On Wednesday one of Israel’s largest dailies had a scoop:
four months ago a man from Gaza received urgent medical treatment
at Beilinson Hospital in Petah Tikva, Israel. He had had a serious
cardiac episode that no hospital in Gaza was able to treat.
Not such a scoop, one might think? The man was the husband of
Suhila Abd el-Salam Ahmed Haniyeh — sister of Ismail Haniyeh,
political leader of Hamas in Gaza and an ideological enemy of
Israel, to put it mildly.
Haniyeh’s movement, Hamas, says in its charter that “Israel will
exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it,
just as it obliterated others before it”; and quotes the famous
hadith: “The Day of Judgment will not come about until Muslims
fight Jews and kill them. Then, the Jews will hide behind rocks and
trees, and the rocks and trees will cry out: ‘O Muslim, there is a
Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him.’”
And Hamas regularly acts in the spirit of such statements,
having killed and injured thousands of Israelis in suicide
bombings, rocket firings, and other terror. As for Ismail Haniyeh,
you can see him
here at Hamas’s 24th anniversary rally in Gaza last December
14, bellowing decidedly unfriendly things about Israel such as:
the armed resistance and the armed struggle are the path and the
strategic choice for liberating the Palestinian land, from the
[Mediterranean] sea to the [Jordan] river, and for the expulsion of
the [Israeli] invaders and usurpers from the blessed land of
Palestine. The Hamas movement will lead Intifada after Intifada
until we liberate Palestine — all of Palestine, Allah willing…. We
won’t relinquish one inch of the land of Palestine.
Words that don’t leave much room for a “two-state solution” or
any sort of peaceful rapprochement. Most recently Haniyeh has
blamed Israel for Sunday night’s terror attack at the
Israeli-Egyptian border, in which global-jihad terrorists killed 16
Egyptian border guards, commandeered their armored vehicle, and
would have rammed it into an Israeli community if not stopped in
time by the Israeli army and air force. Egypt, rather than pinning
this exploit on Israel, has been retaliating
against comrades of the actual culprits.
It was this background, then, that made the lifesaving treatment
of Haniyeh’s brother-in-law by an Israeli hospital noteworthy —
not the fact that the brother-in-law is a Palestinian. In 2010 over
100,000 Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza were
treated in Israeli hospitals, over 100 Palestinian doctors
interned at them, and five organ donations were performed.
In one notorious case, a Palestinian woman patient from Gaza
didn’t show much appreciation for her treatment. In 2005 Wafa
al-Biri was
treated at Soroka Hospital in Beersheva for burns sustained
over 45 percent of her body in a gas-cooker accident. Her family
wrote a thank-you note to the hospital on her behalf. Two months
later Al-Biri, on the way to Soroka for follow-up tests, was
detained at a checkpoint; hidden in her clothing was a 20-pound
bomb with which, she said, she had hoped to kill 30 to 50 Jews once
inside the hospital.
Though admittedly an extreme case, it would be nice to think
this large number of Palestinians’ benefiting from Israeli medicine
would have a conciliatory effect. In the case of Haniyeh’s
brother-in-law, the above-linked report says that, after his
cardiac episode,
the couple filed an urgent entry request with Israeli
authorities, a Palestinian ambulance transported the husband to the
Erez Crossing, [and] he was moved to [an Israeli ambulance] and
taken to the hospital in Petah Tikva along with his wife.
The husband was hospitalized in Israel for about a week, during
which his condition was stabilized. Following the treatment, the
couple returned to Gaza.
When the chips were down, then, they knew not only that an
Israeli hospital could give lifesaving treatment that Gaza
hospitals couldn’t give, but that there was a chance the Israeli
authorities would consent to their request even though Gaza is a
hostile entity that instills
hate and regularly bombards Israel with rockets and mortars —
in part at the instigation of the distressed man’s own
brother-in-law.
Ideally, this would induce soul-searching not only about
Israel’s technological superiority but a value system that sees the
humanity even of members of a hostile population. There is, though,
no sign of such a reckoning.
