who will seek forgiveness?
if only......
Hebron.
by Ian
International Solidarity Movement
Report:
After a period of fine weather, the city now has
Biblical floods and power cuts. It's difficult to know
what's going on down the road, let alone in the UK.
Still, droplets of news dribble in. Apparently
campaigning for next year's General Election is underway,
and political debate is shifting to domestic issues. Law
and order. Immigration. The National Health Service.
What a dream the NHS seems here. Despite the Labour
Government's fetish for privatisation, it's still (so
far) a free service for British citizens. Under pressure,
like the rest of the welfare state, but it remains a
cornerstone of our civilised society.
It has its critics. A running story in the national
press for some time now has been the scandal of an NHS
'postcode lottery'. Why should someone in Hampshire, say,
have better services and shorter waiting lists than
someone in Lancashire? Where you live shouldn't affect
your rights as a patient...
In post-Arafat Palestine too, an election looms,
though the debate about domestic issues here now has a
desperate urgency.
Law and order, for instance. The basic principle back
home is to protect members of the public. What a miracle
that would be for the Palestinian people, who have no say
at all in how law and order is administered in the West
Bank. The law is made in West Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, and
enforced in Palestine by the occupying forces. On the
ground, it is harsh, improvised and often lethal.
Unemployment? Someone told me the other day that
unemployment in the militarised Hebron region is
currently running at 78%. Impossibly high, but who knows?
It's impossible to verify. The economy here is as smashed
as the infrastructure. Surrounded and controlled by a
state raking in billions of dollars a year in foreign
aid, Palestine's poverty is in the third world league.
Families scrape together whatever they can from any
part-time, menial, temporary work they can get.
And immigration? This really is a mind-bender. There
are plenty of people flooding into Palestine looking for
a better life, but they're not returning Palestinians.
Nor are these new settlers asylum-seekers fleeing
persecution, or migrants making a positive economic
contribution in their host country. They are here for the
subsidised housing in rapidly expanding settlements. They
are here to steal farming land. Many of the latest wave
of settlers in and around Hebron are from America, the
richest country on earth, and they are here to rob the
poor.
As for the state of the health service in Palestine,
you need only visit the Mohammad Ali Hospital to see how
the 'postcode lottery' operates in Hebron. The hospital
is in H2, the eastern section of town that includes the
Old City and inner suburbs. It is a military zone, and
under an Israeli administration.
Before the second Intifada, the 280-bed hospital dealt
with 80% of admissions in Hebron district. Now it deals
with just 28%. Fear keeps people away. It's not just the
roadblocks patients must negotiate to get there, or the
dangers of being detained by soldiers when you need
urgent medical assistance. Simply being in an ambulance
here is dangerous.
The Palestine Red Crescent Society isn't 'recognised'
by those who control H2. 'Terrorists' may be using
ambulances, so emergency vehicles can find themselves the
targets of gunfire. Snipers are everywhere. Tanks are
stationed at high strategic points around the city. Six
ambulances have been destroyed in the last three years.
'You can be held up at a roadblock for two hours, even
if you have called the DCO (the local Israeli
administrative commander) to tell them you are sending an
ambulance' says senior consultant Firas Amro. 'If it's an
emergency - someone with a serious myocardial infection -
in half an hour he will be dead. A woman in labour - she
can't wait. We regularly have babies delivered at
checkpoints.'
Getting patients to the hospital is difficult, but
it's just as difficult to attract money. There is no
National Health Service here. Theoretically, treatment is
paid for. Sometimes the Palestinian Authority will cover
costs if a patient is sent down from Ramallah or Nablus.
Sometimes patients will pay the full amount, sometimes
half. Often they can afford to pay nothing.
Infant and paediatric services here are in crisis.
Hebron's population is over half a million. More than 50%
are under 15 years old. Thirty new specialist paediatric
spaces were created this year, bringing the district
total to 100, provided by the PRCS and the district's two
government hospitals. A similar catchment area in Israel
would have about 500.
Mohammad Ali Hospital is now the main centre for
neonatal care in the southern West Bank. If premature
babies survive the trip, they have a chance. And life in
Hebron is very much a game of chance, the odds stacked
according to your nationality.
The other day I saw three teenage settler girls
strolling home along a Jewish-only road, barred to
Palestinian traffic. They felt secure enough. They were
being followed by an Israeli Defence Force jeep, meekly
travelling at the pace they set. Now I am being told of a
Palestinian boy, 17 years old, out with his friends when
he was taken by Israeli soldiers. He was later admitted
to hospital. Dead on arrival. He had been thrown from a
moving jeep.
The death of a Palestinian may glimmer briefly in the
day's news. But beyond the grim, growing list of
fatalities lies a vast number of less newsworthy victims
- the maimed, the physically and mentally disabled.
This largely unseen problem, amplified to grotesque
proportions by a brutal Occupation, is a huge project for
the PRCS. Not only are they struggling to reach and deal
with damaged children - particularly in rural areas -
they are also battling traditional community attitudes to
disability. Until recently physical handicap and mental
illness meant shame for the family. The disabled were
looked after by their nuclear family. And kept out of
sight.
Now the PRCS is running social programs, bringing
mobile care units to remote villages, offering respite
care and rehabilitation services, raising awareness. A
series of educational films on the causes of and
treatment for disability (i.e a biological explanation
rather than the infuriating default one of Fate, or God's
Bloody Will) is now airing on local TV stations. Almost
anywhere else in the world, this public service would be
paid for by the government in charge. The TV audience
isn't Israeli, though, so an international charity is
funding the campaign.
Al-Raja Centre, just outside Hebron City, is a PRCS
day care unit for 80 children, aged 6 upwards. There's a
range of activities - physical and psychological therapy,
special needs teaching, even greenhouses and a chicken
farm. Farming teaches, but it also feeds. And,
importantly, produce earns money for the centre.
There's some wonderful, progressive work going on
here. As part of its awareness campaign, the PRCS has
recently called for 5% of employees to be disabled, a
target it already exceeds at Al-Raja. The ethos is
integration - a regular kindergarten brings day care kids
and local children together, and craft workshops teach
embroidery and bamboo furniture-making.
This isn't just occupational therapy. Older teenagers
can move from Al-Raja into Hebron's local craft
industries. It is, staff say, one of the most satisfying
outcomes of their work. Rebuilding bodies and minds -
whether damaged at birth or splintered by the random
violence of the Occupation - is a slow process. To see
hope and self-esteem inch back over the years is
gratifying. But to watch kids move from shameful
sequestration at home to enlightened day care to a proper
job is cause for jubilation.
The centre building is spartan. Built in 1981, it
feels like a cheap 1960s comprehensive school. The
rusting hulk of a clapped-out Red Crescent ambulance has
been hoisted onto a roof as an improvised logo. For
director Tayzir Maraqa, as with every senior health
official, the job seems to be half admin, half
fundraising. The centre plans to build another storey
soon, increasing capacity to 140 (thanks, Spain) and at
least the stone classroom floors are a bit warmer now -
another overseas donor has provided carpets.
A long-term plan is to establish a bottle-making
factory - Hebron glass is celebrated throughout the West
Bank, even grudgingly in Israel - to generate more income
and provide more jobs for Al-Raja children. But first
they must find a donor. And then get the money. And then
face another hurdle. 'The problem is transferring the
money' says Maraqa. 'The UN, whoever...you're promised
the money, they they (the Israelis) say this money is not
to aid development, it is to build a bomb...'
PRCS staff are loyal, and patient. According to Firas
Amro, 'you maybe get a salary cheque every two or three
months...' Medicines and equipment are much harder to get
since 9/11. 'We used to receive funding from the UAE,
Saudi Arabia. Now Bush says no money can be transferred,
we are financially threatened. It is very hard.'
He too spends a lot of his time writing letters and
emails to charities asking for help - 'begging for
aspirin, even. Much of the stuff we get from overseas is
past its expiry date or surplus to requirements. I just
wish most of the people I write to would even respond.
Usually, there is no reply.'
When medicines do arrive, they can be held up for
weeks at the airport, for security reasons or just out of
bureaucratic spite, so that by the time they get to the
hospital they are useless. Sometimes soldiers interfere:
'We had a vaccination programme for 2-5 year olds
recently. Soldiers stopped the ambulance trransporting
the vaccine, which cannot be exposed to light, insisted
we unload all the boxes and then opened them. They
wouldn't listen. The vaccine was ruined.'
At the PRCS ambulance and emergency unit in Hebron,
there are two buildings. One is a low, beaten-up old
block at the end of an unmade, potholed road. It
functions both as a general treatment and dispensing
centre and as the area's main ambulance despatch station.
The other is an unfinished 7-storey building, Hebron's
new A&E hospital. The shell has been constructed 'by
the will of Allah and the help of some local and
international NGOs...' Like almost every other building
in Hebron, it sprouts metal rods from the top. There's no
cladding, no glazing. They'll have to find the money to
complete it, then find the money to fit it out, then find
the money for equipment...
For now, the nerve centre for Hebron's emergency
services is a cramped control room with what would be, at
home, a sylishly retro swichboard with proper old-school
telephone handsets. On the admissions sheet there's a log
entry for the 19 year-old admitted yesterday with serious
wounds. He'd been demonstrating against the Apartheid
Wall at Beit Ula and caught live fire. In through his
shoulder, out through his back, taking his spleen and a
kidney on the way. When we visited the site of the demo -
a beautiful mountain valley dotted with ancient Canaanite
caves and Roman ruins, just about the worst place in the
world to erect a giant concrete barrier - people there
were convinced an explosive bullet had been used, illegal
under international law. Like almost everything else that
happens to Palestinians. The young man will live but
he'll be permanently disabled.
Perhaps he'll need a wheelchair. Today, the PRCS are
celebrating the news that 100 chairs (another gift from
far beyond the borders of the 'only democracy in the
Middle East') are to be delivered this week. I hope
they're in better shape than the one I saw being unloaded
from a PRCS ambulance amid the rubble of a devastated
street.
An elderly woman was being decanted. It was the
closest the paramedics could get to her home, wherever
that is, as the road had been blocked by several lumps of
concete, each a cubic meter. They create a 'no go' zone
around Worshippers' Way, a settler road.
This is how you end your days in Hebron, assuming you
die of natural causes. Bumping through rubble onto a
steep hill where your ambulance isn't allowed. The PRCS
has some burly volunteers for this. Many of Hebron's
roads are surreally steep. Some feel like they're only a
couple of degrees from being walls. There she was, the
old lady, being trundled home along the same road where
occupying forces escort their teenage children with jeeps
following behind at walking pace.
And this is how you start your days in Hebron if
you've arrived too early - at the Mohammad Ali Hospital,
in the heart of H2. Your ticket in the postcode lottery.
Born into a society abandoned by the world to the
arbitrary will of an oppressive military power.
This is a place brutalised, traumatised by violence
and death, where divorce rates are soaring, where job
prospects are close to zero, where children play war
games. Where, in postcode H1 outside the military zone,
hospital doctors arive at work to find 250 patients
waiting. Some have queued since 4a.m.
If the Occupation ended now, it would take years,
generations, for the wounds to heal. 'Our children face
extreme violence every day' says Firas Amro. 'The
psychological effect of this is unimaginable. You can
cry, and you can stop crying. Something happens to people
when they become used to families falling apart, when
they can no longer depend on shelter, food, water, their
brothers and sisters, when they know hate, when they
believe they are going to die. Death has many faces here.
One of them is Israeli.'
What could possibly upset a doctor on the Hebron front
line, when this shit is going on round the clock, week
after week, year after year? The medical director of
Mohammad Ali, Said Natsheh, has seen more misery than
most. Yet the incident he recalls now with a distracted
look happened a decade ago. 1994, the year of the Oslo
Agreement, was also the year of the Goldstein Massacre in
Hebron. A Jewish settler (from what the AA guide Explorer
Israel calls the 'tough-minded' settlement of Kiryat Aba)
entered the Ibrahimi Mosque and opened fire on
worshippers, killing 29 and wounding many more.
Ensuing violence in the town saw Mohammad Ali
hHospital occupied continuously for three days by
heavily-armed troops. And from his overflowing memory of
the suffering this caused to patients and staff, and from
all the death and pain he has witnessed since, this
doctor is momentarly baffled and disturbed by one small
memory.
A little girl, four or five years old with meningitis,
siting in a chair. He remembers the soldier, searching
for something to stand on to get a better view from a
high window. He just grabbed the chair, spilling the
child to the floor. As though she didn't exist. Rage at
this split second of callousness has burned inside him
for 10 years.
And then we go upstairs to the premature baby unit.
It's difficult to write this. Not because I see anything
horrible. Here, afer all, is hope. The babies here made
it. Many don't. There are four babies in incubators, born
in Hebron and born too early - between 28 and 30 weeks.
Of these four, one has permanent brain damage (oxygen
starvation) but will live. Another has meningitis and
severe heart and lung problems and will die. The chances
are good for the other two, and I'm looking at one of
them now. He's as big as a skinned rabbit, tubed up and
wired in. The monitor is calm and steady. He has a lung
infection but he will survive - another miracle.
He should be dead. His mother went into early, sudden
labour. There were complications. This little boy without
a first name on his medical sheet was born in a village
house an hour away from the hospital. The family is poor
- it can't afford to pay for medical treatment, can't
afford transport.
A twist of fate - a nurse from Muhammad Ali is a
neighbour. She brought the child in and has agreed to pay
at least something towards his care in the premature
unit.
And I am thinking about the 10 minutes or so before
the nurse arrived to take control. This child had been
abandoned at birth. Not dumped somewhere, or murdered,
but born, loved and watched in despair. What must it do
to your mind, to look at your newborn child and know that
you are powerless, that you can only lie there with him
while he dies?
I can't get it out of my mind. I have seen both my
children born, watched them grow and thrive. And I am
standing here, trying not to fucking cry, trying to think
myself into the head of a parent looking at this tiny
thing and feeling only anguish. I may cry later, but for
now I am burning with rage.
www.ism-london.org.uk
The Games We Play |
Maia
Carter Hallward
Saturday, April 2, 2005
After a week of hot summer weather, the winter
returned, the rain came, and fog obscured the
sightsthe wall encircling
Bethlehem and the ever-expanding Gush Etzion
settlement blockon our drive from Jerusalem
to Hebron. Since the majority of our group was
comprised of Israeli Jews, we were not allowed to
drive into Hebron via Halhoul. Although this is
currently the main route into the city (the
actual main road has been blocked for years), we
had to instead go through Kiryat Arba, the first
Jewish settlement established in the Palestinian
Territories after the 1967 war. As it was
Shabbat, the settlement was quiet, and between
Shabbat and the rain, no one was on the street
except for us, which drew the attention of the
settler security, who drove up in his white
armored jeep. We asked if it was possible to
drive to the Ibrahimi Mosque/Cave of Machpela
from there, as the rain was strong and cold.
Yes, you can, he said, if you
are all Jews and do not have an Arab
driver. Instantly I was converted.
Driving from the settlement full of modern villas
and 1970s era apartment buildings that look
exactly like those in the French Hill
neighborhood of Jerusalem, we wiggled through a
Palestinian neighborhood, passing the newly-paved
Worshippers Way that cuts 200
meters off of the Shabbat walk for the settlers
going to pray. It also necessitated the
demolition of a number of ancient Palestinian
homes, some of them 800 years old or more, as the
route cuts right through the oldest part of
Hebron. Upon arrival in the area of the Tomb of
Abraham, we met with Dianne and Donna of
Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT) and Zlika, a
Palestinian Muslim who runs a community center
for women and children in the neighborhood
adjacent to the mosque entrance. She cautioned us
not to speak Hebrew, and to pretend we were all
tourists from outside the country, as there are
parts of the city where Jews are not supposed to
go. It was my comrades turn to be
converted.
I have been to Hebron many times; this is my
fourth visit in six months. Regardless, every
time I see something new; the situation is always
changing. As Yehudit, one of the women along for
the tour noted, the situation is the same as when
she was here decades ago, except it is even worse
than before. As we were given some initial
orientation by our guides, dozens of settlers
passed by, going to and from Shabbat prayers at
the synagogue that comprises half of the large
stone structure in front of us. Girls in long
skirts, women with baby carriages, and dozens of
young men in their teens carrying rifles around
their shoulders passed along, unstopped, along
Shuhada Street. While some of them had them
casually resting on their hips, others walked
with their hands on the gun, as if cocked and
ready to shoot at a moments notice. Many of
this youth are not old enough to drive, yet carry
automatic weapons on their way to pray. With the
exception of Zlika, no Palestinian could be seen
on the street, and all the shops were shuttered
shut, covered with graffiti proclaiming
Death to Arabs and Jews do not
expel other Jews (referring to the Gaza
disengagement plan of Ariel Sharon). A checkpoint
by Shuhada Street and another checkpoint at the
entrance to the mosque from the Old City keep
most Palestinians at bay. Palestinian families
living in the area recount stories of beatings,
strip searches, and other humiliating treatment
at the hands of the soldiers manning the
checkpoints. In addition to the physical
harassment, those who defend themselves are often
charged with trying to kill a soldier
and are given heavy fines as well.
Zlika showed us the view from the roof of her
house and pointed out the rooftop route to school
that children had to take during the 3 years when
Hebron was under curfew most of the time. Leaving
her house, we noticed the iron gate, welded shut,
leading to the Old City and the shopping
district. The army placed it there to
protect the Palestinians from the
settlers who would come through to vandalize
Palestinian property. As a result, Zlikas
family (and others living in that area) must go
through the checkpoint into the Old City and take
a much longer route to the market. In addition,
the checkpoint closes in the evening, forcing
them to come back home over the rooftops if they
are out past 8:00 pm.
The checkpoint between the Cave of
Machpela/Ibrahimi Mosque and the Old City is
relatively new. As of January, when I last
visited Hebron, the pillbox and turnstiles were
not in their present location. Indeed, there were
no turnstiles at all. Now, one must go through
turnstiles entering and leaving the Old City, and
they are not manually-turned gates, but rather
electronic ones controlled by the young soldier
sitting in the pill box. When it came my turn to
go through, he stopped the machine, catching me
inside with bars blocking my exit and my route of
entry. I could do nothing but wait until he
decided to let me pass. As he was in a
glassed-enclosed pillbox some 20 meters behind
me, there was no one with whom I could speak
regarding this entrapment. Later, as we were
leaving the Old City at the end of our tour, we
watched as the soldier trapped every single
Palestinian coming through the turnstiles. One
young boy of no more than 7 years old he kept for
a good 5 minutes, despite the fact that 15
non-Palestinians were witnesses to this act. What
do they do when no one is looking?
We visited another neighborhood of the old city,
one that abuts the Avraham Avinu settlement,
which is located in the midst of what used to be
the bustling central vegetable market. The
entrance to the neighborhood is sealed off, a
door placed in the entrance to the area again to
protect the Palestinians from the
settler rampages. Consequently, the family owning
the house between the neighborhood and the next
street over opened the first floor of the house
for through traffic, so that area residents can
gain access to the rest of the city. From there
we walked through the house of Zlikas
brother, exiting the other side and walking down
a staircase taking us Shuhada Street once again.
Walking up Shuhada Street toward Beit Hadassa
settlement, we were not sure how far we would be
allowed to go. The market, which was supposed to
be re-opened according to the 1997 Hebron Accord,
remains in the hands of the settlers, and a large
colorful banner left over from a Purim party hung
from the roof. The main entrance to the rest of
Hebron was closed off by cement barriers, barbed
wire, and piles of rubbish, and only Shuhada
street, re-paved and renovated with USAID money
in the late 1990s for the purpose of bolstering
Palestinian business in the area, was open for
foot traffic. Zlika came with us, expecting to be
stopped, but she was allowed to pass with us, the
first time she has been allowed in years. She
carried her camera, snapping photos like a
tourist on a street less than half a mile from
her house.
What used to be a thriving shopping district has
now been closed off for years. Palestinians are
not allowed on the street at all, and all
entrances to the street are closed off entirely
or monitored by IDF checkpoints. Hebrew graffiti
on the storefronts reads Death to
Arabs, Sharon, Rabin is waiting for
you and Kahane was right. An
American dressed in an IDF uniform guarded a
soldiers coffee corner named after a
settlers son who was killed near Nablus,
and one of our group was asked not to take
pictures. Behind us we saw the Palestinian school
for the area, on the hill between the Tel Rumeida
and the Beit Hadassa settlements. The children
are kept from reaching the school by the normal
staircase, as it is filled with coils of barbed
wire, and so must walk past the school, deeper
into the settlement, and then climb by a
treacherous half-crumbled staircase farther down
the street. The feisty headmistress has kept the
school open despite intimidation, often meeting
the children on the road to escort them to class
herself.
We continued along the street and passed through
the checkpoint separating H-1 from H-2, going
from the Israeli-controlled part of the city to
the Palestinian-controlled area. The difference
was remarkable. Immediately we found shops open,
people moving, the noise and traffic of a living
city. Whereas the old city and its environs are
basically dead, the newer part of the
city, where people are allowed to breathe and not
constantly stopped and harassed by checkpoints,
still bustles. While the city is living, I
hesitate to say it is alive, as the
employment opportunities for its residents are
limited, and while the Palestinians are not
confined to as tight a prison as those living in
the Israeli-controlled portion of the city,
theirs is the larger cage defined by the
boundaries of the city, the Jewish settlements,
and the Israeli-only roads. Without a map
demarcating areas H-1and H-2, one can detect the
boundary by the closed shops, the empty streets,
Hebrew graffiti and the tell-tale signs of large
cement blocks and smoke residue from gun fire and
Molotov cocktails.
After completing our tour we walked back through
the Beit Romano checkpoint, the Tomb of Abraham
checkpoint, and then once in our cars had our IDs
checked three more times before we reached
Jerusalem: driving toward Kiryat Arba, at the
gate of Kiryat Arba, and at the checkpoint by
Beit Jala. Of course, as we carried Israeli and
foreign IDs, we were able to pass relatively
smoothly, and we were not stopped by the
additional flying checkpoints we
witnessed in Jerusalem and on the way to and from
Hebron. Despite the current
ceasefire, travel restrictions have
not eased for most Palestinians, and even cities
like Tulkarem, which have supposedly been
turned over to the Palestinians,
remain hemmed in by checkpoints, whether
permanent or flying. On the ground,
the Palestinians do not see improvements, and if
anything, see the situation worsening. We could
see new construction underway in Ephrata, in
Harsina and in Kiryat Arba settlements, and while
Palestinians are supposed to be disarming
militants, automatic weaponry is openly possessed
by very young, very radical settlers in the midst
of West Bank cities, even as they go to pray.
Have pity on us the settler signs
proclaim all the way from Hebron back to
Jerusalem, referring to the disengagement plan. I
do have pity on them, but not for the
still-theoretical evacuation from Gaza. I pity
them for failing to recognize and appreciate the
beauty and generosity of their Palestinian
neighbors, for lacking the far-sightedness to see
that this land is big enough to be shared by two
peoples, and for closing their hearts and minds
to the possibility of equality, diversity, and a
just peace.
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