As Israel-haters, the mainstream media, television medical dramas, and certain long-past-their-used-by-date comedy shows would have you believe that Jews only care about the lives of their fellow Jews, real life continues to show the opposite is the case.
A nurse at Jerusalem’s Hadassah Medical Center won the gratitude of a family from East Jerusalem after breastfeeding the infant daughter of a woman who was seriously injured in a car accident Saturday.
The family of five were all hurt in the car’s collision with a truck in the Hebron area.
The four-month-old baby did not accept a bottle and was wailing loudly for hours. Staff was considering feeding her intravenously, but when nurse Yael Cohen arrived, she offered to feed her herself.
“It wasn’t odd for me at all to offer it, even though I’ve never breastfed another person’s baby,” said Cohen, a mother of two from the settlement of Nokdim.
“I asked the aunt taking care of her if it was okay for me to breastfeed, I wanted to hear that it’s fine by her. She was immediately enthusiastic and thanked me happily,” Cohen recounted. “She was helpless, she didn’t know what to do.
“As a mother it broke me to see [the baby] suffering. She was hungry, her mother wasn’t by her side and the only thing that could calm her was unavailable,” she said.
“I sat down, took her to me, calmed her and fed her. And suddenly it got quiet, she calmed down and ate hungrily.”
Cohen said she was very touched by the family’s warm response to her.
“I could understand so much. I have two girls who were bottle refuseniks and only breastfed and it was so clear to me that when you need to breastfeed, you don’t think of anything, just of the baby crying of hunger.”
An uncle of the infant said: “It’s not something every woman would have done. It’s not easy to do for a baby that’s not yours… It saved her after a long time of being hungry and refusing to feed on anything else.”
No doubt, this will drive the haters crazy – especially considering nurse Yael Cohen is a “settler.”
Allow me to drive them even crazier: This is not even the first time a Jewish nurse here has breastfed a palestinian Arab baby.
In other words, this is not even a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence. It is totally something a Jewish nurse here would do and does. Because unlike the narrative advanced by haters, mainstream media, television medical dramas, and certain long-past-their-used-by-date comedy shows, to us Jews – all lives really do matter.
Update: In related news, an Israeli medical delegati on landed in Equatorial Guinea yesterday to assist the African country after massive explosions on a military base killed over 100 people and injured hundreds.
