I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor's Journey (11 page)

At first it took the form of a lot of tire burning and stone throwing at Israeli troops. The response from the Israelis was disproportionate—kids throwing stones were met with soldiers attacking with M16 assault rifles. My brother Rezek was detained for no apparent reason. My sister had a miscarriage likely caused by the stress of the intifada. The daily news we were reading in Saudi Arabia was full of reports about attacks on the people, the deaths and injuries they suffered. The hostility was building every day: there were boycotts of Israeli goods, barricades were thrown up, there were strikes, and then Molotov cocktails and hand grenades were being thrown.

It was not a good time to be away from home, as Nadia and I were always worried about what might happen next to our families and friends. On the other hand, soon enough Nadia was expecting, and our personal joy and excitement battled for precedence in our
hearts with the constant political tensions back home. Our daughter Bessan was born in 1988.

In the personal realm, life was at last satisfying, even wonderful. I was gaining the medical experience I wanted. My family was growing and prospering, and despite my mother’s desire to see me back home as the patriarch of the extended family, especially in these troubling times, I decided we’d stay in Saudi Arabia for a while. A huge factor in this decision was that the opportunity to specialize in obstetrics and gynecology was presenting itself to me again, and this time I wanted to follow my dream. In early March 1988, I received a scholarship from the ministry of health in Saudi Arabia to specialize in obstetrics and gynecology, getting my diploma at the Institute of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of London. I’d become extremely interested in infertility. In Jabalia Camp there was a lot of infertility, which seems at odds with the high birth rates everyone assumes are the norm in Palestinian families. The paradox is that places with high fertility also turn out to have the opposite as well, high infertility rates. I decided to do my thesis on this issue. Most of the classes were in Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, with only a few months of coursework in London.

I had a valid visa for travel to the UK, and my Palestinian passport caused me no travel problems: I boarded the plane for my first flight brimming with excitement. I already spoke English, so I did not face much of a language barrier, and London was a larger-than-life experience for me. So different from Gaza—cold, rainy, dark—but alive, fascinating, cosmopolitan. It was a place where people from all over the world—all races, all religions—lived together, though of course I was aware of the conflict between the British and the IRA. And the one thing that truly bothered me was the way native-born British sometimes looked down at people who weren’t British. I noticed that superior attitude on the street,
in stores and in community centres. Happily it didn’t exist in the classroom, so it didn’t affect my studies in London.

My research gave me a tempting taste of the work I could do in this field, and I was thoroughly smitten. I’d seen so much suffering in women who were having difficulty conceiving. In a male-dominated culture such as my own, the woman is blamed for infertility problems even though not being able to produce a child can be the man’s problem just as much as the woman’s. She’s even blamed for the sex of the baby, although the Y chromosome that creates sons is an exclusively male factor in the conception process. I wanted men to know the facts and stop blaming the women, and I wanted those women to be relieved of the shame of being condemned as “barren.” In my culture, ominous expressions such as “the unproductive tree should be cut” are common. I wanted to educate people so that they never say such things about any woman again.

Working with couples who are trying to conceive, you learn how hard it is for them, how disappointed they are every single month that conception doesn’t occur. But it’s particularly painful for women, and I wanted to focus my efforts on how to alter that reality. As my research into infertility progressed and my clinical work in London and Jeddah with couples dealing with fertility problems started to produce excellent results, I decided to commit my career to this subspecialty.

After I completed the course in 1989, I returned to Saudi Arabia and my job at Al-Aziziyah maternity ward. I was so glad to be reunited with my family. By then Nadia, who’d stayed in Jeddah to take care of Bessan and our second daughter, Dalal, who was born while I was in London, wanted to go home to Gaza. Saudi Arabia was much more conservative than Gaza; as Palestinians, we felt like foreigners there even though the Saudis were supposed to be our Arab brothers. I wasn’t free to move where I wanted to
move and I worried that, as an outsider, I wouldn’t advance much further than I’d already come in my career. The social norms were different; we found the restrictions too onerous. So we decided that we would leave. But it wasn’t as easy as packing up the car and driving home. In order to repay the educational opportunities given to me by Saudi Arabia, I had to agree to provide three years of medical service. Only after that obligation was fulfilled, could we go home.

Life was further complicated by the ever-present monsters in the Middle East: politics and war. The lead-up to the first Gulf War was creating problems for Palestinians in the Gulf States. In August 1990, Yasser Arafat made statements that sounded as though he approved of Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, and suddenly Palestinians were
personae non gratae.
I could see the writing on the wall: lots of Palestinians were being laid off in Saudi Arabia. Happily, by November 1990, my employers determined that I had fulfilled my obligations to the hospital in Jeddah, and Nadia and I were able to pack up our daughters and our belongings and return home on a bus. By the time the Gulf War started on January 16, 1991, my family and I were back in Gaza.

We arrived home in the midst of the continuing intifada. There were Israeli guns and tanks at every corner. And then, in the face of all this madness, it turned into a fratricidal bloodbath as well. An estimated one thousand Palestinians who were accused of collaborating with Israelis were executed by our own people even though there was no proof of collusion in most cases. By the time the first intifada ended, on August 20, 1993, with the signing of the Oslo Accord, more than 2,100 Palestinians were dead—a thousand at the hands of their own brothers and 1,100 killed by Israeli soldiers. One hundred and sixty Israelis had been killed by Palestinians.

What came out of the intifada is hard to measure. Certainly the world began to pay attention to Palestinians as a result. And Israel got a black eye for its treatment of the Palestinians and for Palestinian living conditions. That the United States officially recognized the Palestine Liberation Organization as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people was seen as a victory for us. But a new and disastrous weapon of terror was born during the intifada: suicide bombings. On April 16, 1993, in a parking lot at Mehola Junction, a rest area on the Jordanian Valley Highway, a Palestinian man who had loaded his car with explosives drove it between two buses and detonated the bomb. The blast went upward instead of radiating out sideways, so most people were spared. A Palestinian who worked at the junction was killed and so was the bomber. Twenty Israeli soldiers and civilians were injured. That horrible event began a string of equally terrible suicide bombings, which led to the bloody destruction of our youth, the deaths of many innocents and paralyzed many regions of the Middle East with fear. Certainly the people of Gaza, the West Bank and Israel are not better off as a result of the birth of this inhumane tactic. Like the cost of most wars and uprisings, the cost in human treasure of the intifada and the suicide bombings was too high for everyone.

I had opened a private evening clinic in Gaza with money I’d saved from Saudi Arabia so I could treat poor people in my own place. I was committed to providing care for people who could not afford it. I also accepted a post with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency as a field obstetrician and gynecologist.

While studying at the University of London, I had noticed that most of the references I depended on for my thesis on infertility were by Israeli professors, so I decided to make a bold move and get in touch with the Israeli medical community to see what they
were doing about infertility and to exchange ideas. Although the intifada continued apace, it didn’t stop me from communicating with and eventually meeting my colleagues in Israel. I’d come across a important textbook on infertility by two professors from Ben-Gurion University in Beersheba, Israel: Dr. Bruno Lunenfeld and Dr. Vaclav Insler. I called them, described who I was and what I wanted, and was surprised when they were so willing to meet with me and assist with advice on the care of my patients. In time I started taking Palestinian patients to Dr. Lunenfeld’s clinic. Some of them needed laparoscopic surgery, and he referred them to Marek Glezerman, who was at that time the chairman of the department of obstetrics and gynecology at the Soroka hospital, also in Beersheba. Because of the depth and importance of my subsequent relationship with Dr. Glezerman, I take the liberty of referring to him by his first name. Meeting Marek was a turning point in my career and my life. He immediately saw the value in bringing me onto his team and tried to figure out a way to make that happen. As I had no formal association with the doctors of Soroka hospital, he suggested I become a volunteer at the hospital to introduce myself to the Israeli medical system and to find out how its doctors were dealing with issues around obstetrics and gynecology, and especially infertility.

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.”