The long and powerful arm holding the sword

  The Chilean writer Pablo Sapag, a professor at Complutense University of Madrid and the author of “Syria in Perspective”, recently wrote an article published by “Al-Mayadeen TV” website about the “Seif Al-Quds Battle” between the Palestinian resistance and the Israeli occupation which was commemorated this week by the Palestinians.

 Under the title “The long and powerful arm holding the sword” Sapag wrote:

Compared with other engagements around Gaza, the Palestinian Resistance battle of May 2021 was brief – just eleven days – which means four times shorter than the previous full-scale armed confrontation in 2014. Despite its limited length, or precisely because of it, Seif Al-Quds Battle undoubtedly represents a strategic achievement that consolidates a new balance of power between the occupier and the occupied. Its profound implications, however, go far beyond those two actors and reminds how the Palestinian struggle has and will always have an undeniable larger dimension, the very one that the occupier and its western advocates systematically try to deny.

 In such a deceiving endeavor, they have eagerly tried to count on some Arab collaboration in the form of “normalization” and other schemes whose results can only be found in the field of semantic propaganda. The latter consists of twisting the genuine meaning of the words to create parallel, and therefore, artificial realities. By the way, those Arabs involved in the plots, either by will or because they were blackmailed, are all alien to Bilad Al-Sham, and thus irrelevant to the outcome of a struggle of decades, if not centuries. 

It’s natural that a European offspring group, such as the Zionist one, smuggled into the southern edge of Syria in the late 19th century, once and again recurs the divide and conquer recipe so dear to its patrons, partners, and nowadays subordinates in Europe and the US. It is in their DNA. In so doing, they have doggedly tried absolutely everything, from drawing artificial boundaries to pretending that the Palestinian, Syrian, and Arab endeavors to confront the Zionist entity are religiously based. However, the reality is that the struggle has never ever had a motivation of that kind.

The struggle remains a national one and for a territory inhabited for millenniums by the same people, considering it as an integral part of Bilad Al-Sham, the land where natural religious cohabitation is the essence of social daily behavior. How different this is from the Western short-minded approach, like the one that the French and British tried to impose with their secret Sykes-Picot plot. The goal was to establish a constellation of little entities artificially created according to religious or ethnic lines, all to justify their exploitation of the region’s resources and the creation of a Zionist entity to represent their colonial interests on the ground. Of course, the other components of the region are well aware of all that. That’s why and with very few exceptions, from the very beginning, all have always rallied behind the Palestinians.

Seif Al-Quds Battle is one more example of that permanent collective behavior. Palestinians from Gaza reacted against the occupiers’ escalation in their systematic violation of international law in Al-Quds’ Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood. In so doing, they showed that the apartheid-type scheme of enclosing the Palestinians in open sky camps like the Bantustans of racist South Africa means nothing. Neither do the artificial borders created by Sykes-Picot and imposed during the British and French occupation of Bilad Al-Sham. Palestinians from Gaza received the know-how and support from Lebanon, Syria, and beyond, showing that the ungrateful and disloyal positions adopted by some Palestinian leaders at the beginning of the Syrian crisis will never ever jeopardize a superior collective cause.

With that assistance and in just 11 days, the Palestinians from Gaza forced the occupation entity to reach a ceasefire even before sending ground troops into the Strip. In that way, Palestinians outperformed by far their 2014 achievement, mirrored in the Lebanese one of 2006 and in the sequence of Syrian victories in a long-decade war against the same enemy, the sectarian intruder plus its western advocates, and their disposable mercenaries.

Such a military success has not come alone. At the same time, economic hardship, the pandemic, the Lebanese financial crisis, the imposed isolation of occupied Palestine, and the consequences of the coercive measures illegally foisted on Syria by the EU and the US have all been faced by clever collective measures. In so doing, the people of the region ignore both, the French and British artificial imposed land boundaries and the mental ones instilled by propaganda and self-embraced by a fistful of colonized local minds.

The reality on all fronts shows that the 1919 Damascus Programme is still the only valid road map to confront occupation, economic turmoil, and other day-to-day challenges. The reason for the Programme’s durability is no other than the fact that it took into account the long-standing will of the people of Bilad Al-Sham. Against that powerful idea, self-deceiving propaganda and artificial creatures of western imperialism can do nothing. That eternal will is the arm that, one year ago, sustained Seif Al-Quds, a sword whose protective blade reaches far beyond the Holy City.