I read I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor’s Journey by Izzeldin Abuelaish yesterday. It was a breath of fresh air to read something by an actual Gazan instead of Americans projecting their country’s problems onto their hazy concept of Palestine. I was incredibly moved by Abuelaish; his writing reminded me a lot of Rachel Goldberg-Polin. Both of them lost their children to this endless, senseless conflict; they went through the worst possible tragedies imaginable, and it resolved them to hold true to their principles and to share the necessity for peace and coexistence. I don’t have much to add in the way of analysis; I think his writing speaks for itself, and there were entire chapters I wanted to quote. If you have the opportunity to read the book, I highly recommend it.
- Abuelaish was raised in Jabalya refugee camp in the Gaza Strip. Something that I think gets glossed over in the Western understanding of Palestine is that there’s a deep status divide among Palestinians between those who already lived in Gaza and the West Bank, and those who came there as refugees in 1948. The Palestinians who already lived there tend to have better housing, better jobs, and better education; the refugees usually remain trapped in the camps and told by those who already lived there that to resettle outside the borders of Israel is a betrayal of their nation. In this way, they face two injustices: the first expulsion, and the continual confinement to refugee camps without any hope to improve their conditions.
- I was actually reading Return to Zion at the same time as this, and reminded of Golda Meir’s initial impression of the refugee camps in Gaza: “I was appalled by what I saw there, and by the fact that these miserable people had been maintained in such degrading condition for over eight years only so that the Arab leaders could show the refugee camps to visitors and make political capital out of them. Those refugees could and should have been resettled at once in any of the Arab countries of the Middle East — countries, incidentally, whose language, traditions, and religion they share. The Arabs would still have been able to continue their quarrel with us, but at least the refugees would not have been kept in a state of semi-starvation, or lived in abject terror of their Egyptian masters.”
- Abuelaish describes horrific living conditions and overcrowding. He recounts the morbid death of his baby sister Noor: without room for a crib, his mother put her to sleep in the dish basin at night; one day, his brother, trying to escape a punishment, jumped into the basin to hide and crushed the three week old baby.
- He has a low view of intidafas generally. The second one he largely blames for the collapse of the peace process, but even the first one he sees as reprehensible. He says the fight against the Israelis was just as much a fight against other Palestinians, and quickly devolved into a witch hunt. Of the 2,000 dead, half of them were killed by other Palestinians who accused them of disloyalty and insufficient devotion to the cause; this disgusts Abuelaish, who has a deep reverence for life over death.
- “Many Palestinians couldn’t see any future for themselves — they began to see their lives as useless. And then, when one person goes crazy and becomes a suicide bomber, no one around him tries to prevent the act. Instead they call him a hero. That’s the way things get worse.”
- “I felt as if we’d been so close to peace [before the second intifada]. Like many others, I had been full of hope. I’d been conducting tours, and had even opened clinics in Gaza with the help of Israeli doctors (which all had to close). I find it astonishing that the two sides could be so close to a peace agreement and then see our relationship deteriorate so rapidly. As the second intifada raged, each side was focusing on its own pain and blaming the other instead of realizing we have to recognize the rights of both peoples to live in harmony and peace; the alternative is war and distrust. I wished then that I could close my eyes and open them to where we had been before the second intifada began, when we were still talking to each other.”
- Abuelaish becomes a doctor specializing in obstetrics and fertility; this allows him to move his family out of the Jabalya camp and gives him a permit to work in an Israeli hospital in Beersheba, which means he has to cross the border from Gaza twice a week to get to work. He describes this as an agonizing, humiliating, arbitrarily difficult process where he was randomly turned away or searched on the whims of the Israeli and Hamas border guards. “People often tell me they admire my patience and ability to be calm. I tell them I learned all of it while waiting in line at the Erez checkpoint.” Because there is no way of knowing how long a border crossing will take, he rents an apartment in Beersheba to try and prevent work absences and tardiness, keeping him away from his family for most of the week.
- His commitment to life comes through in everything he does. When Gazan object to his helping Israelis, he tries to force an understanding of common humanity. “Some have suggested I am helping to deliver a new generation of occupiers. I try to tell them that these Israeli babies could grow up to be doctors.” He strongly believes in health care as a unifying force.
- In the second intifada, a woman named Wafa al-Biss was caught trying to cross the Erez checkpoint with explosives for a suicide bomb, in a plot to destroy a hospital where she was receiving medical treatment — the same hospital that Abuelaish worked at in Beersheba. He wrote an open letter to Times of Israel: “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.… 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." He adds that many Gazans were pleased that he wrote the letter, and they said it spoke for them. “As for Biss, she’s in an Israeli prison and I doubt she’ll be getting out any time soon.” This book was published in 2010; she was released months later in exchange for Gilad Shalit’s body.
- “I was heartbroken by [Hamas’s takeover] in Gaza. How could we heal this new wound and cope with the resulting scar? The Israelis were the enemy, but we’d become enemies inside our own house, too.”
- “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, neighbors in Gaza, friends in Israel — aren’t like our leaders. They worry about my family as I worry about theirs. We all lament the lost decades, the uncertain future. And as amazing as it may seem to someone watching us from afar, we believe in each other, in our ability to share this Holy Land.”
- “Trust in the Middle East is such a rare commodity today, it's gasping for air. The thing is, you cannot ask people to coexist by having one side bow their heads and rely on a solution that is only good for the other side. What you can do is stop blaming each other and go after a dialogue with one person at a time. Everyone knows that violence begets violence and breeds more hatred. We need to find our way together. I feel I cannot rely on the various spokespersons who claim they act on my behalf. Invariably they have some agenda that doesn't work for me. Instead, I talk to my patients, to my neighbours and colleagues — Jews, Arabs — and I find out they feel as I do: we are more similar than we are different, and were all fed up with the violence.”
- “One of my Israeli friends at Soroka told me, ‘Izzeldin, I heard that you were afraid to come back. I want to tell you, I am ready to sacrifice my life for your safety if any Israeli tries to do harm to you.’ What more can one do than this?”
- Abuelaish’s wife dies suddenly and unexpectedly of leukemia. She’s treated at an Israeli hospital, which means only one family member is permitted to cross the border with her. Abuelaish’s travel visa randomly flags him as a security threat and he spends a full day in detainment before he’s able to see her; he describes it as the most stressful and helpless day of his life.
- With his wife dead and Hamas restricting life in Gaza, he makes plans to take his eight children to Canada. One of his main ideas in this book is the empowerment of Gazan women, who are often put into arranged marriages as teenagers and confined to the home under their husbands’ rule.
- “One of the ways to alter the status quo is to look to the women and girls. It's easy to find a thousand men in favour of war; it's difficult to find five women who are inclined that way. I feel it's time to empower Palestinian women and girls, to give them respect and independence and let them take the lead. Too many girls cannot get an education because of financial and cultural considerations…. I grew up watching the way women in Gaza raised their children. I saw the decision making and the perseverance, but I understood that the women weren't being given the opportunity to bring their own expertise to the table. Women and girls are not able in Gaza to rise to their potential, and as a result they cannot participate to their fullest.”
- I’m reminded a lot of Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib; Abuelaish has a similar medical background and regard for life, and understands the necessity of uplifting women. I saw an interview with Alkhatib a few months ago, where he said that even before the war, Hamas was severely curtailing women’s freedom of movement, and harassing women who left their homes without male accompaniment.
- “A healthy society needs wise and educated women. An educated and healthy woman will raise an educated and healthy family. We need to link education with health care, and the most effective way to do that is to make sure that education and health care are available to women. It's an investment that can shift not only the thinking but power in the Middle East. Removing the barriers that confront our women and girls could very well lead us to peaceful coexistence.”
- In 2008, Israel and Hamas have a twenty-two day war that begins with a suicide bombing at a checkpoint and a volley of Qassam rockets. Abuelaish’s home is hit by two shells. Three of his daughters and his niece are killed instantly, and two others are gravely wounded. Content warning for gore: He describes walking into what was once his daughters’ bedroom and seeing one of them decapitated, another’s body crushed, dismembered limbs, and his surviving daughter standing in the middle of the room holding her eye out of its socket. [END]
- Abuelaish calls an Israeli news reporter friend of his to try and stop the shelling and get medical care to his daughters. Shlomi Eldar answers live on Israeli television, and Israelis mobilize to expedite an ambulance crossing. His family spends the next three weeks in Israel with a daughter and a niece in critical condition; after many surgeries, both survive, and the family misses the funeral of the four girls who died.
- “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.”
- “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 Chaida'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.’”
- “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.”
- “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.”
- “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.”
This is one of the best books on the conflict I’ve read; it’s one of the most hopeful works I’ve read in a while. I have great respect for pragmatic peace activists; at every turn, you can feel his frustration and exasperation with the leaders who have no regard for life and are willing to sacrifice everything to gain nothing. Laying it all out like this makes it so clear how futile and senseless violence really is in matters of justice against justice, and need against need against need. I want to share the foundation that he started in memory of his daughters, to uplift and empower women in the Middle East through education:
Our Story
In January 2009, an Israeli tank shelled the home of Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish in the Gaza Strip and killed three of his daughters
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