A Tale of Two Ambulances
If you want to know if there’s Apartheid on Israel’s West Bank, don’t look to where the noise is. Whenever there’s an incident, there are always two or more versions about what happened. If you’re at all invested in the conflict, there’s a good chance you’ll believe who you want to believe. Even if you don’t, it’s often unclear who did what to whom and why. If you want indisputable certainties, look at the little things that everyone takes for granted and no one ever questions.
A case in point is a fight that happened between Palestinians and Israeli settlers near Mount Hebron on 12th September. Two of the protagonists needed hospital treatment. Itamar Cohen from the nearby settlement of Ma’on suffered a fractured skull. Hafez Hureini from the neighbouring village of Al Turani suffered injuries to both his arms. Following the incident, Hafez Hureini was arrested and held in custody for ten days. He was released on bail by a military court on 22nd September, a condition being that he stays away from his own land for thirty days.
When the story first broke, the Israeli mainstream media talked about a suspected ‘lynch mob’ of around thirty Palestinians allegedly attacking Israeli settler Itamar Cohen and causing a life threatening skull fracture.
But the Left Wing 972 magazine told a very different story and claimed that it was corroborated by over 20 minutes of unbroken video footage recorded by a witness. According to 972, Hafez Hureini was on his own land minding his own business when a group of settlers came and attacked them. When Itamar attacked Hafez with a length of pipe breaking both his arms, Hafez fought back in self defence with a shovel causing Itamar’s injuries.
I’ve only been able to access about two minutes of the video, which was posted by the Times of Israel, who offered a similar version of the story to 972. The clip shows a group of Israelis ascending a hill. Itamar Cohen is indeed carrying a pipe like object. Hafez Hureini apprently comes down to meet them brandishing a hoe. The camera person appears to have trouble focusing on the two men fighting so we don’t actually see them strike each other with their improvised weapons However, another of the settlers repeatedly fires a gun; probably intentionally into the air as a scare tactic.
There certainly doesn’t seem to be a Palestinian lynch mob, unless there’s some very clever camera work going on. It also appears from the footage that the Israeli settlers are the aggressors here, though that’s difficult to verify, especially without seeing the rest of the video. What is also significant is that the Israeli sources sympathetic to the settlers have gone quiet, suggesting that the settlers’ narrative is not backed up by the evidence.
At the same time, not everything claimed by 972 and and the Times of Israel adds up either. According to 972 Hafez Hureini was carrying a shovel; not a very useful tool in a dry, stony field. Actually the video footage shows him with what looks like a draw hoe. If someone hits you over the head with a shovel, it’s a relatively flat implement so there’s a chance you’ll just wake up with concussion and a sore head. A draw hoe, on the other hand, has a blade that points downwards and is much more likely to crack your skull. 972 also claims he only hit Itamar Cohen after the latter broke both his arms with his length of piping. Erm, excuse me! How does a man with two broken arms hit another man over the head hard enough to cause a skull fracture?
Hafez Hureini was arrested, held in custody for ten days and released on bail. Neither Itamar Cohen nor any of the other settlers have been arrested. Both Itamar and Hafez were injured but Itamar’s injuries were more serious. There still isn’t evidence to conclusively determine who the aggressors and the victims are. OK, so maybe that’s still a question of which side you believe.
But there’s another bit of the story that nobody disputes, and that’s because it’s so normal that it’s completely taken for granted by both parties. Two men were injured. Two ambulances came to take them away. But one ambulance belonged to Magen David Adom. The other belonged to the Palestinian red crescent. The first ambulance took Itamar Cohen to the state of the art Soroka Medical Center in Beersheba. The second ambulance carrying Hafez Hureini was bound for the Palestinian public hospital in Yatta.
Hafez and Itamar live barely a mile apart, yet everyone takes it for granted that they are picked up by two different ambulances and taken to two different hospitals. It is this more than any of the violence, that provides indisputable evidence that Apartheid is a daily reality on the West Bank.