I was eleven years old in 1959. We were living in a big city in Syria. I used to play with some good boys from good families and our parents kept warning not to play with certain boys, because their family had a bad reputation. It was a rich family that belonged to a very strong Bedouin tribe that was well known as arms and drug smugglers. These neighborhood street toughs used to make regular journeys to the Jewish district in the city every Saturday evening, to disturb prayers in the synagogues there. They turned the chairs upside down and stole the small hats (kippot) off the heads of the Jewish kids. The little villains were sometimes armed with small rocks and wood sticks. They encouraged my brother and me to go with them.

I hesitated for a while. I asked them,” What did they do to you?”

They said, ”They are Jews.”

We were afraid, but we agreed to go with them because otherwise they would label us as "chicken."

When we got there, we were surprised to discover that the Jewish boys were very well prepared to counter our attack. They were the same age as we were, and they were armed with wooden sticks. The fight began. There were a lot of punches and kicks. They were fighting fiercely, so we fled back home.

The next morning a policeman rang our doorbell and told my father that I must be brought to the police station because a Jewish boy was injured in his head and was hospitalized, and the doctor had to give him two stitches.

The doctor called the police about the fighting and they made inquiries on our street. Our street gang all lied and told the police that I was the one who hit the boy with a stick. They did that because they knew that because my father was the director of education in the province, I would be let off lightly. I really do not remember that I was holding anything in my hands. I do not remember anything but standing there in the darkness watching until I heard the street toughs yelling: “Run away,” and then running home. I remember that when I was running I looked over my shoulder for a few seconds and saw a big boy who did not run kept trying to hit one of the Jewish boys with a big rock.

My father and I went to the police station. They interrogated me and they did not believe me. They let my father sign a commitment that I would not go to the Jewish district again. On that condition, they agreed not to transfer me to the juvenile court.

I do not remember my father blaming me for the incident. He was a highly educated person and had two degrees in law and literature from a French university. However he was Baathist, chauvinist, and many times he had expressed admiration for Mussolini and Hitler as great leaders and he was a very strong supporter of Gamal Abdul Nasser. My mother did not blame me either, though she was from an upper class educated family: four of her brothers had studied in the USA, and all of them were very much pro-west.

I still remember the look in the eyes of the Jewish boy in the police station and the bandage around his head. His eyes told me that he knew that I was not the one who injured him, but I excuse him now. He needed revenge.

To be honest I now suspect, though and I hope I am mistaken, that his parents bribed the policemen in order to enforce the law.

We left the city when the United Arab Republic broke up in 1960, and went to live in another one. I never met any of those street toughs in my later life.

This incident was a black mark in my life and I am ashamed to tell about it.

The astonishing thing about this incident was that nobody at that time mentioned Jews as conquerors of Arabic Muslim Palestine or Zionists. We attacked them just because they were "Yahood" - JEWS! The same "Yahood" who were cursed in Qur'an.

I want to ask Norman Finklestein, the author of the book The Holocaust Industry, “Please tell me when the Holocaust ended?”

 Aram,

Syria