Free I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor's Journey by Izzeldin Abuelaish Page B

looked normal to me. Where I came from—in the refugee camp, on my street, in my village—this would not be seen as normal at all.
    When I was fifteen years old, I had the chance to work in Israel for the summer, on a farm called Moshav Hodaia, close to the town of Ashqelon. It was owned by the Madmoony family. For forty days I lived in the heart of a Jewish farm family. I did chores from six in the morning until eight at night, pretty much working every daylight hour. I’d never slept away from home before except on that trip to Cairo, and I was so lonesome that I can remember the aching in my gut to this day. But the family, Sephardic Jews, were very warm to me, even when I did really naive things that they must have found perplexing.
    For instance, I was still dressing in hand-me-down clothes, donations from the humanitarian agencies that operated in Gaza. I had assumed that the clothes came to us because their former owners were so rich they threw their clothes away when they got tired of wearing them. So when I saw some piles of clothing on the floor of the Madmoony household, I assumed they were throwing the clothes away, and I quickly gathered them and stored them in my knapsack so I could take them home to my mother. I had no idea I was actually collecting the family laundry! After a while they asked me if I’d seen their clothing, and to my great embarrassment I had to confess.
    That summer left a powerful impression on me in many ways. That an Israeli family would hire me, treat me fairly and show kindness toward me—none of this was what I had expected. The experience was made all the more unforgettable by the events that followed one week after my return to Gaza.
    We were dirt-poor refugees who had by this time moved out of the one-room shelter in which we’d been crammed into a simple two-bedroom house in Block P-42 of Jabalia Camp, with a roof made from small cement tiles that would still leak whenever it rained. The toilets were still outside, public toilets shared by several families. Even though it was barely fit for human habitation, it was our home.
    At the time, Ariel Sharon was the Israeli military commander of the Gaza Strip. He was concerned that the roads that ran through the camp weren’t wide enough for his tanks to patrol. His solution? Bulldoze hundreds of houses to the ground. There wasn’t a thing we could do. The level of inhumanity was astonishing, and it has stayed with me to this day.
    That it was Ariel Sharon who ordered this destruction meant even more to our family as our land in Houg had been taken by him. So when his tanks came to our street that night, my familyshuddered at the thought of what could happen to us. The warning sound of their tracks crunching up the road wakened everyone. It was midnight. Families rushed to doorways to see long guns pointing at us from the turrets of the tanks. Now I wonder how those soldiers must have felt, pointing their murderous weapons at little kids still rubbing sleep from their eyes and clinging to their mothers in doorways, but to me then it was the quintessential display of power over the powerless. The houses along the street were simple, small, even primitive, but they were all we had. Sharon saw them simply as obstructions on a road that he wanted widened.
    I remember the feeling of being trapped, of peril coming to my home. Whatever type of house you have, if you have a house, it means you are not homeless. Thirty-nine years later, when I witnessed the destruction of Gaza during the Israeli incursion of December and January of 2008–9, the same thought came to me. I saw people become homeless as bombs smashed into their dwellings and brought them tumbling down, and I realized that the pain of homelessness has never left me.
    The soldiers ordered the people on my street to leave our houses and stand together and wait. About eight hours went by. At dawn they said we had a couple of hours to empty our houses. I was thinking, “Empty?