I tried after that to live a "normal" life with my family, to  go to school,
play, dance my favorite Dabkeh and dream of a better life. I was still
12 when for the first time I participated in a demonstration against the
Israeli occupation and I cannot to this very moment forget the pain I
felt when a soldier beat me until I lost consciousness. It took me a long
time to realize why that soldier had beaten me so harshly. My small heart,
full of the love and forgiveness with which my parents and grandparents
had raised me, could not understand why. After all, I had done nothing
except peacefully to say: "I don't want you here on my land."

When I was 18 I left my country alone on a scholarship to study medicine
abroad. I used to go and come via the bridge to Jordan and each and every
time I crossed the bridge I felt the humiliation that the Israeli occupiers
used against us Palestinians. Each time I came home I was challenged by
the Israeli soldiers, each time I was kept for many hours, just like many
other students and young people, and asked lots of questions about my
study, about my friends and about my political views. My answer was each
time very simple, that I love freedom, I hate the occupiers and this is
my political view. Once I was interrogated because I was reading a book
while waiting for my turn to go through. I was stopped for 2 hours just
because I was reading; the book was a novel by Nagib Mahfouz. I also remember
the time Shmuel, an Israeli soldier on the Allenby bridge who gave me
some cold water to drink after I had been interrogated for 3 hours, was
punished for it by his commander who had seen him.
 
I graduated from medical school to become a young physician and started
working in our hospitals and learning what medical schools couldn't teach
us, what it means to work under military occupation, to feel so frustrated
that you are running out of alcohol or cotton or bandages or essential
antibiotics for your dying baby patient. Or to be faced by injured youth
when you are not trained to deal with "war casualties". I learned, as
did any of my other colleagues, the real meaning of health in its social,
economic, human, psychological and political  dimensions.
 
Still I had a space for " the other". I was on call in the emergency room
when casualties from a traffic accident arrived at the hospital. I can
still hear the voice of the Israeli settler mother calling for her "tinok"
(meaning baby in Hebrew). I was in tears and I fetched her baby, and brought
it to a semiconscious mother to tell her that her baby was safe. I kept
the baby with me until an Israeli ambulance came to pick up the casualties.
And again, I can't forget his eyes, calling for help. He was a young Israeli
soldier who had run away from the middle of the confrontation: Palestinian
youths throwing stones at Israeli soldiers and getting shot. This soldier
was injured. I treated him and helped him to escape to a safe area: I
saved his life. I have no regrets.
 
Still I had space for the other. I always tried to see the other side
of each and every Israeli that I met, including the Israeli soldiers on
the many checkpoints through which I had to go through four or five times
a day, on my way to work as a pediatrician in the West Bank, East Jerusalem
or Gaza. I even tried to learn more about the Israeli people, their culture,
their religion and their language. And I made some  Israeli friends.
 
To know what it means to live under occupation, you have to go through
it, you have to live the occupation. It means to be humiliated and harassed
every minute. Your water, your electricity, your economy, your freedom
to move around, your freedom to express yourself and your land all are
controlled by a foreign military force. To live under occupation means
to leave your home to work, not knowing if you'll come back or not, it
means that your children go to school and you don't know if you will see
them again or not. You ingest the occupation in the oxygen that you breathe,
the water that you drink, the food that you eat, and the news that you
read or watch at the end of the day. I tried my best, not to accept but
rather to try to live with it, to adapt to it and find ways to live a
"normal life", like people all over the  world do. I wanted to live in
peace with myself and with my family , and to be honest with my daughters.
I even tried to explain to my daughters, when they asked me why an Israeli
soldier had killed our cousin Fadi in 1994, that we are in crisis and
that the 16 year-old Fadi had been killed by a crazy Israeli  individual.

 
Yes, I tried to be myself and live to love rather than to hate. But to
see the 12 year-old Mohammad al-Durra  being killed in cold blood! And
to read that general Mofaz, the educated, civilized, democratic father,
thinks that Mohammad had been participating in demonstrations against
the occupiers before, that is to say, when he was 7 years old,  and so
Mohammad deserved to die! And Sarrah, not yet two year-old Sarrah, killed
by an Israeli settler! Why? And what should I tell my daughters, when
they ask me "Mom can you protect us, Mohammed's father and Sarrah's father
couldn't protect them!" Or when Ramallah was bombed by helicopters and
my daughters with their schoolmates witnessed all that and were terrified,
or when my 16 year-old daughter Dana tells me: " No, Mom, I'll never leave
my home again", because she and her sister had been taken by their grandparents
to stay with them and be with their cousins in a safe place after the
bombing of Ramallah? And she says: "I would like to ask those soldiers,
why do you kill children? Can you go to sleep after that ? Don't you have
children? If they ask you: where have you been, do you tell them that
you were involved in killing Sarrah, Mohammad, Nizar and many other kids?
Don't you think that all of those kids have mothers and fathers just like
you and they want to be  hugged  and be loved, exactly  as you and your
kids do?" Or when my 11 year-old daughter Tala asked me: "Why, Mommy,
do settlers shoot at us every night? Why do they start so late at night?
I'm scared. Why do they kill children?" And it's true, there are some
settlers living in a settlement at the edge of Ramallah, and they begin
shooting every night at 30,000 people in Ramallah and El Bireh. What do
they want from us? I believe that the message we are being sent from all
that is: shut up, you sub-humans! It is a case of power over justice,
over humanity and over peace, of arrogance against civilization.

This is what an analysis of casualty figures and types of injuries, after
three weeks of the current uprising, have yielded: 8% of the  all martyrs
are children; 10% of the wounded are children; on one single day, October
23, 2000, 15% of those wounded died; the overall percentage of wounds
to the upper parts of the body (heart and head) was initially 50,2%, and
has gone up to 83.2 % in the later period; the use of live ammunition
has gone from 20,2% to 57,7%, and now to 82%; 44% of  casualties are now
injured in the chest and 43% in the head (for a combined total of 87%);
18% of all wounded are in a state of clinical death, critically wounded,
paraplegic or quadraplegic. 20% of all the wounded are likely to remain
saddled with a permanent disability; the average age of all martyrs or
wounded persons is 21 years. These are the statistics which lie behind
my daughters' fears and my own shifting convictions regarding Israeli
intentions, and the collective state of Israeli mental health. And the
psychological scars our people will endure from the present slaughter
are incalculable: what is to happen to our entire society? These figures
speak eloquently of their desire to kill Palestinians, in large numbers.
I hear behind the din of these cold statistics and of my daughters' cries,
the echo of Mohammad al Durra's voice, asking for protection for our people
in the 21st century; this plea must be heeded by all those who still believe
in humanity.

On the other side, it is clear that the  Israeli military institution
is building a sick society, and that they will be faced by a whole generation
of psychologically ill people. This is the fate of children and youth
who are only taught to speak the language of power and of violence. And
finally: I am left with no answer to the many questions from my daughters,
to the call of the statistics, to the plea from Mohammed,  except that:
we are freedom fighters.
 

By Juman Odeh MD, MPH
The Director of the Palestinain  Happy Child Center
Telefax: 970 - 2 - 2964482
Telefax: 970 - 2 - 2956865
    972 - 52 - 578877

E-mail:  jumtala@yahoo.com