I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor's Journey by Izzeldin Abuelaish

Author:Izzeldin Abuelaish [Abuelaish, Izzeldin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Personal Memoirs, History, Middle East, General
ISBN: 9780307358882
Google: 8JXbHQbTDEEC
Publisher: Random House of Canada
Published: 2010-04-26T12:00:00+00:00

FOUR

Hearts and Minds

SO MUCH OF WHAT HAPPENS in my homeland results from decisions taken a long way from the streets of Jabalia City where I live. The Oslo Accords, signed in 1993, agreed that the Gaza Strip would be part of the Palestinian Authority, along with the West Bank; a potential corridor connecting the two would eventually form a Palestinian state. Yasser Arafat was the leader of both regions, and two main political parties, Hamas and Fatah, vied for the loyalties of Palestinians. Fatah was more dominant in the West Bank. Hamas, headquartered in Gaza and founded in 1987 by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin as an offshoot of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, preached an ideology based on Palestinian nationalism, Islamism and religious nationalism. Like Fatah, its name comes from an acronym of the Arabic words that make up the full name of the organization: “Islamic Resistance Movement.” Hamas got most of its support from Gazans, and it was Hamas that launched the suicide bombings in April 1993 (and only renounced them in April 2006).

In September 2005, Israeli settlers were withdrawn from Gaza, fulfilling a promise from the Israeli government that the territory would be controlled by Palestinians. It wasn’t exactly a success story—Israel acted unilaterally and the border crossings were still controlled by Israelis—but it was an important step forward all the same. At least, that’s the way I saw it.

Such events made political headlines around the world, but on the ground there are other scenes acted out on an almost daily basis that are largely ignored by the international media yet play relentlessly on the hearts and minds of the Gazan and Israeli peoples. I’ve been involved with some of these, whether I wanted to be or not.

For example, a couple of months before the Israeli settlers withdrew, on June 21, 2005, a woman from my home in Jabalia tried to attack the hospital where I was working. Her name was Wafa Samir Ibrahim al-Biss, a twenty-one-year-old Palestinian woman, and she had actually been a patient at the hospital after she’d suffered burns in a cooking accident. After her release, she was issued an outpatient card and a special pass that allowed her to cross into Israel to receive the ongoing treatment she needed.

No one was more surprised than I was to learn what happened next. On her way to the hospital, she was stopped at the Erez Crossing because an alert security guard became suspicious. It turned out that she had ten pounds of explosives strapped to her hips. Her plan was to detonate herself in the hospital, and she later admitted that she had intended to take out as many people as she could, even children.

I was so outraged that I wrote an open letter to The Jerusalem Post, published on June 24, expressing my disgust with her actions and my solidarity with the hospital. After expressing my dismay, I wrote: “On the very day she planned to detonate her bomb, two Palestinians in critical condition were waiting in Gaza to be taken for urgent medical treatment to Soroka.

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