The Twilight Zone by Gideon Levi
Haaretz, January 18th, 2002
How can an Israeli soldier prevent a woman from reaching the hospital? It’s a fact. It happened twice in one week. Both babies died right birth.
Suliman Abu-Hassan lived for a single hour before he breathed his last breath, as his laboring mother was dragged back and forth for 12 hours in her desperate attempt to reach the hospital. She never made it. Muhammad Zakin died at eight hours old, after his mother was dragged back and forth for half the night, until she was able to make it to the hospital using a succession of back roads. But it was also too late. Suliman’s parents weren’t able to come near the anonymous soldiers, who sat faceless and identities inside the tanks that blocked their way. Muhammad’s parents were able to come near them but weren’t able to reason with them and allow a woman in labor to travel a kilometer and a half up the main road, that’s open to Jew’s only, to the hospital in Jenin. The soldier’s turned them away. They sent them back home cruelly, to face their baby’s death. Both women are from the same village, the two bereaved mothers. They’ve never met before, but within the span of six days, the cruelty of the Israeli occupation treated them similarly to death.
These stories aren’t unusual. It’s a matter of policy. The siege on Jenin was all encompassing. It included ambulances and women in labor. Ask the soldier who told Muhammad’s father that he had the right to kill him and not let him through. Ask the ambulance driver employed by the red cross in Jenin that told the desperate father that it would be easier to bring down a star from the sky than to send an ambulance from Jenin to the town of Al-Yuman, which was located a few minutes away by car. But these were not ordinary days, these were days of disgust, as coined by David Grossman, days in which a Palestinian woman in labor has no way of reaching a safe haven. These are cruel days that one can’t remember similar ones since the beginning of the occupation. These are the worst of them.
And this is also the other side of terror – the Israeli terror. Checkpoints that will not permit women in labor to come through are checkpoints of death. They hurt innocent civilians, as in a terror attack, does not differentiate between women and children, not to mention newborns. The victims of this Israeli terror, the two bereaved families, sat in their homes in Al-Yuman, and their emotional disparity was most evident. In the near by cemetery their two sons, Muhammad and Suliman, were laid to rest, that weren’t able to live for more than a few hours, the eternity of a butterfly. The blood of both these babies is on our hands. On the hands of those who gave the soldiers their orders, on the hands of the soldiers for following these orders through in the face of two agonizing women in labor. On the hands of us all that allow this machine of cruelty to run rampart.
