The Estranged

By Niall Twohig

Four of us are sent for supplies donated to the encampment. Three were faculty, likely chosen because we sat on the camp periphery, a bit awkward but wanting to help. The fourth, K, was a medical student and part of Healthcare Workers for Palestine.

On the way to the supplies, K and I get to talking. He mentions the medical community’s overwhelming silence on Gaza.

“If we remain silent during a genocide,” K says, “How can we call ourselves doctors? How can we say we’re concerned with public health?” I think of the crushing testimony from doctors in Gaza as they attempt to care in conditions were care has been made impossible. I mention this to K, wondering why I do, because he knows.

Midway to the supplies, we are stopped. A student, unaffiliated with the protests, has fallen from her motorized scooter. She injured her ankle and is in pain. Two other students attempt to help, but they look uncertain. K, whose keffiyeh covers his face, approaches them. The girl looks apprehensive for a moment.

“I’m a medical student. Can I take a look?” The student nods through a grimace. K then asks if he can touch her injured ankle. He tenderly applies pressure with his index finger and thumb.

“Does the compression help?”

“Yes. A little.”

“We have a medical tent across the way. They’ll have compression bandages and more ice.”

The three of us, faculty, look on a little stupidly as the two students make for the encampment to get more help. We’re not much help here, so we leave K to his work. “I guess K was exactly where he needed to be tonight,” one of us says. 

*       *       *

Turns out the supply trip was a one-man job. “How many faculty members does it take to screw in a light bulb,” one of us jokes. We carry the shopping bags and make for the road where the girl had fallen.

A campus van has blocked off the road so that no traffic nears the encampment. A stone-faced woman sits inside the van while two students urge her to move.

“There’s a student down there who’s injured,” they say. “She’s not a protestor. She just fell. We need to get an emergency vehicle through.”

“My department is closed. I can’t move. I’ve been told to stay here for the night.”

She’s on auto-response. She doesn’t really hear them. And if she had, would it have mattered if the injured girl was a protestor? Would that have been the criteria that determined whether she moved or not?

We get back to K who kneels next to the girl. Two other young medics from the encampment have joined them. They tend to the girl. I see blood has returned to her face. She smiles when I ask, “not what you were expecting tonight, huh?” There’s nothing for us faculty to do here, so we make for the encampment.  

*       *       * 

Two days on, I can’t stop thinking about the medics as they tended to the stranger who had nothing to do with their protests.

The Stranger. I think of Camus’s novel. Of his character Meursault, a French settler in Algeria. Of that moment when Meursault reencounters an unnamed Arab on the beach. The Arab flashes a knife and Meursault shoots him dead, pausing, then shooting his corpse again and again and again and again. 

Too long has the West been in the position of Meursault, affirming its own existence through the violent destruction of a people it has dispossessed. He is certainly in the U.S. arms dealers and war mongering politicians who affirm Israel’s existence through genocide. Certainly in Jared Kushner, already discussing Gaza’s valuable waterfront property. More death on the beach.

But Meursault is also here in more subtle forms: in the woman who will not move the van; in administrators who tell students and faculty to remain “aloof” and “neutral” when it comes to “partisan” protests; in my friend who says I have the right to turn off the news and focus on myself. That last person, my friend, doesn’t see that my right is built atop a mountain of the dead. He doesn’t see that, through our silence and inaction, we are shooting the dead again and again and again and again.

*       *       *

Too long have the Palestinian people been in the role of that unnamed Algerian killed on the beach. If “role” is the right word. Like the character, they are an object in the West’s story, a thing to be killed for the narrative to develop, a non-being that the West encounters violently to affirm Its being. How could one feel anything but rage if forced to live in such material and existential squalor? How could one not flash the knife?

Yet the Palestinian people feel and embody so much more: Joy in the face of violent objectification. Dance in the face of destruction. Prayer amid ruin. Solidarity in open-air prisons. This is what came to life in the encampment the other night. You’d have to be there to feel it.

A mantra also echoed amid the prayers and dance that first night of the encampment. 

“Your liberation is bound up in mine.”

I witnessed those three healthcare workers embody that mantra as they tended to the stranger who was no part of their protest.

I see them in my mind still, squatting next to the girl, tenderly tending her broken ankle. I know that if this girl had been a Zionist, they would do the same.

I see them in my mind still. And there, in my mind, they become a wounded Palestine sitting next to the world that has wounded it, tending to that world despite itself.

They know no strangers. Only the estranged.

Word Weapon >