I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor's Journey Read online

  Though the conflict kept raging, my brothers and I decided to build a new house—a five-storey building where we could live separately but together, one brother on each floor except for the first floor, which we reserved for our mother. We chipped in together, although I paid for most of it, and constructed a house in Jabalia City, on the outskirts of the camp. My brother Shehab lived nearby, while my three sisters lived with their husbands and their husbands’ relatives in Jabalia Camp and Gaza City. But like everything else in our lives, the new house presented a new dilemma. Our mother, Dalal, the strongest woman I’d ever known, refused to move in with us. She was still waiting for my brother Noor to come home. All those years, she hung up his shirts to air and pressed his trousers, hoping that he would walk through the door and all would be as it was. She watched constantly for him. She wouldn’t leave the small house in the refugee camp that had been built with the money I earned at fifteen in case Noor came home and couldn’t find us. Of course, everyone knew where we were now and they would have told him how to find us. But our mother stood firm, and so each of her sons took turns staying with her. One of my brothers named his daughter Noor and another named his son Noor. We kept him in the family that way. It’s all we could do. My mother regularly dreamed that she saw him returning home, though he’d been gone for nineteen years.

  When we moved into our lovely new home in September 2001, she would not set foot in it. She was still waiting for her missing son. I begged her to come. But she said she would not. I couldn’t fully understand her thinking. I still don’t. But we decided that we had to make her happy and comfortable and simply help her to stay on in the place she needed to be.

  I was on duty on September 11, 2001, in the emergency room of the gynecology department at the Soroka hospital. We were busy with patients that night, so busy I hardly had time to scratch my head. At about midnight one of the cleaners said, “Buildings are falling in America.” I went to a room that had a television in it and saw what he was talking about. The first tower of the World Trade Center was collapsing. Nobody thought terror could come to America. But it had.

  As a Palestinian, I knew a thing or two about terror. I’d been living with it for much of my life. Soon after the tragedy of 9/11, I was invited to participate in a panel discussion at a symposium the American Friends of Soroka Medical Center of the Negev were organizing in New York City. It was titled “After Terrorism Strikes: A Dialogue of Healing.” The other panellists were a journalist, David Makovsky, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the lawyer Steven Flatow, who was the father of Alisa Flatow, who was killed by a suicide bomber in Gaza, and Esther Chachkes, the director of the Social Work Department at New York University Medical Center. I knew immediately that I wanted to accept this invitation, wanted to address this audience on this topic. But then I heard from the organizer, Mona Abramson, my friend and colleague of five years at Soroka hospital, that one of the other panellists wanted my name withdrawn.

  It was Steven Flatow who rejected my name. He’d asked Mona, “What’s a Palestinian from Gaza coming to this conference for? My daughter was killed in Gaza.” But Abramson told me that she persuaded him by saying, “Don’t be judgmental, don’t be impulsive, and don’t say no without knowing.” When Mona explained the resistance to me and asked if I’d still be a panellist, I told her I was ready, that I didn’t even have to think twice about this opportunity. Because that’s the way I saw it—as an opportunity to cross this bridge to get to these people. This is precisely where the healing needs to begin. I carefully prepared my message, wanting to make every single word count. I wasn’t nervous, but I was upset because I realized that they could only see themselves and didn’t want to see me or understand what I needed to tell them.

  I flew to New York determined to speak my truth, but worried about what I’d face as the only Palestinian voice among Jews on the panel. When I got there, it was clear that the audience were mostly Jewish. Even before the panel discussion began, members of the audience were tossing provocative comments my way. One said, “You raise your kids to hate us.” I wanted to let them know what life was really like for Palestinians, and I felt the gravitas of the situation because it was an opportunity to open their eyes. As baseball fans right here in America would say, “I had to hit this speech out of the park” if I wanted to make a difference to their view of Palestinians. I looked at the audience in front of me and understood the size of the task before me. You can tell when people have closed minds—they lean back in their chairs, don’t make eye contact, behave as though their attendance is a perfunctory task. Maybe they were only here to see the other panellists put me in my place; that happens as well. But it usually doesn’t end that way. I had information they didn’t have, I had the stories to tell, and I had a case to make. I reminded myself to smile when it was my turn to speak. There were about three hundred people in the room. I was third in the order of speakers. They’d already heard from Steven Flatow when I stepped up to the podium.

  At first I wondered if they were even able to hear me, given the size of the terrorist tragedy they had just suffered. Could they process the agony of another when they’d just been attacked themselves? I wanted to tell them about the last four weeks in the Middle East, about the extreme tension between Israelis and Palestinians, about Ariel Sharon saying, “Everyone has his Osama bin Laden, ours is Yasser Arafat,” about the blameless Palestinian children who had been killed, the people on both sides, including leaders, who’d been assassinated in brutal acts of revenge, the lynching of Israeli soldiers in Ramallah, the anti-Arab pogrom in Nazareth. September 11 had unleashed a toll on my side of the world as well. That’s how terrorism seeds its roots. By finding its way among the disenfranchised, the discontented and the uneducated, it germinates fear, distrust and intolerance.

  I didn’t want to talk about Balfour Declarations and Peace Accords and Jewish settlements and smugglers’ tunnels between Gaza and Egypt. Everyone on this file talks about those issues incessantly. I wanted to talk about people, about trust, respect and tolerance. I wanted to share what I know of Israelis and Palestinians, how much alike we are.

  We all need to understand that there are evil people in every country, every religion, every culture. But there is also a silent camp of people in every country who believe like I do that we can bring two communities together by listening to each other’s points of view and concerns. It’s that simple. I know it is; I’ve been doing it for almost all of my adult life. Look at the Middle East, the bruised Holy Land and its generations of hatred and bloodshed. The way to replace that is with dialogue and understanding. Trust in the Middle East is such a rare commodity today, it’s gasping for air. The thing is, you cannot ask people to coexist by having one side bow their heads and rely on a solution that is only good for the other side. What you can do is stop blaming each other and go after a dialogue with one person at a time. Everyone knows that violence begets violence and breeds more hatred. We need to find our way together. I feel I cannot rely on the various spokespersons who claim they act on my behalf. Invariably they have some agenda that doesn’t work for me. Instead, I talk to my patients, to my neighbours and colleagues—Jews, Arabs—and I find out they feel as I do: we are more similar than we are different, and we’re all fed up with the violence.

  As a physician practising in Israel and Gaza, I see medicine as the bridge between us, just as education and friendship have been bridges. We all know what to do, so who is stopping us? Who is holding up the barrier between our two sides? We need to reach each other by sending messages of tolerance rather than intolerance and healing instead of hate.

  I watched this audience of Jewish Americans while I spoke. I could see them absorbing the truth when I recited the facts of life in Gaza. They weren’t leaning back in their chairs waiting for me to finish. Like decent people everywhere, they were shocked by what I had to say and a little surprised by the simplicity of my message. I knew I had scored when Steve Flatow, the m
an who didn’t approve of my presence on the panel, stood up and said, “Tomorrow you are invited for Shabbat lunch at my house.” He sent a limousine for me the next day. We had lunch with his mother and after lunch he said, “Izzeldin, what can I do for the Gazans?” There was no better gift I could have received that day.

  In February 2002, my mother died, and I felt I had lost the person who sacrificed the most for me. She was the one who held the family together when I was a child. It was her strength—sometimes outright bullying—that moved all of us forward. Just a few days before she died, I found her standing on the street waiting for a ride to her cousin’s house and I took her there in my car. She seemed much as she had always been, strong and healthy.

  We had just celebrated Eid’s Feast of Sacrifice: my mother was euphoric at seeing all her children and grandchildren together. I was heading home afterwards to pack for a trip I was supposed to make to San Francisco to attend a meeting on behalf of the hospital, and just as I got in the door my brother called to tell me my mother was feeling unwell. When I got back to the house, I realized that she had had a stroke and I got her into my car to take her to Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza. After she was admitted to the intensive care unit, I called Soroka to say I couldn’t make the trip and my colleagues suggested I bring her there. I considered the offer because Al-Shifa didn’t always have the equipment patients needed, but when I went to see her in the hospital that day I found the minister of health for the Palestinian Authority making an official visit to the hospital and a flurry of officials attending him. He stopped by my mother’s room to say hello to me and after his visit the staff made sure my mother had everything she needed. At Al-Shifa, it’s still about who you know. As a physician I realized the best we could do was to keep my mother comfortable. As a son, I made sure that when she regained consciousness and asked for Bessan, who had spent many nights with her grandmother over the years, that I brought Bessan to see her. The whole family stayed at her bedside day and night until she passed away three days later.

  I felt so sad to lose this woman. I’d wanted to give her a better life, take care of her, make up for the hardship she had suffered. Somehow I always felt it was never enough. She would have been so proud of me graduating from the residency program at Soroko and becoming the first Palestinian doctor on staff in an Israeli hospital, but that was still a few months away. When we took her to the cemetery to be buried, the funeral cortège drove by the new house my brothers and I had built. That’s as close as she ever got to it.

  A month after my mother died, there was a suicide bombing at a hotel in Israel. Although I was on the other side of the country and obviously had nothing to do with the plan, I was immediately barred from entering Israel, prevented from seeing my patients, doing my job. It took two months and intervention from many Israeli colleagues from the hospital, and even members of the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, to overturn the prohibition and allow me as an individual to cross the border again. People often tell me they admire my patience and ability to be calm and avoid rash and impulsive behaviour. I tell them I learned all of it while waiting in line at the Erez checkpoint.

  The next year, our second son, Abdullah, was born. Our family was complete. Patient man or not, as I made my way through the border to and from work, I wondered what kind of a world this family of mine was growing up in.

  Depending on whom you listen to, the second intifada ended in November 2004, when Yasser Arafat died, or in February 2005, when Mahmoud Abbas agreed to stop the violence and Israel’s Sharon agreed to release nine hundred Palestinian prisoners. But who knows when or even if it ended. Until people start to talk to each other, this problem is not going to go away.

  In those years, I was away from home a lot. As soon as I completed my residency, I was sponsored by the American Friends of Ben-Gurion University and the American Friends of Soroka to receive specialist training in fetal medicine and genetics at V. Buzzi hospital in Milan, Italy, and Erasme Hospital in Brussels, Belgium. My dreams to be an expert in obstetrics and gynecology were coming true.

  Such travel also opened my eyes to the huge need for better public health policies, particularly among populations such as the Palestinians. A friend of mine organized a meeting for me in Boston with the dean of academic affairs of Harvard University’s school of public health, and the dean told me, “You can benefit from us and we can benefit from you.” What he meant, of course, was that I had first-hand experience with the public health issues in an overcrowded refugee camp and he had expertise in how to create public health policy; together, we could innovate the theory around public health policy. But studying in Boston would mean another long period away from home. I also wasn’t sure I was in the right frame of mind for writing another set of exams, this time the GRE (Graduate Record Exam) for entrance to Harvard. It seemed I’d been studying for exams for decades. I wanted to get back to the business of building a career. But the public health issue kept scratching at me; I knew it was like a missing puzzle piece for the work I wanted to do. Eventually I made the decision to accept the scholarship Harvard was offering and left in 2003 to do the twelve-month masters degree in Health Policy and Management.

  The experience turned out to be invaluable, exposing me to a whole different realm of the medical world and making me aware of opportunities for improving the health care of Palestinians. The health system in the Gaza Strip is fragmented; services are duplicated and poorly coordinated, so they don’t meet the needs of the people. The United Nations still covers primary health care; the Palestinian Authority does the rest. But too many people are caught in the middle. If you have a simple disease, it’s okay, but if you have a serious problem, you need to go outside Gaza to be treated. Obviously this has an impact on the health of the people. The bottom line is that every time the administration changes, the health system undergoes a metamorphosis that’s dependent on the people in charge rather than the needs of the population. I wanted to find a way to reverse those facts. The downside was that, because I was travelling on a student visa to the United States, I couldn’t go back to visit. The rules of the visa were so strict that if I’d come home to visit my family even over the lengthy Christmas holiday break at Harvard, I would not have been able to return to complete my studies.

  And so I lived in Boston for the whole academic year, and although I missed my family, I focused on studying. I also enjoyed the friends I made there. There were students from all over the world who had a myriad of experiences with their medical practices and an enormous amount of information to share. I confess I had come to the United States under the impression that Americans are arrogant people. Living among them taught me not to judge people by the frustrations you may have with their government. This was an open, competitive society that was built on concepts of success. My time in Boston taught me that most Americans are kind people and good neighbours. Judging them all as arrogant is the same as calling all Israelis occupiers and all Palestinians troublemakers.

  Even in those democratic, human rights–conscious classes at Harvard, though, the old Middle East issues still came up. When I was selecting a class for health economics, there were two professors who taught the course I needed; one of them was a Jew. A classmate from the United Arab Emirates told me to study with the other professor because he said the Jewish one hated Arabs. I signed up for the class with the Jewish professor anyway because he was known as an expert in the field of health economics and I wanted to learn from the best. But I did get the impression that he was ignoring me in class. Was that my own paranoia after being warned about him, or was he really isolating me from the other students?

  I decided to ask for a private meeting. When I went in to see him, I was absolutely straightforward. I said, “You know I am a Palestinian. I know you are a Jew. I was told not to take this class because you wouldn’t treat me fairly. It feels to me that you’re ignoring me in class. And I want to ask you if this is true.” He was flabbergasted. He said he had no idea I felt neglected in h
is class. We talked about it, and as I tried to offer examples that would justify my concerns, I realized they were petty and insignificant and that I had been influenced by my classmate who had advised against taking the course. I felt foolish after that, and wondered even then if he’d hold it against me. But he didn’t. In fact a few weeks after that meeting he stopped me after class to say there was a speaker coming from the World Bank and that he wanted me to meet her.

  I graduated on June 10, 2004, and was back in Gaza by June 12. I wished my family could have been there at the commencement. I wished my mother and father could have risen from their graves to see me, their son, a boy of poverty, accepting my degree. I wanted all Palestinians to share the moment with me. But it wasn’t possible. The faculty raised the flag of the country of every graduating student in the commencement ceremony, and when I saw the flag of Palestine up there with the others, I was proud of who I am and who we are together.

  My homecoming was bittersweet. I’d been away so long the children felt estranged from me. My son Abdullah, who was only a year old when I left, didn’t even know me. He heard his cousins calling me uncle and called me uncle as well. I had three suitcases full of gifts for the children, including a black wool coat for Bessan that cost more than I’d ever paid for anything before, and dresses for my other daughters and American toys for the younger children. But my three eldest daughters weren’t there. Bessan, Dalal and Shatha were away at the peace camp in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I had to wait another two weeks before seeing them. My brothers and their families were there, and so was most of the neighbourhood. We talked and laughed and ate my favourite food that Nadia had prepared. There was noise and fun and celebrations for about two weeks. It felt awfully good to be home.

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