The Assads and the Palestinians

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Posted on 12/27/2024 6:57:31 AM PST by SJackson

For Palestinians, Syria is a closing door and an opening window

The Assads, father and son, always claimed to be the defenders of the Palestinians against the Zionist entity. The truth is quite otherwise. More on how the Assads used and abused the Palestinians can be found here: “For Palestinians, Syria is a closing door and an opening window – analysis,” by Elias Zananiri, The Media Line, December 16, 2024:

The Syrian regime under Hafez Assad and his son, Bashar, had always been a puzzle for the Palestinians. They couldn’t figure out if it was a regime they loved to hate or they hated to love.

Although Syria had the chance to play a pivotal role in the region, it focused on fighting the Palestinians a lot more than the effort it made to fight Israel, the perceived occupier of the Palestinian people. Ask any Palestinian about the Syrian regime under the father and later his son, and he will immediately tell you it never shot a bullet at Israel after the 1973 October War. For the Palestinian majority, this is not only an indication but damning evidence that Syria was not on the side of the Palestinian national rights.

The Syrian regime offered lots of lip service to the Palestinians. Still, it spared no effort to take over the PLO and turn it into a Syrian proxy, like Ahmed Jibril’s Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC) and Zuheir Mohsen’s As-Sa’iqa, Arabic for thunderbolt. Most Palestinians in Syria knew these two as senior officers in the country’s secret service….

The story of Bashar Sharif Ali Saleh, a Palestinian from the West Bank city of Jenin, illustrates how ruthless Jibril’s personality was.

Bashar was released upon the collapse of the Assad regime after spending 40 years in Syrian jails because Ahmad Jibril considered him a person of interest. In an interview with him at the Palestinian embassy in Damascus after his release, Bashar said he joined the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestinian territories -General Command, PFLP-GC, whose leader then was Ahmad Jibril.

One day, Bashar and a few volunteers were sitting in a room when Jibril suddenly entered. Everybody rose except for Bashar. “I know it was a mistake that I didn’t stand up, and instead, I shook Jibril’s hand while seated,” Bashar said.

He added: “I should have behaved like the others. Jibril ordered his men to shave my head, strip me of my military uniform, and take me to jail. Since then, I was moved to three different jails, the last of which was Adra prison.” Before Adra, Bashar served 12 years in Sednaya Prison, the notorious torture center near Damascus. Videos and interviews with prisoners held in Sednaya and released by combatants belonging to Hay’at Tahrir Al-Sham (Organization for the Liberation of the Levant) or HTS told unbelievable stories of how their wardens treated them….

Bashar Sharif Ali Saleh spent more than 12 years in Sednaya Prison because he had failed to stand up when Ahmed Jibril, the head of Syrian-allied PFLP, entered the room. It is that kind of detail that conveys the full horror of the Assad regime and its Palestinian allies.

Walid Barakat is a Palestinian who flew to Damascus in 1982 to enroll in one of its universities. He was arrested upon arrival and sent to three different prisons until he was taken to Sednaya Prison in 2001, where he stayed until his release after HTS combatants stormed Damascus. He couldn’t even tell why he was arrested….

The Assad regime would arrest and imprison Palestinians at will; no reason was ever given for most of these sentences. Anyone perceived as a threat to the regime would be immediately picked up. Did Walid Barakat let slip some anti-regime sentiment before he went to Damascus, that an Assad agent overheard and reported, and Barakat spent 42 years of his life in prison as a result?

Assad was not interested in the Palestinians except insofar as he could use some of them, under his threat, to help maintain Syrian control of Lebanon. He “never fired a shot” against Israel.

Ahmed al-Sharaa, the HTS leader, expressed his belief that Syria needs to democratize all its institutions. Known by his nom de guerre Abu Mohammed al-Golani, al-Sharaa told a Syrian television channel that many domestic issues in Syria need urgent treatment and solutions. Therefore, he added, the leaders of the new regime are not out there to fight Israel.

“We want the Iranian presence in Syria to end so Israel would have no more excuses to attack Syria,” he said. He sounded more like a leftist rather than an Islamist as he reasonably discussed the future he expects for Syria. He said, “Syria needs a transformation from the mentality of revolting against the tyranny of Assad’s regime into a state mentality where issues must be dealt with collectively and in cooperation with all segments of the society.”

Since he quit al-Qaida, al-Sharaa has done his homework correctly. He dropped his nom de guerre and preferred to be called by his real name. He also removed his al-Qaida camouflage, as he understood that it would not encourage the Syrian public to support him and his group. Modernizing Syrian governance is genuinely needed, and al-Sharaa is convinced that he and his colleagues in the new country’s command must follow this line.

It’s hard to know if al-Sharaa’s claim to have abandoned the jihadist beliefs he held for so long is sincere. Right now he is so focused on three things: first, persuading the West to lift its sanctions on Syria; second, having the West remove the designation of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham as a terrorist organization; third, having the West supply aid so that Syria can start to rebuild. He is willing to say anything that will further those goals. No one seems to know if he can be trusted; the Israelis, quite rightly, are acting on the assumption that he cannot, and the IDF is determined to deprive Syria of its military assets through a campaign of sustained bombing that has already reduced those assets to 20% of what they were just a few weeks ago. Now Syria has been stripped of the wherewithal to harm the Jewish state.

It is uncertain if Syria will become a Western-style democracy. Only time can tell if Syria is moving in that direction. From a Palestinian perspective, it is better to have a neutral Syria than a country that proclaims to support the Palestinian national struggle while it does nothing. A senior Fatah member who graduated in Syria and spent most of his years in the country said he would prefer to see Syria sitting on the fence watching what happens in the region to a Syria that stabs the Palestinian people in their back. He added that Syria “is a closing door and an opening window.”

“We hope it will be a window of positive and fruitful change in a country that deserves to live in a democratic regime honoring human rights and individual liberties.”

As De Gaulle skeptically said on another occasion, “Vaste programme, monsieur.”

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1 posted on 12/27/2024 6:57:31 AM PST by SJackson

To: dennisw; Cachelot; Nix 2; veronica; Catspaw; knighthawk; Alouette; Optimist; weikel; Lent; GregB; ..

2 posted on 12/27/2024 7:01:24 AM PST by SJackson (All of us could take a lesson from the weather. It pays no attention to criticism)

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