P U L S E

A little over a year ago, during Israel’s Winter assault on Gaza, I attended a Palestinian solidarity demonstration on a January weekend.  The snow from the previous day had turned to rain and the Downtown streets were wet with the persistent slush that sticks to your boots and freezes your toes no matter what kind of footgear you’re wearing.  The sidewalks were crowded with shoppers rushing to get from one store to the other, now slowed down by the hundreds of impassioned demonstrators chanting in unison, carrying signs and waving Palestinian flags. We were blocking the roads and the walkways, and when we started marching, traffic halted too, causing annoyance amongst everyone who was not with us – drivers, passengers and pedestrians. 

I lagged behind at the end of the marching crowd as we temporarily shut down some of the city’s busiest streets and when the last of them disappeared around a corner, I hurried to a covered bus stop to clean my camera lens.  Two older women were waiting there, clearly frustrated and wondering when the next bus would arrive if so much of Downtown was now inaccessible by traffic.  

“What are they protesting?” asked one. 

“I heard on the news that Israel is defending itself against terrorists again and these people are speaking for the Arabs.” 

“The Israelis are so patient!  The Arabs have been trying to destroy the Jewish people forever and whenever Jews try to defend themselves, the whole world seems to come down on them.” 

I paused for a moment and then quickly put away my camera and hurried towards the sound of the demonstrators’ voices.  Voices, I assumed, that those women would never listen to anyway. 

This vivid memory unexpectedly came back to me a few days ago while reading a testimony on B’Tselem (an Israeli-run human rights NGO), by a woman who had lost her young Palestinian niece to cancer while waiting for a renewed travel permit so she could seek better medical treatment. 

Fidaa Talal Salim Heji died at the age of 17, just a few months ago, in occupied Gaza.  From her aunt’s description, she was little more than skin and bone when she passed.  She had suffered through agonizing bouts of chemotherapy that weren’t successful in Egypt.  In response the Egyptian doctors referred her to a hospital in Israel where she could get “better treatment” and a bone marrow transplant, but the Israeli occupation forces did not grant her a travel permit until 4 days after her death.  The details are all found here, in a series of simple, quiet, written words. 

Young Fidaa died while waiting.  Her mother, her aunt and her loved ones helplessly watched her suffer while they waited for their Israeli occupiers to allow her to move from one part of the land she was born in, to another.  There is no mention of what Fidaa dreamed of, or what she thought about the occupation of her homeland.  No testimony about her favourite food or description of what it was that she was waiting for.  Was she waiting for a permit to go to another hospital to have more life-saving poisons injected into her body, or was she waiting for a chance to get out of Gaza, her home turned prison, one last time before she died? 

In the affluent city I attended that protest in, people complain about waiting all the time.  I guiltily admit that I sometimes join them.  They complain about the girl behind the counter who made their speciality coffee drink the wrong way and the boring tedium of city traffic.  Sometimes, when there are more pressing issues like line-ups at the emergency rooms in our state of the art public health care system, even news articles get published about their complaints.  But when a child suffers needlessly from a disease thousands of miles away in a land devastated by an occupation that our government supports, hardly a word of complaint appears anywhere. 

I wonder, perhaps stupidly, what those women at that bus stop would have done with their complaints if they had to bury their child because an occupation prevented them from getting adequate health care.  If I had known this story and been patient enough to tell them it, would they have still felt the same way in the end?   

Fidaa was dying when Israel initiated ‘Operation Cast Lead’ upon Gaza and took the lives of 1,400 Palestinians, one third of which were women and children, in less than one month.  Some of those ‘casualties of war’ are cited, sometimes, in mainstream press, but what about the statistical category Fidaa falls into?  How many hundreds or thousands of Palestinians will one day be cited as having died while waiting for Israel’s occupation of their land to end?

I came across Fidaa’s story and felt compelled to write about it, though inadequately, I will admit.  But I wish I had known it on that cold January afternoon one year ago, so I could have told it to those women, complaining about our protesting complaints and praising the occupier for its amazing display of patience with the oppressed.  

Her name was Fidaa.  I won’t forget.

Tagged: B'Tselem, Fidaa Talal Salim Heji, Gaza, Israel, Operation Cast Lead, Palestine