Ambassadors of Peace medical program shows us it's a time to heal

So, once again things are heating up in the Holy Land: Jerusalem is burning; rockets are flying in from the South. As always, there’s the niggling thought: Is it our leader who is orchestrating this trouble in some last-ditch effort to stay in power as Israel’s only strong-enough hero to save the day? 

As far-fetched as it may sound, our eternal prime minister has certainly been doing some strange things lately: One election he thunders ‘Bibi or Tibi’; the next he’s seducing Arab parties into his coalition. One minute he’s declaring them legitimate partners; the next he’s alarmingly silent as Bezalel Smotrich lets rip with racist rants. It’s hard to see how we can move beyond suspicion when our leader is stirring it up. 

Hopefully, by the time this is published, the sane center will be cruising into coalition mode, and the craziness of our previous government will be relegated to Eretz Nehederet skits and then forgotten. And we will all begin to heal. 

The moderate majority of Israelis, of course, has held fast even in the face of relentless incitement from our prime minister. Despite his sneers that there are his worshipers, and there are the (hiss) “leftists,” Israelis across the spectrum have continued to coexist and cooperate in many fields. And medicine, according to Dr. Maher Deeb, cardiac and chest surgeon and medical director of St. Joseph’s Hospital in east Jerusalem, is one of the shining lights.

“Medicine is the true bridge in this terrible situation,” he says, “and should be harnessed even more for peace.” 

As with many wonderful initiatives, Deeb’s “Ambassadors of Peace” medical program was born out of close personal friendship.

Decades ago, Deeb was a classmate of Prof. Amitai Ziv, today director of Sheba’s Rehabilitation Hospital at Tel Hashomer, and founder and director of the MSR – The Israel Center for Medical Simulation – a world leader in this field. 

“He was Deeb and I was Ziv, and our surnames, in Hebrew, meant that alphabetically we were placed in the same study group from our first year of medicine in Jerusalem,” recalls Ziv, with a smile. Later, the two young doctors studied on fellowships together in Philadelphia where their wives (both educators in the field of peace building), also became close, and their children played together. 

Back in Israel they decided to widen their personal friendship to professional collaboration. Deeb was frustrated at the level of training of some of the young Arab graduates who had studied abroad; Ziv suggested they do their specialization at Tel Hashomer, ranked among the top 10 hospitals in the world.

 “We came back to Israel in 2000, full of dreams to cooperate and build a better society,” recalls Ziv, “in the days of hope, before everything collapsed.”

Through personal connections such as theirs, young Palestinian doctors trained in countries including Egypt, Jordan, Russia, Algeria and also in the West Bank are placed in Israeli hospitals such as Tel Hashomer. This comes with its challenges: Some students have to do a crash course in Hebrew, security clearance has to be secured, housing is often needed (and provided).

“We do our best to give our Palestinian doctors a sense of belonging and community,” explains Ziv, “and we hope that education can become a bridge for peace.” 

PLACING PALESTINIAN doctors in Israeli hospitals has been happening for many years, and extends to other hospitals in Israel, including Hadassah. The networking for placing the doctors often rests on personal friendships and collaboration with bodies such as the Peres Center for Peace. Deeb handpicks his most promising doctors for training mostly at Tel Hashomer/Sheba, which currently has some 20 Palestinian resident doctors specializing in a wide range of fields: orthopedics, surgery, oncology and more. (These residents are over and above the Israeli residents who train at Sheba, and the program does not cost the hospital much, as the Palestinian doctors are funded largely by their night shifts). Friendships are forged; rifts in society are triaged and treated. 

Yet, sometimes those “only-in-Israel” moments are bound to pop up. Along with Physicians for Human Rights and Tel Aviv University Sackler School of Medicine, Palestinian doctors receive training from their Israeli counterparts at MSR. Together they treat victims of the eternal conflict; discussion is life-saving and not political, focusing on how much blood to give and whether to intubate, not on the evil or biblical justification of the occupation. Three-day seminars at the Center culminate with “getting-to-know-the-other” initiatives, including praying at al-Aqsa Mosque.

Still, the hard reality is never far from the surface.

Yousef Alhoubani, for example, is a young doctor from Bethlehem, who studied for his first degree in Algeria, where medical technology lags far behind that of Israel. Back home he joined the staff of St. Joseph’s, where his potential was soon spotted by Dr. Deeb. Alhoubani was a perfect candidate for Ambassadors of Peace, and today he studies Nuclear Medicine at Sheba, where he lives in an apartment belonging to the hospital. 

He loves his work, is very happy at the hospital, and feels a sense of belonging and solidarity. But, living where we do, we have not quite hit John Lennon’s magical “imagine all the people living life in peace” scenario yet. Alhoubani has been arrested twice as he walked down the street, and held overnight – once in Tel Aviv and once in Jerusalem – the police “didn’t recognize” his security clearance papers. 

I walked with this lovely looking young man through the humming corridors of St. Joseph’s – nuns hurrying to their wards, nurses watching wall-to-wall monitors of the corona patients – COVID was still raging and he had come back on his free days to help out, and I just couldn’t help thinking of South Africa. I remembered the sense of outrage I had felt, as a teenager in the pernicious days of apartheid when Robert, our gardener, had been “picked up” for not carrying his “pass,” which he had forgotten at home. I know too that it’s more complicated than that. I’ve lived through intifadas and brutal terrorism here; I know security is paramount and our enforcement officers have to do their job. But still. When will we ever move forward out of this mess? 

Despite the problems, insists Dr. Deeb, there are bright spots of hope. His hospital, founded by a French order of nuns in 1848 in what is now east Jerusalem, is hugely popular among Israelis as a warm and welcoming place in which to give birth. A young mother holding her brand new baby recounted with pleasure how a fasting Muslim doctor had delivered her daughter during Ramadan and handed her to a Catholic nun, who then passed the tiny tot to her kippah-wearing new dad. 

And that’s a pretty “You may say I’m a dreamer” moment, no? Maybe someday soon many more inhabitants of this lovely, complex country will join the Ambassadors of Peace, and the world will live as one. At least in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. 

Dr. Deeb has another dream. “One day,” he hopes, “doctors from Israel will come and train with us here at St. Josephs.” 

 

Roll on the glory days.