Israel Clashes With Protesters on Four Borders

With an unprecedented wave of coordinated protests, the popular uprisings that have swept the region for the first time touched Israel directly. Like those other protests, plans for this one spread over social media, including Facebook, but there were also signs of official support in Lebanon and Syria, where analysts said leaders were using the Palestinian cause to deflect attention from internal problems.

At the Lebanese border, Israeli troops shot at hundreds of Palestinians trying to force their way across. The Lebanese military said 10 protesters were killed and more than 100 were wounded; Israel said it was investigating the casualties.

In the Golan Heights, about 100 Palestinians living in Syria breached a border fence and crowded into the village of Majdal Shams, waving Palestinian flags. Troops fired on the crowd, killing four of them.

In the West Bank, about 1,000?protesters carrying Palestinian flags and throwing stones and occasional firecrackers and molotov cocktails tangled with Israeli riot troops near the military checkpoint between Ramallah?and Israel. Scores were injured, local medical officials said.

In Gaza, when marchers crossed a security zone near the border, Israeli troops fired into the crowd, wounding dozens.

In Jordan and Egypt, protesters setting off for the border were thwarted by government security forces.

Every year in mid-May, many Palestinians mark what they call the Nakba, or catastrophe, the anniversary of Israel’s declaration of independence in 1948 and the war in which hundreds of thousands of Palestinians lost their homes through expulsion and flight.

But this was the first year that Palestinian refugees and their supporters in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt, inspired by the recent protests around the Arab world, tried to breach Israel’s military border from all sides.

“The Palestinians are not less rebellious than other Arab peoples,” said Ali Baraka, a Hamas representative in Lebanon.

At day’s end, as a tense calm returned to the country’s borders, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said the protests had been aimed at destroying Israel, not creating a Palestinian state alongside it.

“The leaders of these violent demonstrations, their struggle is not over the 1967 borders but over the very existence of Israel, which they describe as a catastrophe that must be resolved,” he said in a televised statement. “It is important that we look with open eyes at the reality and be aware of whom we are dealing with and what we are dealing with.”

Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian authority, saluted the protesters in a televised speech, referring to the dead as martyrs. “The blood of the Nakba fatalities was not spilled in vain,” he said. “They died for the Palestinian people’s rights and freedom.”

Officials and analysts have argued that with peace talks broken down and plans for a request of the United Nations to declare Palestinian statehood in September, violence could return to define this conflict, which has been relatively quiet for the past two years.

“This is war,” said Amjad Abu Taha, a 16-year-old from Bethlehem who joined the protesters in Ramallah, a rock in one hand and a cigarette in the other. “We’re defending our country.”

Nearby, hundreds of Israeli troops roamed the area using stun guns and tear gas.

In Gaza, the Hamas police stopped buses carrying protesters near the main crossing into Israel, but dozens of demonstrators continued on foot, arriving at a point closer to the Israeli border than they had reached in years and drawing Israeli fire.

Later, in a separate incident, an 18-year-old Gazan near another part of the border fence was shot and killed by Israeli troops when, the Israeli military says, he was trying to plant an explosive.

Reporting was contributed by Nada Bakri and Hwaida Saad from Beirut, Fares Akram from Gaza, Ranya Kadri from Amman, Jordan, and David D. Kirkpatrick and Liam Stack from Cairo.

 

The E.U.'s Balancing Act on Open Borders

BRUSSELS — Allowing travelers to speed across frontiers and skip long lines at airports, the passport-free travel zone is a rare symbol of the benefits of closer European integration.

But this experiment in dismantling borders faces one of the biggest challenges in its 35-year history: Can it adapt to an era of growing international migration? Proposals due on Wednesday could bring the European Union unprecedented powers to manage external frontiers when migrants arrive en masse.

In exceptional circumstances, nations would find it easier to reinstate temporary controls at the hundreds of border checkpoints they have put into mothballs. And the European Union might even create its own border guard.

All this is being proposed to salvage a system that was already under increasing strain when it was plunged into crisis by the dispute between Italy and France over the arrival of more than 20,000 people from Tunisia as a result of the revolution there.

“In Europe, we are surrounded by poorer but increasingly internationally mobile peoples who want in to societies boasting the highest quality of life in the world,” said Hugo Brady, senior research fellow at the Center for European Reform. “It is hard to see how we can deter that desire indefinitely.”

The rift between Italy and France touched a raw nerve on a continent where anti-immigrant parties have chalked up a series of recent advances.

“We know,” said one European official who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, “that because of the coming French presidential elections and the situation in Italy, there is going to be a temptation to undermine one of the pillars of European integration.”

That is not the world envisaged by the founders of a system named after the tranquil wine-making village of Schengen, Luxembourg, where negotiators from Belgium, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and West Germany met in 1985. There, aboard a riverboat, they signed an accord on “the gradual abolition of controls at the common frontier.”

For countries whose borders had been fought over just 40 years earlier, this was a bold step, but one fundamentally concerned with scrapping internal barriers between nations that enjoyed strong economic and geographical similarities.

Yet while Britain and Ireland have stayed outside the Schengen zone, it has expanded enormously, even beyond the European Union to places like Norway and Switzerland, and now numbers 25 countries.

Inevitably, challenges have mounted, because once travelers enter one nation, there is little to stop them from moving on to another, making the zone only as strong as its weakest link. Anxiety has been worsened by plans to admit Bulgaria and Romania, both of which have struggled to control organized crime and corruption.

Expecting migratory pressure to be greatest on its eastern borders, the European Union created an agency to coordinate cooperation on border security — Frontex, based in Warsaw. South European nations, meanwhile, were relying on Arab and African regimes to control flows of migrants.

Italy, for example, began cooperating with Libya more than a decade ago. In 2008, Italy signed a friendship pact and agreed to pay $5 billion, spread over 25 years, officially as compensation for abuses during its 32-year colonial rule of Libya but effectively in exchange for cooperation in stopping migrants. There was pressure on countries like Morocco and Algeria to sign agreements to take back people who tried but failed to win asylum.

That strategy has been called into question by the “Arab Spring,” and a fierce dispute broke out last month when, convinced that they should have had more help dealing with the arrival of refugees from Tunisia, Italy issued temporary residence permits to those who arrived in Italy before April 5. Because the permits allowed them to move within the Schengen zone, France introduced border checks and pushed back hundreds of people.

The proposals due on Wednesday from the European Commission, the bloc’s executive, aim to avert such rifts, in part by giving countries greater freedom to close their borders temporarily under such exceptional circumstances.

In fact, however, Schengen nations have used existing rules to do exactly that at least 66 times since 1995, according to a recent paper by the Center for European Policy Studies. The justifications ranged from the wedding of Prince Felipe in Spain in 2004 to a visit by Hells Angels to Reykjavik in 2009.

Perhaps more significant, the European Commission will also propose a new crisis mechanism to try to prevent the type of tension seen between France and Italy.

This would “allow the Union to handle situations where either a member state is not fulfilling its obligations to control its section of the external border, or where a particular portion of the external border comes under unexpected and heavy pressure due to external events,” according to a draft of the document.

Frontex, the border security agency, would be able to mount special operations, as it did when it recently sent a 250-member multinational team to the Greek-Turkish border. How the mechanism would be triggered remains to be resolved.

Officials hope, however, that Frontex will gradually be granted greater resources and a bigger role. “The feasibility of creating a European system of border guards should be considered,” the draft document says.

The draft also seeks to address the bloc’s biggest problem with illegal migration: the E.U.’s inability to track those who overstay their visas. The answer, it says, is to go ahead with plans to create a European “entry-exit system” to record movements of non-E.U. citizens, though officials concede that constructing that will be costly.

That underlines how strengthening Schengen will require governments to spend more money and share more sovereignty — something they have shown little appetite for.

“The politics of Schengen are such that no one wants to give up control of their own frontiers but everyone wants some control over other countries’ borders,” said Mr. Brady, the research fellow. “That’s not the best basis for a new grand bargain on the rules of the game.”

 

Cases Without Borders: Without His Mother’s Milk, a Haitian Boy Is Lost

I got up and walked over to the hospital entrance. Because the emergency room had only two beds, and the hospital itself had limited resources, patients were sent through triage at the gate, and only those who could be treated were brought in. The others were turned away to seek care elsewhere.

Arriving at the gate, I could already smell the sharp odor of diarrhea. A young woman was holding a baby wrapped in a stained and tattered blanket. From the interpreter, I learned this was a 5-month-old boy with watery yellow diarrhea, vomiting and a decrease in oral intake during the previous four days.

Opening the blanket and looking at him, I was amazed that he was still alive. His chest looked like a chicken breast picked clean of meat. His mucus membranes were pasty dry, his eyes and fontanel were sunken and his skin hung off his arms and legs as if it were three sizes too large. At 5 months he weighed less than four and a half pounds.

The gastroenteritis, it turned out, was only what had tipped him over. On further questioning we learned that his mother had stopped nursing shortly after he was born because her “milk was bad,” and had been bottle-feeding him with watered-down 7Up soda.

Because he was so dehydrated, his veins had collapsed and the nurses in the emergency room weren’t able to place an intravenous line to give him fluids. It was clear that I’d have to insert a thick needle directly into his shinbone to deliver sterile saline solution with a syringe, an ounce at a time.

Never having done this before (though I had practiced on a raw chicken leg), I was nervous about the procedure. The only needle available was longer than his leg was thick, and I was afraid I would push it through and pin him to the mattress.

He hardly whimpered as the needle entered the tibial cavity with a crunch. We gave him the fluids and admitted him to the pediatric ward, but had no way of measuring his electrolytes. He continued to have severe diarrhea and died several hours after being admitted. While gastroenteritis can be fatal in otherwise healthy infants, his extreme malnutrition had made him more vulnerable, and we were unable to save him.

The Haitian belief in “bad milk” — “lèt gate,” in Creole — is well described by Paul Farmer in his book “Partner to the Poor” (University of California, 2010). It is one of the main reasons for the premature stopping of breast-feeding in Haiti, often with deadly consequences for the infant deprived of safe and dependable nourishment.

That same week, one of the nurses in our group was able to prevent something similar from happening to another infant for whom we were caring. Born a few hours before we arrived, and several weeks before his due date, he, too, weighed less than four and a half pounds.

He was placed in an incubator and given antibiotics, and he seemed to be doing well except for one thing: His mother refused to nurse him, or even to express milk to feed him by bottle. Denise, the nurse who cared for him the week we were there, could not understand why the mother refused so adamantly to feed her son.

She pressed the mother every time she saw her, explaining the advantages of breast milk over formula, until finally the mother explained that a previous child of hers had died in infancy, and that a houngan (voodoo priest) had told her that her milk was no good and that she must never nurse any subsequent babies or else they, too, would suffer a similar fate.

Each day Denise pleaded with her to try to nurse. On the third day, the maternal grandmother came to visit and had a long conversation with Denise, asking whether her daughter’s milk was somehow tainted. Denise assured her it was not.

The next day the mother agreed to try nursing her son. He had difficulty latching on, and she expressed a small amount into a bottle, which he eagerly gulped down.

The following morning she returned, nervous about how he had fared. Once she saw that he was fine, she unbuttoned her blouse and again tried to nurse, this time with better success. Over the next few days she continued to nurse him until she no longer needed to express into a bottle, and looked much more relaxed and in better spirits than she had since he was born.

The difference between breast milk and calorically depleted drinks, or formula prepared from water potentially contaminated with organisms that cause diseases like cholera, can be a matter of life or death. And so encouraging this young mother to give her son the sustenance he needed was a potentially lifesaving intervention, achieved through patience, education and the building of trust.

While it may not sound like much, the sad truth is that in Haiti all of these are hard to come by and remain very much in need.

Dr. Dennis Rosen is a pediatric pulmonologist at Children’s Hospital Boston and an instructor at Harvard Medical School.

 

Cases Without Borders: Without His Mother’s Milk, a Haitian Boy Is Lost

I got up and walked over to the hospital entrance. Because the emergency room had only two beds, and the hospital itself had limited resources, patients were sent through triage at the gate, and only those who could be treated were brought in. The others were turned away to seek care elsewhere.

Arriving at the gate, I could already smell the sharp odor of diarrhea. A young woman was holding a baby wrapped in a stained and tattered blanket. From the interpreter, I learned this was a 5-month-old boy with watery yellow diarrhea, vomiting and a decrease in oral intake during the previous four days.

Opening the blanket and looking at him, I was amazed that he was still alive. His chest looked like a chicken breast picked clean of meat. His mucus membranes were pasty dry, his eyes and fontanel were sunken and his skin hung off his arms and legs as if it were three sizes too large. At 5 months he weighed less than four and a half pounds.

The gastroenteritis, it turned out, was only what had tipped him over. On further questioning we learned that his mother had stopped nursing shortly after he was born because her “milk was bad,” and had been bottle-feeding him with watered-down 7Up soda.

Because he was so dehydrated, his veins had collapsed and the nurses in the emergency room weren’t able to place an intravenous line to give him fluids. It was clear that I’d have to insert a thick needle directly into his shinbone to deliver sterile saline solution with a syringe, an ounce at a time.

Never having done this before (though I had practiced on a raw chicken leg), I was nervous about the procedure. The only needle available was longer than his leg was thick, and I was afraid I would push it through and pin him to the mattress.

He hardly whimpered as the needle entered the tibial cavity with a crunch. We gave him the fluids and admitted him to the pediatric ward, but had no way of measuring his electrolytes. He continued to have severe diarrhea and died several hours after being admitted. While gastroenteritis can be fatal in otherwise healthy infants, his extreme malnutrition had made him more vulnerable, and we were unable to save him.

The Haitian belief in “bad milk” — “lèt gate,” in Creole — is well described by Paul Farmer in his book “Partner to the Poor” (University of California, 2010). It is one of the main reasons for the premature stopping of breast-feeding in Haiti, often with deadly consequences for the infant deprived of safe and dependable nourishment.

That same week, one of the nurses in our group was able to prevent something similar from happening to another infant for whom we were caring. Born a few hours before we arrived, and several weeks before his due date, he, too, weighed less than four and a half pounds.

He was placed in an incubator and given antibiotics, and he seemed to be doing well except for one thing: His mother refused to nurse him, or even to express milk to feed him by bottle. Denise, the nurse who cared for him the week we were there, could not understand why the mother refused so adamantly to feed her son.

She pressed the mother every time she saw her, explaining the advantages of breast milk over formula, until finally the mother explained that a previous child of hers had died in infancy, and that a houngan (voodoo priest) had told her that her milk was no good and that she must never nurse any subsequent babies or else they, too, would suffer a similar fate.

Each day Denise pleaded with her to try to nurse. On the third day, the maternal grandmother came to visit and had a long conversation with Denise, asking whether her daughter’s milk was somehow tainted. Denise assured her it was not.

The next day the mother agreed to try nursing her son. He had difficulty latching on, and she expressed a small amount into a bottle, which he eagerly gulped down.

The following morning she returned, nervous about how he had fared. Once she saw that he was fine, she unbuttoned her blouse and again tried to nurse, this time with better success. Over the next few days she continued to nurse him until she no longer needed to express into a bottle, and looked much more relaxed and in better spirits than she had since he was born.

The difference between breast milk and calorically depleted drinks, or formula prepared from water potentially contaminated with organisms that cause diseases like cholera, can be a matter of life or death. And so encouraging this young mother to give her son the sustenance he needed was a potentially lifesaving intervention, achieved through patience, education and the building of trust.

While it may not sound like much, the sad truth is that in Haiti all of these are hard to come by and remain very much in need.

Dr. Dennis Rosen is a pediatric pulmonologist at Children’s Hospital Boston and an instructor at Harvard Medical School.