By drawing up the facets of a new world, the revolutions are reproducing the social and political powers, as well as their structures, and introducing definitions and concepts differing from the ones which prevailed over reality and our way of thinking throughout the past stages.
This is being done by the Arab revolutions whose events are eliminating practices and convictions, receiving others or paving the way before unfamiliar phenomena in the old world. In the new Arab era, new angles have emerged at the level of the Palestinian cause and the entire Arab-Israeli conflict. Indeed, after seven decades during which it was repeated that the Palestinian cause is the “central cause of the Arabs,” the revolutions came to confirm that the Arab regimes exploited the Palestinian tragedy to the point of vulgarity and debauchery. The biggest proof for that is the Palestinians’ stand against and their intellectuals’ statements in rejection of the implication of the name of their occupied country in the oppression practiced by the Syrian regime against its citizens.
In reality, by focusing on freedom and refusing the eternal enslavement practiced on the Syrian people by a regime which has been using the Palestinian cause as a stepping stone since the sixties, the Syrian revolution revealed the extent reached by the Baath regime – with its familial-mafia formula – at the level of the discrepancy between the words and their meanings, i.e. between the statements about Palestine and the actual action to lift the occupation off it. It thus seems that the talk of the Syrian regime’s spokesmen about the global conspiracy targeting it in the backdrop of its resistance against the Israeli occupation and the imperialistic expansion in the region, is some sort of a heavy joke immediately bringing back to mind the primary (and public) reason which prompted Hafez al-Assad to take power. Indeed, this reason is related to his dispute with his companions over their “adventurous” tendency, which made them push the Syrian army into Jordanian soil to support the Palestinian revolution during the September 1970 battles.
Afterwards, the measures and actions adopted by the Syrian authority to render the Palestinian cause a card used to maneuver and improve the negotiating stand started to unfold. Thousands of Palestinians were the victims of this method which is still ongoing until this day, while its main tool is outbidding over Palestinian blood. Many states and parties also exploited the cause, the resistance and Palestine to secure their interests, at a time when the settlement activities were eating away at the Palestinian land.
The bloody facet of Syrian-Palestinian relations was a mere tool exploited by the former and current Syrian presidents among others, as a defense line for their regimes. There is almost no one opposing this idea, and you might even find some who are defending it in the context of the arrangements of the priorities or the protection of the “rejectionist” regime.
But today, the situation has changed. Indeed, even if one were to assume (in an unrealistic analysis) that Al-Assad’s regime will stay in power, it is clear that the ability of this regime - and all its affiliates - to exploit the Palestinian cause is no longer mastered like before.
Baathist arrogance can proceed with its commotion indefinitely, despite all the insults addressed by the regime and its media outlets toward the Arabs, the Arab League and the “Bedouins” during the past months, considering that coherence and shame are not among the qualities of this regime. However, the thin coat which was used by Al-Assad to justify his tyranny over his own people, but also over the Lebanese and the Palestinians whenever he could, has started to falter to the point where his previous and collapsing tools are no longer useful to patch up his nationalist tunic.
This in no way means that the Palestinian cause is a figment of the imagination of the Arab regimes to stay in power. It rather means that the Palestinian people, and with the Arab revolutions’ achievement of additional victory and accomplishments, will be able to find new grounds to cooperate with governments that are aware of the facts and history of the region, but also of the real suffering of the Palestinian people. Hence, the Arab spring might introduce a new spirit among the Palestinians, in the context of their strenuous journey toward their freedom and nation.
The Syrian regime has long invested in the Palestinian cause, and its general bankruptcy will not be compensated by whichever side.
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