By Tim Klass, Special to JTNews
To many in the Middle East and beyond, Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish represents a triumph of faith, hope and determination over squalor, suffering and frighteningly long odds.
The oldest of nine children, all born in the Jabalia refugee camp, he became known as “the Gaza doctor,” the first Palestinian physician on staff at an Israeli hospital, a globally respected obstetrician and gynecologist specializing in human fertility with a master’s degree in public health from Harvard.
Then his wife Nadia, the mother of their eight children, died of leukemia at age 45. Four months later, on January 16, 2009, three of his daughters, Bessan, 21, Mayar 15, and Aya, 14, and a niece, Noor, 17, were killed when someone in an Israeli tank shelled the family home during the Gaza war. No Israeli authority has asserted there was hostile fire or any other sign of resistance from the house.
Abuelaish, an observant Muslim, subsequently completed a book he had been contemplating for three years, I Shall Not Hate, an autobiographical plea for peace and human dignity that he brought to a pair of recent Seattle-area book signings.
“It is important to feel anger in the wake of events like this; anger that signals that you do not accept what has happened, that spurs you to make a difference,” he wrote. “But you have to choose not to spiral into hate. All the desire for revenge and hatred does is drive away wisdom, increase sorrow, and prolong strife.”
In an appearance before about 275 people at Temple B’nai Torah in Bellevue on January 17 and a presentation that drew 310 at Town Hall in Seattle two nights later, Abuelaish never wavered from that theme.
In Seattle, where the audience appeared to be more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, he was berated by a middle-aged man who said he grew up in a refugee camp on the West Bank and served time in an Israeli prison.
“How can you say don’t hate them?” the man said.
“For many Palestinians, we hate the Israeli army. They are our killers … they murdered your daughters,” he continued, raising his voice. “You’re asking us to love them?”
“Killing can’t be solved by killing. What’s important to me is my daughters,” Abuelaish replied. “They will never come back.”
The Palestinian cause is “holy and noble. We must use the holy and noble means … away from any hate,” he said. “Keep confident in your cause with rationality, with wisdom.”
At the synagogue, a center of interfaith efforts, the audience was predominantly Jewish but included Christians and Muslims, including women in headscarves.
Asked what he would tell Hamas about justice and violence, Abuelaish said he would not single out Hamas, that his message was the same to the Palestinian Authority and the Israeli government: “Violence will never win… words are stronger than bullets.”
He has repeatedly asked personal acquaintances in the Israeli government why his house was shelled, “people who know what happened,” and the response, he said, has been “nothing. They turn a deaf ear.”
Before his appearance in Bellevue, Abuelaish was asked how trying to promote understanding and ease tension between the Israeli and Palestinian peoples could be translated into government and political action.
“I hate politics. I hate politics,” he exclaimed.
Someone like Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, he said, “cares only about staying in power, not about the humanity, not about the people.”
Abuelaish ran unsuccessfully for the Palestinian parliament as an independent in 2006, when Hamas routed the Palestinian Authority throughout the West Bank and Gaza. He wrote in his book that he had never contemplated losing but “discovered that when it comes to politics, you can’t always count on the people to do what you say they are going to do.”
His book also denounces suicide bombings as a “disastrous weapon of terror.” He describes repeatedly unfair, unreasonable, arbitrary, dilatory, seemingly malicious treatment he experienced at Gaza-Israel and Gaza-Egypt border crossings but praises the “alert security guard” who caught a woman wearing 10 pounds of explosives she planned to detonate at a hospital where he worked in Beersheba in 2005.
His letter of outrage over the attempt, the organizers and the woman, Wafa Samir Ibrahim al-Biss, 21, a former patient at the hospital, was published in the Jerusalem Post.
“Is this a reward for kindness? Is this an advertisement for Islam, a religion which respects and sanctifies human life? This is aggression and a violation of humanity,” he wrote.
Abuelaish’s appearances in Seattle, sandwiched around a presentation in Portland, Ore., were part of a 16-city tour that began Jan. 12 in Los Angeles and ends April 1 in Portland, Maine.
He and his five surviving children now live in Toronto, where he is an associate professor at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto, a position he had decided to accept before the outbreak of the Gaza war.
Proceeds from sales of his book, initially published in Canada and revised slightly for the U.S. edition issued in January by Random House, go to Daughters for Life, a foundation he established to provide scholarships for women in Jordan, Egypt, Israel, Syria and other Middle Eastern countries (www.daughtersforlife.com).