The story of Israeli doctors treating the Syrians either at field hospitals on the border or in Israeli hospitals raises the question of why, if the Syrian crisis is an internal Arab affair, why are we not seeing the Arab countries putting their money where their mouths ofgten are and support the humanitarian efforts on behalf of the injured? As is the case of the Palestinian refugees, the Arab Staters in the region sit back and let the West and the USA provide the vast bulk of the funds for UNWRA.
Below, is the story of the reaiity on the ground
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To
help refugees from the Syrian war, Israeli doctors and aid workers must do
their work furtively. When they go into refugee camps in Jordan, they change
clothes so that they can fade into the background. They must be smuggled in and
out. They don’t tell others where they’re going and when they go home they
usually don’t say where they have been. Above all, they don’t want anyone to
know the names of their patients.
They
move “under the radar,” in the words of a clandestine organization in this
field. When they treat Syrians in Israeli hospitals, they make sure no visiting
journalist learns details that will identify the patients to authorities back
in Syria.
Usually,
Israel is glad to announce when it contributes to emergency relief. The case of
Syrian aid is different.
Syria
does not recognize Israel and forbids its citizens to go there. Israeli doctors
are not welcome in Jordan, where their work has been denounced as a violation
of Jordanian sovereignty. And Israel is anxious not to be involved in the
Syrian civil war. It does nothing, officially, that could make it look like the
medical corps of the rebellion.
For
Syrians the possibility that their own government will punish them adds to the
horror of their situation. This summer, in Nahariya, Israel, near the Golan
Heights, scores of patients have been covertly brought across the border from
Syria to be treated by Israeli doctors.
For
patients’ friends or relatives, Israel becomes a last hope when no Syrian
medical help is available. Masad Barhoum, clinical director at Western Galilee
Medical Center, recently told an NBC reporter that many patients arrive
unconscious. “When they wake up and find that they are in Israel they are
anxious and afraid.”
A
Syrian woman in the hospital said that she came to Israel because her daughter
was hit by a sniper’s bullet. “The hospital in my town was destroyed. They
saved her here, but now I am afraid to go back. We will be marked.”
An
Israeli organization, iL4Syrians, operates anonymously in Syria and other
desperate countries. Providing food and medical supplies for those who need
them, it relies on secrecy to protect both its local contacts and its own
practitioners. Its web site identifies no directors or staff but carries a
defiant slogan: “Nobody asks permission to kill. We do not ask permission to
save lives.”
They
explain that “We focus on countries that lack diplomatic relations with Israel,
transcending differences.” They argue that a respect for the sanctity of human
life expresses Jewish tradition and culture. As they see it, this applies to
Israel’s toughest and cruelest enemies as well as anyone else.
Since
all of these efforts are unofficial and unrecorded, no one can say how many
Israelis are involved. I was alerted to this phenomenon by one of the regular
letters of Tom Gross, an astute British-born commentator on the Middle East.
Gross has a 15-minute film showing a couple of days spent by an aid
group visiting refugees. The refugees don’t expect them to arrive and are
surprised when they learn that their benefactors are Israelis. That makes some
of them nervous but in the film others say in Arabic “May God bless Israel.”
The
team takes along a professional clown to perform for the children while food is
being handed out; in one camp, however, the adults briefly riot over limited
supplies. A journalist asks one of the aid workers, “Do people call you crazy?”
She answers: “Not many people know.”
Information
about this work has to be pieced together from fragments of journalism, like a
paragraph in an Israeli/Arabic paper: “The Arab countries offer condolences but
the best role is provided by the Israelis because they are crossing the border
to provide assistance to the refugees, risking their lives without a word of
thank you.”
These
are dark days for much of the world, dreadfully dark for Syrians. Few can even
imagine a solution that does not involve even more tragedy for them. W.H.
Auden, in his poem “September 1, 1939” described an even darker time and
offered the only advice that made sense to him: “Show an affirming flame.”
As
Jews celebrate the start of the new year, it’s worth noting that these Israeli
humanitarians have found a way to make their flame burn with a brave
affirmation.
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