ALAN KAUFMAN
451
"There, to the left, that's the army checkpoint to Beit Jalla," she says,
bearing away to the right. She slows to let me absorb the immense tank
cannon pointed straight at us, then speeds up. "We don't want to enter
there with what I've got in the trunk," she says.
"What is it?" 1 ask nervously.
"Baby food. Medicines."
"What will the IDF do if they find it?"
"Nothing," she says. "They actually turn a blind eye to what I do,
though they always search, which is a pain. The Palestinian Authority
are the ones I worry a bou t."
This is complete news to me.
Back home in the U.S., media reports deliver the impression that
Israel is a surly, hostile foe of medical relief personnel as they valiantly
stand by bullied Palestinians in the territories. (I think in particular of a
widely circulated photograph of an Anglo-Saxon relief worker with her
face thrown back, howling in presumed anguish at her first glance of the
"devastation" in Jenin, as though she were entering Hiroshima days
after the bomb dropped. The fact that the actual area razed was a small
congested maze of homes, wired to explode, is virtually never reported.)
Yet it's not Israel that Breda Fitzpatrick frets about on her mercy run,
but Yasir Arafat's Palestinian Authority. "Until
I995,"
she says, navigat–
ing the car through narrow, dusty streets and up steep inclines, approach–
ing her "secret" drop-off point, "my Palestinian patients and their kids at
Hadassah Hospital all had Hupat Cholim, Israeli medical insurance, and
were under my care. But since then, they have been under jurisdiction of
the Palestinian Authority, who get their health care money from the EU,
who have given over to the PA, in good faith, a fortune in funds. I tracked
my patients through the new situation. And year after year I wondered:
Why are they not receiving their medications? What supplies there were
got stockpiled in warehouses, but remained undistributed; or if they were
ever given out, it was grab what you can. And my patients just did not
receive the specific medical help they required, like powdered breast milk
formula, special baby foods, antibiotics, ear drops, such things."
"Why not?"
She doesn't admit it easily. Up ahead is a gate. She stops the car. Before
getting out, she says, "Because the Palestinian Authority used the EU
health care funding, and the medical supplies that got brought in, used all
of it, it all went ... they bought guns with it.
It
all went to buy weapons."
We're in what Fitzpatrick calls Area C, a West Bank Arab zone, at the
gated entrance of a local institution. She exits the car, speaks through an
intercom. A buzzer sounds and the locked gates part just enough for
