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April
3, 2003
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David
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March
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April 5,
2003
A
Drowning in Salem
In
Order for Life to Continue
By ANNE GWYNNE
Earlier this week I received an urgent call from
my young friend, Feras al Bakri (the courageous UPMRC Ambulance
Driver)--"An'ne, where are you now? Come on, quickly, quickly
to my home! Today I am nearly killed". A 10-minute sprint
through the Old City, flights of stairs taken two at a time,
and there he is, pale and exhausted, lying on a sofa in front
of a gas heater, wrapped in blankets and quilts, and very, very
cold. Stressed and shocked, he wants to tell me of his day (though
he interrupts his story frequently with--"really, I don't
want to remember"), skipping briefly over the morning which,
anywhere else, would be a story in itself.
The Beit Iba roadblock was 'closed' when
the Ambulance stopped there with three patients bound for Raffidia
Hospital from Sebastiya, a city so ancient that my guide book
almost apologises that it 'did not become an important Administrative
Centre until 837 BCE'! "Checkpoint closed while soldiers
take rest. Come back in three hours" smirked the fat, red-faced
young thug who went away, giggling hysterically, to join his
juvenile mates in an appropriate, if demeaning game of 'donkeys'--leading
each other around the checkpoint with the strapping on the helmets
acting as halters--whilst they exchanged lewd sexual banter about
whores and brothels.
Naturally, Feras could not keep three
sick people in that hell-hole for hours, so up the mountain he
went, to the Sar'ra T-Junction and over the hilly, but very smooth
'settler' roads and down to Huwarra checkpoint to the west of
Nablus.
'Checkpoint?' It all sounds straightforward.
No. These very illegal roadblocks which stretch for miles and
destroy hectares of Palestinian farmers' land with no redress,
are not in any sense of the word, checkpoints. These desolate
places are for terrorizing, humiliating, inflicting pain by beating
or shooting, degradation and death; they have only one purpose--to
make any kind of normal life or commerce impossible for the civilian
population whose lives the Israelis daily destroy.
The morning's detour was fraught with
danger of sudden death at every turn, for these are not ordinary
roads and the people they serve are not 'settlers' in any ordinary
sense of the word. They are illegal immigrants who have killed
and beaten, and stolen the land as they pushed its rightful owners
out of their homes. These heavily-armed gunmen and women are
served by miles and miles of constructed highway, cosily termed
'settler roads'. They are the only roads in the world built on
someone else's land for the exclusive use of one religious group--Jews--who
are empowered to kill anyone they 'suspect' of, well, anything
really--since they kill with impunity it isn't important what
they invent. On this occasion the Ambulance and its vulnerable
cargo made it to Raffidia Hospital without any bullet holes to
add to the many already there.
So much stress and danger would, anywhere
else, warrant the afternoon off. Not here. At Raffidia Feras
picked up a very precious load: baby, father and Caesarian-section
mother, Naseem Ishtey'ya, to be taken home to the village of
Salem, some 3 km--normally 10 minutes drive--from Nablus. But
Salem is a 'closed' village. All villages around Nablus are closed
and have been for a year. Indeed Nablus itself, a beautiful,
ancient city of 200,000 is more often closed than open these
days.
The process of closure is one that only
the Israeli Ministry of Gratuitous Cruelties could have thought
up. Bulldozers the size of houses, like the one which crushed
Rachel Corrie, are brought from Israel and spend weeks digging
huge trenches and building mountains with the displaced earth
in concentric circles around the villages (see photograph 1).
The sewerage pipes are then fractured and the sewage diverted
into the trenches. At this moonscape everything and everyone
is prevented from entering or leaving.
Palestinians have lived here for thousands
of years, empathetically with the landscape and weather they
understand. Any disturbance of the natural drainage which has
evolved from pre-history causes storm water to build up into
huge and terrifying floods at alarming speed, creating maelstroms
of madness and what we call 'Seas of Insanity' over all the land
as far as the eye can see. The Israelis (or what my 4-year old
granddaughter calls, presciently, the Isra-Aliens) have no understanding
of, nor empathy with, this ancient landscape, so they demolish,
ravage and vandalise the countryside in an orgy of destruction
and hatred.
With the natural drainage destroyed,
the waters around Salem take the line of least resistance, down
the hillside to the village and along the 'closed' road, gathering
depth and force as it flows (see photograph 2, taken during lesser
flooding in February). By the time the Ambulance left Raffidia,
the weather, which had been deteriorating all day, had developed
into one of the worst storms in living memory. The iciest snow
I have ever felt was borne in sheets on a gale-force wind, covering
the streets with a thick layer of the most slippery slush, like
thick engine oil in viscosity, on which it is virtually impossible
to stay upright. This was accompanied by a spectacular 'son et
lumiere' display which lasted for more than 10 hours, with forked
and sheet lightning crackling through the valley, followed by
thunder crashing deafeningly; the ice-snow later turning to torrential
rain.
Once the Ambulance reached the dreaded
Salem checkpoint, Feras stopped because "everything is very,
very closed" and no driver can move inside the village.
The cut road (shown in photograph 1) is, of course, closed and
the only way is on the left of the road--up a raging flash-flood
of thick, muddy water. Feras went in up to his knees to see if
his patients could reach their homes inside the village: "Very,
very difficult, too deep water and very slippery under the feet"
he told me, "for my patient from Raffidia, it is not possible
with her caesarian-wound, long clothes, the baby and so on".
So he came back to the Ambulance and asked a Red Cross Driver
who was watching the incident to call the IOF to see if the road
could be opened because they have to carry the woman in a wheelchair.
He told her to explain additionally, that "if there is a
heart-patient or pregnant woman they will die inside the village.
Ask C.O. to open please the street or maybe people die here".
Feras has seen this firsthand: a month ago (at the time the pictures
were taken) a pharmacist, of the Alawn family, collapsed and
drowned there in the Israeli-made foul sewage pit trying to reach
Feras' Ambulance (see photograph 3). Unbelievably, the Red Cross
closed their windows and drove off without doing anything.
With no alternative, Feras took the baby,
wrapped up like an Inuit, over an insubstantial make-shift bridge
and returned for the mum, but realised that the 'bridge' was
too small and narrow for the wheelchair. As he looked at the
racing, swirling, muddy maelstrom in which trees, metal bars
and gates, bushes, rocks and other debris sped by, he was afraid
of drowning, but he knew he somehow just had to get this vulnerable
new mother to the other side. With Naseem in the wheelchair,
a blanket over her face so she could not see the danger, three
men carried her through the four-foot deep icy water, Feras guiding
from behind. Carefully, with one foot placed gingerly in front
of the other they reached the middle of the chest-high rapids,
where one of the men slipped into the water, crying "Allah
Akbar, I die, I die". But, caught by Feras he was able to
grip a handle on the chair and regain his footing.
All this time the guns of the murderous
soldiers were aimed, and ready to shoot them on a whim. Suddenly,
Naseem's husband and two of the other men lost their footing,
and for about 3--5 minutes they were floundering in the icy water--the
panic was overwhelming. Just as they were being pulled up the
bank to what would, anywhere else, be safety, the soldiers chose
this terrible time to prepare their machine guns for firing,
pulling the bolt back and forth (a horrible sound when you are
facing the barrel--I will not forget it easily), poking the half-drowned
men with their guns and shouting hysterically "we are going
to shoot you dead now". Feras, still in the water and very
cold, shouted as well as he could in the wind to "please
be quiet--can you see everyone is in panic here". Did they
think these rescued people could possibly kill them? Feras said,
"you want to shoot, but it would be better if you help,
not shoot, because maybe the ones still in water will die of
cold". The soldiers laughed and said, as usual "it's
not my problem" and continued to search and threaten the
men lying on the bank.
In spite of everything, Naseem, baby
and father were safely taken across the raging river, but Feras
now had to cross back to the Ambulance with the wheelchair. By
this time, the 'bridge' had been swept away and it was impossible
to speak properly in the wind and rain. Feras asked the soldiers
for a piece of rope (which they did have) to tie to the chair
to help him back over. "Not my problem", they retorted.
Someone suggested that the only way back across the ever-deepening
water was to walk to the nearby Azmout roadblock (where earlier
the soldiers had shot a boy and wounded another). Although very
short, it was a difficult walk because Feras could barely move
for the cold in his bones. At Azmout, the rushing water was no
shallower; he slid down the Israeli-made mud-rampart for three
meters only to find two more people in the water trying to reach
their homes in Salem. A girl was looking down at the flow and
crying desperately. She was terrified. Feras told her not to
look at the water but to look at the other side as he led them
through the chest-high floodwater to safety.
A desperately-ill man begged Feras to
take him to Nablus in the Ambulance, but as they tried to cross
the torrent they were knocked over by large debris in the ever
faster, ever deeper water. Holding onto each other, hand by hand
and foot by foot they reached three large rocks which looked
like stepping stones. Struggling against the ferocious current
they managed to crawl onto the rock and made their way to the
Ambulance. Feras remembers Naseem's husband waving and shouting
his gratitude from the other side. Somehow, despite being in
icy water for two hours, Feras drove the Ambulance back to the
UPMRC centre, collapsed and was taken home, where it took several
hours of intensive heat to bring his temperature up to normal.
He was just doing his humanitarian work,
carrying out missions of mercy, in his own city in his own land
where his ancestors have lived for millennia. A land occupied
by a brutal army which, every day, breaks every applicable International
Law and Convention in its attempt to make life so intolerable
that the people it has not murdered will flee, leaving the beautiful
land of Palestine in their acquisitive, long and grasping fingers.
Later, Feras said to me: "What I
learn in my life, after First Aid and to drive Ambulance, I learn
very good thinking. Really. It is very important: if I see someone
in a dangerous situation like a car accident, a house fire, in
the water, a factory accident or shot by tank--I don't think
who they are, I forget if it is Muslim, Christian, Jew, really,
because that way is peace".
This young man, who often comes close
to death, demonstrates the difference between the total absence
of understanding or humanity of the Israelis and the complete
comprehension of the reality of the situation, when he says to
me later that evening--"You see, An'ne, at that moment when
they refuse to help someone in a dangerous situation they lose
all humanity and become less. Really, I am sad for them".
No hatred, no resentment, just understanding. Two peoples a world
apart--on the one hand, only the wish to kill and destroy, on
the other, only the wish to help and heal. Hatred versus love.
Violence versus kindness. Delusion versus comprehension. Ignorance
versus knowledge. Self-preservation versus self-sacrifice. I
pity Israel.
Anne Gwynne
is working with the Union of Palestinian Medical Relief Committees
in Nablus. She can be reached at: gwynne_anne@hotmail.com
Today's
Features
Uri
Avnery
A Crooked Mirror: Presstitution and
the Theater of Operations
David
Vest
Can You Hear the Silence?
Anthony
Gancarski
Colin Powell Telemarketer
David
Lindorff
Takoma: the Dolphin Who Refused
to Fight
Michael
Roberts
War, Debts and Deficits
Ramzy
Baroud
Now That Iraqis Are Being Killed Is Israel Any More Secure?
Jo Wilding
From Baghdad with Tears
Anton
Antonowicz
Cluster Bombs on Babylon
Alison
Weir
Israel, We Won't Forget Rachel Corrie
Bruce
Jackson
Hating Wolf Blitzer's Voice
Eliot Katz
War's First Week
Steve
Perry
War Web Log 04/03
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