By Gershom Gorenberg
JERUSALEM: Dalal rested in her father’s lap. She smiled but only said one word, ana, “I” in Arabic — her entire vocabulary at the age of three and a half. My friend, Dr. Eliezer Be’eri, carefully felt her feet and ran his hand over her back. “Can she hold things?” Be’eri asked.
“She just started to with her right hand,” answered her father, Osama Rusrus.
“Does she pass things from hand to hand?”
“No. The other hand doesn’t function.”
The examination continued. A cool evening breeze blew across the patio of the Everest Hotel, a mountaintop pensione on the outskirts of Beit Jala in the West Bank. Beit Jala itself is in Area A, the part of the West Bank that is under full Palestinian Authority control and that is off-limits to Israelis by Israeli military order. Alyn Hospital, the Middle East’s only pediatric rehabilitation hospital, where Be’eri is a department head, is in Jerusalem, which is off-limits to West Bank Palestinians unless they procure Israeli permits. Our lives are fragmented by many borders in very little space.
The Everest, however, is in Area C, the part of the West Bank that is under Israeli control, meaning that Palestinians and Israelis can meet there. It is no-man’s land, or rather everyman’s land. Dalal is brain-damaged. The reasons, for the moment, aren’t clear: It could be a genetic condition; it could be cerebral palsy, caused by a lack of oxygen before or during birth. The story of Dalal’s examination is a short one with, I admit, a large cast of characters and with hope of a happy ending.
The catalyst was journalist Gideon Levy, who writes with singular, furious dedication about the inequities of the occupation for the Hebrew daily, Ha’aretz. Whether journalism can sway large numbers of people to make peace, whether it can change the big picture, is a question that eats at me. I’d like to believe it can, but so far, the thesis is hard to prove. In the meantime, however, Gideon has shown that an article can change the small picture. And even while the occupation continues, it’s possible for Israelis and Palestinians, here and there, to cross boundaries and ameliorate an injustice. I find some solace in that.
In September, Levy published an article about the Rusrus family. Osama was born in the West Bank. His wife, Sonia, is from Rafah in the Gaza Strip. After they married, they lived in Dura, in the southern West Bank, and Osama worked for the Palestinian Authority. Dalal is their second child. By the time she was 4 months old, her parents knew she had serious developmental problems. But late in 2007, Sonia took Dalal with her to see her ailing father in Rafah. While there, they were trapped inside the Israeli siege of Gaza. Finally, at the end of Israel’s 2009 invasion, mother and daughter received humanitarian permission to cross into Egypt. From there, they traveled to Amman. But Israel now strictly bars Gaza residents from entering the West Bank. Osama visited them in Amman. When Sonia got pregnant and gave birth to a third child, she suffered postpartum depression. Osama decided to help out by taking Dalal back to the West Bank, though Sonia could not come with him.
The full text of this article can be found here: http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=crossing_borders_10
Gershom Gorenberg is a senior correspondent for The Prospect. He is the author of The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977 and The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount. He blogs at http://www.southjerusalem.com. This article was distributed by the Common Ground News Service (CGNews) with permission from the author.
