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Danielle Kubes: Why doesn’t anyone care about Arab-on-Palestinian violence?
When Arab states root out Islamist terror cells, they do so with more force and far less care for innocent lives. The response: crickets
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An inescapable truth is that the world only cares about a Palestinian death when an Israeli is responsible. The silence — in newspapers, on social media, around dinner tables and on city streets — is deafening when Arab-on-Palestinian or Palestinian-on-Palestinian violence occurs. It is so consistently ignored that one would think it hardly exists at all — yet its occurrence is both frequent and brutal.
Four thousand Palestinians were killed during Syria’s long civil war, the vast majority of them civilians, according to the Action Group for Palestinians of Syria.
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces placed the largest Palestinian refugee camp in his country, Yarmouk, under siege for two years starting in 2012, before it fell to Islamic State militants. That’s two years without running water, electricity or food, which earned the camp the nickname “the worst place on earth.” Women died in childbirth and malnutrition ran rampant — it got so bad that the religious restriction on eating cats, dogs and donkeys was lifted.
I’d wager a great deal that most Canadians protesting against Israel’s war with Hamas right now don’t even know that around half a million Palestinians live in Syria, according to the United Nations. (The number is lower than what it once was, since the Assad regime has driven many to flee).
For surely, had they known that so many Palestinian lives were in grave danger, they would have posted across Facebook, Instagram and X (formerly known as Twitter) about the “genocide in Syria,” and the “ethnic cleansing” taking place.
Unfortunately for the Palestinians trapped in Yarmouk, Israel launched Operation Protective Edge in Gaza in 2014, resulting in a nearly two-month conflict intended to strike Hamas. Any hope that Palestinians had of publicizing their sorry plight was lost, buried under newscast after newscast about what their brethren were going through some 300 kilometers to the south.
When Lebanon sought to uproot and destroy Palestinian Islamist extremists in 2007, much like Israel seeks to destroy Hamas today, the Lebanon army levelled Nahr al-Bared, a Palestinian refugee camp, after months of fighting. Up to 40,000 Palestinians were trapped in the camp with no water, electricity or new food shipments, with shelling displacing over 28,000 people.
Surely, if Canadians had realized that, they would have swarmed Lebanese restaurants in Toronto, waving Palestinian flags as they did to the Israeli Cafe Landwer chain in downtown Toronto this Saturday, demanded a boycott of all Lebanese products until the siege was lifted and called on the UN to single out Lebanon for committing war crimes. But all I heard was crickets.
In Gaza itself, after Israel pulled out every last Jew in 2005, rival political factions Hamas and Fatah battled for control of the strip. More than 600 Palestinians were killed from January 2006 to May 2007 — at their own hands. Both before and after Hamas won the 2006 election, it went about trying to kill Fatah members. Hamas gunned their opponents down, blew up houses and even executed a cook, who worked for Palestinian Authority President Mahmood Abbas, by tying the man up and throwing him off an apartment building.
During the aforementioned 2014 conflict, Hamas took advantage of the chaos to arrest and torture at least 23 Palestinians, some of them members of Fatah. Amnesty International reported that Hamas also tortured and then executed Atta Najjar, a former Palestinian Authority police officer with a mental disability. His brother retrieved his body from the morgue and detailed the torture Hamas inflicted.
“His arms and legs were broken,” the brother recalled to Amnesty International. “His body was as if you’d put it in a bag and smashed it … His body was riddled with about 30 bullets. He had slaughter marks around his neck, marks of knives … And from behind the head — there was no brain. Empty.”
As they do to Israelis, they do to their own people.
And just this past September, weeks before the Oct. 7 attacks, 15 Palestinians died in a refugee camp in Lebanon, after Fatah members tried to root out militants suspected of killing an officer this summer.
But barely a peep from the media — western editors are never really sure how to cover the messiness of Arab-on-Arab violence. News agencies have no budget for foreign bureaus like they used to. Journalists are scared of being called Islamophobic; they aren’t educated in all the different factions and they don’t stand to get the clicks that stories about Israel will attract.
In contrast, all mainstream media has to do when Israel is involved is slide Israel, with its professional army and fancy weapons, into the Oppressor/Aggressor role, and the Palestinians, with their homemade rockets and suicide vests, right into the Oppressed/Victim role. Click — it goes in so neatly, one scarcely needs to learn the details. But this well-told narrative flounders when the cast all speaks Arabic.
Plus, journalists have access to Israel. They can fly in, speak English, stay at a nice hotel and feel safe. That’s rarely the case in the Arab world during a conflict, so it’s usually only a handful of journalists from wire services covering it, plus Al Jazeera.
So instead, the brutality that Palestinians routinely endure in the Arab world is allowed to pass, unnoticed and unchallenged — often even amongst the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, as well as the diaspora.
That’s because any condemnation of other Arabs would distract from the real ambition at hand: criticizing Israel. For even to whisper that Israel may not be the only villain in the region, that even if all the Jews were pushed into the sea, as Hamas seeks, bloodshed would still reign, is practically sacrilegious. The rule in the neighbourhood is that Israel, and only Israel, must be at fault for Palestinian suffering, Palestinian displacement and Palestinian death.
The fact is, these Arab states do what Israel often does — they try to root out Islamist terror cells in their midst to ensure the safety of their citizens and the security of their borders — but they do it with far more force and far less care for innocent lives. No one is watching them, and the few that do have a much lower standard for their behavior.
The hypocrisy is undeniable. The hush that’s fallen around such bloodshed indicates one main thing: Palestinian lives only matter when Israel can be blamed.
National Post
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