I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor's Journey (8 page)

Almost no one had behaved the way I’d expected them to behave—not the parents who’d run off without their children, not the soldiers who I’d presumed were there to kill us. The knowledge unsettled me. It made me more aware of what people say versus what they actually do. And I finally realized that my own poverty wasn’t the only issue holding me back. I began to ask questions about discrimination: Why are the Israelis like this and we are like that? How come there’s a difference in the way we are treated? At last, at age twelve, I began to keep my eyes open in order to better understand the circumstances I was living in.

Soon enough, after the Six Day War, Israelis started coming back to the parts of Gaza that had always flourished—the areas where Gazans lived before the refugees arrived. The fish, fresh fruits and vegetables in the region were a particular attraction for these Israeli tourists. I saw their arrival as a way to earn some money. I carried their shopping bags and fetched parcels of fruit for them. I’d walk the six kilometres from Jabalia Camp to Gaza City with a basket strapped to my shoulders and earn a little money that way.

When the new school year started in September 1967, for the first time I began to have doubts about my goals. Why was I bothering with school when we were occupied and the future seemed so bleak? I was older now and better understood the consequences of occupation. My school grades notwithstanding, I began to question whether there was a way out of this turmoil. Also, my
family desperately needed any money I could earn and I was good at finding jobs. Why shouldn’t I just try to make life a little easier for my family? As the eldest boy, it was my job to provide. Perhaps I should give up on my dream of improving our lives through education.

And so, in grade seven, I started skipping classes. If there was a job to do, I wouldn’t go to school. If I was exhausted from piling orange crates until three in the morning, I’d rest rather than attend classes. My parents knew I was missing school, but they both thought that it was better to work and make money than get an education. I’d always tried to set an example for my brothers and sisters, but for a time I didn’t care about that at all.

Then my English teacher took me aside. He told me I was a good student, said I was intelligent enough that I could eventually go to university, become a professional, a doctor or lawyer or engineer. He pleaded with me to consider the consequences of skipping school. At that point I’d actually been planning to drop out, but after he took me to task I decided that I couldn’t let him down, though I continued to skip class when it was absolutely necessary. My family obligations pressed on me like a red-hot branding iron, but my teachers never stopped encouraging me to stay the course. I tried my best to keep my teachers happy, especially my English teacher. It was the practice to assign extra homework for students to do over the regular two-week winter break, which for me was an opportunity to work at a paying job every day that I couldn’t miss. So when the grade eight winter holiday rolled around, I did all my English homework in advance and handed them in to be marked before the holiday had even started. I will thank my teachers forever for never ceasing to encourage me to stay in school.

By the end of grade eight, I rarely skipped classes, but I never stopped working. In the winter months there were always jobs
picking citrus fruits and loading them on trucks. In the summer months I’d go to the farms to load fertilizer, which entailed piling manure into two baskets that were slung over my shoulders and carrying the load to a truck. I felt like a donkey. The smell was awful, the summer heat almost unbearable, and the manure seemed to weigh more than I did.

I remember I had to walk five or six kilometres to get to that farm, which took two hours. This meant I had to get up at four to make it there for six, when work started. All that walking to and fro was hard on my arthritic legs, and my joints became swollen and inflamed. One day I fell and couldn’t get up—I just couldn’t force my legs to support me. The United Nations health centre referred me to Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City.

I asked the doctors and nurses so many questions about the arthritic pain in my legs—that’s where I learned about the use of high-dose aspirin for my condition—and about everything else I could think of. All of it fascinated me. They were all Palestinians like me; I wanted to know what they knew, live like they seemed to live, with good jobs and respect. I knew one of the doctors had running water in his house and a special room called a sitting room where people gathered just to visit. But more than that, I was very impressed by the medical treatments, by the fact that there were drugs or therapies or other means to actually alter the course of an illness. I could see that they were really helping people. This was when and where my dream about becoming a doctor began. I could see that if I became a doctor, it would be possible for me to improve the condition of my family and also to serve the Palestinian people.

But the hospital experience left other impressions on me as well. I shared a room with a Palestinian girl whose family brought her food—quantities of food such as I’d never seen in my life. They obviously weren’t refugees! They brought whole bunches of
bananas. If there was ever a banana in our house, my mother would cut it into equal pieces—one for each child. In my world there was no such thing as a bunch of bananas, and certainly nothing as luxurious as a whole banana for yourself. The girl and I shared a cupboard in the hospital room and one night I took one of her bananas and ate it. I loved that banana. I admit I stole the fruit. But I excused the act by telling myself that the Quran allows such behaviour if you are hungry.

Another lasting impression on me was made by the relationships I observed between the male and female nurses and the doctors. It was clear even to this young boy that they were having fun at work. They respected each other, worked hard and helped each other out. The hospital culture—the way the women and men related to each other—was very different from what I experienced at home. For example, there was teasing and gossip about nurses and doctors having intimate relations. In my world, men and women wouldn’t even work together, never mind make jokes like this with each other. And I saw romantic relationships between men and women in the health field, and they looked normal to me. Where I came from—in the refugee camp, on my street, in my village—this would not be seen as normal at all.

When I was fifteen years old, I had the chance to work in Israel for the summer, on a farm called Moshav Hodaia, close to the town of Ashqelon. It was owned by the Madmoony family. For forty days I lived in the heart of a Jewish farm family. I did chores from six in the morning until eight at night, pretty much working every daylight hour. I’d never slept away from home before except on that trip to Cairo, and I was so lonesome that I can remember the aching in my gut to this day. But the family, Sephardic Jews, were very warm to me, even when I did really naive things that they must have found perplexing.

For instance, I was still dressing in hand-me-down clothes, donations from the humanitarian agencies that operated in Gaza. I had assumed that the clothes came to us because their former owners were so rich they threw their clothes away when they got tired of wearing them. So when I saw some piles of clothing on the floor of the Madmoony household, I assumed they were throwing the clothes away, and I quickly gathered them and stored them in my knapsack so I could take them home to my mother. I had no idea I was actually collecting the family laundry! After a while they asked me if I’d seen their clothing, and to my great embarrassment I had to confess.

That summer left a powerful impression on me in many ways. That an Israeli family would hire me, treat me fairly and show kindness toward me—none of this was what I had expected. The experience was made all the more unforgettable by the events that followed one week after my return to Gaza.

We were dirt-poor refugees who had by this time moved out of the one-room shelter in which we’d been crammed into a simple two-bedroom house in Block P-42 of Jabalia Camp, with a roof made from small cement tiles that would still leak whenever it rained. The toilets were still outside, public toilets shared by several families. Even though it was barely fit for human habitation, it was our home.

At the time, Ariel Sharon was the Israeli military commander of the Gaza Strip. He was concerned that the roads that ran through the camp weren’t wide enough for his tanks to patrol. His solution? Bulldoze hundreds of houses to the ground. There wasn’t a thing we could do. The level of inhumanity was astonishing, and it has stayed with me to this day.

That it was Ariel Sharon who ordered this destruction meant even more to our family as our land in Houg had been taken by him. So when his tanks came to our street that night, my family
shuddered at the thought of what could happen to us. The warning sound of their tracks crunching up the road wakened everyone. It was midnight. Families rushed to doorways to see long guns pointing at us from the turrets of the tanks. Now I wonder how those soldiers must have felt, pointing their murderous weapons at little kids still rubbing sleep from their eyes and clinging to their mothers in doorways, but to me then it was the quintessential display of power over the powerless. The houses along the street were simple, small, even primitive, but they were all we had. Sharon saw them simply as obstructions on a road that he wanted widened.

I remember the feeling of being trapped, of peril coming to my home. Whatever type of house you have, if you have a house, it means you are not homeless. Thirty-nine years later, when I witnessed the destruction of Gaza during the Israeli incursion of December and January of 2008–9, the same thought came to me. I saw people become homeless as bombs smashed into their dwellings and brought them tumbling down, and I realized that the pain of homelessness has never left me.

The soldiers ordered the people on my street to leave our houses and stand together and wait. About eight hours went by. At dawn they said we had a couple of hours to empty our houses. I was thinking, “Empty? There’s nothing inside to empty.” Whatever difficulties we had with this house, there was nothing to save except the house itself, its walls. A lush, tangled grapevine had bloomed and grown for years over the door. We appreciated it most in the summer months when the temperature soared to forty degrees and the inside of the house was unbearably hot. The whole family would sleep outside under that grapevine. So when the soldiers said, “Empty the house,” I wondered how one plucks up a grapevine and moves it to another location.

They wanted us to move to Al ‘ArĪsh, a town in the northern part of the Sinai desert, where there were empty houses because
the Egyptians who had lived there had run away when the Israelis arrived and occupied the region. But how were we to do that? We were Palestinians. We grew up in the Jabalia refugee camp. This small house was our home, our palace. Couldn’t anyone understand how important it was to us? It protected us from the winter cold, the rain; it gave us a place to be together, to rest, to eat.

We decided to stay. But because we refused to relocate, Sharon denied us compensation for our home. The blackmail was astounding. He would have paid us for our house if we’d agreed to be uprooted illegally and had moved to a place we didn’t know, where we didn’t have family. About five families from our street agreed to move, but they returned a few months later. That day I learned the bitter lesson of what it means to be helpless in the face of one man’s power.

The bulldozers started their calamitous work on our street at eight a.m. We scrambled to collect falling bricks, to try to salvage something in order to build another place. In one hour we witnessed the demolition of our house and about a hundred others that were in the way of the tanks, and many more houses throughout the refugee camp were also demolished under orders from Sharon in a campaign that lasted for two weeks. Then the soldiers rumbled back down the road in their malignant columns of tanks that had knocked down our lives. Was our suffering of any consequence to their consciences? Did they see us as victims? Or were we simply nameless, faceless humans who were in their way?

That night and for several nights thereafter, we slept in one room at my uncle’s house. My parents and siblings slept in a row on the floor, like pickets on a fence. I was stretched out at everyone else’s feet. Our few possessions were stacked in a box outside the door as there was no space in the room to keep them with us. I wasn’t a little kid anymore; I’d worked outside the country,
earned my own money. Sleeping at everyone’s feet felt humiliating, and I stung from both the cause and the effect.

But I did have a plan. I’d earned 400 lira (about US$140) working on the Madmoony farm that summer. Along with a few Egyptian pounds my mother had saved, we had enough to buy another house. My father had been ill while I was away in Israel; now it broke my heart to see him witness the destruction of the only shelter his family had. But I knew he was pleased and proud that his son had come home with enough money to solve this enormous problem. My brothers were also very impressed with me, and to this day they tell people how I bought the family a house when I was just fifteen years old.

The new house wasn’t much better than our old one. But it was from inside this home—built on destruction—that I was able to reflect on the second crossing in my life. The contrast between the warm hospitality of the Israeli family who had employed me that summer and the brute force of Sharon’s Israeli soldiers made me recognize that I had to commit myself to finding a peaceful bridge between the divides.

I’d seen the destruction of my home, and to this day those images stay with me, but hate has never been part of my repertoire, nor were politics at that time. Of course I knew about Fatah and the Palestine Liberation Organization, and I was never accused of not being engaged. During the school year I went with my brothers and friends to the demonstrations in support of the PLO. But I always returned to class afterwards. I was very aware of the suffering of my people, but I also believed the weapon I needed was not a rock or a gun but an education, so I could fight for human rights and help all the Palestinian people. Even though I sometimes attended marches organized by Fatah and the PLO, political demonstrations were not a large part of my day-to-day life
as a teenager. Except for my brother Noor, my siblings weren’t much interested either. Although resistance to occupation was discussed in our house, my parents weren’t involved in politics. Noninvolvement in politics as I was growing up was common and politics were not considered a big deal.