I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor's Journey (27 page)

I listened intently to her acceptance speech, and when I made my own, I felt I was speaking for my whole family, for all Palestinians. I said: “I would love for a moment if my parents could come up from their grave, my wife also, and my daughters, and the Palestinian people in general and the Gazans in particular, to share with me this happy moment, and know that they are not alone; that someone else in this world is thinking of them. I assure you that this tragedy has strengthened me, and I am more determined than ever before to continue my efforts for the sake of
humanity, but I also want you to know that willing is not enough. We must act. It is well known that all it takes for evil to survive is for good people like you to do nothing. It is time to do and to act. We have to look forward. The dignity of Palestinians equals the dignity of Israelis and it is time to live in partnership and collaboration—there is no way backwards.”

On the day of the shelling that ended my daughters’ lives, we had decided as a family that we would take up the posting in Toronto that had been offered to me by Dr. Peter Singer and Dr. Abdullah Daar, and that I would come to work at the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health.

As we made arrangements to leave Gaza in the summer of 2009, both Israel and Hamas were seeking a truce, and Egypt was once again willing to broker it. Hamas declared that the firing of rockets into Israel from Gaza would stop. And Israel said that shipments into Gaza would start again in stages. But the rockets didn’t fully stop and the shipments remained well under expected amounts.

Still on those summer evenings my friends and relatives gathered every night out on the street to escape the stifling heat of their houses. We sat outside my house on white plastic garden chairs arranged in two rows facing each other and exchanged the news of the day. I also carried on meeting with the dozens of people who needed my help. Because I was one of the few with access to Israel and to the goods the Gazan people need, every weekend when I came home from the hospital in Tel Aviv, I’d bring filled prescriptions, shoes for a child, eyeglass lenses for one, a passport for another. I’d also arrange medical appointments with specialists in Israel and ambulance transfers for those who needed them. Even the famous families, the heads of the tribes in Gaza—the Hmaid family, the Akel, the Abu Zaida—had
fallen into the habit of coming to my house to discuss their health issues with me. This is my world, this is what I’ll miss, and this is why our departure from Gaza will not be permanent.

There was much to do before we left in late July. Shatha studied for her final examinations day and night, holed up in the living room with the door closed, hoping to place among the top ten students in the graduating class. Dalal was tethered to her drafting desk preparing final drawings for her architecture class. My task was to prepare travel documents for the children, find us a place to live in Toronto, get the tickets, and somehow pack for a five-year voyage with a family of six.

Our departure was exciting, slightly chaotic and nerve-racking. Our extended family, friends and neighbours had begun the goodbyes the day before, gathering around us with tears, hugs and best wishes. The younger children had never left the Gaza Strip except to come to the hospital in Tel Aviv when Shatha was a patient there, or flown in an airplane. The only planes they knew were the Israeli F-16s that flew over our home. I was concerned that the first Israeli they would see would be a soldier at the Erez Crossing, which is not in keeping with the lessons I’d taught them about who Israelis are. I took all our suitcases to the Erez Crossing early to start the inspection process, then went home and got the children. Once through the crossing, which took until five p.m., we were treated like celebrities. In the airport, television cameras were there to record the event, and Channel 10 TV anchorman Shlomi Eldar, who had played such a critical role in our lives, came to interview me and to say goodbye. (The piece was called “The Co-Exister Has Left.”) He brought me a jar of sand so I wouldn’t forget where I came from. Our farewell was mixed with tears of sadness and joy, of anticipation and regret. And it still took about three hours at the airport to clear the inspection for our flight, which left at midnight.

As the plane took off down the runway, the children exchanged glances with me. We all knew this would be an adventure, and we were all thinking of Aya’s remark, “I want to fly, Daddy.”

Toronto has turned out to be everything I’d hoped for: a place and a time for my children to heal. Dalal and Shatha are enrolled at the University of Toronto. Mohammed, Raffah and Abdullah are in a junior school nearby. The neighbours welcomed us to the street and soon enough we found our way. In our first days in the new house, an incident warmed my heart. Most of the backyards around the neighbourhood are fenced. The family next door has children about the same ages as my younger ones, and the first thing they did after we moved in was to take down a section of the fence so the kids could run back and forth without barriers. That simple act gave me a lot to think about.

Tragedy cannot be the end of our lives. We cannot allow it to control and defeat us.

My vision for the Middle East is of a peaceful, secure, cooperative and united place. That’s not going to happen with words alone. Each of us has to contribute to creating the harmony and take an active role in promoting the dream of coexistence.

Peace is a vague and unwieldy term in the region today. The efforts by so many to create treaties that would bring the two sides together and the continuous negotiations between countries in the region have failed to bring peace—and certainly failed to reduce the animosity, tension and bloodshed. The so-called news from the Middle East is invariably about war starting or war stopping.

People are fed up with the lack of progress and want to find new ways to alter the insecure facts of their daily lives. For that reason, I feel we should avoid formal declarations for now. Instead, we should seek ways to be together—at soccer matches, at conferences,
at family dinners. The most important step now is getting to know each other and establishing mutual respect. We share so many fundamental values: the way we socialize, the way we raise our children, the way we argue loudly and embrace ancient mores and a sense of honour. What we need is to believe in our own ability to lift ourselves up out of this quagmire that threatens to choke all of us. We need a heavy dose of hope.

My core values, which are essentially medical, tell me that people are people. If we treat each other with decency and respect; if we refuse to take sides; if we see with clarity and take responsibility for our actions, then getting past the ugliness of war is possible.

In my opinion, coexistence and co-operation, partnership and sharing at the grassroots level, is the only way forward for Palestinians and Israelis. Rather than talking about peace or forgiveness, let’s talk about trust, dignity, our shared humanity, and the one hundred thousand other steps it takes to finally achieve peace and forgiveness. The conflict in the Middle East will never be resolved when there is so much hatred on both sides, when tolerance and compromise are not part of the equation. We know that military ways are futile, for both sides. Intellectually, we say that words are stronger than bullets. But the bullets continue to find their targets. My philosophy is simple, it’s the advice parents give to children: stop quarrelling with your brother and make friends—you’ll both be better off.

Consider the most contentious issue—that of the right of return. The argument presented by the hard-liners in the Israeli government is that Israel is a small land and there isn’t room for more people. But Palestinians can’t forget the fact that Israel has plenty of room to bring Russians, Argentinians, Ethiopians and others of the Diaspora to the Promised Land. Room is surely not the issue.

Increasingly, the international community is examining the deplorable situation for Palestinians. On October 27, 2009, Amnesty International launched an in-depth report on the lack of access to adequate, safe and clean water for the Palestinian population of the Occupied Palestinian Territories. The 112-page report looked at how Israeli water policies have resulted in violations of the right to an adequate standard of living for the Palestinian population, including the rights to water, food, health, work and adequate housing.

The present standoff isn’t sustainable. The people who live on the two sides know that; opinion polls say both want the situation repaired—now.

My friend Dr. Shlomo Usef thinks I should have stayed in Gaza, that in Canada maybe I’ll have a rest and become a normal person. “You’ve never been like that,” he said. “You need to come back here and finish your mission.” I can assure Shlomo that I will be back and that, in the meantime, I’m fulfilling my mission from here.

Dr. Zeev Rotstein also had mixed feelings about my departure, and said to a reporter: “He has a mission right now. I hope it will carry him to a productive place—a symbol of the tragedy of two peoples. Strife and hostility is completely unnecessary, unjustified. Health can be a very important bridge between the two sides. It works: you save a life, another one, do it over and over again. You don’t give up. That creates an opportunity for the other side to see the face of Israelis and Palestinians rather than knowing each other only through rifles. For me, Izzeldin is a partner. He shares my vision. I want to help him in any possible way. Before this we’d been planning to establish better relations between physicians in Gaza, the West Bank and here in Israel. We were trying to establish a learning centre to improve relationships, of
teaching, learning and coordinating treatment. I think he’ll come back to finish the job.”

What happened to my family still strikes me as unbelievable. I lost three beautiful daughters and a wonderful, loving niece. I cannot bring them back. But I have five more children to take care of. All my children are my hope for the future, my hope for change and a peaceful world.

What I can say is this: Let my daughters be the last to die. Let this tragedy open the eyes of the world. Let us ask each other, “Where are we going? What are we doing?” It’s time we sat down and talked to each other. As I have said many times since the tragedy, if I could know that my daughters were the last sacrifice on the road to peace between Palestinians and Israelis, then I would accept their loss. There must be a new era, a new opportunity to think of each other with honesty. In the long years since the Oslo Accord was signed, peace talks have broken down, resumed, and then have broken down over a few square metres of proposed border—in other words, an externality. Let me tell you, there is no “magic” square metre, or hilltop, or valley, that if ceded by one side to the other will bring about peace in the Middle East. Peace can only come about after an internal shift—on both sides. What we need is respect, and the inner strength to refuse to hate. Then we will achieve peace. And my daughters will have been the last price anyone in this region has to pay.

M
Y HOPE FOR THIS BOOK IS
that it has embraced and embodied the Palestinian people, and the tragedies we have faced, and has revealed the determination of the Palestinian people to face life’s challenges and to be strengthened—not weakened—by them.

This book is also about freedom. We all must work towards freedom from disease, poverty, ignorance, oppression and hatred. In one horrifying year, my family and I faced tragedies that mountains cannot bear. But as a believer, as a Muslim with deep faith, I fully believe what is from God is for good and what is bad is man-made and can be prevented or changed.

The first blow was the loss of my dear wife, Nadia. The blow that does not kill will strengthen you. My children and I survived Nadia’s death, becoming stronger through our need to take on additional responsibilities and to help each other survive our individual suffering.

Then in January 2009, I lost three precious daughters and a niece when an Israeli tank shelled my house in Gaza. When it is your children who have become “collateral damage” in a
seemingly endless conflict, when you have seen their bodies literally torn apart and beheaded, their young lives obliterated, how do you not hate? How do you avoid rage? I vowed not to hate and avoided rage because of my strong faith as a Muslim. The Quran taught me that we must endure suffering patiently and to forgive those who create the man-made injustices that cause human suffering. This does not mean that we do not act to correct those injustices.

Our great philanthropists and leaders may live to see their names written in stone or metal on monuments. But our children and the poor only write their names in the sand, and only their survivors witness those names written in stone on their graves. I want to tell what happened to my family in order to pay tribute to all the innocent people who have died due to conflicts throughout the world. Through my foundation, I hope my daughters’ names will be remembered and written in stone and metal on schools, colleges and institutions that support the education of girls.

I want this book to inspire people who have lost sight of hope to take positive action to regain that hope and to have the courage to endure that sometimes long and painful journey to peace and a peaceful life. The most holy things in this universe are humanity and freedom. I learned from the Quran that the whole world is one human family. We were created from a man and woman and made into nations and tribes so that we may know one another and to appreciate the diversity that enriches our lives. This world must embrace much more justice and honesty in order to make this a better place for all people. I hope my story will help open your mind, your heart and your eyes to the human condition in Gaza, and help you avoid making sweeping false judgments.

I hope to inspire people in this world, afflicted with violence, to work hard at saving human lives from destructive hostilities. It’s time for politicians to take positive actions to build, not destroy.
Leaders cannot be leaders if they are not risk-takers; the risk they must take is not sending in the soldiers, but finding the moral courage to do the right thing to improve the world’s human face in the face of criticism from the haters.