I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor's Journey

by Izzeldin Abuelaish

Then an Israeli official was quoted as saying I should have left the Gaza Strip before my children were killed. But where were we to go? Mosques, schools—every place was a target. There wasn’t one safe place in Gaza. I stayed at home because I believed that everyone knew which house was mine and because I felt it was the safest place for my family.

  The fact is, Israeli tanks were moving from house to house, shelling and destroying homes they said were thought to serve as Hamas positions. By the look of the streets of Gaza in the aftermath, you could be forgiven for thinking that every single home must have been a hideout for armed Hamas soldiers. Everyone on both sides knows that this is absolute nonsense, and I believe the soldiers were driven into overkill by unreasoning fear fostered by so many years of hostilities and prejudice. The troops’ actions even led some of the hard-nosed military supporters within Israel to criticize the IDF for using excessive force.

  Following the attack, my friends surrounded me in the lobby of the hospital, where we gathered every day, usually after I’d done one media interview or another. People I had never met also came to show their support for me and their dismay with the military, and some others came to assert that my daughters were merely a casualty of war. Tammie Ronen, a professor of social work at Tel Aviv University, had been working with me to research the effects of conflict-related stress on Palestinian children in Gaza and Israeli children in Sderot, the border town that has been hit by rocket fire during the last eight years. She said, “You cannot let yourself collapse. You have your living children to take care of.” I saw Anael Harpaz coming toward me. She’d been upstairs with Shatha, holding her hand while the nurses administered pain medication, and now she was here to support me. Anael is the woman who met my children Bessan, Dalal and Shatha at the Creativity for Peace camp in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I called out to her and said, “Tell these people who my children were.” She was sobbing and saying, “I hope this is a wake-up call. This is such a peace-loving family.”

  While I watched over Shatha, Ghaida and my brother in the hospital in Tel Aviv, my three daughters and niece were buried in Gaza. The Quran says the deceased must be buried quickly, and it was impossible for me to get a permit to cross the border in time to be there for them. Even in death we are separated from our beloved ones. And in one more breathtakingly cruel adjunct to this tragedy, I was told that Bessan, Mayar and Aya couldn’t be buried beside their mother because the Israeli soldiers said no one was allowed to go into that area. Their graves are several kilometres away from the Jabalia Camp cemetery where Nadia is buried.

  Revenge was on the lips and in the minds of most people I talked to in the days after my daughters and niece were killed. Zeev Rotstein had managed to bring my other children to Tel Aviv and arranged lodgings for all of us near the hospital. Atta, who’d been taking care of my younger children and arranging the funeral for the girls, came too. His daughter Ghaida remained in intensive care with wounds so severe we wondered if she would survive. Shatha needed more surgery to save her eyesight. I remember after one of the operations, Dalal passed chocolates around to the staff and other patients in the hospital; it’s our way of marking a blessed event. We struggled together, my children and I, and I tried to respond to the chorus of people calling for Israeli blood to atone for the deaths of my girls. One said, “Don’t you hate the Israelis?” Which Israelis am I supposed to hate? I replied. The doctors and nurses I work with? The ones who are trying to save Ghaida’s life and Shatha’s eyesight? The babies I have delivered? Families like the Madmoonys, who gave me work and shelter when I was a kid?

  But the cries for reprisals didn’t stop. What about the soldier who fired the deadly volleys from the tank—didn’t I hate him? But that’s how the system works here: we use hatred and blame to avoid the reality that eventually we need to come together. As for the soldier who shelled my house, I believe in his conscience he has already punished himself, that he is asking himself, “What have I done?” And even if he doesn’t think that now, tomorrow he will be a father. He will suffer for his actions when he sees how precious is the life of his child.

  To those who seek retaliation, I say, even if I got revenge on all the Israeli people, would it bring my daughters back? Hatred is an illness. It prevents healing and peace.

  Shlomi Eldar told me later that our few minutes together on television had left an indelible impression on his viewers. He said: “The broadcast had a huge effect on Israelis who until then didn’t want to hear about anything from Gaza because they were so angry about the eight years of rockets being fired into Israel by Hamas. The majority of Israelis were in favour of the incursion. Now, for the first time, they understood what was happening inside Gaza. I’m told it was Izzeldin’s voice and my face that made the story. I was very close to crying as I listened to his agony. That same agony affected the Israelis who were watching the program. Even the Prime Minister of Israel told me he was crying when he saw this on TV. It wasn’t prime time, but even six and seven months later people tell me they saw it live on TV. I believe those five or seven minutes of television led to the ceasefire.

  “Part of the story that fascinated me was the way Izzeldin moved back and forth between being a father and a physician—at one moment weeping about the tragedy, at another demanding his daughter and niece and brother be taken to the Sheba hospital because there were better facilities to treat them there.” I knew I had to get them to the hospital in Israel—the facilities in Gaza lacked for everything and were already overloaded with casualties.

  As much as I reached for calm and a larger mission during those terribly dark hours, my thoughts kept drifting back to the girls—those beautiful, innocent daughters of mine. I sat in the hospital, imagining their futures, their weddings, the contributions they would have made to the world. And I thought about how a dream of happiness can turn into a nightmare in a matter of seconds. A person you’ve nurtured for years is lost to you in a flash of destruction. It felt as though they’d been kidnapped from me.

  I longed for the day to be replayed: they wouldn’t have been in the bedroom; the rumoured ceasefire would have already been in place. But I also tried to focus on the survivors and how I could help them recover. I looked at it as a believer: God had given me my daughters as a trust and now they were taken back. But I was also consumed with the craziness of this act, the blind stupidity of attacking the citizens of Gaza and claiming the rampage was aimed at stopping the rockets being fired into Israel.

  School started again at the end of January, and so after they stayed with me for ten days, I sent the children back to Gaza to stay with my siblings. Raffah was haunted by nightmares and even wet her bed, and Mohammed, too; my son was troubled so deeply he suffered seizures for months after his sisters were killing. During those long days, while my daughter, niece and brother recovered, and before I was able to return to our smashed, empty, sad home in Gaza, my overriding questions were: Why did this happen to us? And what am I going to do about it?

  The apartment building I built with my brothers in Jabalia City to house our families. The photo was taken a year after the shelling.

  My niece Noor, who died with my three daughters on January 16, 2009.

  Aya wanted to be a journalist when she grew up, and was the poet in the family.

  Mayar was the top maths student in her school in grade 9, and wanted to become a doctor like me.

  Bessan, at twenty-one, had almost completed her business degree; she took on a mother’s role with her younger siblings after Nadia died.

  My daughters’ bedroom after the shelling.

  Their grave in the Gaza Strip, on the anniversary of the girls’ death, January 16, 2010.

  There is no caption that can express a father’s loss.

  SEVEN

  Aftermath

  THE AFTERMATH OF THE SHELLING of our house continued to be tumultuous. I can hardly sort out the threads—the agony of loss; the flood of emails and handwritten letters from people around the world, most of them strangers wh
o wanted to reach out to my family and share our sorrow; the extraordinary support of my colleagues; the ceasefire that came two days too late, on January 18; the questioning faces of my surviving children. Now what? What am I to do to make sense of this?

  On April 1, I left the small apartment where I stay at the Sheba hospital and brought Shatha home. We were greeted on the Palestinian side of the Erez Crossing by a crowd of our relatives and friends bearing flowers and the Palestinian flag. Busloads of students, neighbours, professors and doctors also arrived, even the president; the media showed up to film our return, and there were hugs, kisses, speeches. And destruction all around us.

  Nasser had recovered from his injuries and had gone home three weeks after the tragedy. Ghaida, who was still healing, stayed on in the hospital in Israel for two more weeks before she was well enough to come home. Construction workers had begun to repair and rebuild the remnants of the bedroom where my daughters died; building materials were hard to find and the price had quadrupled. Despite the incessant hammering, sawing, scraping and pounding of the workers’ tools, my house seemed deathly quiet. I was determined to sleep in my own bedroom, but my children stayed on with my brothers Atta and Rezek, and with my sisters Etimad and Yousra; they tried so hard to be brave, but their barely concealed anguish was difficult to bear. One night I found a poem on my pillow—a message to Aya written by Raffah. Translated, it reads:

  No no no—where did you disappear to from our home

  Aya, you were the light of our home

  What’s happened to the home that was lit up by you

  Where has the beautiful light gone?

  Where has the beautiful girl gone

  No no no.

  Where have you disappeared Aya

  What do you say to a child who writes such words? And Mohammed kept repeating, like a prayer, “The girls are with our mother. They are happy there. My mom asked for them.”

  What if I had been at the hospital in Tel Aviv when the attack began? I would have been separated from the children for the duration of the incursion, unable to care for them, receiving the dreadful news at a distance.

  I had always worried that something catastrophic would happen to my family when I was away from them. As a boy, I feared something would happen to my mother, and after we married I worried for Nadia, especially when my training and work kept taking me out of the country. I realized in the aftermath that I was grateful that neither my mother nor Nadia had witnessed this disaster.

  The personal aftershocks of our loss kept rippling out. Ghaida had been so critically wounded that for a time we couldn’t risk telling her that Bessan, Mayar, Aya and Noor were all dead. When she asked for the girls, we told her they were also wounded, also in critical care. For a while such evasions did soothe her, although she’d say things like, “Just don’t tell me they died.” She kept asking, of course, and finally we—her father, Shatha and I—knew it was time for her to be told. Shatha was the one who did it. She held her cousin’s hands and explained that all four girls had died in the attack. Ghaida started screaming and shouting that she never wanted to go home again, that if her cousins weren’t there, she never wanted to be in our apartment again. We were so worried we’d made a mistake: she was still in serious condition. But Shatha stayed with her and eventually they brought comfort to each other, these teenage survivors who were dealing with shrapnel and stitches, pain and loss.

  From the moment we got home—with smashed buildings, collapsed bridges and rubble all around us—I realized that I had two options to choose from: I could take the path of darkness or the path of light. If I chose the path of darkness, of poisonous hate and revenge, it would be like choosing to fall into the complications and the depression that come with disease. To choose the path of light, I had to focus on the future and my children.

  But first, there were some truths that had to be addressed. The Gaza Strip was wrecked—bombed to pieces. It wasn’t just the government buildings and police headquarters, which the Israel Defense Forces had insisted were the targets, but entire neighbourhoods that had nothing whatsoever to do with political parties or militants. From the window of my house, as far as I could see, there was the disgraceful sight of a scorched earth policy fulfilled. In Jabalia City alone there was some 500,000 tons of rubble; it looked like a cross between Sarajevo under siege and Afghanistan after the mujahedeen were finished with it. The burned-out apartment buildings, the blackened shells that once were houses, the gaping holes where windows had been that made the buildings still standing look like ghosts: it was all a testament to the overkill that comes with the hatred of war. That’s the thing about war: it’s never enough to disable the buildings, to blow holes into their middles; instead, they’re hit over and over again, as if to pound them to dust, to disintegrate them, to remove them from the earth, to deny that families ever lived in them. But people did live there. And they needed to return, even though there was nothing left to return to except forbidding piles of broken concrete and cable wires sticking out of the heaps like markers of malevolence.

  When I surveyed the wanton destruction, I couldn’t help but ask myself what on earth the soldiers thought they were doing. Who makes these decisions? What were they thinking when they did this? The IDF speaks about Qassam rockets; who was going to speak about this?

  As it turned out, a lot of people had a lot to say about what went on in Gaza during those dreadful winter days. It was dubbed the Gaza War in the mainstream media, code-named Operation Cast Lead by the IDF, called the Gaza Massacre in the Arab world and the War in the South by the Israelis. The reports of how many were killed are inexact, but everyone on all sides agrees that the number is between 1,166 and 1,417 Palestinians and 13 Israelis. There are more statistics to cite among the living: more than 400,000 people in Gaza were left without running water; 4,000 family homes were destroyed or so badly damaged the people couldn’t return; tens of thousands became homeless; 80 government buildings were bombed.

  In September 2009, the United Nations Human Rights Council released a report on the incursion and a new firestorm ensued—this one of words—from the political arms of both sides, condemning the report, which had been written by the respected South African judge Richard Goldstone. He called the Israeli assault on Gaza “a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population.” He accused the Israeli military of carrying out direct attacks against civilians, including shooting civilians who were trying to leave their homes to walk to a safer place, waving white flags. He blamed the IDF for the destruction of food production and of water and sewerage facilities, and he accused them of being systematically reckless with their use of white phosphorous while bombing Gaza City and the Jabalia refugee camp, of attacking hospitals and UN facilities, and of rocketing a mosque during prayers.

  But he also criticized Hamas for firing eight thousand rockets into Israel over the last eight years, calculated to kill civilians and damage civilian structures. The report accused Palestinian armed groups of causing psychological trauma to the civilians within the range of the rockets, hitting Israeli houses, schools and a synagogue, and forcing civilians to flee. Judge Goldstone called for a public inquiry on both sides, but his pleas fell on deaf ears. The Israeli government described the report as full of “propaganda and bias” and Hamas said it was “political, imbalanced and dishonest.”

  That’s how things happen in the Middle East—the size of the rhetoric trumps the facts on the ground. In my experience, the vast majority of Israelis and Palestinians were horrified by the terrifying events of the three-week war. The reaction of ordinary people strengthens my case about our need to talk to each other, to listen, to act. And it reinforces my lifelong belief that out of bad comes something good. Maybe now I really have to believe that: the alternative is too dark to consider. My three precious daughters and my niece are dead. Revenge, a disorder that is endemic in the Middle East, won’t get them back for me. It is important to feel anger i
n the wake of events like this, anger that signals that you do not accept what has happened, that spurs you to make a difference. But you have to choose not to spiral into hate. All the desire for revenge and hatred does is drive away wisdom, increase sorrow, and prolong strife. The potential good that could come out of this soul-searing bad is that together we might bridge the fractious divide that has kept us apart for six decades.

  This catastrophe that killed my daughters and niece has strengthened my thinking, deepened my belief about how to bridge the divide. I understand down to my bones that violence is futile, a waste of time, lives and resources, and has been proven to beget more violence. It does not work, just perpetuates a vicious circle. There’s only one way to bridge the divide, to live together, to realize the goals of two peoples: we have to find the light to guide us to our goal. I’m not talking about the light of religious faith here, but light as a symbol of truth. The light that allows you to see, to clear away the fog—to find wisdom. To find the light of truth, you have to talk to, listen to and respect each other. Instead of wasting energy on hatred, use it to open your eyes and see what’s really going on. Surely, if we can see the truth, we can live side by side.

  I am a physician and as a consequence I see things most clearly in medical terms. I am arguing that we need an immunization program, one that injects people with respect, dignity and equality, and that immunizes them against hatred.

  I have dedicated my life to peace, to healing, to bringing babies into the world, to solving the problems of the infertile. My work involves doing joint research projects with Israeli physicians; for years I’ve been something of a one-man task force bringing injured and ailing Gazans for treatment in Israel. This is the path I believed in and what I raised and educated my children to believe in. I find it somewhat inconceivable that after a lifetime of contributing all I had to coexistence, I would be the one to bear witness to the worst consequences of war.