Translated from Arabic by Rana Issa

In this interview with the Syrian intellectual living in Berlin, Yassin al-Haj Saleh claims that “We are all Palestinians to various degrees,” inviting us all to inviting us to recognize how our devaluation as political subjects is produced by the same systems of exploitation and violence currently destroying Gaza and murdering its population.. The dispossession that structures the Palestinian experience is present elsewhere, especially in regimes that claim to be sworn enemies of Israel. Pointing towards this shared experience, al-Haj Saleh proposes a way forward by challenging as well as defending democracy as a crucial political concept that can lead us to a new socialist horizon. Speaking to an Arab audience, he argues that to wrench out democracy from the fortresses of our Western enemies must not preclude engaging in solidarity work with Western allies. Essentializing identities dangerously prevents our struggle from forging a new horizon for democracy that can overcome its current limits.

While working on translating this interview, which was originally published in The Legal Agenda, I had to pause and reconsider the question of democracy and the discourse of human rights, particularly as it is practiced through development economics and the NGO industry. Al-Haj Saleh does not problematize this discourse, as per his mention of the work of economist Amartya Sen, whose yoking of freedom to development economics has contributed to legitimizing the work of NGOs globally. In the case of Palestine, development economics was deployed by complicit Western states to lull Palestinian society– particularly in the West Bank– to the Oslo Accords’ promises, while Israel relentlessly confiscated land, demolished homes, jailed, and massacred Palestinians. NGO and Human Rights work in Palestine has been a mixed bag. On the one hand, it has produced a clientelistic society that shapes its civil programs to the whims of donors while also providing independent eyewitness reports of Israeli crimes against Palestinians. Take UNRWA. While Palestinians must patiently wait for UNRWA handouts for food, medicine, education, and jobs, this war has shown the precarity even of such a system of subsistence that depends on charity disguised as development. Nevertheless, UNRWA has also generated important eyewitness reports and statistics that document the Israeli crimes against Palestinians. In the interview, al-Haj Saleh does not delve into how the yoking of development to freedom, as a practice, has been complicated everywhere, but especially so in Palestine. This lack of nuance in the interview risks distracting the reader from the crucial suggestion al-Haj Saleh is making about democracy. He argues for what we are witnessing today on college campuses everywhere: what safeguards democracy is the struggle to transgress it. He rejects the democracy of the ballot box, and the dissenting masses know that this democracy of ballot boxes is no longer for us. The street is our democracy, and the international struggle, like charity, begins at home. Only when our democracies can expand to include those it absents can the ballot box be rehabilitated. Today, what we have is each other and an inclusivist Palestinian solidarity movement that would do good to carry the slogan “We are all Palestinians,” more or less, not so much as a rallying call to flatten difference but as an exploration of how our own political realities are complicit in the vicious genocide in Gaza. Aspects of Palestinian dispossession are, to various degrees, globally replicated, and the struggle for Palestine in the collective labor of liberation centers the injustice of dispossession and demystifies the workings of a colonizing world system that creates wealth through politicide.

Legal Agenda: The genocide we are witnessing today and the ongoing siege imposed on the Palestinian people makes us confront a destructive force that seeks to be a model for managing the region and the world, eliminating all political and legal possibilities for change. How do you read this destructive force?

Yassin Al-Haj Saleh: Israel has always been the paradigm for politicide in our region. The concept of politicide means mass killing for political reasons (for example, the Indonesian Communist Party in 1966) or the political killing of a group, its political decapitation, so to speak, though without necessarily murdering many of its members, but with keeping the possibility of genocide. The Palestinian people are in this situation. Israel is at its best with the spread of this model, and when more of the region’s regimes are based on politicide, as has been happening in Syria, where we find two facets in the extermination relationship: the Palestinization of the Syrians and the Israelization of the regime. The matter goes beyond Syria, as most Arab regimes, to varying degrees, have reproduced the Israeli condition locally.

What is happening today is a terrifying jump in demolition and politicide of the Palestinian people, spilling over from Gaza to the occupied West Bank, even if not with the same dramatic degree of destruction, killing, and impetuousness. This destruction is persistent and systematic, decimating Palestinians through settlement, destruction of homes, making life unlivable, and through direct murder. What seems to me relatively new today is the obscene vulgarity of Israel’s allies and protectors in their support of it, something that reminds us of the heyday of Western colonialism, when racist and civilizational theories gave legitimacy to expansion, and peoples were classified into white peoples with rights to control the world and other enslaved people whose resources were plundered in various forms. This is being repeated today in Palestine through (the unbelievably brazen) bias on the part of Western powers, their total embrace of Israel, and a prevailing feeling that theirs is a common battle.

There is something akin to “national unity” in the West around Israel, where no voice is louder than Israel’s battle against Gaza—which has been besieged since 2006—and “Israel’s right to defend itself.” I believe that this framing sends a message to the Palestinians first and to Arabs generally that this is the future that is intended for the inhabitants of the region. The battle of Palestine is, therefore, broader than Palestine, as it constitutes the model that creates possibilities for those who build their regimes around politiciding their peoples, like the Assad regime in Syria that produced genocidal possibilities for other Arab regimes and for Israel itself. An Israeli official even asked: Why are the Palestinians not deported to Egypt, as millions of Syrians were previously displaced to Turkey?

It has become possible to transform human beings into violated subjects, a model that Giorgio Agamben described through the concept of the “homo sacer,” a form of life outside the law, reduced to the biological dimension. Killing a homo sacer does not constitute a crime, and her life has no moral or sacrificial value. She cannot be a martyr, and her death has no sacrificial value. Today, this is practiced on a collective scale in Palestine, and it has been practiced on a large scale in Syria, and in some way, it is the model adopted in Egypt. We have a brutal model that combines fascism with traditional colonialism. This model is being reproduced in our region everywhere, and it bodes more violation and obliteration.

LA: Despite the reproduction of the Israeli model by more than one Arab regime, to this day, we still see Arab regimes adopting a discourse that defends the Palestinian cause and aligns with the so-called axis of resistance or “mumana’a.” What is your take on this?

YAS: We must distinguish between structural and discursive facts. At the structural level, there is a propagation of the politicide model by treating the population as superfluous and dispensable. This is apparent in Syria and, to some degree, in Egypt. However, the level of atrocity was mainly achieved in Syria and Palestine. Through this structural model, we can talk about a Palestinianization of the ruled and an Israelization of the rulers on a large scale. We are all Palestinians to various degrees. Look at how seven million Syrians, about 30% of the population, are displaced and have become refugees in countries near and far in an ongoing Palestinian scene. Isn’t this another nakba? These structural facts are more important than the discursive facts that are used for the sake of mobilization and building legitimacy. When the Assad regime in Syria, or the so-called axis-of-resistance regimes, speak about Palestine, this is a fact of discourse or ideology, while the reality of the situation belies what the speaker is saying. The reality is that you deal with your governed (your people) as dispensable: they are arrested, tortured, raped, killed, bombed, exterminated, and displaced. Legitimation tools are less important here since these regimes instrumentalize a popular and resourceful cause, but this instrumentalization is in constant contradiction with the structural situation. As we can see, Gaza has been abandoned for more than five months now. As we also see, the champions of normalization with Israel, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia are themselves the champions of normalization with the rule of the Assad family.

LA: In addition to the Arab regimes, hegemonic Western powers are experiencing a great contradiction between practice and discourse, which has made descriptions of the West as arrogant and hypocritical more acceptable than ever before. These descriptions also express a mounting sense of the end of major values, notably democracy. Does this trend paint a true picture of what is going on?

YAS: I believe that here, too, we need to distinguish between structural and discursive facts. The Western countries have never been democratizing forces in our region. There is an instrumental use by the West of the universally accepted and positively perceived discourse of democracy and human rights in ways similar to how the Palestine cause is used by the “axis of resistance.” But because the idea of democracy is important and is actually a gain for the people, it is better for enemies like us not to have it. The actual structure, as it appears in Gaza, is a very crude colonial setup. This time, even the discursive level has been insolent and lacking in diplomacy. It is difficult for our memory to forget the votes of Western parliaments against the ceasefire in Gaza and the American use of veto power against the ceasefire.

This observation is important in our struggle for democracy and against renewed forms of international domination. The struggle for democracy does not put us in the same trench with the Americans or the Europeans, but rather the opposite. Democracy, if we can win it, is like “war booty,” as Kateb Yacine once said about the French language in which he was writing. The West seems aware of this and prefers for us authoritarian or even genocidal regimes.

At the same time, we must oppose nihilistic forms of hostility toward the West that Islamists and Arab nationalists prefer. One of the main traps we must avoid today - while we are emotional and angry - is thinking in terms of “us” and “them” or thinking tribally about the conflict. It is true that our worst enemies are in the West, but our best friends are also there, including Western citizens, activists, and intellectuals in various countries. Therefore, it is important that we avoid essentialist traps that consider Americans and Europeans evil only because they are Americans or Europeans. This hostility is similar in structure to Islamophobia and Arabophobia, which deals with us as a homogeneous human mass, as a person-collective who is hated and discriminated against. It is important that we look for partners to work with, and there are many of them. The global situation is more complex than ever before, to the point that a few weeks ago, a global strike for Gaza was called for in more than one region in the world, and this idea was unimaginable until recently. Today, through global information circulation, it is possible to call for a global strike. Regardless of its success, the call has reached billions of people in various forms. In this world, we cannot think in tribal terms, and we must have partnerships within which we can work for the sake of a different world based on fraternity, equality, partnership, and respect.

As for democracy, I see it going through a crisis everywhere in the world. I do fear the possibility that democracy may collapse in the West itself, just as Soviet socialism collapsed decades ago from within. The enemy of democracy is the rising right-wing populist movements in the West, which in recent years have become closer to the mainstream of the political scene after being on its distant margins. Western political elites today act without the sense of social responsibility that existed during Soviet socialism and its derivatives. On the contrary, it adopts elements of the right's anti-refugee and anti-immigrant programs to win elections. Politics becomes elections. The entire political scene shifts to the right. Without making a misguided prediction, it seems to me that the dynamics at work today may lead to the collapse of democracy or its failure to defend itself against the ongoing process of erosion to which it is subjected. For this reason, too, we need to work with partners for broader democratization in our countries and in the world and to stand up to anti-democratic trends.

LA: Considering the global crisis that democracy is going through, what are the features that appear before us if we try to imagine the fate of the world in the near future?

YAS: It seems to me that the state of the world today is one of no alternative. There is no alternative or TINA, as Margaret Thatcher called it forty years ago. This means that the only alternative to the liberal democratic form that prevails in Western countries–which is eroding today– is this form itself, which is a form that the likes of Biden and Trump are following in succession in America. The extreme right, or what was considered the extreme right ten years ago, is becoming more and more acceptable today. We have Marine Le Pen in France and perhaps tomorrow the Alternative for Germany (AFD) party, and before that, the rise of the extreme right in Hungary, and recently, a super-right-wing president was elected in Argentina, and perhaps Trump will be back in America. This is what the current mechanisms of liberal democracy promise in light of the weakness of leftist alternatives. In our country, we are told explicitly that there is no alternative, and the only alternative to Assad rule is this neo-Sultanic hereditary rule itself, which publicly declares that it will keep power eternally and raises nihilistic slogans of the type of Assad or no one, or Assad or we burn the country. Eternity is not a gregarious continuity, nor is it a pleasant stability. Rather, it is a perpetual war against the future with the aim of eliminating any potential alternatives or nipping them in the bud. For this reason, I believe that the condition of a global no-alternative is “syrreal,” a global generalization of the Syrian eternity, which is the largest social, cultural, and political regression in the history of Syria since the Ottoman Tanzimat era, a return to an extremely ferocious neo sultanism. Rather than Syria evolving towards a more open world, the world has become more like Syria in the last ten years or more. This puts us before a great challenge: the challenge of coming up with alternatives, creating a new language, building new networks of interaction, and new solidarities. We are in a crisis for this reason, a global crisis, and the crisis of the left and democrats are parts of it.

LA: Considering the suffocated alternatives that threaten major ideas such as democracy and human rights, what transgressive horizon is possible for thought?

YAS: The idea of human rights does not carry traction outside the political frameworks of modern societies, and the basic dominant framework here is the nation-state. I agree with Hannah Arendt's criticism of the idea of human rights, which is about a right to rights contingent on the existence of a political group rather than the abstract individual. But even the existence of a political community such as the nation-state does not guarantee that it is a framework for the right to rights except in some countries, as we know well in our countries. Even in liberal democratic countries, rights are decreasing for immigrants, people of color, and refugees. But the dynamic of decline may soon include broader groups, including parts of the dominant ethnic group (the poorest, the dissidents…). This is part of the agenda for the struggle in the coming period—as we are witnessing pivotal times at the global level—which makes me almost say that we need a new socialist horizon, albeit a socialism with different connotations.

The meaning that I prefer for socialism today is openness to the absented: the immigrant, the refugee, women, the oppressed, the marginalized, and to the environment because we have a global problem of the living environment. All of this is absented. Democracy today is based on a bilateral dialogue between “I” and “You.” The third, “he,” “she,” “they,” the human as well as non-rational others, are not present; they are absented. Socialism is about the presence of the absented. Today, we are witnessing a decline even in the dialogue between you and me, and in Germany, where I currently reside, instead of dialogue, there is monologue regarding Gaza, a kind of official doctrine and imposition of censorship that verges on the Inquisition, where everyone can be asked, Do you support Israel? If this happens, it will put Germany closest to totalitarianism since the fall of Nazism. Instead of the crisis of dialogue being resolved in the direction of pluralism that accommodates the absented, we see that it is being resolved in the direction of a return to the official doctrine, that is, in the direction of the “monologue” and the single voice. Sixty years ago, there was a left-wing movement in France led by Cornelius Castoriadis under the banner of socialism or barbarism, which is the name of the movement’s magazine as well, after a slogan that Rosa Luxemburg put forward before her assassination in 1919. Today, it seems valid to me to put forward a slogan that says socialism or totalitarianism. Multiple voices or the one voice and the official doctrine.

Democracy is healthy only when it is the theater in which the absented can show up, present, and represent themselves. But from the days of Athenian antiquity, Athenian democracy excluded women, foreigners, and slaves. The poorest and most marginalized groups today are the slaves of yesterday, not the working class in the broad classical sense. Women are still in the position absence, under-present, and underrepresented—in our societies more than in Western societies. Foreigners today are immigrants and refugees. Added to them is a fourth absented, which is the environment that constitutes the living framework of life. I want to think about socialism by pursuing these directions, for how they stimulate the political imagination because we lack a utopian vision and images that provoke new political thinking. Democracy only protects rights to the extent that there exists a dynamic of transcending democracy itself. If this dynamism does not exist, democracy tends to become formal and empty, as it is today. What saves democracy is what goes beyond it. Therefore, it is important to build new traditions of struggle because there is a crisis of imagination, as many have said, including Alaa Abdel Fattah, a prisoner of the Sisi regime for most of the past ten years. We have indeed lacked intellectual and organizational creativity in recent decades. Among the left and elsewhere, liberal sensibility prevailed: very individualistic, dispersed, and separated from living social forces, defining itself by what it stands against because it had nothing positive to define itself with.

I believe that in this direction, the idea of human rights can be protected by moving beyond it towards the right to rights, as something not linked to the nation-state but rather as something linked to the struggle to overcome the current conditions in the world.

LA: On the Arab level, the democratic demand has often been postponed in the name of the priority of socialism or providing bread before freedom. In your opinion, how do we read this discourse, especially in light of the state of democratic and social decline in more than one Arab country?

YAS: Allow me to return a little to my personal path. I was a communist opposed to the Syrian regime on democratic grounds, in one of the first Arab communist parties that recognized the issue of democracy by benefiting from the writings of Yassin al-Hafez (1930-1978), the Syrian thinker, who died young before the end of the seventies. At that time, the democratic idea had a dimension contrary to “de facto socialism” existing in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, which had begun to stagnate at least since the 1960s. This socialism was univocal, without dualism like democracy, and certainly without pluralism. What was wasted in the experience of democratic movements with leftist origins in the Arab sphere is the idea I mentioned previously, basically that democracy is fine whenever there is a dynamism to carry it further. In the Arab sphere, I think it is important for democratic forces, and I include myself with a degree of self-criticism, to open their thought on how we relate to peoples’ life needs, to how people can own their lives, and with a feminist horizon that pervades family and society, and a third environmental horizon. We undoubtedly have to flesh this out, but this is the socialist horizon I am talking about. I think that our approach to the idea of democracy in recent times has exhausted its energy to bring something new. Perhaps we, who were communists and later became democrats, are not qualified for this. I think we did the right thing in our younger years, but is it still the right thing today?

I do not believe that democracy, as it is currently proposed, addresses broad segments if it does not open towards a transgression that takes the direction of owning life, or to put it in traditional Marxist language, what is related to the relations of production and distribution of wealth. If we continue to think of democracy in the liberal sense, which is the position of middle-class intellectuals, we will not succeed in establishing it, especially since liberal democracy is in crisis. It is time to move beyond the question of the localization of democracy and whether we have democratic traditions. On the contrary, as long as democracy is in crisis, we are theoretically in a position that qualifies us to contribute to getting out of this crisis towards a socialist horizon. By this, it should be now clear, I do not mean the socialist historical experience. What happened in that experiment was a sacrifice of democracy or a retreat to one voice instead of moving forward toward a plurality of voices. Socialism is no longer a three-dimensional transcendence of two-dimensional democracy, which in turn has transcended individualist one-dimensional liberalism. Rather, on the contrary, socialism became monodirectional, with one voice, and it was imposed as an official doctrine. Again, what protects democracy is something that goes beyond it, that opens up to the absent or the absented. Absence is always politically constructed through relationships of power, wealth, and knowledge.

We must also break with this deceptive blackmail between bread and freedom. Exclusive preoccupation with bread sacrifices not only freedom in advance, but also bread. There are important theories, such as the work of Amartya Sen, that development is freedom. This is what I mean by people taking ownership of their lives: material life as well as public political life. The starvation of Gazans today, and that more than 90% of Syrians have fallen below the poverty line according to United Nations figures makes clear that hunger is politically manufactured and is closely tied to the administration of genocide and politicide in the two afflicted countries. We do not forget that the Assad regime raised the slogan: hunger or kneeling during its siege of multiple areas of the country between 2013 and 2018. What guarantees bread is exclusively what goes beyond it towards freedom, which is that citizens should not be treated as tools. Whoever sacrifices freedom for bread will lose both. What protects them both is a horizon to overcome them, provided that it is a dynamic horizon and not imposed from above.

LA: You are currently residing in Germany. How did you keep up with the reactions of the German authorities and part of the elite to the aggression against Gaza?

YAS: Only a week after the start of the war on Gaza, I traveled and spent a month outside Germany. Therefore, I did not directly experience the worst periods of attacks on pro-Palestinian demonstrations and the targeting of the kuffiyeh and the Palestinian flag. It seems to me that Germany today is closer to totalitarianism than at any time since the Nazi period. Despite my respect for the country, its culture and society, and its historical richness, we cannot deny that some aspects of this history were extremely criminal, most notably Nazism and World War II. Even before that, there was Namibia, where the first genocide occurred in the twentieth century. After World War II and the Holocaust, German self-consciousness centered on atonement for this crime, with a feeling of special responsibility towards the Jews. This in itself is a positive and understandable thing. But the problem is that the idea of “never again” carries a narrow interpretation that says that “this will never happen again only to the Jews,” as if there is nothing wrong with something similar happening to others. They violently insist that nothing close to the Holocaust could happen. Every comparison of the Holocaust with other genocides has come to be seen as a relativization of the genocide of the Jews or even a trivialization of it. We can understand this logic as a manifestation of a pathological complex caused by the horrific genocide committed by the Nazis, which included, in addition to the Jews, gypsies, the disabled, and homosexuals. What belies understanding, however, is why this pathological complex is being transformed into a global standard of normality. The collective complex of a particular people in relation to a very bad aspect of their history cannot be generalized and imposed on others. Only totalitarianism can demand that a Palestinian, Syrian, or Arab recognize Israel and support it. We do not have their memory, and we did not participate in their crime, and the meaning of Israel, as far as we are concerned, is colonialism, racism, and ethnic cleansing, not survival and a “fortress of the West,” as it may be in the eyes of Germans. We are victims of Israel. Not only the Palestinians but the Syrians were also greatly affected. Even if we accept the stupid nationalist logic that says that Palestine does not concern us as Syrians, Israel also occupies Syrian land. How do you want me to recognize Israel and bracket the question of values and moral inclinations and questions of justice, all of which put one on the side of Palestine and against Israel?

I now believe that centering German awareness around the Holocaust is not an expression of alterity as much as it is an expression of narcissism. I would almost say that the issue is not even about the Jews, as much as it is about the Germans making themselves feel good in search of narcissistic self-sufficiency. The slogan “Germany above all” is back but in a different way. In my view, Germany has not yet emerged from its narcissism towards a healthy and genuine alterity.

[1] Translator's note: This interview was published before the student protests, but it was written in their spirit and in the spirit of months of overwhelming international solidarity and state repression.