Qalandiya - a story of wounded procedures
As it were, a routine event that is not to be noticed or related.
For what is extraordinary when a wounded victim of a traffic accident is taken to the hospital?
But occupation has its own rules. It makes its marks on people subjugated to it, marks people above and below.
The tool that separates people is the ID that occupation has provided.
Green IDs for those without any rights, blue IDs for those with relative rights.
Understanding the differences in status and IDs is crucial to understanding an event such as a traffic accident.
So this is what happened:
An ambulance arrived at the Qalandiya checkpoint, carrying a victim of a traffic accident near Kufr Aqab. A frontal collision of two vehicles. So how come only one of them was rushed to the hospital by ambulance?
The answer is not the severity of the wounding but the color of the ID.
The victim arriving in an ambulance, fixed to his stretcher, holds a blue ID and is defined as a resident of Jerusalem (non-citizen), and taken to Hadassah Hospital not because of his wounds or the proximity to the hospital, but simply and only because of the color of his ID.
Kuf Aqab is 2 kilometers from Ramallah, so its hospital is the closest to the site of the accident, and good sense would have the victim’s health demand to be taken directly there without losing time nor shaking the wounded body as is done at the Qalandiya checkpoint when the wounded person changes ambulances (to say nothing of the hundreds of NIS that the family spends on the services of two ambulance companies).
In fact, the victim’s upper class compared to Palestinian non-residents of Jerusalem actually did him a disservice.
This was the fate of Covid-19 patients during the pandemic, when Israeli emergency services were afraid or simply did not want to cross the apartheid wall and evacuate patients from the quasi-Jerusalem neighborhoods, which eventually led to the neglect and death of quite a few people.
And what happened to the other victims of that traffic accident? They must have been taken in a hurry to a Ramallah hospital.
In actual fact, this is not a story about a wounded person, but about wounded procedures…
