In 2005, the consulate thankfully moved to its new home
in Arnona in the western part of the city. Inside, however, things are pretty
much the same. Almost all local employees are Arabic-speaking Palestinians. I
never hear a word of Hebrew. This isn’t coincidental.
A quick look at the cultural activities on the
consulate’s website and its Arabic language Facebook page shows activities
exclusively aimed at benefiting West Bank and east Jerusalem Palestinians,
whether the focus is women’s rights or small businesses. Even Environment Day
had the consul going to Wadi Kelt “to observe local flora and fauna in one of
the West Bank’s most vibrant natural habitats.” As for local hires, almost all job
descriptions require Arabic.
After speaking with one of the very few Orthodox Jewish
American Consulate employees, I now realize why.
Eliana M. Aaron is by all accounts a remarkable woman.
The first practicing nurse practitioner in Israel, she holds degrees from
Yeshiva University, New York University and Rutgers University and was recently
accepted to a select doctoral program in nursing at Yale. The great-niece of
the late senator Arlen Spector of Pennsylvania, she made aliya in 2002 with her
husband, Avrum, a lawyer, to participate in the Zionist dream. Instead, she has
found her- self, with tragic irony, the victim of what she describes as an
anti-Jewish campaign orchestrated by none other than the American Consulate in
Jerusalem set up to serve the interests of Americans living abroad.
It all started in 2004 when she accepted the position of
advanced practice nurse and medical officer for the US Consulate General in
Jerusalem, founding its health unit and being put in charge of the healthcare
of US diplomats and their family members, VIP US government visitors and local
staff. Her reputation was such that when US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
visited Israel, Clinton’s staff personally requested Aaron as their medical
officer. Responsible for only work-related health issues for local staff, she
went way beyond, once managing to coordinate between the IDF and the
Palestinian Authority to rush a Palestinian staff member’s hemorrhaging newborn
to an advanced Israeli operating room, saving his life.
Nevertheless, from the beginning, Aaron says she found
the working environment at the consulate overtly hostile toward her as an
Orthodox Jew and an Israeli. “In 2004 my supervisor, Sylvia Martinez, told me
that others didn’t want to work with me because I was Jewish,” she says. In
2005, the head of USAID at the consulate bent her ear describing a movie about
suicide bombers and how “she now understood and sympathized with them.”
BUT THE real problems started in 2010. “A diplo- mat who
was about to give birth insisted that I make arrangements for her at a hospital
in Nazareth. Well, there is no hospital in Nazareth.
Next, she insisted on a Palestinian hospital in east
Jerusalem. But that hospital didn’t have a materni- ty ward.” When Aaron
explained this, the woman responded angrily, accusing her of “just saying that
because you are Jewish.”
From that moment onward, Aaron found herself reprimanded
again and again for not providing enough options for Palestinian doctors and
hospitals for the consulate staff. “I was hired because I had con- nections to
the best local medical care. It was my job to find doctors with Western
degrees, who spoke Eng- lish and had an excellent reputation. Now I was being
asked to lower my criteria. I was being told to choose by race and religion as
a priority instead of quality of care. This was unacceptable to me.”
She describes how human resources officer Kather- ine
Bischoff (who would later wear a “Free Palestine” T-shirt to Ben-Gurion Airport
when she was on leave to the US) pointed an accusing finger at her, saying:
“People don’t want to wait in waiting rooms full of Orthodox Jews. Find us
[i.e. consulate personnel] Palestinian doctors.”
According to Aaron, when she complained to her supervisor
about the prejudiced remark, she was sim- ply blown off. Eventually, she
selected a Palestinian clinic in east Jerusalem. “But when the head was
arrested for affiliation with Hamas, I refused to con- tact him even though my
supervisor and American security officers wanted me to continue.”
Realizing her superiors would not help, she filed a
complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEO) in 2011. She
says she did this not only for herself, but for every Israeli Jew working for
the consulate – most of whom are low-level employ- ees afraid of losing their
jobs. “What I suffered was tip of the iceberg to what goes on there,” she says
Her work conditions consistently worsened. In a grievance filed against her
acting supervisor, Edward “Dwayne” Jefferson, she details how he told her:
“When you speak, it’s a bitch session.” According to Aaron, Jefferson made it
clear to her colleagues that he had made firing her a priority.
Despite her pending EEO complaint, she was, in her words,
“systematically targeted.” They took away her company car, accusing her of
“unauthorized use” in the “settlements” after she took it to a car wash in
Modi’in: “They took away my flextime, stripped my position description, almost
every request was chal- lenged, leave requests denied, my medical confiden-
tiality violated and, worse, I was asked to violate my patients’
confidentiality.”
Weekly, anonymous callers accused her of taking
kickbacks, selling government equipment, tax fraud and, most wounding of all to
this caring, meticulous professional, medical misconduct.
According to Aaron, despite every allegation being
thoroughly investigated and found baseless, she was nevertheless fired in a
well-orchestrated termination that had been planned months in advance. The
grounds? “They told me I had “misused a govern- ment vehicle” and “stolen” the
vaccinations I received after being asked to get them by the Office of Medical
Services in the State Department.”
Furious and heartbroken over what she considered illegal
retaliatory actions for her EEO complaint, Aaron appealed her dismissal to US
Consul General Michael Ratney. He refused to reconsider.
In January 2013, she filed a lawsuit against the con-
sulate in the Jerusalem Labor Court demanding to be reinstated and compensated.
Facing mounting legal bills, she says the consulate delayed paying her termina-
tion compensation – which has only just now been paid – and has not returned
her medical license or her per- sonal computer files that contain her pay
stubs. Instead, consulate officials have accused her of “stealing con- sulate
property” – i.e. her work laptop, employee ID and mobile phones, all of which
she informed them were at her lawyer’s office for them to pick up, as she has
been barred from entering the consulate.
Like David facing Goliath, she has no illusions: “I am
going up against a big and powerful machine. But I want justice to be done. And
if that means fighting, I will fight.”
When I asked about Aaron, I received the following
response from Leslie Ordeman, the US Consulate press attaché and spokesperson:
“We do not provide details on specific administrative actions internal to the
mission due to privacy and legal concerns. We can say generally that when- ever
disciplinary action is taken against a local employee of any of our diplomatic missions
overseas we follow all relevant local labor laws and State Department
regulations. United States diplomatic missions overseas, to include the
Consulate General in Jerusalem, maintain work environments that pro- mote
tolerance and reflect the American values we endorse worldwide. We have no
tolerance for racial or religious discrimination.”
As she waits for the slow wheels of justice to turn and
to be fully reinstated in her position in the consulate, the highly qualified
Aaron has received a number of job offers. She is currently a Yale doctoral
candidate as well as being involved in two non-profit organizations: the
Association of Mid-level Medical Providers in Israel, an advocacy group to
advance nursing practice and recognition for foreign-trained nurse
practitioners in Israel, of which she is co-founder; and Level Lev, the African
Refugee Clinic in Tel Aviv, where she is volunteer director of research
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