I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor's Journey (10 page)

But I also learned that sometimes something good can come out of something bad. For example, one day a man was looking for two workers to build a chicken coop. It was a two-day job. He picked me and another guy. But the second morning I was late getting to the square, I can’t remember why. I do remember running breathless to the pick-up point and seeing the other worker go off with his cousin to do the job I’d been hired for. I shouted at him and started berating him for giving my job to his cousin. I felt stung by the injustice, the loss of a work day. But another Israeli employer who’d been watching the drama said, “Forget it, come and work for me. I am also building a chicken coop, but it’s more than a two-day job.” I ended up working for that man for almost eight months. He had a contract to build chicken coops for his customers all over the district. He not only showed me how to wire the chicken coop, he also taught me how to install the electricity and the water system, to stain the metal exterior with rust repellent. It was a bonanza of learning for me. After two or three months he made me the manager. I
brought boys from my neighbourhood to work with us and paid them as well as myself on contract rather than taking a salary. That way you get more work done and everyone works even harder because they can see the money to be made. I worked for him right up until the day I left for Cairo. He even gave me a goodbye present.

I remember the moment I left Gaza for Cairo as if it was yesterday. I’d been accepted into the medical school, as I’d hoped, and it was an emotional and triumphant day for all of us. My mother wanted to be the mother of a doctor as much as I wanted to follow my dream of joining the field of medicine. I felt drawn to the profession as profoundly as a person is attached to his name. My heart was pounding. My clothes were packed in a blue plastic suitcase. I carried a satchel stuffed with olives, soap, red chili peppers and my mother’s homemade bread and cakes. I waved to my family, who were weeping with joy, from the steps of the Israeli bus that would take me through the Sinai into Egypt. Everyone was weeping with joy.

The windows of the bus were painted over so that we couldn’t see outside, because we were travelling though Israeli-occupied Sinai and they didn’t want us to see their military installations. Once at the Egyptian border, the Red Cross organized the transfer to an Egyptian bus, which took us to a quarantine camp where our vaccination certificates were checked and each of us was examined in case we were bringing a communicable disease into Egypt, a procedure that took several days. At last we moved to the student quarters in Cairo.

Arriving in Cairo as a student was unbelievably exciting. I wanted to see and do everything at once. In Gaza, there were no shops or cafés like this, no music blaring from loudspeakers. However, I no sooner arrived than I had to leave—the particular campus I was
assigned to was a hundred kilometres away. I was terribly disappointed until I found out that, if my marks were good enough, I could transfer at the end of the first year to the Cairo campus. I took an apartment with two other students and started classes, determined to get top marks.

There was a Palestinian girl in my class who flirted with me. I liked her, she was very beautiful, and I always saved a seat for her next to me. But her behaviour also distressed me. I wondered what she wanted. Was I to have a romance in Egypt? The thought shocked me, so much so that I decided I wouldn’t go out to the parties, not even to the cinema; I would study day and night to reach my goal. The girl approached me a few more times and I was cordial with her, but I was scared of a relationship that might become more than friendship. I was young.

I made the grade academically and the next year I moved to the Cairo campus and began to taste the life in a big international city. I felt like I wanted to memorize every corner of this place. I did break down and go to clubs with my friends, although I never drank alcohol, and still don’t. I connected with students from half a dozen other Arab countries, joined the foreign students’ club, talked politics and girls into the middle of the night, and had my eyes opened to the world beyond the small refugee camp where I was raised. I didn’t have a girlfriend, but my colleagues tease me to this day about the life we lived as students—carousing from party to party and staying out until dawn.

Yet my priority was my coursework. While we had to study all the various medical rotations—pediatrics, internal medicine, surgery and so on—it was obstetrics and gynecology that caught me as though, when I was studying them, I was breathing rarefied air. The first time I assisted in the delivery of a newborn, I was nearly mesmerized. That a life had just begun at my fingertips, that the woman on the delivery table had come through this
nine-month period safely and was grinning with love and joy and pride, was like a miracle to me. From that day on I saw pregnancy as a process as natural as eating and drinking water. Later, during my internship in Cairo, I knew I wanted to specialize in this field. Delivering a baby thrilled me. A mother would be screaming during the delivery and swearing she’d never do this again, and then she’d say afterwards, “I bet I’ll see you in another year or two.” I remember the first time I treated a woman who was hemorrhaging during a miscarriage. She could have died. I managed to get the bleeding under control and saved her life. Using my skills to save a life or help a patient in distress or bring a newborn into the world was the career I wanted.

Another key part of my Cairo experience that stays with me is our student celebrations of Ramadan. About fifteen of us would gather and share food at each other’s houses, then we’d go out into the Cairo night and join the festivities—the singing and storytelling in places like the Al-Azhar club—until the sun came up. Those were carefree, precious days unlike anything I had known before, or have enjoyed since.

After one preparatory year, another five years of medical school and a year interning at Cairo University Hospital, I graduated with my MD in 1983 and received my licence to be a general practitioner. I was young, passionate and ready to work. But after what I’d been through as a kid growing up in Gaza, I also saw myself as a conduit that could bring news of life in the refugee camp to the outside world. Someone had to start paying attention to what was happening to the Palestinians. They didn’t have proper health care or education, not even enough food. There was no end to the needs of the Palestinian people, the needs of my family, and even the size of my own career goals. In my culture we don’t study just to improve ourselves; we study to raise
the standard of living for our brothers and sisters. My family saw me as a role model. And goodness knows we were all in agreement about the need to improve the lives of Palestinians.

That was also the year my brother Noor went missing; no one in my family has heard from him since 1983. The Israelis had put him in prison when he was eighteen years old because he was working for Fatah. Actually, my view is that he got caught up with a bad crowd of friends; he was discouraged, his self-esteem had faltered, and he’d started dealing in hashish, although none of that was what got him arrested. When he got out of prison, he said he wanted to go back to Gaza or start over in Lebanon. He came to Cairo and stayed with me for six months. I told him I’d help him find work in one of the Gulf States, but in the end he did not accept my offer and chose to go to Lebanon. The last time I saw him, he said, “I don’t want to make trouble for you, leave me.” I told him I couldn’t leave him, that he was my brother, I would always love him and be responsible for him. But he went anyway. We could presume that he was killed and that no one has found his body. But we don’t do that. If we don’t know what happened, there is still hope. I think he would have been in touch if he was alive, but I leave those thoughts alone. For me and my family, I maintain the hole that my eyes will see him again.

My return home was bittersweet. I’d been offered a residency to become a specialist in obstetrics and gynecology in Cairo, but I had turned it down, not only because I couldn’t afford to stay on but because my parents wanted me to come home. My father was desperately ill with liver disease, and he’d been hanging on, waiting for the moment when he would again see his son who had become a doctor. But his health was deteriorating daily. He hadn’t been well enough to come to my graduation from medical school in Cairo. In fact the family stayed at home with him, so rather
than have no one there to witness my graduation, I went home and missed it myself.

I was in for a shock when I got back to Gaza. I couldn’t get a job in the place where I was born and raised, this place that was in so much need, the very place I’d vowed to help by becoming a doctor. The Israelis had been occupying Gaza since 1967; it was now 1985. You couldn’t travel anywhere in Gaza without seeing Israeli influence, and if you wanted to be employed, you had to be the son of an important person such as a government official or an influential person with connections to the Israelis, or a millionaire, or an Israeli collaborator.

Eventually I was offered a position in the obstetrics and gynecology department at the Nasser hospital in Khan Yunis, nearly thirty-five kilometres away from Jabalia Camp; you couldn’t get much farther from my home and still remain in the Gaza Strip. The position paid pocket money, so although I accepted it, I knew I would soon have to find something else.

Then, just eight months after I got home, my father died. Here was a man who had worked hard and suffered a lot. He didn’t get to enjoy what he planted in his life. He’d been a successful farmer, the son of a respected landowner, but then he was homeless, living in a refugee camp, raising his children there, working as a guard, never earning enough money. It was humiliating for him. I could feel his anxiety throughout my boyhood, and as my life began to improve at medical school in Cairo, I felt guilty that my father hadn’t been able to be the role model to his children that he believed he should be.

The last days of his life were painfully difficult. He had hepatic failure—his liver was shutting down. He was vomiting, he couldn’t eat, and he was barely aware of his loving family hovering over him. When he slipped into a coma, we took him home as there was nothing else the hospital could do. As a doctor, I felt
so helpless. I am the one who is supposed to help the patient, but this patient, my own father, could not be saved. I had vowed that once I graduated my family would have a better home, we’d have enough to eat, and my father would know what he meant to me and he’d see that I was going to be all that he’d been denied. But just as I was beginning to fulfill that promise, he was gone. I still have the grief of his passing in my heart. So I will always do the three things that Muslims do for the dead: I share his knowledge and wisdom with others, I pray for him, and I give to charity in his good name.

As for my career, I’d been transferred from Nasser hospital in Khan Younis to Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City, but this hospital, too, wasn’t run by merit but by people with connections. A classmate from university was the son of the director general of the department of health for the Gaza Strip. His mother was chair of the obstetrics and gynecology department at Al-Shifa. He’d got a job with an excellent salary even though he’d been a playboy at university and hadn’t achieved good marks. The next thing I knew, he was acting as though he was my superior, a big boss, always giving me orders.

So I quit and applied for a job with the ministry of health in Saudi Arabia. Actually, this was another of those cases where good came out of bad. I got the job, but it was four hundred kilometres away, in Jeddah. I was not at all familiar with the place, and when my uncle said, “All those good times you had at school in Cairo are about to be paid back,” I wondered if taking the job had been such a good idea. However, I had a close friend from medical school who was from Saudi Arabia and I called him to find out how hard the posting and life in Jeddah would be. He was an ambassador’s son, and so I too now had connections, and he got a perfect job for me, caring for Palestinians at Al-Aziziyah maternity ward. It wasn’t Gaza, but it was taking care of Palestinians, and it
was an opportunity to test the waters of the medical specialty I’d been drawn to from the time I studied obstetrics and gynecology at medical school.

That I liked the job goes without saying, but the other piece of this experience was that it gave me an opportunity to build a real social life and feel economic life for the first time. I also earned enough to help my mother pay for repairs to our house in Jabalia. I was also able to help my brother Atta go to the Philippines to study medicine (though he soon came back to Gaza and switched to pharmacy), and I helped another brother, Shehab, with money so he could get married. One of my half-brothers lived in Jeddah too, so we would get together at each other’s houses. I enjoyed this kind of social life—being welcome in another house, talking, eating, sharing stories, having time to do things other than work, which was all I knew when I was growing up in Jabalia Camp. Then, just two years after starting the job, I had saved enough money to go back to Gaza and marry.

Nadia and I were married in Jabalia Camp in 1987. Only days after the celebration I had to return to Saudi Arabia by myself because she didn’t have a visa and I couldn’t get her one until after we were married. She joined me about a month later. We lived in a rented house, and although we were unhappy about being so far away from our families, I did have my half-brother in Jeddah. I was happy to have relatives nearby: our culture prizes being near to family very highly.

Two months after our wedding, the first intifada began. Sadly, it started right in my neighbourhood in Jabalia and spread pretty quickly throughout Gaza and into the West Bank and East Jerusalem. No one is really clear what triggered it. Some say it started because of an incident on December 8, 1987: an Israeli army tank ran into a group of Palestinians from Jabalia, killing four and injuring seven. A few days earlier, an Israeli salesman had
been stabbed to death in Gaza, and many Palestinians felt the so-called accident was actually a revenge killing. Or is could have been retribution for an another incident: a week before the intifada began, Palestinians had been accused of infiltrating an Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) camp in Lebanon and killing six Israeli soldiers. Whatever the spark, people were outraged and took to the streets. There was so much tension created by the humiliation of the occupation, by Israeli soldiers doing stupid things like forcing a Palestinian to walk like a donkey just to make fun of him, that any small incident, real or imagined, could have set it off. But as far as I could determine, the unrest came mostly from the fact that nothing was being done to alleviate the situation for Palestinians. There was no sign of a Palestinian state; the leadership on the issue from the Arab states was faltering. Palestinians had been waiting for change, for relief from intimidation and harassment, for the twenty years since the Israelis took over in Gaza, and it was not surprising to see violence erupting in our streets.