The Yarmouk camp for so-called “Palestinian” refugees in southern Damascus was under relentless bombardment by the Syrian government this past April. The Assad regime was attempting destroy the last remnants of ISIS fighters in the camp, but in so doing, it bombed the way it usually does — indiscriminately — and killed and wounded many of the “Palestinian” civilians in Yarmouk. That camp is by far the largest of the 13 camps in which “Palestinians” live in Syria, and at its height had close to 200,000 residents. As many know, the “Palestinians” in Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan are required by their host governments to live in camps. They are not granted full citizenship in these countries nor, for that matter, anywhere else in the Arab world (though a limited citizenship is granted in Jordan), and they are kept from full access to educational and vocational opportunities. For it is more important to the Arabs that the “cause of Palestine” be promoted, even if it means damaging the life-chances of generations of those Muslim Arabs who continue to call themselves, wherever they were born and raised, “Palestinians.”
The April 2018 bombing of the Yarmouk camp had ISIS as its intended target, but the Syrians were indifferent as to how many “Palestinian” civilians (i.e., non-ISIS) also died. Several dozen — about 50 — is the estimated number. Of the 6,000 “Palestinians” who were still in Yarmouk on April 19, 5,000 have since fled. The last remaining hospital in Yarmouk was also destroyed by the Syrians. “Yarmouk was a refugee camp that had already been transformed into a death camp,” said Christopher Gunness, a spokesman for the UN Relief and Works Agency (Unrwa), the agency for Palestinian refugees. And now “things have become unimaginably brutal for the civilians there.”
The Yarmouk camp had been bombed many times before in the Syrian civil war. In August 2012, two dozen civilians were killed in a single attack by the Syrians. In December 2012, there was an aerial bombing by Assad’s MiG fighter jets. In what would eventually become commonplace, the bombing targeted a hospital, a mosque, and a school, killing more than 100 civilians in the process. The Assad regime suspected that Syrian opposition forces were using Yarmouk as one of their bases. In 2013, there was a siege of the camp, and at least 135 “Palestinian” civilians died directly from being bombed during the siege. More than 1,020 died indirectly, of starvation.
In June 2014 the Syrian regime started to cut off water to Yarmouk; this man-made drought, manufactured by the government, continues intermittently to this day. Water had to be smuggled in, for the 18,000 “Palestinians” — less than 10% of those who once lived in Yarmouk — who remained. And as the number of “Palestinians” decreased to 6,000 earlier this year, the deliberate drought inflicted by the Free Syrian Army remained.
During these years, ever since the siege by Assad’s forces began in 2013, the inhabitants of Yarmouk were made aware that their Arab brothers were indifferent. Even their fellow “Palestinians” elsewhere remained silent. “Of course we’ve seen how many Palestinians aren’t speaking about our crisis,” Hakem Said from Yarmouk News Agency explains. “Most people in the camp blame the Palestinian factions the most for what has happened. They have not done anything to help us. But many Palestinians that aren’t even in factions have also not said a lot about the siege. We know that if this were happening in Palestine the reactions would have been stronger. We know this and it bothers us a lot.”
It was the same during this latest bombing of Yarmouk by Assad’s army in April 2018. There was no outcry over these attacks. Not at the U.N. Not in Europe. Not from any Arab states. Not even from the “Palestinian Authority.” But when “Palestinians” belonging to, or egged on by, Hamas, attempted to breach the security fence during the Great March of Return, in order to enter Israel to commit mayhem and murder, and Israel managed to prevent them, there were howls of denunciation at the U.N. and from Arab and Muslim countries. The Arabs and Muslims will protest to high heaven the killing of “Palestinians” by Israelis, but are silent if the killers are other Arabs, for that would dilute the effect, and the propaganda value, of any “Palestinians” killed by the Israelis.
The “Palestinians” in Gaza began their Great March of Return on March 30 and officially ended it on Tuesday, May 15, but they may well continue to show up, in dwindling numbers, for a few more Fridays. Hamas organizers had initially hoped to attract 100,000 marchers, but only 30,000 showed up for that first Friday, which was not exactly a vote of confidence in Hamas, and the numbers steadily went down every subsequent Friday, to a few thousand, before a single last upsurge of close to 40,000 on May 14. In media coverage of the Gaza events, marchers were invariably described as “peaceful” and “unarmed.” But in fact, throughout the seven Fridays of marches, and on the last two days, May 14 and May 15, the Hamas-directed “Palestinians” hurled rocks and Molotov cocktails over the fence, showed up with still other explosives to bury right at the fence, brought wire-cutters to cut through that fence, burned tires to create a smokescreen (making it harder for Israeli soldiers to target them with rubber bullets and tear gas), and — a new weapon — let loose kites to which they had affixed oil-soaked rags, and lit the rags on fire, kites which would then land on the Israeli side of the fence and set farmland ablaze –which is exactly what has happened. A handful of the “Palestinians” have also been armed — non-violently, of course — with axes, grenades, and even the occasional gun. The foreign media has been most reluctant to report on all this deadly weaponry. Only a handful have reported on the swastikas daubed onto the killer-kites.
The Israelis were not eager to engage the Gazan Arabs and thereby to further the propaganda value of the spectacle. They continually warned the marchers, week in week out, not to come close to the security fence; they announced these warnings from loudspeakers, they air-dropped leaflets with the same warnings. Then, to stop the marchers who did not heed the warnings, they always responded first with endless volleys of tear gas, and then with rubber bullets. Only in the most menacing cases (as when some Gazan Arabs managed to cut, or were on the verge of cutting, through the wire of the security fence, or were close to the fence flinging Molotov cocktails over at soldiers in Israel, or planting explosives at the fence, or setting alight Israeli farmland with their kites, did the Israelis use live fire, and then they were very careful to aim for the legs, so as to halt the marchers. How accurate was their fire? As of the end of May 15, there have been, according to the figures put out by the “Palestinians” themselves (so a little skepticism may be in order), a total of 109 “Palestinians” killed, and a total of 12,000 wounded. In other words, despite a constantly shifting, confusing, smoke-filled battlefield, 99% of those who were wounded survived; fewer than 1% died from Israeli gunfire. That bespeaks surgical accuracy by the Israelis, rather than wanton killing. Hamas, of course, did whatever it could to encourage children to take part, hoping for many casualties among them; it even sent a seven-year-old “Palestinian” girl (rescued by the Israelis, who returned her safely to her parents) across the security fence on May 11. Hamas also placed adults with intellectual disabilities at the front of the marchers, hoping that they, too, would become victims of the Israelis. Some people were also paid to participate. These are among the many stories about the Great March of Return that the Western media failed to cover.
Many of those killed were initially reported by the Western media as being innocents, but it has later turned out that quite a few, including a “journalist” — that is, someone wearing a sign saying “Press,”about whose death a great fuss was made — were members of Hamas. Despite the flaming kites, the Molotov cocktails, the burning tires, the rocks, the occasional guns and grenades and axes, despite, too, the membership in Hamas of many of those killed, these people remain “unarmed demonstrators” — and not just on Al Jazeera.
Israel has always maintained that not only did Hamas, a terrorist organization, orchestrate this whole event, and inveigle and even pay others to participate, but its own members took the major role as the most aggressive marchers to the security fence. In a television interview on May 16, Hamas official Salah Bardawil proudly proclaimed that “[i]n the last rounds of confrontations, if 62 people were martyred, 50 of them were Hamas.” How many of the 47 demonstrators killed before May 14 were Hamas members? If among those previously killed, the percentage of Hamas members was roughly the same as it was among those killed during May 14 and 15, that would mean that 40 of the 47 killed during those Friday marches were Hamas members, and of the total of 109 killed, 90 were members of Hamas.
Meanwhile, in late April, other “Palestinians” — many dozens of them — were killed in the Syrian bombardment of the Yarmouk camp, in just a few days, about half the number killed by the Israelis during the seven Fridays of the Great March of Return and on May 14 and 15, during the last final spasm of “Palestinian” rage orchestrated by Hamas. Unlike the Israelis with the Gazan marchers, the Syrians faced no threat from the “Palestinians” in Yarmouk. They had no burning kites or Molotov cocktails. Those “Palestinians” were simply being killed because they were there, stuck in Yarmouk, caught between ISIS and Assad’s army, with both sides indifferent to their fate. No Arab country, not even one of those those opposed to Assad, has bothered to deplore the killings in Yarmouk of “Palestinians” this past April. Nor have any of the “Palestinians” in Gaza or the West Bank mentioned the Syrian Army’s assault on Yarmouk and the “Palestinians” who were killed there. The Yarmouk killings were too close in time to the Great March of Return that had been announced, and the “Palestinians” understood that the Yarmouk story would only draw attention away from the propaganda spectacle about to begin in Gaza, and for Hamas that would never do.
A recent report in Maclean’s describes the situation in Yarmouk:
In Ramallah, the humanitarian catastrophe suffered by Syria’s Palestinians has only rarely warranted any attention from Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian National Authority. In Gaza, Ismael Haniyeh of Hamas has had frosty relations with the Assad regime, but he has taken great care to stay on the good side of the Khomeinists in Tehran, who provide both Hamas and Assad with armor and money.
What this means is that Syria’s Palestinians have not only been left on their own against Assad’s barrel bombers and Russian warplanes. They are just as likely to be killed in encounters with the various jihadist forces ostensibly identified with the Syrian opposition camps, including the Islamic State and Al Qaida’s affiliates. In places like Yarmouk, Latakia and Deraa, they have died at the hands of Assad’s allies in Iran’s Quds Force and Hezbollah. Assad’s mercenary allies in Syria include the PFLP-GC, the Palestinian Liberation Army, the “Free Palestine” organization, Fatih Intifada, and Liwa Quds — all terrorist groups armed to the teeth and claiming to be fighting in the interests of the Palestinian people.
By the Action group’s calculations, 3,702 Palestinians have been killed in Syria over the past seven years. That’s nearly twice the number of Palestinian civilians who were killed during Israel’s Operation Pillar of Defence in Gaza in 2011, and Operation Protective Edge in 2014. But when Syrian Palestinians die, they die far from the television cameras, and their deaths prompt no rallies and marches in the streets of the NATO capitals.
Such hypocrisy no longer amazes. We expect it whenever Israel is concerned. South Africa has “recalled” its ambassador from Israel. Belgium has called in the Israeli ambassador to express its displeasure at the casualties in Gaza. Russia, that celebrated champion of civil rights, has expressed its “deepest concern.” But the most outrageous outrage was that expressed by the inimitable Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Even though the Israelis made endless efforts to warn the marchers away from the security fence, by loudspeaker and leaflet, fired tear gas and rubber bullets to try to head them off through non-lethal means, and only as a last resort did they use live fire, taking great care to aim below the knee, so that 99% of those wounded survived, Erdogan had the gall to accuse Israel of the crime of “genocide” and of being a “terrorist state” because it dared to defend its borders against those hellbent on harming it. Erdogan does know something about “genocide” because — according to the U.N. — his troops have since 2015 killed thousands of Kurds, most of them civilians, inside Turkey, and displaced tens of thousands more as they destroyed large parts of Kurdish cities, including Diyarbakir, Nusaybin, Silopi, and Sirnak. And earlier this year, in Afrin in Syria, Turkish troops killed more than 500 Kurdish civilians — that is, roughly five times the number of “Palestinians” killed in Gaza since March 30. None of the Kurdish civilians killed in Afrin threatened the Turkish state, while the Hamas-led “Palestinian” marchers were baying for Jewish blood — that was the whole point of their breaching the fence. Yet here is Erdogan declaring that Israel is guilty of “genocide.”
France’s Macron has let the Israelis know that the “Palestinians have a right to peacefully protest,” as if that was what they had been doing all along. Did Macron manage to miss the spectacle of all those marchers who flung Molotov cocktails and pipe bombs over, and buried explosives beside, the security fence, and sent flaming kites toward Israeli farms, while others used wire-cutters in an attempt to massively breach the fence itself, so that the “Palestinians” could rush in en masse to kill Israelis, with whatever weapons they had? What “peaceful protest” is he talking about? Has he taken leave of his senses?
The next time someone tells you about what those terrible Israelis did to those innocent unarmed marchers in Gaza, mention the orchestration of those marchers by Hamas, mention the mentally deficient adults and children, including a seven-year-old girl (rescued by the Israelis), inveigled into taking part, mention the Molotov cocktails, the pipe bombs, the tires set aflame, the flaming kites with swastikas painted on them, the axes and guns and grenades wielded by some of those “unarmed” marchers. And then describe the care the Israelis took throughout to warn the marchers, by loudspeakers and by leafletting, not to approach the security fence, before employing non-lethal force, and when, as a last resort, Israeli soldiers used live fire to halt those marchers who came close to or were at the fence, attempting to breach it, those soldiers took extraordinary care, by aiming to hit below the knees, to avoid killing, which is why 99% of the wounded survived. And once you have delivered yourself of all of that information then, as a parting shot, be sure to ask “And why didn’t anyone report on what happened to the ‘Palestinians’ in Yarmouk?”
Hari Singh says
There is no mention in the Leftist press as we have come to expect such things from Arabs, but not Israelis. We expect Israel to have morality as the media intuitively knows Israel is a more moral society.
The media doesn’t care , really, about Palestinians, but about denigrating and destroying Israel, the agenda of so much of European History.
First Jews were hated for their religion, then their race, and now for their Nationalism. Its anti-semitism in a new form, with the same goal making the Jews suffer.Scholars have told them everything from there being no such thing as a Jewish people, they are not a race in the sense used by British English, and have no right to autonomy, despite centuries of genocide.Say you support Israel and loud individuals, will denounce it as a colonial settler state, whose colony I don’t know. But many of these people are descendants of colonial-settlers in USA, Canada, Australia etc. you get the picture. Hypocrisy on Israel reveals hate as the agenda.
carpediadem says
Very good points.
Wellington says
Muslims killing other Muslims, no big deal, no matter how indiscriminately, no matter how many. The Western MSM cares nothing about this. Not in the least.
The IDF, while using all kinds of restraints, nonetheless killing some Muslims intent on lethally demonstrating their animosity towards the very existence of Israel, even using children to do this as is Islam’s wont, a very big deal in the Western press.
Conclusion: Islam is barbaric and the Western MSM is moronic.
And a concomitant conclusion from all this: Barbarism, as awful as it is, is not as potentially destructive of liberty as being a fool enjoying freedom in a free society all the while not inculpating the barbarian but rather the freedom fighter fighting the fight against the barbarian. Think, as examples of this idiocy, MSNBC, the BBC and the CBC.
b.a. freeman says
Wellington, i’m afraid that i must differ ever so slightly with U here. the legacy media are not moronic; they are treasonous. they knowingly lie to us, and expect us to believe them, in spite of the plethora of evidence easily obtained by other means. in decades past, there would have been a much better chance of success for them, but fortunately, this is no longer the case.
that said, i seriously doubt that all personnel of legacy media are lying traitors; the majority of them have simply been deluded by being “educated” in the indoctrination centers of the u.s. the same can probably be said about those who control these organizations. when people have been taught to look to authority figures to learn how to act and what to believe, it only takes a tiny group of thought leaders to guide the footsteps of millions of tools. nevertheless, a lot of people who think they know better than the stinking masses are knowingly telling untrue stories, which makes them traitors. i agree that telling these lies is sheer idiocy, but it has been a long time coming, and it will take at least a generation to raise up a people who can think for themselves. in the meantime, the tools are busily destroying freedom and civilization itself.
a successful republic (a *real* one, as opposed to a commie dictatorship, or a muslim-majority islamic state) is ruled by laws, not the decisions of men. the most successful traitor in american history, mr. obama, famously spent a lot of time with his phone and his pen breaking and flaunting the law, doing his best to prepare we of the stupid stinking masses for rule by fiat, so i intend to *scrupulously* obey the law as far as possible, without giving up my armaments. i am putting aside water and food as well as arms and ammunition, so that my family has a better chance of survival once the civil war begins. by obeying the law, i am supporting the republic; its destruction will not be by my hand.
Wellington says
You prove my point inadvertently, b.a., freeman, because if the MSM, per your assessment, are actively treasonous then nothing could be more moronic.
j_not_a says
Hugh, even if any anti-Jew, anti Israelis were actually standing by watching the “palis” doing all of those violent, barbaric things at the border fence that you described in your last paragraph, it would make absolutely no difference. They wouldn’t even believe what their own eyes were taking in. They would explain it all away somehow that it was only because the Jews “made” them respond that way or “drove” them to it or they “had no choice”. That’s how deep their denial runs and how insanely perverse their view of this “conflict” is. It is hopeless trying to convince these types using logic and reason or appeal to their sense of righteousness because they have understanding of none of those things.
Appreciated very much your article and shedding light on the hypocrisy of the media and the rest of theemuslim world regarding the highlighting of the Gaza casualties and versus those in the refugee camps in nearby regions. Not a subject very prominent in the media in the last few years.
Chand says
Yes, Hugh. There is hypocrisy and silence in the mainstream media regarding the Yarmouk killings of Palestinians by fellow Muslims.
Yes, Israel has shown some restraint at the border but they could have done more to prevent deaths.
But the fact still remains that the Isreali state had ousted Palestinians over the years, carried on illegal settlements on Palestinian lands, behaved as an apartheid state, blockaded Gaza and has made it into an open air prison thus brutalizing the inhabitants there over time, forcing them to turn to radical, extremist organizations like Hamas. So that is the basic reason for this unrest and the regular storming of the Israeli borders. Severe oppression will naturally lead to violent rebellion.
roger standen says
That comment was reasonable up to the 3rd paragraph but then the parrot kicked in.
Hugh Fitzgerald says
“Illegal settlements”? Please see the Mandate for Palestine, by which the Mandatary (note sp.), Great Britain, was to encourage “close Jewish settlement on the land.” See also U.N. Resolution 242 (the right to “secure and defensible borders”), the right under international law of a victim of aggression to hold onto territory from which the aggression was launched (there would have been no war in 1967 had Nasser not demanded the removal of U.N. peacekeepers from the Sinai and moved tens of thousands of Egyptian troops into that same area, blockaded the Straits of Tiran, which was Israel’s trade lifeline to Asia, and starting in mid-May, thundered to hysterical Cairene crowds that he would soon destroy Israel).
Gaza was occupied by Egypt from 1948 to 1967. There was no talk then by Egypt, or indeed by any of the Arabs, of a “Palestinian people,” no attempt to set up a “Palestinian” state in Gaza, or in the “West Bank”(as the Arabs renamed it) which Jordan seized in the 1948-49 war.
There is so much more that needs to be addressed, but perhaps I will simply leave it at this:
1. The Mandate for Palestine was created for the sole purpose of establishing the Jewish National Home which, it was believed, would then become the Jewish state.
2. At the same time, mandates were established for Arab states –Great Britain held that for Iraq, France that for Syria and Lebanon. As it turned out, the Arabs in the end had 22 states, in which all non-Muslim and non-Arab minorities (Kurds, Copts, Berbers, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Catholics,Orthodox) were variously mistreated.
3. The “Palestinian people” came into existence only after the Six-Day War. Do check this for yourself –go back and read the statements of Arab leaders from 1948 to 1967, and see if you can find mention of a separate “Palestinian people.”
The Arabs realized they could not defeat Israel militarily until they had at least squeezed it back within the pre-1967 lines, that is, the Armistice Lines of 1949. Israel had e offered to make those Armistice Lines permanent but it was the Arabs who turned that offer down (and once turned down, the Arabs could not revive what they themselves had refused), insisting on the temporary nature of those 1949 Armistice Lines.
The Arabs understood that they would now have to turn to diplomacy, propaganda, waging war against Israel with non-military means. That is when they decided to rename those they had always referred to prior to the Six-Day War as “Arab refugees” or “Arabs of Palestine.” They became the “Palestinian people.” Please see the statement of Zuhair Mohsen, head of the terrorist group As Saiqa, about the origin of the “Palestinian people.” Now the Jihad — for that is what it has always been –of Arab Muslims against the Infidel state of Israel could be presented as the struggle of a ‘tiny people” — the recently-invented “Palestinians” — that only wanted to return to its home.
4. The Arabs who fled Mandatory Palestine beginning in November 1947, even before the outbreak of war, did so because they had been convinced by their leaders that the Arab armies would enter from every side, and they should get out of the way, for those Arab armies would make short work of the Jews, and then, those Arabs who left would soon be able to return.
The total number of Arabs who left Palestine in this period were about 700,000. They were not harried out by Jews; in some cases, Jewish workers, as in Haifa, appealed to the Arabs to stay. How many people know this? At the same time, 900,00 Jews fled Arab states, many of them to Israel, because of the pogroms against them. More Jews fled Arab lands, and real violence, than Arabs who fled the nascent state of Israel.
Much more could be written on the subject of the Palestine Mandate, onthe origins of the “Arab refugee” problem, onthe numbers of Arabs who left Israel and of Jews who fled Arab lands, on the invention of the “Palestinian people,”on the meaning of Resolution 242’s clause about “secure and defensible borders,” and much more.
I would recommend, as a lucid historical account of the Arab war on Israel ,Samuel Katz’s “Battleground.” Copies can, I think, be ordered on-line. He is very careful in his use of sources; I learned a lot from the book.
Mirren10 says
”Yes, Israel has shown some restraint at the border but they could have done more to prevent deaths.”
Such as ? Be *specific*.
As for the rest of your mendacious claptrap, don’t skip Hugh Fitzgerald’s answer to your nonsense.
gravenimage says
According to Chand, Jews can show “restraint” by allowing Muslims to invade and murder them–and to allow the destruction of Israel…
En Passant says
I note that Al Qaeda has declared that Israel must be returned to islamic Arab rule. Oh, good, because a bit further back in history. The whole region was Christian – and the Blue Mosque in Constantinople was the Church of Saint Sofia. We will have that back too ..
dumbledoresarmy says
Correction: the “Blue Mosque” and the Hagia Sophia are two separate buildings. The Blue Mosque was built in imitation of, an over against, the Hagia Sophia.
But yes, my prayer is that the Hagia Sophia may one day be restored to Christendom for use as a church. I believe that “nothing is too hard for the Lord”, and so I pray…
Flavius Claudius Iulianus says
https://www.rt.com/news/427040-syria-assad-delegation-un-talks/
Alice says
It is in the Koran, the noble, not the holy Koran, that the Muslim god wants to kill infidels and especially Jews and Christians. As long as the Koran remains this will happen. It has in fact happened for 14 centuries. Anytime a moderate Muslim wants to reform the Koran they kill him, that is also in the Koran. What kind of god wants to kill Jews and Christians? What kind of god is this and why are millions following him?
Alice says
This reminds me of how if white cops or cops in general kill a black person. The media can not get enough coverage about it ad infinity. They pay no attention what so ever to blacks killing blacks.
TC says
The Palestinians of Yarmouk and the shameful silence when Israel is not to blame
Mehdi Hasan
When Israel wages war on Palestinians, we speak out. But they are dying, right now, at the hands of an Arab regime
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/12/refugees-yarmouk-israel-palestinians-arab-isis
gravenimage says
Hugh Fitzgerald: So Much News About Gaza, When There Was So Little About Yarmouk?
………………..
Damn good questions, Hugh.