We thought it was important to have a testimony from one of those NGOs that, all too often, unfortunately, have occasion to act in the Middle East.
With this in mind, Rolland Doukhan was able to meet Doctor Jean Beckouche, head of mission at Médecins du Monde.
PLURIELLES: First of all, I would like to make clear to you that this interview, in principle planned around ressentiment, may largely, if you wish, go beyond that theme, given that your travels and your missions have led you to be a privileged witness of many situations that have stirred, and still stir, our media.
JEAN BECKOUCHE: I thank you for removing right away constraints that, by nature, I do not much care for, insofar as they cramp the image of what I will call “the field”.
Pl.: We are agreed, then. To begin, I would like to ask you whether, in the course of your various missions, whether in the Middle East or in the Maghreb (Morocco and Algeria), you perceived a permanent ressentiment or some feeling of anger toward what I will call, in a very broad word: the Western world.
J. B.: It depends on the era — I mean the period — and it depends on the interlocutors I happened to have across from me. It is true that the caregivers we meet, whether in the occupied territories, or in Morocco or Algeria, are in general interlocutors with whom our association “Médecins du Monde” works, in the sense that we respond first of all to their request. They are therefore very particular interlocutors, very involved, very open to the NGOs. And so we discuss, in order to try to improve the health situation, and essentially access to care.
Pl.: You meet, then, men and women of various horizons, of various trainings.
J. B.: Yes, whether they be doctors, psychologists, reception secretaries, nurses, all sorts of caregivers — many among them are mandated to deal with health, whether in the Middle East or in the countries of the Maghreb. I would say that the big problem we are confronted with in Palestine is the psychological wounds with regard to the occupation. And there, the caregivers themselves are confronted with the political situation, with the difficult social terrain in which these populations live.
Pl.: Do you mean by that that these teams of caregivers have a kind of disconnection in relation to the social and economic status of the countries where they live? Could that be the basis of the imbalance — say, mental or psychological — that you were able to note in people?
J. B.: It depends. In countries like Algeria and Morocco, they are, in general, figures whose humanism is the most representative of the population of those countries. To my mind, they represent the most advanced part of the population, and they are the ones who make us most optimistic about the evolution of the situation in those countries. They are therefore above all democrats, defenders of Human Rights. To speak only of Morocco, we are in contact with associations that try to rehabilitate, to reaccustom to the fact of living, those who were victims under the reign of Hassan II. For some, they are survivors of veritable death camps.
Pl.: How many years did those people spend there before getting out? Five? Ten? Twenty?
J. B.: It depends. It ranges from five to eighteen years for these political detainees freed from the penal colonies and prisons in 1991 by King Hassan II, and that, a few years before his death. The new king, Mohammed VI, set up an Equity and Reconciliation Commission, which allows these former deportees to express themselves in the course of public hearings, followed by the whole country. And that is, it seems to me, one of the major elements of the country’s current democratic advance. However, will these victims benefit, for all that, from social coverage? One cannot yet answer this question. This action of rehabilitating the victims of political violence seems to me to be a preventive measure against the resumption of these violations of Human Rights.
So, on the whole, we are dealing with caregivers, volunteer doctors who take care of these victims, as well as with militants of associations who give much of their time and their energy, to find again, for most of them, militants or members of their own family who disappeared without leaving a trace.
As for the Palestinian doctors, who have been our partners since 1995, we have several missions in the West Bank and in Gaza, to train them in disaster medicine, to bring first aid to the wounded in the ambulances of the Red Crescent, and to give primary care to the mothers and children of these territories. We are dealing, then, with Palestinian doctors who, at the start, were open to a work of coordination not only with the doctors of “Médecins du Monde”, but also with an association of Israeli doctors, numbering 600, called P.H.R. (Physicians for Human Rights — Israel). (Website: www.phr.org.il) [see insert]
This association, a partner of “Médecins du Monde” for more than 10 years, would go, until these last years, at the request of Palestinian doctors, to treat patients in isolated villages.
Today, we go very often to these villages, separated from the rest of the country by the famous wall. There are tens of thousands of Palestinians there who have no access to their former care centers and who cannot, on the other hand, gain access to the care centers of the Israelis. We bring our support to emergency medical transport services as well as to mobile clinics for women and children, in 11 villages of the West Bank. The Palestinian health system is endangered by the difficulties of access with which patients and care teams are confronted. The rupture of family bonds, the tension, the increased isolation, have repercussions on the psychological plane, and contribute to the deterioration of the health level of these populations.
Pl.: So, these Palestinian doctors whom you met, and who also meet the Israeli doctors, are first of all preoccupied with acting as field doctors — is that right?
J. B.: Yes, essentially.
Pl.: And, on these occasions, were you able to notice a kind of ressentiment toward everything that was Israeli, or even, more broadly, toward what was Jewish? In fact, did you find yourself before a political racism or not?
J. B.: Your question leads me to make clear to you what you already know, of course: we are here before a general problem that one encounters in Palestine. That is to say that at the start…
Pl.: You are speaking there of the years 1995, 1996, I suppose…
J. B.: I mean to speak of the years ’90, up until around the second Intifada, in 1999. At the start — and this is what the head of mental health in Gaza told us. He did work with his students, his doctors, within the framework of the management of the psychic suffering of these populations, women, children, adults. “What must we do, Professor? Well, we do this, we do that. We help, we support, we support… we treat, we treat, we treat…” I, for my part, met this man two or three years later, it was well after the beginning of the second Intifada, and he confided to me then: “What I do, now, is try to hold them back so that they do not engage in the armed struggle against the Israeli occupier.”
So, as for the words Israelis and Jews, on a general plane, one is witnessing a tipping-over. Until then, among the population, one spoke of the Israelis, but now, almost everywhere, in language, with the exception of the political or cultural figures, one hears talk of Jews and not of Israelis.
Pl.: And what do you think of this tipping-over, of this drift from the term Israelis toward the term Jews?
J. B.: One may fear that this drift will translate into a widening of the conflict, until now limited to the Israeli and Palestinian territories. But one must fear the transformation of the secular nationalism of Fatah, of the PLO, into an Islamist nationalism closer to Hamas, already in power in Palestine. For the moment, one sees only very few Palestinians launch into suicide operations, whether in Iraq, in Europe, or elsewhere in the world. Yet one cannot deny that hatred is settling in, developing incontestably. One has only to see the entry into the Israeli government of that far-right leader — it is a sign of ill omen. When there is no dialogue, and hatred settles in on both sides, then there is no longer anything but war as a way out, and, alas! as a political instrument. And that is incontestably what is feeding Hamas at present. Peace has deserted the Near East. And yet, nothing will be possible so long as the two sides have not mutually accepted each other, for this simple reason that neither of the two antagonists has the means to get rid of the other. All are tired, worn out, in particular as concerns the Palestinian population. Men, women, children, young or old, no one is spared, and I felt among them a feeling of powerlessness that threatens to engulf them.
Pl.: Does there come back to your memory an encounter, that I would qualify as man to man, with a Palestinian doctor? I mean by that an encounter where the political problems, the preoccupations with the care to be given, the therapeutic dimension itself, would have been made secondary to the benefit of a mutual and humanist acquaintance.
J. B.: It had been decided that Doctor Moncorgé, president of “Médecins du Monde”, and I myself, that we would go to see both the Palestinian authorities and the Israeli authorities, to present our report condemning the suicide attacks in Israel. It was there that, in July 2003, we first met the Palestinian minister of health in Gaza, who delivered to us a discourse of perfect wooden language about the Palestinian State, without any reflection on the drama lived by this population, especially in Gaza with its frightful unemployment and its overpopulation. We then saw President Arafat himself, who insisted on meeting us in Ramallah. The next day, we were able to see the officials of the Israeli foreign affairs ministry, who, of course, were entirely in agreement with this report. The previous year, we had presented a report on the violation of international humanitarian law during the incursions of the Israeli army into Nablus.
The relations properly so called with the doctors, we have them in field actions. Whether in the Palestinian hospitals of Gaza, where “Médecins du Monde” trains the Palestinian doctors in the disaster medicine we were speaking of a moment ago, or in the various sectors of Nablus, on the plane of mental health, where we have taken charge of many children, many women in a state of suffering before the situation.
Pl.: And among these victims, did you perceive something of the order of hatred or ressentiment?
J. B.: Among the victims, there are in general few words. Those who speak are the children. I have in mind an 11-year-old kid who said to us: as for me, when I grow up, I will kill all the Israelis for all the harm they do us. To understand such an affirmation, one must gauge the impact of the occupation or of the destruction of a house on the psychological plane. The children are witnesses, silent or agitated, of the disarray and the feeling of powerlessness of their parents, essentially of their fathers. In fact, these parents are concerned only with the material problems of their family. The fathers ask themselves only questions of the kind: how to hold out? How to feed my family? How to keep the kids from being killed? How will I myself be able to work, to get through the checkpoint in less than three hours? How to be able to go to the hospital? These problems are all of a burning immediacy. I think back to those scenes of young Israeli soldiers of 18 or 20, weapon in hand, who demand papers for an hour, two hours, even three hours, from one of our Palestinian partners, who was nonetheless in a “Médecins du Monde” car. They forced him to get out of our vehicle, and a young soldier asked him to remove his trousers in front of everyone. And it is a very frequent scene, which often unfolded before mothers, women, children. It is, there, a permanent humiliation, and to my mind, an organized one. Because it cannot be otherwise, and I am not speaking of the hours of waiting, or of the fact of being a young and able-bodied man seeking to get through to go and sell his labor power. I am speaking of how simply to go to the hospital, how to carry a sick person, from arm to arm, across the mounds and the sandbags of the checkpoint, in order to reach the taxi that will take him to the hospital. And it is an everyday scene. An unbearable humiliation that cannot but engender ressentiment and hatred.
Pl.: You perceived this ressentiment, then, everywhere and in each and every person?
J. B.: Yes, of course, in Gaza as in the West Bank. But I would like to speak, in particular, of the children…
Pl.: Why of the children?
J. B.: The children — I dare not say that they no longer have a father. But where, then, are the fathers? One finds only sons, brothers. The image, the example, is the brother, the big brother. The group of brothers organizes itself on the model of the sect.
Pl.: The brother truly becomes a father?
J. B.: Yes, I found myself in Palestine, whether in Gaza or elsewhere, before these sects of children where the big brother commands, shows the way. In fact, as one knows, the law is the Name of the Father. Now, there is no longer any law. Therefore, there is no father. To my mind, the father no longer encounters the child. There is, however, an important figure: the mother. She does everything. It is she who works, who brings back something, who does the cooking. But she still has no place in the decision. She remains always a more or less submissive figure.
The political climate is obviously different in the Maghreb — I mean in Algeria or Morocco, since Tunisia is forbidden to us. I found myself in Casablanca a few days after the attacks that had taken place there in 2003. In the immense hall of that hospital where the wounded of the attack had been gathered, I was struck by the deep sadness of all these victims, traumatized, in shock. They had that stupor that one always notices among the survivors of attacks. Their eyes are open, but one senses that their mind is still in the explosion that was inflicted on them, and they remain, as it were, astonished by it…
Pl.: In sum, they are wondering: how could that have happened to me?
J. B.: Yes, I do not know how to put it, they remain there, they do not speak. They no longer understand…
Pl.: You lead me to question you about the hospitals of Gaza or of the West Bank that you probably visited. You entered them. Because of the proximity, the contiguity I should say, with a country like Israel, you were certainly able to note something bitter among the doctors or in the medical administration?
J. B.: I do not have that feeling. There are, as everywhere, cutting-edge services — I do mean cutting-edge. And others, very mediocre, as everywhere too. What must be understood is that when one has a surgery service of 150 beds, and that, abruptly, owing to a bombardment or some other thing that characterizes this war, one sees 100 or 200 wounded disembark, more or less serious, one finds oneself, within an hour, before a veritable problem. One must triage, choose the most stricken, cope, save as many human lives as possible, and that, under conditions that suddenly become dramatic.
Pl.: You mean that one is far from serenity, or that it is very easily explained? One is far from possible bridges between the two populations — is that indeed your view?
J. B.: Not so far as that. For example, at a given moment, we had need of medical and surgical equipment for Gaza. For a hospital whose name I no longer remember, nor the details. We had put all this equipment in a plane and we had alerted the Israeli embassy — I myself had taken charge of it. When the plane arrived in Tel Aviv, trucks of the Israeli army — I do mean of the Israeli army — loaded this equipment, had it cross the border and handed it over to the Palestinians, into the Palestinian trucks. And this operation took no more than 2 or 3 hours. When one knows the time it takes for a simple worker to get through a checkpoint, one cannot but feel optimism before such a fact. And one wonders by what miracle, by the intervention of such-and-such a person, these things were able to come about.
Pl.: As you say, it is a miracle. But it is an exception, no?
J. B.: No, I do not think it is a matter of an exception. It is terribly complex. I believe that everything exists, the unbearable behaviors of settlers or of petty soldiers as well as these admirable acts that do honor to humanity. The ones and the others are men worthy of esteem; unfortunately, the general context is not at all one of the outstretched hand, whether it be a matter of conciliation or of negotiation.
Pl.: The arrival in the Israeli government of that far-right deputy is not a particularly comforting element in this respect.
J. B.: Indeed. His language, his positions, can only bring grist to the mill of Hamas. It is normal: the extremes meet and sustain each other. But I want to come back to what I was saying to you about the wounded. Some, I had noted it, remain in shock at what they have just lived through. There are those who deny, momentarily or durably, the shock of reality. I remember, for example, a woman two of whose children had been killed on the roof of her house. It was in Rafah, in 2004. Others become agitated, become logorrheic. Still others loudly take Allah to witness; some hole up to flee the danger and others throw themselves into the danger. They seem no longer to gauge it. It is very astonishing. For the children, it is the same thing.
Pl.: And school, in all this?
J. B.: It is a place of very, very rich encounters. A space for sharing experiences among friends, a kind of response to their isolation.
But I would like to take up again the subject of women. The increase in poverty, the dangers in everyday life, have brought about a reversal of roles. These women find themselves the only ones to provide for the needs of the family. This obviously creates tensions in these traditional families. When one enters, as I have done, into these families taken in charge by psychologists of “Médecins du Monde”, or by Palestinian psychologists, one perceives at once a bitterness, a rancor toward the man, and not only toward the Israelis. In the villages affected by the wall — that is, cut off from the rest of the country — 49% of the girls are married by the age of 18 and 47% marry a cousin. The impossibility for these girls of pursuing studies and of choosing a spouse outside their own family worsens as the construction of the wall proceeds. There, the women play at the same time the role of the father and that of the mother. They provide for the needs of the family, they lavish care when it proves impossible to go to the hospital; on the other hand, I repeat, they possess no power of decision, in conformity with tradition.
In Nablus, I found a very beautiful city, one that did not have much to do with an underdeveloped country. One could find there the latest model of PlayStations, digital cameras, high-resolution printers. It is a city that has parks, buildings, local television stations… It is not the image that one usually has of the third world.
Pl.: And the demography in a city like Nablus?
J. B.: It is much better than it has been, except if one is speaking of Gaza.
Pl.: And on the plane of the economic situation?
J. B.: A growing poverty, a difficult access to fundamental needs, such as water, food, shelter, and education, are the signs of the economic deterioration of this population. The villages concerned by the checkpoints are often cut off from all activity, and before the consequences of the military operations, the peasants manage as best they can. In case of emergency, they practice what is called “back to back”, that is to say, they transport their wounded at arm’s length over the mounds or the bags of earth, and finally reach the ambulances on the other side.
Pl.: What is their state of mind like?
J. B.: They do as best they can, defending themselves sometimes with a humor that preserves their pride. But there are above all those who have given up…
Pl.: You mean that they fall silent?
J. B.: Yes, they often have an extinguished gaze, in which one can read fear, terror even. They are very afraid. We are here before a new form of war. And must one speak of the camps? I mean the refugee camps. In Jordan, there are enormous camps of Palestinian refugees, some of which — and even most of which — have been there since 1947. And there, the smell! The corrugated-iron roofs let the heat through, of course, and there is neither running water nor sewerage. But when one enters these makeshift dwellings, one is always welcomed with cakes and mint tea and, above all, one can see, hung on the wall, the very large key of their house in Palestine. Always. I would like to continue with the children in the camps of the West Bank, or in Gaza. To speak of the portraits, the posters of martyrs everywhere in the houses, in the streets, in the public establishments.
The fact is that since Hamas took over the government, there are practically no more attacks. It is a deliberate policy of the government, Islamist though it is. But, to my mind, Islamism is a cover. The reality of this Islamist movement is that it is a political movement. Against Israel, in Palestine; against the West, elsewhere. And I do not believe that it is religion that characterizes the Palestinians. I believe that it is a radical movement that refuses, up to now, all weakness, and thus all negotiation.
Pl.: I have not gone, as you have, to all those places where you have been, but my recent journey to Israel convinced me of one thing: that the solution, for the Palestinians, for a viable and autonomous Palestinian State, the chance for this people, lies precisely in Israel. I mean in that proximity, that contiguity with Israel. It seems incredible to me that these political groups, these leaders of Hamas or of Fatah, do not see, in this contiguity with a State that is in osmosis with the 21st century, the chance, the possibility of acceding to their autonomy, at the same time as to access to all that the modern world can offer. I was able to note in the Israeli population the feeling that it is ineluctable that one day, at its door, there will be a Palestinian State. The Israelis, the Israeli people, wish for it, but they would like to live this side-by-side in tranquility.
J. B.: But to hope to witness one day the development of an economic ensemble between Israel and Palestine, one would first have to see them accept — the political powers as much as the populations — the historic compromises necessary for the establishment of peace; we are, unfortunately, very far from that.
Pl.: I was able to note, during my recent passage, one thing that somewhat astonished me. On the beaches of Tel Aviv, the showers run permanently, without any timed cut-off, as one can see in the south of France.
J. B.: You know, on the subject of water, one must know that it is the same water table that supplies the West Bank, Jordan, Gaza, and Israel. And that, from time immemorial. Well, the Israeli water services and the, let us call them, Palestinian water services have always collaborated with one another with an extraordinary efficiency. Without there ever having been the slightest cubic meter taken in excess by the ones or the others. And whatever the political situation, these problems relating to water have always been settled in a harmonious fashion. Unfortunately, it happens that Gaza has drawn on this water table in an uncontrolled fashion, and it seems that they have only 2 years of water reserve left. They are, moreover, in negotiations with Egypt for a part of the Nile’s water to be directed to Gaza. It is a major problem that the political situation of today is not apt to harmonize. I have learned, and I hope that it is true, that the Israeli settlers currently still in the West Bank use only water coming from Israel. Yes, it is a big problem, this problem of water.1 It happens that one is now reaching an affordable cost price for desalination; one is trying, as concerns Israeli agriculture, a heavy consumer, to use non-potable water in this respect, so as to keep potable water only for food consumption.
But everything we have said until now relates to the situation before the new Hamas government and the halt to the transfer of funds by Israel. Which means that there is a worsening of unemployment in Gaza, unemployment reaches 40%, with 70% of the Gazans living below the poverty threshold (less than 2 dollars a day). Today, the situation in Gaza is as follows: an exhausted population, a health system that does not cease to degrade, with premature births increased by 60%, the vaccinations of children having practically ceased for lack of products; the vital infrastructures in large part destroyed. Despair, the absence of prospects, a great precariousness, precipitate the population into a spiral of violence whose limits it is difficult to foresee.
Pl.: We have now reached, dear Jean Beckouche, the end of this interview. I wish to thank you for all these details that you have been so kind as to confide to us, and to thank also the organization “Médecins du Monde” for the admirable work it carries out in this part of the world that is so dear to our hearts. Thank you again, and until soon, I hope.
(Interview conducted by Rolland Doukhan)
Notes
See Gershom Baskin: Le problème de l’eau dans le conflit israélo-palestinien (The Problem of Water in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict), in Plurielles No. 5.↩︎