I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor's Journey Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 chanceto 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.
    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 regionwant, 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