Monday, February 09, 2009
Elder of ZiyonScores of Palestinian patients being treated in Israeli hospitals, a rare bright spot of coexistence here, are being sent home because the Palestinian Authority has stopped paying for their treatment, partly in anger over the war in Gaza.As the article goes on the show, there are many patients - cancer patients especially - who simply cannot get comparable care in Palestinian Arab hospitals. And Israel's hospital costs are one quarter that for comparable care in the West.
Hadassah Hospital says that for the past week no payments have come in and Palestinians whose children are being treated there have been instructed by Palestinian health officials to place them in facilities in the West Bank, Jordan or Egypt.
“Suddenly we have had 57 patients dropped from our rolls,” lamented Michael Weintraub, director of pediatric hematology, oncology and bone marrow transplantation at Hadassah. “We have been bombarded by frantic parents. This is a political decision taken on the backs of patients.”
The Palestinian health minister, Fathi Abu Moghli, said he was examining the entire referral procedure because he was tired of adding to what he called Israel’s “oil well,” meaning the payments for Palestinian patient care. In particular, he said, he had no desire to see the injured from the Gaza war get Israeli care.
“We already pay $7 million a month to Israeli hospitals,” he said in a telephone interview. “Since the first day of the Gaza aggression I said that I will not send to my occupier my injured people in order for him to make propaganda at my expense and then pay him for it.”
An Israeli clinic set up with great fanfare on the Israeli-Gaza border the day the war ended on January 18th has already been closed since both Hamas, the rulers of Gaza and the Palestinian Authority essentially boycotted it. The Palestinian Authority pays for the care in Israel of its citizens — or much of it — out of its budget.
Once again, the so-called "leaders" of the Palestinian Arabs are not only willing, but eager, to sacrifice the life and health of their own people in order to score rhetorical points. Projecting their own hatred onto Israelis, they feel that the Zionists only care for Arabs for propaganda purposes and they would rather remove that perceived, imaginary gain by Israel - and let their own children die.
This is no different than how Palestinian Arab leaders have made most of their decisions in their short history - looking at everything as a zero-sum game and assuming that what is good for Israel is bad for their people, and vice versa. And then they make decisions that are the exact opposite of what their own people would prefer.
After all, no one is forcing Palestinian Arabs to choose Israeli hospitals to treat their people. They obviously want to - but their wise health minister can't stand it and would rather have some of them die.
Even the most obvious win-win cannot be stomached, because one of the sides that wins is the hated Jewish side. This kind of hatred is pathological.
