I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor's Journey (3 page)

I chose this date—December 12—to bring them here because it followed hajj, one of the holiest days in the Islamic calendar; it was a time to reflect, to pray, to gather the family together. Hajj is the pilgrimage to Mecca that takes place between the seventh and twelfth days of the month of Dhu al-Hijjah in the Islamic calendar.
This is the largest annual pilgrimage in the world; every able-bodied Muslim is required to make the trip at least once in his or her lifetime. Whether you go to Mecca or not, Waqfat Arafat is the Islamic observance day during hajj in which pilgrims pray for forgiveness and mercy. It’s the first of the three days of Eid al-Adha that mark the end of hajj. In Mecca, pilgrims stay awake all night to pray on the hill of Arafat, the site where Muhammad delivered his last sermon. For the millions of Muslims, my family included, who do not go to Mecca each year, bowing to the Alkebla in the east, falling to your knees and praying the prayers of the believer is sufficient. On the second day we mark the Feast of Sacrifice: the most important feast of Islam. It recalls Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son in obedience to God, and commemorates God’s forgiveness. Everyone observes the day by wearing their finest clothing and going to the mosque for Eid prayers. Those who can afford to do so sacrifice their best domestic animals, such as a sheep or a cow, as a symbol of Abraham’s sacrifice. We observed the prayer day in Jabalia Camp with our relatives and went to the cemetery at the camp to pray for Nadia. I’d bought a sheep and had it sacrificed, donated two-thirds of the animal to the poor and needy, as is the observance, and had some of the rest of the animal made into kebabs for a barbecue at the beach to mark the final day of Eid.

We got up early the next morning, made sandwiches and packed a picnic, and at seven a.m. we all climbed into my car—a 1986 Subaru—and set out.

Before we got to the beach, I had another treat for my children. In early December I’d bought a small olive grove, maybe a thousand square metres in size and half a kilometre from the beach. It was like a little piece of Shangri-La, separated from the hurly-burly by a three-metre fence, a place where we could be together, a place where maybe we could build a little house one
day. I’d kept it a secret until I could show them. As they tumbled out of the car, the kids were surprised and delighted with this unlikely piece of utopia on the outskirts of Gaza, with its olive trees, grapevines, fig and apricot trees. They explored every corner, marvelled at the tidy rows of trees, and happily chased each other through the undergrowth until I reminded them that there was work to be done. We all dug into the task of tidying up the place, which was a little neglected and needed weeding. Even though they had known nothing but life in the crowded confines of the Gaza Strip for most of their lives, my children—the descendants of generations of farmers—seemed at home here.

After we had done enough work, we retreated to a small area of the grove bordered by a line of cinder blocks and shaded by an arbour of grapevines. We spread mats and made a small fire from the twigs and brush we’d cleared from the olive trees, and sat in the shade of the vines eating our falafel sandwiches and talking about the events of our family life—the loss of my wife, their mother, a change so enormous we were still, four months later, trying to come to terms with it.

I also needed to talk to them about another significant surprise. Recently I’d been offered a chance to work at a hospital in Canada. Except for a brief stay in Saudi Arabia, where Bessan and Dalal were born, the family had never lived anywhere but Gaza. Moving to Toronto would be a monumental change, maybe even too overwhelming so soon after their mother died.

When I told them about the opportunity, Aya said, “I want to fly, Daddy.” So I knew at least one of them was willing to leave everything behind—our home, the uncles, the aunts and cousins, the friends—and start over in a new country. Soon the others had also agreed: together we would go to Canada, not forever, but for a while. The older girls, 21-year-old Bessan, Dalal, 20, and Shatha, 17, would attend the University of Toronto; the younger ones,
Mayar, 15, Aya, 14, Mohammed, 13, Raffah, 10, and Abdullah, 6, would go to public school in Canada. There would be many challenges: attending classes in English, experiencing a Canadian winter, learning about a different culture. But we would also be out of the constant tension of Gaza; they’d be safe. These eight children had seemed to be adrift, even in our home, without their mother. This change would be good for them. Together, we’d manage. I could see the excitement on their faces and my old optimism returned for the first time in months.

After the family discussion ended and we had cleared away our meal, the kids were anxious to get to the beach. Fifteen of us—if you counted the cousins and uncles—followed the rutted path up a small hill and through a meadow that led from the olive grove to the water. We walked all together, our group changing shape every few metres as one child ran ahead and two others stopped to examine an object on the path and three girls walking together became five, arms linked. But eventually we made it to the sand.

Despite the cool day, the children ran straight for the water, where they swam and splashed each other for hours, taking breaks to play in the sand. These children of mine—my offspring, my progeny—were the joy of my life. And they’d meant the world to Nadia.

I’d known Nadia’s family before we were married in 1987, when she was twenty-four and I was thirty-two. It was an arranged marriage, as is the custom in our culture, but of the young women my family arranged for me to meet, Nadia seemed the most suitable. She was a quiet, intelligent woman who had studied to become a dental technician in Ramallah, on the West Bank. Our families rejoiced at our union but were not as happy when we left Gaza almost immediately after our marriage for Saudi Arabia, where I had been working as a general practitioner. Nadia, too, felt the anxiety of dislocation. Though Bessan and
Dalal were born there, Nadia never adjusted to living in Saudi Arabia, never felt that she belonged. The customs were different to the ones we were used to, and she keenly felt the separation from our extended family and wanted to return home, which we eventually did in 1991.

I travelled a lot after we settled again in Gaza—to Africa and Afghanistan for work and to Belgium and the United States for more medical training—but Nadia stayed at home with the children. We were a very traditional family, surrounded by my brothers and their families as well as my mother, who lived next door, and Nadia’s mother and father, who lived nearby. Since I had to be away quite often, both Nadia and I felt the need to be close to other family members. She never complained about my frequent absences during the twenty-two years we were married. I could never have studied at Harvard or worked for the World Health Organization in Kabul, Afghanistan, or even done my obstetrics and gynecology residency in Israel, without the support she gave me.

It seemed surreal that she was gone. I watched my children and wondered what would become of them without their beloved mother. How does anyone come to terms with this sort of pain?

In the weeks since Nadia died, Bessan, our first-born, my oldest daughter, had assumed the role of mother as well as older sister. It was a particular relief this day to see her dashing into the sea, the surf soaking her jeans, her laughter carried away on the wind. She was a remarkable girl, my Bessan. She was on track to graduate from the Islamic University in Gaza at the end of the academic year with a business degree. She seemed to be able to handle anything: mothering the children, taking care of the house, getting high marks at school. Since her mother died, though, she’d begun to see that exams are the easiest part, that there were other, harsher realities. It was a lot for a twenty-one-year-old to bear.

Dalal, my second-oldest daughter, was named after my mother. She was a second-year student at the same university as Bessan, where she was studying architectural engineering. She was a quiet, studious girl, shy like most of my daughters. Her architectural drawings were remarkable to me—a sign of the precision she demanded of herself.

Shatha was in her last year of high school and hoping to score the top marks in the class when they wrote their exams in June so she could fulfill her dream to become an engineer. The three girls were best friends and slept in the same room of our house in Jabalia City, a five-storey building that my brothers and I had built. Each of us had a floor for his family; my children and I lived on the third floor. One brother lived apart from us in a separate house. He’d had his own house in Jabalia Camp, and when we constructed the apartment building, he said he wanted to be near but in his own place. So we built another house for him. (My sixth brother, Noor, had become caught up in the conflict of the region, and has been missing for decades.)

Mayar and Aya, who were in grades nine and eight, were almost painfully shy. Sometimes they even asked one of their older sisters to speak to the others for them. But they were clever girls. Mayar looked the most like her mother, and she was the top math student in her school. She entered school competitions here in Gaza and usually won. She wanted to be a doctor like me. She was the quietest of my six daughters, but she was not shy about describing the impact the strife in Gaza had on the people who live here. She once said, “When I grow up and become a mother, I want my kids to live in a reality where the word
rocket
is just another name for a space shuttle.”

Aya was never far from Mayar. She was a very active, beautiful child who smiled easily and laughed a lot when she was with her sisters. She wanted to be a journalist and was very determined in
her own quiet way. If she couldn’t get what she wanted from me—permission to go to visit a relative or to buy a new dress—she’d go to her mother and say, “We are the daughters of the doctor; you must give this to us.” Aya loved language, excelled in Arabic literature. She was the poet in the family.

Raffah, my daughter with eyes as bright as stars, was an outgoing child, inquisitive, rambunctious and gleeful. She was in grade four this year.

Mohammed was a young man of thirteen. He needed the guidance of a father, and I was worried about that because I was away four days a week, working at the Sheba hospital in Tel Aviv. He was to write the grade seven exams in June. His little brother Abdullah, in grade one, was the baby of the family. Watching him running to his sisters on the beach, kicking up the sand as he bounded over the dunes, I felt a special pain for this motherless boy: how much would he remember her?

That day they all sat for photos beside their names in the sand. Even Aya and Mayar smiled into the camera. When the tide came in and washed their names away, they wrote them again, higher on the beach. They rushed from playing in the surf and riding the waves to climbing into a boat that was moored on the beach, from building pyramids in the sand to racing back into the water—the camera click, click, clicking, recording the jubilance of my eight children. I watched them, thinking, “Let them play, let them escape from their grief.”

While they cavorted on the dunes, I drove back to Jabalia Camp to fetch the kebabs. There’d been such a long lineup at the butcher early that morning, I’d decided to go to the beach and return for the meat once the children were settled. While driving, I thought about Nadia and the changes in our lives since she had died. At first I’d believed that I would have to stop the research work I was doing, since it required me to be in Tel Aviv
from Monday to Thursday. But the children insisted that I continue. They said, “We’ll take care of everything at home. Don’t worry.” It was the way Nadia had raised them. She was the example they were following. Nadia managed the house, the children, the extended family, everything, while I went away to study, to work, to try to make a better life for all of us. Sometimes I was away for three months. When I studied public health at Harvard from 2003 to 2004, I was gone for a year. But how could these children manage without a mother if their father was away more than half the time, even though they all told me that I needed to go on? This is why I was so happy they had agreed to move to Toronto: there we could all be together, with no border to cross every day.

And while we were in Canada, this place would be waiting for us. There’s something eternal about olive, fig and apricot trees, a piece of land that’s near a beach where the sky meets the sea and the sand, where whitecaps break as waves roll up to the shore, where the surf rides high on the beach and the laughter of children soars on the wind.

The ringing of my cellphone brought me out of my reverie. It was Bessan, teasing me, saying, “Where is my father with the kebabs? Our stomachs are fighting. We need food.” I told her I was on my way and they should go back in the olive grove and get the hibachi started.

Later, we feasted on the kebabs, told more stories, and then returned to the beach for one last walk before the setting sun sent us home.

The strife of Gaza has been the backdrop of my children’s whole lives, though I have tried my best to make sure that their experiences growing up have been less traumatic than my own. But I remember clearly how grateful I was that day for the chance
to get them out of there for a while, to fly them away with me before more trouble came our way.

My daughters had heard me speaking about coexistence throughout their lives. Three of them—Bessan, Dalal and Shatha—had attended the Creativity for Peace Camp in Santa Fe, New Mexico, that is run by Israeli and Palestinian coordinators. One of the coordinators, Anael Harpaz, told me she sees the youth of the region as the antidote that can counteract sixty years of acrimony. I wanted my daughters to meet Israeli girls and to spend time with them in a neutral setting in order to discover the ties that may bind and heal our mutual wounds. Getting the paperwork for the girls to leave Gaza for the United States was a monumental task, as Gazans cannot leave the Strip without permission from Israel. But this was an experience I desperately wanted my children to have, to see that people can live together, can find ways to cooperate and to make peace with each other. Bessan went to the camp twice. The others had one visit each.