I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor's Journey

by Izzeldin Abuelaish

  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:

  Foreign Office,

  November 2nd, 1917.

  Dear Lord Rothschild,

  I have much pleasure in conveying to you, on behalf of His Majesty’s government, the following declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations which has been submitted to, and approved by the Cabinet:

  “His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”

  I should be grateful if you would bring this declaration to the knowledge of the Zionist Federation.

  Yours sincerely

  Arthur James Balfour

  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 t
hat 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.

  I remember my paternal grandfather holding court in the refugee camp. Everyone came to listen to Moustafa Abuelaish because of the position he’d held in the village of Houg. I saw him as the rock, the man with the power, the leader who discussed the issues of the day. He was highly respected and set an example for all of his sons, brothers and cousins, and even for my family, as he was the only one who came to see us regularly. I was only a youngster at the time and children weren’t allowed to sit with the older people; I knew mostly by the way others came to listen that what he had to say was important. He and his peers talked a lot about being displaced. I suppose that was natural for people who felt they had been forced from their homes. Your home, whatever it is, is where you feel safe, or at least grounded. To be pushed out of it is to be marked with the scar of expulsion for the rest of your life. Even now, six decades after my family became refugees in the Gaza Strip, knowing that our family land will never be ours again, I still suffer from this loss. But I was never drawn in by the loss and nostalgia my grandfather expressed, or his outrage. I learned instead to direct my attention to studying and surviving. I knew there was a better way, and even as a kid I set out to find it.

  Like most Palestinian children, I didn’t really have a childhood. Until I was ten, my family, which eventually numbered eleven (two parents, six boys—I was the eldest of them—and three girls), lived in one room that measured three metres by three metres. There was no electricity, no running water, no toilets in the house. It was dirty. There was no privacy. We ate our meals from a single plate we shared. We had to wait in line to use the communal toilets and wait for water that was delivered by the United Nations—we were only allowed to fill our pots during certain hours of the day. We waited for trolleys to come by with kerosene or wood for us to buy to cook with. We were usually barefoot, flea-bitten and hungry.

  We all slept together on a huge mattress that was hoisted up against the wall by day and lowered at night—except for the baby. There was always a newborn, it seemed, who slept in the same basin my mother used to wash the dishes, scrub the kids with a loofah and clean the house. When we were ready for bed, she’d wipe the dish bucket out and use it as a cradle for the baby to sleep in.

  One night my brother Nasser was acting up, aggravating my mother. She reached out to slap him, but he got away from her and she leapt up to chase after him. He jumped into the dish bucket to escape her, landing on top of the baby. The baby, my sister, who was only a few weeks old, died. It’s hard even to imagine a baby dying like that. I was five years old at the time and don’t remember the exact sequence of events. My mother grabbed the baby; she was crying and screaming. Nasser escaped by running outside. I do remember that female babies were not valued; people saw it as a tragedy if a newborn wasn’t a boy. It was the way the culture was at that time. The little baby girl, called Noor, was buried in the cemetery the next day and we never spoke about the incident again. It’s the worst memory I have of growing up.

  In an overcrowded refugee camp, people cling to hope by a thread that threatens to break at any moment.

  I don’t really know how my father bore it—the conditions we lived in—given that he had lived the first part of his life on the family farm, where there was plenty of food, and just as much pride. My father was thirty-five years old when I was born. He was of average height but he was strong, and he always wore the national Palestinian clothes and wrapped his head in a keffiyeh. He was the second eldest in his family, a hard-working and successful farmer, but in the camp he had to search for odd jobs that never paid enough to feed his first wife and two sons and all of us. I remember once he had a job as a guard at an orange grove. My mother would pack a lunch for him and give it to me to deliver. To me this task was of enormous importance, and I swelled with pride each time my mother handed me his food, honoured by the trust she had in me. But even at six I understood the angst he felt at being a provider who couldn’t barely sustain his family.

  My mother was tall and pale-skinned, with a strong personality. Her courage and determination made her a great role model. Indeed she challenged everyone who came on her path. It was my moth
er who had the character and tenacity that helped us cope with the changed circumstances of our lives, the deficiency, the want and the incessant need. She’d fight for us, protect us and whenever it was possible she did not hesitate to take over the economic lead from my father. She raised goats and pigeons in our small space. She got milk from the goats and eggs from the pigeons, enough for our table and something left over to sell at the market to make money. I remember that after I started my education, she’d come to the school to ask my teachers how I was doing. I didn’t want her to come, would beg her not to embarrass me in front of my friends, who would all tease me, saying, “Your mama is here.” But it didn’t stop her. She wanted to know how I was doing, so she came to the school to ask.

  I don’t dwell much on that time, but I do remember how painful it was, before I got to go to school, to sit on the stoop outside our house and watch other children walk past on their way to kindergarten, dressed in their handsome uniforms. A uniform was something my family couldn’t afford, so I couldn’t go no matter how eager I was to learn. Remember, there were people living in Gaza long before the refugees arrived. Their lives were vastly different from ours, and although they didn’t live in the camp, those children walked by our home every morning while I burned with jealousy and told anyone who would listen that it was unfair that only some children got to go to school. But the majority of the people we knew were in the same situation, too busy with survival to worry about coming up with the money for school fees or uniforms so they could send their children to kindergarten.