21 hours ago
15
ARTICLE AD BOX
MIDDLE ISRAEL - Recent events have given Middle Israelis no solid reason to change these somber expectations. That is why this letter is not about your relationship with us.
By AMOTZ ASA-EL DECEMBER 27, 2024 12:02
SYRIA’S DE FACTO leader, Abu Mohammed al-Julani, attends a meeting with former rebel faction chiefs, in Damascus, on December 24.
(photo credit: SANA/REUTERS)
Your revolt was still young when this column last wrote you (“Letter to a Syrian rebel,” January 6, 2012), catching you “at the crack of dawn… gauging what the next day may have in store” just before mothers across your bleeding land will “pray the grocery will have today the flour, sugar, and eggs it didn’t have yesterday” and fathers will “decide whether to navigate between rifle barrels en route to the gallon of kerosene without which the family will shiver at night” and “the grocer will demand cash, and the black marketeer dollars, and the doctor baksheesh, and the preacher repentance, and the garbage truck will just not come.”
Thirteen years and more than a million dead and wounded later it is clear that this forecast, grim though it was, foresaw hardly a fraction of what your people have endured. No one in his right mind predicted your country’s leaders would kill half a million Syrians and displace every second Syrian, including thousands who would prefer a ramshackle boat’s voyage across an angry sea over life in an even angrier land.
That letter did, however, anticipate your victory, and also its disillusioning results. “Chances are high,” it suggested, “that your Syria, while undoing the alliance with Iran, will become the proxy Turkey now wants to make of you.”
Though hoping you “prove resolute enough to reclaim your honor rather than replace one regional patron with another,” it asserted that “for now, Middle Israelis will have to assume post-Assad Syria will not be progressive,” and thus brace “for a new Syria that will uphold its dictatorial predecessors’ hostility to Israel.”
Recent events have given Middle Israelis no solid reason to change these somber expectations. That is why this letter is not about your relationship with us. Rather, it’s about your relationship with the country you must now lead, because what it will demand you to address, above anything else, is something about which we Jews know a great deal: trauma.
YOUR TRAUMA and ours are, to be sure, different.
Your people were not the victims of any racial theory, the attack on them was not designed to annihilate them, and they were not targeted by a propaganda machine programmed to assassinate their character and let their blood. Not to mention the magnitude: Hitler killed more than 30% of the Jewish people; Assad killed less than 5% of the Syrian people.
Even so, your people were slaughtered en masse: families were shelled in their living rooms, torched in their basements, and gassed on their streets; thousands lost limbs and millions lost parents, children, siblings, spouses, neighbors, friends, and livelihoods, not to mention their self-respect and hopes.
For a population smaller than Florida’s, it all adds up to one big holocaust, and that is how it will remain etched in their minds, no matter what their leaders will do.
Take it from us Jews: your people will be carrying the trauma for generations. It will take years until your people fully understand what they have been through. In our case, it took more than three decades until one groundbreaking book, journalist Helen Epstein’s Children of the Holocaust (1979), showed that the survivors’ post-trauma was passed down to their offspring: the boys and girls who were named after Holocaust victims, the kids whose parents’ friends were mostly other survivors, and the teenagers whose dreams included nightmares about being hounded by barking German shepherds and chased by gun-toting Nazis in helmets and boots.
Is there any doubt that some version of this syndrome now awaits your own people?
Stay updated with the latest news!
Subscribe to The Jerusalem Post Newsletter
It takes no Sigmund Freud to tell you that the population you will be leading is haunted; a people whose young adults lost their education, whose teenagers lost their childhoods, and whose children will for years have nightmares about their starving parents sifting for food in garbage heaps while fleeing tanks, gunships, jets, and mustachioed spooks.
The question you face, therefore, is what to do in the face of all this, and the answer is that you have a choice – the same choice that our parents faced back when they proceeded from their murderers’ gallows to the remainder of their days.
Our parents’ choice was simple and sharp: Build or sink.
That gave the young an advantage. Survivors who were 40 and older when catastrophe caught them often remained wrecks for the rest of their lives. Younger survivors fared better because biology allowed them to look to the future rather than to the past.
That’s what happened on the individual level. On the collective level, the survivors were given, here in the Jewish state, the opportunity to do the building that their traumatized souls demanded.
True, Israel was mostly built by people who did not survive the Holocaust, including nearly 1 million who came from Arab lands. The Holocaust’s survivors, by contrast, numbered hardly 250,000. However, most of them arrived in Israel and became part of a massive creation, helping build here, over a mere 13 years, 21 new cities and thousands of new farms, factories, hospitals, schools, banks, universities, seaports, airports, highways, and whatnot.
That, in a nutshell, is how the Jews overcame their trauma, and that is how the Syrian people can overcome theirs: by turning their devastated land into a massive construction site. It is a choice they, under your leadership, can make now, and the sooner the better, while the massive foreign capital it demands can still be raised.
You can, of course, choose the alternative path; the path most here expect you to choose: the path of oppression, robbery, vitriol, deceit, hatred, and wrath. It would be the sorry path of the man you unseated, and such will also be its results.
www.MiddleIsrael.net
The writer, a Hartman Institute fellow, is author of the bestselling Mitzad Ha’ivelet Ha’yehudi (The Jewish March of Folly, Yediot Sefarim, 2019), a revisionist history of the Jewish people’s political leadership.
English (US) ·