Qalandiya: Back-to-back procedure is practiced where heart-to-heart procedure is needed
I know that greater injustices are perpetrated against Palestinians every single day.
I know that younger persons are beaten, starving and dying in the space between the river and the sea. But even after years of presence where incidental victims and guns meet, witnessing this procedure which years have normalized, quickens the pulse and suffocates the throat because normal sense forbids one to treat people as though they are goods.
She did not complain as she lay for a long time in the closed ambulance.
She did not shout as her tormented body was shaken between stretchers.
She only bit her lips and groaned in a choked and quiet voice as the medical team members carried her there.
Her daughter, accompanying her, tried to persuade the armed soldiers to escalate the procedure: “We’re from Shu’afat, she must reach the hospital quickly, please…”
But this place and those serving here have their own scale of preferences, unaffected by a person’s suffering or medical urgency. These armed people follow orders and instructions: “First of all one must check coordination”, said their representative.
- Coordination precedes pain, suffering, even life.
And according to procedure, coordination was checked, IDs were photographed and personal belongings were inspected.
When all procedures satisfied the armed personnel and were completed, the woman ill with cancer was passed from one ambulance to another and she made her way to the hospital on Mount Scopus.
- First, they tried to remove me but I insisted on being present, for a place that holds civilians is no military zone and another civilian is not chased away. Only when the procedure took place, they claimed I couldn’t photograph it. “It is allowed,” I said. “Only if they allow it” they countered (suddenly there is ‘they’, suddenly what ‘they’ allow is most important), but the patient’s daughter not only permitted me to take pictures, she even blew me a farewell kiss.
And let us not forget that Qalandiya is not the shortest or quickest way from Shu’afat refugee camp to the Hadassa Mount Scopus Hospital. One must remember that men are distanced from the sickbed of their female family members, or as some woman said: Back-to-back procedure is practiced where heart-to-heart procedure is needed.
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Apparently, the Separation Wall begins to wake up from its longtime slumber:
