On Wednesday afternoon, November 9, Israeli forces killed a Palestinian in Jenin — the second in the span of 12 hours. Ra’afat Al-Issa was 29 years old and shot near an opening in the apartheid wall west of Jenin.
His body remained in the morgue until his parents, who live in Jordan, were able to arrive to bury their young son, who was killed for the sake of earning a living.
On Thursday, November 10, Al-Issa’s father kissed his son’s cold forehead before being laid to rest in his home village of Sannour, 26 km southeast of Jenin. More than 200 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces since the beginning of the year, 50 of whom were killed in Jenin, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health.
Medical negligence and intentional delay
Al-Issa was shot near the Israeli apartheid wall located in the western part of Jenin. A Palestinian worker attempting to reach his place of employment, Al-Issa was not only shot, but later denied medical care by soldiers as he bled out.
“Al-Issa’s leg was blown up like a balloon,” Mahmoud Al-Saadi, the head of the Palestinian Red Crescent Society in Jenin, told Mondoweiss. “He was shot in his thighs, hitting a primary artery, which resulted in internal bleeding, and it eventually cost him his life.”
According to Al-Saadi, the injured man was delayed medical care for almost an hour and a half before finally being handed over to Palestinian medical services. “[Al-Issa’s] face was pale,” Al-Saadi recalled of the slain man. “He was thirsty and asking for water, which soldiers didn’t seem to have given him,” he said.
As a Palestinian with West Bank identification, the Israeli military would not take him for care at an Israeli hospital, despite being responsible for his injury. This practice, which extends beyond the killing of Al-Issa, has become defined as “conditional” healthcare by Palestinian analysts.
“Issa’s case is threefold,” Al-Saadi explained to Mondoweiss. “First is the shooting of Issa, then the movement of Issa and provision of care on the spot, and the third is the ways in which the injured man was handed to us by the Israeli army.”
However, in addition to the way in which Al-Issa was mistreated, his case also sheds light on a fourth layer — the condition of Palestinian laborers working in Israel. Al-Issa, who became known as “the martyr of daily bread,” exemplifies the painful cost of securing daily bread in Palestine, and the impact of the apartheid wall on the safety and financial security of Palestinians.
The martyr of “daily bread”: livelihood in context
Even before the economic crisis produced by the global COVID-19 pandemic, almost 47 percent of Palestinians in the West Bank and besieged Gaza were impoverished or below the poverty line. In the past decade, this phenomenon has increased at an alarming rate in the West Bank.
The apartheid wall impedes Palestinian access from the West Bank, Jerusalem, and historic Palestine (the lands now making up what is now the State of Israel).
Erected during the early 2000s, the concrete wall was ostensibly built as a strategy to deter Palestinian armed resistance. Two decades later, however, it has clearly been unsuccessful in this objective, especially in light of the resurgence of Palestinian armed resistance in the West Bank.
The apartheid wall — part of the illegal military occupation of the West Bank — also allows for better control of Palestinian movement, especially Palestinian laborers.
Palestinian laborers, even children, are often subject to systemic abuse by their Israeli employees, but also by soldiers manning the checkpoints through which they must pass. More than this, Israel holds Palestinians captive by using its permit system to deny or allow formal employment.
This forces a large segment of Palestinians to search for alternative ways of securing a livelihood, even if through informal employment. Many sneak through openings made in the apartheid wall in order to get to their place of work. The danger they face in going through these breaches has considerably increased during the past year.
Only last July, Israeli soldiers lynched and murdered 32-year-old Ahmad Ayyad from Gaza as he was going through a breach in the wall outside of Tulkarem. Ayyad had a permit to work in Israel and was battling a colon disease. As of the time of writing, there has been no accountability for the crime of his murder..
“The events are repeating themselves,” Al-Saadi told Mondoweiss as he reflected on his years as a medic during the early 2000s in Jenin. “It’s horrifying.”
2 of 2
The Friedmans’ lament now demonstrates the depth of their blindness.
“It’s because of Bezalel Smotrich that there won’t be room for a Palestinian state. It’s only his party colleague Orit Strock who views Israeli Arabs as a fifth column. It’s sad how funny this is.
Dear Tom, there hasn’t been an inch left for a Palestinian state for quite some time. Since the days of the left-wing & centrist governments that you liked so much, the country has filled up with 700,000 settlers, all of whom are politically powerful & some of whom are violent. And the malignant suspicion towards Israel’s Arabs has long become the legacy of a great majority in Israel. Look at how the left-wing and & centrist parties have evaded forging partnerships with them, yet now it is being blamed on Netanyahu’s new partners? Isn’t that a bit belated, a bit hypocritical & self-righteous?
“But there’s nothing bad without some good. As belated as it might be, Friedman’s prediction actually inspires great hope: American diplomats, he predicted, would stop reflexively defending Israel, & friends of Israel in Congress would begin wrestling with the billions that Israel gets. [A] fundamental question will roil synagogues in America & across the globe: ‘Do I support this Israel or not support it?’
“And what more could we ask for? If there is a reason not to despair, that’s the one. Was American diplomats’ reflexive support for Israel bad or good for it? Did the Jews who didn’t ask themselves what kind of country they were supporting help or hurt it? In a reality in which there were no remaining optimistic scenarios, this terrifying scene is actually the last source of hope.
“It would be better if the Jews of the world didn’t support Israel blindly & that U.S. politicians were freed from reflexive support. It has corrupted Israel & taught it that it can cause as much harm as it wishes without taking responsibility & at no cost. Maybe now, when Israel is going ‘there,’ as this top American commentator put it, it will free itself of the many wheeler-dealers surrounding it & finally understand that it must break this habit by itself. Maybe.”
1 of 2
https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2022-11-09/ty-article-opinion/.premium/the-friedmans-lamentation/00000184-5e11-dd2b-a78c-7f7d6d2c0000
“The Friedmans’ Lamentation” Gideon Levy. Haaretz. Nov 9, 2022
“And suddenly darkness has descended upon Israel. After years of shining brightness, this beacon of justice and freedom that cast its light into the distance has fallen dark. The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman was quick to provide a diagnosis (New York Times, Nov. 5). After his good friend Nahum Barnea reported the Israeli election results to him and explained that ‘we have a different kind of Israel now,’ Friedman concluded that ‘we are truly entering a dark tunnel.’
“Friedman’s was a column lamenting that for him, Israel has gone to pot, as it has for a good many other Israelis. As usual, he aptly expressed liberal American Jews’ sense of frustration & dread, something strikingly similar to that of their friends on the Zionist left in Israel. Things were good & then along came Itamar Ben-Gvir, & now things will be bad. That’s what they also thought in 1977 when Menachem Begin’s Likud first gained power.
“Netanyahu’s new partners believe that construction in the settlements needs to be expanded so there is not an inch left anywhere in the West Bank for a Palestinian state,” Friedman writes, and they view Israel’s Arab citizens as a fifth column. Up to now, after decades in power without these new partners, supposedly there were an infinite number of inches for a Palestinian state & no one had viewed Israeli Arabs as a 5th column. Now, because of Ben-Gvir, it will happen. The country has been lost, & we have no other country.
“It’s a time for lamentation, the lamentation of the Friedmans from both sides of the Atlantic. How good it’s been here & how terrible it will be from now on. True, it was nice to think like that. How nice it is to lie to oneself. While Friedman & Barnea went around Israel having numerous meetings with Israeli army officers whose words they thirstily drank up, one of the world’s worst tyrannical military regimes was entrenching itself, run by those same officers, yet the Jews of America and Israel’s own enlightened citizens didn’t see what was happening.
(cont’d)