I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor's Journey (4 page)

Bessan was the only one of my children to have met Israelis before going to the peace camp. In 2005, she had joined a small group of five young women from both sides of the conflict for a road trip across America. Their leader, Deborah Sugerman, took them in a van along with a cameraman to record their views on a multi-state visit that was supposed to promote dialogue, create an understanding of each other’s point of view, break down barriers between enemy cultures and build bridges over the huge, complicated problems that existed between the two sides. There were no easy answers during a journey that was layered with forgiveness, friendship, sorrow and hope. Their conversations and activities were filmed for a documentary entitled
Dear Mr. President
, and the girls hoped to meet President George W. Bush to enlist his support for the work they were doing.

For me, it was an example of what most families in the region
want, most teenagers, most scholars: to find a way through the morass in order to live side by side. Some of the comments Bessan made in the film have stayed with me: “There is more than one way to solve a problem. To meet terrorism with terrorism or violence with violence doesn’t solve anything.” She also admitted that it’s hard to forget what has happened here, the humiliation, the oppression of being basically imprisoned in Gaza and denied basic rights; that hurt of injustice lingers. “All problems can be solved by forgiving the past and looking toward the future, but for this problem it’s hard to forget the past.” Near the beginning of the documentary she says, “We think as enemies, we live on opposite sides and never meet. But I feel we are all the same. We are all human beings.”

I’d been straddling the line in the sand dividing Palestinians and Israelis for as long as I could remember, even as a fourteen-year-old when I worked for an Israeli farm family for the summer and discovered that they were as human as me. As I watched the children on the beach that day, I saw the points in my life where I had crossed a line in the sand drawn by circumstances, by politics, by the ever-present enmity of two peoples. The abject poverty I lived in as a child, the opportunities I created through my performance at school, the Six Day War that altered my thinking—all of these and other crossings have shaped my life. From the time I was a very small boy I had been able to find the good piece of the bad story, and that was always the attitude I tried to bring to the considerable obstacles that have challenged me, and it was how I managed to move from one crossing to another. It seemed to me that I’d gathered strength from one to prepare for the next.

We stayed at the seaside until our shadows were casting six-metre silhouettes onto the sand. Then we went back to the olive grove, packed up our belongings, and the children bundled into
the cars my brothers and I had driven that day for the short journey home. Laughing about the day’s events, mimicking and teasing each other as children do, the older ones looking out for the younger ones, they were bound together like rolls of twine in the back seats of the cars. As I drove, I listened to them chattering away, and I thought to myself, “We are getting there—they will be okay. Together, we can do this.”

Exactly thirty-four days later, on January 16 at 4:45 p.m., an Israeli rocket was fired into the girls’ bedroom, followed swiftly by another. In seconds, my beloved Bessan, my sweet shy Aya and my clever and thoughtful Mayar were dead, and so was their cousin Noor. Shatha and her cousin Ghaida were gravely wounded. Shrapnel in his back felled my brother Nasser, but he survived.

The aftermath was carried live on Israeli television. Because the Israeli military had forbidden access to journalists and everyone wanted to know what was happening in Gaza, I had been doing daily interviews with Shlomi Eldar, the anchorman on Israel’s Channel 10. I had been scheduled to do one that afternoon. Minutes after the attack occurred, I called him at the TV station; he was doing the live newscast and he took the call on air.

The footage shot around the world and showed up on YouTube and in the blogosphere. Nomika Zion, an Israeli woman from Sderot, the town that is on the receiving end of Qassam rockets, said: “The Palestinian pain, which the majority of Israeli society doesn’t want to see, had a voice and a face. The invisible became visible. For one moment it wasn’t just the enemy—an enormous dark demon who is so easy and convenient to hate. There was one man, one story, one tragedy and so much pain.”

This is what happened to me, to my daughters, to Gaza. This is my story.

I
CANNOT PRESENT MY PAST WITHOUT
first describing the present and daily consequences of the recent history and tortured politics of Palestine, Israel and the Middle East. Then, as you read back into the past, I hope you will carry with you an appreciation of the relentless absurdity of a system that does not allow humans to be human.

I am one of a very few Palestinians who has a permit to work in Israel. Since my home is in Gaza, I cross the border at Erez twice a week. I go to work in Israel on Sunday unless the border is closed, in which case I go on Monday, and I come home on Thursday. When people ask me what it’s like, I wish they could come with me and find out for themselves. Erez, located in the northern part of the Strip, about a ten-minute drive from my home, is the only crossing that serves as a pedestrian exit point for Gaza residents entering Israel. (The other crossings are Karni in the east, which—when it is open—is for cargo, and Rafah in the south, which goes to the Egyptian border and is usually closed.)

It’s hard for civilized people to believe what happens there—the humiliation, the fear, the physical difficulty, the oppression of
knowing that, for no reason, you can be detained, turned back, that you may miss a crucial meeting, scare your family into thinking that perhaps, like thousands of others, you’ve been arrested. As an experience, crossing is never routine, often erratic, frightening and exhausting. I did it twice a week every week for years.

On Thursdays on the way home from my hospital job in Israel for the weekend, first I stop at a shopping centre about five kilometres from the border. This is where the Palestinians lucky enough to be allowed to make the trip stock up on everything from brake fluid—for a car that’s so old it needs new parts every few weeks—to foodstuffs, always in short supply in Gaza, Coca-Cola, plastic shoes (there are rarely any leather ones for sale) and flat-screen TVs. To us it feels like the Disney World of shopping before we return to the land that’s closed, where everything is shut down, shut off or shut out.

At the border, you proceed with luggage, briefcase and sacks of purchases to the first checkpoint and join the lineup at the booth, where you present your passport and papers and submit to a search. The Israeli border officers may take apart every bag and search every pocket or simply give a cursory glance at your person and your goods. There is no way of knowing which treatment you’ll receive and how long you’ll be held up, so there is no way to predict when you’ll arrive home. No means of transportation is allowed beyond the first checkpoint, so when you’re cleared through, you have to walk with your luggage and whatever else you’re carrying to the next stop: a sleek, stainless steel building that looks like a cross between an airline terminal and a prison, which was built in 2004 to screen for what Israel called terrorists. The walk is slightly uphill, a strain on anyone carrying heavy items. This billion-dollar building, with all its X-ray machines, monitoring equipment, special conveyor belts and video cameras, was designed to process 20,000 to 25,000 people a day: workers
who used to cross by the thousands to and from their jobs in Israel, journalists who came in the dozens to file stories on Gaza, aid workers from many humanitarian groups. Since almost no one is allowed to cross anymore, the place is practically empty on this day I’m describing—except for scowling staff, a couple of medical evacuees from Gaza and a single pair of bored-looking humanitarian aid workers. It seems like a giant make-work project for Israeli guards on one side and Hamas loyalists on the other.

The brand new outpatient clinic, supposedly the catch basin for medical emergencies coming from Gaza, is also in this building, and just as empty—a state-of-the-art facility designed to treat thirty patients an hour, complete with an intensive care unit, paramedics and ambulance services for transfer to Israeli hospitals. It stands like a monument to the intransigence that keeps people apart. (This clinic would finally be opened with great fanfare just two days after my daughters were killed. But everyone knew that Palestinians could not get treatment there since they wouldn’t have permission to cross the border. It was closed shortly thereafter.)

Inside the terminal, you’re directed to the appropriate counter—women this way, men that way, foreigners here, non-foreigners there. More questions. Then, unless you get turned away, and many do, your papers are stamped and you’re on your way through a series of confusing corridors that challenge anyone with a lot of baggage and leave a sensible person feeling there’s trouble ahead. Which there usually is. Grumpy porters can carry your bags on their luggage carts for part of the way if you’re willing to pay their fee, which changes by the hour, but once out of the terminal, eventually you need to take the bags yourself—no one knows why—over approximately 1.5 kilometres of gravel, rock, dirt and dust that leads to the Gaza side of the border. For equally inexplicable reasons, more porters appear two hundred metres
from the finish line and hoist your luggage. After paying them about ten shekels a bag (US$2.60), you’re in Gaza.

Under the irritated gaze of Hamas guards, you haul your bags to the rickety table at the roadside and prepare for another grilling. Papers are searched. Luggage is opened and tossed about, then the contents are jammed back into the bags. A thrust of a chin sends you on your way again, still toting your luggage and if necessary holding the hands of any children who may have crossed with you, lest they stray into the path of the cars that speed up to the crossing.

The message of Erez is clear: don’t live in Gaza, don’t go to Gaza—no one will help you on either side of the most fractious and contested border on the planet.

But it’s the trip back across the border into Israel that really tells the tale of a population cordoned off and under siege. There are precisely twenty different checks at different gates and in separate locked rooms with whirring X-ray machines and cameras. Instructions, issued sometimes impersonally, sometimes with hostility, rarely reluctantly, include “Spread your legs, put your feet on the designated spots, raise your arms above your head.” Most of the people who cross into Israel since the blockade began in 2006 are patients with special permission to exit for hospital appointments. Often they are carrying small children who can’t be left behind, or they are struggling with illness or limping with the help of a cane or being pushed in a wheelchair. In other words, they are sick. Yet there in the checkpoint they wait for hours, for no apparent reason; no explanation is given.

The trek starts on the Gaza side with the glowering policemen of Hamas who leave you to bake in the sun while they process your papers. If you pass whatever test they’re conducting but not telling you about, they nod toward the gate to no man’s land. You trek first across an open field, then down a cement corridor and
finally into the stainless steel building, obeying red and green lights that tell you to stop or to go, passing into consecutive locked cubicles with more stop-and-go instructions. Disembodied voices bark from loudspeakers. There never seems to be a single person—Palestinian, Israeli or foreign—who understands the whole procedure, so we all carry on trying to interpret signs and responding to demands, hoping for a speedy arrival at the other side. My fellow travellers this day include old ladies with plastic bags of pita bread and Styrofoam containers of soup that they are bringing to relatives in Israeli hospitals, I presume to avoid the starvation patients invariably anticipate while they wait for treatment in places away from home. There are little children, some of them obviously suffering with illness, who also have to wait interminably for a light to flash green or a guard to mutter, “Lakh,” which means, “Go.”

At the other end of the terminal building today, my suitcase is selected for special scrutiny. It’s already been opened and X-rayed at least twice during this crossing. I open the suitcase again with the patience I have cultivated over the years to reveal that it is stuffed with children’s books for the Palestinian kids who are patients at the hospital where I work. The security guard goes through every one of the 200-odd volumes. Pop-up giraffes and monkeys on springs jump from the pages, surprising the guard, but she doesn’t crack a smile. A little boy next in line, clinging to his mother’s hand, cranes his neck to see and manages a grin as the images flash by and animals leap from the page.

The border staff at times will go to great lengths to explain that this is about security and the safety of all concerned and not meant as harassment. It’s a story that’s hard to swallow when you watch the clock ticking while a guard turns every single page of two hundred children’s books and mutters something about the scanner not being available today.