[Salon] Syrians Deserve Freedom. So Do Palestinians.

[Chas Freeman <cwfresidence@gmail.com>]

Transcript of remarks by Peter Beinart

I wanted to say something about the extraordinary developments in Syria, which have now led to the overthrow of Bashar Assad's regime. The first point is that although we don't know what this new government in Syria will be like or whether even it'll be able to hold the country together, Syrians do seem, from the news reports,

really overjoyed that Assad has been overthrown, at least many, many, many Syrians. And I just think it's an important lesson for all of us to remember that brutally oppressive regimes can come in all kinds of different ideological flavors. And there was this danger, which I've noticed over the years, that people on the far left,

people who were really, really upset about America's crimes around the world and the crimes of America's allies, and particularly Israel, kind of soft peddled or even apologized for Assad's crimes because the idea was, well, if he's against America and against Israel, then he can't really be all that bad.

Or if America and America's allies are saying these terrible things about him, then they must be lying. And it can't really be true. Right. I think this is the same kind of danger you saw sometimes that leftists fell into during the Cold War when they they could kind of soft pedal or even apologize for

the crimes committed by Stalin or Mao. or Castro or the North Vietnamese, right? Something about the human personality leads us to want to believe that there must be one source of kind of ideological purity and light in the world. And when you are very, very much hostile to one side, even if it's your own government side,

there's a tendency to kind of want to project all of your hopes for humanity onto the other side. But the harsh reality is that in most geopolitical conflicts, you have terrible abuses committed on both ideological sides, even even under different ideological or religious kind of political systems. And so although it's kind of dispiriting, it's really,

really important to remember that it can be true that America has committed terrible crimes, that America's allies, the Saudis, the United Arab Emirates, Israel, commit these terrible crimes. But that doesn't mean that the opponents of that Western system or Western imperialist system or whatever you want to call it

Russia, China, Iran, Syria are not themselves also doing terrible, terrible things. And it's important to kind of keep the focus on the recognition that regimes that are not accountable to the people will almost always abuse their people. because if they're not checks on their power,

and that the human rights and dignity of all people must always be paramount, irrespective of the banner ideological that's being used to justify their denial of rights. The second point about what's happening in Syria is that, of course, Israel and its supporters are really, really excited. They see this as a kind of transformative geopolitical event.

And I think that's true and it's not true. It is true that this is a real blow to what has been called the Iranian regime. access. Israel had already done tremendous amount of damage to Hezbollah. Hezbollah in Lebanon doesn't cease to exist, but it has been badly degraded militarily.

And it will be harder for it to rebuild now because it may well be that you have a regime in Syria that's not allied with Iran and is not going to serve as a land bridge through which Iran can send weaponry to rebuild Hezbollah. And so this will be this is a blow to Iran's geopolitical power.

They couldn't protect Hezbollah. They couldn't protect Assad. I think those things are all true. But the danger is that people use these kind of things in order to suggest that the Palestinian question doesn't really matter, that it's not really central, right? That because Israel can strike these blows against Hezbollah and Syria, and now, of course,

people are going to want Israel to be even more aggressive against Iran, the idea is then Israel can make itself safe, right? Right. Because the real problem, this is, again, something you're constantly in pro-Israel circles because the real problem is the Iranian puppet master. And if you can basically degrade and weaken or even overthrow that,

then Israel won't have these problems because that's at the core of its security issues. And I just think it's fundamentally wrong. It has issues fundamentally backwards. Israel's fundamental security concern is that Israeli Jews lived cheek by jowl with Palestinians. Their safety is ultimately interconnected, that Palestinians live without freedom, that because they live without freedom,

Israel's system of oppression inflicts brutal, brutal violence on them. never more so than over the last year. And that though that violence ultimately threatens Israeli Jews as well. And because that issue is often hard for supporters of Israel to actually face and look in the eye,

they always want to argue that the Palestinians are just pawns of somebody else. You can go back and find Netanyahu in the 1980s saying that Israel's real problem was the Soviet Union. Because the Soviet Union was the puppeteer for all of these different groups. And if they weren't around, it wouldn't be a problem, right?

The Soviet Union fell. And even if Iran is not as formidable a foe of Israel, and even though Assad is not around, even if Hezbollah is not as formidable a foe, The fundamental problem of the Palestinians will be a tremendous problem for Israel. And there will be other foreign powers that emerge that latch onto the Palestinian cause,

maybe because partly because it's still a cause which has tremendous, tremendous power in the Arab and Muslim worlds. And so there will be regimes that are tempted to pick it up. If only because it gives them a chance of increasing their own power and prestige by latching onto something that so many people genuinely care about. Right.

It's always been a lie, this idea that people in the Arab Middle East don't care anymore about the Palestinians. Right. Some of their regimes didn't care. But the people really, really do. And so we've gotten used to this idea that somehow the Palestinian cause was kind of the province of Iran and this Shia axis.

Well, before that, it wasn't, right? In fact, during the Iran-Iraq war, Israel actually favored This was after the Islamic revolution. In the past, you go back, it's not hard to find people saying that Saudi Arabia and these Sunni states were the real threat to Israel.

It may be that now that Turkey has more influence in Syria or Qatar has more influence in Syria. And they become the boogeyman that people focus on because both of those countries also have geopolitical conflicts with Israel. Erdogan in Turkey has been a very, very harsh and formidable kind of adversary of Israel in recent years.

So it's just an illusion if you look at the history to think that Israel's fundamental problem is a product of Iran. And as I was thinking about this, I went back and found an article. that I want to read from a different context, but I think one that just puts this in a certain context, right?

So this is an article called What the Nkwamati Accord Means for Africa. The Nkwamati Accords were an accord signed between the apartheid government of South Africa and its neighbor in Mozambique in 1984. Mozambique had been a very important sponsor of the African National Congress. And there were many,

many people in South Africa who believed that the fundamental problem, the threat that the ANC and Black South African Rebellion in general faced was these border states that were threatening South Africa. And South Africa had this incredible, a part of South Africa had tremendous diplomatic and military success with the Nkumati Accords in 1984.

And this is what this journal article, how it reads. Quote, once again, we are reminded that the future cannot be foretold. Who could have studied the political developments of Southern Africa only one year ago and foretold the events of the past months? Sounds kind of familiar, huh?

Which analyst would have been bold enough to foretell that in April 1984, the Mozambican government headed by the Frelimo Party would be deporting the cadres of the South African revolutionary movement from their country? or raiding ANC homes and offices in Maputo under the supervisory eye of a joint Mozambican-South African Commission.

This was a huge geopolitical coup for South Africa to basically move Mozambique from being a government that was actively hostile to it and supporting the ANC to basically getting Mozambique out of the game and indeed getting the Mozambicans to expel the ANC, right?

Just as it was a huge accomplishment for Israel when it got Lebanon to force the PLO out, the PLO to leave Lebanon in the early 1980s. And now it's a military and diplomatic success that Assad won't be there and that Hezbollah is weakened and that Iran is looking weaker. Although parenthetically,

it's probably going to respond by moving closer to building a nuclear weapon to protect itself from an Israeli attack. But the point is, It's not hard to find these moments in these kind of conflicts in which a country that is oppressing its people feels like it's moving towards solving its problem

because it is convinced some external force to stop being in the business of supporting those that that domestic movement that it's fighting against. But ultimately, it doesn't solve the underlying problem. Mozambique got out of the game. Other countries on South Africa's borders moved in to support the ANC. The Soviet Union supported the ANC.

The ANC was always going to be able to find patrons, and the South African government wasn't willing in 1984 to deal with its fundamental problem, which was the ANC as the representative of black South Africans. Similarly, in the long run, Israel will not solve its problems by dealing blows to Syria or Hezbollah or Iran or anyone else.

There will always be new patrons of the Palestinian cause as long as there is a Palestinian freedom struggle that is responding to the fact that millions of people are held without basic rights. And anyone who in this moment forgets that is not doing Jews in Israel any favors,

and they're just blinding themselves to the fundamental realities of what this conflict is really all about.