What does the fall of the Assad regime mean for the Palestinian struggle?
Author Anne Alexander and German-Palestinian activist Ramsis Kilani detail the context of the Middle East in the wake of Assad's fall, the opportunities for mass resistance in Syria and, crucially, what it means for Palestinian liberation
In Depth
SOCIALIST WORKER
Tuesday 14 January 2025
Issue 2938
The fall of Assad, and the failures of the 2011 Syrian revolution, have implications for the Palestinian struggle
The fall of the Assad regime has triggered polarised reactions from Palestinian activists and in the broader Palestine solidarity movement.
One tendency views the collapse of Assad’s regime as a catastrophe. The collapse compounds the damage inflicted on Hezbollah in Lebanon in its war with Israel. According to this viewpoint, the weakening of the Axis of Resistance—Iran and the militias it backs—constitutes a major setback for the Palestinian liberation movement.
Others have celebrated Assad’s fall, on the grounds that HTS’ leader Mohamed al-Jolani will allow Sunni Muslims to “emerge as a major power in the area and work for the liberation of Palestine,” according to researcher Zain Hussain.
What these two sharply-divided analyses have in common is their focus on liberation strategies “from above”. But the success of Syrian rebels has also revived discussions around resistance “from below”. Assad’s fall may create opportunities to rebuild mass mobilisations and popular resistance, both in Syria and the Middle East.
These debates unfold as Israeli forces escalate their hideous crimes. Indeed, the aftermath of Assad’s overthrow has more evidence of Israeli ambitions for territorial expansion, including the seizure of Mount Hermon overlooking Syria’s capital Damascus.
The long process which led to the fall of Assad illustrates once again two basic features of the struggle for Palestinian liberation.
First is the weakness of strategies based on conventional military contests with Israeli forces, which naturally depend on the support of regional states.
Secondly, an alternative strategy is one which places the Palestine revolution where it belongs— at the heart of the struggle of ordinary people across the region to liberate themselves.
This demands the active and conscious participation of organised workers to have the best chance of succeeding. That in turn requires political space for workers and the poor to organise themselves independently of the state.
Only under these conditions can the masses make Palestinian liberation one of their own demands and recognise the overthrow of regional tyrants a necessary step in their victory.
The collapse of Assad’s regime has demonstrated once again the limitations of relying on regional states to provide a bulwark against Israeli aggression using the tools of conventional warfare. Despite the hopes of many, the Axis of Resistance was not able to match the military capacity of Israel and its Western backers.
If Hamas intended the 7 October attacks to mobilise other regional states behind its besieged fighters and overwhelm Israeli forces, this has not happened so far. Both the leaders of Iran or Hezbollah were hesitant over escalating missile exchanges with Israel in response to the brutal assault on Gaza.
The leaders of Hezbollah and Iran were clearly operating under greater constraints than their Israeli counterparts. Their hesitation created opportunities for the Israeli military to pick off Hezbollah’s experienced leadership and pound Lebanon into a ceasefire. The Axis of Resistance was unable to combine the military resources of its members to outweigh Israel’s Western-backed firepower.
On the other hand, if the 7 October attacks were primarily a diplomatic gambit to stimulate negotiations on more favourable terms for Palestinians, they were also a miscalculation. Israel’s genocide has made the normalisation of Saudi-Israeli relations more difficult, in the short-term at least.
The implementation of the Abraham Accords—the attempt at normalisation in 2020—will be harder. But it also revealed the depths of the Western powers’ political support for Israeli, despite considerable levels of opposition from their own citizens. The Israeli leadership has so far enjoyed complete political impunity where it matters—among their Western allies and principal arms and military components suppliers.
Some, such as author Tariq Ali, have suggested that Assad’s fall means Turkey, Israel and the Gulf States can now dismember Syria, as part of a resurgent US plan to reshape the Middle East. While Turkey has clearly benefitted from Assad’s collapse, and played a key role in it, Turkey has its own ambitions. These have the potential to create future conflicts, as Israeli officials’ concerns over the transfer of Turkish arms to HTS illustrate.
But do these setbacks mean Israel is certain of victory over Hamas and other resistance groups?
The US acted with similar levels of brutality and apparent impunity as it napalmed, defoliated and bombed its way across Vietnam and Cambodia, yet still ultimately lost. French colonial forces killed at least one in ten of Algeria’s 1954 population, but ultimately failed.
Israeli forces, despite superior firepower, have been unable to eradicate resistance fighters in South Lebanon and Gaza. Moreover, their expanding occupation in Syria will create a new insurgency. Israeli troops shot and wounded seven residents of Al-Suwisa village protesting over the occupation of their land in one of many incidents in the areas recently seized.
The other factor limiting Israel’s victory is the rage and fury of the dispossessed, which can power national liberation movements from below. It is those who have nowhere left to go, the ones who never had the luxury to buy an escape route, who turn out to be unconquerable. It is not an accident that Palestinian refugee camps have forged so many generations of fighters, even if leaders are drawn from higher social classes.
This rage is certainly present in the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank. Here, it is not difficult to see dynamics of a kind of class war unfolding in the recent escalation of clashes and resistance. Israel devastated Jenin during the Second Intifada and repeatedly bombards it. It also has one of highest levels of poverty and unemployment in the West Bank. New resistance formations are emerging as factions from Palestinian Islamic Jihad to the Fatah party’s Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades join forces.
Recent attacks on the camp, abductions and assassinations of several fighters have been carried out not by Israelis, but by the Palestinian Authority’s (PA) militarised police force. Young men and women have staged mass protests, surrounded the PA’s armoured police vehicles, denouncing the security officers as traitors and collaborators.
Other camps, such as al-Am’ari near Ramallah, Tulkarem and Al-Khalil are too drawing the conclusion that PA is an obstacle to the struggle against genocide and settler colonialism.
The story of Assad’s downfall echoes the Palestinian struggle. Part of the political appeal of HTS’ military offensive was a powerful story of return from exiled and impoverished refugees. Images of fighters marching from the Syrian city of Idlib to the areas they were forced to leave a decade ago will remain with Syrians for many years.
As Palestinian writer Ahmad Ibsais points out, these images have special meaning for many Palestinians. “The images of Syrians returning home have stirred something deep in our collective consciousness—the possibility of a return, of roads reconnected, of borders erased by the simple act of people walking home.”
But there are many contradictions in Syria after Assad. There are potential tensions between the interests of rank and file exiled fighters and Jolani’s leadership bent on inserting itself into the state machine—and integrating that machine into the global system.
Jolani’s pragmatism towards Israel is partially a result of the same types of pressures that drove former PA leader Yasser Arafat towards compromise and betrayal. The pressure to present a reasonable face to uncertain allies and fickle friends to secure funding to rebuild shattered homes, pay government workers’ wages and gain access to weapons will likely work themselves even more quickly than in the Palestinian case.
There are further reasons to be wary of HTS and sceptical of its role in Palestinian liberation. One of these is the chauvinist and sectarian inclinations of figures such as Jolani who are more focussed on a battle with Iranian influence in the region than the Palestinian cause. The reactionary politics of the HTS leadership on issues such as women’s rights and the authoritarian nature of the state it wants to build are a threat to Syrians who have fought so hard for liberation.
There is a problem with reducing the debate about the overthrow of Assad to an assessment of the ‘revolutionary’ potential of two different elite strategies. It risks obscuring three important lessons for the Palestinian struggle that can be taken from the Syrian revolution in 2011.
The first is that Syria’s uprising was powered by the rage of the marginalised and dispossessed. Impoverished suburbs of the major cities acted as vital reservoirs for revolutionary mobilisations, becoming spaces of sanctuary and hope in the face of the regime’s repression. They also paid a heavy price for their defiance through sieges, starvation, bombardment and exile, yet never gave up. When conditions allowed, ordinary people began to organise themselves again to demand basic freedoms and social justice.
Secondly, the fate of the Palestinian community in Yarmouk in South Damascus demonstrates the impossibility of ‘neutrality’ or ‘non-interference’ for ordinary Palestinians during a popular revolution. By 2011 the original camp in Yarmouk was integrated into the surrounding working class suburbs—Palestinian identity despite the difficulties. Palestinians wanting to join the revolution were threatened with massacres and becoming refugees again.
Despite this, many Palestinians instinctively and unconditionally saw themselves on the side of the people against the state and acted accordingly.
This was why the camp exploded first against the Palestinian factions allied with the Assad regime, such as the PFLP-GC This armed faction’s leadership acted essentially as mercenaries for Assad’s Ba’athist state. The first major confrontation came after the PFLF-GC recruited young activists for a demonstration on the border of the occupied Golan Heights in June 2011. Israeli forces shot and killed over 20 Palestinians.
The funerals brought 30,000 onto the streets of Yarmouk, and anger turned towards the Syrian regime. Protesters accused the PFLP-GC of spending the lives of Yarmouk’s young people to try and deflect attention from the increasingly brutal crackdown on protests against Assad’s rule. These had been underway for six weeks by that time and, according to media reports, PFLP-GC gunmen opened fire on the crowd.
Syrian-Palestinian writer Nidal Betare recalled later his intense feelings of release during the June 2011 funeral protest in Yarmouk.
“In that demonstration, I realized I was screaming the word freedom from the bottom of my heart because I longed for it: I craved it. I also realized that Palestine was nothing but the bridle that the regime had covered our mouths with for 30 years of my life. I chanted a lot, and that barrier collapsed, the veil was pulled back.”
Over the following years, the Assad regime’s war on the people would grow ever more intense. In December 2012, the Syrian air force first bombed Yarmouk, forcing most residents to flee. The following year, the regime besieged the area, subjecting it to the Syrian government’s “surrender or starve” policy aimed at breaking both political and armed resistance.
The grim similarities with the horrors Israel forces upon Palestinians in northern Gaza a decade later are clear to see.
The third key lesson from is that the fury of the dispossessed and the marginalised was not enough on its own to destroy the regime. What was missing in the Syrian experience was an organic connection between revolutionary activism in the streets and the workplaces.
The absence of an independent working class movement has devastating consequences. The revolution was unable to deny Assad’s regime the use of public sector workplaces, schools and hospitals, as well as public squares as platforms for its propaganda.
Ultimately, it was unable to shut down normal life in the heart of the capital. Unlike in Tunisia and Egypt, the revolution could not impose on Syrian society as a whole the realisation that it was time to take sides.
The intervention of organised workers does not prevent immense state violence. But, as seen in the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions of 2011, and the Sudanese revolution of 2019 it can constrain or delay the deployment of the kind of deadly force that the Assad regime used in Syria to fragment the popular movement.
As in 2011, strikes in solidarity with Palestinian resistance have the greatest potential to turn the tide. Strikes create a different dynamic of escalation to street protests. They threaten to disrupt transport and public services, stop the import and export of goods or flows of finance through the banking system.
One of the more hopeful outcomes of the large-scale Palestine solidarity movements in Europe and the US has been the modest, but important attempts to take action in the workplaces for Palestine.
In Europe and the US, one of the more hopeful outcomes of the large-scale Palestine movements is the important attempts to take action in the workplace. University workers’ strikes in the US and Netherlands have challenged the repression of Palestine encampments. The trade union SI Cobas in Italy has called strikes, arms factory pickets and port blockades, co-organised with Giovanni Palestinese d’Italia, a network of Palestinian activists.
In Britain, workplace days of action have involved protests and symbolic walkouts rather than strikes, but some have involved impressive numbers of workplaces.
There is no doubt that the place where a revival of workers’ struggles would have the greatest impact for Palestinian liberation currently is in Egypt. A chill wind from Damascus has been blowing through the corridors of president Abdel Fattah El-Sisi’s palaces.
The Egyptian state has been busy arresting Syrians for daring to celebrate the downfall of a dictator in case their hopes for liberation prove contagious. The media is in overdrive attempting to ‘disprove’ evidence of atrocities of the Ba’athist torture machine precisely because the similarities between Sednaya and Toura Prison, near Cairo, are patently obvious.
In Egypt, the majority experience grinding poverty, while the enriched elite is deeply complicit in the genocide in Gaza. These contradictions have not yet exploded into a protest or strike movement which threatens the regime.
If it did, this would transform the situation in the Middle East opening immense possibilities to relieve pressures on the Palestinian resistance in Gaza.
The fall of Assad, and the failures of the 2011 Syrian revolution, have implications for the Palestinian struggle
The fall of the Assad regime has triggered polarised reactions from Palestinian activists and in the broader Palestine solidarity movement.
One tendency views the collapse of Assad’s regime as a catastrophe. The collapse compounds the damage inflicted on Hezbollah in Lebanon in its war with Israel. According to this viewpoint, the weakening of the Axis of Resistance—Iran and the militias it backs—constitutes a major setback for the Palestinian liberation movement.
Others have celebrated Assad’s fall, on the grounds that HTS’ leader Mohamed al-Jolani will allow Sunni Muslims to “emerge as a major power in the area and work for the liberation of Palestine,” according to researcher Zain Hussain.
What these two sharply-divided analyses have in common is their focus on liberation strategies “from above”. But the success of Syrian rebels has also revived discussions around resistance “from below”. Assad’s fall may create opportunities to rebuild mass mobilisations and popular resistance, both in Syria and the Middle East.
These debates unfold as Israeli forces escalate their hideous crimes. Indeed, the aftermath of Assad’s overthrow has more evidence of Israeli ambitions for territorial expansion, including the seizure of Mount Hermon overlooking Syria’s capital Damascus.
The long process which led to the fall of Assad illustrates once again two basic features of the struggle for Palestinian liberation.
First is the weakness of strategies based on conventional military contests with Israeli forces, which naturally depend on the support of regional states.
Secondly, an alternative strategy is one which places the Palestine revolution where it belongs— at the heart of the struggle of ordinary people across the region to liberate themselves.
This demands the active and conscious participation of organised workers to have the best chance of succeeding. That in turn requires political space for workers and the poor to organise themselves independently of the state.
Only under these conditions can the masses make Palestinian liberation one of their own demands and recognise the overthrow of regional tyrants a necessary step in their victory.
The collapse of Assad’s regime has demonstrated once again the limitations of relying on regional states to provide a bulwark against Israeli aggression using the tools of conventional warfare. Despite the hopes of many, the Axis of Resistance was not able to match the military capacity of Israel and its Western backers.
If Hamas intended the 7 October attacks to mobilise other regional states behind its besieged fighters and overwhelm Israeli forces, this has not happened so far. Both the leaders of Iran or Hezbollah were hesitant over escalating missile exchanges with Israel in response to the brutal assault on Gaza.
The leaders of Hezbollah and Iran were clearly operating under greater constraints than their Israeli counterparts. Their hesitation created opportunities for the Israeli military to pick off Hezbollah’s experienced leadership and pound Lebanon into a ceasefire. The Axis of Resistance was unable to combine the military resources of its members to outweigh Israel’s Western-backed firepower.
On the other hand, if the 7 October attacks were primarily a diplomatic gambit to stimulate negotiations on more favourable terms for Palestinians, they were also a miscalculation. Israel’s genocide has made the normalisation of Saudi-Israeli relations more difficult, in the short-term at least.
The implementation of the Abraham Accords—the attempt at normalisation in 2020—will be harder. But it also revealed the depths of the Western powers’ political support for Israeli, despite considerable levels of opposition from their own citizens. The Israeli leadership has so far enjoyed complete political impunity where it matters—among their Western allies and principal arms and military components suppliers.
Some, such as author Tariq Ali, have suggested that Assad’s fall means Turkey, Israel and the Gulf States can now dismember Syria, as part of a resurgent US plan to reshape the Middle East. While Turkey has clearly benefitted from Assad’s collapse, and played a key role in it, Turkey has its own ambitions. These have the potential to create future conflicts, as Israeli officials’ concerns over the transfer of Turkish arms to HTS illustrate.
But do these setbacks mean Israel is certain of victory over Hamas and other resistance groups?
The US acted with similar levels of brutality and apparent impunity as it napalmed, defoliated and bombed its way across Vietnam and Cambodia, yet still ultimately lost. French colonial forces killed at least one in ten of Algeria’s 1954 population, but ultimately failed.
Israeli forces, despite superior firepower, have been unable to eradicate resistance fighters in South Lebanon and Gaza. Moreover, their expanding occupation in Syria will create a new insurgency. Israeli troops shot and wounded seven residents of Al-Suwisa village protesting over the occupation of their land in one of many incidents in the areas recently seized.
The other factor limiting Israel’s victory is the rage and fury of the dispossessed, which can power national liberation movements from below. It is those who have nowhere left to go, the ones who never had the luxury to buy an escape route, who turn out to be unconquerable. It is not an accident that Palestinian refugee camps have forged so many generations of fighters, even if leaders are drawn from higher social classes.
This rage is certainly present in the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank. Here, it is not difficult to see dynamics of a kind of class war unfolding in the recent escalation of clashes and resistance. Israel devastated Jenin during the Second Intifada and repeatedly bombards it. It also has one of highest levels of poverty and unemployment in the West Bank. New resistance formations are emerging as factions from Palestinian Islamic Jihad to the Fatah party’s Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades join forces.
Recent attacks on the camp, abductions and assassinations of several fighters have been carried out not by Israelis, but by the Palestinian Authority’s (PA) militarised police force. Young men and women have staged mass protests, surrounded the PA’s armoured police vehicles, denouncing the security officers as traitors and collaborators.
Other camps, such as al-Am’ari near Ramallah, Tulkarem and Al-Khalil are too drawing the conclusion that PA is an obstacle to the struggle against genocide and settler colonialism.
The story of Assad’s downfall echoes the Palestinian struggle. Part of the political appeal of HTS’ military offensive was a powerful story of return from exiled and impoverished refugees. Images of fighters marching from the Syrian city of Idlib to the areas they were forced to leave a decade ago will remain with Syrians for many years.
As Palestinian writer Ahmad Ibsais points out, these images have special meaning for many Palestinians. “The images of Syrians returning home have stirred something deep in our collective consciousness—the possibility of a return, of roads reconnected, of borders erased by the simple act of people walking home.”
But there are many contradictions in Syria after Assad. There are potential tensions between the interests of rank and file exiled fighters and Jolani’s leadership bent on inserting itself into the state machine—and integrating that machine into the global system.
Jolani’s pragmatism towards Israel is partially a result of the same types of pressures that drove former PA leader Yasser Arafat towards compromise and betrayal. The pressure to present a reasonable face to uncertain allies and fickle friends to secure funding to rebuild shattered homes, pay government workers’ wages and gain access to weapons will likely work themselves even more quickly than in the Palestinian case.
There are further reasons to be wary of HTS and sceptical of its role in Palestinian liberation. One of these is the chauvinist and sectarian inclinations of figures such as Jolani who are more focussed on a battle with Iranian influence in the region than the Palestinian cause. The reactionary politics of the HTS leadership on issues such as women’s rights and the authoritarian nature of the state it wants to build are a threat to Syrians who have fought so hard for liberation.
There is a problem with reducing the debate about the overthrow of Assad to an assessment of the ‘revolutionary’ potential of two different elite strategies. It risks obscuring three important lessons for the Palestinian struggle that can be taken from the Syrian revolution in 2011.
The first is that Syria’s uprising was powered by the rage of the marginalised and dispossessed. Impoverished suburbs of the major cities acted as vital reservoirs for revolutionary mobilisations, becoming spaces of sanctuary and hope in the face of the regime’s repression. They also paid a heavy price for their defiance through sieges, starvation, bombardment and exile, yet never gave up. When conditions allowed, ordinary people began to organise themselves again to demand basic freedoms and social justice.
Secondly, the fate of the Palestinian community in Yarmouk in South Damascus demonstrates the impossibility of ‘neutrality’ or ‘non-interference’ for ordinary Palestinians during a popular revolution. By 2011 the original camp in Yarmouk was integrated into the surrounding working class suburbs—Palestinian identity despite the difficulties. Palestinians wanting to join the revolution were threatened with massacres and becoming refugees again.
Despite this, many Palestinians instinctively and unconditionally saw themselves on the side of the people against the state and acted accordingly.
This was why the camp exploded first against the Palestinian factions allied with the Assad regime, such as the PFLP-GC This armed faction’s leadership acted essentially as mercenaries for Assad’s Ba’athist state. The first major confrontation came after the PFLF-GC recruited young activists for a demonstration on the border of the occupied Golan Heights in June 2011. Israeli forces shot and killed over 20 Palestinians.
The funerals brought 30,000 onto the streets of Yarmouk, and anger turned towards the Syrian regime. Protesters accused the PFLP-GC of spending the lives of Yarmouk’s young people to try and deflect attention from the increasingly brutal crackdown on protests against Assad’s rule. These had been underway for six weeks by that time and, according to media reports, PFLP-GC gunmen opened fire on the crowd.
Syrian-Palestinian writer Nidal Betare recalled later his intense feelings of release during the June 2011 funeral protest in Yarmouk.
“In that demonstration, I realized I was screaming the word freedom from the bottom of my heart because I longed for it: I craved it. I also realized that Palestine was nothing but the bridle that the regime had covered our mouths with for 30 years of my life. I chanted a lot, and that barrier collapsed, the veil was pulled back.”
Over the following years, the Assad regime’s war on the people would grow ever more intense. In December 2012, the Syrian air force first bombed Yarmouk, forcing most residents to flee. The following year, the regime besieged the area, subjecting it to the Syrian government’s “surrender or starve” policy aimed at breaking both political and armed resistance.
The grim similarities with the horrors Israel forces upon Palestinians in northern Gaza a decade later are clear to see.
The third key lesson from is that the fury of the dispossessed and the marginalised was not enough on its own to destroy the regime. What was missing in the Syrian experience was an organic connection between revolutionary activism in the streets and the workplaces.
The absence of an independent working class movement has devastating consequences. The revolution was unable to deny Assad’s regime the use of public sector workplaces, schools and hospitals, as well as public squares as platforms for its propaganda.
Ultimately, it was unable to shut down normal life in the heart of the capital. Unlike in Tunisia and Egypt, the revolution could not impose on Syrian society as a whole the realisation that it was time to take sides.
The intervention of organised workers does not prevent immense state violence. But, as seen in the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions of 2011, and the Sudanese revolution of 2019 it can constrain or delay the deployment of the kind of deadly force that the Assad regime used in Syria to fragment the popular movement.
As in 2011, strikes in solidarity with Palestinian resistance have the greatest potential to turn the tide. Strikes create a different dynamic of escalation to street protests. They threaten to disrupt transport and public services, stop the import and export of goods or flows of finance through the banking system.
One of the more hopeful outcomes of the large-scale Palestine solidarity movements in Europe and the US has been the modest, but important attempts to take action in the workplaces for Palestine.
In Europe and the US, one of the more hopeful outcomes of the large-scale Palestine movements is the important attempts to take action in the workplace. University workers’ strikes in the US and Netherlands have challenged the repression of Palestine encampments. The trade union SI Cobas in Italy has called strikes, arms factory pickets and port blockades, co-organised with Giovanni Palestinese d’Italia, a network of Palestinian activists.
In Britain, workplace days of action have involved protests and symbolic walkouts rather than strikes, but some have involved impressive numbers of workplaces.
There is no doubt that the place where a revival of workers’ struggles would have the greatest impact for Palestinian liberation currently is in Egypt. A chill wind from Damascus has been blowing through the corridors of president Abdel Fattah El-Sisi’s palaces.
The Egyptian state has been busy arresting Syrians for daring to celebrate the downfall of a dictator in case their hopes for liberation prove contagious. The media is in overdrive attempting to ‘disprove’ evidence of atrocities of the Ba’athist torture machine precisely because the similarities between Sednaya and Toura Prison, near Cairo, are patently obvious.
In Egypt, the majority experience grinding poverty, while the enriched elite is deeply complicit in the genocide in Gaza. These contradictions have not yet exploded into a protest or strike movement which threatens the regime.
If it did, this would transform the situation in the Middle East opening immense possibilities to relieve pressures on the Palestinian resistance in Gaza.
