I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor's Journey

by Izzeldin Abuelaish

  The Six Day War of 1967 was something very different. From my twelve-year-old perspective, it came out of nowhere. I was waiting impatiently for the grade six exam results to be posted at the school, as I wanted to see my name at the head of the class. But instead, my Palestinian teachers were so preoccupied by the growing tension between Egypt and Israel that they only posted a pass-or-fail list. Although there was always plenty of talk among the adults about avenging the 1948 Nakba, to me, a schoolboy who was forever on the hunt for a job that would pay cash or in-kind donations to feed my family, such talk was merely background noise. But then the whispering about war in the refugee camp turned into loud cheering that this war was going to be a total defeat of the Israelis.

  It wasn’t. It started on June 5 and ended on June 10. In a mere six days, the Israelis destroyed the Egyptian air force before the planes even got off the ground and turned back the neighbouring armies of Egypt, Jordan, Syria and the Arab states of Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria, all of whom had contributed arms or soldiers to the battle.

  It was actually unfinished business that had led to the war. After the 1956 Sinai War, peacekeepers had been left behind to keep the warring factions apart. In May 1967, Gamal Abdel Nasser requested the withdrawal of the United Nations peacekeepers from Egyptian territory and the Gaza Strip, and closed the Straits of Tiran to any ship flying the Israeli flag or carrying materials that could be used for war. Arab countries fell in line to support the Egyptian initiative. Israel called up 70,000 reservists and its cabinet voted to launch an offensive, which led to a standoff of several weeks. Then full-out war began, and in an astonishingly small number of days, Israel had won—and had assumed control of the Sinai Peninsula, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights.

  Although I wasn’t aware of it at the time, this disruption in my community was pivotal in various capitals around the world, the evidence being the number of names the war still goes by. The Arabic term is Harb 1967. The Hebrew is Milhemet Sheshet Ha-Yamim. The rest of the world, divided into supporters of one side or the other, calls it variously the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, the Third Arab-Israeli War, or a Naksah (setback).

  The Six Day War affects the geopolitics of the region to this day. But it wasn’t those geopolitical consequences that made the war a crossing in my life. I was only twelve years old. The war wasn’t something that happened on a transistor radio or was described by way of the rumour mill at the refugee camp. It happened right in front of my eyes, and it looked like the end of the world to me.

  Israeli tanks rolled right onto our street. The shelling, the shooting and the fires breaking out all over the camp were completely terrifying. Parents were fleeing, some leaving their children behind; there was chaos, noise, panic. Most of my family headed for a fruit farm in Beit Lahia, north of Jabalia Camp. Hundreds of others did the same, but when we got there, we realized that some of the children had become separated from their families and some family members hadn’t come at all. The effort to escape was so disjointed that some of my own brothers had been left behind. Parents, including my own, started screaming. There was absolute pandemonium.

  We stayed in the fields for three or four days, slept on the ground, ate the apples and apricots in the orchards until it was over. When we returned cautiously to our homes, we found out that some people who had had no place to run had dug holes in the ground and jumped in and covered themselves with pieces of tin. Many of our neighbours were killed or missing. We also discovered that the Israel Defense Forces were now occupying Gaza: there were tanks all over the streets and soldiers who pointed their guns at us while we walked home. I’d never seen Israeli soldiers before. When loudspeakers suddenly announced that all the residents should gather at the public square in the middle of Jabalia Camp, I was certain we were all going to be killed. The square was also the major water collection basin for the whole camp, but since this was summertime, the water hole was dry. The soldiers made us line up around the empty waterhole. I was sure we would be forced to jump into it and be shot.

  But all the soldiers did was to arrest some young men I didn’t know and take them away to prison. Then they told us to return to our houses and not to break any of the rules, the major one being that from now on there would be a curfew from six p.m. until six a.m. For me, that was the end of the Six Day War.

  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 tw
o 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 t
anks 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.