Authors: Dion Nissenbaum
In more tranquil parts of the world, being an emergency paramedic means responding to car accidents and heart attacks. In Jerusalem, working for United Hatzalah means that Khaled has been one of the first responders to years of Palestinian suicide attacks. It is always risky business.
Emotions run hot in the aftermath of suicide attacks in Jerusalem. It's not uncommon to see groups of young Jewish men, often led by ultra-Orthodox nationalists, chanting “Death to Arabs” as medics carry off the injured and religious crews try to collect every piece of the victims' bodies that they can find.
United Hatzalah started hiring EMTs like Khaled to work in the Arab neighborhoods, where its Jewish paramedics were often afraid to go. Riding their bikes, with red sirens attached to the top of their medical-gear boxes on the back, the paramedics are able to zip through traffic and respond more quickly than conventional ambulances trying to squeeze through Jerusalem's narrow, traffic-clogged roads. And living in Abu Tor meant that Khaled was often one of the closest EMTs when a suicide attack occurred in the center of the city.
Khaled said he feels protected when he wears the full, heavy motorcycle helmet and leather jacket bearing the United Hatzalah logo. It sends a clear message that Khaled is there to help. Especially with his helmet on, people can't tell if Khaled is Arab or Jewish. Khaled's fluent Hebrew means that he understands everything going on around him when he gets to the scene. He can tell when emotions are running high, and it makes sense to stick close to friends for protection. And he's got plenty of allies among the medics and police officers who are part of the city's unique fraternity.
“They hurt the other Arabs,” he said of the vitriolic activists who seem to converge on every major Palestinian attack in Jerusalem. “But not me.”
Khaled was willing to take the risksâas long as his wife and kids were safe. That wasn't something Khaled was always able to guarantee, especially when his son reached his teens. At the scene of one West Jerusalem attack in 2008, just down the street from the YMCA, Khaled saw his only son Jamal, who was about to turn 12, in the crowd, standing among the TV cameras and angry young bystanders. While police prepared to remove the body of a Palestinian assailant who'd commandeered a tractor and wounded two dozen people before being shot dead, Khaled rushed over to see Jamal.
“What are you doing here?”
he asked his son.
“Get out of here. It's not safe.”
Khaled's sinking feeling got worse during the summer of 2014. He could see a little bit of Mohammed Abu Khdeir in his son. Had fortune been against Jamal, he could just as easily have been the one snatched off the street that summer day. Like the 16-year-old Khdeir, Jamal was thin, with adolescent acne and few signs that he'd be able to grow a beard any time soon. As much as Jamal wanted to think he was tough, he probably couldn't put up much of a fight.
“I'm afraid for Jamal all the time,” Khaled confessed one evening as he sat in his living room with his son in the fall of 2014. Khaled was always on alert because of his work. It made him hypersensitive to shifts in the atmosphere. That November, Khaled had been one of the first to reach the scene of an attack in which an East Jerusalemite plowed his van into people waiting at a light rail station on the wide highway that was part of the border dividing the city from 1948 to 1967,
just down the road from the old Mandelbaum Gate that once connected Jordanian-controlled East and Israeli-controlled West Jerusalem.
The attack, captured on film by various security cameras, showed a white van careening into people as they scrambled for safety at the rail station. The driver jumped from the car and vainly tried to get away. Dozens of drivers watched police officers shoot the man in the middle of one of Jerusalem's busiest intersections. For many, the attack was a clear sign that random attacks were going to be the hallmark of the third intifada.
Khaled's emergency alert went off on his phone while he was working at the Y. He grabbed his leather jacket, put on his helmet and jumped on his scooter for the short ride to the scene. He zipped past the French hospital that once sat on the edge of No Man's Land, where Catholic nuns carried out their unusual search for a patient's missing dentures in 1956.
When Khaled got to the scene, he saw the attacker, shot dead by police in the intersection. Nearby, he saw an older couple trapped in their car, which had been sideswiped by the van. The couple looked terrified as Khaled walked up to them, still wearing his helmet. Khaled saw Muslim prayer beads on their dashboard as he approached.
“
A-salaam allekum,
” he said to them as a wave of relief washed over both their faces, knowing they weren't going to be lynched by an angry mob.
“
Ilhamdulilah,
” they said in thanks to God. “You are Arab.”
Three people were killed by the driver: a 17-year-old Jewish religious studies major, a 38-year-old Druze border policeman, and a 60-year-old Palestinian man from the West Bank. Hamas claimed responsibility for the attack, but it seemed more likely that the driver was a lone wolf.
Khaled saw his work as an EMT as perhaps the most important thing he could do to shatter misconceptions most Israelis seemed to have about Palestinians.
“Every time I volunteer somewhere in Israel, when I go inside a house, I say: âMy name is Khaled and I am a volunteer,'” he said. “They are surprised because, to them, they have a stereotype in their head that, as an Arab, you're not supposed to be doing any good in any way.”
Khaled takes that view as a personal affront. He's made it a personal mission to change people's minds.
“I try always to challenge that idea and say: âDon't be surprised. I'm not unique. There are many Arabs like me.'”
In 2014, Khaled appeared in a two-minute advertisement to promote United Hatzalah. The video was meant to showcase the private aid group's diverse volunteers. It begins in a mosque where Khaled, wearing saggy, dad-style blue jeans and a short-sleeved green polo shirt, is praying with dozens of men. It cuts to a young, bearded, ultra-Orthodox Jewish colleague, draped in a white prayer shawl covering his head and the small black box filled with Torah verses strapped to his head, praying in a synagogue. Then it cuts to an attractive sandy blond (apparently secular) woman, in jeans and a black T-shirt, listening to music on headphones in a CD shop. All three of them rush from what they are doing when they get a medical alert on their phones. This time, it's not about a suicide bombing or lone-wolf car attack. The three join forces to save a young red-haired Israeli girl who is choking in her kitchen. Khaled and the other man jump on their scooters while the woman gets behind the wheel of an ambulance. The three, all wearing United Hatzalah's neon orange emergency vests, work together to save the blue-faced girl's life. As the girl's relieved mother hugs her daughter, the screen fades to white with the group's slogan, in Hebrew, Arabic and English, appearing on the screen: “United Hatzalah of Israel: United for Life.”
The work bolsters Khaled's reputation among Israelis as “one of the good ones.” It gives Khaled unusual credibility when he criticizes Israeli policies. Though he can ramble on in a voice that can lull you to sleep, Khaled's words can be cutting.
One night, Khaled took his wife to a special screening of a documentary about an Israeli high school up north that decided to produce a play with kids from a nearby Arab village. The film captured the tensions between the Muslim and Jewish kids as they tried to overcome their preconceptions and misconceptions to put on a musical about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Khaled knew the film's producer from his work at the Y, so he and Rita walked down to the Cinematheque,
Jerusalem's art-house theater set in the lower part of the Hinnom Valley, the Valley of Slaughter, across from the Old City walls. A few dozen people turned out to see the film in a large, mostly empty auditorium. Most decided to stay after the film was over for a discussion with the producer. Khaled and Rita seemed to be the only Palestinians in the small audience.
The screening attracted like-minded people who wanted to see Arabs and Jews living together. Mostly.
One man wondered who Israel belonged to: The Jews? The Arabs? Both? He mentioned the Holocaust and reminded everyone about why Israel had been created in the first place.
“The Arabs have a lot of countries and the Jews have but one,”
he said during the discussion.
“It has to be protected.”
People in the crowd murmured amongst themselves and Khaled could tell that most people weren't on this guy's side. Khaled raised his hand to speak and stood up so everyone in the movie theater could see him. He wore a worn, espresso-colored tweed blazer over a simple striped polo shirt and khaki brown pants. Dressed in a well-fitting, hip-length scarlet jacket over black tights and pointed, ankle-high, black leather boots, Rita looked on as Khaled spoke his mind.
“With all due respect to the victims of the Holocaust, many of the Arabs in this country feel that they, too, paid a price for the Holocaust,”
he told the small group that stayed for the postmovie talk.
“Because of the guilt of the world after World War II, the world supported the creation of the State of Israel, which came at a great price: the
Nakba,
the Catastrophe, for Palestinians.”
The audience wasn't sure what to say. The producer thanked Khaled for his thoughts and the moviegoers soon made their way out into the chilly Jerusalem evening. Khaled rarely seems to doubt his place in Israeli society. He sees it as his duty to challenge Israelis, especially those who consider themselves open-minded. One Jewish colleague at the Y told Khaled a story about left-leaning Israelis living along the coast in an old Palestinian home in Jaffa, the funky Brooklyn of Tel Aviv, just up the Mediterranean coastline. One day, Khaled's friend told him, the original Palestinian owners of the home turned up and told the progressive Israelis that they were living in their old house. In a conciliatory gesture, the Israelis invited them in, but things quickly went badly and the Israelis kicked the original owners out of the house. The story struck Khaled for its fundamental hypocrisy.
“If these were leftist Jews, what do you expect of the extreme Jews?” Khaled said. “I guess people talk big about coexistence until the topic comes home. Then they show their true colors.”
CoExistence Is a Joke
What to some people might come across as anti-Israeli seems to Khaled's son to be just the opposite.
“Every time he discusses political issues it seems like he's backing the Jewish narrative,” Jamal said. “My father sees only the positive side of the story and not the negative side. He has never been to a checkpoint. That's why he only sees the good side of Jews. Because he works with them.”
Jamal's studies at Bir Zeit University outside Ramallah regularly brought him into the West Bank for classes. In an effort to show Jamal the value of coexistence, Khaled sent him to an Arab-Jewish peace camp in Ottawa, Canada, in the summer of 2013.
The kids spent hours talking about their lives, went on field trips, played confidence-building games together and vowed to keep in touch before heading home. A year later, Jamal ran into one of the Israelis from the peace camp. She was serving as a guard at the Qalandiya checkpoint, one of the regular battlegrounds for Israeli soldiers and Palestinian demonstrators. One summer she was celebrating coexistence in Canada. The next, she was wearing an Israeli military uniform, armed with a machine gun, manning one of Israel's biggest West Bank chokepoints. That moment told Jamal all that he needed to know about the value of coexistence.
“Look at her now,” Jamal said. “She's checking IDs.”
To avoid being scrutinized by the Israeli soldier he'd met at peace camp in Canada, Jamal ducked his motor scooter into a different lane, flashed his Jerusalem ID to another soldier and sped home. Jamal came to regret taking part in the Canada peace camp after a religious teacher told him it was tantamount to “normalization.”
“Our religion bans us from having peace with them,” Jamal said. “Because they betray you, just like they betrayed the Prophet Muhammad.”
Khaled saw his son's views as an uneducated interpretation of Islam. Sure, Muhammad expelled Jewish tribes that had broken their pledge to support him in Medina when Islam was taking root. But he also gave Jews and Christians religious autonomy in Medina, referring to them, like Muslims, as “People of the Book,” and reminded his followers that all of them prayed to the same god.
“If Jamal were to read more, he would not base his views on what he hears,” Khaled said while his son checked his cell phone messages.
Khaled had the same debate with Jamal all the time.
“There's a school of thought that we should not talk to the other side at all,” he said as his son listened from the other side of their living room. “I disagree with that, and I present myself to them, always, as a human being. I am a human being like you. Don't lie to me. Treat me with respect.”
Khaled's wife was torn. She was one of the only wives on the eastern side of Assael who didn't cover her hair. She has no problem wearing tight jeans and sleeveless shirts that might elicit catty comments from more conservative women on the street. But she feels just as Palestinian as they do. One of her relatives is a high-ranking member of the Palestinian Authority intelligence service. Her sister is a well-known host on Palestine TV in the West Bank.
“I love the West Bank,” she said. “Whichever Arab country we visit, I feel they have more commitment to their Arab and Pan-Arabness than here. Once we have Jerusalem as our capital, we will make lots of mistakes and we will suffer tremendously, but at least it will retain its Arab character.”