This article was drawn from an event sponsored by J Street, the New Israel Fund, and the Beth El Temple Center Adult Learning Committee in Belmont, Massachusetts. You can watch the full recording of the event at the link here >>
By noon on October 7 2023, Dr. Yasmeen Abu Fraiha and her emergency room team had run out of antibiotics.
She was working at Soroka University Medical Center, the largest hospital in Israel’s southern Negev region, as hundreds of seriously injured men, women and children flooded the ER.
It was a frantic scene. Families from the Kibbutzim, young people from a nearby music festival and foreign workers from farms presented with serious burns, bullet-wounds and shrapnel injuries. Several people from a nearby Bedouin community were injured by rockets, their villages unprotected by the Iron Dome.
That morning, Gaza terror group Hamas had launched a shock terror attack on Israel, firing a barrage of over 3,000 rockets and flooding thousands of militants into Israeli communities in the south. The attackers killed over 1,100 people – including over 750 civilians – in massacres in towns, kibbutzim and the Nova music festival. Terrorists took over 200 civilians and soldiers hostage.
It was the most intense day in the hospital’s history. Every doctor and nurse in the area, regardless of whether they worked there, came to the hospital: Left-wing Jews, right-wing settlers, Bedouins and Palestinian-Israeli medical professionals alike.
That day, Dr. Fraiha felt a deep conviction: “It is my obligation to be here.” Between the pain and horror, she also saw great acts of compassion and humanity. “I saw the beauty of living together,” Dr. Fraiha says.
Beyond Us vs Them
Discussions of the Israeli Palestinian conflict often paint Israelis and Palestinians as monolithic — united in their life experience and in their animosity for the other group. For Palestinian citizens of Israel it’s not so simple as they navigate the complexities and challenges of being connected to both societies.
Dr. Anwar Mhajne grew up in Umm al-Fahem, a majority Muslim town in Northern Israel. Her great grandmother told her stories of the war in 1948 and her teachers taught her about the Nakba – an Arabic word meaning “catastrophe” – used to describe the, often violent, permanent expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes during the war.
Dr. Mhajne grew up with a deep Palestinian identity, but it was never simple. She discovered her grandfather’s old army uniform one day and learned he had served in the IDF until 1967 — when the Israeli-occupation started. Her family had never talked about it. Growing up, her father’s business partner and closest friend was Jewish.
When she studied at Ben Gurion University — one of the few colleges that houses Jews and Arabs in the same dorm — many of her classmates had never met someone who was Arab inside of Israel, though some grew up in towns only minutes from Umm al-Fahem.
During the 2008-2009 Gaza War, as Hamas fired hundreds of rockets and Israel launched a ground-invasion into Gaza – she huddled with other students in bomb shelters. She feared for her life in Israel, but she also thought of the families on the other side, also paying the price of this war, most of whom didn’t have shelters to hide in.
Once, another Jewish student at Ben Gurion tried out his Arabic with her. ”Stop or I’m going to shoot you,” he said. It was one of the Arabic phrases he learned in the IDF. He thought he was being funny.
“In Israel, regardless of how you identify as an Arab, you’re still treated as a Palestinian.” Dr. Mhajne says.
Bridging A Divided Society
Dr. Fraiha grew up speaking Hebrew. She was born in a Bedouin town, but moved to a Jewish community when she was five. Though the two towns are only five minutes away, moving between them feels like “moving through time,” she told us. “The difference is one hundred years of development and socioeconomic status.”
Dr. Fraiha studied medicine in Jerusalem. In East Jerusalem, she met non-Israeli Palestinians for the first time. It was there that she learned Arabic, taught by her patients.
For almost her entire life, Dr. Fraiha felt like a full and equal Israeli citizen just like anyone else – but then came a distressing reminder.
Her mother passed away from breast cancer. “We couldn’t bury her in our hometown,” Dr. Fraiha told us. “There was one cemetery and it was only for Jews.”
“It was the first time that I realized that I wasn’t really equal to my neighbors and my colleagues and my friends,” she says. “Even though we study together, we have drinks together, we have birthday parties and weddings together— we do everything together — we can’t die and be buried next to each other.”
While Israelis and Palestinians can struggle to interact with each other while in the region, Dr. Mhajne told us that when Israelis come out of Israel, regardless of their identity, “they find lots of commonalities,” especially in their experience of how differently Americans behave. Both Dr. Mhajne and Dr. Fraiha now live in the United States.
Grappling with October 7
After the horror of October 7 and the ensuing war, Dr. Fraiha found that Israelis and Palestinians in the US were living through parallel experiences.
At an an Iftar meal — the fast-breaking evening meal of Muslims during Ramadan — they discussed how hard it was to be a Palestinian abroad; how you can’t share your identity; how people look at you differently and can’t understand you. Later, when she was at a Shabbat dinner, “the conversation was the same, to the word.” — “so much of our pain is the same.”
So many Israelis and Palestinians are united by a common experience — violence.
“Violence and fear does not discriminate,” Dr. Mhajne says.
“My sister was afraid to get on a bus due to suicide bombings,” she says. When Iran sent rockets, many of the communities that got hit were Arab communities. “Our brother felt his house shaking,” she says.
“I have personally lost two friends who were hostages, which is heartbreaking.” Dr. Fraiha said.
Trapped in two worlds
Holding the pain of both peoples is not easy. In addition to facing Islamophobia and racism against Arabs, Dr. Mhajne has faced blowback after revealing her Israeli-Palestinian identity and speaking out for her values. There were times when she was afraid to show her Israeli passport while abroad, fearing judgment. Recently, she was kicked off of a project when the organizers learned she was an Israeli citizen.
Dr. Mhajne has has had people stop talking to her due to her condemnation of October 7. A proud feminist who studies sexual violence, she says the whole discussion of sexual violence during October 7 has really disturbed her. “There’s a way to talk about these issues without justifying war, but still giving victims dignity,” she says.
Dr. Mhajne refuses to let her condemnation of the Israeli government’s response to October 7, erase her empathy for the victims of the attack. “I always imagine my child being taken hostage, it shouldn’t be done,” she says.
Dr. Fraiha holds similar sentiments. “People’s lives are sacred,” she says. “What happened on October 7 was terrible and a war crime, and what is happening now [in Gaza] is a war crime. I condemn them both.
All her life Dr. Mhajne has heard politicians paint Israeli-Palestinians as disloyal, “a disease from within,” a fifth column. But “Palestinian Israelis must be viewed not as a fifth column, but as a bridge,” she says.
Palestinian-Israeli’s are uniquely situated to understand the pain of both peoples. In this experience both Dr. Mhajne and Dr. Fraiha find reason to hope. “You see some of the least violence between Jews and Arabs among Israelis and Palestinian-Israelis,” says Dr. Fraiha. “This should be a model of how we think of the future of Israel-Palestine.”
Amid all the darkness, she still sees hope for a better future. “I know that people right now are very much grounded in their trauma and grief, but war and death changes people’s minds,” she says.
“If you’d ask an Israeli in 1974 if they thought there could be a peace agreement [with Egypt] they’d think you were crazy, but after three weeks of war, they got the first agreement which laid the groundwork for a real peace, five years later,” she says. “If Israel and Germany have such a wonderful relationship today, then any conflict can be solved.”
“We are people who choose humanity over violence,” Dr. Fraiha says. “The divide is not between Israelis and Palestinians, but between those who choose violence and those who choose humanity.”
This article was drawn from a discussion with Dr. Yasmeen Abu Fraiha and Dr. Anwar Mhajne at an event sponsored by J Street, the New Israel Fund, and the Beth El Temple Center Adult Learning Committee in Belmont, Massachusetts. You can watch the full recording of the event at the link here >>
The event starts about 4 minutes into the recording and ends at about 1 hour and 45 minutes.
