I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor's Journey

by Izzeldin Abuelaish

  This was the new era of reproductive technologies, and I wanted to be at the cutting edge. I was hungry to learn, to expand my knowledge. My dream was to undertake a formal residency in obstetrics and gynecology, but it was a huge investment of time—four years—and there were finances to consider. For a long time I wondered if this particular dream was out of reach.

  While I was moving back and forth between my UN position in Gaza and the volunteer work at Soroka, I was invited to attend the First World Congress on Labour and Delivery in Jerusalem in 1994. While I was in Jerusalem, I decided to try to find the Jewish family I had worked for as a teenager. I’d been thinking about them for a long time but had never before tried to find their farm. Since I had to drive from Jerusalem back to Soroka, I decided this was the time to find the family who had had so much influence on me as a teenager, who had allowed me to see how small the differences actually were between the two peoples of the Middle East. I longed to show them that the Palestinian youth who had once worked for them was now a doctor and doing well. It was a reunion I’d imagined for a very long time. I knew they had lived near a village called Hodaiah, somewhere along the road from Jerusalem to Beersheba. But where exactly was it? Could I find it again? The area had changed a lot and the grandparents would be in their eighties by this time; I wondered if they were even alive.

  I eventually found the farmhouse, and it was the granddaughter, who had been just a few days old when I left that summer, who opened the door. She asked what I needed. I answered, “I want to see your father.” I had worked for her grandfather as well, but it was her father I knew best.

  He was sitting on the couch near the window. He had noticed the Arab licence plates on the car when I turned into the driveway and had assumed I was an Arab businessman here to sell them something. He didn’t recognize me at first. “You don’t know me?” I asked. “I’ll tell you who I am. I am Izzeldin, the one who worked here.” With that, he jumped up from the couch and kissed and hugged me. When his wife saw me, she embraced me and said it felt as though she were holding her own son. She said, “Izzeldin, I remember you, the boy who worked in the chicken coops and was always holding his nose because he could not bear the smell. I used to pity you and think it’s not a place for a youngster to work.”

  I was so happy to have found the family once again and to see that they were all alive and healthy. And I was glad to have the chance to explain to them how much my summer at their farm had meant to me, that it had proved to me that Jews and Palestinians could behave as one family. And they told me that they had never expected that a doctor would be coming out of a place like the Jabalia refugee camp, a place full of fighting and hostility. I wanted to show them the affection, even love, I had for them. I know how much we can accomplish when we pull down the barriers that stop us from achieving our dreams.

  Back at the Soroka hospital, my Israeli colleagues kept talking to me about taking up a residency there in obstetrics and gynecology. I simply couldn’t see how to do it. I was still running my clinic in Gaza, earning enough money for the family, and coming regularly to Soroka to consult with and learn from my new colleagues.

  Marek Glezerman tailored the program to suit me and recommended that I be the first Palestinian resident in his department, but left for a position at another hospital before he could follow through. He was replaced by a new chair, Moshe Mazor, who also supported the idea, but it wasn’t easy. For example, the hospital had to arrange for four different certificates just to get me started. I had to carry a special identification card as well as a work permit that was good for one year, a licence giving me permission to sleep in Israel on nights when I couldn’t make it home, and a special licence that allowed me to cross the border in my own car (we could drive cars across the border then). Shimon Glick and Margalith Carmi, both professors at Ben-Gurion University’s school of medicine, were crucial, persuading the MacArthur Foundation to issue a grant to cover my salary.

  Dr. Shlomo Usef, who became the director of Soroka at that time, was also supportive. He has said, “Izzeldin was a special person, with a balanced point of view about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict…. He saw it as a conflict with two sides, and himself as the person to bridge the two. On top of that, he had aspirations to reach new heights in his own work. So I thought we should train him. We had to deal with everything—his career, the finances required, all the permits he would need from our government and his to make this happen. We did it all through Ben-Gurion University. I saw how eager Izzeldin was to move ahead. So I wanted to help to make sure his residency at Soroka began. The rest he did on his own.”

  I took up the residency in 1997, almost exactly one year after our first son, Mohammed, had been born. Nadia was now at home with him and our five older daughters. I know it was difficult for her. I was away during the week, and often on weekends as well if I was scheduled to be on shift at the hospital. The border crossing between Gaza and Israel was so unpredictable, I never knew if I could get across in time to be at work, so I rented a small apartment in Beersheba and used part of the $2,000 monthly salary I was being paid to cover these expenses. Otherwise I was worried I’d be late for a class or to relieve another resident at the end of a shift or for a patient who was depending on me. Even though I got to know many of the soldiers and they didn’t hassle me, the new ones or the ones I didn’t know gave me no end of grief, just as they did with other Palestinians coming into Israel. I was learning, yes, but I was also serving the Israeli patients in the hospital—it was not an easy situation.

  I remember one time they asked me to drive my car over the pit where soldiers inspected the undersides of cars. I sat at the side with my briefcase, watching the procedure, trying to be patient. When at last the screening was finished, I drove away. It wasn’t until I reached the hospital that I realized I’d left my briefcase with my licence, my passport, all of my documents and important papers on the landing beside the car. I phoned the crossing station, but there was no answer. So I drove the forty-four kilometres back to the crossing and told the soldiers about my dilemma. The man in charge hardly even raised his head to look at me. He said, “We thought it was a suspicious package and we blew it up.”

  I understood the security issue. Security is as important for Palestinians as it is for Israelis. But those soldiers knew me, and they ought to have dealt with me as a Palestinian, as a human being. I was simply a man who had forgotten his briefcase. There are plenty of Palestinians who are also looking for peace, and they deserve the same respect as anyone else at the crossing. Still, I put up with the indignity because I did not want to jeopardize my chance to learn at the Soroka hospital.

  My research was in the fertility unit. My patients were Israeli and Palestinian and Arab-Israeli couples who were having difficulty conceiving a child. The department was like a world unto itself. Life in general is not easy, not for anyone, but it is especially difficult for couples who are dealing with infertility, with all its additional baggage of anguish and self-doubt. Somehow this pain has always resonated with me: from the beginning of my training, I have always wanted to help relieve this fundamental ache in men and women who want to become parents and yet can’t conceive. It’s why I continue to work in this field.

  But there were—and still are—so many unique challenges in the way of our finding the path to peaceful coexistence. For instance, a critically ill woman from Gaza was brought in for treatment; she would have died had she stayed in Gaza. She was a mother of ten with acute renal failure and she’d been in a Gaza hospital for about two weeks, with the diagnosis of deep-vein thrombosis and marked swelling in her legs. But then she developed a high fever and other complications, and a decision was made to transfer her to Soroka. It’s not easy to move patients across this divide. A Palestinian ambulance had to bring her to the Erez Crossing. The ambulance from Soroka had to meet them and make the switch. It was (and still is) difficult to get permission to cross into Israel. Not only that, but the Palestinian Authority had to ag
ree to pay her medical costs before she could leave. There was a lot of distrust between Palestinians and Israelis at that time, as there still is, and as a consequence so much needless suffering, pain and loss on both sides. Nevertheless a transfer was coordinated and she was moved to Soroka. I was consulted when she got there to determine if there was a gynecological reason for the high fever. When I spoke to her in Arabic and told her I was a Palestinian from Jabalia Camp, she grabbed my hand and wouldn’t let go. She had never been to Israel before and was afraid she’d be mistreated.

  But it was Israeli doctors who saved her life. I love my work because a hospital is a place where humanity can be discovered, where people are treated without racism and as equals. In the brotherhood and sisterhood of medicine, we make an oath when we graduate to care for the sick. We leave our differences outside the walls. Certainly I cannot speak for everyone, but in my experience the Israelis I worked with see the patient, not the nationality or the ethnicity.

  There’s another experience from my days at Soroka Hospital I’d like to describe. I was determined to learn Hebrew, because I never wanted a patient to think I couldn’t read their chart or understand their symptoms; I was afraid that he or she would lose confidence in my work if my command of the language was insufficient. So I was very careful about to speak Hebrew grammatically. One day a Bedouin woman was admitted with severe hypertension in her pregnancy, but she refused to stay in the hospital. I had to write a discharge summary and record the fact that she had refused medical advice. In Hebrew the word for “refused” is meseravet. I didn’t know the symbol for the letter s—whether it went one way or the other—and I didn’t want the Bedouin woman or her husband to know that in case they’d wonder why the doctor couldn’t spell. For that reason, I couldn’t ask the nurse how to spell it in front of the patient. Believe it or not, for that reason alone, I tried to persuade the patient to stay in the hospital. She wouldn’t. Finally I asked her to go with her husband to his car and bring her identification to me, just so I could get them out of the room long enough to ask the nurse how to make an s in Hebrew. When the couple came back and I asked them to sign the discharge sheet, they told me neither of them could write their names.

  I’d been so worried about making a mistake in front of them. I was always aware that I could be judged as wanting, whether it be in medical skill or language or interpersonal relationships. As much as I’d been given the opportunity of a lifetime to be a resident at Soroka, I knew I was a test case in the eyes of my Israeli colleagues, and that my success could create openings in the future for other Palestinian physicians. My failure might shut that door.

  Most Jewish Israelis mistook me for an Arab-Israeli, but I quickly told them I was a Palestinian from the Gaza Strip. Although I wore a name tag with a Palestinian surname and spoke Hebrew with an accent, no one seemed to object. Disease doesn’t know borders. But I have to admit, politics and prejudice keep pushing their way into things. I just wanted to do my job at the hospital and leave the politics at the checkpoint, but they came right with me into the emergency department. For example, one afternoon at about four o’clock I was in the gynecology wing of Emergency when a woman arrived in distress. She was in the early stages of pregnancy and was bleeding. I examined her, did an ultrasound, found that the pregnancy was intact but that she was threatening abortion. The only treatment was bedrest. I told her there only was a fifty-fifty chance the pregnancy would be saved.

  She left the hospital but came back at midnight; the bleeding had increased. This time her husband, a Sephardic Jew from Morocco, started shouting at me, claiming I killed the baby and threatening to do the same to me. I was busy dealing with the patient—his wife. He continued threatening me and the nurse called for security. This man would not have treated an Israeli doctor like this. He blamed me for his wife’s condition because he saw me first and foremost as an Arab. He complained to the head of the hospital, who took the man to his office, pointed at the shelves full of medical textbooks and said, “What Dr. Abuelaish did came from these textbooks.” He defended me wholeheartedly and the man calmed down.

  I did my share of pushing the envelope for coexistence even then by acting as an unofficial peace envoy for the region: I would host groups of Israelis at my home or in the homes of my friends one weekend every month. We toured the Jabalia refugee camp and Gaza City, showed them the conditions people live in, let them experience the overcrowding, and allowed plenty of time so they could talk to people, ask their own questions, draw their own conclusions. Then we’d have coffee and sweets together—all of us, the Israelis and the Palestinians. We’d discuss and we’d argue. These get-togethers brought home to me how similar we are when it comes to socializing. We’re expressive. We talk loud, and the decibel level goes up with the intensity of the conversation. The more interesting it gets, the noisier we become. That’s how Palestinians and Israelis are. But I can say that even the most vociferous arguments almost always ended with the exchange of telephone numbers and the forging of friendships.

  Then it stopped. The second intifada began in September 2000 when a number of incendiary events came together like the perfect storm. Ariel Sharon visited the Temple Mount, the third most holy site in the Islamic world, in a show of “I dare you to try to stop me.” The peace talks at the Camp David Summit in July had collapsed; skirmishes on both sides had resulted in deaths. Then the rock throwing, the firebombing and the tear-gassing began. Riots followed. The border was closed and my little band of peacemakers were no longer allowed to meet.

  I continued work in my own clinic in Gaza one day a week, giving medical treatment for free. But even I couldn’t cross into Israel during the first several weeks, and the approximately 100,000 other Gazans who had jobs in Israel couldn’t go to work either. It felt as though we were being squeezed out of existence. No jobs and no money means no food and no goods. Although it would get a lot worse later, many Palestinians couldn’t see any future for themselves—they began to see their lives as useless. And then, when one person goes crazy and becomes a suicide bomber, no one around him tries to prevent the act. Instead, they call him a hero. That’s the way things get worse.

  I wanted to go back to work in Israel, and in order to protect myself I consulted many Palestinians about whether I should. I wanted to know whether it was ethical. The general consensus was, “Izzeldin, go to your work. It’s beneficial for you, for us, for the Israelis.” I still had the papers that allowed me to cross into Israel, and despite the fact that the intifada was still raging, it was business as usual when I presented them at the border.

  When I arrived back at the hospital the first time, my Israeli colleagues and friends accepted me like a son who had come home after a long absence. They told me they had all been thinking of me. One of my Israeli friends at Soroka told me, “Izzeldin, I heard that you were afraid to come back. I want to tell you, I am ready to sacrifice my life for your safety if any Israeli tries to do harm to you.”

  What more can one do than this?

  But even after my pre-emptive consultations, some of my colleagues in Gaza questioned my motives. One said, “How can you help these Jewish women to have babies? They will grow up to be soldiers who bomb us and shoot us.” Another said through clenched teeth, “It makes me very angry that you are doing this.” Some have suggested I am helping to deliver a new generation of occupiers. I try to tell them that these Israeli babies could grow up to be doctors.

  I felt as if we’d been so close to peace. Like many others, I had been full of hope. I’d been conducting my tours, and had even opened clinics in Gaza with the help of Israeli doctors (which all had to close). I find it astonishing that the two sides could be so close to a peace agreement and then see our relationship deteriorate so rapidly. As the second intifada raged, each side was focusing on its own pain and blaming the other instead of realizing we have to recognize the rights of both peoples to live in harmony and peace; the alternative is war and distrust. I wished then that I could clos
e my eyes and open them to where we had been before the second intifada began, when we were still talking to each other.

  It was a fine line I walked while trying to bring two sides of a very fractious debate together. I thought that attracting more Palestinian doctors to Israeli hospitals to do their residencies would show them the real Israelis who believe in peace, and it would also allow Israelis to see the human aspect of the Palestinian. Politics aside, I believe the best way to bring peace between our two peoples is through health care. For me, every patient is like one of my relatives. I don’t make any distinction: Israeli, Palestinian, Arab-Israeli, new immigrant, Bedouin. My duty is to make sure every child has the same chance for health at birth. But look what happens after these innocent children grow up. Who is telling them these things that turn them into enemies rather than friends?

  The second intifada actually proved more than anything else how much we Palestinians and Israelis are stuck with one another, and that we have to find a way to live together. The failure in the peace process was a failure for both sides. We were both linked to it, and because we couldn’t find détente, we ended up with another intifada.