Collective Punishment on the West Bank

[vierundzwanzig]

Dialysis, Checkpoints and a Palestinian Madonna
By JULIANA FREDMAN

Although it is cliché to say so, her beauty and serenity evoke an aging Virgin Mary, especially in this setting. She sits on her donkey expression unchanged as she bounces along among the olive trees through the rocky valley pass eyes glancing outward, watchful and placid.

Her donkey has an open sore on its behind and she has a grotesquely bulbous and purple arm irritated to elephantine proportions by the holes made to clean her blood three times a week.

It is this arm that she offers to the soldier as proof of her right to pass. The man she travels with, also a dialysis patient, on a healthier donkey with less corroded looking track marks, speaks English,"Please", he says looking up at the two boys lounging on the hill, guns cocked, "Dialysis, we are dialysis."

Nidal has no common language with these people. She offers the arm and a slight faraway smile.

http://www.counterpunch.org/fredman08262003.html