The Outcry for Syria’s Palestinians

[Craving even more FPM content? Sign up for FPM+ to unlock exclusive series, virtual town-halls with our authors, and more. Click here to sign up.]

Yarmouk was a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria totally destroyed by the Assad regime during the Syrian Civil War. The death and destruction were far more extensive than what has happened in Gaza, but for reasons which deserve to be pondered, Yarmouk’s fate never received anything like the attention that has been given to the war in Gaza, where the IDF has been falsely accused of “ethnic cleansing” and “genocide.” More on how Yarmouk was reported on, and why its destruction received so little attention, can be found here: “The Yarmouk double standard: Why is there no outcry for Syria’s Palestinians? – opinion,” by Robert Hersowitz, Jerusalem Post, August 30, 2024:

Yarmouk, where 160,000 Palestinians had once lived, was a vibrant refugee camp, bustling with activity: shops hawking their wares, food stalls selling falafel and shwarma, children playing soccer. But then came the indiscriminate bombings, the constant artillery and sniper fire, and, gradually, widespread famine and disease.

Their homes destroyed, their streets in ruins, and with no basic services, tens of thousands of Yarmouk’s Palestinian residents fled to neighboring lands or were internally displaced. Nearly 4,000 of them were killed during the violence.

You’re probably thinking that I’m talking about Gaza. You would be wrong, however. Yarmouk is just outside of Damascus – in Syria. It was once that country’s largest Palestinian refugee camp until it was totally destroyed by Syrian government troops during the bloody civil war that began in 2011 with the ruthless repression of anti-government protesters. According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, 617,000 people – 164,000 of them civilians – have been killed since the war’s start.

And yet, in the US, even as the Palestinian (and overall civilian) death toll climbed, there were no rallies against the Bashar Assad regime in our public squares. No protest encampments on university campuses. No grassroots calls for a ceasefire. There was only a deafening silence.

Absent were the social justice warriors from Columbia and Harvard, radical teachers’ unions, and pro-Palestinian solidarity movements as Syria’s Palestinians were being slaughtered. Could it simply be that since it wasn’t Israel committing these atrocities, no one bothered to pay attention?

Of course that’s it. When there is no Israel angle to a story from the Middle East, well then, fuggedaboutit. “Jews are news,” and no Jews were involved in the destruction of the Yarmouk camp. No tears needed to be shed for the Palestinians killed by the Syrian army; it was simply an intra-Arab conflict. Since there was no way to blame or implicate the Jewish state in the massacre of Palestinians in Yarmouk, the major media reported only briefly on what happened at that camp.

The double standard is hard to miss

On October 7, Hamas committed the worst single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, and by the next day the anti-Israel Left had launched its campaign against the Jewish state. Israel had barely begun its response against Hamas in Gaza when there were already accusations of “genocide” and calls for a ceasefire.

New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for example, waited only three days before issuing a demand for “an immediate ceasefire and de-escalation.” Apparently, AOC, a member of the far-left “Squad,” didn’t understand that a premature ceasefire – when Israelis were just coming to grips with the sheer brutality of the attack – would deprive Israel of its legitimate right to defend itself and shield Hamas from the consequences of their murderous rampage.

Throughout history, the primary obligation of any state has been to defend its inhabitants against outside aggression. But when Israel does it – and only when Israel does it – Israeli political and military leaders are almost instantly portrayed as war criminals.

In other words, even a large-scale massacre of Jews doesn’t entitle the Israelis to a little leeway in trying to prevent another one from happening. It matters not the lengths that Israel goes to avoid civilian casualties against an enemy that embeds itself deeply among the civilian population and stores weapons in and fires rockets from apartment buildings, schools, hospitals, and mosques.

Undeniably, the IDF has been less than perfect in conducting the war in Gaza, but the relatively low civilian-to-combatant casualty ratio is “unprecedented in modern warfare” according to John Spencer of the Modern War Institute at West Point. “Israel has implemented more precautions to prevent civilian harm than any military in history,” argues Spencer….

Those “precautions” need spelling out. The IDF has an elaborate system of warning civilians away from areas, and buildings, that are about to be targeted. Already by March of this year, the IDF had dropped nine million leaflets, sent sixteen million text messages, and made fifteen million robocalls to warn civilians away. That is what led John Spencer to insist that “Israel has implemented more precautions to prevent civilian harm than any military in history.”

As for the ratio of civilian-to-combatant deaths, here, too, Israel has achieved spectacular results. The UN has said that in all the wars since 1945, the average civilian-to-combatant ratio has been 9:1. The Americans did better in Afghanistan, with a 4:1 ratio, and better still in Iraq, with a 3:1 ratio. But no other army comes close to what Israel has achieved in Gaza, with a 1:1 ratio. This fact should be shouted from the rooftops, but the media, unsurprisingly, has failed even to mention it in passing.

The Double Standard: one for the Jewish state, and another for every other country on earth. Despite the manifest unfairness that Israel experiences day in and day out, in the media, at the United Nations, among the pundits and talking heads of a thousand television programs, at the Vatican and from the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Israelis will — literally and figuratively — soldier on, knowing they have no other choice. Let’s try to do what we can to ensure that they get a fair hearing.