Damsel in Distress: Arabs Thank God for Life in Israel
The poignant story of a young Arab-Israeli woman hanging between life and death, mercy and bureaucracy, Jordan and Galilee – as 2022 wound down.
Dina Khalil, 22 years old from the Arab-Israeli village of Jadeidi-Makr in Western Galilee, was studying nursing in Jordan. She and her roommates were putting up Christmas decorations outside their fourth floor apartment there when disaster struck and she fell!
Dina’s friends quickly got her to the local Jordanian hospital, but then disaster struck again in the form of cruel bureaucracy. The hospital refused to operate on her or even perform medical tests until they received payment of $4,000. Dina’s friends could not immediately produce the sum, and while they and the family scrambled to gather the payment, Dina’s life ebbed. Eventually she was brought across the Jordan River to a hospital in Haifa. But by then it was too late.
In a bittersweet ending, her heartbroken family instructed the Israeli hospital to use her organs for transplants, and so brought life-prolonging help to five Israelis, Arabs and Jews.
Yoseph Haddad, a pro-Israel Arab influencer whom Israel Today has interviewed in the past, says that the whole of Israeli Arab society is outraged over what happened to Dina, and shocked by the cruel withholding of urgent medical intervention in Jordan when it could well have saved her life.
For Israeli Arabs the juxtaposition of the Jordanian and Israeli baseline approaches to saving a human life was stark and startling.
Outcry in Arabic, in favor of Israel!
Israeli Arabs went on record on social media, in Arabic, thanking God for their good fortune in living in Israel rather than Jordan, or any other Arab state.
Here are some of their responses, translated for your benefit:
“How shameful. In Israel humanity comes before everything.”
“That’s how it is in Arab countries. Money is more important than human life. There’s nowhere better [to live] than Israel.”
“Thank God that we live in a country [Israel] that knows the value of human life.”
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