Give Us Our Land Back

The Golan Heights, Greenwashing, Syria and Palestine’s Intertwined Revolutions

Banah Ghadbian

August 6, 2024

Since October 7, social media accounts have circulated “viral” images of the genocide in Gaza that are actually from Syria. For example, social media users have posted an image of Palestinian children naming their dreams (“I want to eat bread; I want my father to be released from prison”). These posts are meant to raise awareness about Zionist prisons, yet the image is from Abdallah Al-Khatib’s Little Palestine: Diary of a Siege—a film about the Assad regime’s siege of Yarmouk refugee camp in Syria, not the Zionist occupation of Gaza.

The misrecognition of these images and their decontextualized circulation show the similar experiences of genocide under the Assad regime and in Gaza. Susan Abulhawa posted graffiti that read “when and where I die does not concern me. All I care about is for the screams and chants of the revolutionaries to remain and fill the earth with their agitation until there is no more injustice built on the bodies of the poor and defenseless.”¹ Although Abulhawa labeled the graffiti as “written on the ruins of Gaza,” it is actually from the Creative Memory of the Syrian Revolution archives.² Instead of using this “viral” moment for self-reflection on the way our collective movements intersect, this same activist cast doubt on Assad’s chemical weapons attacks in Syria. The experiences of those now called “Syrian-Palestinians” (Syrians displaced from Syria to Gaza) and Palestinian-Syrians (Palestinians displaced from Palestine to Syria) reveal deeply overlapping experiences of structural violence.³ Why are Syria and Gaza’s conditions so similar? Is there a consciousness that can encompass a critique of patriarchy, colonialism, environmental destruction, classism, ableism, and authoritarian violence simultaneously?

This intervention examines: 1) Assad’s treatment of Palestinians in Syria as part of the motivation for the Syrian Uprisings; 2) the Zionist entity’s settler occupation of Syria in Golan and its use of “greenwashing”; 3) places and movements among Syrians where consciousness of multiple oppressions converge, and in particular, where a relationship to earth (using roses and apples as technologies of resistance) defies both the settler-colonial and neoliberal regime logics of domination.

Syrian child with sign, “Oh Gaza, Hobait [a village in Syria] is with you until death. Our blood is one and our pain is one,” 2012.¹

The Assad Regime and Palestinians of Syria

In March 2011, a popular uprising began in Syria.⁴ Children of rural Deraa scribbled graffiti on their school walls that read “Your Turn Doctor!”; “Freedom! Freedom!”;’ and the Arab Spring slogan, “the People Want the Fall of the Regime.”⁵ Community members flooded Deraa’s streets on March 18, 2011, the “Friday of Dignity,” to demand accountability from the Syrian state.⁶ The Assad’s regime’s betrayal of Palestine, treatment of ethnic minorities, threats of sexual violence toward Deraan mothers, and the egregious state of prisoner’s rights and the conditions of disenfranchised farm-working communities were at the roots of the revolutionary fervor.⁷ The regime’s responded by first shooting down protestors, then barrel-bombing their neighborhoods (with chemical weapons such as chlorine, sarin, napalm), and committing crimes against humanity. Despite this response, a struggle for dignity blossomed in Syria.⁸

A few months after the initial Deraa protests, on Nakba Day (May 15), a thousand protesters from Syria marched towards the Zionist-occupied Golan Heights near Quneitra and Majdal Shams. This protest, dubbed the “Third Intifada” on Facebook, was part of a coordinated regional uprising against Zionist borders in Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine.⁹ Residents of the Golan were shocked by young Palestinians from Syria, who carried photographs of their grandmothers and deeds to their families’ land in their arms. Their bravery broke the fear of landmines on the border. Since 1975, the Israeli military had told residents of Golan that landmines lined the border and could not be crossed; two Syrians died stepping on them. In 2011 as Palestinian youth marched, Golan’s residents realized that the border was permeable. The Palestinian youth showed the Golanis a borderless future, one where they broke not only the physical barrier but the psychological trauma of occupation. As Golani Syrians welcomed Palestinian youth with food and water, one resident said that watching the Palestinians cross the border was like a dream, and that “what Arab armies have not been able to do, the Palestinian youth did.”¹⁰

On June 5, 2011, the anniversary of the 1967 Zionist invasion into Syria, protestors coming from Syria stormed the border again to commemorate the Naksa. This time, Zionist snipers injured 350 protestors and murdered 23 more as they marched.¹¹ Many of the protestors who came out every Friday against the Assad regime took part in these anti-Zionist marches against colonial occupation.

One such protestor was Khaled Bakrawi, a twenty-six year-old Palestinian-Syrian from Yarmouk, the largest Palestinian refugee camp in the world, located on the outskirts of Damascus (Syria is home to twelve Palestine refugee camps). During the Naksa march, Israeli snipers shot Khaled and injured him.¹² Bakrawi wrote, “it was a day in which the refugees’ fear was broken and a day in which they reclaimed their voice and image. What took place that day was legendary; it returned hope to millions of refugees and it returned joy to the camps.”¹³ Bakrawi returned to Yarmouk and cofounded the Jafra Foundation, aiding newly displaced refugees fleeing Tadamon, Hajar Aswad, and Babila. The regime police arrested Bakrawi in Damascus’s Mezza neighborhood at the end of 2012. He died under torture in Assad’s prisons two months later.¹⁴ The Assad regime shelled Yarmouk refugee camp and killed Bakrawi’s friends Ahmad Kousa and Bassam Hamidi, other Palestinian-Syrian activists in the Syrian Uprisings.

According to Nayef Alsamadi, several Palestinian-Syrians were central to organizing the Syrian protests, including George Talamas (who worked to provide relief for wounded protestors) and Adnan Abdurahman (a Palestinian Syrian who led protests). Other Palestinian-Syrian activists such as Bassel Khartabil Safadi turned the digital cultures of the resistance movement into a secret physical space in downtown Damascus known as Aikilab for revolutionary journalists. He was subsequently imprisoned, tortured, and executed in Adra Prison in 2015.¹⁵

Residents of the Golan were shocked by young Palestinians from Syria, who carried photographs of their grandmothers and deeds to their families’ land in their arms. Their bravery broke the fear of landmines on the border.

The Assad regime and its security apparatus is notorious for its abuse and treatment of Palestinians in Syria as second-class citizens. This is why Khaled Bakrawi and other Palestinian-Syrian dedicated their lives to fighting both Zionism and Syria’s authoritarian regime. Connecting Syrians’ struggle against Assad to the anti-Zionist struggle can deeply strengthen our movement and transform the larger, enveloping region, known as Bilad al-Sham. Bilad al-Sham is an Arabic term that means Greater Syria. The region encompasses the precolonial borders before the French and British carved up Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, and Syria.

There is a persistent myth that the Assad regime fights Zionism—a tactic Razzan Ghazzawi and Nayrouz Abu Hatoum call sumoud-washing.¹⁶ From its inception, the Assad regime used the Palestine cause to argue that Syria was in a state of emergency and needed to be under martial law.¹⁷ The Emergency Martial law suspended habeas corpus and expanded the definition of what characterizes a political crime, as any “offense against the security of the state.”¹⁸ Today, Bashar al Assad’s Instagram often posts in solidarity with the people of Gaza, but history shows us the Syrian regime has long acted otherwise.¹⁹

In 1976 Hafez al-Assad, with US support, backed far-right, Christian extremist Phalangists and massacred three thousand Palestinians in Tal al Zaatar refugee camp in Lebanon.²⁰ During the civilian evacuation, Assad’s militia forces machine-gunned Palestinian refugees. The Syrian offensive on the camp lasted two months. Syrian militias prohibited food, basic supplies, and even the Red Cross from entering the camp. On the night of August 14, 1976, Hafez Al-Assad’s forces stormed the camp and massacred thousands. The assault on Tal al Zaatar was not an isolated incident, as the Syrian regime also besieged Jisser Al-Basha and Al-Kalantina, two other Palestinian refugee camps.

Beyond direct assault, the Syrian regime operates through carceral violence. It uses imprisonment as a key tactic to quell Palestinian voices in Syria. This strategy parallels the Zionists’ prison systems. In the 1980s, Hafez al-Assad imprisoned and executed hundreds of Palestinian dissidents in the Palestinian Popular Committee, Fatah, and the Party for Communist Action.²¹ His son Bashar al-Assad carried on that tradition and thousands of Palestinians have languished in his prisons. The Action Group for the Palestinians of Syria documents the current detainment of over 1,796 Palestinian-Syrians in Syrian prisons and the murder of 4,048 Palestinian-Syrians since 2011.²² At least 644 Palestinian detainees have died under torture in the Assad regime’s detention centers since March 2011. Many Palestinians and Syrians languish in the “Palestine Branch” of these centers—or what is known as Branch 235 by the regime’s Military Intelligence—where approximately ten to fifteen people are killed under torture per day.²³

Like the Zionist state, the Assad regime censors public thought as part of its strategy of suppression. In 2009, the Assad regime imprisoned a seventeen-year-old Syrian named Tal Malouhi for blogging poems about Palestine.²⁴ In February 2011, after three years of detention without charge, the State Security Court sentenced Malouhi to prison for treason. She became known as one of the youngest prisoners of conscience in the world.²⁵ Her poems echo a popular memory of Assad’s betrayal of Palestine:

Oh Jerusalem, Oh Damascus

Oh scent of clay, Oh orange blossoms….

Oh you my Arab blood

Oh star between you and me

who illuminates Jerusalem from my flesh and blood

from my ocean to my gulf

Before the people handed us over to invaders

To the king who sat on my coffin

And the mourners who were captive

from that fragile time

Oh Jerusalem, has our identity been lost?²⁶

Malouhi expresses a fiercely rooted reminder of the ontology of land, being, and identity in a consciousness of Bilad al-Sham that sees the authoritarianism as an inherent failure to protect the land from occupation, that is, as a betrayal of the body and lineage.

The Assad regime mimics Zionist strategies of starvation sieges, mass shelling, and chemical weapons. Assad’s forces besieged Yarmouk Refugee Camp in December 2012 and blockaded the camp until 2014, preventing people, food, and medical supplies from leaving or entering.²⁷ A report by Amnesty International revealed that the regime used starvation tactics against civilians.²⁸ The regime launched rockets and dropped chemical rain from airplanes during the siege.²⁹ The “viral” images of Yarmouk’s children in 2012–2014 could viscerally mirror Gazan children’s 2023–2024 reality in such a deep way because of the affinity of tactics between the Assad regime and the Zionist occupation.

The Golan Heights and the Zionist Greenwashing of Syria

Syria and Palestine’s struggles are intertwined by both Assad’s treatment of the Palestinians and the Zionist occupation of Syrian land. In 1967, Zionist forces stole the Golan Heights in Syria and displaced 95 percent of its population overnight.³⁰ Zionist militias destroyed 340 Syrian villages and farms. Only 5 remained—Majdal Shams, Buqatha, Masa’ada, Ein Qenyah, and Al G’ager.³¹ Over 130,000 Syrians were forced to flee and today only around 26,000 Syrians remain in the area.

A few weeks before the 1967 invasion, Syrian residents of the Golan watched as Syrian military generals and soldiers mysteriously packed up their bags and left the abandoning vulnerable populations under the aerial bombings and machine gunfire of the Zionist army on June 5. One resident recalled they thought they were leaving just for the summer.³² While researching children’s youth theater in Syria for my dissertation, I came across modifications of revolution songs that memorialize this abandonment. The song يا حيف Ya 7eif (Oh Shame) by Samih Shuqer—who is from Quneitra, a Golani village that was invaded by in Israel in 1967 and almost completely obliterated, but later handed back to Syria in 1974—croons “oh shame on you who showers bullets on defenseless people and arrests children as young as roses, the son of our country, killing our children.”³³ In children’s theatre performances near Idlib, I watched as rural communities sang the line “you’re still mocking us, shame on you, oh son who sold the Golan.”³⁴ This line evokes popular memory of Hafez al Assad’s betrayal of the residents of Golan. It slips between the cracks of the regime’s official historical self-representation as valiantly fighting Zionist violence.

Today, Bashar al Assad’s Instagram often posts in solidarity with the people of Gaza, but history shows us the Syrian regime has long acted otherwise.

Before the Zionist invasion, the Golan Heights represented a quintessentially Syrian mosaic of ethnic and religious diversity: Circassians, an ethnic group who fled Russian persecution in the nineteenth century, comprised 10 percent of the population; Turkmanis, or Tukorman, who came to Golan in the 1500s, resided throughout the region; Kurds and Armenians lived in Quneitra; and Maghribis and Bedouin tribes lived in its villages.³⁵ Palestinian refugees from 1948 were part of this social fabric. Sunnis, Christians, Druze, Alawites, Ismaili’s and Shi’as all lived in the region.³⁶ Zionist settler-colonial strategy was to ethnically cleanse the Golan Heights and erase its diversity, leaving behind a population comprised mostly of Druze Arabs.

In 1981, the Israeli Knesset passed its illegal annexation of the Golan and attempted to force its remaining Druze Syrian Arab inhabitants to take Israeli citizenship, which they refused. The proud farmers of Golan protested annexation by halting labor on their lands in a six-month strike in 1982.³⁷ The Zionist entity held the Golan under siege as punishment, cutting off electricity and water, and burning crops and livestock to the ground. In response to the blockade, Golanis erupted in mass protests, violated curfew to tend their crops, distributed free food among the community, built their own education cooperatives, and constructed alternative irrigation and sewage systems.³⁸

In 1983, in retaliation for two years of coordinated civil resistance, fifteen thousand Zionist troops invaded Golan and put its Syrian residents under a forty-three-day siege.³⁹ One resident, Naseba Keesh Smara, said that “the village was full of Israeli policemen with guns and weapons. They knocked on every door, they knew where everyone lived, they threw the passports inside and then shut the door. We collected [the Israeli passports], went to the main square of Majdal Shams, threw them in the soldiers’ faces and ran back home. There were also some people who burnt them. We belong to Syria, we weren’t frightened by the soldiers. We felt like we would go back to Syria.”⁴⁰ In parallel with the French separation of Syria into a Sunni Arab, Shi’a Alawite, and Druze ethnic states during the mandate period, the Zionist entity tried to leverage a sectarian strategy on Druze communities in the region to alienate them from their Arabness.⁴¹ “We see this for what it is,” said Dr. Tayseer Maray of Golan for Development, “an attempt to create a false category, as if we are defined by our various religious affiliations instead of the reality that we are united by our national identity; we are all Syrian Arabs.”⁴² This history of repression and division is the immediate context for the Syrian Druze’s attempt to kick out Prime Minister Netanyahu and Finance Minister Smotrich from visiting their villages last week after airstrikes killed twelve children playing soccer—they called him a “fascist,” a “criminal,” and a “child killer,” despite the Zionist state trying to coopt the tragedy for its own aims.⁴³

Part of the egregiousness of the 1981–1983 sieges was the battle over water. When Israeli laws became enforced in the Golan after its illegal annexation in 1981, the Israeli Water Authority had to approve any use of water on Syrian farms and homes, including the construction of tanks to collect rainwater. The fact that native Syrian Golanis constructed their own sewage and irrigation systems in revolt shows their fierce ties to their land.

In response, the Zionist entity deploys a tactic of “greenwashing” to separate Syrians from their water. The Golan is situated at the head of the Jordan River, whose tributaries include the Banias, Dan, and Hasbani Rivers. Israel pumps water from the Golan’s many lakes to its settlements. Today Golan provides one third of Israel’s water consumption.⁴⁴ In 1981, Eden Springs Limited (now owned by the Canadian Cott Corporation) began collecting water from Golan’s Salukia Springs, which it illegally bottles and sells in eighteen European countries. Eden Springs takes pride in its eco-friendly sustainability and advertises itself as a leader in climate action as the first carbon neutral water company supplying water to Europe. On their website, they boast, “We love the environment, that’s why we take care of it day after day in what we do. When you become a client of Eden, not only do you consume water and hydrate yourself, but you do so in an environmentally responsible way.⁴⁵ Eden Springs directly profits from exploiting the Golan and violates Articles 28, 55, 47 of the Hague Regulations by pillaging the Golan’s water and exporting it for profit.⁴⁶ In 2021, the Zionist entity announced plans to double the number of settlers in Golan. In tandem with this proposal, Energix, a public company, developed a clean wind energy project to build fifty-two wind turbines on the last 5 percent of farmland owned by native Syrians.⁴⁷ To convince Syrians of this plan, the company created a scholarship fund for the community and claimed it was bringing development via renewable energy. Energix gave Syrian farmers long, confusing contracts that promised one percent of revenues and coerced them to hand over unrestricted access to their land. Farmers were banned from publicly sharing information about their interactions with Energix. Energix calls itself “a breakthrough global green utility committed to the future of our planet.”⁴⁸ The use of the guise of environmentalism to justify unethical land grabs in both examples are classic instances of “greenwashing.”⁴⁹

In response to the blockade, Golanis erupted in mass protests, violated curfew to tend their crops, distributed free food among the community, built their own education cooperatives, and constructed alternative irrigation and sewage systems.

The Zionist entity uses discursive strategies of neoliberal progress and development to justify the colonization that uproots indigenous Syrian farmers who carry the knowledge of how to tend the land sustainably, while resisting the exploitative destruction of their waterways. It mirrors the Assad regime’s 1973 Arab Belt project, which displaced 332 Kurdish villages, and drowned 66 underwater, to build Lake Assad.⁵⁰ The destruction of Kurdish lands was a form of neocolonial violence in the name of “Arab development” and “progress.” Rural, farm-working communities in Syria also experienced the systemic exploitation of their waterways by the regime and subsequent land grabs of exiled farmers.⁵¹ And yet Kurdish farmers reindigenize themselves by turning to their ancestral practices of belonging with the land in the face of greenwashing violence. Fela7 or farmworking communities displaced from their land have begun rooftop gardens.⁵²

The Technology of Apples and Roses: Earth Based Practices and Shamiya Feminism

The Golan and Syrian uprisings represent a key bridge between Syrian and Palestinian struggles that envisions a holistic, earth-based future beyond Zionist occupation, colonial fragmentation, and the failed promises of Arab regimes. Syrians, Lebanese, and Palestinians use their knowledge of the land to resist Zionist violence in what I argue is a Shamiya (the feminized Bilad al-Sham) feminist consciousness. Colonial and authoritarian violence in Bilad al-Sham is deeply gendered and tied to the treatment of the land. I use the term “Shamiya feminism” to do a feminist reading of earth-based liberation practices in the Golan and in Syria. Shamiya feminism would understand liberation as a reunion of land and memory in Bilad al-Sham. In imperialist, authoritarian, and patriarchal capitalist logic, land is ripe for penetration and domination—with all the symbolic connotations of the those terms.⁵³ This logic carries over to the bodies of Palestinian and Syrian women, children, and men who experience sexual violation in the name of imperialist domination over the land.⁵⁴ Syrian soldiers cut open the pregnant bellies of Palestinian women and mass raped them during the Tal al Zaatar massacre and Zionist forces routinely use rape as a settler colonial strategy.⁵⁵

Technologies of earth-based land practice and arts-based revolutionary work imbue Shamiya feminist consciousness. Majdal Shams is known for its apple orchards, which serve as a political symbol.⁵⁶ Zionist exploitation of water led apple farmers to build small rainwater tanks and alternative irrigations systems to counter what they call the “rape of our groundwater.”⁵⁷ This language reveals the indigenous Syrians’ understanding of the patriarchal nature of environmental exploitation by settler-colonial systems and imbues a Shamiya feminist consciousness of dismantling settler colonial patriarchy through reunion with earth.⁵⁸ In the 1980s, Golani farmers hosted students from Birzeit University and showed them how to build water tanks and move soil from the valleys to the mountains to grow apples. Such educational projects reveal an understanding of indigenous earth-based knowledge as critical for Palestinian resistance.⁵⁹ The Zionist entity announced plans to establish 750 new farming estates for settlers in order to “create anchors” in Golan using “clean-wind technology.” To do so, they bulldozed the apple orchards in the Buq’ata villages. One farmer says, “Apples were and are and will be a symbol of the Golan Heights. We are attached to the apples and apples are also attached to us.”⁶⁰ Another farmer writes, “Our connection with mother earth is so deep and strong, we can’t leave our homeland.”⁶¹ And yet in 2024 the Israeli water company Mekorot is pumping all of the water Syrians use for their apple orchards, causing 20 million dollars of damage to the Syrian farmers’ apple market to make way for settlers.⁶² Syrians’ relationships to waterways, apple orchards, and the earth itself as an extension of the body move beyond anthropocentric resistance and expand to anticapitalist, border-defying Shamiya feminist modes of relating that imagine the body, the family, and the flesh as home itself—a home with roots so deep they cannot be cut.

Syria and roses have a long, poetic history. The eternal rosa damascena or damask rose is a beloved “plancestor” in the region.⁶³ During the early Syrian uprisings, protestors in Deraa, Darayya, Banias, and elsewhere held roses and water bottles to the sky.⁶⁴ The story of these roses is critical to understanding the Syrian Revolution. Banias, a coastal city in Syria was one of the first cities to use roses in protest in March 2011.⁶⁵ In Darayya, a small town on the outskirts of Damascus, the Coordination Committee of Darayya (CCD)—often known as the “Peaceful Youth of Darayya”—encouraged youth to bring roses to protests.⁶⁶

A formerly imprisoned youth activist, Yahya Shirbaji, said “Darayya itself is in need of roses. The revolution is an opportunity for us to change too.”⁶⁷ Shirbaji and other protestors including Ahmad Helmi, Islam Dabbas, and Ghiyath Mattar stayed up late nights writing messages on water bottles with roses that read, “We are all Syrians… why are you killing us?” Razan Zeitouneh, a Syrian activist who was later disappeared by extremist forces she critiqued, wrote about Darayya’s youth and their roses, which were handed to soldiers.⁶⁸ The roses created slippage in the moment of state violence: armed Syrian soldiers could not understand why they were given roses, and the pause ruptured the theater of oppression in which soldiers intimidate protestors before killing them. Dabbas described this moment, “as the moment of flight, the moment of lighting the flame, when he broke with everything that had gone before and became part of a larger spirit.”⁶⁹ On July 22, 2011, the Friday of National Unity, Dabbas carried an armful of roses to soldiers. This time the roses did not rupture the moment—he was seized, and imprisoned. Years later, his family discovered he had been executed.⁷⁰ Shirbaji was arrested on September 6, 2011, and executed after four months of torture.⁷¹ Regime forces kidnapped Ghiyath Mattar on August 9, 2011, and tortured him—they left his body on his mother’s doorstep for his pregnant wife to find.⁷²

Later on, Syrian women such as Rima Dali launched movements such as Stop the Killing: We Want to Build a Syria for All Syrians, that echoed Darayya’s youth and their insistence on a revolution of roses, by handing out white and red roses to passersby with messages of antisectarianism.⁷³ Carrying roses in the face of immense state violence reveals a web of earth-based relations—a Shamiya feminist consciousness as a creative confrontation against oppression, in which the roses themselves carry the message of resistance.

Syrians taking to the streets in the coastal village of Banias wielding roses and water bottles, May 2011.²

Syrian Women Take to the Streets of Dignity Square, Suwayda, Syria, March 22, 2024, wielding roses and wearing flower crowns. Their demands include the fall of the regime and the change of the political system.³

Syrians, Lebanese, and Palestinians use their knowledge of the land to resist Zionist violence in what I argue is a Shamiya feminist consciousness.

The residents of Golan, with their long history of anticolonial resistance and eco-revolts against Zionist settler-colonial greenwashing, made clear their stance on Assad during the Arab Spring.⁷⁴ In 2011, the residents of occupied Golan declared solidarity with the Syrian uprisings in a statement called “You are the Voice and We Its Echo.”⁷⁵ Local residents also created a Facebook page called Tansiqiyat al Thawra as Soriya fi al Jawlan Asoori Almuhtall (Activities of the Syrian Revolution in the Occupied Syrian Golan) and a YouTube channel for publishing anti-Assad protests in Golan.⁷⁶ Throughout Syria, protests for Palestine were woven into the grassroots uprisings. In December 2017, rural people in Jassim protested Trump’s decision to recognize the Israeli embassy in Jerusalem.⁷⁷ While raising the Syrian Revolution’s flag, they raised signs of Palestine, saying “Jerusalem is our bride,” and burned American and Israeli flags. In Syria, protestors have held fundraisers,⁷⁸ organized choirs to sing songs for Palestine,⁷⁹ created a sculpture for Gaza in Idlib’s main square,⁸⁰ painted murals,⁸¹ burned the Israeli flag,⁸² and held countless protests⁸³ for Palestine.⁸⁴ In Idlib, where protestors resist the extremist occupation of Hay Tahrir al-Sham,⁸⁵ Turkey,⁸⁶ and Assad and Russian airstrikes,⁸⁷ journalist Hadi Abdullah declared “our prayers and hearts and minds are with you Gaza. Because we know more than anyone what bombing is, what it means to have your house fall on you and your family’s’ heads. We know more than anyone what it means to lose someone you love. And because we know these things, we pray for you night and day.”⁸⁸ Throughout 2023 and 2024 Suweida protestors have regularly criticized the Assad and the Zionist settler colonial entities at the same time and often send their greetings to the occupied Syrian Golan in solidarity.⁸⁹

Women in Suweida on International Women’s Day in solidarity with Palestine in 2024.⁴

Protestors in Suweida wield roses and wear flower crowns of jasmine, carrying the original call of Darayya’s youth who reminded us to return to the poetic value of the flower—even when reaching towards the earth results in prison and torture. These protestors hold multiple critiques at once—because they experience multiple systems of oppression at once. This idea that racism, sexism, and imperialism are intertwined was theorized by Frances Beale, a US Black feminist and an early predecessor to intersectionality.⁹⁰ As Audre Lorde put it, “there is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.”⁹¹ This to me exemplifies a Shamiya feminist awareness of multiple oppressions—and places the earth at the center.

While there are certainly Syrian Zionists and Palestinian regime apologists who remain unaware of the interconnected nature of these oppressions, we can be creative in our solutions to these problems. For example, when thousands of Syrians received refugee asylum in San Diego in 2016, a local Syrian organization accepted a $50,000 grant from a Zionist funder. A group of youth from Palestinian Youth Movement and I helped create an arts space called the “Arab Youth Collective” in response. We found Syrians taking Zionist money to be unconscionable. Our mission was to support the Syrian community from a perspective rooted in the liberation of Palestine and in appreciation for our arts as forms of community liberation. Eventually, the collective got a physical space named “Khaled Bakrawi Center” in honor of the intersection that Khaled Bakrawi represents to Syrian and Palestinian communities. It is now renamed the Majdal Center, after Majdal Shams, to honor the overlapping geographies of Bilad al-Sham liberation. Our oppression occurs simultaneously, as Syrians whose lands are occupied by Israel and Palestinians oppressed by Assad. We can hold both critiques at the same time; when we do, a more holistic vision of our liberation emerges.

What does it mean when an Arab regime claiming to fight Zionists mimics the same systems of oppression on similarly vulnerable bodies? What does it mean that Syrians in Golan use their apples orchards and waterways as technologies of refuge and rootedness to their lands? What does it mean to hold a rose up to the sky?

Nadera Shahloub Kevorkian speaks about “ashlaa,” the unwholing, or scattering of human flesh in Gaza—how racialized violence splits the body apart.⁹² As Shahloub-Kevorkian theorizes, “this [process] produces the Palestinian as non-being, unwhole, never able to be a collective, marked as dispensable, nongrievable, sub-ontological difference.”⁹³ Settler colonialism is inherently sexual violence—a degrading, non-consensual attack on the body and land. In Syria, in where multiple, overlapping regimes of violence have blown up Palestinian and Syrian bodies and homes, “ashla’a” manifests in the forced disabling of Syrian children—like those children of Deraa whose fingernails were pulled out as punishment for their graffiti.⁹⁴ In the Tal al Zaatar massacre, Hafez al Assad’s forces’ preferred method of murder was “falkh,” or tying Palestinians’ legs to cars and tearing their bodies apart.⁹⁵ In the genocide in Gaza today, Zionist forces snipe children directly in the heart and dismember their limbs while destroying the land.⁹⁶ Syrians and Palestinians resemble their dismembered societies, whose bodies are scattered across countries, whose limbs have been physically amputated and whose spirits are symbolically displaced. Earth-based liberation practices rooted in apple orchards, roses to the sky, and arts-based revolutionary work have a way of piecing Palestine and Syria back together again, perhaps reuniting us in a Shamiya feminist consciousness that moves beyond borders and into earth.

Give Us Our Land Back

The Golan Heights, Greenwashing, Syria and Palestine’s Intertwined Revolutions

Banah Ghadbian

The Assad Regime and Palestinians of Syria

The Golan Heights and the Zionist Greenwashing of Syria

The Technology of Apples and Roses: Earth Based Practices and Shamiya Feminism

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Give Us Our Land Back

The Golan Heights, Greenwashing, Syria and Palestine’s Intertwined Revolutions

Banah Ghadbian

The Assad Regime and Palestinians of Syria

The Golan Heights and the Zionist Greenwashing of Syria

The Technology of Apples and Roses: Earth Based Practices and Shamiya Feminism

SHARE

Scholasticide as Cultural Genocide

Capitalist Politics in Crisis

Under Postfascism, Fractures in the State Will Make Openings for Protest

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