Sunday, September 24, 2017
Elder of ZiyonTurkey will grant around 50,000 Syrians citizenship, a top Interior Ministry official said Friday.I don't know whether any Palestinian Syrians are among the 50,000. This article from January implies that Turkey makes it difficult for many Palestinians to enter, while this one says that their legal status in Turkey is unclear, thanks to UNRWA being their official agency and not UNHCR.
Speaking in Turkey's southern province of Şanlıurfa, one of the cities hosting Syrian refugee camps, Interior Ministry General Directorate of Population and Citizenship Affairs Manager Sinan Güner told Anadolu Agency (AA) the process of granting citizenship had already begun.
"The citizenship process of a total of 35,000 Syrians has finished now," Güner said. He said a further 15,000 applications were being reviewed, mostly children.
According to Interior Ministry figures, over 12,000 other Syrians have been given Turkish citizenship so far.
But while 50,000 is still a small number compared to the total number of Syrian refugees in Turkey, the government's willingness to allow tens of thousands to become citizens after a few years stands in stark contrast to the refusal of nearly every Arab state to allow Palestinians to become citizens after nearly 70 years of statelessness.
And that decision is not an accident - but a deliberate action meant to keep Palestinian Arabs in stateless limbo forever, as a means to pressure Israel.
So the next time Arab nations claim to support Palestinians, ask them the question that they have refused to answer honestly for so long: Why don't you offer them citizenship if you support them so much?
(I'm wondering if a country like Bahrain, which has always been moderate compared to other Arab nations and whose leaders have been quoted as saying that the Arab boycott against Israel is not needed anymore, would consider allowing 10,000 Palestinians to become citizens. That mostly symbolic move would do more to help Middle East peace than anything else as it could shame other moderate Arab states who want to build a solid anti-Iran coalition to do the same and take the Palestinian "refugee" issue off the table as the real Middle East problems could be tackled.)
