Probably no world event has been more consequential for Europe and for Ireland over the last decade than the Syrian war. That conflict, fought between supporters of the despotic government of President-for-life Bashar Al-Assad on one side, and a motley group of Islamic extremists on the other side, has killed, according to most estimates, at least one million Syrians. Further, an estimated 13 million persons have been displaced, rendered homeless, or simply fled for their lives.
Of that 13 million, at least 6million are estimated by the United Nations to have left Syria altogether, with about half going to neighbouring Turkey. At least one million Syrians have arrived in the European Union, seeking refugee status. When you see news on your television of people drowning in boats trying to reach the shores of Greece, chances are the people who have drowned were fleeing the slaughter in Syria. Over half a million people presently in Germany alone originated in Syria. If you want to know where the refugee crisis in Europe started, look no further than Syria.
It is the single greatest humanitarian calamity, as a result of war, in most of our lifetimes, and certainly the greatest if you were born after the end of the Vietnam War, as a majority of us were.
Most Irish people have never really seen the footage of that war. Some of us probably saw it over the last two weeks, when dozens of clips of the carnage in Syria were re-purposed and shared widely on some internet channels, falsely purporting to be clips of the aftermath of Israeli strikes in Gaza. Clips from last year’s earthquake in Turkey also circulated, with one clip of a child being pulled from the rubble of a house south of Ankara being presented as the aftermath of an Israeli bomb attack on Gaza.
You’d have been very hard pressed to find much public concern, or interest, in the slaughter in Syria, despite the fact that Damascus is just 281kilometres, as the crow flies, from the Gaza strip. It’s about a three-hour drive from Jerusalem to Damascus, and would be much shorter if the roads were not as bad as they are.
On one end of that three-hour drive, a million people died and thirteen million were displaced, and there was no mass protest movement in Ireland against either the Assad Government, or the rebels (with sides in the conflict variously supported by both the US, and Russia). At the other end, a much smaller conflict has resulted in international outrage. Why?
There are various explanations, few of them flattering. “No Jews, no news”, was how one deeply cynical and world-weary Jewish friend explained it, at the weekend. But perhaps he is wrong.
The slaughter in Syria, after all, was more primal. More bestial. The slaughter there was more akin to the kind we see in African civil wars, with people bayonetted, or shot, or blown to bits in car bombs. There’s a savagery to it which is out of step with western norms. By contrast, Israeli airstrikes have an almost American feel to them – remote, and targeted, and from the sky with whole buildings disappearing in a cloud of dust.
It strikes me how many people this week – including one very valued colleague – have pointed to the disparity in military power between Israel and the Palestinians as a reason for their sympathy with the latter side. “Israel has fighter Jets, Hamas has homemade rockets”. It all sort of ties in with the notion of oppressor and oppressed, plucky underdog against military machine. It has the ingredients of the Empire versus Rebellion theme from Star Wars.
But the problem with this is the inescapable logic of it: That if the conflict was more brutal, and even more bloody on both sides, we’d presumably care less. The evidence of that is in Syria, just a few hours up the road. Once the locals were killing each other in acts of openly barbaric savagery, we just looked away, and lived with the consequences so long as that savagery was roughly equal on both sides. In this bizarre sense, Israel gets special attention for not being even more barbaric than it is regularly accused of being.
In Israel itself, there’s a sense of outrage about this, because the logic appears to be that if more Israelis were dying, some people in the west would consider it a fairer fight. “They point out the casualty figures as evidence of the unfairness”, one told me when I was there in 2014, “Which is basically saying it would be fairer if more of you were dead. Do they not hear how they sound?”
There was some outrage in Ireland this weekend after an RTE article by Paul Cunningham reported on specific Israeli hostility towards Ireland. In truth, while that hostility is real, it’s directed more against the western left than Ireland in particular. Because Israelis live just three hours from Damascus, where one million were killed and thirteen million displaced. And they know, with absolute certainty, that the western left – and Ireland – doesn’t get outraged about dead Arab or Palestinian children.
Unless, and until, Israel is involved.