I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor's Journey (5 page)

When I first started crossing on a weekly basis, in the mid-nineties, all the soldiers were rude and arrogant, but with time and enough patience on my part they learned to accept my existence. Now, when I pass, they sometimes ask me for prescriptions for birth control pills for their girlfriends or for medical advice for themselves. Recently the security agent held me up at the crossing, not to dispute my papers, but rather to ask me a very personal question. She was being married the following Saturday and her menstrual period was due two days before the wedding. She wondered if I had any advice for delaying the start of her menstruation. I did, and was happy to spend a few minutes giving her the information she needed.

It used to take an hour’s drive over paved goat trails to get from Gaza to Jerusalem. Today it’s a half-day journey if you’re lucky—if you have an exit pass, if the border remains open rather than suddenly closing, if the bus arrives on time and the traffic isn’t snarled and the security officers aren’t giving lessons in patience. Crossing at Erez is a real lesson in tolerance and compromise for Palestinians, both of which items are usually in short supply in Gaza and Israel.

As I drive away from the border crossing, I see many signs of a past that can seemingly never be recaptured. Old stone huts and storage barns from Palestinian farms stand abandoned in the fields in nearby southern Israel like markers of a bygone era; gaping holes where windows used to be are jammed with encroaching weeds, the hearths inside empty, cold. These are the inanimate reminders of the old Palestine; the living ones spring from the ground in the form of the sabra plant. It’s a cactus-like succulent that has been used for thousands of years as a hedge to mark the borders of Palestinian farmlands. The prickly exterior hides a sweet fruit; the rubbery leaves are beautiful in their uniqueness,
with protrusions that look like stubby toes. For sixty years the land has been bulldozed, reassigned and developed as if to scrub out any vestige of the Palestinians who lived, worked and thrived here. But the enduring sabra plant remains like an invincible sentry, silently sending the message, “We were here, and there, and down by the river and over near those woods and across that field. This land is where we were.”

Coincidentally, the plant’s name in the Arabic language means “patience and tenacity.” Like the roots of the stubborn sabra that have defied the shovel of deportation, the people of Gaza have had to dig in and seek survival.

My childhood was spent in the shadow of a promise: We’ll go back soon. Maybe in two weeks, maybe a little longer. But eventually we’ll leave this brutal place and go back to the land of our forefathers, where we belong.

The village where my father and his father and the fathers who came before them lived is called Houg. It’s in the southern part of Israel, near Sderot. There were kibbutzim all around my family’s land, the village cemetery was nearby, and sheep grazed as far as the eye could see. At least, that’s what I learned as a child, as stories of our earlier times were repeated again and again. In the confines of our treeless, provisional refugee camp, I learned that my grandfather, Moustafa Abuelaish, was the village
mukhtar
, or head, and that our family had been large and rich, one of the most eminent families in south Palestine. The Abuelaishes were well known for their generosity. The name itself—Abuelaish—means that everyone who arrives is fed, a symbol of hospitality in a fertile land where wheat, corn, figs and grapes grow, where sheep are raised for milk and cheese.
El Aish
means “bread.”
Abu
is the one who gives bread, hospitality and care to his guests.

In the refugee camp where I was born, my family told these stories of our old life so vividly that they played on the inside my head as I was falling asleep throughout my childhood. But I never saw that place. We never went back. I was born seven years after my father walked away from his heritage. He wasn’t chased out as others were after the division of Palestine and the creation of the Israeli state in 1948 and the beginning of what is called the
Nakba
(the “Catastrophe”). Nor was the family wounded as others were in massacres that were happening throughout the region. No, my paternal grandfather decided it would be wise for the whole extended family to leave—just for a little while, until the terrible tension settled down. It was important to him that the family keep its dignity and honour. There was a lot to consider in that disruptive year of 1948, with rumours of massacres taking place not far from the family farm, frightening stories of people escaping from the killing fields after witnessing the slaughter of their neighbours. He didn’t know whether the rumors were true, but for the sake of the safety of the family, he had to act.

Gaza was a short distance away from Houg; it was the closest safe place for the family to go and had been designated as a location for Palestinians. The other refuge, known as the West Bank and located on the Jordan River, was foreign to my family, unfamiliar. So they went to Gaza. But the music of our former life in Houg played like a theme song throughout my childhood. There was always the promise, always the message that we were the Abuelaish family—the ones who took care of others, who gave to guests, who belonged to the land. My father never gave up the ownership papers of his farm. Even today, though the land at Houg is known as the Sharon Farm and Ariel Sharon is listed as the owner, the deed and tax papers stay with me. I don’t keep them in order to make a case to get the family land back in some international treaty, but because failing to acknowledge what went on when the land changed hands is like a missing piece of a puzzle that remains unfinished.

I try to explain to my own children that Gaza wasn’t always a war zone or a prison. Before 1948, Gaza had many incarnations, none of them entirely peaceful and almost all of them noteworthy. The earliest recorded reference to Gaza is in Egyptian texts, and refers to Pharaoh Thutmose III’s rule when Gaza was the main city of the Land of Canaan and the only overland route between Asia and Africa. Much of Gaza’s history comes from ancient stories told in the Quran, the Bible and the Torah. The Philistines arrived in Canaan around 1180 BCE, during the Iron Age, and made Gaza a famous seaport. The infamous Delilah of Biblical fame was one of those Philistines, and Gaza was the place where she delivered Samson into bondage. Palestine derives its name from those Philistines who ruled the area at that time.

Today Gaza is a strip of land forty kilometres long. It’s six kilometres wide at its most narrow and fourteen kilometres at its widest. Israel controls everything—the air, the water, the land, the sea. The Palestinian-American attorney Gregory Khalil said in 2005, “Israel still controls every person, every item of commerce, even every drop of water that enters or leaves the Gaza Strip. Its troops may not be there … but it still restricts the ability for the Palestinian Authority to exercise control.” His judgment of the situation is shared by most human rights organizations.

Throughout history Gaza has been eyed by outsiders who had conquest on their minds. Alexander the Great tried to rule it; the Israelite King David ruled for a while, as did the Egyptians, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, Persians and Greeks. So did Napoleon, the Ottomans and the British. It seems that every warrior king or eminent general who made it into the history books has taken a run at Gaza.

The historical event that shaped the existence of every Palestinian today is of course the Nakba of 1948. There’d been talk since the end of the First World War about creating a Jewish
state. The British mandate in Palestine had been created by the League of Nations and the British had been assigned the job of implementing the Balfour Declaration, which would establish Palestine as the national home of the Jewish people. The agreement, reached on November 2, 1917, is so important to the history that followed, I want to cite the whole document:

The trouble began with those words. Jews were a minority in Palestine, outnumbered by Arab Christians and Muslims. All of
the rights of all of the non-Jewish people in the region were prejudiced by their expulsion from their homes and farms. The British mandate in Palestine ended on May 14, 1948, the same day the Israelis announced their Declaration of Independence and the birth of the Jewish state. Gaza, according to the United Nations partition plan of 1947, was supposed to become part of an independent Arab state, but the terms were not acceptable to the Palestinian people, who were expected to walk away from their homeland. Nor was the plan acceptable to their Arab neighbours. So when Israel declared its independence, Egypt acted on behalf of the rest of the region and invaded from the south, triggering the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.

Since then, a string of well-known dates has marked our failure to coexist: the Sinai War of 1956, the Six Day War of 1967, the intifada of 1987, the second intifada of 2000. There have been endless accords and agreements and leaders: the Oslo Accord of 1993, the Palestinian Authority, which gave self-rule to Palestinians under the leadership of Yasser Arafat in 1994, the Palestinian parliamentary elections of 1996 and the rise of Hamas in 2006.

In 1948 the Palestinians were accused of wanting to throw the Israelis into the sea. David Ben-Gurion, the founder of Israel, was asked at that time how he would deal with the Palestinians who lost their land and had been deported. He replied, “The old will die and the new generations will forget.” But look at the situation today: no one threw the Israelis into the sea and the Palestinians didn’t forget. However, after six decades in which the largest harvest in the region has been misunderstanding and hate, it’s fair to say that forgetting the past is not the only issue; we need to find ways to go forward together.

I was born on February 3, 1955, in the Gaza Strip, a refugee child, and I had three strikes against me right from the start: we
were poor, my family had been dispossessed, and I was the son of the second wife. Let me explain. My father married his first cousin and they had two sons when they lived on the family farm near the village of Houg. It was 1948 when he brought the family to Gaza to avoid the possibility of being deported. My mother, Dalal, was from another village called Demra, closer to the Erez Crossing. When my father and his family left Houg for Gaza, they walked north a few kilometres to Demra, and it was my mother’s grandfather who invited the family to rest there. My father thought Dalal was beautiful, and she was divorced. After my father had settled in Jabalia Camp, my father sent for her and they were married, though I’m not sure when—sometime around 1950.

It was unusual in those days to marry someone from another village, someone you were not related to, and so my mother was ostracized by the rest of the family. However, my paternal grandfather accepted her; it was the cousins and uncles and aunts who were nasty, never including my mother in family events, shunning her on the street. While I was growing up, the first wife and her two sons lived in one house and my eight brothers and sisters and I lived with our mother, the second wife, in another house about two hundred metres down the street. I thought that my father was separated from his first wife because he lived with us, but he wasn’t, and that created a lot of problems. Some believe that Islam allows men to marry one, two, three, even four wives, something I don’t agree with, but still something that is controlled by the needs and norms of the culture. So with a marriage that wasn’t going well, it was acceptable to marry another wife, and leave the first wife hanging, but not to divorce her: divorce was not an acceptable alternative to happiness.

No matter my father’s opinion, his extended family obviously preferred his first wife, and we were treated like strangers, looked
upon as the sons and daughters of the foreign woman. Even though we all lived in the same neighbourhood, even though my father provided for both families, we were the ones who were punished. I remember the hurt we felt during the feast of Ramadan when my uncles and aunts would give gifts and money to the children of the first wife, but nothing to my siblings or me. They had special clothes to wear; we did not. No one in the extended family came to mark feast days with us. We were made to feel different. While we loved our mother, this aspect of our childhood remains a source of sadness.

A lot of people I knew in the Jabalia refugee camp focused on what was lost. The camp in the Gaza Strip wasn’t far from Houg—about a ten-kilometre walk—so our past lives and family history lingered only a few hours away. My family hadn’t carried much with them when they left in 1948, because they were certain we wouldn’t be gone for long. Gaza wasn’t a refugee camp yet, just a place designated for Palestinian people when the State of Israel came into being. But day by day it filled up with people who had no place else to go. In 1949, when the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) in the Near East came to the area, the number of exiled Palestinians was growing exponentially as more regions of Palestine fell under the ownership of the new State of Israel. Ultimately, the agency designated eight refugee camps in Gaza, Jabalia being the largest. It was located in the northern part of the Gaza Strip, and after the Arab-Israeli War it housed 35,000 refugees in 1.4 square kilometres. More than 200,000 live in Jabalia Camp today. My parents moved from one small shelter to another, still thinking it was just a matter of time before they would be able to return home, but slowly, over the decades, temporary displacement became permanent reality and the spaces outside the camps, such as Jabalia City and Gaza City, burgeoned. Even inside the
camps, real estate traded hands and businesses waxed and waned with the times.