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If
anyone was born to be a nurse, it was Rinad, my pleasant and
compassionate head nurse
colleague. A midwife, she has worked for the past 10 years in Al-Makassed
Hospital’s
Obstetrics and Gynecology department, demonstrating daily her
remarkable devotion to
her humanitarian career and her strong sense of
belonging to the community she serves.
Despite having to cross the various checkpoints that separate her
little village, a suburb of
Bethlehem, from besieged Jerusalem, there was not a single day when
Rinad arrived at
work
late. She always knew how to find her way around the checkpoints,
and would leave
her
home after the dawn prayer, giving herself enough time to trudge up
and down the hills,
across muddy and dusty streets, and reach her place of work on time.
Unlike many of the rest of us, Rinad’s reservoirs of joy and
patience didn’t get consumed
on
the way to work. She was always calm and calming. In fact, it was
sometimes difficult for
me to accept her over-easy-going, pacifist demeanor.
When
I last saw Rinad before leaving for vacation abroad, I congratulated
her on getting
married. She looked even calmer, happier and more beautiful than
usual.
When
I returned to work a month later, however, a different Rinad awaited
me. I was
astonished by the disappearance of the welcoming smile and her
optimistic spirit that
always spread hope in the hearts of our patients and repeatedly
renewed the energy of
those who worked closely with her.
The
change in Rinad was so frightening that I was reluctant to approach
her directly at first.
Her
friends told me that Rinad’s husband, Issa Abu-A’ahour, was among
the couple of
hundred people who had sought shelter April 2 in Bethlehem’s Church
of the Nativity. While
Rihab was in Jerusalem at work, Issa, along with others in his
neighborhood, fled the
invading Israeli forces to the city of Bethlehem. Only 13 days after
their marriage, Issa’s
fate
hung between the peaceful sanctuary of the church and the bullets of
the Israeli snipers
surrounding it.
Finally, after the six-week-long siege of the church was over, Issa
and 39 other Palestinian
men,
so-called “terrorists,”
were expelled either to Gaza or to Europe. Isaa was expelled from
his native city of
Bethlehem to Gaza, without even having the chance to say goodbye to
his wife.
While international news programs refer to U.S.- and EU-sponsored
“negotiations” between
Israeli and Palestinian delegations that resulted in an “agreement,”
a “resolution” to the
siege, and an official Palestinian approval of the transfer,
everyone on the Palestinian
street, from professors to falafel shop owners, quietly considers
the PA’s approval of
transferring Palestinian activists a cheap sellout. We know that
only a free people, not a
besieged authority, can negotiate a meaningful agreement.
One
of our most cardinal and legitimate Palestinian demands is the right
of return to which
the
PA’s approval of this transfer arrangement stands in severe
contradiction. Nor does it
even
take into account the lack of consideration of the deal’s
repercussions for those 40
exiled Palestinians and the people who love them.
Israel, whose existence is based on the expulsion of a nation from
the lands of their parents,
is
reasserting its essential exploitative nature. In the Israeli
Knesset, parliament members
continue to talk both in secret and publicly about transferring
Palestinians to other Arab
nations. “We cannot make peace with the Palestinians until we reduce
the population of
the
West Bank by 50 percent,” said Labor’s Dr. Ephraim Sneh, a minister
in Sharon’s
cabinet.
The
occupation is fulfilling its purpose: raping more and more “empty”
Palestinian land all
the
time. The shame lies in Palestinian approval of such a policy.
“Issa was an activist, he loved his people and he was politically
opinionated, that was all,
that
was his ‘crime,’” Rinad told me. “I knew this about him before we
got married and, in
fact, that was what attracted me most to him,” she added. “I do not
regret having married
Issa.
Even if I could foretell the future and had known ahead of time that
we would live
together only for 13 days, I would still have chosen
to marry him.
“Now
that he has been transferred to Gaza, I fear the worst for Issa,”
his bride said. “They
took
him out of the church to put him in a larger prison, where they can
assassinate him
during any incursion into Gaza and count him as just another ‘war
casualty.’ Gaza is more
out
of our reach than Europe. There is no way that I can go and live
with him or visit him
there, considering the tight closure of Gaza.
“I
miss Issa,” Rinad said. “I’m very angry about what has happened to
him and to 40 of his
siege comrades but I’m so grateful to be carrying his child,” she
told me, with tears in her
eyes.
How
does Issa feel about this pregnancy? I asked. “He is so delighted,”
Rinad replied. “I
could just about see the smile on his face when I told him over the
phone that I was pregnant.
I
wish he could be here to feel the early kicks, to see the first
ultrasound images and to
give
us his presence and being.”
Although the Church of the Nativity crisis is over, however, Rinad’s
has just begun. Not long
after our conversation Rinad miscarried and was left in agony, the
grief at losing her baby
added to the pain of separation from her husband. Rinad, who has
consoled and
supported so many women through failed pregnancies and post-partem
depression, needs
someone to support and console her at this moment in her life. The
one person who might
do
that, however, is far out of sight and out of reach, and she does
not even know if she will
ever
see him again.
Rihab’s story is one of the many, many stories of the 40 wives, the
40 mothers and fathers,
and
the more than 40 children of our 40 young Palestinian men who were
unjustly judged
without a trial, “found” to be “terrorists” and punished by
transfer, uprooted from their own
homes and loving families.
As
for the rest of us, who approved of, or were indifferent to, or were
too timid to object to
the
Church of the Nativity deal, life goes on with gloomy expectations.
On this night, another
night shift in our hospital, our patients are asleep in bed with
their pain, as always. We,
meanwhile, sit in the lounge watching the news of the Palestinians
who have been deported
to
Europe, the continuing invasion of Palestinian towns and villages,
and the daily death
and
destruction of our Palestinian civil society. I sip some more of my
bitter coffee and
continue writing, glancing every now and then at a dispirited and
exhausted Rihab, sagging
in
her chair and hugging her pillow for dear life.
Washington Report on
Middle East Affairs July/ 2002
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