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Olivia C. Harrison: Who’s Afraid of Palestine Solidarity?


Image 1: The logo of Mouvement des travailleurs arabes, from the Saïd Bouziri collection at Archives de La Contemporaine.

One question has been haunting me since the current wave of repression of pro-Palestinian speech began in the wake of the October 7 attacks and the genocidal campaign-disguised-as-reprisal that followed: who’s afraid of Palestine solidarity? This is an urgent question on US, French, and German campuses today, but its purview is not limited to the Global North. In fact, this question puts pressure on the distinction between Global North and South, as if the newly minted leaders of formerly colonized nations had created the “new man” that Frantz Fanon so passionately called for (Fanon 1963: 316). As dissidents, intellectuals, and artists from former European colonies have taught us, the simple transfer of power cannot be mistaken for what Fanon called decolonization, a process that begins with sovereignty but does not end there. The mass transfer of populations set in motion by colonial settlement and postcolonial migration is one of the vectors that disrupts the neat temporal and epistemic divisions between the imperial era and the purportedly postcolonial era. So too is Palestine, the object of a century-long process of settler colonization that flares up every few years in a new war of elimination. The migrant question and the Palestinian question are not separate questions. The ways in which they overlap go a long way to explaining the threat Palestine and Palestine solidarity represent across our still decolonizing world.

At first sight, Palestine appears to be an outlier on the sanitized map that has made permanent the borders drawn by European colonial powers – as if Palestine were a belated hangover from the era of full-throttle imperialism and settler colonialism. But the impermanence of Palestine’s ever-dwindling borders gives the lie to the fantasy of decolonization as a fait accompli. Palestine is a thorn in the side of postcolonial regimes too quick to forget the revolutions that carried them to power – perhaps especially those regimes that pay lip service to the Palestinian cause while quashing dissent, including Algeria, a self-declared ally of the Palestinian resistance that has long suppressed any speech deemed critical of the state. As dissidents in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia have repeatedly warned, Palestine has long served as an alibi for repressive Arab regimes.

And yet Palestine solidarity is alive and well, as the mass protests of the past two years have shown us, even though the conditions on the ground have deteriorated to the point that the goals of Palestine solidarity in the era of Third Worldism – total decolonization in the form of a single, democratic state for all inhabitants of historic Palestine – seem completely unattainable today. The facts on the ground have all but foreclosed the possibility of Palestinian sovereignty. So why does Palestine continue to pose a threat, not only to the settler colonial regime that has been steadily replacing the Palestinians for over a century, but for nation-states that have apparently no stake in the outcome of settler replacement or indigenous resistance? This is not a rhetorical question, although the answer may seem obvious in the nation-state in which I write, the US, a settler colonial regime likewise premised on the replacement of its indigenous populations. Settler colonial solidarity goes a long way to explain the threat that Palestine and Palestine solidarity represent to Israel and the US. This is also true of other settler and post-settler regimes like Australia and France (more on the latter below). But this does not explain the threat that Palestine solidarity poses to the postcolonial regimes of former European colonies – including former settler colonies like Algeria. This is the flip side of Arpan Roy’s caution against taking Palestine solidarity as a given. If we need to rethink what it means to commit to Palestine, anti-Palestinian backlash, too, should be denaturalized. In what follows I discuss several case studies that shed light on dangers that commitment to Palestine represents in France, Algeria, and the US, focusing on the links that tie the migrant question to the Palestinian question.

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I begin with a document that stages our relationship to decolonization as an unfinished process, one in which Palestine figures among other more or less successful anticolonial revolutions. French-Moroccan artist Bouchra Khalili’s twenty-two minute digital video Foreign Office is part of an installation which includes fifteen photographs of the now-deserted embassies of Third World revolutionary movements in Algiers and a silkscreen print that assembles these sites in an “Archipelago” of now disconnected points. The video begins with a medium shot of Ines and Fadi, two young Algerians, sitting side by side at a black desk that turns into an editing table as they handle the maps, photographs, audio and video recordings that together compose the archive of Algiers as a “Mecca for revolutionaries,” in Amílcar Cabral’s poetic phrase: the soundtrack of the 1969 Pan-African Festival; black and white photographs of Eldridge and Kathleen Cleaver at the Black Panthers’ international headquarters in Algiers; and portraits of Nelson Mandela, Malcolm X, Agostinho Neto, Mário Pinto de Andrade, and other Third World revolutionaries who gathered in Algiers to discuss their plans for decolonization (Khalili 2015). In the wake of the Algerian revolution, anticolonial and antiracist movements from around the world found refuge in Algiers, sometimes headquartered in the same colonial-era building, vacated to make room for transcolonial solidarity. But this legendary past is long gone. “We have inherited only disenchantment and history in pieces,” Ines observes. What has happened to Algeria, she wonders, to make everyday Algerians yearn to leave for France? Ines speaks in Darija (Algerian Arabic), Fadi speaks in Taqbaylit, an indigenous language that predates the Muslim conquest of North Africa in the seventh century, and they understand each other perfectly. Together, they edit the archives of an era they never knew to understand the present they share, summoning the voice of Algerian writer Kateb Yacine, who left behind the French language – his “butin de guerre” (war booty) – to forge new cultural forms and idioms in a newly sovereign nation that was already betraying its revolutionary ideals.

Shot in Algiers a few years before the pro-democracy movement (al-hirak) took to the streets in February 2019 to protest Abdelaziz Bouteflika’s attempt to secure a fifth term as president, Foreign Office sketches the coordinates of transcolonial solidarity and its undoing in the aftermath of decolonization. What lessons can we draw from Ines and Fadi’s “revolutionary heartbreak” (to cite a term coined by my colleague Neetu Khanna) as we witness the destruction of Gaza in the twenty-first century? And what can Palestine teach us about our relation to the anticolonial past and neocolonial present? The lines that Foreign Office draws between past and present, here and elsewhere are an invitation to rethink what commitment to Palestine means at a time when the intensity of Palestine solidarity stands in inverse proportion to the possibility of Palestinian futurity.

To begin answering the question “who’s afraid of Palestine solidarity,” I take Ines and Fadi’s invitation to return to the work of Kateb Yacine, an outspoken advocate for Palestinian rights who deployed Palestine in a twinned critique of the roles Algeria and France played in transforming the figure of the indigène (the colonized) into the figure of the immigrant, divorced from the settler colonial histories that produced it. In response to Ines’s question as to why Algerians continue to leave the “Mecca of revolutionaries,” Kateb’s play proposes that they do not have a choice. Settler colonialism set in motion the mass transfer of populations from the metropole to the colony, from the colony to the metropole, and, if the anti-immigrant right has its way, from the post-settler colony back to the former colony. It’s not coincidental that settler colonialism set this train in motion, or that Palestine, the object of another project of settler replacement, elucidates this dynamic in Kateb’s writings and in the forms of migrant activism that followed. As I will show in my concluding discussion of Palestine solidarity in 1970s France and the US today, Palestine has become a litmus test for national belonging in the settler postcolony.

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In 1970, the beloved anticolonial writer Kateb Yacine returned to Algeria with the aim of working in the languages of the people, Darija and Taqbaylit, better suited, according to him, to achieving cultural decolonization than the colonial tongue he mastered so brilliantly. On his friend Ali Zamoum’s recommendation, he joined Masrah al-bahr (Theater of the sea), a popular theater troupe that had already performed several plays, including one on Vietnam, a topic dear to Kateb’s heart. Based on collaboration, improvisation, and audience participation, the troupe began adapting parts of Kateb’s thousand-page French-language manuscript play, Boucherie de l’espérance (Butchery of hope, 1968-69) in their headquarters in the working-class neighborhood of Kouba, in Algiers. Their first play, Mohamed arfad valiztek (Mohamed pack your bags), premiered on October 17, 1971, marking the tenth anniversary of the murder of hundreds of Algerians peacefully protesting against a racist curfew targeting Français musulmans d’Algérie (colonized Muslim French nationals of Algeria) by Paris police forces five months before the signing of the Evian Accords that would put an end to the Algerian war of independence from France. The irony of the title, Mohamed pack your bags, was initially lost on the Algerian immigrants who saw the poster for the play during the troupe’s French tour in 1972 – they reportedly panicked, assuming it was a call for the expulsion of immigrants. (The far-right National Front party was founded on this very campaign promise in October 1972. It remains the number one agenda of its de-demonized successor, the National Rally, and the plethora of anti-immigrant parties and organizations that have cropped up since.) While one of the self-declared aims of the play was, in fact, to convince Algerians to return to their homeland to continue the work of decolonization, the play is also a fiercely funny denunciation of the collaboration of postcolonial Algerian authorities and French government and industrial forces in recruiting, deporting, and exploiting Algerian workers in France. Mohamed arfad valiztek remained the troupe’s most popular play, reaching an estimated 75,000 spectators during the French tour, from February to June 1972, and another 350,000 in Algeria in the next four years, where the troupe (renamed Al-nishat al-thaqafa lil-‘umal/Action culturelle des travailleurs or Worker’s cultural action, hereafter ACT) continued to perform Mohamed arfad valiztek alongside plays on Palestine (Filastin al-maghdura, Palestine betrayed, 1974) and the neglected role of Imazighen (“Berbers”) and women in Algeria’s millennial history (Malik al-gharb, The king of the west, 1977). Initially funded by the Ministry of Work and based in the popular Bab El Oued neighborhood of Algiers, the troupe’s irreverent and openly critical performances soon caught the attention of government censors. In 1977 the troupe was forced to relocate to the Western province of Sidi Bel Abbès, where they continued to perform until Kateb’s premature death in 1989.

An often bitingly funny satire of the backroom deals between the Algerian and French governments that resulted in the emigration of an estimated 750,000 Algerians by the time the first decade of independence was over, Mohamed arfad valiztek depicts the trials and tribulations of the titular character, a down-on-his luck migrant who faces a series of setbacks that ultimately lead to his triumphant return to Algeria where he resumes possession of his expropriated home thanks to the proverbial nail in the wall (this scene is based on a popular “Juha” tale known throughout North Africa) and vows to join the struggle against injustice “until the end of colonialism!” (Kateb 1999: 336). Although no opponents are named – Mohamed battles in turn the slavedriver, the police officer, the qadi (judge), the mufti (religious leader), and Boudinar (“father of money”) – the satire of the national elites and their French counterparts is impossible to miss. More subtle is the play’s critique of the transformation of indigènes (natives), as the Algerians were dubbed in French colonial law, into immigrants, construed as a disposable labor force that greases the wheels of the French and Algerian economy alike. The satirical name Pompez-tout (“Pump-it-all”), a near homonym of Pompidou, the French president’s name, neatly captures the labor-for-oil deals of the postcolonial migrant economy. But a less expected figure joins the chorus of characters on stage to expose the colonial genealogies of the migrant economy in France: a Palestinian laborer. What does Palestine have to do with Algerian immigration to France?

Mohamed arfad valiztek begins with a scene split between French Algeria and Mandate Palestine. On one side of al-halqa (a circle drawn by the spectators) stand Mohamed I, an indigenous laborer, and Ernest, a French settler; on the other, Mohamed II and Moses, a Zionist settler. The two Mohameds till the land under the supervision of the settlers, until the pairs depart, seemingly taking the same path home. After a good night’s rest, the two Mohameds and settlers wake up and begin chasing a single rooster with the generous aim of offering it to their “guest” for breakfast. The hilarious battle for hospitality that ensues satirizes the contest for indigeneity in a now chiasmic settler colony (“If only this rooster could speak… – He’d say France! . . . – Israel! – Algeria! – Palestine!) but also, as the rest of the play implies, in the settler postcolony, where yesterday’s indigène has been transformed into an immigrant, and the settler of old has become a native (Kateb 1999: 214). Rooting French anti-immigrant discourse in the longue durée history of French Algeria, Mohamed arfad valiztek exposes the settler colonial genealogies of the forms of nativism that were taking hold in France at the time. That it delivers this critique through a comparison with Palestine should not surprise us. If settler colonialism is based on land expropriation rather than labor exploitation, it remains the case that both French Algeria and Israel relied on native labor – notwithstanding the Zionist myth of Jewish labor – and that the indigènes (natives) have been transformed into foreigners in both France and Israel. But the play goes further than this. If the migrant economy is a product of settler colonialism, settler replacement also provides the rhetorical framework for calls for “remigration” satirized in the title Mohamed pack your bags. The fantasy of the “great replacement” – the purported replacement of Français de souche, white French people, by immigrants – was born at the colonial frontier.

When the ACT toured Mohamed arfad valiztek in France, North African migrant workers were already organizing around Palestine. In the wake of Black September, the 1970 massacre of thousands of Palestinian fedayeen by King Hussein’s troops in and around Amman, a group of Moroccan, Algerian, Tunisian, Syrian, Lebanese, and Palestinian activists got together at the Maison du Maroc (Morocco House) of the Cité Universitaire in Paris to form the Comités de soutien à la révolution palestinienne (Committees in support of the Palestinian revolution, hereafter CSRP). The first autonomous organization dedicated to the rights of migrant workers and students in France, the CSRP allied support for Palestine to advocacy for migrants, raising money and donating blood for the fedayeen even as they organized mass protests to denounce racist crimes and anti-immigrant legislation. The French authorities, aided by their counterparts in North Africa who were busy tracking their nationals’ political activities abroad (including activism against the authoritarian regimes of Morocco and Tunisia), arrested scores of pro-Palestinian activists and deported several to their home countries, where they were duly collected by domestic police forces. These punitive measures did not deter CSRP activists, who went on to found the Mouvement des travailleurs arabes (Arab workers’ movement) and a theater troupe, Al Assifa (The Tempest), named after the armed wing of Fatah (the Palestinian National Liberation Movement). Popular theater was, for Al Assifa as it was for the ACT, a weapon in the struggle for migrant rights in France. Whether or not the members of Al Assifa attended any of the ACT’s performances in France – there is no evidence of this in the archives – the North African genealogy of Palestine solidarity in France is clear. North African migrant workers and students identified with the Palestinians on the grounds of a shared experience of colonization and settler replacement. But they also looked to Palestine for inspiration, explicitly positioning themselves as successors to the Algerian revolutionaries and allies of the fedayeen. Migrant rights were, for these activists, part of a process of decolonization that did not stop with formal independence or at the borders of France-Algeria. The French government was right to suspect that Palestine solidarity meant activism on many fronts, including in defense of migrant rights, just as its North African counterparts were right to see Palestine solidarity as a first step in the struggle for decolonization in the purportedly postcolonial era. For the past half century, Palestine has been a “rallying cry” for decolonization in former colonies and metropoles alike (Said 1979: 125).

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The repression of pro-Palestinian speech in 1970s Algeria and France prefigures the repression of pro-Palestinian speech today, even though there are important differences between these two moments, not least the impossibility of calling for cohabitation in a single democratic state – let alone the right to resist colonialism, once enshrined in international law – without being branded a terrorist. Today the suppression of pro-Palestinian speech remains intimately tied to the suppression of migrant rights, as illustrated most recently by the Abu Daqqa case in France and the Mahmoud Khalil case in the US. In conclusion, I briefly turn to these two cases, which are exemplary of the intimate links between Palestinian and migrant rights, and the continued instrumentalization of pro-Palestinian speech by anti-immigrant policy.

On October 16, 2023, undercover French police arrested Palestinian feminist activist Mariam Abu Daqqa in Marseille, following an Interior Ministry expulsion order that claimed that her presence on French territory after the Hamas attacks of October 7 was a threat to “public order” (Abu Daqqa is a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which is blacklisted as “terrorist organization” in France and the US). A pioneer of the Palestinian feminist movement, Abu Daqqa was invited by French feminist organizations in September 2023 to speak about the rights of Palestinian women and the plight of female political prisoners in Israeli jails. The timing of her presence on French territory proved ideal for the nativist right. Her arrest came one week after the October 7 attacks and one day after an Islamist Russian national murdered a French schoolteacher, Dominique Bernard, in Arras. Despite legal attempts to stay the deportation order, she was deported to Cairo on November 10 (the state did not deport her to her native Gaza, on humanitarian grounds). In the following weeks, the Abu Daqqa and Bernard cases were instrumentalized to support a proposed law that would make it possible to deport immigrants displaying “behavior not compatible with French values.” Abu Daqqa is a feminist activist, and an unveiled one at that – in this sense, her behavior is presumably compatible with the values of the French Republic. But this does not make her less threatening in the context of France’s ongoing war on terror. To be Palestinian or pro-Palestinian is to be a potential terrorist.

The long history of the French state’s suppression of pro-Palestinian speech offers lessons for activists and scholars who continue to commit to Palestine in a range of diverse contexts, even though we must attend to the specific forms these commitments take, and the particular contours of the backlash against them. Writing as a French-American teacher and scholar based in the US, I am struck by the parallels between the foreignization of Palestine solidarity in France over the past fifty years and the decades-long reduction of Palestine solidarity to terrorism in the US. Remember that one of Donald Trump’s first reelection campaign promises was to deport foreign pro-Palestinian protestors. True to his word, he has spent the first few months of his second term targeting pro-Palestinian activists, starting with students carrying visas and green cards. Although I’m not aware of any inkling within his team that France has a proven record of doing the same, it’s clear that the deportation of pro-Palestinian migrant workers in 1970s France and, more recently, the deportation of Mariam Abu Daqqa offer a playbook for the foreignization of Palestine solidarity in the US, one that fits perfectly in the narrative of the war on terror that governs both French and American domestic and foreign policy. The current arrest of pro-Palestinian protestors by the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is the most recent example of anti-Palestinian policing in the settler postcolony, where migrant rights are the first (but not the last) to be sacrificed in the name of security. That the government is threatening to deport a permanent resident, Mahmoud Khalil, apparently marks a departure from the French state’s practice of deporting immigrants, whether on French territory legally or not. And yet twenty-first century debates about denaturalization in France, and more recently in the US, make it clear that Palestine has become a litmus test for national belonging: if you’re pro-Palestinian, you’re not really French, or American.

That the criminalization of pro-Palestinian speech has been reenergized in the wake of October 7 and the unfolding genocide in Gaza should not delude us. If the killing subsides, as one must hope it will, Palestine solidarity will not die down, nor will attempts to suppress it. Commitment to Palestine has only become more urgent as a result, particularly for those of us who have the privilege of carrying a French or US passport – at least the kind that cannot be revoked. We know who’s afraid of Palestine solidarity, and we’re not afraid of them.

Olivia Harrison is Professor of French, Comparative Literature, and Middle East Studies at the University of Southern California, and author of Natives against Nativism: Antiracism and Indigenous Critique in Postcolonial France (2023) and Transcolonial Maghreb: Imagining Palestine in the Era of Decolonization (2016).

References

Fanon, Frantz (1963). The Wretched of the Earth, translated by Constance Farrington. New York: Grove Press.

Kateb, Yacine (1999). Boucherie de l’espérance: œuvre théâtrale. Paris: Seuil.

Khalili, Bouchra (2015). Foreign Office. Digital video.

Said, Edward W. (1979). The Question of Palestine. New York: Vintage Press.

Cite as: Harrison, Olivia C. 2025. “Who’s Afraid of Palestine Solidarity?” Focaalblog September 26. https://www.focaalblog.com/2025/09/26/olivia-harrison-whos-afraid-of-palestine-solidarity/

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Arpan Roy: “Is this Narrow Coastal Strip Worth All this Blood?” Bassel Al-Araj on Armed Struggle in Palestine

By taking control of 22 Israeli military bases and localities, sequestering over 200 hostages, and killing more than 1,000 civilians and soldiers (although many details remain ambiguous), Hamas accomplished militarily on October 7, 2023 what no other Palestinian faction has ever accomplished. Early on during the operation, Hamas declared that its goal was to liberate the 5,200 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons by means of a hostage exchange;[1] meaning that the uprising was a spectacular show of force by which to negotiate on better terms with the enemy. In this crux between military success and negotiated exchange, Hamas burst open old-new debates regarding the role of armed struggle in Palestinian movements. The predictable Israeli response is the currently unfolding psychotic war of revenge and accompanying propaganda campaign. As of the time of writing, there are some 20,000 dead Palestinians, tens of thousands more injured, over a million displaced, critical infrastructure irreversibly damaged, one of the oldest cities in the world all but razed to the ground, and 3,000 newly arrested prisoners. More horror likely awaits in the very near future. Was the uprising worth all the death and destruction? Will any good come out of this? Away from the media frenzy of political talking heads and party pundits, these are the kinds of questions that have emerged on the streets of Ramallah, Jerusalem, Amman, and elsewhere, where misery and despair fuse headily with pride and possibility. Misery and despair, that is, because a genocide of Palestinians not only in Gaza but also Jerusalem and the West Bank seems frighteningly plausible; and pride and possibility because for some it has become conceivable for the first time—unlikely perhaps, but somehow still conceivable—that Israel can be defeated militarily.

The nature of Palestinian resistance has had historical ebbs and flows (see Qumsiyeh 2011). Tracing Palestinian uprisings from their first instances in the 1920s (four decades after the establishment of the first Zionist settlements) to October 7, one can observe clearly identifiable Zeitgeists, from periods of political petitioning, times of boycotts and other grassroots satyagraha, other times kamikaze attacks, and seasons of war. In recent decades, the pax americana that was supposed to have been the Oslo Accords ushered in an era of liberal politics in the 1990s (see Haddad 2018, Rabie 2021), which then exploded into the Second Intifada in the early 2000s. After this, the nature of Palestinian movements changed; fragmented, the Palestine Liberation Organization[2] placated by an end-of-history worldlessness,and a Palestinian public was left disenchanted with the failure of liberal politics but without knowing where else to turn. Hamas, during this period, became the unlikely vanguard of Palestinian resistance; a national liberation movement without the nation mentioned anywhere in its name.[3]

In contextualizing the place of armed resistance in the current chapter of the Palestinian story, I present below translations of three short texts by Bassel al-Araj (1984-2017), a Palestinian pharmacist by day and blogger by night who was assassinated in his apartment by Israeli forces in 2017. Al-Araj left behind a body of writing, often blog posts, that has greatly inspired the current generation of leftist Palestinian activists. Al-Araj advocated that the intellectual in Palestine not be a passive commentator but actively “engaged” in resistance, and he coined the term al-muthaqaf al-mushtabak “engaged intellectual;” a nod to the New Man of Guevara-esque romance, in a play of words that is more poetic in Arabic than in English. Some erroneously confuse the epithet with the even more irresistible al-muthaqaf al-musalah “armed intellectual,” a slip that Al-Araj would not have protested. His agitating against the security coordination between the Palestinian Authority and Israel landed him in a Palestinian prison in 2016. He was released following a hunger strike. Six months later, he was killed by Israel. He was thirty-three years old.

The following pieces are translations from Arabic taken from a collection of Al-Araj’s writings, letters, and Facebook posts, published by the Beirut-based leftist publisher Bisan in 2018. In the first piece, written after the 2014 Israeli campaign in Gaza, Al-Araj offers a very original analysis in the aftermath of this event, observing that Hamas’s strategy of armed struggle does not break from the overall arc of armed struggle in Palestinian history. Al-Araj insists that Hamas’s strategy in the conflict was not to defeat Israel militarily, but to arrive at better conditions for negotiations. In the second piece, Al-Araj examines the gains and losses of the Second Intifada, challenging the position that the lesson from Israel’s brutal quelling of the uprising is that such uprisings are not to be repeated. Rather, Al-Araj speculates on what lessons can be learned from the intifada’s defeat so as to be able to succeed in a future iteration. In the third piece, more literary in flavor, he asks whether Palestine, as a national-territorial concept, is worth all the blood that is shed in its name. In this brief communique, he employs a revolutionary-poetic minimalism reminiscent of leftist writers of the twentieth century like, for instance, Eduardo Galeano.

Reading Al-Araj in the context of the current bloodshed, hopelessness, and despair, we might ask again: Was the uprising worth all the death and destruction? Whatever the answer may be, Al-Araj invites us to recognize the complexity of this question, and to remain faithful to rational analysis even in times of an unbearable irrationality of being.

Image 1: Soldier (1970), by Inji Aflatoun

1.

Yezid Sayigh says in his book on the Palestine Liberation Organization that the Fatah movement never took the military conflict seriously, and never viewed the armed struggle as an end in itself or the only path to liberation. Rather, the armed struggle was a means by which to negotiate a diplomatic solution.

I believe that Hamas’s experience in Gaza follows the same approach. Their political leadership views armed struggle exactly as Arafat [4] viewed it.

This is an essential difference between Hezbollah’s experience, for example, and our experience. It is also the difference between the Algerian, Chechen, Vietnamese, and Cuban experiences, and our experience.

In these other experiences, they believed that they could defeat the great powers that were their enemies. We came to the conviction that it was impossible to defeat Israel, and we never believed that returning to Palestine would involve changing the reality on the ground, but rather by appeasing the capitals of influence in the world.

2.

On the allegation: “The Intifada ruined us” [5]

2013/26/09

At the end of the 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s, the Black Hand uprising began in Palestine. It was completely crushed and its participants were eliminated within 4 months. They were either martyred, imprisoned, or exiled. During the same period, the Communist Party attempted to launch an uprising in Vietnam, which was also suppressed and the Communist Party was almost extinguished.

The important thing is that these two uprisings were two of the most excellent uprisings that humanity has ever seen: The Black Hand uprising, which was one of the most important factors leading to the 1936 Revolt [6], and the Communist Party uprising, which was one of the most important factor leading to the Vietnamese rebellion against France. The leaders learned from their mistakes, dealt with them, and corrected them.

People at that time did not renounce the option of armed struggle, nor did they brood over the colonial discourse regarding the usefulness or uselessness of armed struggle. Rather, they reviewed their experience, analyzed it, and launched subsequent uprisings that avoided the same mistakes. In contrast, Palestinians brood over the destruction the Second Intifada brought, and are reluctant to engage in any future uprising for fear of the same results.

I do not know whether Palestinians have sat down to evaluate the results of the Second Intifada in a scientific manner, especially the results of the Intifada’s military experience. Usually, when you hear a person talk about the destruction, the tragedies, the losses, and the setbacks, he is reproducing Zionist propaganda, but in his own language. This propaganda is constituted by multiple mechanisms and begins altering the Palestinian discursive space in a way that does not end only with the official line of the Palestinian Authority (the line of Mahmoud Abbas). The war against us has still not ceased, nor has the symbolic violence and hidden oppression that are the real masters of the situation. Usually when any experiment fails, the criticism focuses on the execution of the experiment, and not on the theory or ideology behind it. The results were not what we could have imagined. Was Gaza not completely emptied of settlers? And is Gaza not reaching a stage of fortification and hybrid warfare as a result of the Second Intifada? Were Tel Aviv and Jerusalem not hit hard by the early iterations of rockets that resembled cans of bug spray? Were settlements in the West Bank (in Jenin and Nablus) not dismantled because the occupation was no longer able to protect them and could no longer afford the cost of their continued existence? Did the Intifada not cost the enemy billions of shekels? And do we not realize what the Intifada did to delay the tragedy awaiting our people? Personally, I believe that the Intifada temporarily delayed a new expulsion process that was being prepared.

Evaluating the military experience of the Intifada, it appears that the armed experience of the Intifada was not actually the reason for its setbacks. Rather, there are other factors that led to this. The leadership was not able to deal with the responsibility of organizing society and preparing it for a sustained popular war. Some also had a naive understanding of armed struggle, and they flattened its essence to the extent that it did not affect the surface tensions. Recall the expression: “Carry a rifle and shoot, who will stop you?”

In addition to a lack of consciousness, as well as a lack of psychological and social readiness, there was no proper organization of the fighting forces. This led to incompetent leadership after the elimination of the first rank. As this social base was completely absent, there emerged a rift between the masses and those carrying out military action.

In addition to this, there was the counterrevolution against Yasser Arafat, and secret contacts and treasonous agreements were made under the table with the enemy. There was also an absence of preparations, equipment, strategy and combat tactics. The objective was the Oslo Accords (the homeland reduced to Gaza and the West Bank). And let us not forget here the Palestinian Authority’s dependence on the occupation for its financial, employment, and administrative system. Finally, there was a lack of conviction by some that armed struggle can change the reality on the ground. Rather, they were convinced of its use in improving the terms of negotiation, and nothing more.

In conclusion, the first thing that colonialism does is establish what is possible and impossible for oppressed peoples. Some elements of the oppressed people usually assist in this. This is done through direct and indirect brainwashing techniques, so do not trust this discourse that is transmitted and planted into our minds. Judge instead the testimonies of our people based on trusting logic and the power of liberation.

3.

Is Palestine beautiful?

I am frequently asked this question. As easy as the question seems, it is one of the most difficult questions. It is more difficult than the question “How are you?” It is difficult to answer once you realize that the real meaning of the question is: “Is this narrow coastal strip worth all this blood?” We all know that beauty is relative and that one’s environment shapes one’s aesthetic sensibilities, and that this differs from person to person. Here you have to resort to comparison to arrive at an easy answer.

But Palestine, in my opinion, is actually the most beautiful place; not because of her greenness, blueness, yellowness, redness, crops, bounty, or nature. Her beauty is that she is the one who answered my search for meaning, and she is the one who answered my existential questions, and who justifies my existence and cures my chronic anxieties.

Endnotes

[1] This number has risen to approximately 8,000 after mass arrests made by Israel since October 7.

[2] The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), founded in 1964, was for much of its history a revolutionary guerrilla movement that eventually became Israel’s political partners with the Oslo Accords of 1993.

[3] Hamas, in Arabic, is a kind of acronym for harakat al-muqawama al-islamiyya “Movement of Islamic Resistance,” but hamas also means “excitement.”

[4] Yasser Arafat (1929-2004) was the co-founder of the Palestine Liberation Organization, and was a guerrilla-turned-politician. He signed the Oslo Accords with Israel in 1993 and became President of the Palestinian Authority.

[5] Al-Araj is referring here to the Second Intifada, the Palestinian uprising against Israel that lasted roughly between 2000-2005. Its outcome, on the one hand, was the evacuation of Israeli settlements from Gaza, but also the loss of thousands of lives and the expansion of the Israeli security infrastructure.

[6] The Great Arab Revolt in 1936 was the first large-scale Palestinian mobilization against British rule and the Zionist settlement project in Palestine.

The author would like to thank Abeer Juan for assistance in the translations.

Arpan Roy is an anthropologist researching in Palestine and currently based in Berlin. His book Relative Strangers: Romani Kinship and Palestinian Difference will be published by University of Toronto Press in 2024.

References

Al-Araj, Bassel. 2018. Wajadt Ajwabti. Beirut: Bisan.

Haddad, Toufic. 2018. Palestine Ltd.: Neoliberalism and Nationalism in the Occupied Territory. London: Bloomsbury.

Qumsiyeh, Mazin. 2011. Popular Resistance in Palestine: A History of Hope and Empowerment. London: Pluto Press.

Rabie, Kareem. 2021. Palestine Is Throwing a Party and the Whole World Is Invited: Capital and State Building in the West Bank. Durham. Duke University Press.

Cite as: Roy, Arpan 2023 “Is this Narrow Coastal Strip Worth All this Blood? Bassel Al-Araj on Armed Struggle in Palestine” Focaalblog 12 December. https://www.focaalblog.com/2023/12/12/arpan-roy-is-this-narrow-coastal-strip-worth-all-this-blood-bassel-al-araj-on-armed-struggle-in-palestine/

Blog

Maria Kastrinou: Looking at ethnic cleansing in Palestine from the occupied Syrian Golan

The unfolding genocide in Palestine today is a continuation of Israel’s 75-year-old occupation and ethnic cleansing. This article provides a perspective on the ongoing tragedy from the vantage point of the Golan Heights – often referred to as Israel’s ‘forgotten occupation.’ How are the stateless Syrians experiencing this war? And why do ‘ethnic cleansing’ and ‘genocide’ reverberate as strongly here as in the rest of Palestine and Israel? By threading the current genocide to the story of occupation and ethnic cleansing in the Golan Heights, this article discusses the underlying settler-colonial assumptions about religious purity and war that have fuelled imperialist projects in occupied Syria and Palestine, and in the wider region.[1]

Fear and messages on WhatsApp

On Sunday, 8th of October, my friend Kamel[2] wrote on WhatsApp: ‘the kids are worried so much… I bought food and water for them… we are preparing ourselves for a big war in the area…’ With his wife and three young children, Kamel’s family have been staying inside for the past month, working and going to school on Zoom.

We became friends in Damascus in 2009. Kamel had just finished his degree in English Literature at Damascus University, while I was doing fieldwork for my PhD. We’ve kept in touch and I’ve visited him and his family in the Golan Heights. Last time this May, I promised Salam, his wife, that I’ll bring my own young children to Majdal Shams, the biggest of the occupied villages in the Golan, next time I visit in February 2024. Our kids are of similar ages, our families in similar stages. If we lived closer, we’d have playdates and family dinners.

Image 1: The border fence between occupied Majdal Shams and Syria, Druze flag [Photo taken by the author, 2015]

People, Kamel tells me, are really afraid to go outside their houses. Out of fear of arrests and, even more, out of fear of pogroms against Arabs, most dare not leave their villages to travel into Israel. For friends from the Golan Heights that live and work in Israel and in the West Bank, the situation is sheer terror. ‘We are afraid to go to work, we are afraid to speak Arabic in public,’ Kamel adds. People have been arrested by Israeli police for writing pro-Palestinian posts on social media. Throughout Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories people get arrested and held without charges, university students and workers, Arab and Jewish Israelis. Sara, one of the stateless Syrians in the Golan Heights, has stopped going to work in the Israeli eco-project that she was working with before the war on Gaza: ‘Israeli society has become, overnight, so extreme, so racist,’ she tells me.  

Others, especially from the older generation, are not surprised by the state of Israel’s genocidal attack on Palestinians. ‘The tree of occupation never bears good fruit,’ Salman tells me on the phone. The ‘tree of occupation’ is the 75 years of occupation, killing, dispossession, and apartheid that Palestinians have endured in the hands of the state of Israel. This is the ‘root cause’ of violence.

Salman is one of the community’s leaders and revolutionaries, also a former political prisoner in Israel. He is a friend and a co-author, whose field research and hospitality have shaped my own field visits in the Golan over the past years.  We speak on the phone often, he is worried about the ‘total siege on Gaza,’ and emphasises that Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant ordered a ‘complete siege on Gaza’ saying that they are fighting ‘human animals.’ In his speech, and throughout the past month, Palestinians have constantly been dehumanised in the Israeli press. ‘They don’t show any pictures from Gaza, nothing!’ Salman exclaims.’ In a state of war, Israeli public media focus on Hamas’ massacre and Israel’s ‘right of self-defence,’ egging on the ‘flattening of Gaza.’ Like many others, Salman is afraid because Netanyahu, Gallant and others sense that their time is up, and they want to cause as much destruction as possible. From academics to the UN, the word genocide is used to describe the collective punishment of Palestinians unleashed by Israel.

Back to Kamel, we send each other video messages and funny things that the kids do. I keep thinking: how do you keep young kids busy amidst a war? In what stories do you translate your fears? Do you speak to them about the killing of so many children? How do you contextualise the sound of rockets across the border, and the constant humming of drones over your head? Do you tell them that the Israeli soldiers in their streets use them as human shields when they fire from the military bases within the Golan, to Syria and Lebanon? Can you make the rockets that get intercepted by the Iron Dome seem like fireworks or early Christmas lights?

As human beings and anthropologists, how can we make sense of this brutality? We watch live the purposeful and vengeful collective punishment of the Palestinian people, the indiscriminate bombing of refugee camps, hospitals, schools, residential buildings, mosques and churches. We (mis)measure again the different value of being a human, where Palestinian children are cast ‘outside of humanity’ (Fernandez 2023). We bear witness to state terrorism and murder (De Lauri 2023), to starvation and siege, to war crimes, and to the genocide of a people by the machinery of one of the most highly armed nuclear states in the world. These techniques of extermination are a continuation of Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians that started with the al-Nakba, furthered through the wars of 1967 and 1973, and has continued unabated until today (Pappé 2007).

Although I don’t have answers to the above questions, this piece is a way to make sense of the pain, war, and defiant hope that come out of years of ethnographic fieldwork, and of the most recent genocidal war and the reign of fear. For, although the Israeli occupation in the Golan has been the least violent in comparison to the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), we can see that from ethnic cleansing to the religious engineering of a compliant minority, the sectarianism of the occupation is part of a larger arsenal, one of the means towards the same ends.

The weaponization of religious difference, or, how the Israeli occupation in the Golan was from the start ethnic cleansing and religious engineering

“If you live, live free. If you die, die standing like a tree.” These lines are carved onto the tombstone of Hayel Abu Zeid (1968-2005), who died, the epitaph continues, ‘for the resistance and hope.’ Hayel is one of the martyrs and revolutionaries from the Israeli occupied Syrian Golan Heights who dedicated their lives to the cause of liberation from Israeli occupation. Next to his tomb is a commemorative plaque for Amir Abu Jobal, a boy of 5 years who was killed by an Israeli mine near his home. In the cemetery in Majdal Shams, the largest remaining occupied village, there are many other tombstones commemorating resistance, heroism, and the unjust loss of life as a result of war and occupation.

Occupation, ethnic cleansing and resistance have deep roots among the indigenous stateless Syrian people. From the very start of Israel’s invasion during the Arab-Israeli war of 1967, ethnic cleansing was an important strategy of war and occupation. 95% of the Syrian indigenous population was forcibly displaced and only five villages, out of 340 villages and farms, remained. These villages were predominantly Druze (the villages are Majdal Shams, Mas’ada, Buq’atha and Ein Qiniya. The village of Sahita was later destroyed by Israel, Ghajar is an Alawi village). Israeli army officials believed that the Druze, a religious community with historical links to Isma’ili Islam, would inflict a ‘stab in the back’ to Arabism. The sectarian logic of the Israeli occupation from the start, thus, was clear: displace the indigenous population, render them prostrate, or engineer them so that they cannot unite with Palestinian resistance and no longer pose a threat. Sectarianism is the more insidious continuation of ethnic cleansing outside of war.

Image 2: Much of the occupied territory is designated by Israel as military zones [Photo taken by the author, 2015]

The belief that the ‘Druze’ would be compliant peons in maintaining a state founded upon religious and ethnic difference was not unfounded. Israel had already by 1949 achieved an alliance with the religious Druze elites in the regions of Carmel and Galilee, in what became Northern Israel (Firro 1999). This alliance with the state of Israel isolated the Druze community in Israel from their co-religionists in Syria and Lebanon. In exchange for becoming political representatives of a new religious ethnicity (not unlike the created roles of tribal chiefs in other colonial settings), the sectarianisation of political identity in the greater context of Israeli ethnocracy (Yiftachel 2006) was moulded, and the ‘Israeli Druze,’ thus, created.  The creation of the ‘Israeli Druze identity’ became henceforth an ongoing project between local Druze elites and the Israeli state, a project of producing ‘ethnic difference’ in the process of ‘inventing religious traditions’ (Firro 2005).

And so, the ‘Israeli Druze’ were the first Arabs ‘to be trusted’ to serve in the Israeli Defence Forces, and until recently, they were the only Arabs to be conscripted to do so (Kanaaneh 2008). Their so-called loyalty to the state of Israel turned ‘Druze identity’ into a laboratory for the manufacturing of sectarian difference, as the Israeli state and military worked hand-in-hand with local elites to produce and fund new ‘Druze traditions,’ as well as a comprehensive and specifically ‘Druze’ educational curriculum to educate the new generations. While this project was successful in funding the architecture of religious politics, it has not done much to address the chronic poverty and impoverishment of this region. Indeed, the Druze in Israel continue to be second-class citizens living under a settler colonial apartheid state. As such, all state policies are essentially discriminatory on the basis of religion, as shown during the 2018 Druze protests against the Jewish Nation-State Law.

The Druze in the occupied villages of the Golan Heights are Syrians and different from their ‘Israeli Druze’ counterparts described above. As the tombs in the cemetery proclaim, the heroes and martyrs of this mountain community have fought Israeli occupation, sacrificing their lives to either Israeli bullets or inside Israeli jails. Although individuals can be killed, memories of such resistance, here as in Palestine (see Swedenburg 2003), are not easy to kill.

What is being Golani? The complexity of citizenship, belonging and resistance

‘Israel wants us to be Druze,’ explained Fahed, the president of a local autonomous organisation, during an interview in May 2023, ‘Israeli Druze.’  Here, being ‘Israeli Druze’ means being compliant to Israeli authority. For deeply pious shaykhly families in the Golan, being somehow connected, or dependent upon the worldly authority of an occupying power is a religious anathema, and the most religious among them, have abided by strict regimes of independence and autonomy (see Kastrinou et al 2020).

Nevertheless, Israeli propaganda posits that the Druze of the Golan do not take Israeli citizenship because they are afraid of repercussions from the Syrian regime, should the Golan return to Syria. Yet none of my interlocutors has ever mentioned this reason. Instead, during the height of the Syrian war in 2015 I heard that ‘We will still be Syrians, even if Syria ceases to exist!’ Like inside Syria, the stateless Syrians in the Golan Heights underwent a similar process of anti- and pro-regime protests, while more recently from this August, some have been protesting in solidarity to the Druze protests ongoing in the Syrian province of Sweida.

Image 3: Barbed wire at a UN post on the border [Photo taken by the author, 2015]

On the basis of estimates from local representatives and academics, between 10 and 25% of the stateless population has accepted Israeli citizenship. The vast majority of Syrians in the Golan Heights remain stateless. Getting Israeli citizenship is a contentious subject for a community that is known for its resistance to Israeli occupation (Mason et al. 2022). When I asked Nidaa, a member of the women’s committee in the Golan, whether she’d still want to be part of Syria while there is a war, she adamantly said: ‘I’m part of the Syrian body, I’ll go through what the people go through.’ Yet, taking Israeli citizenship has increased after the Syrian war, but it happens for complex, and sometimes contradictory reasons – out of losing hope at the aftermath of the Syrian revolution (Al-Khalili 2023), or to be able to work within the Israeli job market and advance one’s career, rather than because people ‘feel Israeli.’ Rabiah, a young man in his late 20s, for example, took Israeli citizenship so that he would not lose his land after living outside the country for three years – ‘I did it so that Israel does not confiscate my land,’ he told me.

In the 1980s and 90s it was the norm that people who took Israeli citizenship suffered social ‘death.’ Branded as being ‘traitors’ and ‘collaborators,’ they were excommunicated from social and religious affairs. Jawad’s father was one of the first people in Majdal Shams to publicly declare his support for Israel and also one of the first to get Israeli citizenship. He lost most of his business and social capital in doing so. Jawad mentioned bitterly that, when his father died, the local religious shaykhs refused to carry out the mortuary prayers and rituals; the family had to bring in Israeli Druze shaykhs from the Galilee. Yet, when I asked him where he feels his identity lies, to my surprise he replied that he feels ‘Syrian’ even though he has Israeli citizenship. And, like most people who have acquired Israeli citizenship from the Golan Heights, Jawad was exempt from serving in the IDF: ‘I don’t like the army,’ he says. ‘I’m a pacifist.’

Settler-colonial assumptions, imperialist projects

Underpinning the process of ethnically cleansing the Golan and the sectarianisation of political identities that Israel undertook lies a simple colonial logic, namely that religious groups are, basically, homogeneous. This logic assumes that there is one homogenous Druze community running through the occupied Golan Heights and the Druze villages in Northern Israel. This assumption is simplistic, filled with colonial connotations (i.e. same religion = same everything else), and simply not correct. We can see this assumption supported by Israeli policy and propaganda which has historically tried to imprint a sectarian logic and ‘Druzification’ on the occupied Syrians in the Golan Heights. The same colonial logic underpinned USA’s ‘tribal’ policies during the invasion of Iraq (González 2009).

It is the same logic, extended, that we see used by Israel to explain the large-scale genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. In the words of Israeli President, Isaac Herzog, “it is an entire nation out there that is responsible,” The Israeli ex-defence minister Avigdor Liberman said that “there are no innocents in Gaza.” Indeed, this is the logic that was used from the very start of the Zionist project, with ethnic cleansing ongoing since its inception (Pape 2007). The murder in Gaza is blatantly obvious whilst the occupation of the Golan is, in comparison, less bloody. But the underlying assumption of homogeneity within religious and ethnic groups is the same. The settler colonial state, then, either engineers homogeneity or works to expel or exterminate it.

Image 4: Inside a civil building in the deserted town of Quneitra, now used as an Israeli military training ground [Photo taken by the author, 2015]

But “religion is precisely the recognition of man in a roundabout way,” wrote Marx whilst exploring how capitalist states, in general, pretend but essentially fail to keep their secular, emancipatory promises.  And creating a homogenous, religiously pure social entity is a risky, unstable business.

The French had already tried it. During their colonial mandate, they divided Syria into territorial chunks on the basis of the colonial assumption of obedience in exchange for religious homogeneity. It was at the end of the Ottoman Empire and the establishment of Western colonialism and imperialism in the Middle East that what Ussama Makdisi (2005) calls the ‘culture of sectarianism’ was born, as a thoroughly new and modern phenomenon.  And, as it was born it was also resisted: the Syrian revolt against the French colonial rule was started in the Druze province by a Druze, Sultan Basha Al-Atrash, one of the greatest Syrian national heroes. The French collectively punished the Druze for their disobedience by burning down the village of Majdal Shams and collectively punishing its inhabitants. Indeed, it was this memory that was cited as a deterrent for villagers in leaving their village during the 1967 invasion (Kastrinou et al 2020). No one wants to be uprooted twice. The Israeli plan to move more than a million Palestinians from North Gaza to the south, along with the possibility of a further displacement in Egypt’s Sinai, could be a history repeated thrice: as tragedy, farce and genocide.

As with French colonialism and USA imperialism, the Israeli operation to ethnically cleanse the Golan Heights and to homogenise Druze identity in exchange for obedience, did not go to plan. When Israel decided to unilaterally and illegally annex the Golan Heights in 1981, the occupied people responded by going on a six-month strike. In their vast majority, the Syrian people of the four occupied villages, some 25,000 people, are stateless because they have not accepted Israeli citizenship. Their status is legally the same as that of Palestinians in East Jerusalem (see al-Marsad 2011, and Delforno 2019): they are ‘permanent residents’ in Israel and as such they do not serve in the IDF. Legally stateless, they don’t have passports but laissez-passer documents where their nationality is ‘undefined’. They have trouble travelling inside and outside of Israel, trouble getting jobs, accessing basic services, and they are constantly under the threat of the military occupation that steals their land (the ongoing conflict with the wind turbines is a point in green colonialism), and creates a host of other problems.

This experience of colonial taxonomical imposition, violence and ethnic cleansing resonates from French colonialism in Syria to Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank today.

Sowing resistance, sowing hope

A different heritage, that of resistance, is knitted into the town’s urban landscape, the most emblematic of which is Hassan Khater’s statue ‘The March’ (1987), which depicts Sultan Basha al-Atrash, the Druze leader of the Syrian revolt against the French in 1925, surrounded by contemporary figures such as a man of letters, next to a traditionally dressed man, a mother holding her dying son – a new martyr of the resistance. On the back of the statue there are three kids, the future, holding books and wheat. Instead of religious homogeneity, the threading theme is resistance to outside occupiers. The French missed that, and so did the Israelis.

Image 5: ‘The March’, statue by Hassan Khater (1987) at the central square of Majdal Shams [Photo taken by the author, 2023]

History teaches that colonial assumptions of religious purity lead to imperialist projects of ethnic cleansing and genocide, like the televised genocide in Gaza and the occupation of the Golan Heights. Look closer, though, in the continuities of everyday practices and the threads of another history become visible: the history of ordinary resistance, what the Palestinians have exemplified and gifted to struggles far and wide: ‘sumud’ – steadfastness. In combating the ‘bad fruit’ of occupation, the occupied people of the Golan Heights, and the occupied Palestinians, continue to sow resistance and hope, what the poet Mahmoud Darwish described in his poem ‘A state of siege’:

Here, where the hills slope before the sunset and the chasm of time

near gardens whose shades have been cast aside

we do what prisoners do

we do what the jobless do

we sow hope

Maria Kastrinou is Lecturer in Social Anthropology at Brunel University London. Her research interrogates the politics of sectarianism, statelessness and resistance through the lives and stories of her ethnographic interlocutors from Syria and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. Author of Power, Sect and State in Syria (I.B. Tauris 2016), she is currently working on the project ‘Lives across divides: Ethnographic stories from the Golan Heights.’

Endnotes

[1] Acknowledgement: Many thanks to colleagues and friends in the Golan Heights who despite the war read through and made suggestions; to colleagues at Brunel University, especially Isak Niehaus, Gareth Dale and Mark Neocleous; to Vera Sajrawi, and to Steven Emery. Kastrinou’s current research about the Golan Heights is supported by the Druze Heritage Foundation, London.

[2] All names are pseudonyms and some details have been altered in order to ensure my interlocutors’ anonymity.

References

Al-Khalili, Charlotte, 2023. Waiting for the Revolution to End: Syrian displacement, time and subjectivity. London: UCL Press.

Al-Marsad, 2011. ‘Suggested issues for Consideration Regarding Israel’s third Periodic Report to the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR) To Be Held On November 14-December 2, 2011.’ NGO Report. (https://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/cescr/docs/ngos/Al-Marsad_ISRAEL_CESCR47.doc) Accessed: Nov. 13, 2023.

Delforno, Alessandro. 2019. More shadows than lights: Local elections in the occupied Syrian Golan. Majdal Shams: Al-Marsad. (https://golan-marsad.org/wp-content/uploads/More-Shadows-than-Lights-Local-Election-in-the-Occupied-Syrian-Golan-1.pdf) Accessed: Nov. 13, 2023.

De Lauri, Antonio 2023 “The Courage of Historical Truths” Focaalblog 30 October. https://www.focaalblog.com/2023/10/30/antonio-de-lauri-the-courage-of-historical-truths/

Fernandez, Júlia 2023 “Outside of Humanity: Palestinian Children and the Value of Life” Focaalblog 31 October. https://www.focaalblog.com/2023/10/31/julia-fernandez-outside-of-humanity-palestinian-children-and-the-value-of-life/

Firro, Kais. 1999. The Druzes in the Jewish state: A brief history. Vol. 64. Brill.

Firro, Kais M. 2005. “Druze maqāmāt (shrines) in Israel: From ancient to newly-invented tradition.” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 32, no. 2: 217-239.

González, Roberto J. 2009. “On “tribes” and bribes: “Iraq tribal study,” al-Anbar’s awakening, and social science.” Focaal 2009, no. 53: 105-116.

Kanaaneh, Rhoda Ann. 2008. Surrounded: Palestinian soldiers in the Israeli military. Stanford University Press.

Kastrinou, A. Maria A., Salman Fakher El-Deen, and Steven B. Emery. 2020. “The stateless (ad) vantage? Resistance, land and rootedness in the Israeli-occupied Syrian Golan Heights.” Territory, Politics, Governance 9, no. 5: 636-655.

Makdisi, Ussama. The culture of sectarianism: community, history, and violence in nineteenth-century Ottoman Lebanon. Univ of California Press, 2000.

Marx, Karl. 1843. The Jewish Question. Proofed and Corrected: by Andy Blunden, Matthew Grant and Matthew Carmody, 2008/9. (https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/jewish-question/) Accessed: Nov. 13, 2023.

Mason, Michael, Munir Fakher Eldin, and Muna Dajani, eds. The Untold Story of the Golan Heights:: Occupation, Colonization and Jawlani Resistance. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022.

Pappé, Ilan. 2007. The ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Simon and Schuster.

Swedenburg, Ted. 2003. Memories of revolt: The 1936–1939 rebellion and the Palestinian national past. University of Arkansas Press.

Watenpaugh, Keith David. 2022.  “Kill the Armenian/Indian; Save the Turk/Man: Carceral Humanitarianism, the Transfer of Children and a Comparative History of Indigenous Genocide.” Journal of the Society for Armenian Studies 29, no. 1: 35-67.

Yiftachel, Oren. 2006. Ethnocracy: Land and identity politics in Israel/Palestine. University of Pennsylvania Press.

Cite as: Kastrinou, Maria 2023 “Looking at ethnic cleansing in Palestine from the occupied Syrian Golan” Focaalblog 16 November. https://www.focaalblog.com/2023/11/16/maria-kastrinou-looking-at-ethnic-cleansing-in-palestine-from-the-occupied-syrian-golan/