http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/770571.html
A respected doctor - and a suspicious Arab By Ruth Sinai Dr. Aziz Darawshe's utopia is located in the basement of Haemek Hospital in Afula. For 17 years, he has worked alongside Jews to save the lives of Jews and Arabs. No one there examines his identity card. No one hints that his life here is conditional. Dr. Darawshe directs the hospital's emergency department. Each year, 125,000 patients pass through the department - including the sick, accident and terror victims, and war casualties. Darawshe sometimes resuscitates three patients in an hour. He can count on one hand the number of times a sick or wounded Jewish patient refused to be treated by him because he is Arab. There is something in pain, worry, sorrow and near-death experiences that unites everyone, he says. "Heart attack victims do not differentiate between Jew and Arab," he says. "The oasis," his name for the emergency rooms in his command, survived the intifada, dozens of terror attacks, the October 2000 riots and Operation Defensive Shield. Some of the physicians who work with him were drafted during the recent Lebanon war, as were their sons. As often happens in his schizophrenic life, Darawshe found himself torn between concern for their safety and opposition to the destruction and killing in Lebanon. Advertisement He proudly notes that the integrated unit has been the leader in consumer satisfaction polls the Clalit health maintenance organization conducted among its tens of thousands of members who were treated at the Afula hospital. More than 40 percent of the patients and a significant percentage of the medical staff there are Arab. In general, integration of Arabs in the health care field is quite successful, according to Darawshe. There are many more Arabs who work in health care - including as doctors, male nurses and pharmacists - than in other professional fields. "This is a field in which Arabs can become prominent among Jews," he says. "We have successfully squeezed into this niche." This inclusion appears completely natural to him. His own integration looks perfect. His Jewish colleagues invite him to circumcision ceremonies, funerals, bar mitzvahs and weddings. He is known and respected throughout the region and privy to royal treatment. "But take me out of the area and I become a suspicious object. An hour's drive away from here, at the Haifa Mall, for example, the world turns 180 degrees," Darawshe says. He also becomes a suspect following every terror attack - not in the eyes of his work colleagues, but certainly to external observers. It makes no difference how many wounded Jewish victims he saves; there is always a reporter who shoves a microphone in his face and asks, "Do you condemn this?" "I once told a reporter, 'I condemn it - period. You have standing orders to say Dr. Darawshe unequivocally condemns this after every terror attack.' They are constantly testing my loyalty," he says. >From Tolstoy to Zafon Darawshe is a moderate and supports coexistence. His loyalty is clear and firm, and he does not understand why he is subjected to examination. He is loyal to his people and the nation in which he resides, in that order. "I am an Arab Israeli. I was an Arab first, for hundreds of years, and became an Israeli later, 58 years ago," Darawshe says. He has no questions regarding his citizenship. "Why are we a constant subject of discussion? That is the biggest problem - that you have not internalized what we have - that we are Israeli citizens. We have no other citizenship and, as you say, [in a popular song by Corinne Allal], we have no other country." Darawshe's utopia also exists in the patio in front of his home, in the village of Iksal. There, beneath branches of palm, ficus and citrus trees, he sits and reads during rare leisure moments. He reads everything, from Tolstoy and Dostoevsky to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jose Saramago and Carlos Ruiz Zafon. He reads translated literature in Hebrew, and Arabic literature in the original. A breeze blows through his hilltop home on its way from the sea to Nazareth. When he looks up, he sees buildings in Nazareth. When he looks directly ahead, he sees the home of one of his four brothers. Darawshe, age 51, is the oldest of 12 children. His mother did not know how to read or write. His father completed four years of elementary education. He was a farmer and later a construction worker. Even before he was born, his father and uncles decided Darawshe would be a doctor. They knew the profession of every one of their future children. "It was not open to negotiation," Darawshe says. Darawshe studied medicine in Bulgaria. He easily learned the language, just as he learned other languages that he speaks, including Russian, Yiddish and a bit of Amharic. When he returned to Israel, he was accepted as an intern at Barzilai Medical Center in Ashkelon, and completed residencies in cardiology, internal medicine and emergency medicine. Out of boredom, he completed a master's in health systems management. In 1989 he moved to Haemek Hospital, and in 1994 he was appointed emergency department director. His wife Mona is a teacher and is currently completing a master's in mathematics education. His son is beginning his third year of medical school at Hebrew University. Another son is studying German in Germany and considering studying medicine, and other sons are in high school and kindergarten. Darawshe is concerned for his children. "I do not know how they will get along here. Whenever coexistence recovers slightly, it receives another blow that buries it even further," he says. When the State of Israel was created, 24 dunams of his father's land, near Givat Hamoreh, were expropriated. The state wanted to compensate the father, but he refused. "We refused to take pennies for a deed like that," said the son, who was not yet born at the time. Darawshe knows very little about his father's and uncles' experiences during the Nakba - catastrophe - the Palestinian term for the creation of the State of Israel. "We did not talk about it at home. Father did not want to. It's sort of like parents who did not want to discuss the Holocaust around their children," Darawshe says. Why does he think things are even worse now? Perhaps because once there was hope that the situation would improve, because he was younger, or because he was not exposed to multiple television channels - and perhaps because every parent is more concerned for the future of his children than for himself. "The last six years have been extremely difficult, and predictions are dire," he says. "Now, I anticipate the moment when they decide to thwart sperm [a reference to cutting edge contraception] from entering the wombs of Arab women." Connection to the land Darawshe's anxiety regarding his children stems partially from doubts concerning their connection to the land. As a boy, he spent all his summer vacations in the fields. He would go out at 5 A.M. and return at 8 P.M. While friends were going to the beach, he plowed and dug in the earth of the Jezreel Valley. Even now, after an exhausting day in the emergency room, he likes to work in the fields or the garden of his home. He has no gardener. He and his brothers harvest olives together, with limited help from hired hands. "But my son's connection to the land is a bit flimsy," he says. "That worries me, because connection to the land will determine our power to persevere here." He never had any doubts that this was his home and the home to which he would always return - even while studying in Bulgaria, traveling to conferences in the United States, Canada and Europe, and working in Ashkelon. "Mona and I would come here from Ashkelon to visit Iksal with two small children. The minute the bus entered Wadi Ara toward the [Jezreel] Valley, we felt we had come home. There is nothing like the valley. I have the most fun here," he says. Neckties and socialism Darawshe believes he expresses the beliefs of centrist Arabs, who regardless of despair and oppression are encouraged by every shred of hope. He has a few circles of friends. He has buddies from what he calls "military service" or the "Bulgarian mafia," Israelis who studied medicine with him and with whom he has maintained contact for 30 years. He plays in a junior soccer league every Tuesday and Friday with other native sons of the village, most of whom are builders, floor layers and plasterers. There are fishermen in Acre with whom he goes boating all night long - but he usually has to forgo this pursuit because he cannot work the following morning, and his wife does not enjoy cleaning fish. And there is the "elite," as he calls his educated friends. "I tried to blend all these circles together but I did not succeed," he says. Darawshe defines himself as a socialist. He has no private practice. "I am not willing to be connected to patients by money," he says. But he is quick to add that he understands colleagues who maintain private practices, because physician salaries in the public sector are typically meager. "I receive a handsome salary, my wife earns money, and that is enough for me," he says. He also lectures medical and nursing students, and his love of teaching produced the certificate of excellence in education that hangs on the wall of his tiny office, beside certificates of professional achievements in Israel and abroad. His only apparent material hedonism is neckties. He has hundreds. He always wears a tie - even when he goes out to the orchard. "In the hospital, they tell a joke, 'How does Dr. Darawshe take his clothes off? He takes off his tie,'" he says. Quality, not quantity One approaches Aziz Darawshe's utopia by slowly climbing the ladder, step by step. "Before you tell me about Jews who live in Arab settlements and Arabs who live in Jewish settlements, let's see them establish a new Arab settlement. They have not established a new settlement in 60 years. There is no master building plan - nothing. Gurnicht!" he emphasizes, in Yiddish. After the October 2000 riots, the government decided to allocate NIS 4 billion to the Arab sector, Darawshe recalls. "Did they do it? Why talk about utopia? First, let them allocate part of that money to employment, education, to closing gaps. They shouldn't just throw money at us to shut up the Arab sector. I want a comprehensive plan, with quality control and supervision. Not just more money for additional welfare benefits and salaries." He is not interested in the appointment of an Arab minister, nor is he interested in increasing the numbers of Arab MKs. He is not interested in the growth of the Arab population. "I want quality. I want us to be an educated minority that works and contributes. I don't need millions of unemployed illiterates who sit at home and beat their wives. I want a stable, strong minority - not a minority dependent on the charity of national insurance," Darawshe says. Darawshe accepts his role as a part of a minority. He would prefer a State of Israel for all its citizens rather than a state only for Jewish citizens. He even accepts a national anthem with which he cannot identify and an Independence Day he cannot celebrate, because memories of the Nakba make it a day to stay home and ponder. What he is unwilling to accept - what disrupts his serene demeanor - is the fact that "a Jew from Ethiopia or Siberia has more rights before he boards the plane to Israel than a family that has lived here for generations." He is also annoyed when he hears people say, "What can you do? We don't live in Switzerland." "You were in Europe. You were persecuted. Did you want them for neighbors? You tried those neighborly relations for 2,000 years. It ended with the Holocaust. The Jews who lived in Arab countries were treated well, much better than how you treat us here," says Darawshe, who participated in the first Jewish-Arab mission to visit Auschwitz three years ago. "Why do I always have to pay the price of the Holocaust?," he asks. "Did we cause it? We are sensitive to your tragedy. Why are you not sensitive to our tragedy? We pay and will continue to pay for the tragedy that befell you." 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