Hearts and Minds
SO MUCH OF WHAT HAPPENS in my homeland results from decisions taken a long way from the streets of Jabalia City where I live. The Oslo Accords, signed in 1993, agreed that the Gaza Strip would be part of the Palestinian Authority, along with the West Bank; a potential corridor connecting the two would eventually form a Palestinian state. Yasser Arafat was the leader of both regions, and two main political parties, Hamas and Fatah, vied for the loyalties of Palestinians. Fatah was more dominant in the West Bank. Hamas, headquartered in Gaza and founded in 1987 by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin as an offshoot of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, preached an ideology based on Palestinian nationalism, Islamism and religious nationalism. Like Fatah, its name comes from an acronym of the Arabic words that make up the full name of the organization: “Islamic Resistance Movement.” Hamas got most of its support from Gazans, and it was Hamas that launched the suicide bombings in April 1993 (and only renounced them in April 2006).
In September 2005, Israeli settlers were withdrawn from Gaza, fulfilling a promise from the Israeli government that the territory would be controlled by Palestinians. It wasn’t exactly a success story—Israel acted unilaterally and the border crossings were still controlled by Israelis—but it was an important step forward all the same. At least, that’s the way I saw it.
Such events made political headlines around the world, but on the ground there are other scenes acted out on an almost daily basis that are largely ignored by the international media yet play relentlessly on the hearts and minds of the Gazan and Israeli peoples. I’ve been involved with some of these, whether I wanted to be or not.
For example, a couple of months before the Israeli settlers withdrew, on June 21, 2005, a woman from my home in Jabalia tried to attack the hospital where I was working. Her name was Wafa Samir Ibrahim al-Biss, a twenty-one-year-old Palestinian woman, and she had actually been a patient at the hospital after she’d suffered burns in a cooking accident. After her release, she was issued an outpatient card and a special pass that allowed her to cross into Israel to receive the ongoing treatment she needed.
No one was more surprised than I was to learn what happened next. On her way to the hospital, she was stopped at the Erez Crossing because an alert security guard became suspicious. It turned out that she had ten pounds of explosives strapped to her hips. Her plan was to detonate herself in the hospital, and she later admitted that she had intended to take out as many people as she could, even children.
I was so outraged that I wrote an open letter to The Jerusalem Post, published on June 24, expressing my disgust with her actions and my solidarity with the hospital. After expressing my dismay, I wrote: “On the very day she planned to detonate her bomb, two Palestinians in critical condition were waiting in Gaza to be taken for urgent medical treatment to Soroka.” There are several militant factions that mastermind these atrocious acts; whoever it was who sent Biss, they wanted her to kill the very people in Israel who are healing Palestinians from the Gaza Strip and West Bank. What if Israeli hospitals now decide to bar Palestinians seeking treatment? How would those who sent this young woman feel if their own relatives, in need of medical care in Israel, were refused treatment?
As I wrote in my open letter: “As for Biss herself, she should have been a messenger for peace among her people, and should have been bringing flowers and appreciation to the Soroka doctors for healing her burns … To plan an operation of this kind against a hospital is an act of evil. Children, women, patients, doctors and nurses were the target. Is this a reward for kindness? Is this an advertisement for Islam, a religion which respects and sanctifies human life? This is aggression and a violation of humanity.”
I assumed she’d been brainwashed; otherwise how could she turn on the people who had helped her? The Gazans I know were pleased that I wrote the letter; they said it spoke for them. Even some politicians, who felt they couldn’t get involved publicly, told me that I’d said what they were unable to say. As for Wafa al-Biss, she’s in an Israeli prison and I doubt she’ll be getting out any time soon.
During my time at Harvard University, the thought of entering politics began to poke its way into my conscience. I had always rejected the political arena, had felt certain it wasn’t the way I could make a contribution to my people. But as I studied health policy and realized how much a well-thought-out plan with carefully created policies could move the Palestinian people out of their chaos and deprivation, I was drawn like the proverbial moth to the flame. There was an upcoming political election in Gaza, and when I got home I began immediately to test the waters for a possible run for office. For months I went to every single community event in the northern part of the Gaza Strip. My message was: “I am here for you. I am going to make changes that will affect health and education in Gaza.”
Since the election was still months off, I took a job working as the reproductive health consultant at the Maram Project, a small program the Palestinian Authority was running with a donation from USAID. Since the work took me all over the Gaza Strip, I was also able to continue to talk about my plan to run in the upcoming election. I believed that I was received very well; people on the streets were saying, “He’s back. He’s going to be in the government.” I was also giving lectures at Soroka hospital and doing medical referrals from my own home. So I was in a good position to develop community relationships and to let people know that I had a plan.
I told my neighbours that I knew what was wrong and I knew how to fix it. The health culture, the managerial and performance culture weren’t good enough. Progress was determined only by who had the power to hand out jobs rather than by the needs of the people. By now I had international experience in London, Belgium and Italy, as well as at Harvard University. I’d worked for the United Nations and been on the staff at a variety of hospitals in Gaza, Israel and Saudi Arabia. I’d seen the way good health systems operate and I knew how to bring them to Gaza. Furthermore, I had established relationships with doctors and administrators in all these international centres and I knew I could count on them to help me.
Conditions in Gaza had deteriorated sharply while I’d been at Harvard, and I knew that we needed new blood very badly on the political front. Although I’d been abroad for two years and needed to re-establish myself, I believed that the people wanted the changes I was proposing.
Basically, I campaigned for the rest of 2005. My brothers helped me, and friends did too. We all thought my chances for success were good. Some asked how I could forgo the money I would make as a doctor to campaign for election. But I didn’t care about the money. I was making enough as a consultant to pay our bills; the thing I really wanted was to help the Palestinian people.
When the election was announced for January 25, 2006, the Fatah party asked me to run for them in the October primaries: “We need you with us because we’re looking for professional, highly educated, well-trained candidates.” At the time Hamas were not considered to be contenders; they were popular in Gaza, but Fatah still seemed to be in charge. I wanted to run as an independent. Politics in Gaza are tribal, party-based and entirely dependent on who’s paying your salary; I argued that we needed to challenge all that and cultivate a people-based form of politics where ordinary voters truly choose. But Fatah assumed I was on their ticket, and weighing all the costs and the consequences, I felt I’d better go along with them.
I was a neophyte in the ways of electioneering. I thought I knew the score and could hold my own, but soon I was being told what to say, which policy to promote, how to respond to questions. Suddenly, being elected wasn’t about who I was and what I stood for, it was about who I was connected to and what I would do for them. As I campaigned all over the northern part of Gaza, the region I hoped to represent, nonetheless I was seen as a new voice, a man with common sense. But on the day of the primaries, some militants from the Fatah party burst into one of the polling rooms in my district with machine guns. They destroyed the ballot boxes, scared the people nearly to death and ruined any chanc
e of a fair election. The results in northern Gaza were voided.
An older man I know and respect a lot took me to one side and said, “Don’t get involved in these dirty games. Run as an independent. I will support you.” And I took his advice: no matter the consequences, I was going to run in the upcoming January election as an independent. When Fatah realized I was serious about being an independent, they offered me incentives to stay with them: they’d make me deputy prime minister, for example, and they’d pay for my campaign. But I didn’t accept. Instead, I borrowed $35,000 from my brothers and friends to pay my campaign expenses.
As the election date approached, we began to realize the situation was unpredictable. I was campaigning to eradicate poverty, unemployment and disease, to improve health care and education, and to raise the status of women in Gaza. Hamas was seriously challenging Fatah by running on a platform similar to mine, though they certainly did not campaign on women’s issues. Their election slogan was “Repair and Change.” What they were vowing to repair was what had been damaged not only by Israeli rocket attacks but also by the Palestinian Authority. Everyone was accusing the PA of mismanagement, corruption, a bad attitude and of attracting donors who only gave money so they could call the shots. Most Palestinians were upset with the malfeasance of the government. That was what Hamas was vowing to change.
They were exceptionally well organized. On the day of the vote, they sent cars to pick up constituents, using computers to figure out who was voting and where they lived. In comparison, Fatah was asleep at the switch. I was still confident that I would win in northern Gaza because of the numbers of Gazans who told me they were going to vote for me. Hundreds of people, huge groups, came to support me. On the last day, my children and Nadia came out to campaign for me, urging people to vote for Izzeldin. But on election day itself, 79 percent of the voters cast their ballots for Hamas instead. No independent candidate won anywhere in Gaza. Hamas took 76 of 132 seats in the West Bank and Gaza and became the government.
I guess it says a lot about my nature and determination that I had not even contemplated losing. Still, like other times in my life, good came out of bad. Internal conflict within the new government began almost immediately; I felt lucky that I wasn’t part of it. My goal was to make change for the people, to focus on health, education, justice, and women’s issues. By midnight on election night, I realized that the loss was actually okay with me. Clearly, this was not my time.
The process was interesting, though. I learned an immense amount by running in that election. I discovered that when it comes to politics, you can’t always count on the people to do what they say they’re going to do. Some people show you their full support and then go to the voting booth and cast their ballot for the other party.
Getting out of an election with your reputation intact is tricky enough. But soon after the election, we found out that we had had a crook among us during the campaign, and his actions threatened to drag our family name into the dirt. When we lined up the various computers and pieces of office equipment we had borrowed for the campaign in order to return them, a lot of it was missing. A man from Jabalia City had come to help us during the campaign; he’d stayed at my home, eaten at my table. As we checked off who did what and who was where when, we realized that it was this man who had likely stolen the computers. I called the police, who arrested him after they found the missing equipment at his home. Everything was returned to its rightful owners, and the man went to jail. But all of it left a bitter taste in my mouth.
Then there were the bigger issues all Gazans soon had to deal with. The peace process had been squandered; the second intifada was a consequence of that failure. Before the election was even called, the Palestinian Authority had told their international partners, the Americans in particular, that they were not ready. But these so-called partners forced the issue and Hamas emerged victorious. Since Hamas was deemed a terrorist organization, sanctions were quickly declared against us. The Palestinian people were made to pay—again. But I left that debate to others. With a campaign debt of $35,000 and a family of eight kids to feed, I needed to find a job pronto. We’d already sold all of Nadia’s gold jewellery as well as the gold we’d put away for the children’s educations. It was payback time.
The day after the election, I sent my CV to the World Health Organization (WHO). I heard back from them almost immediately. They said they wanted to hire me as the WHO’s Health Systems and Policy Advisor to the minister of health in Afghanistan. Taking such a job would mean I’d be separated from my family again, but we badly needed the money. There were glitches, of course; after all, this is the Middle East. The WHO required me to attend at their offices in Cairo in order to sign the contract, but since Hamas won the election and was deemed a terrorist organization by Israel, as well as by most of Israel’s backers, the borders were shut tight. I could not get out. The Israeli authorities said that if I had an invitation to attend a specific event, I would be allowed to cross at Erez and travel to Jordan for a flight to Cairo. But a meeting to sign a contract—that didn’t qualify for an exit permit. So I was stuck in Gaza until the WHO issued me an invitation to a conference in Alexandria. I managed to get permission to go to that and then went on to Cairo to sign the contract. I left from Cairo for Afghanistan in mid-July 2006.
Because Afghanistan was a conflict zone, the work schedule for the job was six weeks on and ten days off. The situation in the country was shocking, even to me. Humanity was intimidated there. The living conditions of most Afghan people reminded me of the descriptions of our villages a hundred years ago. In Gaza we have an unstable political situation and much deprivation, but our systems are far more advanced than the ones in Afghanistan. The airport in Kabul was backward and creaking. It was obvious that the country had been burned by violence. The infrastructure had been destroyed and most of the systems—from electrical and water to health and social supports—were fragmented and malfunctioning. I thought Gaza was bad; Afghanistan was much worse. Oddly enough, Gazans ask about Afghanistan as though it’s the most troubled place on earth and Afghans asked about Gaza in the same way. The hospitals were old, lacked equipment and couldn’t offer decent patient care. I was actually glad that my job was to make policy and that I therefore spent my time in the office, not on the wards.
I came home every six weeks for ten days, and it was always a celebration when I got back with my bags stuffed with Afghan carpets and traditional Afghan dresses for the children or clothes and jewellery from the Dubai airport. It usually took me three days to get home but only a day and a half back to Kabul (for the usual reasons concerning travel restrictions on Palestinians), and all the travel days came off my ten-day break. I kept up that schedule until June 2007 because the job allowed me to support my family and to repay my campaign debt, and to be in Gaza often enough to keep tabs on what was unfolding. Each visit home was marked by increasingly disturbing incidents.
The situation had become complicated after the election. Mahmoud Abbas was still the leader of the Palestinian Authority even though his Fatah party had been defeated. Although the two sides tried to form a government, the union was on shaky ground from the start and the fighting between the factions was growing worse. It was brother against brother, and violence was spreading both in intensity and in range, until most of the Gaza Strip was involved one way or another. My country was in danger of imploding.
On June 11, 2007, I was preparing to leave Kabul for the last time and called ahead to say I was coming home via the usual convoluted route through Islamabad, Dubai and Amman. My brother told me that Hamas had surrounded the house of a Fatah supporter, and later that day I saw on the Internet that two brothers had been killed by Hamas at that house. When I got to Dubai and checked the Internet again, I learned that Hamas had declared the northern part of Gaza a military zone and that their soldiers had surrounded the region, taken over the police stations, commandeered the army posts. No one could enter or leave.
I arrived in Jord
an on June 13 and hired a taxi to take me to the Erez Crossing. We were at about the halfway point, at Latrun Mountain near Jerusalem, when I called home to ask my brother Nasser to come pick me up on the Gaza side of the Erez Crossing. Shatha answered the phone, and she told me that Nasser was sick and couldn’t come. I didn’t believe her. I knew something was very wrong.
As soon as I got through the Erez Crossing, I could feel that Gaza was at a boiling point. Northern Gaza had been turned into an armed camp totally controlled by Hamas. The Palestinian National Guards who normally check people at the border were standing at the side of the road, too frightened to move. The streets were empty. It was as though war had been declared.
When I got home, my brother Atta explained how close this war had come to our home. Our nephew, Nasser’s son, had been shot in the knees and ankles; his father had not been too sick to come to the border for me—he was too distraught. My nephew was an officer with the National Guard of the Palestinian Authority and he’d been shot by Hamas gunmen in an act of revenge, presumably for taking the side of Fatah. There were many young men between the ages of twenty-two and twenty-four in northern Gaza who were wounded and bleeding. Nasser hoped I could help, but I couldn’t even get to most of them at first. The Palestinian Authority’s security bases had been taken over by Hamas, and for one awful week, from June 13 to June 20, there was full-out civil war. By the time it was over, Hamas had routed the Fatah forces and taken control of the Gaza Strip.
We stayed inside for the duration—no one dared to go out on the street. When we needed food, we plotted a course to the market, ventured out, then scurried home again. There was gunfire all around, shooting on every street. With civil war you never know who the enemy really is. I’d spent the last year in Afghanistan seeing the same confusion of tribal, political and ideological warfare. And here in my own Gaza, I wasn’t sure who was fighting against whom. When the street-to-street fighting lessened, I arranged for some of the severely wounded, including my nephew, to be transferred to Soroka hospital. My nephew was in the hospital for two months. They saved his legs, but he still walks with a severe limp. I was heartbroken with the turn of events in Gaza. How could we heal this new wound and cope with the resulting scar? The Israelis were the enemy, but now we’d become enemies inside our own house too.
I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor's Journey Page 11