ISRAELI SOLDIERS HARASS MEDICAL PERSONNEL
Jenin checkpoint, 4 P.M.
Gideon Levy, Ha'aretz, 8/4/02
haaretzdaily.com
We are behind the ambulance. Waiting. A quarter of an hour passes. No soldier approaches the vehicle. Another half-hour goes by. Still nothing. The ambulance driver, Mahmoud Karmi, does not lose his cool. He always waits here between an hour and two hours before the soldiers come over. So far, an hour and a quarter has passed since he arrived at the checkpoint.
Following a phone call to the office of the IDF Spokesperson and a further wait, two soldiers descend from their position. In a lordly manner, they gesture for the ambulance to approach. The driver says he is afraid the soldiers will get back at him because we phoned the IDF Spokesperson. A brief check by the soldiers and the ambulance is allowed to proceed. It's worth keeping in mind that this is the road between Jenin and Jalma, not a road to Israel (between Jenin and Israel there is another checkpoint, at Jalma). The soldiers, of course, did not know the destination of the waiting ambulance or who it was carrying - an injured child, a dying man, a woman in labor.
One of the soldiers afterward told us that this was the order they had been given: to delay ambulances. The endless complaints about ambulances being delayed are more than confirmed by an eyewitness account…
This ugly and inhumane phenomenon of hazing and harassing ambulances stems from a deeper source: from the soldiers' basic attitude toward the Palestinian population. It's doubtful that the soldiers at the Jenin checkpoint delayed the ambulance because they were ordered to do so by their commanders. It's more likely that they thought this was the way Palestinian ambulances should be treated.
In the perception of the soldiers at the checkpoint, a Palestinian is not a person like them, he is part "human dust" and part potential enemy, so they have the right to do with him almost anything that strikes their fancy. It is likely that none of the soldiers tried to imagine a similar situation in which an ambulance carrying his mother or his father was being delayed. Nor, by the same token, did any of them consider how he would feel toward whoever was responsible for the delay.
We have regressed to dark days. If, after the Oslo Accords, the IDF started to become aware that the Palestinian population should be treated differently and did not consist entirely of "troublemakers," we have now returned to the old and bad conceptions - that a good Palestinian is one who is humiliated, harassed and ground into the dirt. |
