Erella Dunayevsky’s stories evoke the dailiness of Palestinians’ lives under occupation. They take place over many years but, as Dunayevsky has written, “the essence of the stories is identical, whether they took place during the nineties of the previous century or are happening right now.”
Erella composed this epistolary story on February 19, 2008…
Greetings dear friends,
I have a soulmate in Gaza. Due to the Occupation that took me to Gaza every month between the years 1998 and 2000, I was able to meet my friend in his home town. This happened ten years ago. Gaza was still licking its wounds after the First Intifada and had exquisitely rebuilt its ruins. Since then, a lot of filth has flowed through Gaza’s sewage again and Mustafa and I, thank God, nourish our relationship through our mobile phones whenever Gaza has enough electrical power to charge them.
But not everything is so terrible in Gaza. If you are critically ill, for example, and have not yet died from lack of medication and medical equipment, lack of electricity in hospitals, or the absence of an adequate doctor; and if, in addition, you are fortunate and the hospital doctor signs the document for you to receive Palestinian Authority funding, you might have the miraculous good fortune to find yourself in a hospital in Israel. This is how Widad, Mustafa’s wife, arrived at Ashkelon’s Barzilai Hospital to nurse her ill father.
We visited them once, twice, and a third time.
We crowded about a round table in the pleasant, intimate lobby of the Oral and Maxillofacial Department – Ehud and I were visiting Widad’s father who had violent mouth cancer; Atef, the second patient in her father’s room, also a Gazan, was waiting for surgery on his thyroid gland; Widad, who insisted on hosting us despite our protests; and 3-year-old Sarah, who had 18 stitches in the rip that gaped in her right cheek, and her mother – both from Gaza. We all spoke, thanks to my broken Arabic and Ehud’s better Arabic, and Widad’s father who spoke far better Hebrew and who had worked for the Egged Bus Co. for a decade, in the good old Occupation days of the 1970s and 1980s.
At the next table sat a young woman, visiting a local patient, and reading a small prayer book she held in her hands. The television above our heads was set to the Knesset (parliament) channel, and loudly invaded our ears. Atef lowered the volume and turned to the young woman sitting beside us, asking her pardon. She answered smiling that it was alright, and added that the hospital is a place of understanding and that here everyone was on friendly terms. “But Sderot sometimes gets surprises,” she added after a short silence. Atef asked what she meant by “surprises” and I translated this into Arabic, adding that she spoke of the Qassam rockets. Atef nodded, in understanding and identification. She looked at all of us, and rested her gaze on little Sarah who played next to us. The 18 stitches on her right cheek invited a longer gaze. After a while the woman moved her eyes from Sarah, turned to me and asked: “What happened to the girl? It’s a painful sight. She’ll probably be scarred for life.” Since she spoke to me, I voiced the information I had from a previous visit, and added: “Gaza too gets its surprises. This is one of them.”
The young woman broke the silence and said: “I have an idea. It must be done. On TV, one should tell the story of Sarah from Gaza and the child from Sderot who lost his leg and the stories of other children from both places, instead of all that TV talk.” The television was still carrying the Knesset channel.
We listened to her, all of us. She spoke excitedly as one who had just discovered something that had been hidden from view.
Silence reined again, until another wave of excitement gushed out of her and met our respectful listening: “This should be broadcast not just once. 24 hours a day!” She repeated this a few times. We nodded in agreement and translated her words for the Gazans. A wave of empathy was sent to her from all of us.
On our way home to Kibbutz Shoval, a 45-minute ride from Ashkelon’s Barzilai Hospital, I knew in my heart – another person had added herself to the circle of those who understand what is most important.
“Thanks” to Sarah’s right cheek and its 18 stitches, in a hospital with one staff that cares for everyone, where people are at their weakest, both patients and their visitors – one’s heart is more open, and it is much more difficult to blur the pain.
Alongside her own pain, this woman had met the pain of little Sarah, a personal one with a name and an address, and her heart was opened at once for compassion that could contain the whole world.