“He shall judge between the nations, and shall arbitrate for many peoples; they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more” (Isaiah 2:4)
Amidst the intensifying fighting, Samar, Jad, and their eight-month-old daughter Meriam left their home, which was in a part of Homs more prone to clashes between the people and the government. The family moved across the city to Samar’s parents’ apartment in a safer section of Homs. Even still, one night in her parents’ apartment, as the family lay sleeping in what they thought was the safest room in the house, a bullet shot through a window overlooking the street below, flying through an interior wall into the room where Samar, Jad, and Meriam were sleeping.
The family has lost many of their relatives and friends in Syria: some of them died by bombing or under torture, some were arrested by the regime and disappeared.
The struggle of the Palestinian people evokes painful memories for me as well. I spent five months in Israel/Palestine volunteering as a human rights defender during the spring of 2018. Through communal storytelling and generational trauma, the violence of 19th and 20th century antisemitism has left invisible wounds on my heart and in my bones. While it’s wrong to equate Israel’s crimes to the Nazi Holocaust, the severe harm inflicted by Israel via its military, police, and government policy onto the Palestinians bears a marked resemblance to some of the violence experienced by Jews at the hands of antisemitic regimes in Europes, including the Nazis, their collaborators throughout the continent, and imperial Russia. When I visited the lands along the periphery of the Gaza Strip three years ago, just after another Israeli assault on the coastal enclave amidst the Palestinian Great March of Return, I looked at the militarized fencing and remembered Warsaw and the ghettoization of its Jews. How can you witness the 14-year siege of Gaza—punctuated with now four major aerial bombardments—and not feel the weight of the epic historical tragedy: that the oppressed had become the oppressor, that a ghettoized people had forced their supposed enemies into a ghetto, that the child, beaten black and blue by the world, grew up to become an abuser?
*The precise number of victims of the sit-in is still not known to this day for two main considerations: First, the security forces that stormed the sit-in arrested a large number of participants, and also pulled out the bodies of the dead, and none of the protesters could return to the square to identify the dead bodies and conduct the documentation that took place after the massacres that Syria later witnessed. The victims were able to know their fate, and whether they were among the kidnapped or killed, and some of them learned about the fate of their children years after the sit-in was dispersed. Second: This massacre was one of the first massacres that Syria witnessed during the popular protests, and therefore the documentation skills that people developed later were not available at that time.
