For episode 180, Leila Al-Shami and Elia Ayoub are joined by Dr Banah Ghadbian to talk about her piece “Give Us Our Land Back: The Golan Heights, Greenwashing, Syria and Palestine’s Intertwined Revolutions” published on Spectre Journal.

As the title suggests, we spoke of the importance of the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights in the liberation of both Palestine and Syria. This was recorded before the fall of the Assad dynasty in Syria. Since then, Israel has already taken steps to occupy more of Syrian territory in the Golan Heights, making Banah’s arguments about how Syria and Palestine’s freedoms are intertwined even more pertinent. Leila also shares about the solidarity she experienced living in Gaza in the first couple of years of the Syrian revolution.

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For more:

• Listen to the previous episode with Banah on TFTT: 78/ Pedagogies of Liberation, Gender and the Syrian Revolution
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• Elia is on Bluesky, Mastodon, IG. He has a newsletter and a website.
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Transcriptions: Transcriptions are done by⁠ Antidote Zine⁠ and will be published on⁠ The Fire These Times’ transcript archive⁠.

Credits:

Leila Al Shami (host), Elia Ayoub (host, episode designer), Ayman Makarem (producer, sound editor), Elia Ayoub (episode design), ⁠⁠Rap and Revenge⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ (Music), ⁠⁠Wenyi Geng⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ (TFTT theme design), ⁠⁠Hisham Rifai⁠⁠⁠⁠ (FTP theme design) and ⁠⁠Molly Crabapple⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ (FTP team profile pics). 

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Transcript via Antidote Zine:

There is solidarity between Gaza and Syria, because there is a particular experience of having entire neighborhood blocks bombed.

Banah Ghadbian: My name is Dr. Banah Ghadbian; I teach comparative women’s studies at Spelman College, and I study the creative work of Syrian women. Thanks for having me.

Elia J. Ayoub: Thank you for doing this—this is the second time we’ve had Banah on; I’ll link the previous episode.

Leila al-Shami: It’s great to have you here, following the article you wrote last month in Spectre Journal called “Give Us Our Land Back: The Golan Heights, Greenwashing, Syria and Palestine’s Intertwined Revolutions.”

Just to start, what made you decide to write this article?

BG: I’ve been working on this for quite some time, because I felt like there were some gaps in leftist social movements that I was organizing in, around understanding Syria, Palestine, and Lebanon’s interconnectedness. It’s called “Give Us Our Land Back” because I felt people were missing the entire point: that this is a struggle about land, Indigenous land.

I use an eco-feminist analysis to understand that there is a particular orientation that Syrian, Palestinian, and Lebanese people have toward their land, and I connect it to a bigger concept that I’m trying to articulate around “Shamiya feminisms,” as a part of and in conversation with “Arab feminisms.” The idea is that there are non-Arab people in our lands, and also Arabs with minority ethno-religious positionings that should be accounted for, that uniquely situate them within Zionism, and that might get overlooked in an Arab framing.

That’s not to discount an “Arabness.” Arab nationalism is triggering for a lot of Syrians, as we see what our own regime has done in the name of Arab nationalism and fighting colonization, and the kinds of abuses it’s justified. So I wanted to have multiple layers of critique simultaneously: the anti-authoritarian, the anti-colonial, the anti-patriarchal, the anti-capitalist, and the anti-environmental-destruction lens all together at once.

LS: You start the article sharing what I imagine comes from your own frustration that on social media, since the war began on Gaza, we’ve seen so many people sharing pictures from Syria—bombed-out areas in Syria or children who were injured in Syria—and saying that these were pictures coming out of Gaza. Especially frustrating is when some of those people are the same ones who mocked or denied what was happening in Syria; they support Palestine, but they weren’t able to extend that same support to people in Syria.

BG: Exactly. And I was coming across that same kind of consciousness in organizing spaces. It’s hugely important in moments when images go viral to always contextualize them. A lot can be understood when we actually talk about the misrecognition and the differences.

As you said, I was noticing this photo set from Yarmouk, from [the documentary film] Little Palestine: Diary of a Siege by Abdallah al-Khatib, which many Syrians and Palestinians might be familiar with. But I don’t think people in the Global North or even leftist organizing spaces around the world might understand the context of Assad’s siege on Yarmouk refugee camp. 

Yarmouk refugee camp is the largest Palestinian refugee camp in the world, and it’s on the outskirts of Damascus. There were particular kinds of solidarities being forged and fought for there, and people like Khaled Bakrawi and others gave their lives to show that they were fighting both the Assad regime and Zionism. 

So when I saw those circulated without context—I mean, I could go on a whole vent about viral images from Syria and the harm that they’ve caused. They also play a particular role of creating a pitied refugee who’s depoliticized, who’s not an agent of their own liberation, who wasn’t displaced because of politics.

I wanted to focus on that moment and recognize that my friends from Gaza, even before this current iteration of the genocide, always told me that if you walk down the streets of Gaza, people understand Syria more than anywhere in the world.There is a solidarity between Gaza and Syria, because there is a particular experience of having entire neighborhood blocks bombed. I had one friend tell me that even though we have these issues in social movements in the Global North around Syria and Palestine and the misrecognition of the Syrian movement, if you were to go to Gaza, on the ground today people would understand Syria’s revolution more than anything, from a materialist place.

So I also felt like that consciousness was missing; there was some kind of shared experience—and of course it’s different, and those differences must be discussed. But it is a way of understanding each other that people were not knowledgeable about. 

LS: It’s important. When the Arab Spring started, I was living in Palestine and I was spending a lot of time in Gaza. And definitely, I felt so much support—people always asking what’s happening, How’s your family? I really felt that. It was only through doing internationalist solidarity work that I saw a very different side of the Palestine movement: people who would discredit what was happening in Syria.

There’s a shared understanding between Palestinians in Gaza and Syrians—and since October 7 we’ve seen so much solidarity coming out of Syria: people at demonstrations holding the Palestinian flag; in Idlib they’ve done a whole square in the Palestinian colors. There’s definitely a mutual understanding and mutual solidarity between people on the ground, but unfortunately that’s not translated into other circles.

EA: I had Mohammed Suleiman on two or three years ago. He was born and raised in Gaza (in Australia when we recorded), and he was talking a lot about the Assad regime on Twitter at the time, and he explicitly told me, I can tell you, I can guarantee you that very few people in Gaza have any sympathies whatsoever towards Bashar al-Assad.

And Refaat Alareer—many people would know him now, unfortunately, especially after he was assassinated last December in Gaza—tweeted repeatedly that Bashar al-Assad is as monstrous as all the Israeli leaders.

If we forget the other context that the three of us are familiar with as well—Syrian voices being erased, Yarmouk never being talked about, or if it is, only on conspiracy theory terms—if we forget all of this and just think: Of course they would think that. Of course most people who live under a brutal siege and blockade, who are also part of the same historical community, who have intimate ties with Syrians—of course they’re going to see the obvious parallels between bombed-out neighborhoods in Aleppo and in Gaza. Why wouldn’t they?

I try and remind myself of this. Because those are not the people who are currently dominating their spaces and the “discourse.”

LS: And of course that disconnect is perpetuated by the Syrian regime; the Syrian regime itself uses Palestine to boost its popularity; it presents itself as a defender of the Palestinian cause, as an “Axis of Resistance”—but that’s very different from how it treats Palestinian populations.

This is something you also talk about, Banah, in your essay.

BG: What both of you are pointing to is that a lot of us, and a lot of people who are in the region right now, from Bilad al-Sham, the Levant, have an intimate, bodily knowledge of the layers of generational violence and the political systems that caused those violences. In that layeredness comes a critique, and that’s where some feminist methodologies are useful.

I think of “theory of the flesh” by Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga, that if you were grounded in the flesh and the bodies of people who were experiencing these things, and even in its diaspora and the implications these political systems have created in terms of displacement, then from that place the critique would automatically include an awareness of the interconnectedness.

But so many people are not coming from the theory of the flesh. They’re coming from being on Twitter, and being in really mind-centered places, where it’s about “analysis.” But if you look at the experience of Palestinians in Syria, that will tell you everything you need to know about the interconnectedness of these systems of violence.

The ways that Palestinians in Syria were treated as second-class citizens under both Hafez al-Assad and Bashar al-Assad’s regimes; the ways they were tortured, imprisoned, and massacred, and also had their struggle co-opted by the same person abusing them claiming to fight for their liberation—that in itself is why they get so silenced. As you said, the propaganda of the regime is so strong, even in the left.

I also want to point out that among Syrians, too, because of some of these failures, I’ve also noticed a regression, where they feel like, Ugh, no one’s paid attention to us, why should we care now about Palestine? It’s so harmful, it’s so disrespectful to our embodied knowledges and histories. Even if you’re not Palestinian in Syria, the Zionist occupation is on your land. Even if you’re not Palestinian in Syria—my own family fought for Palestine, because it was a collective struggle. Before Camp David it was a united Arab struggle.

We’ve lost that—and of course the Zionists use that, and try to dismiss Palestinians and dismiss the usage of the term “Palestine,” and invisibilize them and say, This is an Arab thing. But we have lost the greater solidarity, and it’s due to the failure of our regimes.

EA: I genuinely believe that one of the core tenets of Assadism—authoritarianism à la Syria, authoritarianism as practiced by the Assad regime, first the father and then the son—is a structural anti-Palestinianism. There’s something profoundly anti-Palestinian, from the start, from the early 1970s, about Hafez and then Bashar al-Assad. Palestine was always at best a rhetorical device, a tool to be used whenever convenient at the local level, and also in terms of international posturing as an “anti-imperialist state.”

As someone who is from Lebanon and who comes from the very specific positionality of being against both the Israeli state’s project and the Syrian one, specifically the Assadist one—we lost Elias Khoury just a few days ago, and he was an embodiment of the understanding that it’s artificial to separate Syria and Palestine when we talk about how these regimes practice their authoritarianism, practice their power. They have always learned from one another.

In Lebanon, they literally co-occupied Lebanon militarily for a good couple of decades. We hear a lot about the Israeli one (not unreasonably so; it was very brutal) between 1982 and 2000. But the Syrian one ran parallel to this, from 1976 to 2005, on and off. They literally carved up Lebanon because it was convenient for them to do so.

As you mention yourself in the piece, the first big invasion of Lebanon was in 1976, and it was by Hafez al-Assad’s regime in order to protect the same establishment, the same sectarian elites, embodied by the Phalangists, especially Kataeb, that Israel would later intervene to protect, in 1982. Who was their enemy, in both cases? It was the Palestinian resistance and the Lebanese national movement, some communists here and there. Hafez al-Assad and the Israeli establishment both found them to be the enemy.

They agreed on who the enemy is! For me it’s very revealing.

BG: What you’re saying is really important. We have to talk about Lebanon, and the ways the Syrian regime has terrorized Palestinians, Syrians, and Lebanese people. That is part of this Shamiya/Bilad al-Sham consciousness I’m trying to share. This is beyond Syrian nationalism, Lebanese nationalism, or Palestinian nationalism. Our peoples have a specific Bilad al-Sham sovereignty and ties to our land that is disrupted, and that we are displaced by, because of authoritarianism and colonialism working together.

I also want to point out the role of class in all of this. It’s something that’s missing in a lot of leftist spaces that don’t understand the Syrian regime. They don’t understand the ways that this became an oligarchy that is a ruling class, that has so much economic and military power in the region (even if they’re positioned as the underdogs in this fight somehow). They have so much structural power, and it’s ironic because the entire point of the post-colonial movement after the French left was to redistribute the sectarian hierarchies that the French had created among Alawi and Sunni people. 

By allowing this man who came from a peasant Alawi background to be president—this was supposed to be a powerful thing, and then we saw him terrorize the peasant people, the Kurdish people, the Palestinian people, the Lebanese people—basically everyone who weren’t the upper-class Syrian city-dwelling elite. 

And I hate to say it like this, but there’s also a role that displacement plays here. I’m a child of people who fled Syria in the eighties and the seventies, and there’s a whole generation like me who grew up their whole lives feeling crazy, because we only met Syrians who were pro-regime in the cities—because their life was never impacted the way that the other classes were by the regime. 

There’s a lot of invisible things happening here that people are unaware of, and the story of Lebanon is one of them. The way the Assad regime facilitated heinous massacres and played such a huge role in occupying Lebanon is exactly speaking to the moment we’re in right now, too. I wish people understood that.

That’s what’s so ironic about the racist attacks on Syrians in Lebanon. It’s like, You know they’re being displaced by the same powers that oppress you, right? It doesn’t make any sense.

EA: No it doesn’t. Nationalism rarely does.

LS: Palestinians in Lebanon were also treated badly in the refugee camps. Despite the rhetoric of pro-Palestine, their situation is very bad.

EA: It’s the same playbook being recycled and applied to Syrians. They say so! Gebran Bassil, the leader of the Free Patriotic Movement, and other viciously anti-Palestinian figures, explain their anti-Syrianism (by which I mean anti-Syrian-refugees; they’re fine with the Assad regime) by evoking their anti-Palestinianism. They mate those things all the time.

BG: There’s a tactic I mention in the article that Hafez al-Assad’s troops used in Lebanon (this is extremely graphic): the “splitting” of Palestinians. They were literally using the methods of brutality that we see the Zionist state using, like tearing people’s bodies apart. That’s why I brought up [Palestinian feminist theorist] Nadera Shalhoub Kevorkian [in the article], because she has a whole theory about how Zionism scatters and tears the flesh apart. That’s part of their project: to destroy people’s bodies and also fracture them from their lands, fragment them, rip them from their roots.

The farmers in the Golan who I mentioned in the article are using apple-growing and cherry-growing and waterways as a way to resist colonization, and also Syrians are using roses, even now in Suweida, in this majority-Druze area, which is a lot like the Golan—they are using flowers and passing out grapes. This may seem trivial, but it is a way to resist that tearing-apart of the body, mind, land.

LS: And of course in the Golan, much of the Israeli occupation has been around control over resources, and denying people access to their land, access to their water sources. That’s a big factor in it.

BG: The work of Muna Dajani is really important, because she writes about the waterways of the Golan. The so-called state of Israel gets one-third of its water from the Golan, because it’s at the head of these tributaries, and they export this springwater to all of Europe. Companies like Eden Springs and the other ones I mention say they’re using one of the first “ethical, carbon-neutral climate action strategies” to do so, but during the siege on the Golan in the eighties, they cut off the waterways; that was a big part of it. So residents of the Golan dug alternative irrigation systems and sewage systems in resistance to this. 

There was also a way that the education system of the Zionist entity was trying to co-opt the Druze people and say that they were not Arab or Syrian, like they did to people inside of the borders, to Palestinian Druze people. They changed the textbooks to say that Golan is part of indigenous Israeli land—and the people of Golan created alternative curricula and pedagogies, and had underground kindergartens and underground sports camps. You just saw the fierce ties of the people to the land.

I talk about a wind turbine project that’s going on now, where they’ve tried to convince the Syrian farmers of Golan to give up the last five percent of their land to build a “sustainable, renewable” wind turbine project, and farmers are harassed and extorted, essentially, by these companies to force them to hand over their land, and they won’t. 

Even when we saw the children in Golan who were bombed and killed while playing soccer—you saw the Israelis, Netanyahu himself, coming to Golan and trying to normalize, trying to exploit and triangulate them, and say We’re in solidarity with you! And the people in Golan ran him off, said he was barbaric and they refuse.

EA: One man in the Golan was interviewed right after the attack that killed those twelve kids, and he specifically said, The only ones this benefits are Netanyahu and Hassan Nasrallah.

There is also a law prohibiting specific types of foraging, including akoub, zaatar, and so on, and there is a defiance, from a lot of folks who are from the land, to ignore the law. They have to constantly pay fines, but they want to continue to do it. Controlling the land has always been an extension of controlling bodies.

You mention the Assadist equivalent of this: flooding entire areas, Kurdish areas especially, to make way for these grand projects which authoritarian governments tend to be quite obsessed with.

BG: It reminds me of Omar Amiralay’s film A Flood in Baath Country. He was hired by the regime to do propaganda, and then through interviewing these villagers who were displaced by these modernization projects that flooded and destroyed their lands, he became politicized against the regime. So then he made this film in the early 2000s about the flooding of rural farmland.

That’s something my own family, who were rural farmworkers, experienced. They had a system from Roman times, irrigation tunnels from the Romans, so they had it really well-organized on how to share water; they’d done this for thousands of years. And the regime in the seventies and eighties confiscated a lot of the water sites, the springs. 

That thousand-year-old irrigation system was sustainable and had to do with sharing—you had a specific time of day when the water came on to water your crops, and there was someone in charge of making sure everyone used their water minutes, and you could donate your extra water minutes to another farmer family if there was that need. It was really cooperative; it was really socialist. Everyone got the same, but you could share if you opted to do that. The regime destroyed that delicate Indigenous farming practice by polluting the rivers, mismanaging the land, and doing mass land grabs of peasant farmers’ lands. 

And I have to mention the Lake Assad project in 1973. I didn’t even know about this! I should have known more; that’s my Arab privilege—I didn’t know that they drowned sixty-six Kurdish villages. The Assad regime displaced 332 villages and drowned 66 because of this Arab development.

LS: The Arabization of the area.

BG: Yeah, and it did remind me of Gamal Abdel Nasser and the Nubians, and the building of the Aswan dam and the use of water to colonize and to further displace people from their homes.

LS: That’s something we see clearly in the Golan as well: most the population was pushed out of the Golan, only five Arab Druze villages remained—and most of the water is diverted for agricultural settlements. The people of those villages who work in agriculture, who work the land, have very little access to water because they cannot develop their own resources and infrastructure; their wells are drying up, they have to pay more for water than the Israeli settlements in the region, and they have much stricter quotas on how much they can use.

It is a policy of using the water to make it untenable for people to stay on that land.

BG: Exactly. I mention this phrase from Golani farmers, who call it the rape of our groundwater. They couldn’t even collect the rain that fell on their land, and even despite that they still tried to build rainwater tanks and alternative irrigation systems. And I mention these projects in the eighties to bring Palestinian students to the Golan from Birzeit University, to show them how to build water tanks as a form of resistance, and how to move soil from the valleys to the mountains when you’re restricted with water, so you can grow apples. So these stories of solidarity are also land-based. 

I don’t have my dad’s farm anymore, so how am I going to teach all this random knowledge I have about water and irrigation? I don’t have a fraction of what my family who was on the ground had. Where does all that knowledge go? And how can we carry that across diasporas too, and exchange?

LS: This conversation is reminding me of a book I read recently, The Land in Our Bones.

BG: I love Layla [Feghali]! She’s one of my good friends, my sisters.

LS: It’s a wonderful book. It spoke powerfully to me, because I live on a smallholding, so I grow food here, it raises those issues of what the connection to the land means, and what those herbs mean to people in the diaspora, and the conversations that we’ve been having now about using protection of the land and growing as a form of resistance—how important that is.

BG: I cite her book when I say that the roses are a “plantcestor.” Layla Feghali coined that term in The Land in Our Bones to mean the land is our ancestor; and we take care of the land and it takes care of us. So when we have that splitting-apart of our bodies from the land, it is akin to the rape of our groundwater, just like they were saying. It’s an assault of a sexual nature, it’s a pulling of the roots. It’s so violent.

That’s why it’s so beautiful to me—and I don’t mean at all to romanticize it, because I was privy to some of the conversations in Syria’s revolution about using roses. You wrote about this too, Leila, the use of roses. It’s a technology; I call it a technology, because to reach toward the Earth when you’re being bombed and shot at and terrorized, to reach towards a flower and center that plantcestor—in Suweida today, I watch the women and men holding roses every Friday, and no one is talking about this! It’s still happening. They’re standing behind a statue of Sultan al-Atrash, the first leader of the first Syrian revolution against the French, and they’re holding roses—that’s so significant, for people across Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine, who have been so brutally torn from their lands, to hold that.

Razan Zeitouneh, who we know, who was kidnapped and we don’t know if she’s dead or alive—she wrote about the roses, too. She wrote that it was really controversial for people to hold the roses; people were criticizing it. This is really silly to do in the face of such brutality! Why would you do this? This is not effective. And early activists like Yahya Shurbaji, Ghiyath Matar, Islam Dabbas (some of them were Palestinian-Syrians, also) were brutally killed and tortured for holding these roses.

The things they left behind for us! When I watch videos of Yahya Shurbaji and how passionately he was talking about the roses—that’s another thing I wasn’t finding in social justice spaces that I was in, that connection to Earth. 

One last thing: those same youth who came up with the rose idea were part of the coordination committee of Daraya, and were activists in the early 2000s who fought against US imperialism in Iraq—and were actually imprisoned by the Assad regime for doing those protests in the 2000s! They also did street cleaning and anti-bribery campaigns. Those are the people who come up with roses: the ones who are anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, anti-regime, and pro-environmentalism.

We all have something to learn from that.

EA: I wrote an essay called “An Idea Called Daraya,” years ago now.

LS: It was a beautiful essay, that one.

EA: Thank you. Just to say that it was one attempt—your piece, and Leila’s work regularly does this too—at preserving a very specific thing that I felt could disappear very quickly if not talked about. Not that I was the only one doing it, obviously. But that was my impulse.

I’m wondering if we can talk a bit more about the centrality of—what would centering Yarmouk look like? How would that change one’s analysis? Let’s put it that way, as a way of reflecting on the frustrations that the three of us share towards this segment of the international left that is often very vocal on Palestine, and has this obvious problem when it comes to Palestine and Syria.

BG: First of all, from just hearing the experiences of friends who grew up in Yarmouk and the kinds of organizing that happened there—it has always been a hub of political consciousness. And the marches I mentioned that were happening in 2011 were part of a larger Bilad al-Sham March on the Borders in Lebanon and Syria: Syrian, Palestinian, and Lebanese people marched towards the Zionist artificial borders.

Yarmouk was under siege from 2012 to 2014. The regime bombed them, launched chemical rain; there were no medical supplies or food coming in and people were starving. It mirrors this year. I don’t want to conflate two things, because it is very different, but it mirrors Gaza so much, and the fact that they’re both Palestinian populations who are enduring this extreme starvation siege and genocide—and it was a genocide. 

That viral photo I talk about: those kids were saying, I dream of having bread, and people thought those were children from Gaza today. There was a level of deprivation and the use of tactics by the Assad regime—Razan Ghazzawi posted about this, that they were saying, Where do you think the Assad regime learned that from? That’s all from Israel. Where do you think they’re taking notes from, in how to starve and siege and genocide a people?

Yarmouk has to be at the center of this consciousness. Before that siege, people like Tal al-Mallohi, who aren’t even Palestinian, but they’re Syrians in solidarity about the failures of the Assad regime on Palestinians—she went to jail for writing about those failures, about the failures of the Arab state to protect Palestine. 

LS: And this was before the revolution that she was imprisoned.

BG: Yeah, that was in 2009. And she was only seventeen; she was the youngest prisoner of conscience in the world.

The existence of Branch 235, the Palestine Branch, in the prison system—it was called the Palestine Branch because they were fighting “Israeli spies” and they would send them there, so it was “for” Palestine. But ironically, it became notorious for the torture of Palestinians. And Syrians. It’s one of the most notorious branches of the military intelligence, which is only one arm of a fifteen-branch military and security apparatus, each one with different kinds of prisons and different offices. The Action Group for Palestinians in Syria documents how many Palestinians are taken. 

On a personal level, I went with Palestinian Youth Movement to Greece in 2016, when the EU-Turkey deal was happening and they were trying to deport all of the Syrians. That left Palestinian Syrians in a really hard place because they weren’t even considered “real refugees,” but they were also being deported back to Turkey and put at risk after they had experienced all these layers of violence.

I met a young man from Gaza—his grandparents were from Gaza, and then displaced by the Zionists; his parents grew up in Yarmouk refugee camp and then were displaced; and then he grew up in Dera’a, and he was part of the revolution there. You see in the lives of Palestinian Syrians what I was talking about as somatic knowledge of multiple generations of authoritarian and colonial violence, simultaneously.

Yarmouk shows us that again and again.

LS: Many Palestinians from Yarmouk refer to what happened to Yarmouk as “the second Nakba.” They were forcibly displaced—I think it was April 2018 when the regime retook control of the camp, and everybody left in the camp was pushed out. Until today, the vast majority of them cannot return.

Another similarity with Israel is the way that the Syrian regime uses housing management and property laws to confiscate and expropriate the property of the original inhabitants, and transfer it in this case to regime loyalists for development—but in a way that the original inhabitants, those who oppose the regime, are never able to return back to their homes.

If you look at the Law No. 10, one of the laws that has been used to confiscate property, it’s very similar to the Absentee Property Law that Israel uses to take land off Palestinians.

EA: At the time when the Syrian one was passed, there were Palestinian commentators, I remember, including Yousef Munayyer, saying, This looks familiar. This feels familiar. Because of course it is.

BG:Exactly. This goes back to the title, “Give Us Our Land Back.” This is about land. People keep forgetting. Especially in the Global North, especially in some of the spaces I’ve been in, people sometimes forget that this is a struggle over land. We get so lost in the semantics.

Even just to understand Zionist colonization: they want to steal the land, and they want to take people’s bodies off of the land. The scale of displacement in Palestine created the template for that; the amount of displaced Palestinians there are, and the generations we see—as a Syrian growing up, I didn’t know there were other Syrians who were forcibly displaced, because that generation was mostly lost and tortured, and very few made it out. But once 2011 happened, I saw the scale of a new diaspora. 

And it’s these interwoven diasporas now that we also have to talk about. What happens to the movement, what happens to our people, when you are displaced in these ways? What does it do, generationally? And now we’ve become racialized in other spaces. I’m looked at as a Latina woman—what does that mean? Or I might be considered white now, in some spaces!

I also really care about the work of connecting the work of racialization, even though people are wary of doing that. We don’t want to project US-centric frameworks of racialization, and we also don’t want to get sloppy. There have been Syrians who say, There are “black” and “white” Syrians, using those in a symbolic way when they are actually racial terms in Europe and the North that hold different weight. 

But I think of a project we did during the George Floyd and Breonna Taylor uprisings called “Syrians for Black Power.” It was a video of Palestinian Syrians from Yarmouk, Assyrian Syrians, Armenian Syrians, and Alawite Syrians for the revolution who came together and were in solidarity with Black Lives Matter. I think of Aziz al-Asmar in Binnish, Idlib, making those big murals for Palestine, for Gaza, and also for George Floyd.

What does it mean when we not only connect Bilad al-Sham together, but we also connect to other movements, to Black and Native movements, that we are now—and always have been, because of migration—implicated in? Also, we live in a world where these systems are global.

LS: It seems so obvious to me that we should be connecting all these different struggles, and there’s space to hold all these multiple oppressions. I don’t know why we’re still in a situation where for some people it just seems so difficult to do that. So many people cannot seem to support both Syria and Palestine struggles together, even though it’s not like George Floyd and Syria, which are actually quite distant from each other; they’re part of the same history, part of the same culture.

BG: When I talk to Syrians who have just fled from protests, and talk to them about police brutality in the US, they would say things like, I thought Syria was the only place where the police gun you down. There are these connections that are, again, from the flesh, from these experiences that are the key to our liberation and the map for our movements.

LS: I feel hopeful with having such a big diaspora population, that there’s much more potential for those connections to be made among populations in the diaspora. We’re coming into contact with each other; it’s a microcosm of the world if you go to Berlin or other certain areas. Maybe there’s hope that from those spaces, something new can be born.

EA: Would you say…from the peripheries?

LS: Exactly.

BG: With the diaspora, sometimes we just get into these silly little wars with each other that, again, if you were to listen to someone on the ground in Gaza, and go back to your friends and family on the ground, sometimes we just need that grounding and have to center those experiences. What I find so hard is, like you said, Leila, how it’s one or the other: I can do Syria or Palestine. That’s when the diaspora needs to shut the eff up and listen.

I’ll reserve my full rant about the Twitter world—I’m not even there—or certain leftists who have now become complete “authorities.” Knowledge, and the privilege of speaking and narrating the genocide in Gaza has been given to them? They’re not even Palestinian. They’re not even Syrian. They’re not experts. I don’t know their credentials other than that they are “journalists”  and they’re on Twitter.

LS: They don’t have credentials. It’s amazing that they can take up so much space, because they have nothing whatsoever to commend them to the region or this analysis.

BG: And those same people have been narrating for us. It’s a kind of leftist imperialism, where they’re narrating with authority that Syria and Palestine are separate. It’s not fair to us. And they’re normalizing with Assad, and they’re doing this hierarchy of oppression that it’s just not their role to do. And yet they’re given so much power and authority to do it.

EA: I do think there is such a thing as the imperial left, the colonial left. We know “white left,” that’s a term that’s more familiar. Aimé Césaire complained about this in the sixties; Fanon talked about this in the fifties. In and of itself, that is not particularly new. 

Now it’s just that plus the more modern phenomenon of whoever has the loudest persona online and is literally more shameless—because it’s about posting as much as possible, regardless of whether it’s accurate or not; the most outrageous possible, the least care about sensitivities. You don’t care about which images you’re sharing, no matter how gory it is; you don’t think about these things, because ultimately it’s about “engagement” or whatever.

I also don’t want to spend too much time on this, because they piss me off so much. But I wonder, as a way of slowly coming close to wrapping up—I do also have some hope. In many ways, this entire project exists as a consequence of me becoming part of the diaspora. I met Leila as another member of the diaspora—a different one, but also not so different. And I found out: although I was raised in Lebanon, and was in Lebanon up until the moment I left for my studies, and although obviously there were many more Syrians in Lebanon than those I met in London at the time, the power differential was no longer the same.

That made a huge difference. Because in Lebanon, despite my best efforts, despite my politics, despite all of this, I come from a background with all of these social structures that I can ignore as much as I want to, as an activist and a leftist and all that, but it doesn’t change the fact that the vast majority of Syrians are effectively ghettoized in so-called refugee camps. 

Makeshift tents; they’re not allowed to have any kind of structure that can even resemble something permanent. This goes back again—I mentioned before that this was applied Palestinians, initially; Palestinians to this day in refugee camps have these ridiculous laws, and layers of them, of what you can build. And that was just recycled to Syrians. 

But I’m saying this because when I got to a different space, physically—going back to flesh theory—I was now surrounded by Palestinians, Syrians, some Palestinians who were born and raised in Lebanon, and suddenly we were like, Okay, well, we’re all diaspora now. It’s not that where you come from doesn’t matter; of course it does. But the power differentials within the systems we grew up in, in Lebanon or Syria, we can cast them aside, at least temporarily, in order to get to know one another.

And actually this is how I got to know more about Yarmouk. This is where I met folks who were from Yarmouk and who introduced me to this—at the time it almost felt like an open secret how much resentment and sadness there is towards the global Palestine movement. Because they viewed themselves as Palestinians; their parents and grandparents are Palestinian; some of them still have direct connections and relatives in Palestine, Gaza included; and they felt very alienated from the movement because it’s almost like Yarmouk doesn’t matter.

And yet Sabra and Shatila matters. For good reasons, obviously! But not Tel al-Zaatar, as much. And that was part of your essay as well. I’m trying to just hold this, in many ways; it feels very important to do so. Because these layers of erasures end up severing the links between the destruction and massacre of people in Yarmouk and the destruction and massacre of Tel al-Zaatar, the destruction and massacre in Sabra and Shatila (which was, in that case also, an act of genocide) and the destruction and massacre and ongoing genocide in Gaza today.

Even though the tactics are fairly similar—the technology changes; the intentions are more or less similar. And in those specific cases, the people being victimized are more or less the same people! In some cases literally. There are people, Palestinian-Syrian refugees, who were themselves refugees from modern Israel, who got into Yarmouk and then after 2011 became refugees in Lebanon. Double refugees—that’s how they called them. Those people hold all of those experiences just in their day-to-day, before politics even enters the fray. This is life.

BG: Exactly. It’s such an interesting place. All the great poets talk about exile, and the new consciousness but also the painful, irreversible state that it creates. It’s like a satellite state; you’re always orbiting around, and things that you didn’t see because of the level of segregation among class and ethno-religious groups, and the invisible ways the systems position us against each other in the Bilad, in the homelands—when you enter diaspora…even in early Syrian organizing in Turkey as a youth, I remember I had never, in our very insular, religiously conservative Syrian family and community spaces in diaspora, met an Assyrian-Syrian. 

And suddenly I was meeting a Syrian anarchist feminist who smoked weed, and I was like, I didn’t know you could exist. Or I was meeting a Kurdish street philosopher, or I was meeting Circassian women. I had never heard of that ethnic group! I think if we had grown up alongside each other in Syria I would have never heard of them, because we would have been kept so disparate. My family would have stayed insular and I would have never met these other members of society, and classes and sects in society, who then taught me their struggle that I had never heard about before in detail and understood.

Similarly, I wouldn’t have known Palestinian Syrians. I would have been privileged in relationship to them. Actually, that’s interesting, because a lot of peasant Syrians had class solidarity with the ways that Palestinians were ghettoized and forced into camps. But when you enter diaspora, we get a little lost, because we lose our footing in our relationships to the homeland, and we forget to center people on the ground. Also, though, we’re kind of in a new floating orbit with other satellite moons and planets that were not visible to us before.

And that’s other ethnic groups beyond our region, too. The newest thing I’ve been sharing about and doing workshops about is Black/African-American, and Shamiya/Bilad al-Sham/Lebanon-Syria-Palestine solidarity history. It is so deep! It’s over a century of African-American and pan-African solidarity with the Levant. People talk about Fatima Bernawi, who was an Afro-Palestinian woman who was the first to be imprisoned, but they don’t know her father came from Nigeria to fight the British during the Great Arab Revolt of the 1930s in Palestine. These solidarities against mutual colonizers are cross-African, cross-SWANA, cross-Bilad-al-Sham solidarities.

My own ancestry on my mom’s side is Algerian, because there was a great migration of Algerians who fought the French, who were coming to Syria to fight the French. We’ve always had these diasporas in different ways, and it’s always been a part of who we are. Layla, in The Land in Our Bones, calls the Middle East “the crossroads,” because we really are the crossroads between so many different peoples and struggles, and there’s so much to excavate from our histories and learn for the future.

EA: I think that’s an amazing note to end on. Leila, I don’t know if you wanted to add anything.

LS: No, I was thinking the same.

EA: Thank you Banah, thank you Leila for hosting this. See you next time.