Life, Sustenance and Love: The Ambulance, the Olive Tree and Feras

By Anne Gwynne


The ambulance, the olive trees and Feras Al-Bakri—symbols of life, sustenance and love (photo Anne Gwynne).

I HAVE DECIDED it is as well to sleep here tonight at the center run by the PMRS (Palesinian Medical Relief Society, formerly the Union of Palestinian Medical Relief Committees), because it is too dangerous to return home—only a 15-minute walk away. I get the warm slot in the middle of wall-to-wall young volunteers. Thin mattress on the concrete floor—but there is a wonderful, warm blanket under which we are all really snug. We lie down in our clothes at 2:30 a.m.—we were out until 1:30, and then ate together a delicious meal cooked by a trainee driver—light-as-a-feather vegetable fritters like Indian pakora, with yoghurt and salad. And lots of tea with Marra Mi’ah (sage from the hills of Palestine).

Jareere was driving the ambulance tonight. His eyes are weary from all that he sees and handles, and from the constant harassment at every roadblock. His driving skills are, however, always equal to the task. He is married with four children and constantly worries about what will happen to them if he is shot. Our calls tonight were head injuries and one very sick woman who cannot take any more—the soldiers and tanks thunder menacingly past her windows every day and she is in a really bad state.

Earlier we had been faced with a tank. Even from the height of the Savanna cab it was very, very…huge. Its big gun, facing directly into a house window, swung round into our windshield and stopped us for 20 minutes (for security?) before allowing us to go to pick up our injury—a child with a “rubber” bullet wound to the head. In this context rubber takes on another meaning—specifically, a large-caliber steel core coated with thin rubber and fired from a high-velocity gun. Similarly there is no plasticity about the missile described by the phrase “plastic bullets.” These bullets have killed many: I have seen them, and the autopsies: in the chest, for example, they are fatal, and at the base of the skull where they penetrate deeply and cannot be removed, causing progressive brain injury and death.

Despite the danger, a great deal of fun is enjoyed in the ambulance, and the satisfaction of outwitting the gangsters who have occupied this glorious city of Nablus is considerable! Tonight, however, this is on the surface, and there is underlying fear and anxiety because the Israeli “soldiers” are so unpredictable. It is unlikely they will shoot up the ambulance, but…(85 ambulances have been destroyed and dozens of medics killed to date). There is no way my words can actually convey the level of tension, the uncertainty of every part of every journey, the fear when an Israeli soldier points a machine gun at you because you moved a little farther than he ordered, the anger inside the driver’s soul when he finds himself impotent to help where it is badly needed (as when we have to watch a wounded child bleed to death close by), or the wonderful feelings of affection and safety inside the closed little warm and friendly cocoon which is an ambulance at night in this beautiful city where life ends so violently and without warning, its scarlet life-blood spattered over the pure white rock. If anyone believes that to be angry and horrified at the crimes which are being perpetrated here every hour of every day is anti-Israeli (!) then let them come here and I will ask them how they feel after only two days of this brutality and humiliation.

The anger is burning everyone out.

In the morning we are up early, as always, but no call until 8:30. Our driver this day is the courageous Feras Al-Bakri, a handsome, sensitive young man of 30, who loves soul music and plays his single tape in the ambulance at every opportunity, even if only for a minute. The songs are about loving and sharing, and the closeness of being in love. We have talked a lot about music and the good things in life and how, for just a few moments when he listens to his tape, he thinks of something other than death and destruction.

He lives in fear of losing his three little girls to Israeli gunmen, and he shares with me some terrible memories, his eyes full of pain as he tells of collecting scattered body parts after the Tel Village massacre, and of a man killed in Azmout, a village near Beit Fouriq. The man’s relatives were refused “permission” (an outrageous concept) to take the body until the Israelis had brought starved dogs to tear it open to see if there was a bomb inside! What a stupid pretext for such inhuman behavior—how would he swallow a bomb? And Feras had to pick up the pieces. On another occasion, he had to pick up the mutilated body of my friend’s cousin from behind the U.N. Food Program building, a body which, similarly, was not permitted to be buried, and whose cheeks, lips and eyes (and other parts, of course) had been eaten by dogs in the six days it had been there.


	An angry Feras at the gate between the two Beit Fourik roadblocks (photo Anne Gwynne).

Our drivers have very different personalities. While Feras is very fine and dapper, fair, with a serious demeanor and a cool dress sense, Jareere is big and bluff with great, kind eyes and a wicked sense of humor overlying his deep depression. Both drivers have seen the most horrific crimes against humanity.

Jereere told me how, recently, he was meeting a friend, on foot, at the Huwara checkpoint (surely one of the most bizarre and desolate spots on this earth), when a car came with a woman who was in labor. An ambulance also appeared, empty from a trip, so Jareere put her in the ambulance and told the Israeli “youth-in-charge” what the situation was. The “soldier” refused to let the ambulance through, saying “You Palestinians lying—she not pregnant.” When Jareere asked him to look at her abdomen he said, “She not pregnant—it is a bomb.” Much later, when she cried out that she was in the final stage, this brain-dead idiot again insisted, “It is bomb, not baby.” Jareere persisted, and the little tyrant demanded she lift up her clothes for him to see. She refused, naturally. Jareere put her on the stretcher in the cramped, cold ambulance and put on surgical gloves to deliver the baby. The little fool asked (can you believe it?) what was he doing and when told that Jareere was about to deliver the baby he then said to “go!” Of course, it was too late to go. This happens all the time, and some 35 babies have died of exposure like this.

Israeli state-sponsored terrorism is all these two good men have ever known. Both born under occupation, they have been subjected to endless humiliation, imprisonment and vicious injury, and are living under the constant threat of violent death. Well, who knows? The odds here are not on a peaceful death in bed. (Some 4,000 good people, innocent of any crime under international law, have been murdered by the illegal Israeli occupiers of their land over the past four years.)

Our first call is to Beit Fouriq, a beautiful, once-peaceful village, normally about 15 minutes from the UPMRC center. We travel several miles of once-elegant colonnaded boulevard, dual carriageway with tree-ferns and palms down the central median strip. Now only a few remain, the rest pushed over by the Israeli tanks whose drivers are bent on destruction. Similarly, the median has been broken up and pushed into huge piles of rubble over most of its length. Bombed-out buildings now line this once-lovely street. Tanks and armored personnel carriers (APCs) are everywhere—as is mud, mud, mud. These tracked weapons of war tear up everything, and when they hit the roadway the teeth of their tracks spew great clods of mud all over.

As we make the sharp left at Huwarra onto the road to Beit Fouriq and its 15,000 souls, what we see is unbelievable. This paved country road, with its slender lamp standards, formerly swept through olive groves and villas. Now the Israelis have torn up all of the hard surface and piled it in a more-or-less continuous mound along the verges. The deep and fertile soil of this plain has turned into a winter morass: under the summer sun it bakes into rock-hard ruts. Israel’s pretext is security, but its purpose is the dislocation of any kind of normal interaction: it’s tough in the ambulance, but imagine it on foot. At intervals along this mudscape are the graveyards of the many thousands of cars destroyed by occupation troops in completely illegal acts of vandalism. Thousands of cars, each representing a family’s investment—will anyone ever pay for this wanton destruction?

But then, what are cars? The Israelis have destroyed a whole country.

So, thanks to Feras’s driving skill, we slither and slide to the Beit Fouriq “checkpoint.” In the summer you cannot see for the clouds of dust. Here is another Israeli tank in the middle of an area of about 500 square meters—a devastated wasteland created by the Israelis to “defend their land” (but Palestine is not their land)—and over which people, animals and vehicles must struggle, often over the ankle in glutinous mud. Feras told me this morning that when I was not here, he went to Beit Dajan, a village beyond Beit Fouriq, after the Israelis finally allowed him through this “checkpoint” to pick up a woman who had been in the final stage of delivery for two days. But again it was too late, and she and her child died.

This road formerly swept through olive groves around the contour of the hill. In a fit of paranoia, however, the Israeli occupiers have re-routed it 90 degrees to the right, up an impossibly steep muddy climb topped by a huge and very heavy box-girder barrier. The Savanna’s abilities are well-tested here! People often cannot retain their footing, and must ascend it on their hands and knees. To open the “gate” the ambulance has to stop at an impossible angle from which it doesn’t seem possible to re-start. I feel Feras’s anger as he has to get out and open this barrier. But we are a few inches short, so he has to get back in and I do it. It is so heavy—you have to be very strong to move it. The Savanna gets my vote of approval as its powerful 7-liter engine and huge tires bite and make it over the top.

Everywhere groups of people wend their way wearily toward the checkpoints on the long trek from the village. At the outskirts of Beit Fouriq we are again challenged by a mud track where the paving has been gouged out of the roadway, presumably in another paranoid attempt to prevent the villagers, resident there from time immemorial, from carrying on their peaceful existence. I don’t know…It blows me away to think of all these pale, undersized Israeli “soldiers” busily working like so many ants simply to wreck, destroy and devastate—to bring about the very circumstances which ensure that they will never succeed in taking Palestine from its people, who will never give up the struggle.

In the next mile we meet the huge kind of tank that looks like a house moving—a Mackaver, I believe—and later discover that it has just demolished two houses—two HOMES—in Beit Fouriq. No reason, just a warning not to give shelter to the resistance fighters. Five were demolished on another occasion. This time the families got out alive. Anyway, we reach the home of our stretcher-case, whom we are returning from Raffidiya Hospital. (Funny how I never mentioned him before: the effort of reaching anywhere is so total that it seems the only thing sometimes.) During our journey, he has been jolted beyond any normal endurance. All around his home are lovingly tended, perfectly ordered olive groves—it is always extraordinary to see these ancient havens rising out of a sea of devastation. Here we listen for a few moments to the music of love, and I take a picture of three beautiful symbols of Life, Sustenance, and Love – The Ambulance, The Olive Trees, and Feras. What will any Israeli take a picture of this morning which can have the same significance?

On the return journey we are besieged by people asking for a safe ride to the hospital in Nablus. This is such mental agony for the drivers when they have to say no, so Feras gives help to two groups. One is a young woman, accompanied by her mother, who is going in for a mastectomy. She was turned back at the checkpoint and told to go back to Beit Fouriq to die—as though it is not bad enough to be diagnosed with cancer at a young age and in these times, and to have to walk miles to the hospital. Anger and grief for her chokes us both. And a boy with a severely swollen ankle injury who had dragged himself from the village only to be refused permission to cross. Just two of the countless gross violations of human rights by an illegal occupier. If the guard is feeling particularly nasty he will say to us that the ambulance is now a taxi and maybe he will confiscate the ambulance! It happens. Or he might make us wait for hours. But, thankfully, not this time. Feras plays his tape and puts on a spurt (not easy in deep, slippery mud) to catch up with an APC in the distance whose driver seems to be having problems staying straight. A little act of defiance.

A typical morning—or, perhaps, not so typical, since we have not waited hours at a checkpoint nor been refused permission to pass, not been shot at, arrested and threatened with instant death; and Feras has not been beaten around the head and trampled in the mud or had his arms, his feet or a vertebra cracked, and the ambulance has not been confiscated. All this and more has happened to him and to Jareere. We have only a puncture in the offside front wheel, which is quickly repaired in Nablus, while we eat a delicious breakfast of arroosas and qahweh cooked on the repairer’s stove! Where else but in Nablus? The Israelis just don’t get it. This city will never capitulate and its people will never run away, for they are sustained by so much love, warmth and sharing.

When we get back, Dr. Halla Hanani, the women’s specialist, is there. She has tried to go to Qalqilya today with the mobile clinic to carry out many small, health-giving gynecological operations. After a two-hour wait at the checkpoint, however, the clinic was refused permission to proceed—on the pretext of security, of course. A gynecologist??

Surely anyone who now knows about these preposterous contraventions of human rights and international law will be moved to write at least one letter to their representative in government protesting against what the Geneva Convention on Terrorism terms Israel’s “state-sponsored terrorism,” and against the misuse of precious tax dollars to fund these crimes.

When I first started to collect stories here, I wrote for 16 hours a day because I thought I might miss something! But miss a hundred and there are a thousand more. Any heartbreaking account of suffering I hear is, I know, only one of a hundred thousand here. Everyone has two, ten, twenty, more stories of brutality and gratuitous cruelty. In this city alone, in addition to more than 500 murdered, more than 10,000 have suffered injury from Israeli tanks, Hellfire missiles, helicopter gunships and F-16 fighter bombers. And the open-minded, mostly good, kind, generous and hospitable people of Nablus—a people living in their own land and thus the essence of sovereignty in international law—who want only to live in peace, as is their right, and know that they are now completely alone and abandoned by the world, always ask me:

“Why does the world not care about the suffering of innocent civilian people facing genocide [Clauses 1- 4 of Geneva Convention on Genocide] and ethnic cleansing from the might of the world’s fourth-ranking military?”

Anne Gwynne, a member of the International Federation of Journalists, is a 66-year-old grandmother and retired bank manager from Wales who has worked with the UPMRC (PMRS) in Nablus. She can be reached at <gwynne_anne@hotmail.com>.