There was no getting used to suicide bombings. We would hear the “boom” over Jerusalem and know when it was not sonic, but murderous. After the boom the quick tally: family, friends, colleagues? Israelis did the same. If family and friends were not involved you could breathe again and carry on with the day—you had to—until the stories of the victims hit home: the children, old people, the personal tragedies, the heroism, and the unbearable task of clearing up, of picking up the pieces of life and personality, dreams and hopes reduced to gobbets of flesh.
Operation Defensive Shield did not stop the bombings. Friends continued to email and phone from abroad, asking if we were still alive, and then, “What’s it like, living with ‘terror’?” The answer varied, depending on what had happened that day and how close the last bomb had been. Once, after being in Bethlehem, I started describing the signs of trauma in the Palestinian children I had visited in the clinic. Then I realized this was not the variety of terror my questioner was after. On June 19, 2002, I fretted for hours, convinced that one of my Israeli friends had been among the seven people killed and fifty injured in French Hill. My logic was simple: she lived there and would have been coming home from work when the suicide bomber exploded. That and a bad feeling. But I found out later she was safe. The bad feeling was panic, losing yourself to fear and to the idea that probability would get you one day.
Every day as we trod the short walk to school we saw the arc of limestone wall scrubbed clean of blood and the concavity in the metal gate: reminders of the blast that blew a man apart, “our” bomb, our terror. Every mother in the land, Israeli, Palestinian, or other, worried that her children might not come home from school alive, bombed by suicide bombers, shot by IDF snipers, or caught in the crossfire.
For Israelis there was the underlying, omnipotent fear of annihilation, and beyond that, other terrors. Taking Catriona to preschool one morning I broke in on a scene that went on all over Israel every day, as normal to Israeli families as it was poignant to me. Catriona’s school was in a private house tucked away inside the German Colony, and the teacher’s son, eighteen or nineteen years old, was home on leave from his three-year compulsory stint in the army. He was lying asleep in bed under a pink blanket, his mother wondering whether he would like eggs for breakfast or something else: she was a wonderful cook. She looked at the dark head cut close and I felt my own hand cupped around the smoothness of my baby’s head half an hour before. I began to ask about her son, and she let out the agonies of knowing that he had chosen a dangerous unit and of seeing him set off “on exercise,” somewhere, she was not to know where, or what his duties were. She had to wait until he came back—or for news.
Alison, a close friend, confided that she had picked out a photo of everyone in her family for when one of them was killed. “I know how it sounds, but it’s one way of coping with the constancy of terror.” The press would demand photos and she would be ready. Her son, a newly commissioned officer, talked about the problems of training raw recruits. I skirted around the “refusenik” issue—the refusal to serve as a soldier in the Occupied Territories—asking mildly if he had had any doubts about serving in the army. No, he said, he had always been the outdoor type.
Others skirted around the notion of risk. Some asked themselves how close “terror” came, trying to measure the likelihood of being caught next time. There would, of course, be a next time. This meant being obsessed by probability—to the point of not being able to live at all. In any case, for so many people there was no choice. I varied. We had just returned from a trip to northern Israel when, on June 5, 2002, Islamic Jihad drove a car packed with explosives into a bus at Megiddo. Seventeen people were killed and thirty-eight injured. Three days before this bombing we had driven through the junction and now I pictured us alongside that burning bus. The hill of Megiddo is Armageddon, site of the Book of Revelation’s final battle between good and evil. We had wandered around ruins of a city strongly fortified 5,000 years ago: through a Canaanite gate, up a Solomonic ramp, into temples where citizens had worshipped for a thousand years, and down a stone-cut stair deep inside the hill to a 230-foot tunnel built in 900 BC to keep the city watered under siege. It was a while before I could think through my panic: in my mind I was ruling out all future trips around Israel for fear of being at a junction when Islamic Jihad rammed explosives into another bus, and all the while here we were living in Jerusalem—where there was bomb after bomb.
A few weeks later our Jerusalem shrank again when another bomber exploded by the school. This time, nine months after the last one on Ha’Nevim Street, the bomber detonated further from the school door. This time, as last time, only the bomber was killed, but five other people were injured. The bomber was no doubt on his way somewhere else: a falafel stand took the brunt of the blast. I thought of our first days in Jerusalem when the woman behind that same falafel stand had taken great trouble to explain falafel to me. I held the children while she filled warm pita with shredded lettuce, orbs of chickpea and spice, spoonfuls of salads and herbs, and a slathering of tahini. She looked down at the children’s waiting faces as she handed each one a delicious pocket of the new food, and then beamed at me. Was she one of the five? How was she now? Within a day there was more killing: students at Hebrew University on Mount Scopus. Nine young people dead and eighty-five wounded by a Hamas bomb planted in the student cafeteria.
Resilience and reactions varied. Some people, by nature or experience, or a combination of the two, were more resilient than others. There were Israelis who wouldn’t visit us in our house, Israelis who wouldn’t visit Jerusalem at all, and Israelis who stood in protest in front of IDF bulldozers. There were Palestinians who stood square when the IDF were shooting but, when confronted by a small terrier, confessed that they were “afraid from dogs.” There was Hazel from Northern Ireland who came across the bomb disposal squad worrying around her car one morning, pointing out a suspicious box of garbage left next to it. Hazel was having none of it. “There were a few wires sticking out of the top of the box,” she said, “nothing to get all upset about,” and insisted on moving her car before the bomb squad performed their controlled explosion. And there were those who quit Jerusalem after their first bomb.
In terms of resilience, I was somewhere in the middle. The bombing at Hebrew University disgusted people above the usual level of disgust. And then you catch yourself and ask why is the killing of so many students worse than the killing of women and children, or old people—or anyone? How was it that we were grading the value of a life?
And there was the bombing of the buses; we had a car. June 18, 2002: nineteen people were killed when a suicide bomber attacked a bus from Gilo to Jerusalem. A friend was there minutes later and called me, hysterical, unable to get the images out of her mind, the words out of her mouth, or, most distressingly, the smell out of her nostrils: each breath brought back the images. July 17: five people killed in a double suicide bombing near the old bus station in Tel Aviv. August 4: nine people killed on a bus in northern Israel. September 18: a 21-year-old policeman killed stopping a bomber boarding a bus at Umm al-Fahm. The day after that, six people killed by a bomb on a bus by the Great Synagogue in Tel Aviv. October 10: a 71-year-old killed when a bomber blew himself up trying to board a bus near Bar-Ilan University. October 21: fourteen people killed by a car bomb alongside a bus to Tel Aviv.
The suicide bombings were so horrendous, so shocking, that their impact erased all other thoughts. Everything else would block out: the starkness of killing civilians so close to us, so close that it might have been us. A darkness would fill the place voided by the horror, as I pictured the bomber walking on to the bus, or into the restaurant, and looking about at the faces of his, or her, victims. The bomber who paid her bill before she detonated. And I compared the other forms of killing: those from further away, or from so great a distance that the victims are unseen, and the killings that are sanctioned by our laws, or someone’s laws. There was something different about killings when the killer dies too, but don’t look too closely. Those who try to understand get burned. Never mind the cause: treatment only.
Flesh is something you deal with in medicine. You become accustomed to it. It is made acceptable. You dissect it in your first term, delve into it in surgery, stitch it together in casualty, and take it apart in pathology. It becomes a fascination: its design, versatility, functions, strength. In Israel there is flesh everywhere. Some of it is covered, modest, Orthodox flesh, but most is on display and beautiful. Israelis make the most of their long Mediterranean coastline, and they luxuriate in the Red Sea to the south. They don’t parade excessively—they don’t have to—they are a varied and attractive people. One day in Herzliya two friends talked about racial superiority: I was on the receiving end. “The British Empire,” they laughed, one Sephardic and the other Palestinian Israeli, “it lost its aura of power when your people took off their clothes, and showed the vulnerability of their flesh. You never should have done that. It’s green in our light, not warm and strong like our flesh. We are beautiful. You green Europeans, that is your weakness: you paraded in red uniforms and conquered the world, but when you took off your clothes your empire was doomed.”
And then there is the other flesh: not on-the-beach glorious living flesh, tanned deep-dark and animate, but dead. Dead flesh. Dismembered, dehumanized by a human bomb, a man or woman who sets out to detonate and kill. The images of death were everywhere: the immediate devastation, the photos of the victims, the burials, and the waves of grief. One organization, Zaka, fielded volunteers who picked raw, newly dead flesh off the hot tarmac of the summer Jerusalem streets, finding tiny bits of it plastered against walls, rolled in dust behind cans and debris, placing every last shred inside a plastic sack for sacred rites of burial. Flesh splattered against children’s clothes and in their hair. Resting up after soccer, standing too near a window in the house, a sniper’s bullet that shredded their flesh. Hidden damp holes in flesh—the Palestinian child who died “from shrapnel injuries,” except her flesh was perfect bar the sniper’s hole in her brain. There was the dead gray dormant flesh of the young girl buried alive in Jenin; her eyes closed, dusted, nostrils full of powdery death. Bodies blown apart, unidentifiable, by tank shells, Apache helicopter weaponry.
Terrorism is a weapon of the weak against an enemy of superior military strength. It is also a weapon of the strong to force the weak to submit. Either way, it is repellent. One Palestinian claimed to me that a suicide bomb was the most powerful weapon in the world.
“It is far more advanced than any weapon yet designed,” he said. “It walks, it talks, it thinks. It can decide when and where to detonate. It can withdraw, unexploded, if it thinks it best. It can hesitate, change its mind, go back again and then explode. And look at its effects.” He drummed home his claim: “Suicide bombs give immense power to people who have no power. We are the weakest people in the world; we haven’t even got a state.”
I mentioned this to Andrew, who said in exasperation: “They just never get it, some Palestinians, just exactly how disastrous the suicide bombings are for them. They are not the most powerful weapons in the world. Their sheer awfulness brings down universal condemnation on the Palestinians and silences any debate.”
Stateless or citizen, there were many parallels: where Israelis saw through different lenses depending on their level of pain and suffering, so did the Palestinians. Both saw clearly through their rational lens that ending violence made sense, but then emotions would take over, their ordeal and fear and refusal to be defeated and their humiliation all dictating the need to inflict pain in return, to take revenge. Revenge was consuming. In Israeli eyes their rage meant backing the IDF solution regardless; in Palestinian eyes it meant support for suicide bombings. Each felt justified in responding to the other’s violence, regardless of the repercussions of those responses.
Both sides had parties prepared to say that the rational path was the right one. But these were not in power. After 9/11, reactions from abroad were even more submerged in the emotional response. We were not so much “living with terror,” as living with its effects: the silencing, the self-silencing, the denial, with good people pretending that things like brutal repression and a fundamentalist agenda were not happening or that, if they were, it was somehow acceptable. Acceptable in the short term because “they” are the enemy; acceptable in the long term because, well, how are we supposed to get out of this?
As my Palestinian doctor colleagues pointed out, Israelis were suffering deep, indescribable fears. The fears came from believing that there were people out there who wanted you dead just because you were Jewish, wanted you wiped off the land, pushed into the sea. And everything seemed to fit. Palestinians kept bombing Israeli civilians. Therefore, said the settlers and their supporters, the settlers’ fight—to keep the Occupied Territories—was all Israelis’ fight. According to this line, the two wars, one against terrorist attacks and the other to keep hold of the Occupied Territories, were one and the same. The fact that there were two separate wars, only one of which had the support of the Israeli majority, must be hidden. Lose the West Bank or Gaza, said the settlers, and they’ll come for you in Tel Aviv. We are your front line: force us to give up the settlements and you’ll give the Arabs the green light to turn us all into victims again.
Israelis were being murdered, cruelly and randomly, as they tried to lead normal, civilized lives. Israel itself was under threat. Israel needed security and those saying the Palestinians needed security too, let alone those who said that the Palestinians had turned to terrorism because of the Israeli occupation, were drowned out, or worse, dubbed traitors. Those Israelis who pointed out that Jewish groups had also turned to terrorism because of the British occupation of Palestine, successfully as it turned out—well, they were brave.
There were, of course, many Israelis who saw things differently: people who felt the fear but refused to be dictated by it, who lived with terror but would not be bullied by those who tried to manipulate it. While some Israelis talked about driving the Palestinians out of their homes in the West Bank, other Israelis were refusing to serve their country’s military occupation.
Individual Israelis spoke out time and again, in public and in private. Many Israelis joined marches and protests, wrote books, resigned commissions, put on exhibitions of photographs and gave interviews, trying to show Israelis and others what was really happening. The pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim joined forces with the Palestinian intellectual, Edward Said, to establish a joint youth orchestra to the acclaim of many and the bitter disapproval of others. Barenboim insisted that: “Israel was not intended to be a colonialist nation, and the Jewish settlements in the territories are like a cancer in the body of the process.”1
The former mayor of Tel Aviv took the trouble to visit a number of West Bank checkpoints to see and judge for himself, and wrote about his findings. Among other things, he saw ten trucks loaded with provisions to feed Nablus, and ten empty trucks ready to take the food from the checkpoint into Nablus, and all twenty of them made to wait at the checkpoint, denied permission to unload and reload by the arbitrariness of the local IDF commander. He found the sight of Palestinians being made to walk several kilometers between checkpoints, and in particular four mothers shepherding eight blind children of four to five years of age, hard to take. He doubted that the checkpoints served any purpose other than to make the Palestinians suffer, leaving the young Israeli troops with difficult emotional baggage for later life, and urged “for the sake of the Palestinians, but mainly for our own sake, the faster we end the occupation and leave the territories, the better for us.”2
Some families, bereaved by the conflict, reacted to their grief by forming support and action groups.3 A number of Israeli farmers continued to support, often financially, or with frequent phone calls—any way they could—the Palestinians who used to work for them but were now unable to, locked in behind Closure. One Israeli group, horrified by scenes on Channel 2 of the IDF pounding Gaza, raised money to help rebuild Palestinians’ demolished homes.4 Other groups responded to injustice on their doorstep, like the residents of Mevassaret Zion who joined a petition to the Israeli High Court requesting an amendment to the route of the Security Barrier in favor of the Palestinian village next door.5
In Jerusalem I went to a lecture given by an Israeli woman in her fifties, part of a group of women who had rallied together to try to protect Palestinians from the excesses of the checkpoints, “machsom” in Hebrew. The group was called Machsom-Watch, and the women monitored the most notorious checkpoints in rotation, playing on their age and being female. The lecturer explained that the women believed that the soldiers would be less likely to be cruel or violent if they knew they were being watched by Jewish women who looked like their mothers and grandmothers. They also became witnesses to crimes others claimed did not exist.6
I met the lecturer again later and watched out for news of the group’s work. In interviews the group’s members explained their motivation: to ease conditions for Palestinians and repair the damage being done to Israeli society. “What we are doing is horrible, not just for Palestinians.” Soldiers’ misconduct translates into misbehavior in society, “and it is ruining us.”7 But it was also, as one explained, to “reclaim the humanistic revolution of Zionism. We are calling on the world to help us reclaim our humanistic values.”8
In doing so they confronted fear, the anguish of not being able to prevent abuse, and the truth of what soldiers sometimes do. One Israeli volunteer witnessed checkpoint soldiers shooting Palestinian children who were throwing stones. “During previous times, I had seen them shooting in the air, but that day they were shooting toward the children.” She and a colleague alerted the commander. He responded that the troops were only firing in the air. One fourteen-year-old boy, Omar, was shot in the head and neck, and died.9
The human rights organization Ta’ayush was another joint Israeli-Palestinian organization. I met one prominent member, David Shulman, a poet and Hebrew University professor. He described Ta’ayush’s efforts to defend Palestinian farmers who were victims of a long-running campaign by settlers to seize their lands near Hebron. The professor told me he had been to war and seen terrible things but he had never seen hatred like the hatred he saw in the faces of the settlers who attacked him and his fellow campaigners; the settlers’ eyes wild with loathing. One woman was rifle-butted in the head for trying to protect the farmers. Israeli law had no meaning for the settlers, said David, they have their own, and since the government does almost nothing to stop them they know they can get away with anything, even murder. The IDF had assured Ta’ayush that soldiers would intervene, but when the settlers attacked they did so unopposed, beating and terrorizing the farmers. Then, instead of arresting the settlers, the IDF arrested the farmers and confiscated their tractors. Eight farmers were locked up for plowing their own land. They were kept handcuffed and blindfolded, sitting on the floor in a nearby military camp, for eight hours. From time to time, the soldiers kicked and hit them.
The names of groups that were formed told their own story: Courage to Refuse, Breaking the Silence, Checkpoint Watch. The groups were organized, and active, putting their dislike of the occupation into more than just words. The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD), Physicians for Human Rights-Israel (PHR-Israel), Rabbis for Human Rights, Ta’ayush, Peace Now, Women in Black, hundreds, thousands of Israelis. Soldiers and pilots were speaking out. Before the launch of Operation Defensive Shield fifty reserve officers and soldiers signed a protest letter announcing their refusal to serve in the West Bank and Gaza Strip because of moral difficulties with army practices. They called the fighting “the war for the peace of the settlements”—a cause they did not believe in. More soldiers and pilots, even great heroes like Yiftah Spector, followed suit.
One reservist major, Ishai Menuhin, explained the selective refusal to serve: he would defend his country but would “not participate in a military occupation” that had made Israel “less secure and less humane.” Israelis and Palestinians alike, he said, think of their “soldiers as ‘defense forces’ or ‘freedom fighters,’ when in truth these soldiers take part in war crimes on a daily basis.” He spoke of how terror blanked out the truth: “Daily funerals and thoughts of revenge among Israelis tend to blur the fact that we are the occupiers. And as much as we live in fear of terrorism and war, it is the Palestinians who suffer more deaths hourly and live with greater fear because they are the occupied.” He hoped that more Israelis would see the reality of the occupation, and that “perhaps we will be able to let go of our fear enough to find a way forward.”10
Arik Diamant, the director-general of the Israeli refusenik group, Courage to Refuse, stated, “IDF soldiers know very well that 90 percent of the army’s activities in the territories are not related, even indirectly, to preventing terror. They also know that while they protect and guard a lunatic outpost in the heart of Samaria, they are in effect doing nothing for the security of the people of Netanya, Jerusalem, and Tel Aviv... Our army, the rock of our foundation, the people’s army in which we enlisted and in which we served for many years, has become a private army for the settlers.”11
I met a former fighter pilot at a party in Tel Aviv. He was born in a kibbutz and was eloquent in his description of the kibbutz ideal, the conflict he felt between the appeal of the model and the pain he had felt at being separated from his parents. He talked about his dead mother, leaving me wondering if any of my four would be as understanding of me as he was in his affection of her. He then said he was going to be in Jerusalem the following week and could we talk again? I suggested the American Colony Hotel, but when he turned up there I was surprised by his nervousness. “This place is full of terrorists,” he said. I laughed. He didn’t. I thought he was joking—whom could he mean: Val? Pierre the Swiss manager? The waiters? Perhaps the two American journalists waiting for a taxi in the lobby? I tried to reassure him and, knowing that he had been a fighter pilot, I asked him about his experiences. He toyed with his coffee cup, “I bombed Damascus,” he said simply. “That was in ‘73.”
“Oh,” I said.
“And I bombed Beirut in ‘82. That was a beautiful operation.” He was proud. “Being a pilot was something technical, just a job.” And he chatted away for a while about the technicalities of bombing a city, then looked at me.
“But come on, I want to hear about you.”
I stalled. “I’ve no military background,” I said. I was trying to think about my children, wanting to hurry back to them and their world, the world of homework and squabbles and wondering if Basil might let them ride the mare again soon.
But I was reminded of an interview with another fighter pilot who talked about people like himself seeing “the black flag.” The black flag was the point at which you felt you had to disobey.* I looked up the interview: it was with Dr. Yigal Shochat, who called for soldiers to refuse to serve in the Occupied Territories because it “undermines the country’s security while contributing to the security of the settlers.”12 Dr. Shochat believed it illegal to bulldoze houses to clear areas for the convenience of the IDF, or to stand at checkpoints deciding whether a woman should be allowed to go to a maternity hospital, but he knew it was hard for draft-age soldiers, and sometimes career soldiers, to act on this. For one thing, refusal ruins careers. My friend had not seen the black flag, and I had failed to understand what strength it took, not only to see it, but then to act on it and refuse orders.
Israelis were stunned when, in December 2003, thirteen elite Sayeret Matkal commandos wrote to the prime minister saying that they could no longer participate in Israel’s oppression of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. They wrote “out of a deep sense of foreboding for the future of Israel as a democratic, Zionist, and Jewish state.” The army responded: the soldiers should be dismissed or jailed. Israelis, horrified to see members of such a prestigious unit challenging the accepted line, sent them waves of hate mail, abuse, and even death threats. A well-known former Sayeret Matkal member, Binyamin Netanyahu, objected that refusing to serve would lead to the country falling apart. One of the commandos responded, “If a plane is going to crash, you can jump out or you can try and prevent it from crashing. That is how we feel about the state of Israel.”13
Not long after the thirteen commandos wrote their letter, a serving IDF officer resigned after Israeli soldiers opened fire on unarmed protestors who were demonstrating against the Security Barrier. Among the injured was an Israeli civilian, Gil Naamati, who nearly bled to death. Lieutenant Colonel Eitan Ronel wrote: “A country in which the army disperses demonstrations of its citizens with live gunfire is not a democratic country... I saw this deterioration, stage after stage: the blind eye that was turned to the abuse of detainees in violation of the army’s orders... to soldiers’ gunfire on unarmed Palestinian civilians... to the settlers’ unlawful behavior toward Palestinian civilians; the oppression of the population; the roadblocks; the curfew; the closure; the blind eye the army turned toward humiliation and abuse; the searches and arrests; the use of live fire against children and unarmed people... This is an educational, ethical, and moral failure.”14
In November 2003, the Army Chief of Staff, Lieutenant General Moshe Ya’alon, astonished the government by contradicting the official line on checkpoints when he declared that “restrictions on the movement of Palestinians are counterproductive, generating greater hatred of the occupying army” and strengthening terrorist organizations.15
But when four ex-directors of the Shin Bet security service—Yaakov Perry, Ami Ayalon, Avraham Shalom, and Carmi Gillon—gave an interview to the major Israeli daily, Yediot Ahronoth, Sharon took notice. His later volte-face on withdrawal from settlements—the unilateral disengagement plan of 2005—was partially attributed to many Israelis speaking out, but particularly to these four.16 Together, the four men, with their unparalleled knowledge and experience, decried the failure of the Israeli government to deliver on peace and urged ending the occupation by dismantling settlements in the West Bank and Gaza. Shalom said, “We must once and for all admit there is another side, that it has feelings, that it is suffering and that we are behaving disgracefully.” The Israeli preoccupation with preventing terror, he said, “is not a mistake. It is an excuse. An excuse for doing nothing.”17
My days at al-Makassed Hospital were full of the situation and the conflict. I watched the doctors struggle to get to work through two, three, or four checkpoints, struggle to stay awake having woken at 4AM to start their short but interminable journey, and struggle to deal with their patients’ problems.
More and more women came in “unbooked”—without any prenatal care because they just couldn’t risk the checkpoints except when labor gave them no option. The results were many-layered: poor health maintenance, preventable problems not prevented, increasing levels of anemia, increasing numbers of undetected complications. Doctors railed at the increase in morbidity: “We have patients with eclampsia who would normally be picked up beforehand. We have known cases of cardiac problems who can’t get to us. We have women coming in with post-partum hemorrhage, infection, you name it. This should not be happening.”
Many women tried giving birth at home but got into difficulties and were a mess by the time they finally reached the hospital. After 1967, Israeli policy in the Occupied Territories had been to increase the number of births in hospitals and phase out the community midwives, the doulas. The policy had been successful, except that now, with hospitals so often out of reach because of checkpoints and barriers, women were having to deliver at home unattended. Palestinian organizations were scrambling to mobilize the doulas again—and to position more midwives on the patients’ side of the checkpoints.
Jerusalem provided specialist care for the West Bank. There was St. John’s Eye Hospital in East Jerusalem, for example, the only ophthalmic hospital for three million Palestinians; now, because of measures to deny Palestinians access to East Jerusalem, it was out of bounds for the majority of them. Normally hundreds of cases would be referred to al-Makassed Hospital for specialist care; these ranged across specialties, and in obstetrics even included patients from fertility clinics in cities like Nablus. Now there was Closure. Patients with complicated pregnancies struggled to be allowed through the checkpoints to the tertiary care they needed in Jerusalem. Palestinian agencies and their officials spent hours trying to work with the Israeli officials to authorize passage through checkpoints for patients, and even then it didn’t always work.
I once interrupted Mustafa Barghouti, the head of UPMRC (the Union of Palestinian Medical Relief Committees) and the future presidential candidate, at the checkpoint. I was phoning about meeting him and his wife for dinner, but all I could hear beyond his frustrated voice was the hoot and growl of vehicle engines. He told me later, at dinner in Ramallah, that he had been trying to help an ambulance crew bringing a woman from Nablus to al-Makassed. Everything had been cleared in advance with the Israeli authorities, and between Nablus and Ramallah they had been allowed to pass. Then the ambulance was blocked at a-Ram checkpoint. They were told to turn around and go back. They explained that the patient, who had an occluded iliac artery, cardiac problems, and diabetes, needed specialist care at al-Makassed and that she had clearance from the IDF to pass, but the checkpoint IDF soldiers said no. The crew had to call in Dr. Barghouti who prevailed eventually, but not until after the media and PHR-Israel had been recruited to help.
“There’s an Israeli woman,” he said in exasperation, “—does she have medical training?—who sits at the Beit El DCO and decides which patient may or may not pass the checkpoints to reach the medical care they need. She’s effectively the Minister of Health.”
And, one morning at work: “Where is their humanity?” whispered one doctor in despair at the story of the day. A family driving their aged father to the hospital for urgent treatment had been arrested and their car confiscated—all because the old man had no permit to enter Jerusalem, his own city.
Years before, on wards in Islamabad and Kabul, I had seen families helping out all the time. In those places the nursing profession was undermined by the qualms of Muslim Afghans and Pakistanis, and there was a shortage of nurses, with most jobs filled by Christians who were often looked down on for being Christian and for doing “dirty” work. Every patient was attended by a mother, aunt, wife, or sister—and not just for companionship. Patients were nursed and fed, as well as comforted, by their families, who would arrange rotas and bring in stacked metal containers of rice, meat, and vegetables, and piles of naan. In Palestinian hospitals the nurses were hard-working and skillful, but the presence of family members was no less important for patients’ well-being. At al-Makassed you could immediately tell whether patients came from Jerusalem or beyond: those with gatherings of families beside them were from Jerusalem, those who were alone were from beyond. It was hard for patients, having been subjected to the checkpoints, now to be in the hospital without family visits and support.
My colleague Dr. Ibrahim and I spent unprofessional amounts of time talking. He spoke perfect English, yet he maintained that in English he could not say exactly what he meant. Arabic, he explained, was so rich in expression.
I had asked early on about the hospital’s childbirth policies. He took me through their policy on the management of labor and then on to post-partum practices. “We favor rooming in, of course. Keeping mother and baby together—instead of in the nursery for the nurses’ convenience—is essential for mother-infant bonding and the establishment of breastfeeding, but it’s not so easy now. The mothers complain about not getting a break.” While Israeli mothers at Hadassah Hospital were asking for rooming in, Palestinian mothers at al-Makassed were asking for the opposite, for the nursery nurses to take care of their babies. After all their problems getting to the hospital and coping with the situation as well as with labor, they needed a rest.
Dr. Ibrahim was late one morning because there had been a road accident near one of the checkpoints on his route. He had jumped out of his car to help, and the soldiers had tried to stop him because he was Palestinian, but he had insisted, and there he was trying to save lives and having to fight to do it even when the facts were laid out bleeding on the ground for the soldiers to see, but they had no orders, or no rules, and eventually his authority had overcome their confusion, and common sense had won. He went so far in telling me what had happened, but then gave up, saying it was impossible to explain the subtleties.
I, he noted, had been shaped by a system of justice that I took for granted and assumed would protect me, and that I rarely had to put to the test. In Jerusalem Israelis talked about the injustice of the suicide bombings that targeted innocent civilians, and about the injustice of those who criticized Israelis for defending themselves against such attacks. Palestinians talked about the injustice of being left unprotected by local or international law, and about the injustice of the two-tier system of law imposed by the occupying power. (Palestinians in the Occupied Territories had been, since 1967, subject to the system of Israeli Military Orders: these do not apply to the settlers who live there.)* Palestinians also talked about the layers of impotence and defenselessness. As a neonatologist said to me on the ward one day, “Our families can’t protect us—IDF soldiers and Israeli settlers can do whatever they want to us and our children—our Authority can’t protect us, and the international community refuses to act, even though it means ignoring international law or even breaking it. What are we left with?—only God.”
* The black flag was a reference to Judge Binyamin Halevy’s verdict on the IDF shooting dead 43 Palestinian civilians in 1956 for breaking curfew. Those killed were returning from the fields to their village of Kfar Qasem, unaware that curfew had been imposed.
* One of which, number 898, gives Israeli settlers the right to detain any Palestinian, including children.18