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

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 intothe 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.

TWO

Refugee Childhood
    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 ofknowing 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