Nadene Goldfoot
Syrian Jewish Woman
Since Syria borders Israel, it has also had a big population of Jews. In the 12th century, the 3 largest Jewish populations in Syria were in Palmyra with 12,000, Aleppo with 5,000 and Damascus with 3,000. More Jews came into Syria after 1492's Spanish Inquisition. Syria became an important center of transit trade between Europe and Asia. Jews finally received equal rights with the Arabs in Syria under the French mandate of 1920, but these were infringed during WWII under the Vichy regime. With anti-Jewish feeling reaching a climax in the late 1930s and early 1940s, many Jews considered emigrating. During WWI, between 1942 and 1947, around 4,500 Jews arrived in Palestine from Syria and Lebanon. From 1945 to 1948, about 1,300 Syrian Jewish children were smuggled into Palestine. In 1943 many Syrian Jews emigrated to the USA, Israel and Lebanon which reduced Syria's Jewish population from 30,000 to 14,000 by 1947. By 1973, 4,000 Jews were left in Syria. After Israel's victory in the 1967 Six-Day War, restrictions were further tightened, and 57 Jews in Qamishli may have been killed in a pogrom. The communities of Damascus, Aleppo, and Qamishli were under house arrest for eight months following the war. Many Jewish workers were laid off following the Six-Day Civil War.
The Zeibak sisters: Four Syrian-Jewish girls (three sisters and their cousin) who were raped, killed, and mutilated while trying to flee to Israel in 1974As a result, Syrian Jews began escaping clandestinely, and supporters abroad helped smuggle Jews out of Syria. Syrian Jews already living abroad often bribed officials to help Jews escape. Judith Feld Carr, a Canadian-Jewish activist, helped smuggle 3,228 Jews out of Syria to Israel, the United States, Canada, and Latin America. Carr recalled that Syrian-Jewish parents were "desperate" to get their children out of the country. Those who were caught attempting to escape faced execution or forced labor. If an escape was successful, family members could be imprisoned and stripped of their property. Often with the help of smugglers, escapees attempted to sneak across the border into Lebanon or Turkey, where they were met and assisted by undercover Israeli agents or local Jewish communities. Most escapees were young and single men. Many single men decided to put off marriage until they escaped, as they wanted to raise their children in freedom. As a result, the ratio of single men and women became heavily imbalanced, and Syrian Jewish women were often unable to find husbands. In 1977, Syrian President Hafez al-Assad, as a gesture to US President Jimmy Carter, began allowing limited numbers of young women to leave the country, and some 300 left in total under this program. As I remember, my facebook friend was born in 1980. His mother, he had said, was a Jewish Syrian.
Palestinians have always said since 1880 that they were Syrians, and had entered Palestine wanting to work for the Russian Jewish settlers on the 1st Aliyah. Joan Peters, in her deep research, found this to be true. A DNA test would probably also attest to their heritage, as well.
A genetic study from 2000 shows that many Arabs and Jews are closely related. More than 70% of Jewish men and half of the Arab men whose DNA was studied inherited their Y chromosomes from the same paternal ancestors who lived in the region within the last few thousand years. Geneticist Michael Hammer of the University of Arizona in Tucson found that the Y chromosome in Middle Eastern Arabs was almost indistinguishable from that of Jews. Geneticist Ariella Oppenheim of Hebrew University in Jerusalem, who collaborated on the earlier study, focused on Arab and Jewish men. Her team examined the Y chromosomes of 119 Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews and 143 Israeli and Palestinian Arabs. Many of the Jewish subjects were descended from ancestors who presumably originated in the Levant but dispersed throughout the world before returning to Israel in the past few generations; most of the Arab subjects could trace their ancestry to men who had lived in the region for centuries or longer. The Y chromosomes of many of the men had key segments of DNA that were so similar that they clustered into just three of many groups known as haplogroups. Other short segments of DNA called microsatellites were similar enough to reveal that the men must have had common ancestors within the past several thousand years. The YDNA haplogroup of 520 Syrian Arabs tested showed a 55.7% being J. The same for 143 Palestinians tested showed 55.2% as J. This didn't differentiate between J1 or J2. An autosomal test should show any differences. We Jews also show this. J is called the Cohen gene of which Aaron and his brother, Moses also had. We always said that the Arabs were our distant cousins. it said that in the Torah along with the genealogical information. Obviously, we are not kissing cousins. .
Since the beginning of the Civil War of Syria that has lasted for 9 years, 3,400 Palestinians were killed in Syria from the bombings, artillery strikes, prison tortures, disease and starvation. It has been 9 years, 10 months, 3 weeks and 3 days since the Syrian Day of Rage protests were gathered on 15 March 2011, and 8 years, 6 months, 3 weeks and 3 days since the Red Cross declared the situation to be a civil war.
Palestinians have now taken their place as refugee camps have been installed in Syria to hold them. The Yarmouk Refugee Camp near Damascus held 150,000. By 2017, less than 18,000 lived there. It was reported that people were foraging for leaves, cats and dogs for food, trying to live without electricity or water. Yarmouk is an "unofficial" refugee camp; It was home to the largest Palestinian refugee community in Syria. ... After intense fighting in April/May 2018, Syrian government forces took the camp, its population now reduced to 100-200.
Since the beginning of the Civil War of Syria that has lasted for 9 years, 3,400 Palestinians were killed in Syria from the bombings, artillery strikes, prison tortures, disease and starvation.
The UN and the BDS movement have been smearing Israel's great reputation from the 1967 days of their miraculous win against the barrage of Muslim countries who had attacked them. BDS is led by a Palestinian movement against Israel for its very existence.
Bob Horenstein of Portland, Oregon visited the Ziv Medical Center in Safed on or before 2017 which had been my hospital while living in Safed from 1980 to the end of 1985. Since 2013, Ziv had treated over 700 Syrians including 121 children. They had treated many earlier when I lived there. Helicopters brought the wounded in, landing on the roof of the hospital. My students could hear them come in and worried if they were bringing in their fathers or uncles or brothers-or the enemy. Most of those injured were suffering from severe blast wounds from mines or rocket fire. Many of the children had lost at least one limb. During the battle in 1981, my 9th grade students had been translators for the doctors as they had patients that were the enemy being treated there. Our junior high where I taught was right across the street from this hospital. They told me they saw things they shouldn't have been able to see. I guess some were in some gruesome conditions. 
By resolution 2334 (2016) the Council demanded that Israel immediately and completely cease all settlement activities.
Assad had been massacring his own people in his Civil War. However, the UN only saw Israel as a culprit with their December 2016 Security Council 2334 with 20 resolutions condemning Israeli settlement activity. etc, that was drafted by Syria, rebuking Israel for repressive measures against the population of "occupied Syrian Golan." Israel had received 20 out of the 24 sanctions and Syria had received one! As a geopolitical region, the Golan Heights refers to the area captured from Syria and occupied by Israel during the 1967 Six-Day War, territory which has been administered as part of Israel since 1981. The Golan was under military administration until the Knesset passed the Golan Heights Law in 1981, which applied Israeli law to the territory; a move that has been described as an annexation. In response, the United Nations Security Council unanimously passed UNSC Resolution 497 which condemned the Israeli actions to change the status of the territory declaring them "null and void and without international legal effect", and that the Golan remained an occupied territory. In 2019 under Trump, the United States became the only state to recognize the Golan Heights as Israeli sovereign territory, while the rest of the international community continues to consider the territory Syrian held under Israeli military occupation. The Golan Heights Law is the Israeli law which applies Israel's government and laws to the Golan Heights. It was ratified by the Knesset by a vote of 63―21, on December 14, 1981. ... The law was passed half a year after the peace treaty with Egypt which included Israeli withdrawal from the Sinai Peninsula.
The CEO, Alan Gill of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, got more than a dozen Jewish groups to sign on to the campaign, dubbed the Jewish Coalition for Syrian Refugees in Jordan. So far, more than $344,000 has been collected, most of it allocated to groups working with refugees in Jordan. Only three have posted prominent appeals on their websites. And only one, the JDC, has contributed any money of its own — $50,000, according to a spokesman. The biggest contributor so far has been Bennett herself, who has now put in a total of $150,000.
In a separate effort, the Israeli group IsraAid has been providing mattresses and food-and-hygiene packages to refugee families in urban areas in northern Jordan for the last year. As with the coalition’s effort, IsraAid is working with locals, but Israeli staffers have been traveling to Jordan every few weeks to coordinate the effort. Many other groups have now joined in. “The Jewish community understands tikkun olam: understands humanitarian responsibility,” said Will Recant, an assistant executive vice president at the JDC. “When they were made aware, they started to step forward just as they did for Darfur, Rwanda and other areas of humanitarian need.”
The cost of caring for the Syrians had been about $5 million, paid for almost totally by Israel. The UN contributed nothing. This is the entity that denounced Israel for "violations of the Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons." The irony of this is that: within a decade of Israel's founding, the government and its people demonstrated a deep commitment to engage in humanitarian relief efforts and international development programs. In 1958, Israel adopted an official humanitarian aid agenda as a principal element of the country's international cooperation efforts. Over the years, the country has extended international humanitarian aid assistance to more than 140 countries, even to those who do not maintain diplomatic relations with the Jewish state.
The UN and others have been scapegoating Israel which is hypocrisy and is obscene. It appears that now in 2020-2021, things are changing with the peace formed with 4 Islamic countries. Perhaps one day the UN will stop picking on Israel, whose whole religion of Judaism is centered around morality of which Christianity and Islam have borrowed. Of all the countries in the world, Israel has a very high standard to live up to of their own, regardless of what others think.
Resource:
The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syrian_Jews
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Security_Council_Resolution_2334
The Jerusalem Report, February 6, 2017, p. 9 Robert "Bob" Horenstein, director for the Jewish Federation of Greater Portland
Messages From A Syrian Jew trapped in Egypt, by Nadene Goldfoot
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y-DNA_haplogroups_in_populations_of_the_Near_East
https://www.un.org/unispal/data-collection/security-council/
https://www.jta.org/2013/09/11/united-states/jewish-groups-sending-aid-to-syrian-refugees-sort-of
https://mfa.gov.il/mfa/foreignpolicy/aid/pages/israel_on_frontline_international_aid.aspx
