I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor's Journey (12 page)

I took up the residency in 1997, almost exactly one year after our first son, Mohammed, had been born. Nadia was now at home with him and our five older daughters. I know it was difficult for her. I was away during the week, and often on weekends as well if I was scheduled to be on shift at the hospital. The border crossing between Gaza and Israel was so unpredictable, I never knew if I could get across in time to be at work, so I rented a small apartment in Beersheba and used part of the $2,000 monthly salary I was being paid to cover these expenses. Otherwise I was worried I’d be late for a class or to relieve another resident at the end of a shift or for a patient who was depending on me. Even though I got to know many of the soldiers and they didn’t hassle me, the new ones or the ones I didn’t know gave me no end of grief, just as they did with other Palestinians coming into Israel. I was learning, yes, but I was also serving the Israeli patients in the hospital—it was not an easy situation.

I remember one time they asked me to drive my car over the pit where soldiers inspected the undersides of cars. I sat at the side with my briefcase, watching the procedure, trying to be patient. When at last the screening was finished, I drove away. It wasn’t until I reached the hospital that I realized I’d left my briefcase with my licence, my passport, all of my documents and important papers on the landing beside the car. I phoned the crossing station, but there was no answer. So I drove the forty-four kilometres back to the crossing and told the soldiers about my dilemma. The man
in charge hardly even raised his head to look at me. He said, “We thought it was a suspicious package and we blew it up.”

I understood the security issue. Security is as important for Palestinians as it is for Israelis. But those soldiers knew me, and they ought to have dealt with me as a Palestinian, as a human being. I was simply a man who had forgotten his briefcase. There are plenty of Palestinians who are also looking for peace, and they deserve the same respect as anyone else at the crossing. Still, I put up with the indignity because I did not want to jeopardize my chance to learn at the Soroka hospital.

My research was in the fertility unit. My patients were Israeli and Palestinian and Arab-Israeli couples who were having difficulty conceiving a child. The department was like a world unto itself. Life in general is not easy, not for anyone, but it is especially difficult for couples who are dealing with infertility, with all its additional baggage of anguish and self-doubt. Somehow this pain has always resonated with me: from the beginning of my training, I have always wanted to help relieve this fundamental ache in men and women who want to become parents and yet can’t conceive. It’s why I continue to work in this field.

But there were—and still are—so many unique challenges in the way of our finding the path to peaceful coexistence. For instance, a critically ill woman from Gaza was brought in for treatment; she would have died had she stayed in Gaza. She was a mother of ten with acute renal failure and she’d been in a Gaza hospital for about two weeks, with the diagnosis of deep-vein thrombosis and marked swelling in her legs. But then she developed a high fever and other complications, and a decision was made to transfer her to Soroka. It’s not easy to move patients across this divide. A Palestinian ambulance had to bring her to the Erez Crossing. The ambulance from Soroka had to meet them
and make the switch. It was (and still is) difficult to get permission to cross into Israel. Not only that, but the Palestinian Authority had to agree to pay her medical costs before she could leave. There was a lot of distrust between Palestinians and Israelis at that time, as there still is, and as a consequence so much needless suffering, pain and loss on both sides. Nevertheless a transfer was coordinated and she was moved to Soroka. I was consulted when she got there to determine if there was a gynecological reason for the high fever. When I spoke to her in Arabic and told her I was a Palestinian from Jabalia Camp, she grabbed my hand and wouldn’t let go. She had never been to Israel before and was afraid she’d be mistreated.

But it was Israeli doctors who saved her life. I love my work because a hospital is a place where humanity can be discovered, where people are treated without racism and as equals. In the brotherhood and sisterhood of medicine, we make an oath when we graduate to care for the sick. We leave our differences outside the walls. Certainly I cannot speak for everyone, but in my experience the Israelis I worked with see the patient, not the nationality or the ethnicity.

There’s another experience from my days at Soroka Hospital I’d like to describe. I was determined to learn Hebrew, because I never wanted a patient to think I couldn’t read their chart or understand their symptoms; I was afraid that he or she would lose confidence in my work if my command of the language was insufficient. So I was very careful about to speak Hebrew grammatically. One day a Bedouin woman was admitted with severe hypertension in her pregnancy, but she refused to stay in the hospital. I had to write a discharge summary and record the fact that she had refused medical advice. In Hebrew the word for “refused” is
meseravet.
I didn’t know the symbol for the letter s—whether it went one way or the other—and I didn’t want the Bedouin woman
or her husband to know that in case they’d wonder why the doctor couldn’t spell. For that reason, I couldn’t ask the nurse how to spell it in front of the patient. Believe it or not, for that reason alone, I tried to persuade the patient to stay in the hospital. She wouldn’t. Finally I asked her to go with her husband to his car and bring her identification to me, just so I could get them out of the room long enough to ask the nurse how to make an
s
in Hebrew. When the couple came back and I asked them to sign the discharge sheet, they told me neither of them could write their names.

I’d been so worried about making a mistake in front of them. I was always aware that I could be judged as wanting, whether it be in medical skill or language or interpersonal relationships. As much as I’d been given the opportunity of a lifetime to be a resident at Soroka, I knew I was a test case in the eyes of my Israeli colleagues, and that my success could create openings in the future for other Palestinian physicians. My failure might shut that door.

Most Jewish Israelis mistook me for an Arab-Israeli, but I quickly told them I was a Palestinian from the Gaza Strip. Although I wore a name tag with a Palestinian surname and spoke Hebrew with an accent, no one seemed to object. Disease doesn’t know borders. But I have to admit, politics and prejudice keep pushing their way into things. I just wanted to do my job at the hospital and leave the politics at the checkpoint, but they came right with me into the emergency department. For example, one afternoon at about four o’clock I was in the gynecology wing of Emergency when a woman arrived in distress. She was in the early stages of pregnancy and was bleeding. I examined her, did an ultrasound, found that the pregnancy was intact but that she was threatening abortion. The only treatment was bedrest. I told her there only was a fifty-fifty chance the pregnancy would be saved.

She left the hospital but came back at midnight; the bleeding had increased. This time her husband, a Sephardic Jew from
Morocco, started shouting at me, claiming I killed the baby and threatening to do the same to me. I was busy dealing with the patient—his wife. He continued threatening me and the nurse called for security. This man would not have treated an Israeli doctor like this. He blamed me for his wife’s condition because he saw me first and foremost as an Arab. He complained to the head of the hospital, who took the man to his office, pointed at the shelves full of medical textbooks and said, “What Dr. Abuelaish did came from these textbooks.” He defended me wholeheartedly and the man calmed down.

I did my share of pushing the envelope for coexistence even then by acting as an unofficial peace envoy for the region: I would host groups of Israelis at my home or in the homes of my friends one weekend every month. We toured the Jabalia refugee camp and Gaza City, showed them the conditions people live in, let them experience the overcrowding, and allowed plenty of time so they could talk to people, ask their own questions, draw their own conclusions. Then we’d have coffee and sweets together—all of us, the Israelis and the Palestinians. We’d discuss and we’d argue. These get-togethers brought home to me how similar we are when it comes to socializing. We’re expressive. We talk loud, and the decibel level goes up with the intensity of the conversation. The more interesting it gets, the noisier we become. That’s how Palestinians and Israelis are. But I can say that even the most vociferous arguments almost always ended with the exchange of telephone numbers and the forging of friendships.

Then it stopped. The second intifada began in September 2000 when a number of incendiary events came together like the perfect storm. Ariel Sharon visited the Temple Mount, the third most holy site in the Islamic world, in a show of “I dare you to try to stop me.” The peace talks at the Camp David Summit in July
had collapsed; skirmishes on both sides had resulted in deaths. Then the rock throwing, the firebombing and the tear-gassing began. Riots followed. The border was closed and my little band of peacemakers were no longer allowed to meet.

I continued work in my own clinic in Gaza one day a week, giving medical treatment for free. But even I couldn’t cross into Israel during the first several weeks, and the approximately
100,000
other Gazans who had jobs in Israel couldn’t go to work either. It felt as though we were being squeezed out of existence. No jobs and no money means no food and no goods. Although it would get a lot worse later, many Palestinians couldn’t see any future for themselves—they began to see their lives as useless. And then, when one person goes crazy and becomes a suicide bomber, no one around him tries to prevent the act. Instead, they call him a hero. That’s the way things get worse.

I wanted to go back to work in Israel, and in order to protect myself I consulted many Palestinians about whether I should. I wanted to know whether it was ethical. The general consensus was, “Izzeldin, go to your work. It’s beneficial for you, for us, for the Israelis.” I still had the papers that allowed me to cross into Israel, and despite the fact that the intifada was still raging, it was business as usual when I presented them at the border.

When I arrived back at the hospital the first time, my Israeli colleagues and friends accepted me like a son who had come home after a long absence. They told me they had all been thinking of me. One of my Israeli friends at Soroka told me, “Izzeldin, I heard that you were afraid to come back. I want to tell you, I am ready to sacrifice my life for your safety if any Israeli tries to do harm to you.”

What more can one do than this?

But even after my pre-emptive consultations, some of my colleagues in Gaza questioned my motives. One said, “How can
you help these Jewish women to have babies? They will grow up to be soldiers who bomb us and shoot us.” Another said through clenched teeth, “It makes me very angry that you are doing this.” Some have suggested I am helping to deliver a new generation of occupiers. I try to tell them that these Israeli babies could grow up to be doctors.

I felt as if we’d been so close to peace. Like many others, I had been full of hope. I’d been conducting my tours, and had even opened clinics in Gaza with the help of Israeli doctors (which all had to close). I find it astonishing that the two sides could be so close to a peace agreement and then see our relationship deteriorate so rapidly. As the second intifada raged, each side was focusing on its own pain and blaming the other instead of realizing we have to recognize the rights of both peoples to live in harmony and peace; the alternative is war and distrust. I wished then that I could close my eyes and open them to where we had been before the second intifada began, when we were still talking to each other.

It was a fine line I walked while trying to bring two sides of a very fractious debate together. I thought that attracting more Palestinian doctors to Israeli hospitals to do their residencies would show them the real Israelis who believe in peace, and it would also allow Israelis to see the human aspect of the Palestinian. Politics aside, I believe the best way to bring peace between our two peoples is through health care. For me, every patient is like one of my relatives. I don’t make any distinction: Israeli, Palestinian, Arab-Israeli, new immigrant, Bedouin. My duty is to make sure every child has the same chance for health at birth. But look what happens after these innocent children grow up. Who is telling them these things that turn them into enemies rather than friends?

The second intifada actually proved more than anything else how much we Palestinians and Israelis are stuck with one another,
and that we have to find a way to live together. The failure in the peace process was a failure for both sides. We were both linked to it, and because we couldn’t find détente, we ended up with another intifada.

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.