A Gazan Doctor’s Struggle To Wake Ottawa’s Conscience
Talking to someone like Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish is a humbling experience. I’ve got girls of my own. How do you start a conversation with a man who lost three young daughters and a niece when tank shells struck his home in Gaza in January 2009? A man who still found the courage to make the fight for forgiveness and reconciliation over vengeance and violence his life’s work? Where do you begin?
I began by thanking him, by offering my condolences. The gesture seemed hopelessly inadequate. Still, he thanked me for calling him. He’s like that.
Dr. Abuelaish is a Hebrew-speaking author and gynecologist who, along with his five surviving children, now calls Canada home. I spoke with him on the weekend about his efforts to bring some of the thousands of Palestinian children wounded in Gaza to Canada for treatment.
We all saw the images from the region’s recent bloody and inconclusive war: the mangled bodies of Palestinian babies and children splayed on hospital gurneys, being carried by distraught parents, wrapped in sheets for burial. It’s easy to sink into feelings of helplessness and rage over a conflict which seemed calculated to kill the most helpless — and over the intransigence of a Canadian government which continues to cold-shoulder efforts to offer some of these children a safe haven.
But if there’s one thing Dr. Abuelaish understands, it’s the futility of hate. He lost his wife to leukemia before losing his children and his home to war. Anyone carrying that much pain could easily take refuge in anger; nothing could be more natural, or more pointless. So he does the harder thing: He appeals to our better nature.
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http://www.ipolitics.ca/2014/09/08/a-gazan-doctors-struggle-to-wake-ottawas-conscience/
