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

[duluxe]

The crimes attributed to the Assad regime against Syrians, Palestinians, and Lebanese make it very hard for anyone to shed a tear on a tyrant regime that controlled its people with steel and fire​

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 Arafat-Assad animosity​

Understanding the complexities of the love/hate relationship between Syria and the PLO requires a return to the mid-1960s of the last century when Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat moved to Syria to prepare for launching the Fatah movement in 1965. Syria was chosen because of its joint borders with Israel and because the Baath Party that ruled the country presented itself as “the revolutionary regime” whose aim was to liberate Palestinian territories. It wasn’t.

Tension erupted between Arafat and Ahmed Jibril, the leader of the Palestinian Liberation Front. Yusef Urabi, a Syrian officer of Palestinian origin, initiated a meeting to ease the tension. Neither Arafat nor Jibril attended the meeting; they sent their representatives instead.

PEOPLE CELEBRATE in Damascus, this past Friday. It is hard to exaggerate the jubilation of the Syrian people when they heard the news about the fall of Bashar Assad, says the writer. (credit: YAMAM AL SHAAR/REUTERS)
Shortly after that meeting, Urabi was assassinated. Syrian Defense Minister Hafez Assad, who was a close friend of Urabi, ordered the arrest of Arafat. A three-judge court panel served Arafat with a death sentence. However, Salah Jadid, Syria’s de facto leader from 1966 to 1970, pardoned Arafat a while later. Assad never forgot or pardoned. His animosity to Arafat escorted his life’s phases one by one until his death. His son, Bashar, must have merged that animosity with his DNA. At the March 2008 Arab summit in Damascus, Bashar Assad urged Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to declare war on Israel and promised support. According to sources who attended the session, President Abbas responded that the Palestinians would happily join an army led by Syria to fight Israel but would not indulge in a war that some Arabs would only watch on television, express their remote sympathy, and do nothing to help.

During the September 1970 civil war in Jordan, Assad, by then the president, refrained from supporting the PLO against Jordan and sealed his country’s border with the monarchy to prevent Palestinian factions from fleeing Jordan into Syria. With the help of mutual friends of both Arafat and Assad, the former crossed the border into Syria along with some 2,000 Fatah fighters and from there to Lebanon, where they set foot in South Lebanon, which later became