I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor's Journey by Izzeldin Abuelaish Read Free Book Online

reached on November 2, 1917, is so important to the history that followed, I want to cite the whole document:
    Foreign Office,           
November 2nd, 1917.
    Dear Lord Rothschild,
    I have much pleasure in conveying to you, on behalf of His Majesty’s government, the following declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations which has been submitted to, and approved by the Cabinet:
    “His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”
    I should be grateful if you would bring this declaration to the knowledge of the Zionist Federation.
    Yours sincerely
Arthur James Balfour
    The trouble began with those words. Jews were a minority in Palestine, outnumbered by Arab Christians and Muslims. All ofthe rights of all of the non-Jewish people in the region were prejudiced by their expulsion from their homes and farms. The British mandate in Palestine ended on May 14, 1948, the same day the Israelis announced their Declaration of Independence and the birth of the Jewish state. Gaza, according to the United Nations partition plan of 1947, was supposed to become part of an independent Arab state, but the terms were not acceptable to the Palestinian people, who were expected to walk away from their homeland. Nor was the plan acceptable to their Arab neighbours. So when Israel declared its independence, Egypt acted on behalf of the rest of the region and invaded from the south, triggering the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.
    Since then, a string of well-known dates has marked our failure to coexist: the Sinai War of 1956, the Six Day War of 1967, the intifada of 1987, the second intifada of 2000. There have been endless accords and agreements and leaders: the Oslo Accord of 1993, the Palestinian Authority, which gave self-rule to Palestinians under the leadership of Yasser Arafat in 1994, the Palestinian parliamentary elections of 1996 and the rise of Hamas in 2006.
    In 1948 the Palestinians were accused of wanting to throw the Israelis into the sea. David Ben-Gurion, the founder of Israel, was asked at that time how he would deal with the Palestinians who lost their land and had been deported. He replied, “The old will die and the new generations will forget.” But look at the situation today: no one threw the Israelis into the sea and the Palestinians didn’t forget. However, after six decades in which the largest harvest in the region has been misunderstanding and hate, it’s fair to say that forgetting the past is not the only issue; we need to find ways to go forward together.
    I was born on February 3, 1955, in the Gaza Strip, a refugee child, and I had three strikes against me right from the start: wewere poor, my family had been dispossessed, and I was the son of the second wife. Let me explain. My father married his first cousin and they had two sons when they lived on the family farm near the village of Houg. It was 1948 when he brought the family to Gaza to avoid the possibility of being deported. My mother, Dalal, was from another village called Demra, closer to the Erez Crossing. When my father and his family left Houg for Gaza, they walked north a few kilometres to Demra, and it was my mother’s grandfather who invited the family to rest there. My father thought Dalal was beautiful, and she was divorced. After my father had settled in Jabalia Camp, my father sent for her and they were married, though I’m not sure when—sometime around 1950.
    It was unusual in those days to marry someone from another village, someone you were not related to, and so my mother was ostracized by the rest of the family. However, my paternal grandfather