Is Reconciliation Possible? Ending the Conflict and Carnage in Israel and Palestine. My Hope Endures!

  

Reaping the Rewards of Mutual Respect and Empathy in Pursuit of a Compelling Goal

 

We read story after story, decade after decade, and, recently, day after day, about the conflict and unending carnage within the Israeli and Palestinian communities.

 

It remains a herculean task to exit from this trauma; yet, difficult as it is will be to achieve, there is hope to be drawn from a short essay authored by Dr. Adam Lee Goldstein, the Director of Trauma Surgery at a Medical Center in Holon, Israel (The New York Times, 5/20/21.)  

 

Dr. Goldstein’s hospital is on the southern edge of the city, in a working-class neighborhood filled with Jews and Arabs, recent immigrants from Sub-Saharan Africa, and the countries of the former Soviet Union.

 

On Tuesday, May 18, the hospital faced a crisis.  Within an hour, more than 40 patients had arrived, four in critical condition, three needing emergency surgery.  For the next few hours, the entire hospital worked to evaluate and treat the wounded, no matter their religion or ethnicity.

 

The groups fighting each other in the streets of Holon were suddenly combined together inside the walls of the hospital’s emergency room.  They arrived wearing religious Jewish undergarments or Arab garments.  An Arab nurse treated a Jewish wounded person; a Jewish intern examined a young Arab man who had been injured by a rubber bullet to the chest.

 

Dr. Goldstein writes that his medical center lacks funds; it is not the biggest hospital in Israel, and it has not been painted for four years…“but to me it represents everything that is beautiful and possible at this place.  Before, during and after this current disaster, we are the hospital for one of the most diverse, elderly and neglected populations in Israel.  We train residents from all over the world, especially Africa and Latin America, and Palestinian residents from the West Bank in Gaza.  In two and a half days, we received more than 100 people wounded from missiles, falling schrapnel, or the violence on the streets.”

 

Dr. Goldstein eloquently concludes, “in the coming days, years and decades, I hope that what is happening now under the roof of this hospital—the selflessness, the lack of ego, the team work and diversity and mutual respect—can be a model for this entire country, for our entire region.  If neighbors and communities can’t work together, can’t get along in the way that I see every night in our hospital, I worry that we are guaranteeing that the suffering across this country will only get worse.  If we do come together as we do inside our own walls, it will be a beautiful thing.”

 

This story took me back to a “beautiful thing” I experienced in 1999, at a meeting in Bucharest, Romania.  Bucharest is the headquarters, bringing together nine different countries made up of different ethnicities, different religions, and different languages.  P&G employees were present that day from each of those countries.  Several that had recently been in a war with one another and remained divided by bitter religious differences. 

Toward the end of the evening of grand celebration, diverse music and dancing, one person after another from each of the different countries came up to me to tell me how inspired they were by being able to work together in P&G against a common purpose and set of goals.  Their faces glowed as they told me this.  And so did mine.

 

These men and women had come to know each other.  They had developed empathy for one another.  And they were experiencing the thrill—for that is what it was, of seeing what they could accomplish together despite differences which before and, yes, even in the future, would risk tearing them apart unless they reunited in the pursuit of a compelling goal and came to know and appreciate one another, not as some “labeled” generic category, but as individuals.