I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor's Journey

by Izzeldin Abuelaish

  At last, in 1961, when I was six, I was able to go to the United Nations school in the camp. But even at that school, which was staffed by Palestinian teachers, the prizes went to the kids who were deemed to be the best dressed. Old habits die hard: this school may have been run by an international body, but local rules held firm. The teachers called it the “cleanliness prize,” but we all knew it was for the kids with the nicest clothes. I was dressed in hand-me-downs that had been stitched and restitched so many times there were more mended threads in my trousers than original ones. I thought the awards should have been given to the students who got the highest marks. It would be several years before the system changed and students with academic prowess came to the attention of the teachers. That would be my salvation.

  My first morning in the United Nations school, I was apprehensive for more reasons than just first-day jitters. My mother had found a pair of overalls for me to wear, an item of clothing I’d never seen before. Like almost all of our clothes, the overalls were hand-me-downs donated by other people, even from other countries. I was worried because I could not figure out how I would get the overalls off if I had to go to the bathroom. I got through the day all right, and once I got home that night I figured out how to get the overalls off and on again. But the memory has stuck with me to this day.

  The overalls weren’t my only concern. It turned out the school was already overcrowded. On that first day, some of the students, me included, were told we’d be attending a school that was farther from my home. The other kids who had been picked to move weren’t my neighbours or my brothers, and I didn’t want to go with them. But my parents weren’t there, so there was no one to speak up for me, to insist I should stay in the school near where we lived and attend classes with my friends. I had no choice but to move to the other school. (What I could not have known was that a teacher at the new school would become one of the most important mentors of my life. He treated me like a son. I learned from the experience that you shouldn’t hate something you don’t know, because it may turn out to be the bearer of your greatest good fortune.)

  That first year at school, I had a succession of three different teachers. One sat on a chair and passed out textbooks for us to read and another gave us music lessons, which I liked a lot. The third was a man who acted as though he’d discovered a student in me. He paid so much attention to me that by the end of the year he had thoroughly convinced me, a first grader, that I could learn anything I wanted to learn and become anything I wanted to become. He was an extraordinary man.

  The school was crowded, we sat three to a desk with sixty kids in every class, but I could hardly wait to get there every morning. I loved being at school, enjoyed the challenge of learning new things, and when the teacher asked a question, my energy level shot up as I raised my hand to answer. New information was like a gift to me. This was the place where I found out what I could do.

  By the age of seven, as the eldest boy, I was expected to help the family with money—earn a little here, a little there, to plug this hole or that hole. For example, the United Nations used to give each family a milk ration and it provided an identity card that we had to present to be punched each day when we collected the milk. But not everyone wanted the milk, and those unclaimed rations turned into an opportunity for me. My mother gathered the cards of those who didn’t want the milk and then would wake me at three in the morning so I could be first in line at the distribution centre when it opened at six. I’d collect all the milk and then sell it for the highest price I could get to women who needed it to make yogurt, cheese and other goods they could sell in Gaza City. The buyers were always in a hurry to get their milk, make their product and get to the market in Gaza City, so a fast-moving, enthusiastic and enterprising boy could make quite a bit of money in the early morning and still be in time for school.

  Everything I earned was always for the good of my family. So if I managed to acquire something of my own, I guarded it as if it were gold. The school provided each student with a notebook, pencils and an eraser, which felt like treasure—so much so that I kept all my belongings in a “school bag,” which was actually an old flour bag with a string threaded through the top. The eraser was somehow very special, maybe because it was so small or maybe because my mother had never seen one before. In any case, so I wouldn’t lose it, my mother put a hole in it and threaded it with a string so I could wear it around my neck. But I was a boy all the same: the eraser, precious as it was, became a toy I loved to take off my neck and swing through the air at the end of its string, higher and higher, watching it spin like a flying saucer. Then one day the string flew out of my fingers and disappeared into the crowd on the street. I was on my knees in a flash, searching everywhere, but I couldn’t find it. I couldn’t tell my mother that I’d lost the eraser—she would have thrashed me for sure—so I ran to the school, confessed to the teacher who’d given it to me, and tearfully told him I was sorry. He gave me another one, just like the original, and sternly reminded me to be careful. He didn’t have to worry, though: losing it had been devastating.

  In my neighbourhood, we studied the Quran, learning it by heart so we could recite it in competitions. The first competition I won was during the festival of Ramadan when I was ten years old. The prize was presented by the Egyptian governor of the Gaza Strip, Ahmed Alajroudi. When they called my name to go up to the stage to receive the prize from this dignitary, I put my hand out and couldn’t believe my good fortune when the governor handed me enough money to buy two weeks’ worth of food for the family. Here was this truly poor child, wearing clothes that were patched together from rags, standing on the stage at the Jabalia Camp mosque receiving two and a half Egyptian pounds (about one U.S. dollar). That was a fortune in those days, when a state employee earned eight pounds a month.

  At about that time, my family was participating in a community fund. For a fee of fifty Egyptian piastres, or half an Egyptian pound, we’d get oil, butter, rice and soup at cost. My earnings from the Quran competition would pay the fee for a month. I remember standing in line to fetch the goods for my mother, but when I got to the front and reached into my pocket to pay for the groceries, I discovered to my horror that I didn’t have the money. Had it fallen through a hole in my pocket, which had been re-sewn so many times it wasn’t reliable for holding the coins? Had someone stolen the money? All I knew was that it was gone and my mother was going to be very angry. I went home, dreading to tell her what had happened.

  I feared my mother as much as I loved her, and that day she beat me so much for losing the money I wondered if somehow she thought her blows would magically produce the fifty piastres out of my flesh. Afterwards she sent me back to the street to retrace my steps. I crawled about looking for the money under tables and behind stalls. I knew it wouldn’t be there, but I was scared to go home again without it. As a boy, I could only wonder why she was doing this to me. Now I understand the level of frustration that wells up when you don’t have enough to feed your kids, when life deals you one mean blow after another, when you feel that no matter how hard you work or how devoted you are, your efforts are for naught. Desperation was the motivating force of her anger, and sometimes the only targets she could find were the people she was trying to protect.

  There were times when I hated my life, hated the misery we lived with, the filth and the poverty and being wakened at three o’clock in the morning out of a dead sleep to go to work. I hated myself for having to live like this, for not being able to change our circumstances no matter how hard I tried. In my culture the responsibility carried by the eldest son is very heavy—I was responsible for my parents as well as my younger brothers and sisters. I felt as though I was always living for someone else, never for myself. I railed against so many injustices when I was growing up, but today I look back and am thankful for getting through it at all, thankful for the teachers who saw a brighter future for me. I was lucky that so many of my teachers reached out to help me. They are the ones who boosted
my energy and gave me the self-confidence to carry on. It was the teachers rather than my parents who opened doors for me and let me know there was a future apart from the grinding poverty in which we lived.

  When people find out I grew up in an overcrowded refugee camp, they often ask me what it was like. They presume that even with all the deprivation and anxiety, young boys would still be young boys. How did we play? What sorts of fun did we have? Well, we locked friends in the outdoor toilet as a joke sometimes, and we played other tricks and cavorted endlessly in the forty-degree heat with the water pipes on the street, spraying each other as well as unsuspecting passersby with blasts of water. Yet our games sometimes had perilous consequences. I fell on the water pipes one time and sliced my bare foot open. My mother had to drop everything and take me to the United Nations health centre to get the gash in my foot stitched, scolding me all the way.

  The truth is, my most powerful memories of my boyhood in Jabalia Camp are of the stench of the latrine, the gnawing ache in my hungry stomach, the exhaustion from selling milk in the very early morning to earn that little bit of money that was so essential to my family, the anxiety I felt rushing to get to school on time. I had developed arthritic pain in my joints and when I was tired the pain in my legs was relentless. So even the fun was often not that much fun. It is true that the sky was always beautiful but I don’t remember marvelling at sunsets or gazing at the dawn of a new day. Survival doesn’t allow time for poetic reflection. In those years I was focused on one thing: getting an education and getting out of there.

  Education was the only way out of the circumstances we were in. And as the eldest son, I felt that I was the one to lead them. But it was hard. I’d sit on the floor of our one-room house doing my homework by the light of an oil lamp as my siblings tumbled about me. I could tune out the noise and focus on the task, but sometimes concentration just wasn’t enough. I recall one rainy evening when I was carefully printing the answers to my homework—tidiness was very important to my teachers—and suddenly there was a drop of water on the paper, then another, and soon enough the words were blurring and blotching and running down the page. The leaking roof had let the raindrops spoil my homework, and I had to start again.

  There was no summer camp or team sports or videos in my growing-up years. Mostly they weren’t available, but I also was exclusively focused on learning, and when I wasn’t in class or studying, I was earning money in order to stay in school.

  My mother was like a lioness when it came to protecting us. But she was demanding as well. She expected me to give as much as she did to the effort of improving our situation, and when I failed, I paid for it with beatings. The Palestinian mother is the author of the survival story of the Palestinian people. She’s the heroine, the one behind the successes. She feeds everyone before taking food herself, she never gives up, and she pushes at the barriers holding her children back. For my mother survival was always paramount. School was important, but it didn’t carry the same value as a job. If I could earn money, she’d encourage me to skip classes to do it

  There was one curious incident that stays in my memory although I didn’t fully comprehend what had happened to me until I was grown. In 1966—a year before the Six Day War would end the Egyptian administration of Gaza and replace it with the Israeli occupation—my cousin on my mother’s side invited me to go to Egypt with him. I was eleven years old and absolutely ecstatic about the idea. He was a trader, my mother told me, and he took goods from Gaza to sell across the border in Egypt. I had enormous dreams for what I would see on this trip to Cairo: the pyramids, the anniversary celebrations of President Gamal Abdel Nasser that everyone was talking about, and I desperately wanted to go to the zoo. I’d never been outside Jabalia Camp except to go for a day to Gaza City. I’d only seen photos of zoo animals and the pyramids in picture books. And President Nasser was discussed all the time—Nasser this and Nasser that. Imagine, I could see this man whom everyone talked about.

  My cousin prepared me carefully for the trip across the border. My mother gave me a special jacket to wear, into which she’d sewn extra pockets. She also gave me a pair of size nine shoes that were much too large for me. My cousin stuffed the pockets inside the jacket as well as the oversized shoes with many pairs of socks he wanted to trade. I didn’t have a clue what he was up to, and thought it was just a clever way for one person to carry a lot of items. What I didn’t realize was that Gaza was a duty-free zone and my cousin was trying to avoid paying taxes when he crossed into Egypt to keep the cost of his goods low. I also thought I was helping him with his job, which in fact I was, and felt very grown-up to be selected for the task.

  My cousin set off to Egypt with one of his partners by car, and he put me on the train that would go across the border accompanied by his other partner. When the customs officer came onto the train to inspect the passengers and their parcels and asked me if I was bringing in anything that needed to be declared, I confidently said, “No.” The truth is, I didn’t know what he was talking about. The officer didn’t believe me, opened up my jacket and found all the socks. He smacked me across the side of the head. I didn’t know what I’d done wrong and now he was holding me by the ear and yelling at me. I was scared to death. There was another man sitting in the same train compartment, a military man, a peacekeeper from India, who took pity on me and said, “Let the kid go.” When my cousin’s partner augmented that request with a small amount of cash, the officer did. I shook all the rest of the way to Cairo.

  When I got off the train in the city, I could hardly believe what my eyes were feasting on. There was no electricity in Jabalia Camp, but the city of Cairo was a festival of lights. I thought I had arrived in the capital of the world, or gone from under the ground all the way up to the moon. It was colourful, noisy and, in the eyes of a child, a glorious sight. But as I soon found out, I would have no time to enjoy this grand city. My cousin’s partner took me to the low-rent hotel where the traders met to do business with the locals, where we met my cousin. And that’s where I stayed the whole time, watching the customers come and go, sitting around while my cousin did his business.

  So on my one trip out of Gaza as a child, I smuggled goods for my cousin. What’s more, he knowingly sent me into danger, from which I was saved only by the efforts of an Indian military man and his partner whose bribe also helped persuade an Egyptian customs officer to let me go. My only reward? I got a watermelon from Ismailia, capital of Egypt’s Canal region and renowned for its melons, which I brought back to my family. When I told my mother what happened, she laughed as if she’d known all along that I was being used as a courier.

  When I got back from that misadventure, I continued with my survival routine—going to school and trying to earn a few piastres for the family. I sold ice cream and seeds and geraniums after school. I accepted any work that came along, and never tasted the sweetness of a summer holiday. For a while I had a job at a brick factory, where I had to line up bricks, water them down so they’d harden, and carry them to a pallet and stack them. I was paid two piastres for every hundred bricks I stacked; I worked there after school each afternoon until the factory closed. Consider that there are 100 piastres in an Egyptian pound and it takes 2.3 Egyptian pounds to make a U.S. dollar. Hauling those bricks didn’t give me much, but I took what I could get and though sometimes I was reluctant (what child wouldn’t want to keep some of the money he earned), I always handed the money over to my mother.

  School was the place where I got my rewards. When I was in the sixth grade, in 1967, I was selected to become the school broadcaster, which was tantamount to class president. The teacher prepared the news each day, and I read it over the intercom for the entire term. I liked that. I liked almost everything about school, because the teachers—not all of them, but the most important ones—persuaded me that with an education I could do anything I wanted. I worked very hard to earn their praise, to stay at the top of the class. I remember the June day the results for the final exams fo
r all grade six students in Gaza were supposed to be announced: it was the day the Six Day War started. At first I was more upset about not hearing the results of my exams than about having to endure a war. Perhaps it was because I understood so little of actual war when it started. But I learned.

  It wasn’t the first war of my lifetime, but I was only an infant during the 1956 Suez Crisis, also referred to as the Tripartite Aggression or Sinai war, in which Britain, France and Israel attacked Egypt on October 26, 1956. Egypt and Israel had been sparring with each other ever since 1948, when Israel declared nationhood. My father told me the entire region was on tenterhooks the whole time, that there was always a border dispute or the threat of attack. So people weren’t surprised when the Sinai conflict actually began, sparked by Egypt’s decision to nationalize the Suez Canal after the withdrawal of an offer by Britain and the United States to fund the construction of the Aswan Dam. People just didn’t know what shape the war would take, how it would alter their lives. But like most wars, not much was accomplished in the Sinai War that would change the way of life in Gaza, except that it was a brutal episode that led to six months of occupation by Israel. And in the aftermath we formally came under Egyptian administration, a state of affairs that would last eleven years. (Later I would learn that it was during this war that the Egyptian leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser, rose to prominence and that this was also when the United States established itself as the chief negotiator in the Middle East.)