Izzeldin Abuelaish, 2010
Key words
Palestine, Israel, Gaza, humanism, refugees, apartheid, medicine, conflict resolution, peace, Muslim, Jewish, education
Long before the recent cataclysm in the Middle East, my husband mentioned a book he’d read by a Palestinian doctor who worked in Israel.
After weeks of horrifying headlines, I tracked it down, desperate for a deeper understanding of what is happening in Gaza.
Know justice, know peace; no justice, no peace
That aphorism spotted somewhere in my youth – tee-shirt? Bumper sticker? – is achingly apropos.
Dr Izzeldin Abuelaish grew up in the Jabalia refugee camp. His grandparents had left their land in what is now Israel in 1948 to stay – temporarily! – in Gaza until tensions between Israeli settlers and displaced Palestinians eased.
Abuelaish was born in 1955.
He grew up in the camp, sharing cramped, barely adequate shelter with his family, working odd jobs to scrape money for food.
That Abuelaish survived at all is a wonder. That he became a physician, earned a Master’s at Harvard, worked in Israel and Palestine, served the United Nations, etc. is borderline miraculous.
Yet all this pales next to his greatest achievement: Dr Abuelaish’s indefatigable belief in a peaceful resolution to the decades of violence in Palestine.
The big idea
Palestinians and Israels have more commonalities than differences, they just need to look beyond the history and hatred and see each other as people.
“From the time I was a very small boy I have been able to find the good chapter of the bad story, and that that has always been the attitude I try to bring to the considerable obstacles that have challenged me,” Abuelaish writes.
Though I Shall Not Hate recounts a life riddled with challenges ranging from grinding poverty to chronic illness, the pivotal moment was in 2009, when his three daughters and niece were killed by the Israeli army.
Everything Abuelaish had done up till then – survive hunger, cold, displacement; win a scholarship to study medicine in Cairo; become the first Palestinian doctor to work in an Israeli hospital – was ground to dust in that moment.
He had lost his beloved wife, Nadia, mother to their eight children, just a few months earlier. His children and family were – are – the most important things in his life. There was nothing he wouldn’t do to nurture and protect them. But while he was in the next room, an Israeli tank fired into his home, killing and maiming a swathe of his loved ones.
One might argue, Dr Abuelaish had (hard knocks notwithstanding) had it pretty well till then. At least as well as a Palestinian living in Gaza could have it. (He details the obscene routine humiliations of trying to enter or leave Gaza, even with permission: the searches, the dismissals, the being turned away from a checkpoint as his wife lay dying on the other side.)
But when his daughters were killed in their bedroom, any hint of exceptionalism vanished.
If Abuelaish, who worked at a hospital in Israel, had close Israeli friends, and worked tirelessly for mutual understanding between Palestinians and Israelis, was doing any of it out of naivety or a Pollyanna-ish misconception of reality, his goodwill would have splintered into fury.
His memoir’s title is the spoiler: I Shall Not Hate.
After the shattering loss of his daughters and niece, Abuelaish redoubled his efforts to promote peace and understanding.
In the final part of the book, he tells of moving to Canada with his surviving children. Finally, they could live without constant fear of violence; finally, they could make plans and have dreams.
The coda is heartbreaking.
Since 7 October, 2023, Dr Abuelaish has lost at least 25 more members of his family to the Israeli incursion into Gaza. Speaking to Christiane Amanpour on 17 November, he listed – voice breaking – their names and vocations: a doctor, an engineer, a paramedic, a pregnant mother.
It is impossible to put oneself in his shoes. Especially when he sits, facing the interviewer, and finds the grace to say that the solution is to ‘humanize, not politicize.’
My take
The ongoing massacre of Palestinian civilians in this conflict is a horror and disgrace that will never be erased; nor will the horror and disgrace of Hamas’s slaughter of Israeli civilians.
Dr Abuelaish is the voice of one crying in the wilderness: the only way to out of this catastrophe is to stop arguing over the past and build a shared future.
Their take
“The strength of this book – and there are many reasons why it is one of the most affecting I have read on the subject of Israel and Palestine – is its personal angle. It tells the story of a man who grew up and raised eight children in the most densely populated, and one of the most impoverished, parts of the world: Gaza. His story is important not only for its message of peace, but for the fact that it personalizes the Palestinian experience.” Jonathan Garfinkel, The Globe and Mail, May 14, 2010
Must read for
All of us
Read also
If This Is a Man – Primo Levi
Looking for Palestine – Najla Said
The Book of Ramallah: A City in Short Fiction – Maya Abu Al-Hayat (ed.)