Condition Critical: Life and Death in Israel/Palestine - Brossura

Rothchild, Alice

Brossura

ISBN 10: 1682570517 ISBN 13: 9781682570517

Casa editrice: Just World Books, 2025

Riassunto

Since 2003, obstetrician Alice Rothchild has traveled annually to Israel/Palestine with other concerned Americans, to learn about health and human rights situation of politically marginalized communities, especially Palestinians. Condition Critical presents key blog posts and analytical essays that explore everyday life in Israel, East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza up close and with searing honesty. These eyewitness reports and intimate stories depict the critical condition of a region suffering from decades-old wounds of colonization and occupation. Condition Critical dares (and inspires) its readers to examine the painful consequences of Zionism and Israeli expansion and to bend the arc of the moral universe towards justice.

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Informazioni sull'autore

Alice Rothchild is a Boston-based physician, author, activist, and filmmaker. Recently retired from clinical medicine, she previously held the position of Assistant Professor of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Biology in the Faculty of Medicine at Harvard University. She has written and lectured extensively on many topics including the health and human rights effects of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Her previous publications include: On the Brink: Israel and Palestine on the Eve of the 2014 Gaza Invasion; Broken Promises, Broken Dreams: Stories of Jewish and Palestinian Trauma and Resilience, and the documentary film, Voices Across the Divide. She also contributed to the anthology Extraordinary Rendition: (American) Writers on Palestine.

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Condition Critical

Life and Death in Israel/Palestine

By Alice Rothchild

Just World Publishing, LLC

Copyright © 2016 Alice Rothchild
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-68257-051-7

Contents

Map, 
Preface, 
Chapter 1 Judaization and the Master Plan (June 15–20, 2013), 
Chapter 2 Fatal Embrace (June 20–25, 2013), 
Chapter 3 Only Tigers Survive (June 13–21, 2014), 
Chapter 4 Because They are Here (June 22–26, 2014), 
Chapter 5 Medicine and Torture (June 26–30, 2014), 
Chapter 6 Waiting for Death Every Minute (March 20–25, 2015) Photographs from Gaza, 
Chapter 7 When Will It Be My Turn? (March 26–30, 2015), 
Chapter 8 Only the Pigeons Fly Free (March 31–April 6, 2015), 
Epilogue, 
Notes, 
Acknowledgments, 

CHAPTER 1

Judaization and the Master Plan

June 15–20, 2013

This chapter and the next cover the delegation we took to Israel/Palestine in June 2013. This was the ninth such delegation I had been part of, aiming to explore, experience, and document the "facts on the ground." On these delegations I draw deeply on my skills as a physician: suspending my preconceptions, observing empathically, building toward a new understanding and activism grounded in justice and the possibility of hope and unexpected alliances. I bear witness to trends that have become increasingly obvious since 2004 when I first started documenting realities beyond the dominant mythos of a "heroic, democratic, and principled Israel."

On this delegation, I was struck by the increasing ghettoization of the ethnic-Palestinian communities in Israel and the occupied territories; the active policies to "Judaize" Palestinian communities in Israel and the West Bank, and particularly in East Jerusalem; and the brave and the persistent civil society activism within Palestinian society. In the visits to Jerusalem, the mixed cities of Jaffa and Haifa, the Palestinian city of Nazareth, and its (Jewish) big sister Nazareth Illit, that are chronicled here, I everywhere saw the consequences of the deeply engrained Israeli policies that advantage Jews greatly over their Palestinian neighbors. I saw, too, the harms inflicted by a Jewish right wing that, with the support and often the encouragement of the military, had grown increasingly violent and unchallenged.

When we ventured beyond the "Tel Aviv bubble," the contradictions within Israeli society and the implications for those living under occupation revealed an extremely troubling form of institutionalized discrimination. We found that in Israel, Jewish "nationality" had long trumped citizenship when it came to rights, resources, and privilege; and religious claims and the more fanatical Jewish elements of society were increasingly being used to seize and control more and more of East Jerusalem and the West Bank in a planned and systemized fashion. These facts should give everyone pause.

I found my years of studying the largely invisible details of life in Israel/Palestine very informative. Back in 2010, Ala Jaradat, the program manager of Addameer, a Palestinian human rights organization focused on prisoners and legal aid, had helpfully unraveled the complex civil and human rights issues that faced Palestinians, particularly those who protested the conditions of the Israeli occupation and military rule. I learned that since 1967, the Israeli military had used a broad range of military orders to control the population; these ranged from what road a Palestinian could use to whether he could dig a well for water. There was a stunning list of potential security offenses, from reading the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish, the Palestinian poet who gave voice to the anguish of dispossession and exile, to wearing political symbols, including that of the beloved cartoon character Handala. Jaradat explained that it was illegal to protest the seizing of your own land. Throwing stones at the separation wall was considered destruction of state property; throwing stones at a soldier, attempted murder; and assisting an injured person at a demonstration — including a medical worker — assisting a terrorist. These military orders gave the IDF broad control over the lives of people and organizations, and the IDF used these powers in an often unpredictable and arbitrary manner.

In 2011, we met with Professor Yehouda Shenhav of Tel Aviv University, who challenged many of our assumptions about peacemaking. He explained that the Green Line, used as a starting point for numerous "peace plans" working toward a two-state solution, had already been largely erased by Jewish settlements; yet leftist political approaches to solving the Israeli-Palestinian struggle still clung to the relevance of this now-vanished boundary. He argued that the concept of a Jewish state was problematic as long as the existence of that state was a recipe for the future transfer of Palestinians. He judged the racist, fascist tendencies of the current era to be a continuation of what had happened in 1948, noting that the Jewish state established that year was based on ethnic cleansing, the destruction of villages, massacres, and the dispossession of hundreds of thousands of indigenous Palestinians. He asked, "How does a Jewish racial state cope with non-Jews? There is no difference between Meretz and Avigdor Lieberman except in degree of sincerity. When threatened, all Jews become Lieberman." Meretz is a left-leaning party that supports a two-state solution, opposing the occupation and supporting human rights and social and environmental justice, all within an explicitly Zionist context. Avigdor Lieberman is the Russian-born founder of the Yisrael Beiteinu (Israel Is Our Home) party, the current defense minister, and former foreign minister who lives in a West Bank settlement and openly supports the transfer and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, loyalty oaths for citizens, and other antidemocratic, hard-right policies.

During that same 2011 delegation, I was challenged by an alternative tour of Jerusalem, in the course of which our guide discussed the endemic discrimination against Mizrahi Jews. Mizrachis arrived in Israel starting in the 1950s, coming from countries like Yemen, Iraq, and Iran. Upon arrival, many were sprayed with DDT and were then lodged in crude tents before being settled in the tough buffer zones at the edge of the Jewish state. Our guide also reviewed the spasm of discrimination against Sudanese and Eritreans who had fled oppressive regimes, walked across the Sinai, and entered Israel across the poorly guarded Egyptian border. About a month earlier, there had been race riots in south Tel Aviv, where shop windows, cars, houses, and even a kindergarten were smashed. I heard talk of a Jewish Kristallnacht, with in this case poor Mizrahi Jews, from the bottom of the Jewish economic ladder, turning their rage and racism on the newly arrived African refugees.

That same guide took us to the separation wall — 1 meter below ground, 8 meters above. The wall thrust deep into the occupied West Bank, snaking around so it was designed to be 702 kilometers long, twice the length of the Green Line. Construction had begun in 2002 and now the wall was 62 percent completed. Most Israelis claimed that the wall had protected them against suicide bombing attacks, but that claim ignored the facts that most bombings stopped in 2004 when many Palestinian factions abandoned the tactic, that the wall still had many gaps, and some 140,000 Palestinians still crossed illegally from the West Bank every year, mostly looking for work. Those contradictions cried out for our attention.

In recent years, the level of racism and fear in Israel has exploded, and the occupation has become more constrictive and institutionalized. At the same time, Palestinian resistance, from children's theater in refugee camps to the focus on international law along with human and indigenous rights, has been growing. In June 2013, our delegation started its tour in the Old City, examining the day-to-day experience of Palestinians with Israeli IDs who live in a state that does not want them. We ended the tour in a refugee camp in the West Bank where generations of displaced Palestinians struggle with the long aftermath of the dispossession they and their families suffered in 1948.

* * *

Through the Looking Glass

June 15, 2013

We begin in the Old City of Jerusalem, in the Al Quds Community Action Center established in 2000 to serve the needs of the Palestinian Jerusalemite community. Hamad Shihabi is an attorney who works on the crucial legal issues that face East Jerusalemites, Palestinians who since 1967 have had the unfortunate dilemma of possessing an Israeli residency ID but no citizenship. They are faced with a myriad of challenges, including home demolitions, barriers to family reunification, lack of adequate national insurance, taxes without acceptable local services, and, given the ancient, conflicted history of the place, face-offs with the malignant Department of Antiquities. Their precious IDs can be easily revoked by Israeli authorities: in 2008, more than 4,000 East Jerusalemites, out of a population of 250,000, lost their IDs. At that point they became stateless and began a byzantine and circuitous legal struggle to nowhere.

Under a gracefully arched ceiling, the heat permeating the thick walls, Hamad takes us through the labyrinthine Alice-in-Wonderland kind of world that is East Jerusalem, where there is a kind of endemic insanity reminiscent of something only the Queen of Hearts and the White Rabbit might find reasonable. For instance, if an East Jerusalemite (this only applies to Palestinians) takes another nationality, she loses her ID. Or, if someone builds without a permit (which is virtually impossible for a Palestinian to get), he loses his ID and is fined. The fines are based on each meter of non-permitted building done — 600 shekels ($180) per meter — which accumulate on a daily basis, and they are only getting harsher. There are legal ways to request extensions but little possibility of ever obtaining one. Hamad talks about families that "self demolish" (they literally destroy their own homes) to avoid the increasing fines. He explains that there are extensive zoning and permitting rules, but they aren't applied universally, as only Jewish families ever get permits to build in the Muslim Quarter. Palestinian lands are unregistered in East Jerusalem according to the Israeli Land Authority, so there are always conflicts about the evidence for ownership. In 2011, Israeli authorities revoked the IDs of all Hamas members in parliament and reserve the right to revoke IDs whenever it is "reasonable."

Hamad's personal story is equally disturbing: his father, who is originally from East Jerusalem, has a West Bank ID; their family lands were lost in 1948 and 1967. His mother has an East Jerusalem ID, but their home, which was once in Jerusalem, is now "outside" of the city, so they rent in Beit Hanina, which is "in" the city. Because they have different IDs and haven't been permitted to complete the process of family reunification, his father has to travel separately and go through different checkpoints than the rest of the family. I listen to all of this in my post-travel exhaustion and think once again I have arrived in a land of official insanity! Then I remember the Jewish state's overarching goal: to force Palestinians, one way or the other, to leave their historic and ancestral homes.

We make our way through the winding streets of the Old City, up and down stairs, through dark, dusty stone tunnels and glorious snatches of sun to the Shehaba clan's quarters. One hundred people from 22 families live in 120 rooms, curling around dark stairways, opening into bright courtyards. I see kids tumbling and playing, a kitchen tucked behind a door, a glimpse of a living room. Their papers date back to four hundred years of documented ownership as a waqf, a form of Islamic trusteeship designed to protect the family from dispossession.

In the 1960s a group of ultra-Orthodox Jews claimed that the entry to the Shehaba family quarters was a "religious site" and began praying and performing Bar Mitzvot while purposefully blocking the entry to the Shehaba homes. Both the numbers of ultra-Orthodox and the aggression they displayed increased, and then came the demands to knock down walls, to make male and female prayer areas, and to build tunnels connecting to the tunnels under the Al Aqsa Mosque. The local residents complained and the authorities put up police barricades along their entry to separate them from the meshugas. They also installed a security camera that I suspect is there to improve surveillance of the Shehaba folks and their comings and goings. The nearby sign says in English and Hebrew "Small Wailing Wall," but in Arabic it says "Shehaba Quarters."

We wend our way up the ancient stones, and in classic Palestinian fashion, we are shortly sitting in another Shehaba home where our host was born and raised. We are soon sipping sweet juice and enjoying his curly haired two-year-old daughter. The only sign of tension in this frequently threatened home is his constant smoking. He studied antiquities in Italy and now works at the Khalidi Library, founded in 1725, but his true passion is restoring old documents. He shows us an elegant book of Islamic laws he restored, the pages dating back 420 years. The crowded living room is filled with stuffed chairs, an oriental rug, plastic white lilies, paintings of Al Aqsa Mosque. We hear a muezzin calling in the background. This antiquities expert is dignified and calm in this sea of disordered behavior. As we leave him, he is graciously smiling and says repeatedly: "You are most welcome."

As if this is some kind of bad movie, by the time we get to the bottom of the stairs at the entry to the family quarters, a large crowd of ultra-Orthodox Jews have gathered to pray, loudly and boisterously in their self-assured religiosity. They are guarded by a cluster of soldiers with large automatic weapons and a clear intent to use them if needed.

Dropped down the rabbit hole again.

The Prisons Within

June 16, 2013

Randa Wahbe from Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights has a cheerful, youthful enthusiasm that contrasts with the grim experiences of Palestinians within the Israeli court and prison systems. Established in 1992 and today boasting seven lawyers and a dedicated staff, Addameer is a Ramallah-based human rights organization supporting prisoners and working to end torture and human rights violations through monitoring and solidarity campaigns.

I have always been struck by the number of doctors, teachers, ambulance drivers, students, farmers, activists, and so on, who report having been detained in Israeli prisons at some point in their lives, and I have read Physicians for Human Rights–Israel's studies of torture within these jails, but Randa has the numbers behind this troubling story.

There are currently 5,000 Palestinians in prison. Since 1967, 800,000 Palestinians have been arrested, which translates to 20 percent of the total Palestinian population and 40 percent of the male population imprisoned or detained at some point in their lives. The key issues include torture during interrogation and raids, administrative detention, child imprisonment, the use of prolonged isolation, medical negligence, arrests of human rights activists, and hunger strikes and their health implications. As of May 2013, there are 4,979 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, including 16 women, half of them mothers; 139 of the prisoners are under the age of 18. The number of administrative detainees, 158, is actually low, but these folks can be held indefinitely with no charges, no trials, and secret files. In 2013, there has been an uptick in imprisoned journalists, with thirteen currently detained, half between January and May.

There are four interrogation centers, three detention centers (including Ofer, just outside Ramallah), and seventeen prisons, mostly inside Israel. This is actually against international law, as Palestinian families cannot access these prisons because they are unable to obtain permits. It is an injustice that further isolates and demoralizes the prisoners.

Many arrests occur at home in the middle of the night with a massive military presence, military jeeps surrounding the home, soldiers breaking down the door, sleepy family members corralled, photographed, and interrogated one at a time, including small children. The prisoner is taken, blindfolded, shackled, and put into a military jeep that will either go to a settlement or interrogation center. The interrogation can last for ninety days and is renewable; the prisoners can be denied a lawyer for sixty days, which is another renewable restriction.

Prisoners regularly report physical and psychological torture during interrogation — twenty-hour sessions, isolation cells two by four meters in size with a hole in the floor for bathroom needs. Prisoners may be tied up in stress positions for hours during interrogation, experience physical abuse, sleep and sensory deprivation, and threats of sexual violence, directly against children and indirectly against their family members. As expected, forced confessions are common, and seventy-three prisoners have died in custody since 1967, allegedly due to torture. In February 2013, at the age of thirty, Arafat Jaradat died during his first (and last) arrest. He had been accused of throwing stones. While in custody he requested a medical exam due to severe back pain and was rewarded with an extension of his interrogation. The autopsy revealed he had severe bruising and fractured ribs, but no action was taken against his torturers. Even more frightening, Randa reports that when he was originally arrested, the security forces told him to say good-bye to his wife and children since he would never see them again.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Condition Critical by Alice Rothchild. Copyright © 2016 Alice Rothchild. Excerpted by permission of Just World Publishing, LLC.
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Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: Just World Books
• Data di pubblicazione: 2025
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 1682570517
• ISBN 13: 9781682570517
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 285
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile