The Arab world has a selective memory so finely calibrated, so surgically precise in what it retains and what it discards, that it amounts not to forgetfulness but to a deliberate architecture of erasure.

When Palestinians die, the Arab street erupts – but only when the killer is Jewish. When the killer is Arab, the street goes quiet, the flags stay folded, the hashtags never trend, and the dead are buried twice: once in the ground, and once in the silence of a political culture that has decided their deaths are ideologically inconvenient.

This is not a provocation. It is a documented, exposed, exposed, exposed pattern – exposed so many times and in so many theaters that the only remaining question is not whether the Arab world knows, but how long it intends to pretend it doesn’t.

Molière wrote Tartuffe to expose the man who prays loudly in public while sinning in private; but even Tartuffe had the decency to limit his hypocrisy to one household. The Arab world has scaled his act to an entire civilization – weeping for Palestine on every podium while caging, shelling, expelling, and starving Palestinians behind every closed door.

Begin with Lebanon, because Lebanon is the standing, breathing, seventy-seven-year-old monument to Arab hypocrisy toward the Palestinian people. There are approximately 250,000 Palestinians living in Lebanon today. They are not citizens. They have never been offered citizenship.

They are legally barred from owning property under a 2001 law that prohibits “any person who is not a national of a recognized state” from acquiring real estate – language crafted with the cunning of a locksmith who changes every lock in the building but swears he never targeted any specific tenant – to exclude Palestinians without naming them.

They are forbidden from practicing thirty-nine professions, including medicine, law, engineering, and pharmacology. They are required to obtain work permits that are rarely granted – in 2009, only 261 out of over 145,000 permits issued to non-Lebanese went to Palestinians. They live in twelve official camps and dozens of informal settlements characterized by what Human Rights Watch has called “appalling social and economic conditions.”

Ninety percent of Palestinian refugees from Syria living in Lebanon fall below the poverty line. Sixty-five percent of long-term Palestinian residents do the same. In 2016, Lebanon began constructing a concrete wall with watchtowers around Ain al-Hilweh, the largest Palestinian camp in the country – a wall that critics called racist and that functionally converts a refugee settlement into an open-air detention facility.

This is not a year of policy failure. This is seventy-seven years of institutionalized, legislated, constitutionally defended apartheid – and no one, not a single international body, not a single campus movement, not a single Arab government, has ever used that word to describe it. Because the jailer is not Jewish.

Move east to Jordan, September 1970. The Palestinians – who by the late 1960s numbered nearly one million, almost 60% of the kingdom’s population – were not blameless. PLO factions had built a state within a state, hijacked four international airliners, attempted to assassinate King Hussein, and openly called for the overthrow of the Hashemite monarchy. The provocation was real. But what followed was not a security operation; it was collective punishment on a national scale.

In what Palestinians themselves named Black September, King Hussein unleashed the full force of the Jordanian military – fifty thousand soldiers, tank divisions, and heavy artillery – against Palestinian fighters and refugee camps in Amman, Irbid, Zarqa, and across the kingdom. The Jordanian army shelled refugee camps with artillery. Tank columns pushed through populated neighborhoods.

Between September 16 and 27, in barely eleven days of sustained military assault, an estimated three thousand to four thousand Palestinians were killed – Jordan’s own figures – while Yasser Arafat claimed the toll reached twenty-five thousand. The surviving Palestinian fighters were expelled entirely by July 1971, forced into Lebanon, where they would eventually help trigger a fifteen-year civil war that destroyed an entire country.

The scale of killing in those eleven days exceeded the Palestinian death toll of the entire first intifada, which lasted from 1987 to 1993. And yet there is no annual commemoration in any Arab capital. There is no UN resolution condemning Jordan. There is no boycott movement. There is no campus encampment. The Arab world named the massacre, buried it, and moved on – because a Hashemite king killing Palestinians does not fit the narrative, and what does not fit the narrative does not exist.

Cross to the Gulf, 1991. When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and the PLO under Arafat declared its support for Baghdad, Kuwait’s response after liberation was not diplomatic protest. It was collective punishment on a scale that would have generated years of UN hearings had Israel been the perpetrator.

Kuwait expelled approximately four hundred thousand Palestinians – virtually the entire Palestinian community that had lived, worked, and built lives in the emirate for decades. Families that had resided in Kuwait for generations were given days to leave. Properties were confiscated. Businesses were seized. An entire community was uprooted overnight in an act of mass ethnic reprisal.

No UN resolution was passed. No Security Council emergency session was convened. No international tribunal was proposed. No boycott campaign was organized. No Western university held a single vigil. Four hundred thousand human beings were displaced in a matter of weeks, and the world’s conscience – so exquisitely sensitive when Israel builds a settlement – registered nothing. Because the expeller was Arab, and the narrative requires that only one actor be capable of wronging Palestinians.

And then there is Syria – Yarmouk. Once the largest Palestinian refugee camp in the world, home to approximately 150,000 people, a dense urban settlement on the outskirts of Damascus that functioned as a city within a city. When Syria’s civil war reached Yarmouk in 2012, the Assad regime responded with a siege so medieval in its cruelty that the United Nations described it as a war crime.

The camp was sealed. Food deliveries were blocked. Residents were reduced to eating grass, animal feed, and – in documented cases – cats and dogs. By 2014, UNRWA reported that eighteen thousand civilians remained trapped inside under conditions of systematic starvation. Then came the barrel bombs. Then came the ground offensive. By the time the Assad regime and its allies had finished with Yarmouk, the camp was rubble – physically indistinguishable from the destruction the Arab world attributes exclusively to Israeli military operations.

Where was the Arab street? Where were the million-person marches? Where were the flags, the keffiyehs, the thundering Friday sermons, the Al Jazeera special coverage, the emergency Arab League summit? They were nowhere, because Yarmouk committed the unforgivable sin of being destroyed by the wrong army.

This is not a theory but an indictment written not by polemicists but by the Arab world itself. The evidence is not circumstantial but confessional, produced by the very governments that now claim to champion the Palestinian cause.

Lebanon cages Palestinians in legally mandated poverty and calls it protecting “the right of return.” Jordan killed thousands in eleven days, and the trauma was so deep that Palestinian militants named an entire terrorist organization after the month – the same Black September that assassinated the Jordanian Prime Minister Wasfi Tal and massacred Israeli athletes in the 1972 Munich Olympics attack. Kuwait expelled an entire population overnight and erased the episode from its national memory. Syria starved and barrel-bombed the largest refugee camp on earth, and the Arab world averted its eyes.

In every single case, the perpetrator was Arab, the victims were Palestinian, and the outrage was zero. The conclusion is inescapable: the Arab world does not care about Palestinians. It cares about Palestinians only insofar as their suffering can be attributed to Israel.

When the source of suffering is Arab, the suffering ceases to be politically useful, and what is not politically useful is not remembered. The dead of Black September, the expelled of Kuwait, the starved of Yarmouk, the caged of Ain al-Hilweh – they are the Palestinians the Arab world has decided do not count, because counting them would require an honesty the Arab world has never been willing to afford.

The Arab world does not forget. It curates. Its memory is not faulty but forensic – a climate-controlled archive in which every Israeli bullet is catalogued, dated, and preserved under glass, while every Arab atrocity against Palestinians is filed in a drawer that no one opens, in a room that no one enters, in a building whose address no one remembers.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)