The treacheries of war are undoubtedly painful to all who experience them. In particular are the unacceptable pains that afflict the mothers and sisters of all warring parties, regardless of who they are. The grief of a Jewish mother is no greater than that of a Palestinian mother, both are offensive and intolerable. With the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp, the commanding Soviet Union officer uttered “Never Again.” Since the condemnation of the horrors of the Holocaust, the phrase has been employed by politicians, theologians, and human rights activists alike as a stern cry to the moral abominations that have been exacted against the human race in the contemporary “modern” age following World War II.

While the Palestinian-Israeli conflict may be incomparable to the Holocaust in magnitude and scope, Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is driven by the same overarching themes of oppression and dehumanization underpinning the Nazi philosophy. Regardless of the wanton killings of civilians during the Gaza War or the death of a single mother unable to reach a healthcare facility due to the mobility restrictions imposed on her under occupation, neither human suffering nor a single death can be quantified.

And hence, there exists grave tension between Israeli policy governing the occupied Palestinian territories and its pride as a Jewish democracy ingraining the values of Judaism. The thread of common humanity imbedded within Judaism is of no consequence to Israel’s execution of law over the territories, effectively demonstrating Israel’s defection from Judaism. Israel’s treatment of civilians—not suspected terrorists—is irreconcilable with the tenets of equality and common humanity which Israel, as a Jewish State, purports to uphold. Women and children unjustly, and in breach of Judaism, share the brunt of the burden—a burden that subjects them to health and life insecurity, leaving their livelihood not at the mercy of God, but Israeli lawmakers.

The plight of Palestinian women is unique to that of other political calamities attributing impoverishment a gendered face in that the Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War, “Fourth Geneva Convention,” binds Israel, the occupying power, under international law to provide unprejudiced health services to the occupied, un-naturalized Palestinians of the occupied Palestinian territories, including Palestinians holding Israeli residency in east Jerusalem. Furthermore, Article 38 of the convention even goes as far as to legally compel Israel to afford Palestinians “if their state of health so requires…medical attention and hospital treatment to the same extent as the nationals of the State concerned,” in this context, Israel. Consequently, the convention affords Palestinians health security irrespective of the occupation. William Shakespeare too offers a logical and applicable equivalence among individuals founded on the mere grounds of being human in his play the Merchant of Venice, in which Shylock, a Jewish merchant, pleas for recognition to his Christian rival, Antonio: 

And what’s his reason? I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?

Shylock’s plea for recognition alludes to the holistic conception in Judaism of the image of God in all humans that have come to being. This innate equality by virtue of the divine presence that unites humanity into one common breed—irrespective of sex, race, creed, religion, or nationality—conveys the Jewish values of egalitarianism. And hence, hath not a Palestinian hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Hath not a Palestinian bleed if pricked?

The analogy of the Jew to the Christian and the Palestinian to the Jew illustrates that a Palestinian is as human and vulnerable as any Jew—more is shared between them than the discourse of mere politics permits. Thus given the cemented morality and merits of equality within the Jewish scriptures, should not the Israeli public health infrastructure mirror that of the Palestinians’? Should not mothers of either side of the Separation Wall be able to give their children an equal chance at life through adequate neonatal care? Israel’s current execution of healthcare within its state suggests to the common person that an Israeli mother’s worth is indeed greater than that of a Palestinian mother’s.

It is in this framework that Israel deserts the Jewish scriptures demanding justice, equality, and peace in favor of those calling on Jews to strike their enemy. As this analysis moves forward, it will become clear that Israel deliberately forfeits the tenets forging a common humanity, and thus, defects from the ethical norms of Judaism...

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Jennifer Urgilez is a Writer for the Media and Information Program at the Palestinian Initiative for the Promotion of Global Dialogue and Democracy (MIFTAH). 

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