Alice
Rothchild’s “On the Brink: Israel and Palestine on the Eve of the 2014 Gaza
Invasion” is a collection of blog entries from a tour of Israel and the Palestinian
Occupied Territories during the tense period preceding Israel’s last military
onslaught on Gaza. The brief and pithy blog posts revolve around Israel’s
orchestrated build up to the attack and the reactions of people Alice meets on
the ground to this crescendo in the conflict and the extensive and very
complicated background to it. This is journalism at its best, getting under the
skin of your subjects. But Alice does this not only sympathetically but also
with the sensibilities of a concerned physician. Armed with the professional tools
of her training, with expectant and alert intelligence and with her high degree
of concern for her subjects, she reflects on the major health care and health
determinant issues of the Palestinian communities that she visits. “As a
physician, I am always impressed by the combination of intelligence,
dedication, weariness, and fortitude that characterize so many Palestinians
working in the field of health care,” Alice declares halfway through her
account. The admiration is mutual. As a
Palestinian public health specialist I am greatly impressed by Alice’s
remarkable and deep understanding of what ails the healthcare system (or
non-system) in the POTs beyond medicine, doctors, drugs and clinics.
Having
spent a lifetime struggling with many of the same issues among the Palestinian
citizens of Israel, I highly appreciate her point of view, an obstetrician
addressing public health issues. After all, on both sides of the Green Line
Israel is the main decision maker and Palestinians are the subject of its practice
of assigning or permitting the use of resources to its less than equal non-Jewish
subjects. Repeatedly, as I read the professional observations in “On the Brink,”
I had a rude reminder of the commonality of Israel’s willful neglect of the
health needs of its Palestinians citizens and not only of Palestinians under
occupation. Much alarm and accusations of cruelty are leveled against Israel
for the destruction of Gaza’s infrastructure and thousands of its homes leading,
among other disastrous outcomes, to cases of infants dying of the cold. For
years at end, as the head of the Health Ministry’s office in Western Galilee
where two thirds of the population were Palestinian citizens of Israel I
struggled with the issue of newborn infant deaths from cold injury, occurring exclusively
among Palestinians in my area, to no avail. The only response I could elicit
from my bosses was that this was an issue of general development and has to
await the natural and slow process of overall progress in the Palestinian community,
a thinly disguised logic of blaming the victim. The logical question of how
such cases had been avoided among Mizrahi Jews who had come from communities
with similar backgrounds was never addressed to my satisfaction.
“So,
how does a lie get created and sold as the truth?” Alice asks her readers early
on. As I see it, this is an appropriate and relevant question whose answer not
only shakes the foundations of Israel’s self-righteous image in American eyes
but also undermines the multilayered reality “created and sold as the truth” at
the base of Israeli-American relations: diplomatic, socio-cultural, economic
and military. The lie has gained sufficient credibility to allow Benjamin
Netanyahu to insist on staging a veritable Purim show for congress in direct
opposition to the wishes of the American executive. Throughout the book the
author uses a dry clinical logic to drive her statements of fact home. She gives
factual answers to her question using a raw and direct style of writing in
which she screams her truth at her readers and impels them to look at the ‘real’
reality, the stark reality, often asking them “right?’ to emphasize her
conclusions.
It
has been suggested that Dr. Rothchild and I should make a joint appearance. I
like the idea. A physician like her, I seek to address the greater dis-ease
among those I care about. Alice’s trust in her audience’s shared humanity makes
her directness and common-sense style easy to digest and to sympathize with. In
contrast, in my new book, Chief
Complaint: A Country Doctor’s Tales of Life in Galilee, I attempt to answer
the same question she poses but in a different style. Alice dares to address
her readers on factual basis whereas I portray the same reality using fiction
and relying on my community’s collective memory. Potentially, the two of us can
support and defend each other. The standard accusation that Israel’s Hasbara
and its sympathizers fling at anyone critical of Israel is that of anti-Semitism,
unless of course, if the perpetrator is Jewish, in which case he or she is
branded ‘a self-hating Jew.’ Both accusations have lost much of their bite and validity,
their currency devalued by forgery and cheap trade. Their original sparkle was further
tarnished as it repeatedly went up in flames in Gaza in recent years. Still,
for doubly guarding against such malicious defamation tactics, stating our congruent
truths in a single setting should be helpful: It is rather asinine to label a “Dr.
Rothchild” as anti-Semitic. And self-hating Israeli doesn’t stick or even make
sense in the current Western mentality when applied to a Palestinian citizen of
Israel. Mind you, in my book I do point the finger at my own country’s system
as the underlying cause of much that ails the protagonists of my stories. The
reflexive element is there if you wish. But Israel defines itself as the state
of the Jews thus excluding me out of its existential identity. Logically, even
if I were to admit to hating Israel, (which I do not, provided I am permitted
to define Israel my own way,) that doesn’t make me ‘self-hating.’
My
agreement with Dr. Rothchild’s stand on our common concerns is not limited to
solidarity in the face of potential detractors. I am in full and deep resonance
with her pacifism and social justice advocacy. It is mind-boggling that with
both of us operating in the same constricted arena of peace activism in
Israel-Palestine we have not met so far. This is doubly surprising when one
remembers that both of us are physicians and are active with groups that view
peace through the kaleidoscope of health and healing. May our meeting and the
success of our combined efforts be our reward.
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