t know this when I was more Lebanon-focused—that there was an organic link between Lebanese intellectuals and Syrian and Palestinian intellectuals, and they were speaking to one another and calling to each others’ future “Springs.” This was still in the early 2000s; there was still the hope that many had that Bashar would be more moderate than his father. Obviously we were very wrong about that, but there was still that window.
Talk to us a bit about that. What do you remember from that? What can you tell us about that?
NB: Right, yeah. Every time we talk about the movement that started after the death of Hafez al-Assad, when Bashar al-Assad inherited power in Syria, I like to remind people of something: what happened between 2000 and 2005 (and maybe until 2011 when the revolution started) was not something that erupted from nothing. Syrians never stopped challenging this regime, ever, since Hafez al-Assad came to power, or even since the Baath Party came to power in 1963.
Let me just say this—maybe people won’t like it, but from the perspective of history this is when Arab nationalism was picking up, and Hafez al-Assad and the people around him were very young, in their thirties, and believed in Baathism and Arab nationalism and everything, but Hafez al-Assad actually had another vision apart from Michel Aflaq, Salah al-Din al-Bitar, and all the founders of the Arab nationalism movement around the Arab world. He would oppress and get rid of so many of his friends between 1963 and 1975, when he really started to control Syria by himself.
After that, Syrians did not stop the movements of resistance. You see a lot of communists, Hizb al-‘Amal al-Shuyu’iy for example, the Communist Labor [Party], who were oppressed and imprisoned for tens of years. I know people who spent half their lives in the prisons of Hafez al-Assad. This did not stop, but when Bashar al-Assad came to power, there were the seeds to start something new, and there was a new generation.
I’m not going to say any names in this episode; I freak out now about telling names, honestly, because some of them are still in Syria, Lebanon, and the region, and you know everyone is reachable these days. But for the older generation, they thought that Bashar al-Assad would bring some reforms because of the opening speech of his presidency. He promised an open society, open economy, providing internet and open media, all these things.
But for our generation, I still remember—I was studying sociology at Damascus University at that time—there was a wave of people who did not believe that Syria will be controlled by Bashar al-Assad (who inherited power in five minutes by changing the constitution in the Syrian parliament), and who rejected Bashar al-Assad.
EA: Just to explain: he changed the constitution because he was too young.
NB: He was thirty-four. In the Syrian constitution, before that, it was forty years old, because when Hafez al-Assad came to power he was forty. When Bashar came to power, he was thirty-four, so they changed the constitution, in a few minutes, in the parliament—which was ridiculous and humiliating and insulting to all Syrians, and to the law in general.
So there was rejection. This rejection was translated into a movement among students in the universities across Syria; it was not only in Damascus University, though Damascus was a hub for this movement. In my opinion, this wave encouraged the older generation to do something, and they started doing the Rabī Dimashq, the Damascus Spring: ninety-nine intellectuals signed a letter to Bashar al-Assad in 2000.
The whole narrative of the Syrian revolution is yet to be told. Because of the amount of displacement, the amount of massacres, the amount of killing, people did not have a chance to breathe yet, to think, and to tell their stories.
But it’s coming. It’s going to come, and what happened in Syria is going to be told, very soon.
That happened when, as you mentioned, there was communication not only between the Syrian opposition and the Lebanese who opposed the Syrian regime, but also when there was another generation in Lebanon that grew up under the brutality of the Syrian occupation. They suffered—there are quite a lot of stories of how the Syrians oppressed the Lebanese and controlled political movements in Lebanon, and tried to control the civil society.
This communication was open. And my generation—I remember, 2002 or 2003 was when we started having meetings and exchange visits with friends in Lebanon who later became part of the Democratic Left Movement. I focus a lot on this movement, because it was one of the first independent movements in the region that had a political vision and a strategy for change, and it did not see that change in Lebanon would only come from Lebanon itself, but also from neighboring countries like Syria.
It makes sense. What Samir Kassir wrote about the democracy of Syria and the independence of Lebanon is very accurate. It has underneath it a lot of theory about the relations between the two countries, the two societies, and the two political systems in these two countries. This was proved, actually, in 2005, and later on after 2011 when the Syrian revolution started.
In 2005, after the assassination of Samir Kassir and George Hawi, there was a huge campaign of arrests in Syria. I have thirty friends who I used to hang out with who, all of them, were arrested in 2005-2006, and there was a list of 150 students in the university who were supposed to be arrested—and they were not arrested because those first thirty people did not tell on their friends. But these people were imprisoned for five, six years, and they were only released in 2011, after the eruption of the Syrian revolution.
These were young people, in their second or third year of university, and Bashar al-Assad and Syrian security just cut their lives and put them in prison, and destroyed their future. Bear in mind that these people were only talking about freedom of expression, about reforms in the Syrian political system, about the opportunity for people to express their opinions and form whatever forums and political parties they want.
But Bashar al-Assad and the people around him just continued the mentality that Hafez al-Assad and the Baath Party established in Syria in 1970: that the Baath Party is the only party and the leading party in the Syrian “revolution.” This is the biggest statement that proved to be a lie, and a way to turn into a dictatorship—and later on to massacre the Syrian people.
I still remember the conversations that we used to have, Elia, in those years, between 2006 and 2007 (it lasted for a while): it was full of ambitions and full of energy to make a peaceful change in Syria. But as we discovered later, this regime was built in a way that there is no way to reform it whatsoever. The only way to reform this system is just to get rid of it.
EA: When I was at AUB, American University of Beirut, doing my undergrad, there was the Secular Club: it was very explicitly pro-Palestine and at the same time very explicitly anti-Assad—and, as the name suggests, very anti-sectarianism in Lebanon. They were making these links early on, very much echoing Samir Kassir, and often bringing him up as well.
And after 2015, there were media outlets like Megaphone; it wasn’t that big when it started in 2015 and they were struggling, but they are one of the few media outlets now that are explicitly anti-authoritarian on all fronts. If they bring up Ukraine and Russia, they will be anti-Putin; they will be in solidarity with protesters in Iran and Iraq and Lebanon, and pro-Syrian revolution, pro-Palestine. On all fronts! Anti-Saudi Arabia, what have you. All the different layers of anti-authoritarianism is something they definitely hold to heart.
This is one of the legacies of someone like Kassir.
NB: One hundred percent. And we can’t see that, Elia, if we take a look at the global left these days, and the way they were divided on topics like Syria, on topics like Ukraine, and the increasing number of propaganda outlets that are trying to twist the narrative with circular reasoning and conspiracy theories. You are absolutely right.
Honestly, for me as a Syrian-Palestinian, this is where I am really squeezed. It has so many levels, Elia. There is the emotional level of it, especially when you see intellectuals in Ramallah and the West Bank and Gaza who are pro-Bashar al-Assad. It is hard for me to accept that, and it’s hard for me to believe that they are still pro-Assad even though a lot of them experienced firsthand the Syrian regime! So many Palestinians who live in Ramallah today lived in Damascus before that.
Secondly, look what happened to the Palestinians in Syria! Yarmouk camp is a case study the left should be focusing on, to expose the hypocrisy of the regime and the political system Hafez al-Assad and Bashar al-Assad built, their legacy for more than forty years. I wrote this once, and I will say it now: when Hafez al-Assad split the Palestinian factions in the 1980s, demonstrations erupted in Damascus, in Yarmouk camp, and people started chanting Assadon, assadon fi Lubnan, fa’ron, fa’ron fi Jawlan. “Assad: a lion in Lebanon, a mouse in the Golan Heights.”
You go and express your power in Lebanon but your front lines in Golan Heights are shut up!—this is what people were saying.
EA: And it’s a play on the name Assad, which means “lion.”
NB: Exactly. And he wanted to destroy Yarmouk camp, but there were some powerful Palestinians at the time—it was at the end of the era of having Palestinians with power in Syria—who prevented Hafez al-Assad from doing that. They challenged him. They threatened him with going to war with the military if he does that. And he did not.
Bashar al-Assad used Russian fighter jets to burn this camp to the ground. He starved this camp for years. More than two hundred people starved to death in Yarmouk camp. I cannot imagine that these stories, that people watched livestreamed on media, on TV—that my people, the Palestinian people, in Gaza, in Ramallah, would think that this is pro-Palestine! It is just surreal for me and I can’t get my head around it.
Unfortunately, this segment of Palestinians is supported by the left around the world. The left around the world has huge support for the Palestinian cause, and because of this narrative, that Palestinians in Palestine have supported, that they are pro-Bashar al-Assad and Bashar al-Assad is the sole power in the Arab world (and maybe around the world) that is anti-colonial, and anti-capitalist, and anti-imperialist, that he’s a good guy—even though just a few weeks ago a horrible, terrifying video of the Tadamon massacre was released…
I cannot find any difference between what happened in Sabra and Shatila and what happened in Tadamon, honestly. People don’t like this narrative, but isn’t it true? Killing is killing.
EA: Absolutely. I’m Lebanese-Palestinian, and I come from a family that—in 1982 my father was in the Red Cross in Lebanon, and he witnessed the Sabra and Shatila massacre. He was there during it, as the Red Cross was allowed in at some point. And just a few years later, at the end of the eighties, our home, the one I’m recording from right now, was bombed by the Assad regime.
My family is not particularly political, but because of this heritage, I didn’t see much of a contradiction between opposing the Syrian regime in 2005 during the Cedar Revolution and supporting the [Syrian] revolution in 2011, and then 2019 here, and obviously supporting the Palestinian struggle in Palestine as well.
There was never much of a contradiction, and yet because of those meta-narratives and how they end up being very decontextualized (and we’re seeing it more with the internet), a lot of people just don’t bother knowing these details. I’ve been in many situations where I’ve had to explain to people, for example, that I am anti-Zionist, because I am anti-Assad and therefore they assume I have some kind of soft spot for Israel.
It’s as if the nuances are too complicated for people; they want it very simplistic, black-and-white, and that’s it. These big narratives don’t only erase Yarmouk, they erase Jawlan, as you mention. They don’t speak to people who are Syrians in occupied Jawlan, who obviously know that the Syrian regime is not going to liberate them any time soon. All of these things, if someone is following the Syrian revolution especially, are very obvious, very straightforward.
That’s why Syria has become a litmus test for me, with many people I know. If they tell me they are pro-Palestine, I’m like, Okay, that’s good. But I still have to wait a bit and see what they think about Syria. Some people don’t know; it’s okay, there is ignorance, they can learn. But there are other people who immediately will have all those narratives and discourses that they have taken from somewhere, and that’s where all the red flags are raised.
This has never failed, this litmus test. It says a lot about the priority of the person: whether they support a cause for the aesthetics, or whether they support a principle on a broader anti-authoritarian basis.
There is nothing good about seeing people getting killed. But I think Syrians and Palestinians in Syria have exhausted all the tools and the means to explain to the world how awful the situation in Syria was. It was and is a situation that is beyond imagination. The human brain is not capable of imagining this level of brutality.
NB: Right. And it’s a position that keeps you arguing all the time. I am not a social media guy; I don’t have Facebook, I don’t have Instagram. I tried it, I didn’t like it. But something happened in 2014 or 2015: one of my friends sent me a message that a media outlet here in the United States took a very long report that I wrote on Yarmouk camp for the Institute of Palestine Studies, and they twisted it and put it on Twitter.
So I created my Twitter account. And I was new here in the United States, so I didn’t know much about the Arab communities or how they perceive our life in Palestine and Syria. I was quite new; I came here in 2013, so I was still learning (and I am still learning, obviously). But that was a shock, when this institution, maybe the only media outlet that the Syrian government let us read in Syria since 2000, based here in the United States, a Palestinian website founded by respectable academics (who later left), talked about Yarmouk camp as if the Syrian opposition destroyed it! [Transcriber’s note, December 2024: the outlet being referred to here is Electronic Intifada.]
They said, just to make it a cool title, that the opposition “shares blame.” So I created a Twitter account (not my current one, an older one), and I started reading, to understand how Palestine is very important for the left and how Syria somehow turned into a place that Bashar al-Assad is “fighting to get rid of al-Qaeda and ISIS”—which is hilarious! This is a huge misconception of not only the Syrian revolution, Elia, but the whole history of the struggle of the Syrian people against the Baath party, against Hafez al-Assad, against Bashar al-Assad.
This is where I found myself: Okay, I am Palestinian. I am Syrian. And I am squeezed in this place that I have to explain to people, especially on the left, and especially to my Palestinian brothers, that this is not true, this is not what happened, this is not the narrative.
I have to say, Elia, that the whole narrative of the Syrian revolution is yet to be told. Because of the amount of displacement, the amount of massacres, the amount of killing, people did not have a chance to breathe yet, to think, and to tell their stories.
But it’s coming. It’s going to come, and what happened in Syria is going to be told, very soon. And we are responsible to tell what happened in Syria, on platforms like yours for example. So I understand what you’re saying.
I’ll tell you this story and you can take it from there: I was at a funeral a few days ago, and it was the first time that I go to a place in the United States that is full of Arab community, and mainly Palestinians, from the West Bank: Nahalin, Bil’in, and the wall area. For them, I was Syrian. It hurt me that my identity is not that important for people. I cannot blame them—people who were raised in Palestine, maybe they don’t know that much, they don’t read that much, they don’t watch news that much. But they shocked me to an extent: some of them thought that Yarmouk camp is in Lebanon.
And one of the things that I heard was: Why did you do that in Syria? You were living the good life! Who told you that Syrians were living the good life? People compare the situation of Syrian Palestinian refugees with Lebanon, with Gaza, with refugee camps like Jenin in the West Bank, and then they come up with this conclusion that the life of Palestinian refugees in Syria was good! No. It was not good for Palestinians; it was not good for Syrians.
There is a huge history of struggle for Palestinians in Syria with the Syrian regime, and for Syrians in Syria with the Syrian regime, since 1963. What happened in 2011 was just the eruption of a struggle that had been accumulating for decades.
EA: This is not the first time I hear a Syrian Palestinian person I know, from Yarmouk specifically, saying that when they’ve spoken with other Palestinians (usually in the diaspora, because it’s the only context you can do it, really, in practice), they do not know the specificity of the Yarmouk experience or the specificity of the Syrian experience more broadly.
I remember a conversation: I was sitting with a friend from Yarmouk and a friend from Gaza, as it happens—so there was the Palestinian, the Palestinian Syrian, and the Palestinian Lebanese, speaking to one another. And the Palestinian from Gaza—very anti-Assad and everything—did not know that there were so many other Palestinians who were not anti-Assad. He grew up in Gaza, he was born and raised there; he just assumed that everyone was.
I got to see this friend from Yarmouk’s perspective, and the frustration being built up, especially as by then he was part of the diaspora (he had had to leave Syria, obviously), and this alienation from a lot of these movements that use the language of anti-oppression and anti-colonialism while not really paying attention when Syrians are killed—including when Palestinian Syrians are killed—in Syria.
You brought up the Tadamon massacre. The video came out a few weeks ago, and there was a bunch of reports, and the video is still in my mind; I haven’t been able to get rid of it. I will read a short text that I wrote on this, and then we can talk about it:
Recently, brutal footage of the Tadamon massacre surfaced which showed Syrian intelligence officers massacring civilians in the Damascus neighborhood of Tadamon (the irony is, Tadamon means “solidarity,” for those who don’t speak Arabic). One story, which was retold by a Lebanese friend of mine, Kareem Chehayeb, for Al Jazeera, was that of Wassim Siyyam, a forty-two year old Palestinian Syrian who was forcibly disappeared by the Assad regime in 2013. His family did not know that he was executed just two days after being taken; they only found out because they saw him in that video.
There are many names that have surfaced since then, of Palestinian Syrians who were massacred. I’ll read some of the names I have here; you tweeted them as well.
Nidal Sadani
Hamoud al-Zamar
Iyad al-Khatib
Mohammad Aymari
Ahmad Saleh
Tareq Najji
Ahmad Younis
Mohammad Zeydan
Mohammad Shahoudi
Talk to us a bit about your reaction to seeing the footage.
NB: This massacre is actually a known one, and the video is old. It’s not new, but for many reasons it was not revealed before. This is one of more than five or six other massacres that took place [in Yarmouk], and this is a small one. There are massacres that killed thousands. More than 1,500 people were killed in one massacre; some people are working on a report about this.
[Transcriber’s note, December 2024: this report appears not to have been published in English; extensive scouring of relevant Syria-specific organizations’ publications did not turn up the name Betare cited in the audio. The horrifying truth is that the list of regime atrocities in Syria is simply too long, and will only get longer now that the regime has finally fallen and the full extent of its brutality is being painstakingly logged by investigators.]
What would I say, Elia? Seeing this video was very traumatizing. I’ll be very frank and honest with you here. Last time I was in Syria was in April 2012, in al-Qusayr area in Homs, when Hezbollah and the Syrian regime were trying to take over the al-Qusayr area. The amount of death, and bodies that I saw thrown in the streets, made me decide not to go back to Syria again. I could not handle it.
I was afraid, honestly. Sometimes I don’t believe that I am still alive until now, because it was terrible. I tried to get rid of all these pictures from my mind, and I couldn’t. When the video of the massacre of Tadamon was released, I hesitated a lot before I watched it. I couldn’t watch the six minutes. I only watched the first two or three minutes, because it’s unbearable.
There is nothing good about seeing people getting killed. But I think Syrians and Palestinians in Syria have exhausted all the tools and the means to explain to the world how awful the situation in Syria was. It was and is a situation that is beyond imagination. Normal people in the West, or anywhere stable in this world—even for us, before the war—the human brain is not capable of imagining this level of brutality.
So it is good that it is released—and it was released with good timing, because of what’s happening in Ukraine, especially after Bucha, and the international solidarity with the victims of Bucha. I encourage everyone who has videos like this (and I know a lot of people have, and they still keep them until now without revealing them), I encourage all the organizations who work on social justice in Syria to start a campaign and start releasing the documents they have—videos, photos, whatever they have—to the public.
Because it is part of the Syrian struggle, and it is an essential part of the brutality of the al-Assad regime. There is no way anyone could imagine or understand it unless they see it (and yet there are people who would say otherwise about it). It was horrible, Elia.
Also, it was released a few weeks before the murder of Shireen Abu Akleh; it was ironic to see how divided we are as Syrians and Palestinians. Honestly it was heartbreaking. I know a lot of Syrians who work on bringing Assad to justice; they have organizations or they are writers, intellectuals, they have good platforms and a strong voice—and they were silent about Shireen Abu Akleh. Also, I know a lot of Palestinians who do not believe that what happened in Tadamon was real.
It’s such an irony, I have no words to explain it, Elia. I can explain it in an academic way; I understand, because this was basically my master’s degree, that Palestinian people live under political, social, and economic structures that are different from each other. Our life in Syria is different than Lebanon is different than Jordan is different than Gaza is different than the West Bank. But we all have a cause. I am still a Palestinian refugee. I was born like this, my father was like this, and I am still like this.
If I did not come to the United States, my daughter would also be a Palestinian refugee. We’re refugees all our lives. My grandfather, my grandparents—all of them died refugees, in a refugee camp. And the refugee camp has a backbone legacy in the Palestine cause that Palestinian intellectuals and academics should recognize.
On the other hand, the PLO and the Palestinian factions, all of them, are responsible for twisting the narrative of what happened in Syria—and not only with the Palestinians in Syria, what happened in Syria in general. The authority in Ramallah turned into a company-for-hire for all the Arab dictators in the region, not only for Bashar al-Assad. I know they helped Bashar al-Assad big time, and they are responsible for this. And they are responsible for the narrative that they are telling people in the West Bank and Gaza.
They carry this responsibility forever, and they are a burden on us now. They don’t represent us.
There are some people on the Palestinian side who recognize that what happened in Syria is a massacre and Bashar al-Assad is a dictator. We need these people to bring their voices, because they have credibility. They are living under the Israeli occupation, or under the Israeli apartheid system in 1948 areas, and they can represent the story of the Palestinian people everywhere, including our story as Palestinians in Syria.
I’m happy that there are some people out there who have the courage—because it takes courage, actually. This narrative will leave you with no friends.
EA: I completely agree. It has been heartening to see, whenever we have had protests (last year, and after Shireen’s murder as well), calls for the overthrow of the PA.
I categorize different reactions I see in different groups. There are people who deny, there are people who are shocked and horrified, and there are people who are silent. The silent are often the majority. Most people who I know, specifically most Palestinians I know in the diaspora with a large platform, haven’t said anything on Tadamon—and I know that they know about it.
I know some of them, or we have mutuals, and some of those mutuals are Syrian Palestinians, so I know they would have known about it by now. But they haven’t said anything about it. It reinforces the idea that what matters isn’t who is being killed, but who is doing the killing. This reverses what should be the case, as activists, as protesters, as anti-authoritarians: if you’re fighting for something better, you’re fighting on a set of principles, and those principles have to be applied regardless of who is doing the oppression.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to explain to people that Hezbollah is not a leftwing party! It is quite literally the most conservative party in Lebanon right now: it’s the main party that has upheld this regime, it’s the main party that wanted Hariri to stay in power after the uprising in 2019 asked for him to resign; the main party—I think the only party at this point—that doesn’t have a single woman representative in their entire movement.
And so many other things! Nasrallah calling LGBTQ rights an imposition and an import from the West, demonizing feminists—on all categories of what counts as a conservative (or even a far-right) ideology, they tick the boxes. And yet at the same time, because of history, because they were part of the resistance against Israel—many people forget that they were not the main ones, and arguably in the eighties they made it worse, because they focused a lot of their attention on assassinating communists who were also resisting Israel…
There are all those different nuances. I say this specifically in the context of Lebanon, because it’s where I grew up and it’s my main point of reference. I was also very happy to see major Assadist figures being voted out: [Elie Nagib] Ferzli and [Talal Majid] Arslan and others. It was very funny, to be honest. It was very good to see. But I still think there is a Syria question, just as there is a Palestine question. Samir Kassir identified this early on, and said, You can’t think of freedom in one place without also thinking of freedom in the other place.
Even within my circles—independents, mostly leftists, progressive activists, and so on—there is still a difficulty in talking about Syria. That difficulty comes in many ways: sometimes it’s trauma, because of the Assad regime in Lebanon; sometimes it’s politicking priorities. But other times it’s an ideological block, and it’s why there are people who are still—they’re not pro-Hezbollah, but they treat Hezbollah in a different category than they would the Lebanese Forces or the Kataeb or the other [conservatives].
It’s a blind spot that is only possible by not fully engaging with the question of Syria. As you mention, as soon as I speak to Syrians who have had some interaction with Hezbollah, it’s very clear. It’s very straightforward what Hezbollah’s role has been in Syria. There’s very little doubt—they say so themselves, obviously, but Syrians say even more. I’ve met many Syrians from Yarmouk and elsewhere, in Homs especially, in al-Qusayr, as you mentioned, who have had their house destroyed or occupied or looted by Hezbollah.
And yet a lot of the people I know, very well-meaning Lebanese activists who are by no means pro-Assad—all of them would say the regime is bad, but they stop at the border. The Assad regime? Okay, they were bad in Lebanon but they left in 2005 and it’s no longer the same priority. I think this is a major problem in Lebanon.
NB: Elia, I would say maybe it’s temporary. The situation today in Lebanon—people say sometimes that the situation during the civil war in Lebanon was better than the situation today. This is like if the state failed and the institutions in the country are just gone. But it is temporary; people are just exhausted by thinking about day-to-day life. Everyone in Lebanon, from the lower middle class, from the upper middle class, and in between, and lower than that and upper than that—I don’t remember in my lifetime that Lebanon was in such a situation like this before, honestly.
There is a collapse in the country: a real collapse, a physical collapse that happened with the blast, and there is an economic collapse that we are living now, and there is a social collapse that is represented by this current political class that Hezbollah is part of. This is why it’s good that there are independents, and that they voted out people like Ferzli who are pro-Assad.
However, this differentiation, or this cutoff of talking about Syria in Lebanon, is just temporary, because of the current situation and because Lebanon is going through a huge change. It’s going to last for more years, maybe a decade or more, to get rid of this political class that ruined the country and ruined neighboring countries as well, like what Hezbollah did in Syria. The interaction between Lebanon and Syria is very difficult to defuse, on many levels.
There are fundamental relationships; it’s hard. But Lebanon today is a place that is miserable. People are leaving. Young people don’t have a future anymore there. Look at them: they are in Erbil, Iraq, or in Istanbul or other cities in Turkey, or they are trying to go to Europe. It’s heartbreaking, but it’s understandable. I don’t want to undermine the fact that Syria should be present all the time, but it’s understandable that people take a break and focus on: Okay, what are we going to eat today? What happened with the court about the blast? Is there a trial or not? Is there someone who will be put in court and brought to justice or not?
These are big questions that Lebanese are really focusing on now, and I understand and respect that. This is really a priority. What happened with the blast was—I mean, who could imagine that? We will see, I bet you—mark my words: if the truth is revealed one day, it’s going to be connected to the Syrian government, one hundred percent. I have zero doubt about that.
EA: Me too. That’s the big question in Lebanon, always. At the start of every new regime, it’s become almost a tradition in Lebanon: they start with amnesty laws and they forgive their own crimes. There’s always the risk that they do this with everything, just as they did with their crimes against the almafqudeen, the disappeared in Lebanon, which continues to this day, and the assassination of Lokman Slim last year, and so many other things. I’m barely scratching the surface with it.
NB: Right. Who said once that the political class today in Lebanon is just the civil warlords? Someone said that.
EA: I’ve said that.
NB: You’re right, Elia! Look, [Michel] Aoun was kicked out by the Syrian government, and he came back on a Syrian tank. Hezbollah was established in the early eighties, and look where they are now. Harakat Amal and the al-Hizb ad-Dimuqrat [sic] al-Ishtiraki [Progressive Socialist Party]—all of them! The only party that has changed its leader was Kataeb because of the murder of Bachir Gemayel. It’s even the same people, not even just the same parties: the same people during the civil war are in power today in Lebanon, which is hilarious, ironic. All of them should be in court.
EA: I try to bring stories of people into these episodes. So before we wrap up: we mentioned the complicity of pro-regime Palestinians, and the reason they are so toxic is that the regime does what it does while using Palestine as its shield, rhetorically. So it’s really important to mention the specific stories of people who are on both ends: victims of Israel and victims of the Assad regime.
NB: I keep talking about this young man, Khaled Bakrawi, who, if he were still alive, would be thirty-four or thirty-five. He was a friend of my younger brother, and he was like my younger brother. This guy—if you remember the Demonstrations for Return that took place in 2011, May and June—Khaled went to the June one, on the fifth of June, and he was shot by the Israelis. What happened that day was: there was a no-man’s-zone, the Israelis came from two sides, they entered the no-man’s-zone, and they took positions and started shooting. He was shot in his leg.
This was on June 5, 2011. And sometime in early 2012, I don’t remember when exactly, Khaled and I were working together for humanitarian aid to Syria, and suddenly he disappeared. And years later, when Caesar’s photos were released, he was one of the people who was tortured to death. We saw his face in these photos.
You will hear a lot of stories like this. One of my uncles was shot by the Israelis during the invasion in 1982 in Beirut, and he was arrested by the Syrian government and died later of a heart attack. There a lot of stories like this, Elia.
I would say also, just to be fair, that it’s good that there are some people on the Palestinian side who recognize that what happened in Syria is a massacre and Bashar al-Assad is a dictator. These are the people who we really need to bring their voices, because they have credibility. They are living under the Israeli occupation, or under the Israeli apartheid system in 1948 areas; they can represent the story of the Palestinian people everywhere, including our story as Palestinians in Syria.
So I’m happy that there are some people still out there that have the courage—because it takes courage, actually. This narrative will leave you sometimes with no friends at all, so it’s not an easy situation for you to be in. This is why I use the word “squeezed.” Because it’s squeezing, and it really takes a lot of work.
I hesitate sometimes to talk about these sentimental issues, Elia, but there is a whole generation that was born in the mid-eighties and early nineties in Syria, especially in the Palestinian refugee camps—we had some privilege, to be honest with you, of having some civil society movements, organizations, or forums that other Syrians did not have the privilege to enjoy. This was the generation of Khaled Bakrawi, the generation of citizenship and human rights, this generation taught our generation a lot of things. I learned from Khaled and from Hassan Hassan, who was an actor and comedian also from Yarmouk camp, who was arrested at a checkpoint and we found his photo also in Caesar’s photos—he was tortured to death by the Syrian government.
These two guys and others of their friends had a group, a forum, and they were fourteen years old when they started it. I remember the name: it was called Canaan Forum. I think it was in 2001 or 2002. These young people, all fourteen or fifteen years old, were discussing citizenship and social and cultural rights, and trying to understand Palestine from a human rights point of view.
This was the generation who really bore the burden of carrying the Syrian revolution, and this was the generation that was mostly massacred by the Syrian regime at the very beginning of the Syrian revolution, to an extent that the Syrian regime exhausted any possibility for a leader to come out of this revolution. The amount of killing was above and beyond what we can imagine. Part of this massacring was this category of young people who were born and raised especially after the Second Intifada in Palestine; that had a huge impact on this generation of Syrian Palestinians that I call the “human rights generation,” that we learned a lot from.
Because the older generation was really disappointing, honestly. So Khaled Bakrawi is one of a lot of people who would have had a bright future if they were still alive. But unfortunately, they are gone.
EA: Thank you for this. I’ll ask if there is anything that we haven’t mentioned that you want to talk about, and then to recommend three books to listeners, on any topic.
NB: When the war in Ukraine started, I was looking for something to understand Ukraine and their relationship with Russia, and that history. So there is this book, Ukraine: What Everyone Needs to Know, by Serhy Yekelchyk. It’s a really nice book; it’s small, but it takes you from current Ukraine, the Revolution of Dignity, back to the Orange Revolution, and then back to even the old Soviet Union and the older ages of that region of eastern Europe. It’s a really good book.
I also really encourage people to read these two books: Samir Kassir’s Dímúqrátiyyat súria wastiqlál lubnan [Syria’s Democracy and Lebanon’s Independence: In Search of the Damascus Spring, unavailable in English at the time of this transcription (December 2024)]—it’s really important—and ‘Askar ‘ala mén? [Soldiers Against Whom? Lebanon, the Lost Republic; also unavailable in English]. These two books are articles that were collected together, and both focus on details of daily political life in Syria and Lebanon.
It is really important. If you could read them, you will have a good perspective on what was going on between Syria and Lebanon in the nineties, and between 2000 and 2005 until Kassir was assassinated. They are very important to be read, for anyone who is interested in Lebanon, Palestine, and the region.
EA: I’m always happy when people recommend Samir Kassir. His books are not all translated, unfortunately, for non-Arabic speakers. All of them are in Arabic, some of them are in French, and a few of them have been translated into English, including his history of Beirut.
Thank you for your time, this was really fantastic. I’m sure none of this was easy to talk about, so I appreciate you doing so here.
NB: Thank you so much, Elia, I really appreciate it.
Featured image: thumbnail from a grainy eyewitness video of Yarmouk camp under heavy shelling by Assad regime forces in December 2012. Source: Shaam News Network (YouTube)
