This commentary is by Mark Hage who lives in Montpelier.
Over the course of several weeks in 2022, and for a shorter period in 2023, I was in the care of highly competent nurses at the infusion unit of Central Vermont Medical Center. They were diligent, generous and, without exception, of good cheer and patience as they saw to my needs and those of several other patients.
These women and their unit came to mind on Nov. 14 as I watched live reports on Al Jazeera of Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza being turned into a morgue by Israeli forces, even as its beleaguered staff members struggled to perform their duties under impossible conditions and the daily threat of violent death. I started to imagine the terrors that would unfold at CVMC for caregivers and patients if it was surrounded by tanks, cut off from every vital resource and support service, and shelled.
Al-Shifa, literally translated, means “healing.” The largest hospital in Gaza, it had been under siege for days and attacked intermittently when it took a direct hit on Tuesday, Nov. 14. As I compose this, it is being reported that Israeli soldiers are invading the hospital. Their political leaders and commanders, in typical fashion, are charging that Hamas uses Gaza’s hospitals, including Al-Shifa, as command centers. There is no evidence for this claim.
Mouin Rabbani, a trenchant analyst on Israel-Palestine and Middle East affairs, writes: “Hospital staff, foreign doctors, and others have all vigorously disputed Israel’s claims of numerous — indeed of any — tunnel entrances/exits within the hospital compound. Logically this makes sense. A hospital is a public institution open at all hours 24/7/365 to members of the public, including inquisitive journalists, spies, and Israeli intelligence agents, who could easily collect photographic evidence of Israeli assertions rather than resorting to drawings and graphics.”
Strident rebuttals of the kind Rabbani described by Gaza’s doctors, nurses, ambulance drivers, and other medical personnel hold no sway with powerful decision makers in the U.S., certainly not the one occupying the White House. Nor, apparently, with Vermont’s congressional delegation, which, to a person, is refusing to call for a cease-fire.
Sanders, Welch and Balint’s monumental nonsense about “humanitarian pauses,” combined with their tenacious refusal to advocate for a comprehensive cease-fire, is the gravest abdication of moral and political responsibility by our elected representatives in the four decades I have called Vermont home.
I had to walk away from Al Jazeera’s coverage this evening when footage of premature babies in Al-Shifa filled the screen. Many of these children, barring immediate and decisive American intervention, are going to die.
Perhaps it was babies like these whom Benjamin Netanyahu had in mind when he rallied his troops and nation with reference to the ancient Hebrews supposed victory over their enemies, the Amalekites, described in genocidal terms in the Bible, 1 Samuel 15:3: “Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.”
Netanyahu declared: “This is the war between the sons of light and the sons of darkness. We will not let up on our mission until the light overcomes the darkness — the good will defeat the extreme evil that threatens us and the entire world.”
How can Palestinian infants and their shattered families, most of them refugees, trapped in a city of burning rubble, without food, water and medicine, threaten the goodness of the entire world?
The steadfast courage, selflessness and compassion of Gaza’s medical teams, as nurse Emily Callahan poignantly described in an interview with CNN, and that of many other Palestinians, is what keeps me from surrendering fully most days to the despair and rage engendered by Israel’s barbarous war against the Palestinian “Amalek” and our government’s complicity with it.
I am old enough to remember Israel’s war on Lebanon in 1982. Hospitals, sanitariums and medical personnel were deliberately targeted by Israel’s air, naval, artillery and ground forces during the bombing and siege of Beirut and its Palestinian refugee camps, and at other sites on the path of Israel’s invasion.
For those with the stomach for it, I recommend Noam Chomsky’s forensic recounting of these attacks and their gruesome consequences in his seminal work, “The Fateful Triangle.”
Forty-years ago, Israel vigorously denied committing war crimes as a matter of policy against civilians in Lebanon. Similar chest-thumping denials followed findings by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, among other human rights groups, that its forces had bombed and shelled Gaza’s hospitals and medical personnel during the war on the territory in 2014.
The historical record and the present agonies of Al-Shifa Hospital and its sister medical centers tell a different story.
