The Electronic Intifada 16 July 2024
Hesen Jabr with members of Healthcare Workers for Palestine at a demonstration to protest her firing in front of NYU Langone, 14 June. (Photo courtesy of Hesen Jabr)
Hesen Jabr is the kind of American almost every community admires and raises up as a role model for young people to follow.
A hardworking labor and delivery nurse in New York City, Jabr recently won a prestigious award for exemplary care to patients suffering from perinatal loss at New York University’s Langone Hospital where she has worked for the past nine years.
The tenderness and empathy she showed to mothers who had lost babies, in childbirth or pregnancy, deeply impressed the other nurses in the unit. In May they publicly honored her for it by awarding her the Sebastian Brun Compassionate Care Award, “not only for providing stellar care,” they wrote in their nomination letter, “but also support for the rest of the nursing staff so that we can all live up to her example.”
In her acceptance speech at the award ceremony, which by chance fell on Jabr’s birthday, she talked about the thousands of Palestinian mothers whose children have been killed in Israel’s genocidal military onslaught on the Gaza Strip, suggesting to her audience that they try to feel their pain as they do the pain of grieving mothers in New York.
She closed her speech by saying: “Even though I can’t hold their hands and comfort them as they grieve their unborn children and the children they have lost during this genocide, I hope to keep making them proud as I keep representing them here at NYU.”
These were words that would come back to bite her. At her next shift at the hospital, instead of getting to work with her patients, she was summoned to the office of the hospital’s president and vice president of nursing.
Right away, she told The Electronic Intifada, they scolded her about “ruining the ceremony” and “putting others at risk” and “offending people.”
“It’s because you mentioned genocide,” she said they told her. “It’s bringing up Palestine. It’s fine you mentioned your mother and your grandmother. You should’ve stopped there.”
Jabr said that she was prepared for NYU Langone to punish her, including termination, but their tongue-lashing was nevertheless surprisingly cruel and hurtful.
Beit Hanina roots
When the meeting was over, she proceeded back to labor and delivery and started her shift. However, she would not be allowed to finish. Administration representatives located her in the unit and escorted her to an office where she was read her termination letter, including an order to pay back an end-of-year merit bonus as well as the pay increase she had earned, over $8,000 in total. Then they called the New York Police Department.
And that is how Jabr’s exemplary, award-winning nursing career at NYU Langone ended: a plainclothes police officer removed her from the hospital. Not for getting caught stealing narcotics or harming a patient or coming to work intoxicated or punching a supervisor, but for raising her voice against Israel’s continuing slaughter of Palestinian babies.
Jabr was born in Cleveland, but grew up in many places, including Beit Hanina in East Jerusalem. Her dad, Yazied, was born and raised in Beit Hanina, and her mother’s side of the family is also from there, although her mom, Fatima, was born and raised in Detroit.
Before Jabr moved to occupied Palestine in 2003, she lived for several years in a small town in Louisiana called Pineville. After returning to the US from Beit Hanina she stayed in Tennessee, where she completed high school and, at the University of Memphis, earned a Bachelor of Science in Nursing.
Her mother is also a nurse, and after graduating, Jabr joined her in Brooklyn to begin her career.
By Israeli design, there are no safe or normal places for Palestinians to live in their occupied homeland, but Beit Hanina, some 7.5 km north of the Old City, is among the most difficult.
After Israel’s invasion and military occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in 1967, it immediately pursued a policy of unilaterally expanding the municipal boundaries of West Jerusalem. As a result 28 Palestinian villages were swallowed up and effectively – and illegally – annexed.
Successive Israeli governments aggressively pursued the de facto annexation of East Jerusalem, by putting in place measures to cut it off from the rest of the West Bank, expropriate Palestinian land, destroy Palestinian property and housing, stop Palestinian demographic and geographic expansion, and shrink the number of Palestinian residents in East Jerusalem.
Since 2004, Israel has demolished 1,451 Palestinian housing units in East Jerusalem, including 265 homes in Beit Hanina alone.
In 2002, Israel also began construction of what it continues to call the “separation fence,” better known as the Apartheid Wall, weaving between illegal Israeli settlements and Palestinian population centers.
Mostly constructed inside 1967 occupied territory, some 65 percent, or 463 km, of the 713 km project had been completed by 2022 despite it being deemed illegal by the International Court of Justice in 2004.
Judaizing Jerusalem
The Wall has had a devastating impact on the Palestinian economy, with farmers cut off from their land and communities cut off from each other.
In East Jerusalem, it has separated Palestinians in the city and surrounding villages from the rest of the occupied West Bank to such an extent that, as far back as 2005, the Palestinian human rights organization Al-Haq warned that it was intended to enable the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the city:
“The limitations on access to, destruction and confiscation of land by the Annexation Wall, coupled with severe movement restrictions, removes one of the last obstacles to the total destitution of Palestinian communities in and around East Jerusalem.”
Beginning in the early 2000s East Jerusalem was specifically targeted by the Jewish billionaire Irving Moskowitz, whose fortune came from bingo casinos in poor Latino communities in California.
Moskowitz was a close friend and benefactor of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who wrote a tribute to Moskowitz when the billionaire passed away 2016, and his plan for Beit Hanina – and every other Palestinian neighborhood in East Jerusalem – was to “Judaize” it, bankrolling 17 illegal settlements in the area.
His front man was Arieh King, who led an aggressive campaign of racist harassment and intimidation by Jewish settlers of the Palestinian residents of Beit Hanina and other East Jerusalem neighborhoods: window-breaking, curses, beatings and nighttime evictions facilitated by the Israeli police.
Into this dystopia walked 13-year-old Jabr, and yet when she speaks of her teenage years in Beit Hanina, her eyes sparkle and the anxiety and stress of the past months fade from her face.
“I’m so grateful for that experience,” she told The Electronic Intifada. “At 13, I was definitely forced to grow up very quickly in that environment, but I wouldn’t trade it for the world.”
I asked Jabr what she thinks about when remembering her years in Beit Hanina.
“I get a visceral reaction every time I really sit and think about that time,” she said, “especially these days. To be honest, it was the best time of my life. The spirituality I had then, and my grasp of the world that I had then, I’m still trying to obtain that again. I’m 34 years old, it’s been almost 20 years, but I was at peace.”
Ancestral ties
Even the negatives, she remembered fondly.
“The checkpoints, getting shot at on my way to school, my brother getting kidnapped at one of the checkpoints one time, the way they terrorized my mom and my grandmother, and going to weddings and having to climb over that broken road where they would pile on asphalt so you’re in heels climbing over rubble to get to a wedding. But it was so beautiful and I was at peace. I think it’s because you feel your mortality more in that environment.”
Both of Jabr’s parents’ families are native to Beit Hanina, and during her three years there she lived with her paternal grandfather’s family and attended an all-girls Islamic school. Their ancestral roots in the beautiful hilltop town go back at least seven generations, as evidenced by family headstones in Beit Hanina’s original cemetery.
In fact, as the historian Basem Ra’ad shows in his 2010 academic study study Hidden Histories: Palestine and the Eastern Mediterranean, the archeological record proves that the Palestinian presence in Jerusalem is not limited to this millennium or last, that the Palestinian line of descent in places like Beit Hanina can be traced to ancient pre-biblical Canaanite society, around 4,000 years ago.
“According to my dad, the family fled briefly in 1948,” Jabr told me, “but came back to their homes once the killings stopped. Beit Hanina was relatively safe, or I should say livable, compared to, say, Deir Yassin where everyone was massacred.”
Her dad, who was born in 1963, didn’t see his own father until he was 6, because Jabr’s grandfather went to the United States to seek better job opportunities along with his older sons.
“My grandfather came back in 1969 and tried to establish a future for his children. In the years that followed, my grandfather would travel in pursuit of opportunities, while my dad cared for his siblings and mother at home.”
Yazied worked in a dairy factory near an Israeli settlement and endured all the typical experiences of a Palestinian youth growing up under military occupation.
“He told me that one year there was a bus bombing that happened near Beit Hanina and all the young men in the village were rounded up and imprisoned, no charges, no due process, no lawyers, just torture and in some cases killings. My dad was released after about a week. He didn’t go into more detail than that.”
Yazied completed high school in Beit Hanina, but never finished college because he had to work full-time to support his mother and siblings. When he turned 24, he came to Cleveland, Ohio, where he met Fatima. They got married and made a new family, starting with Hesen.
Fatima’s story follows the same Palestinian diaspora logic.
“My mom was born in Detroit,” Jabr said. “Her mother grew up there as well. My maternal grandmother was a baby when her family fled to the States after the Nakba, while my maternal grandfather was forced to leave Palestine in 1967 after the Israeli invasion, and he went to Venezuela.”
That’s where Jabr’s maternal grandparents met, and from where her grandfather followed her grandmother back to Detroit where the family stayed until Fatima was six and they moved to Brooklyn.
“Just like most Palestinians living in the diaspora, my family thrived by finding their communities and leaning on each other for survival. New York was a huge hub at the time for a lot of people from Beit Hanina, so that’s how they ended up in Brooklyn.”
Fatima earned a Bachelor of Science in Nursing degree in 2009, followed by a Doctor of Nursing Practice in 2014, and she continues to work in New York.
Winds of change
The clear majority of Americans support a ceasefire in Gaza. Among Democrats the numbers are even more stark, with over 75 percent even wanting to condition military aid to Israel.
This has put Israel and its western government sponsors, better known as “the axis of genocide” in Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sitta’s apt phrase, in panic mode. All of their propaganda has failed. Millions of Americans are beginning to see what Israel has always been up to in Palestine: land theft, apartheid, ethnic cleansing and genocide.
In response, these governments are lashing out at their most intelligent, compassionate and courageous citizens, people like Jabr, who are willing to stake their careers, or, in the case of the student protesters, their future careers, to tell the truth about this genocide, one of the most barbaric in recent human history.
Over 38,000 Palestinians are dead so far – and estimates put the real figure much higher at nearly 200,000 – amid the near total destruction of the Gaza Strip.
It is a genocide where Israeli soldiers broadcast the sounds of women screaming and babies crying from quadcopters to lure Palestinians out of their hiding places so they can shoot them.
Where the Israeli military announces food distribution points and delivers to the thousands of desperately hungry not flour and water but sniper fire and tank shelling.
Where smiling Israeli soldiers take selfies in front of shelves of burning books in a university library they just incinerated.
Where an entire people are now facing starvation as a result of an Israeli-engineered famine.
What the people protesting this medieval carnage are up against was stated with brutal clarity by the commanding officer of the California Highway Patrol, Jason Grimm, right before sending in his troops to crush the peaceful student encampment at the University of California Santa Cruz, at the behest of UCSC Chancellor Cynthia Larive: “We’re going to hurt you.”
NYU Langone has inflicted much hurt on Jabr.
“I loved NYU,” she said. “I loved the resources. I liked the camaraderie. The way we worked together was awesome. I loved my peers.”
Currently she’s working per diem, on an as-needed basis, when healthcare facilities are short-staffed. She is in the process of filing an anti-discrimination lawsuit with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
But no matter how it turns out, Jabr will not be returning to NYU Langone.
The aftermath of 7 October has exposed the dominant concept of politics in the US as being focused on disabling protest and dissent. For the past 30 years, we’ve been told that you can be political by adopting or embracing a “radical” identity or lifestyle or aesthetic, and that refusing to participate in an oppressive system is actually more political than directly confronting state power.
In other words, it was possible under this “postcolonial” notion of politics to never risk anything and still go around calling yourself political.
The Palestinian anticolonial revolt of 7 October exposed the emptiness and chicanery of this theory of politics. And the current generation of young people, through their brave and disciplined protest against Israel’s genocide in Gaza, have regained the true meaning of what it means to be political.
Much bigger things await us now, and the path to follow is the one Jabr has been on her whole life.
Jonathan Scott is Associate Professor of English at Bronx Community College.
Comments
fascists
Permalink kronikdenny replied on
More power to her! this will actually help her because today those of us on the correct side of history, help those who speak the truth. I only hope she won't apologize. She did nothing wrong.
Maine Healthcare Workers for
Permalink Jamila replied on
Maine Healthcare Workers for Palestine send our love to Hesen Jabr. NYU Langone's actions against you are deplorable. Thank you for speaking out!