‘We can’t stop’ – the Israeli woman still helping sick Palestinians
JVL Introduction
People’s humanity has been tested by the current conflict over Gaza.
Among the terrible collapse of so much of Israeli society into an ethno-nationalist vengeful mood, Yael Noy’s response stands out.
She heads a charity called Road to Recovery, a group of Israeli volunteers who have been driving sick Palestinians – mostly children – from checkpoints in the occupied West Bank and Gaza to hospital appointments in Israel.
Not presently possible from Gaza but desperately needed – as from the West Bank, where Noy continues her work, despite her own her own trauma over the events which included her parents surviving the attack on their kibbutz near the border and now two nephews in the army in Gaza.
“I’m not doing it for the Palestinians, I’m doing it because I want to be proud to be Israeli. I believe that whether you’re an Israeli or a Palestinian, a Jew or an Arab, people are people.”
RK
This article was originally published by BBC News on Fri 8 Dec 2023. Read the original here.
'We can't stop' - the Israeli woman still helping sick Palestinians
Yael Noy doesn’t wear military fatigues, but she describes herself as being in battle right now, after the Hamas assault on 7 October.
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Thank you Yael for being a star to steer by, showing us by your example (and by your honesty about its costs) HOW to stay a decent human in awful circumstances.
Thanks to the Israeli volunteer drivers and to the Palestinians helped for clinging on to their shared humanity and human connection for as long as they possibly can. Each of them is a beacon of light to the world … even when their light flickers occasionally as the hurt and pain become unbearable.
Great that your humanity can rise to the fore under these difficult conditions. Well done, Yael. Keep going as long as you can.
I know nothing about Yael Noy (not to be confused with orly Noy), but I found the BBC framing of this piece quite toxic and distasteful. Whatever Noy’s complex and conflicted opinions may be – and she appears to be a politicaly confused individual of considerable personal courage and humanity – Noy is not speaking to us directly in her own voice, but rather in soundbites filtered through the medium of the BBC interviewer’s transparent political agenda, with its missionary style tropes at every turn.
Thus Hawley needs to remind us of the animality of Hamas:
“Yael refuses to dehumanise them, or equate them with Hamas, which is classed as a terrorist organisation in the UK and other countries”
and
“volunteers can no longer take patients from Gaza, which is governed by Hamas”. Is Hamas the reason volunteers can’t take patients from Gaza?
Noy’s colonial confusion does shine through in the revealing quotation
“But I’m not doing it for the Palestinians, I’m doing it because I want to be proud to be Israeli….”
but Hawley does not question what this could really mean, because her mindset of an equal conflict between two peoples, rather than a struggle against apartheid, sees nothing anomalous in the assertion. There is no mention in the entire piece of any of Yael’s Gazan friends and collaborators some of whom presumably will have been killed or maimed in the ongoing genocide. Is this because Noy didn’t mention them or Hawley didn’t think it important to ask?