Medical supplies reach Sulfit (with a PS)

Ta’ayush brings medical equipment to Salfit

Haaretz Sunday, July 07, 2002

Some 400 Ta’ayush (Arab Jewish Partnership) activists yesterday brought medical equipment to the town of Salfit in the northern West Bank just as the IDF lifted the curfew on the town. Residents of Salfit and the surrounding villages, totaling around 60,000, used to travel to Nablus or Ramallah for their medical needs, but in recent months have not been able to reach the big cities due to the IDF siege. Ta’ayush donated medicines, dressings, three computers, an ultra-sound and a photospectrometer for the analysis of laboratory tests. (Aliza Arbeli)

Dear All,

To add a word or two to the report below on the Ta’ayush convoy to Salfit yesterday, the residents of Salfit welcomed us, standing in their doorways and on the street as our buses came through. Children, men, women waved and made the V sign and called out “Welcome,” both on our entry and on our departure from the city.

Many residents accompanied us to the clinic, and afterwards to the City Hall where representatives of Ta’ayush, of the Palestinian Authority, of the Municipality, and of Palestinian peace groups spoke to all of us gathered there words of peace, and from those in Salfit words of thanks. Over and over again the Palestinians repeated their desire to live in peace side by side with Israel, in friendship. They over and over again repeated that they had no argument with the Israeli people, only with the occupation and the governments that enforced it.

I have heard on Israeli media reports that most Palestinian children want to become martyrs. In all my trips to the Territories I have never met one such child. The Palestinian youngsters that I have met are much the same as youngsters in other parts of the globe that I have met: Israeli, American, and Indonesian, Vietnamese, Columbian, etc. All want much the same things: to enjoy their youthful years and to have a future to look forward to.

One speaker in the hall wished the Israeli people a new government that would “end the occupation of Israel,” a new but justified twist on the extent of the occupation. Yet, it is the Palestinian population that as a whole has been and is enduring the greater misery by far, at least to date. One father in Salfit whose one and a half year old little daughter is suffering from a serious malady and is in danger of her life was unable, due to the curfew last week, to fax the Doctors for Human Rights to request help for her and to send the necessary information and documents to get that help (he does not own a fax and had to leave the house to get to one).

As you read the report below, imagine yourselves as residents of Salfit enduring the hardships of the occupation.

Dear All, may we and our Palestinian friends see better times.

Dorothy

PS:

Footnote: from Guardian report on academic boycott (see UMIST story)

“A decade ago, Dr Shlesinger was chairperson of Amnesty International in Israel, and has been active in the last 21 months of the intifada in an ethnically mixed group that defies Israeli army blockades to deliver supplies to Palestinian towns in the West Bank. I dont think [Israeli prime minister] Ariel Sharon is going to withdraw from the West Bank because Israeli academics are being boycotted,” she said yesterday. “The idea is to boycott me as an Israeli, but I dont think it achieves anything.”

And a comment (from Charlie Pottins) :

Isn’t it time for an intelligent strategy that enables us to decide what we boycott, and who we extend solidarity to?