I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor's Journey (15 page)

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 Jordan 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.

At that point, any progress we’d made started going into reverse. The Israelis responded to the conflict by creating even more draconian restrictions on access and goods for Gaza. The suffering inside the Strip increased, and as it did, so did the rocket attacks on Israeli towns near the Gaza border.

The last decade has been a particularly disappointing period in this grinding conflict that keeps us apart. Our leaders bicker like children, breaking promises, behaving like bullies, keeping the kettle of trouble boiling. The people I talk to—patients, doctors, neighbours in Gaza, friends in Israel—aren’t like our
leaders. They worry about my family as I worry about their families. We all lament the lost decades, the uncertain future. And as amazing as it may sound to someone watching us from afar, we believe in each other, in our ability to share this Holy Land. It is quite astonishing to realize how similar our two peoples are, in the way we raise our children, in the importance of family and extended family, and in the animated style with which we like to tell stories. We’re argumentative, expressive, emotional people. We come from the Semitic religions and languages. We have many more similarities than differences, and yet for sixty years we haven’t been able to bridge the divide between us.

How is it that we can look at one life and say it is more valuable than another life? Look at the infants in the birthing rooms: they are innocent children who have the right to grow to be educated adults with opportunities in life. But we fill them with stories that promote hatred and fear. Every human life is invaluable, and so easy to destroy with bullets and bombs or with the accusations and revisionist history that promote hatred. Hatred eats at your soul and takes opportunities away from you. It’s like consuming poison.

Ever since my time at Harvard, I’ve received invitations to come back to the U.S. to speak about Israeli-Palestinian relations. Sometimes at those events I receive comments from people who really don’t know what it is to live with so much conflict. To be honest, though, some of the people aren’t really interested in asking a question, they just want to use the opportunity to give their own speeches. There have been plenty of situations when I’ve been interrupted, shouted down and accused of not seeing the other side. Most people in the audience wait until the shouting dies down in order to hear what I came to talk about. I tell them—both the sympathetic and the hostile—how we need to go about solving the problems we share with Israel. For example,
when people tell me that after many years of occupying Gaza the Israeli soldiers left and we should be grateful for that, I try to explain to them that the way the departure happened created more problems than it solved. Any such major move needs to be coordinated with your partner. The lack of discussion created chaos, and the Palestinians were blamed.

At one speaking event, all these things happened at once—the interruptions, the shouting and accusing. But once I got past the unpleasantness, I found that the questions were thoughtful and well intended. For example one person asked, “What can we do here, as Israelis in the United States, to encourage dialogue?” Another said, “It’s great that you’re here talking to us, but are you also making this same plea for peace on the other side, in your own community?” My reply was that yes, of course, I make that same plea, and that this sort of conversation is exactly what we need to be having. If we don’t air our grievances, we’ll never get past them.

Still, one man pointedly asked, “You speak of dialogue between the two nations, but whom do we have to talk to—Hamas? You say we need to respect one another, but your elected leaders are not even willing to recognize the existence of the State of Israel. What kind of respect is that?” All I could do was try to explain that there is a way out of this turmoil; that we need to move forward and stop being mired in what went before. It sounds simplistic, but it’s the only way to get out of the mud our feet are stuck in. The occupation and oppression of the people in Gaza is like a cancer, a disease that needs to be treated. It’s all about the will to solve the problem rather than the determination to keep the anger front and centre. Arguing over who did what and who suffered more is not getting us anywhere. We have to move on; we have to build trust and mutual respect between the peoples. You can’t respect someone you don’t know. So let’s get to know one
another by listening and opening our eyes to the other side. We need to encourage
kavod
(respect) and
shivyon
(equality).

Also, we need to focus on realistic goals. Grand plans for peace have failed us. We need to look at what’s possible right now: working toward both sides having more equal conditions, with equal rights and mutual respect.

Some say I’m wearing rose-coloured glasses, that I refuse to see the hopelessness of the situation. Maybe they’re right. I never see anything as hopeless—not when I’m delivering a baby that’s in distress, not when I’m staunching the blood flow from a woman who is hemorrhaging, not when I’m treating a dozen other ills that have been diagnosed as untreatable. So why would I see the quarrel between two people as hopeless? I care about people. I’m no different than anyone else. We’re created like that, to be social, to live with other people. Segregation is unnatural.

But I’m getting ahead of my story.

By the summer of 2007, I was looking for a job again. I had decided not to renew my contract with the WHO in Afghanistan because it had meant too much time away from my family and it was way too tense in Gaza. I concentrated on getting contract work, lecturing at Ben-Gurion University in the Columbia International Medical Program, treating patients in Gaza, and picking up European Union consultancy jobs here and there.