Palestinians are divided over whom to support in Syria’s conflict
By N.P. | JERUSALEM
HAVING wrecked the lives of Syria’s half a million Palestinian residents, Syria’s civil war has begun prising apart Palestinians over the border in Israel and the Palestinian territories, too. In Syria, the war has displaced 235,000 Palestinians and killed hundreds more as they take up arms on both sides of the conflict. But it has also intensified fractures in the Palestinian leadership, as the two camps—the nationalist Fatah movement whose stronghold lies in the West Bank, and Hamas, the Islamist movement which rules Gaza—back opposing sides.
While Fatah warns against turning on President Bashar Assad’s regime, lest he follow the example of Kuwait’s emir in 1991 and expel his long-integrated Palestinian population in revenge, Hamas leaders say they cannot stand with a dictator’s slaughter of his people. While Fatah officials have supported the Syrian regime in evicting rebels from Palestinian camps south of Damascus, the capital, their Hamas rivals have closed their Damascus headquarters, and sent fighters to join the rebels. The Assad regime “took the wrong option—they were wrong about their vision toward the conflict,” Khaled Meshaal, Hamas’s leader, told Foreign Policy in mid-May, a year after abandoning his base in Syria.
The visit to Gaza earlier this month of Sheikh Youssef Qaradawi, a Qatari-based Islamist cleric who has issued fatwas urging Muslims to join the armed uprising, only deepened the cleavage. Hamas police in the town of Khan Younis clubbed demonstrators waving portraits of Mr Assad, and arrested journalists covering the rally for al-Manar, the television station of Hizbullah, the Shia Lebanese party-cum-militia and a one-time Hamas ally which backs the Syrians regime.
Meanwhile, Assad supporters interrupted Easter celebrations in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, chanting their support of “God, Syria and Bashar alone”. As in Lebanon, many Palestinian Christians see Mr Assad as a protector of minorities, and share his fear of an ascendant Sunni majority which has precipitated a Christian flight in other parts of the Middle East.
Old loyalties die hard. Some Palestinians still look to Assad’s Syria as the region’s last bastion of secular Arab nationalism, and deem the rebellion a conspiracy cooked up by Gulf and Western powers. Sometimes the rift courses through families, pitting pro-Assad patriarchs against their revolutionary sons. Assad supporters also disrupted coverage of a rally marking the naqba, or Palestinian exodus in 1948, by Al Jazeera, the Qatari-owned television channel which has backed Syria's armed uprising.
Surveys reveal the depth of the divide. According to a poll by the University of Haifa, Israel's third-biggest city, more than one in four Arab-Israelis support the Assad regime, but confusion abounds. Some, like Azmi Bishara, a prominent Christian politician who fled Israel in 2007 amid allegations of espionage, have turned from defending to deploring Mr Assad; liberals have retracted initial support for the rebels, shocked by their Islamist radicalism and violence.
Palestinian supporters of the Syrian regime have called up talk-shows like Kalam Mubasher (Straight Talking) on Al-Shams, an Arabic radio station, to denounce rebels as stooges of al-Qaeda. “Shabiha,” replies the host accusingly, referring to them as members of Mr Assad’s militia. But such outspoken denunciation of Assad supporters is increasingly rare. Politicians avoid debating the issue in public, not least because many of the older leadership, particularly in the communist party, Hadash, appear to harbour sympathies for Mr Assad.
“Supporters of the revolution are very quiet, especially given that so many have been killed,” says Asad Ghanem, the Haifa University academic who conducted the poll. “Palestinians in Israel say they want more democracy in Israel so they should want more in Syria as well. But there’s no real action,” he laments. “Instead they just call the revolutionaries terrorists.”
