On the frontlines

Five young women of W. Bank-based Kfir Brigade discuss why they choose to place themselves in the line of fire on an almost daily basis.

By PAUL ALSTER
KFIR BRIGADE paramedics 370 (photo credit: PAUL ALSTER)
KFIR BRIGADE paramedics 370
(photo credit: PAUL ALSTER)
The spotlight on military service in Israel invariably falls on the male soldiers, particularly those involved in combat duties.
Parents of boys who embark on three years’ service face many a sleepless night; one ear trained on radio broadcasts and one eye on social media, assuring themselves their sons aren’t in any more danger than is the norm. For the parents of female soldiers worries also exist, but are usually of a lesser scale, with very few women being actively involved in front-line combat duties.
So for the families of the girls based at Central Command in the West Bank, their day-to-day concerns are just as real – if not more so – than the families of the girls’ male counterparts.
“When you’re a father of boys how you worry” sang the late American singer Perry Como, “But when you’re a father of girls you do more than that, you pray.”
Entering the heavily guarded compound of the Kfir Brigade – the division responsible for patrolling the West Bank and ensuring that calm reigns as much as possible in what is sometimes a highly charged and dangerous place – you realize that a posting here is never likely to be much of a picnic.
“When you are a girl going into the military the kind of positions offered are very different to the men,” Capt. Shani Kesari, the senior figure of the team, tells me. “If you want to express all your abilities you can have a profession like a paramedic. You know you’re going to spend two or three years in the military and you want to contribute or make them as significant as you can. This [the paramedics] is one place where you can do that.”
While around the world girls in their late teens are starting college or university, taking their first salaried jobs, or traveling before deciding on their future direction, Capt. Kesari, together with sergeants Shani Davidpor, Dar Golan, Amit Mor and Carmel Cohen go out on active duty in full military uniform, ceramic vest, helmet, an automatic weapon in one hand and a tightly packed kit bag containing a plethora of emergency medical supplies and equipment in the other.
They are almost always the only girls among their male colleagues.
“We want to do the maximum,” Mor, 21, explains.
“Every time I go out I get the feeling that I’ve got where I want to be. I feel sometimes that I’m a trailblazer, but I’m one of the team and the team will protect me.”
“The team” are the soldiers of the Kfir Brigade. While out on patrol they may be called to deal with a riot, to disperse crowds of stone throwers, pursue and engage terror suspects; every day brings new challenges. “I spare my family most of the details.
They know what they know, and that’s what I tell them” says Davidpor, 20.
“My family is terrified of me being under fire” admits Golan, 21. “They’ve come around now and know this is what I want to do. They’ve been here to see me and that has calmed them down.” Mor smiles and says, “I’m kinda the guy in the family, so it’s OK!” THE TYPE of incident their parents wouldn’t want to hear of occurred just a couple of days before our meeting.
“Two days ago we [the unit] were in one of the Arab villages treating a patient when three Molotov cocktails were thrown at our ‘Ze’ev’ ambulance and the left door was on fire for 15 minutes while we were inside. That’s frightening,” Golan recalls.
“These situations where rocks and stones are thrown happen quite often. Soldiers have injuries from rocks and I will be in the same danger. It’s OK. This is what we do. This is what we’re trained to do.
Your training immediately kicks in and your only goal is to treat someone, or save someone’s life. Afterwards, you sometimes sit down and say to yourself, ‘If I can perform medicine under these circumstances, on the ground, without much equipment and while someone is threatening me, I can perform medicine anywhere.’ That’s where the satisfaction comes in.”
When a soldier or civilian is injured the paramedics swing into operation. Despite their youth, when the situation moves to a medical emergency the paramedics take charge, even over higher-ranking officers.
What is going through their head as they rush to treat someone in the midst of a bloody riot? “We are first of all soldiers,” answers Kesari. “We all carry a gun. It’s a problem though because trying to treat someone while wearing the ceramic vest and a helmet is not so easy. You need to practice medicine in situations that are not ideal.
In civilian medicine, even in emergencies, the doctor or paramedic has control of the situation. We have first to make sure no one is training a gun on us, or that the patient isn’t someone planning an attack or trying to lure us into danger.
“All the time you have to assess the risk,” she continues. “You are not alone though, as other soldiers are with you and guard you while you are treating. It affects the way you treat people. You have to look at the battlefield all the time and assess the time to evacuation.”
DEALING WITH a medical emergency is a highly pressurized affair even in the best of conditions. The Kfir paramedics, however, have to combine the need to do the best for the patient in battlefield conditions with the overall military imperative, a fluid graph that can change by the moment depending on circumstances.
“You have civilians around – sometimes threatening – and you have your commanders wanting things done as fast as possible,” says Kesari. “It’s not often that a lower-ranking soldier gives orders to someone who outranks them and those people have to do what they are told.
Interacting with [more senior] military people and convincing them that what you are saying is the right thing to do; that’s always a challenge.”
On the outskirts of the settlement of Beit El, I visited one of the military clinics staffed around the clock by either a Kfir paramedic or a doctor.
The facility is basic but offers the necessary equipment to deal with a wide range of cases, often local Palestinians who choose to come to the military clinic where they will be cared for free of charge. This is in essence a part of the hasbara (public diplomacy) front line, a place to combat the often preached ideology that Israeli Jews are an evil enemy.
“We treat them as patients, not as Palestinians,” Cohen, 20, stresses. “They know who is coming to treat them. You’d be surprised at the kind of cooperation we have with civilians.
Sometimes we have arrived in situations and they clear a path and say ‘The doctor is here.’ If there is a father whose son is hurt, if you come to give help and they see the stethoscope, it’s OK. In the villages I have had 50 people surrounding me when I’m treating someone and I feel safe. They know we don’t care who the patient is. They know it.”
“There is something about medicine that is so non-political and can calm down many situations” adds Golan. “The Red Crescent tends to deal with treatment in the big cities, but in places where our military presence is bigger – especially in rural places – there are few medical facilities available and they know that the military will treat them when they need it. We actually feel like we are the rural clinic. We deal with cases that involve asthma, heart attacks, stabbings, shootings and even children run over by a car. They come to the gate and ask for help and they know they will get it.”
“It’s very different to being a paramedic in Tel Aviv where so many of your cases are things like heart attacks or strokes, but there have been babies delivered as well,” smiles Kesari.
What about the sensibilities of both religious Muslims and Jews in the West Bank? Isn’t it a problem when a young woman is the only medic available? “I promise you,” says Mor, “with Orthodox Jews or Muslims, when it’s a matter of life or death nobody takes the time to think about it.”
“One battalion in our brigade is made up of Orthodox Jews,” adds Cohen. “There are no girls at all. But when we are training they have interaction with girls. If someone needs medical attention and it is given in a professional way, it is not a problem.”
Strict selection for the army paramedic course is based on a series of demanding tests of the girls’ all-round abilities, as well as their reactions under pressure. Once selected they embark on 14 months’ training, the first section being an intensive course run by Magen David Adom before they undergo two and a half months of basic military training.
ALONGSIDE THE women are male paramedic trainees, and male counterparts on basic training. I wondered just how easily the women are accepted by the men.
“At the end of the day you have to deliver and be the person to take care of others,” Davidpor stresses. “They look at you as someone responsible. If you have this training and are in this position, they will show you respect. But always in life a woman has to prove herself more. It’s the same in the military. We have to work hard to be something. You will always be the girl.”
Sometimes, though, the unexpected presence of a girl in their midst can have embarrassing repercussions for the men.
“I was on a week-long exercise with the infantry,” says Cohen, “and we had to walk with a 40-kg. pack on our back, eating very little food because this was a combat unit. When you have your helmet and gear on its sometimes hard for someone to recognize if you are a boy or a girl. One of the fighters didn’t notice and started telling me the type of story a guy only tells to another guy. He was in shock when I told him I’m a girl! Humor is very important in our work. It helps keep spirits up. Things can be quite bizarre!” Watching them at work and listening to their calm recollections of hair-raising incidents, it’s easy to forget just how young the Kfir Brigade paramedics are, facing situations that would challenge much older people with more life experience.
“I had a case,” confesses one of the girls, “when a person had just talked to me and then died. I had a hard time with myself. How could I have prevented it? What did I do wrong? In the end I had to understand that there are some things you just can’t prevent.
You have to do your best, but sometimes it won’t be enough.”
Not all the girls want to go on to a professional career in medicine, but some certainly will, in some form or other.
At weekends, or when they get time away from the base, can they really leave their work behind and switch off? “I just go to sleep,” laughs Golan.
“I have no problem switching off once I get home,” adds Davidpor.
“Each of us has a different reason for being here,” Cohen surmises. “Bottom line – we all wanted to do something different, something that would make us feel that we really did the army and passed through with something to take from it. What you get from it you can’t return. I’m not the same person I was three years ago. It’s made me a stronger person.”
TOGETHER WITH pride at their achievements, though, is a tinge of sadness that such a task is necessary at all. I wonder aloud, wouldn’t it be nice if, like so many of their contemporaries around the globe their biggest concern was which dress to wear to the nightclub at the weekend? “Don’t think finding the right dress for a party doesn’t worry us every bit as much!” exclaims Capt. Kesari, to uproarious laughter from her team.
The author is a freelance journalist.www.paulalster.com • @paul_alster