I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor's Journey (25 page)

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.

T
HE 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 who 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:

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 in 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.