Please Help Little Amal From Gaza
By Avigail Abarbanel
19 March, 2010
Australiansforpalestine.com
A couple of nights ago I watched the documentary ‘Children of Gaza’ on Channel 4’s ‘Dispatches’. The film was made by the award winning documentary maker Jezza Neumann. Since then I can’t get the face of Amal, one of the four children featured in the film, out of my head. Amal was wounded during Israel’s attack on Gaza just over a year ago. She was found under rubble and I understand that for a while she lay near the dead and mutilated bodies of her uncles, one of whom had his head split in two.
Since Israel’s attack over a year ago, Amal has been living with several pieces of shrapnel lodged in her head. She is suffering from frequent awful headaches and nosebleeds. This is in addition to the obvious psychological trauma that she has to live with. As a psychotherapist I have no idea how long it will take and if it will ever be possible for Amal to recover from the trauma she has been through, and what life will be like for her if the shrapnel can’t be taken out of her brain.
In the film it was explained that an Israeli charity arranged for Amal to see a neurosurgeon in Israel to see what can be done for her. I understood the necessity but I still don’t think it was appropriate to send Amal to Israel for treatment. Imagine what it must feel like for her. Amal knows perfectly well that Israel is responsible for what had happened to her, to her family and her community. Can you imagine what she must have felt when she was sent to an Israeli surgeon? That surgeon, good or not, is or was a solider in the same military force that has been hurting Amal’s people. To send her to someone like that is insensitive and macabre.
I was also absolutely appalled that despite receiving permission to go into Israel to be examined by the surgeon, Amal and her elderly grandmother were made to wait 7 hours outdoors to get permission to cross the border. This is just another example of the indignities that Israel puts the Palestinian people through on a daily basis. There was no real reason for the wait just like there is no reason to keep anyone waiting for hours at checkpoints every day. Jewish Israel does not think that the Palestinian people deserve to be treated with dignity.
But do not make the mistake of dismissing this as the random acts of a messy and dysfunctional third world style bureaucracy. Rather this is a deliberate and calculated campaign to humiliate the Palestinian people and break their spirit. Broken people stop resisting even when exposed to the worst abuses.
In its fight against the spirit of Palestinian resistance Jewish Israel does not distinguish between the very young, the infirm, the able-bodied or the elderly. Every human spirit can inspire resistance. The inspiration and motivation to resist can come from your elderly grandmother just as much as your ten year old niece or newborn baby. Every single person with an aspiration for freedom is a threat to an occupier and oppressor. This is why Israeli soldiers can murder young children in their parents’ arms. They don’t distinguish between freedom fighters and ordinary people. This is the reason behind Israel’s persistent policy of collective punishment. It’s also why there is an international law against it. It’s because occupying powers and oppressors have always viewed the whole group as a threat, not just the designated freedom fighters.
The lack of compassion and humanity on Israel’s part is staggering and frankly I have had just enough of this. I don’t believe that a Jewish Israeli child or soldier with a brain injury would have been treated as poorly as Amal was. What Israeli soldier would allow his grandmother to be treated the way Amal’s grandmother was?
Enough is enough! I can’t sit by any longer and watch this happen without doing something. I would like to see Amal flown to a country overseas with an adult family member to be examined and possibly operated on by a capable and caring surgeon who has nothing to do with Israel and who would be prepared to take on Amal’s case. I know this is likely to cost a lot and will be hard to organise, so I hope a group of us can get together to arrange this somehow. I have never done anything like this before and have no experience. But among the readers there are people with great organising, campaigning and fundraising skills and experience, people who have means, people who have influence and people who know people in key places.
I am asking you to join together to take on Amal’s cause, and help her and her family end this ongoing nightmare. It’s important that Amal’s family in Gaza is contacted so that they can be an integral part of any attempt to help her.
All the children of Gaza need help; all the people of Gaza need help. I would like to help everyone and the way to do this is to do everything possible to end the siege, open the borders and ultimately end the occupation of the Palestinian people. It is unacceptable that people should live the way the people in Gaza do. Jewish Israel cannot be trusted to end this nightmare out of the goodness of its heart. Israel is going very fast down the slippery slope of war crimes and human rights violations. Despite its relentless protest and cries of ‘poor me’, Jewish Israel is a morally bankrupt state that is rapidly losing the legitimacy it should never have had in the first place.
On the Channel 4 website Jezza Neumann, the director of ‘The Children of Gaza’ wrote a short piece describing his experiences in Gaza. In it he mentions that if anyone wants to help any of the children featured in the film they should contact The Children of Gaza Fund. There you will be able to make a donation for one or more of the four children mentioned in the film. The site is hosted by True Vision Productions, which was “founded in 1995 by Brian Woods and Deborah Shipley to make international campaigning documentaries. A number of charities have grown out of the films [they have] made… The Foundation is for those viewers who SPECIFICALLY want to help the individuals featured in our films. Each film will have it’s own account, and donations to that account will be used solely in connection with helping the characters from that film.”
Please make a donation through the site but let’s see if we can do more than give money. Perhaps we can in some way support the True Vision foundation to offer the help that Amal and the other children need so urgently.
Avigail Abarbanel (http://www.avigailabarbanel.me.uk/) was born and raised in Israel. She moved to Australia aged 27 and has been an activist for Palestinian rights since 2001. Until recently, she was a psychotherapist/counsellor in private practice in Canberra, Australia. She and her husband have now moved to Scotland.
