Looking at ethnic cleansing in Palestine from the occupied Syrian Golan

Abstract

The unfolding genocide in Palestine today is a continuation of Israel’s 75-year-old occupation and ethnic cleansing. This article provides a perspective on the ongoing tragedy from the vantage point of the Golan Heights – often referred to as Israel’s ‘forgotten occupation.’ How are the stateless Syrians experiencing this war? And why do ‘ethnic cleansing’ and ‘genocide’ reverberate as strongly here as in the rest of Palestine and Israel? By threading the current genocide to the story of occupation and ethnic cleansing in the Golan Heights, this article discusses the underlying settler-colonial assumptions about religious purity and war that have fuelled imperialist projects in occupied Syria and Palestine, and in the wider region.[1]