Project Rozana

So much to record. So little time. Here's one I've so far had to put on hold. It concerns the woes of, in the words of the appended bio to the opinion piece I'm about to highlight, "Jamal Rifi AM is a Lebanese-born Australian citizen who runs a medical practice in Sydney. He is a prominent member of the Lebanese Muslim community and was awarded The Australian newspaper's Australian of the year in 2015. https://projectrozana.org/"

Dr Rifi's woes are connected with his involvement in Project Rozana, but I'll leave it to him to relate them, as he has in a 31/5/19 opinion piece in The Australian, The children are all that count: Politics & Religion have no role on Project Rozana, where healthcare is paramount:

"During the past two weeks I have been subjected to an enormous amount of abuse from people whose agenda runs counter to mine Most of that abuse has appeared in Lebanese newspaper Al Akhbar, an influential Arabic language newspaper affiliated with Hezbollah in Lebanon, the country of my birth."

Now if I may interrupt here to clarify the status of Al-Akhbar. Asad Abukhalil, aka The Angry Arab, a Lebanese-American professor of political science at California State University, Stanislaus, has not only been a contributor to Al-Akhbar's pages but has had something of a love-hate relationship with the paper over the years, making him something of an objective source on the subject. Here, for example, are just two of his blog (The Angry Arab News Service) posts on Al-Akhbar:

"Ignorant Western correspondents who can't read Arabic refer to Lebanese daily, Al-Akhbar, as 'Hizbullah's paper'. Here is a supplement on Lenin published by the paper. You think Hizbullah likes Lenin?" (Al-Akhbar has a special supplement on Lenin: and you think that a Hizbullah paper would honour Lenin and Bolsheviks? November 13, 2017)

"Al-Akhbar's publisher, Ibrahim Al-Amin, published a scathing critique of Hizbullah and its corrupt role in Lebanese domestic politics. He takes on the party for its reluctance to engage in social justice struggle. But the party is not a progressive party so it is not surprising to me." (Criticisms of Hizbullah's political role in Al-Akhbar, September 15, 2017)

Having, I hope, clarified that Al-Akhbar is emphatically not "affiliated" with Hizbullah, let us return to the words of Dr Rifi:

"I have even been referred to the military court in Lebanon in a poorly disguised attempt to discredit me and silence my brother in Beirut, Major-General Achraf Rifi, a former director-general of the Lebanese Internal Security Forces, former minister of justice and an outspoken critic of Hezbollah and its masters in Iran." (ibid)

(What Dr Rifi does not divulge here is that his brother has "close ties to Saudi Arabia." (See Wikipedia entry for Achraf/Ashraf Rifi.))

"The abuse is directed at my involvement with Project Rozana, a humanitarian organisation that started in Australia in 2013 and is active in the US, Canada, Israel and Palestinian territory. I joined as a director in 2017. Among my fellow directors are inspirational communal leaders of the Muslim, Christian and Jewish faiths... Our single-minded desire is to build bridges to better understanding between Israelis and Palestinians through health... A cornerstone of Project Rozana is to provide lifesaving treatment for Palestinian children and to build the health capacity of Palestinian society... It's about the children... So why am I accused of promoting a policy of 'normalisation' between Palestinians and Israelis? Why have I become the punching bag of people in Australia and Lebanon who regard any affiliation with Jews, let alone professed Zionists, as being haram (forbidden according to Islamic law)? [...] During my 2017 visit [to Israel], I was privileged to meet Palestinian and Israeli volunteers who each day drive critically and chronically ill Palestinian children from their homes in the West Bank to the checkpoints and from these checkpoints to hospitals in Israel... This is a lifesaving service in the real sense of the word." (ibid)

You'll note here that there is no mention of taking critically ill children from Gaza to Israel for medical treatment. The case of Aisha a-Lulu, published in the Sydney Morning Herald on 14/6/19 under the title A little girl lost in Gaza politics (Isabel Debre & Fares Akram) is a case in point. Here are the relevant extracts from that piece:

"When Palestinian preschooler Aisha a-Lulu came out of brain surgery in a strange Jerusalem hospital room, she called out for her mother and father. She repeated the cry over and over, but her parents never came. Instead of a family member, Israeli authorities had approved a stranger to escort Aisha from the blockaded Gaza Strip to the east Jerusalem hospital. As her condition deteriorated, the child was returned to Gaza unconscious. One week later, she was dead... So far this year, about half of applications for patient companion permits were rejected or left unanswered by Israel, according to the World Health Organisation. That has forced more than 600 patients, including some dozen children, to leave the territory alone or without close family. [...] The Shin Bet [Israel's FBI] declined to comment on the case. But in a statement, it emphasised Israel's security concerns about Gaza patients and their companions. 'The terrorist organisations in the Gaza Strip, headed by Hamas, are working tirelessly to cynically exploit the humanitarian and medical assistance provided by Israel,' it said. Efrat, of Physicians for Human Rights Israel, said he was confident that 'most of these rejections are arbitrary'."

Which begs the question: why isn't Dr Rifi's Project Rozana involved in cases like that of Aisha a-Lulu in Gaza? If Project Rozana has the ability to do what it does in the West Bank, with gravely ill Palestinian children such as Rozana, who have their parents by their side in hospital, then why doesn't the same pertain in Gaza? Has Dr Rifi ever raised the matter of gravely ill children from Gaza with Project Rozana? If so, what was their response? And if he hasn't raised the matter, why not?