Note: I generally do not edit posts after I write them (except to correct spelling errors etc.). I would like this weblog to be an honest diary, which includes my mistakes as well as (hopefully) some insights that are correct. Below is my original post, but please see the comments section for a correction - the hospital involved was evidently an Arab-run and not an Israeli-run institution, which may influence how some readers interpret the story.
I spent many years taking care of uninsured patients at a Latino clinic in Washington, DC before I moved to Massachusetts - so this story from the BBC caught my eye. Evidently a Jerusalem hospital tried to hold a newborn baby - one of three triplets - hostage to ensure that the mother, an Israeli Arab, would pay her bill.
Because the children’s father was a Palestinian resident of the West Bank, the hospital demanded payment of the bill as it was not certain of recovering the costs from the National Insurance Institute (NII).
When the woman said she was unable to pay, the hospital released only two of the babies, keeping the third as a “guarantee”.
The baby kept by the hospital was not in need of medical treatment.
|inline
As promised, here are the next two radio pieces by reporter and medical student Seema Jilani. She culled these from tapes she made traveling around the West Bank with the Jewish American Medical Project. There is a weath of amazing source material here - Palestinian and Israeli voices direct from the heart of the conflict, talking about things that are not discussed in media reports. I hope that readers will take a few minutes to listen to the reports - they are unique and wrenching…
|inline
Most Americans see the Occupied Territories through the lens of the media. It’s hard to connect with the Palestinian people, or to grasp what it’s really like to live from day to day under an oppressive military occupation.
That’s why I’m very proud to be able to present this series of audio reports from the West Bank and Gaza by Seema Jilani. Seema is a medical student at Baylor University in Houston, and also a reporter for radio station KPFT there. She travelled to the Occupied Territories in January of 2005 with the Jewish American Medical Project. The group lived and worked in the territories for two weeks - visiting clinics and hospitals, seeing patients, collecting stories and information.
Everywhere we went, Seema had her tape recorder. She recorded at checkpoints, clinics, city streets, playgrounds and cemeteries. Her tapes capture the sounds and voices of Palestinian life: casual conversations, heartrending stories, expressions of fear, anger and hope… |inline
I’m afraid I’ve been too busy to write much - and I still need to get the site spiffed up again. Luckily, there are a lot of terrific blogs out there, and other interesting sources of information. So if you’re looking for an Israel-Palestine news fix, here are a few things to check out…
|inline
The New York Times and The Guardian are reporting today on a leaked British Foreign Office report that sketches out in stark detail Israel’s strategy for Judaizing Arab East Jerusalem in order to prevent it from becoming the capital of a Palestinian state in future negotations. The report, prepared by the British consulate in Jerusalem, was presented at a meeting of the European Union foreign ministers, but was tabled at the request of the Italian representative (Italy being Israel’s most steadfast European ally). According to the report, Israel is using settlement construction, the security barrier and the non-issuance of work and building permits to Arabs as a means of limiting Palestinian access to and residence in East Jerusalem: "the Jerusalem master plan has an explicit goal to keep the proportion of Palestinian Jerusalemites at no more than 30% of the total..."
|inline
The media moment of the Disengagement was the evacuation of the settlers from Gaza. It seemed every camera in the world was pointed at them as they loaded up their trucks and left their farms. "Mission accomplished," said the networks once the last settlement was empty. But the success of the Disengagement depended entirely on subsequent steps. The critical factor in making Gaza an economically viable independent territory was border permeability. If Gazan goods and labor couldn’t make their way into Israel, Egypt and overseas; if there was no link between Gaza and the West Bank; then Gaza was doomed to become a restive, improverished dependency - fertile ground for terrorist recruitment. That’s exactly where things were headed, due to an impasse in Israeli-Palestinian border negotiations, until Condoleeza Rice arrived last week…
|inline
More on the story of Ahmed Ismail Khatib, the thirteen year old Palestinian boy who was shot and killed by the IDF while he was playing with a toy gun. We reported yesterday that the boy’s parents had decided to donate his organs to Israeli children in need of transplants, “for the sake of peace between the two peoples.” I saw this morning in the ultra-right wing paper Arutz Sheva that finance minister Ehud Olmert had invited the parents to Jerusalem. YNet now reports that Sharon would like to meet with them to offer his personal apologies…
(T)he boy’s father said he was invited to meet with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who offered to apologize for the killing, Palestinian news agency Ma’an reported.
According to the Palestinian report, Ismail Khatib said that “if this would serve the Palestinian problem and advance a just peace, I will meet with Sharon and bring him a message of peace.”
Maybe a single act of kindness can accomplish more than an army.
I hope this is true.
