Hats off to Sheba Medical Center doctors, who make no distinction between Jew and Arab, Israeli and Gazan, even in wartime.
By Boaz Gaon, Maariv, January 27, 2009
Ten year old Waela yelps happily into the night "We're going home to Gaza, we're going home to Gaza," as she sticks her head out the car window. Her father, Imad Fanani, a bank teller in Gaza, sits in the back seat aside her. He came to Sheba at Tel Hashomer six months ago to treat his sick daughter. She has leukemia. He probably would prefer to stay in Israel, where there is running water, the streets are paved, and no bombs falling on the heads of cowering children with nowhere to hide.
But Waela wants to go home. "I am not afraid of Jews," she told me as I drove her and her father from the Safra Children's Hospital at Sheba to anther building on campus – one way of passing the time for a child who has no childhood. "If the Jews approach my house, then, yes, I'll be afraid. And if one of my brothers dies, I'll die with him…. Tomorrow we return to Gaza!" she roars. Her father cringes, not knowing how he'll protect her two days later.
Along with Waela, there are about 50 other Gazan children sick with cancers who are hospitalized at Sheba. Some are there for more than half a year and already should have been released; but the hospital keeps them on and gives them shelter so that they don't get thrown back into a place where life in shaky and uncertain. Not far away, in its rehabilitation hospital, Sheba is treating 32 Fatah fighters who were seriously wounded during the Hamas takeover of Gaza. They lost arms and legs to Hamas fire. Sheba feeds and treats them, thus putting into action Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish's dream of peace. Abuelaish's (three daughters were killed in Gaza, and his) youngest daughter is in the Sheba eye department. Until the shelling, which still has not been explained by the IDF, Abuelaish was working on a study about the medical services provided by Sheba to Palestinians.
Appropriately so. Sheba is acting in the finest humanitarian tradition. It is an island of sanity and humanitarianism in a sea of enmity, hate and mean-spiritedness; a stormy sea that threatens to sink us all, unless we get a grip on ourselves.
It's not easy. Israeli-Jewish patients in the eye department are pressing the hospital administration to move Dr. Abuelaish out, so that "he stops wailing at Israel's expense." And the General Security Services are pressing for the return to Gaza of the child cancer patients as soon as possible, because their travel permits have expired. Even some of the hospital medical staff is grumbling; which led hospital director Prof. Zeev Rotstein to send a letter to all hospital staff explaining that Israel's morality is measured specifically in wartime.
I wish to strengthen Rotstein, and bow my head before the Sheba medical staff; it doesn't discriminate between Arab and Jew, or between Israeli and Gazan. Thanks to you, we retain a bit of moral stature. And more: I express disdain for those who would turn the hospital into another Israeli battleground. Those who do so, and still wear a white lab coat, should be ashamed.
