MK Dr. Ahmad Tibi. 'Take a vacation and enjoy your fake feeling of self-righteousness'
Photo: Avi Chai and Yogev Atias
If you can't treat Palestinian kids, go back to your settlement
Op-ed: MK Dr. Ahmad Tibi writes open letter to Israeli physician who expressed his reservations over caring for Palestinians following kidnapping affair.
Several years ago, the IOF (Israel Occupation Forces) bombed Gaza. The three daughters of Dr. Ezzeldeen Abu al-Aish
were killed as his house was bombed.
Even after his daughters were murdered in the bombing, Dr. Abu al-Aish did not lose his humanity. He remained a doctor.
At the exact same time, he was treating Israelis - some of them soldiers or their family members who harmed his people, and some of them settlers who robbed his people's land.
Value of Life
Bambi Sheleg
Op-ed: Connection between mother and son is an important characteristic of Arab culture. So why doesn't mothers' love serve as a shield against growing violence?
In a Channel 10 report by Smadar Peled, a physician named Dr. Dudi Mishaly said that until now he has had the privilege of operating on children and healing them, including Palestinian children. Now, after the kidnapping, the settler doctor revealed that he is more of a settler than a doctor. He sees caring for a Palestinian child from Hebron as "an act of a bleeding heart" or even a "pretentious act." That's right!
His wife even says that Israel should cut electricity to Hebron, impose a siege and stop caring for their children, "so that they treat our children like we treat their children."
Well, she probably hasn't heard about the fate of 13-year-old Muhammad Dudin who was shot to death several days ago by the occupation soldiers searching for the missing-kidnapped teens, who I hope will return safely to their families. The child Muhammad Dudin will never return to his family.
IDF soldiers searching for kidnapped teens in Hebron (Photo: AP)
She hasn’t heard about it, and her husband hasn't heard about the two students Nadeem Nawara and Mohammad Abu Taher, who were shot and killed by the army in Bitunia. They probably haven't heard about almost 2,000 teenagers and children who have been killed in recent years and about Palestinian children who are "kidnapped" from their homes at night and from their schools "under orders."
I remember encountering many hostile patients who noticed that my name is Ahmad. I have even cared for people who called me names on nationalistic grounds because I did not see my medical mission as "pretentious" or an act of a bleeding heart.
Many Arab doctors treat army and police officers devotedly despite the fact that the latter have likely killed their people and hurt them. We have also cared for people who probably expropriated our lands, or drivers of bulldozers destroying al-Arakib and the unrecognized villages in the Negev.
Because being a doctor is a mission. A doctor is a human, before being Jewish or Arab. Japanese have cared for Americans, and vice versa.
By the way, I have never asked to be thanked for a treatment or help I gave. Medicine is a value which depends on the person, not on one's nationality or political views. It's true that a doctor is also a human being with feeling and opinions, but he is tested in his ability to push his opinions aside and not to express them openly.
Dr. Mishaly, I don't want to demand your dismissal from treating children because, as you said, you have been coming to work "with a depression" recently. A depressed doctor can be an oppressing doctor. I am certain that there will be other doctors, both Jews and Arabs, who will agree to do what you find difficult doing: Operating on Palestinian children.
Take a vacation, go back to your settlement, which sits exactly on the lands of the family of the Hebron child whose treatment you question, and enjoy the fake feeling of belonging to a collective of self-righteousness, disowning, crying and showing off. Get out of the Palestinian land. Get out of our souls.
And to you I would like to dedicate Mahmoud Darwish's poem, "Passers between the Passing Words." It's time for you to be gone – ايها المارون بين الكلمات العابرة خذوا اسماءكم وانصرفوا.
Got it, doctor?
