My response to Ibrahim Al-Amin: “Yarmouk Camp – Resistance Camp Needs to Reflect”
Here is my response to Ibrahim Al-Amin’s piece on Yarmouk in which he argues that all Palestinians, refugees in particular, are “100 percent” responsible for their own starvation and deaths. I know many supporters of the Resistance Axis will be disappointed in my position on this issue, especially since I have seen quite a few praise his commentary on social media, but I urge you to read my piece carefully before rushing to judgement, and hopefully reassess your position. Excerpts:
” While Amin is correct in calling on Palestinians to “conduct an overall review,” we, too, in the Resistance camp must also engage in a similar process of self-reflection, especially now that we are in a militarily and diplomatically stronger position than we have been in the past. While it remains even truer today that the real litmus test of our commitment to the Palestinian cause is supporting the Syrian Arab Republic in its struggle against the imperialist-Zionist-takfiri onslaught against the Resistance project, this does not absolve our Resistance camp from its responsibility toward the Palestinian people and their fundamental rights.
What Amin and others who identify with the Resistance Axis should be doing today, is to call on the Syrian authorities, who are much more likely to listen to us than our enemy is, to designate the Yarmouk camp and its inhabitants as a “red line,” just as the al-Qaeda-infested Nahr al-Bared camp was for Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah when he declared it as such in 2007.”
There are very few Arab intellectuals who have displayed the same unwavering commitment to the Resistance and the Palestinian cause as Al-Akhbar’s editor- in- chief, Ibrahim al-Amin. It is precisely because of this that his recent commentary, “Yarmouk – A Palestinian Responsibility,” astounded and disturbed many of us in the Resistance camp.
His thesis, that the Palestinians are personally and collectively responsible for the tragedy that has befallen the Palestinian refugees in Yarmouk, is at once intellectually flawed, morally indefensible and politically damaging. Although Amin’s position is one not shared either publicly or privately by Hezbollah, his commentary warrants a response if only because it reflects the rise of a new and troubling discourse within our ranks which fails to distinguish between ordinary Palestinians and the treachery of their leadership.
Amin’s commentary only reinforces this troubling trend in so far as he boldly and unequivocally asserts that all Palestinians, refugees in particular, are “100 percent” responsible for their own starvation and deaths: “First and foremost, the Palestinians ought to face the truth themselves, commoners before leaders, and refugees before residents of the historical land in the territories stolen in 1948…”
Apparently, the refugees brought this plight upon themselves when they sided with the armed opposition against the Syrian state. But this gross overgeneralization is contradicted by Amin himself when he claims that only “some of the residents” took over parts of the camp and turned it into a safe haven for militants. According to this logic, the bulk of the 20,000 or so refugees who obviously did not take up arms, are still responsible because they have yet to “force the militants out.”
In other words, Yarmouk’s defenseless refugees are to blame for the sins of their leaders, who have allowed in groups that have held some residents hostage – groups which the Syrian army itself has been unable to oust from many areas of Syria. Rather than blame the governmentand rebels for the strangulation of the refugees who have effectively been turned into human shields by the latter, or expose the opposition’s cynical exploitation of the siege to score PR points against the Syrian government, Amin inexplicably chooses to scapegoat their victims. This faulty line of reasoning can just as readily be misapplied to the Lebanese Shia victims of terrorist bombings who can also be blamed for their own slaying on account of their allegiance to Hezbollah, as well as to government-controlled territories in Syria where civilians are subject to even more frequent terrorist attacks.
The Palestinians of Yarmouk are not just any victims either, they are victims of a double oppression: the oppression of Israel which has forced them to flee their homeland, and the oppression of the takfiris and other militants who are banning them from fleeing their refugee camp.
But Amin doesn’t merely stop at blaming the victims. He goes on to depict Yarmouk’s hapless refugees, and by extension all Palestinians, as a fifth column wreaking havoc in our midst, when he repeatedly asks, “Can any Palestinian explain the secret of this great enthusiasm to topple the Assad regime? Whose interests are they serving by destroying Syria?” Amin is referring here to the handful of Palestinians in Gaza (27 to 70 according to different reports he cites) who joined the war on Syria – a miniscule proportion of the foreign jihadis who have made their way there.
Yet such overgeneralizations and undertones about the Palestinian people were not lost on the more racist supporters of the Syrian government who lavished praise on Amin’s article for outing “Palestinian treason” and “highlighting their treacherous nature.” Nor were these racist tropes lost on outraged Palestinian supporters of the Resistance, including the widely celebrated poet and public intellectual Tamim Barghouti, who tweeted “the racist article of the Lebanese journalist who supports the killing of the people of Yarmouk, is the racism of those who carried out [the massacres of] Tel al-Zaatar and Sabra and Shatila. The resistance should not be associated with the language of its enemies.”
Also derogatory was Amin’s demand that Palestinians “admit” that in Syria they “enjoyed advantages that their counterparts were deprived of in every corner of the world – advantages not even enjoyed in Gaza and the West Bank.” While factually correct, such demands for gratitude are counter-productive in that they easily descend into the logic of keeping score of moral debts accumulated by those we are supposedly collectively and morally obligated toward. Moreover, the theme of the “guests who bite the hand that fed them” is politically damaging to the Resistance in that it undermines its prioritization of the Palestinian cause as the leading moral and religious obligation, and reduces its longstanding solidarity with the Palestinian resistance factions and the Palestinian people as something conditional upon their “good behavior.”
None of this is to say that the Palestinians’ historical suffering makes them morally unassailable or politically unaccountable, or that Syrian blood is cheaper than Palestinian blood as the opposition routinely complains; only that we need to regain our perspective and remain mindful of our political identity as champions of the Palestinian cause if we are to maintain our moral integrity and consistency. From the very start, we rightly faulted the opposition and its supporters for prioritizing the struggle against authoritarianism over confronting imperialism and Zionism. But when we come to view all Palestinians as co-conspirators with our takfiri enemy and its Saudi sponsor, then we, too, are at risk of demoting our meta-struggle against Israel and the Empire to second place.
While Amin is correct in calling on Palestinians to “conduct an overall review,” we, too, in the Resistance camp must also engage in a similar process of self-reflection, especially now that we are in a militarily and diplomatically stronger position than we have been in the past. While it remains even truer today that the real litmus test of our commitment to the Palestinian cause is supporting the Syrian Arab Republic in its struggle against the imperialist-Zionist-takfiri onslaught against the Resistance project, this does not absolve our Resistance camp from its responsibility toward the Palestinian people and their fundamental rights.
What Amin and others who identify with the Resistance Axis should be doing today, is to call on the Syrian authorities, who are much more likely to listen to us than our enemy is, to designate the Yarmouk camp and its inhabitants as a “red line,” just as the al-Qaeda-infested Nahr al-Bared camp was for Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah when he declared it as such in 2007. This means the Syrian government must continue to facilitate the entry of food, medicine and humanitarian aid into the camp, as it did on Saturday when aid reached the camp for the first time in months, even if the insurgents will personally benefit from them. Although the militants are largely to blame for obstructing aid and for banning civilians from fleeing the camp, the Syrian government must also grant UNRWA access to entrances to the camp under its control. It also means that barrel-bombing the rebels into submission is morally unjustifiable in a densely populated area where civilian casualties are bearing the brunt of the aerial bombardment. The only other viable moral option is for the Syrian army to devise a military strategy for reoccupying the camp after first evacuating its civilian inhabitants, as it has done in other areas of Syria.
We cannot countenance the current status quo, which is forcing some of us to engage in the kind of moral rationalizations that would make our enemies proud; let us not mimic the US and Zionist occupation armies with the discourse of “collateral damage” in the name of “rooting out the terrorists,” no matter how strategically located the camp is, or how many rebels are using it for refuge. Indeed, Amin is right when he says “Yarmouk is not Sabra and Shatila,” but it is not Qusayr either. As supporters of the Resistance we cannot in good conscience accept the kind of cognitive dissonance that results from condemning the deaths of Palestinians in Gaza by Zionist hands while tolerating the deaths of Palestinians in Yarmouk by Syrian hands. This is even more so the case when those Syrian hands are an intrinsic part of the Resistance Axis, whose raison d’etre is to protect the oppressed and defenseless.
Amal Saad-Ghorayeb is a Lebanese academic, political analyst and blogger. She is the author of Hizbullah: Politics and Religion, published by Pluto Press.
