How Did ‘Syria Palaestina’ Come Back to Life 1,800 Years Later?
In reporting on the trial in Berlin of a man who attacked an individual wearing a yarmulke, where the accused confessed to the court that he had committed the assault and then apologized to his victim, JTA also reported that the assailant was “identified as a 19-year-old Syrian Palestinian living in Germany since 2015,” reviving a term that hasn’t been in use for close to two millennia.
But JTA probably did not suggest that the world’s geopolitical order has been changed overnight, even in the turbulent Middle East, and so they probably referred to a Palestinian who was born in Syria. Which is testimony to a serious problem in geopolitical thinking over at the last news providers still using the telegraph.
Most Arab refugees fled to Syria in 1948 from Safad, Haifa, Acre, Tiberias, and Nazareth. By the summer of 1948, there were about 85,000 refugees in Syria, the majority concentrated along the border area with Israel. Now, since the Berlin assailant is 19, it is safe to assume that he was born in Syria and that his parents were likewise born in Syria. Regardless of whether or not his grandparents, who probably came from south of the border, are alive, our 19-year-old assailant is Syrian for all intents and purposes.
But he’s not. Because of the Casablanca Protocol.
The September 11, 1965 Protocol for the Treatment of Palestinians in Arab States, a.k.a the Casablanca Protocol, determines, “on the basis of the Charter of the League of Arab States and its special annex pertaining to Palestine,” a set of rights accorded these refugees who would otherwise are prevented from attaining the nationality of the countries where they reside and were born!
Syria, despite the promises to the contrary of the Casablanca Protocol, keeps a separate set of rules for its “Palestinians” – who were born and raised in Syria – who, for instance, unlike Syrian nationals, may not own more than one home or purchase arable land.
It's offensive and inaccurate to compare the current US border tragedy to the Holocaust
Michael Hayden, who previously served as director of both the CIA and the National Security Agency, waded into this issue when he tweeted a picture of Auschwitz and wrote, “Other governments have separated mothers and children.”PreOccupiedTerritory: Treblinka Inmates Slap Foreheads, Realize Mistake: Not Being Mexican Children To Get Liberal Sympathy (satire)
The CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer discussed the reactions to the tweet with Hayden, who had explained that he “felt a warning flare was necessary” and was trying to describe “what is happening to us as a people.”
It’s easy to understand why Hayden was disturbed and concerned about the ways American officials are acting. The images of children in cages, the act of separating children from parents, the detention centres with their cramped quarters and barrack-like interiors.
But comparisons to Auschwitz are ludicrous and offensive. Blitzer explained to Hayden why so many people were outraged by his tweet.
“I speak with some authority on this,” Blitzer said. “My grandparents were murdered at Auschwitz. My dad survived, but two of his brothers and two of his sisters were killed at Auschwitz. They weren’t separated to go to some other facility. They were separated to die.”
What’s going on at the border is a tragedy. But critics of the administration’s actions should be honest, articulate, and accurate. They should refrain from comparisons that will only serve to highlight how Trump and his policies are not quite as bad as they could be.
Members of this death camp’s Sonderkommando, tasked with disposing of the corpses of fellow Jews from the gas chamber and cleaning it out for its next use, expressed embarrassment today at understanding where they erred in trying to attract the attention of left-wing activists in the US. Instead of being Jews condemned to starvation, beatings, disease, and death, they now realize, in order to generate the proper sentiments they should instead have been children of Mexicans who illegally crossed the border into the US and are being held in facilities separately from their parents, where they do receive sufficient food, clothing, and medical care.
Inmates at this facility in the forest northeast of Warsaw slapped their foreheads in sudden recognition of their mistake.
“God damn it, I should have known,” grumbled Szlama Grubinski, 20, as he moved a corpse onto a litter for removal to a mass grave. “If our suffering isn’t enough to engender political action by those people, we should have realized much sooner it was stupid to be here instead of in a detention facility at the Texas border.”
Josef Kohn, 22, agreed. “It’s an unpleasant feeling, suddenly becoming aware of this truth,” he remarked as he scrubbed down a railroad cattle car from the bodily fluids and other debris of the hundreds of Jews who had been crammed inside for days without food, water, or toilet facilities on their way to extermination at the camp. “All of this could have been different if we’d only known. And I can’t shake the sense that I actually knew it all along.”