Izzeldin Abuelaish, a Muslim Palestinian physician whose life and family history have been punctuated by tragedy, could easily have been a prisoner of the past, consumed by bitterness, hatred and vengeance.
Consider the facts.
His parents were evicted from their farm in Israel by the Israeli army during the first Arab-Israeli war in 1948. Last winter, amid Israel’s war with Hamas, three of his six daughters, as well as his niece, were killed when Israeli shells inexplicably struck his home in the Gaza Strip.
Izzeldin Abuelaish
Nevertheless, Abuelaish, a 54-year-old gynecologist and obstetrician, does not accentuate the negative. “We have to look forward and build a common future,” said Abuelaish, who has worked in Toronto since last summer. “That’s the message. Israel is there, the Palestinians are there. Let’s find a way for Israel and the Palestinians to live in peace and mutual respect, without violence.”
It is supremely ironic that he was a victim of what he brands as “a crazy war.”
A longtime advocate of Arab-Israeli coexistence and amity, he completed his residency in obstetrics and gynecology at Soroka Hospital in Be’er Sheva after studying at the University of London and Cairo University.
A doctor who practised medicine in Gaza and served as policy adviser to the World Health Organization in Afghanistan, he was thrust headlong into the maelstrom of the three-week Gaza war at exactly 4:45 p.m. on Jan. 16, 2009.
On that fateful afternoon, his home near the Jebalya Palestinian refugee camp was hit by two Israeli tank shells.
“I remember the dust, the darkness and the flashes of light,” he said.
Most of all, he remembers the carnage. The first projectile killed his daughters Bisan, 20, Mayar, 15, and Aya, 13, and their 14-year-old cousin, Nour, leaving scattered body parts, and badly injured another daughter, Shatha, 16, and her cousin, Ghaida, 13.
The second bombardment injured two of his brothers and another niece.
In desperation, Abuelaish – a fluent Hebrew speaker who had recently lost his wife to the ravages of cancer – contacted an Israeli television journalist, Shlomi Eldar. Abuelaish’s anguished pleas for assistance were broadcast live on Channel 10, in one of the most publicized tragedies of a war that claimed the lives of 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis.
Eldar arranged for the wounded to be transported to the Sheba Medical Center, part of Tel Hashomer Hospital in Tel Aviv, an institution that had employed Abuelaish as a health policy researcher since January 2008.
Remarkably enough, the tragedy has not dimmed his ardour for reconciliation, though he has retained a lawyer and insists that the Gaza war increased Arab animosity toward Israel and proved that military solutions are futile.
“The Palestinians and Israelis are like conjoined twins,” said Abuelaish, the Michael and Amira Dan professor of global health at the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health. “We have a common destiny and future.”
In honour of his late daughters, he has created a foundation, a living legacy, to promote education and leadership programs for girls and women in the Middle East.
“I had two choices,” he explained. “The path of light or the path of darkness.”
Tammie Ronen Rosenbaum, one of Abuelaish’s Israeli friends, was not surprised that he channelled his anger and grief into a constructive project.
“He is very positive,” said Rosenbaum, the director of the Renata Adler Memorial Research Center for Child Welfare and Protection at Tel Aviv University’s Bob Shapell School of Social Work.
“He has an ability to look at the bright side of things,” she added. “As we say, if you get lemons, you make lemonade. He really believes in peace and tries to understand both sides of the conflict. If you examine his personal history, you see a story of coping and self-control.”
Abuelaish was born and raised in Jebalya, a densely populated Palestinian refugee camp in northern Gaza where the first Palestinian uprising erupted in December 1987. Since then, it has been a Hamas stronghold.
The Abuelaish family hails from the Palestinian village of Huj, which was situated in the northern edge of the Negev Desert and sat astride a road that connected Gaza to Be’er Sheva.
Founded in the early 19th century, when the Ottoman Turks ruled Palestine, Huj was visited by the American biblical scholar Edward Robinson in 1838 when its 200 to 300 inhabitants dwelled in mud buildings. During World War I, Ottoman and British forces fought near Huj. By the mid-1940s, Huj had a population of approximately 800.
The farmers of Huj cultivated a variety of crops, mainly grain, fruit and almonds. “My father, Mohammed, had a farm,” said Abuelaish. “He was a simple worker. My grandfather was the muhktar, the mayor, of Huj.”
On May 31, 1948, two weeks after Arab armies invaded Palestine in a bid to wipe out the newly proclaimed State of Israel, the Israeli army’s Negev Brigade entered Huj, which was close to the Egyptian front, and ordered its residents to leave.
According to Israeli historian Benny Morris, the villagers were driven into Gaza and their houses were looted and blown up. Huj was one of more than 400 Palestinian villages in what is now Israel that disappeared during the fighting.
Although some Israeli officials believed that Huj was a “friendly” Arab village, others claimed that it was “unreliable.” Eventually, exiled villagers petitioned Israel to be allowed to return, but their appeal was in vain.
Huj’s land was appropriated by Kibbutz Dorot, which was formed in 1941. Today, Dorot – a lush oasis amid barren hills – manufactures irrigation valves and is apparently Israel’s largest single producer of carrots, which are exported to the United States, Europe, Russia and Persian Gulf emirates.
To Abuelaish, as to the vast majority of Palestinians, the 1948 war, including the destruction of Huj, was nothing less than a nakba, or catastrophe.
Yet unlike many Palestinians, Abuelaish is extremely reluctant to dwell on this disaster, which caused the flight of approximately 700,000 Palestinians from Palestine.
He prefers to talk about the present, with all its problems and challenges.
“We go from crisis to crisis,” he said in a reference to Israelis and Palestinians. “From nakba to nakba. We have to move forward and build the future. Palestinians are eager to fulfil their potential. Give us a chance.”
An arch realist, he is confident that Israel and the Palestinian Authority will resume negotiations, and that a two-state solution is still possible. He claims that his views are representative of most Palestinians.“If there is a will, there is a way. Everything is possible. Did you think that a black guy, Barack Obama, would be president of the United States?”
He calls on Israel to agree to a total settlement freeze in the West Bank if it is serious about peace. “The ball is in Israel’s court. Netanyahu can make a difference.”
Abuelaish, who carries a Palestinian Authority passport but describes himself as a citizen of the world, intends to remain in Canada for at least the next five years, the duration of his contract with the University of Toronto. His contract entitles him to an office, a house, a car and a research assistant.
He is glad to report that his surviving children – Dalal, 20, Shatha, 18, Raffah, 10, Mohammed, 13 and Abdallah, 7 – are thriving in Toronto. “They have a future. They are not tied to the past, with all its pain. I raised them on love, not hate.”