A Morally Bankrupt War Claims Another Innocent

I got a queasy feeling the other day when I heard about the death of Amira Nassir. She was a 50-year-old diabetic, trying to get to the hospital. It sounds almost routine, but it wasn’t. Nassir had the bad luck to find herself in a medical emergency during a political emergency: the escalating Palestinian-Israeli war. And she was a Palestinian.

Nassir and her cousin, who was driving, were stopped by the Israelis at a checkpoint on the West Bank outside of Jenin. The soldiers didn’t let her through in time, and she fell unconscious and then she had a heart attack. And died.

I felt queasy because my book about Amira Nassir has just come out. Well, not about Nassir exactly, but about Ibrahim Hajimi, a Palestinian toddler who was stopped at a checkpoint by the Israelis and refused passage into Jerusalem to get to his doctor and the hospital, even though he was clearly in the middle of a severe asthma attack. Like the soldiers who dealt with Nassir, the commanding officer at the checkpoint when Ibrahim and his mother tried to get through offered belatedly to provide help, but the help came too late.

My book is a novel.

Ibrahim Hajimi is my creation, his crisis at the checkpoint my invention. I started writing the book with him in it four years ago. But when people look at the news these days--babies born at the checkpoints, postnatal women dying of infection because they can’t get through, the case of Amira Nassir--and say to me, “Look how life is imitating art,” I demur. Because I did not conjure Ibrahim Hajimi out of thin air, by any means.

Ibrahim is a conflation of many Palestinian babies who have been born, suffered or died at checkpoints for no defensible reason. No matter what the situation on the ground, there can have been no reason for the Israelis to have delayed a diabetic in a potentially fatal episode. The Israelis even claim that they do not delay such people, but they do. My Ibrahim, on the other hand, was the son of a notorious Hamasnik, so at least my commanding officer had a slight excuse.

But Nassir was a nobody, an innocent nobody. She was a nobody just like the nameless Arab man the other day who was beaten almost to death by Israelis in the marketplace in Netanya after a Hamas suicide bomb killed several people in that seaside town. She was a nobody like the victims of that bomb. Her death is an instance of terrorism, just like the deaths of those innocent victims.

Terrorism is when an innocent, or many innocents, are punished for actions of others with whom they have no connection or at most, only an ethnicity, a religion or a nationality in common. When an American is tossed off an ocean liner because someone does not like the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, for example. When an entire village--or an entire city, as happened recently with Ramallah--is put under siege in retribution for a car bombing in Netanya. Those are acts of terror.

Nassir never bombed anyone. Yet she died for those crimes, was in a sense extrajudicially--although not purposefully--punished for a crime she did not commit. She was a victim of collective punishment.

And her death is a good example of how morally bankrupt the Palestinian-Israeli struggle has become. The Netanya suicide bomber was sent to do morally corrupt business by Hamas, a morally corrupt and bankrupt organization. The Palestinian Authority has refused to abjure such violence during this particularly bloody episode of the peace process. Then the Israelis block off whole villages and people starve and die of medical complications, and it’s clear this is inhumane and no solution.

No one knows what to do about the situation. In my book, the Israeli commanding officer tries vainly to make some kind of restitution to Ibrahim’s Palestinian-American mother, but because of politics and history and terrible anger on both sides, this is finally impossible, and has tragic consequences. But at least he tries to make a human connection. This is what is missing now from the unfolding real-life tragedy. It was something politicians tried to develop on both sides during the early days of the peace process. The human connection. It seems a fool’s dream that only a year ago, young Israelis were spending the weekend in Ramallah or going out to have pizza there at night. Now they’re sending in the tanks and stopping sick matrons at the checkpoints.

Can this be the policy Ariel Sharon and Shimon Peres believe in?