Steve Lipman - Staff
Writer
Jerusalem
On a side street in the eastern part of
this divided city, a small conference room on the second floor
of an office building was supposed to serve as a symbol of a
unique Israeli-Palestinian initiative founded by the World
Health Organization last year.
Two Jewish and two Arab
physicians, who comprise the editorial board of bridges, a
glossy bimonthly public health magazine distributed to members
of both communities, would meet around a small table each
Wednesday afternoon reviewing articles and planning
forthcoming issues.
The Israeli and Palestinian
colleagues still share responsibilities equally and cordially
on the publication, but the reality of the Middle East
intrudes.
Often there are empty seats at the table —
because of Israeli army roadblocks, a frequent occurrence
during the cycles of intifada violence, the Palestinian
physicians coming from the West Bank or Gaza can’t get to
Jerusalem.
On one recent Wednesday afternoon, Dr. Hani
Abdeen, dean of the Al-Quds Medical School, showed up late,
and Dr. Fahti Abumoghli, WHO’s national health officer for the
West Bank and Gaza, never arrived, detained at a border
checkpoint.
“We have many barriers,” Abdeen
says.
But echoing the opinions of Jews and non-Jews
associated with bridges, which carries articles in English,
Hebrew and Arabic, Abdeen says despite the logistic problems,
the glossy magazine continues to serve as an example of
coexistence and cooperation.
He says Jewish-Arab
friendships have grown out of the physicians’ work together,
and bridges brings information about vital health issues to
the attention of doctors and political leaders on both sides
of the Green Line.
“Diseases have no borders,” says
Maria Restrepo, project officer for the West Bank and Gaza for
WHO, the public health arm of the United Nations.
The
magazine, believed to be the first such public health journal
jointly produced by representatives of two peoples in
conflict, is among a slowly growing number of joint
Israeli-Palestinian activities that have survived the intifada
or begun in recent years, says Shuli Dichter, co-director of
Sikkuy, the Jerusalem-based Association for the Advancement of
Civic Equality. They include a cooperative health seminar
recently at the United Nations.
“It’s more than just
isolated projects,” he says.
While bridges is a WHO
creation, most of the projects are home grown, supported by
Israelis and Palestinians, Dichter says.
“It’s not
imposed from the outside,” he says. “There are people on both
sides who are interested in maintaining contact.”
While
small-scale efforts like bridges or the All for Peace radio
station (see box) are unlikely to change the tenor of the
wider society, they can establish “benchmarks for the
politicians to follow,” Dichter says. His organization
concentrates on advocacy for Israeli Arabs, but monitors
programs across the Green Line.
“People learn and
relate to examples, to models,” he says. “Whoever wants to be
inspired is inspired.”
Many cooperative projects were
established in the years immediately after the signing of the
Oslo Accords in 1993, but “not many of survived after the
[start of] the intifada” in 2000, Dichter says, adding that
“tens of projects, maybe a hundred,” in such areas as
education, agriculture and business are conducted between
Israelis and Palestinians, often with little
publicity.
“It’s the best-kept secret here,” he says.
“There are more initiatives on the ground here than funding
for them.”
Most of the joint projects are based, on the
Israeli side, at universities or organizations like the Van
Leer Jerusalem Institute or the Peres Center for
Peace.
“One of the main lessons learned from the
failure of the Oslo peace process is that the
‘people-to-people’ public peace process received much too
little attention and far too little financial support,”
Gershon Baskin and Zakaria al-Qaq, leaders of the
Israel/Palestine Center for Research and Information, a
nongovernmental organization engaged in dialogue work, wrote
in a 2003 letter to President Bush. “The need and the demand
for continuing and expanding these activities are very
real.”
Peace Through Health
The most recent
example of medicine’s role as a conduit across the region’s
warring political atmosphere took place last week at the
United Nations.
“Peace Through Health — Middle East
Partnership in Emergency Medical Care,” a 3-year-old program
that has quietly trained nearly 300 Israelis, Palestinians and
Americans — physicians, nurses and social workers — conducted
a panel discussion, its first public activity.
“We do
not pretend to make the peace between Israelis and
Palestinians,” says Dr. Jacob Assaf, director of emergency
medicine at Hadassah Medical Center and a leader of the
cooperative program. “But what we think is that medicine … is
one of the best bridges that can be used to bridge over gaps …
in this conflict.”
Dr. Tawfiq Nasser, chief executive
officer of Augusta Victoria Hospital in Jerusalem, says “there
is a culture of peace that is building.” The program’s goal is
“to create stories of success for people on both
sides.”
“It’s very nice to see … because we’ve always
been stigmatized by the culture of violence,” he says,
referring to the Palestinians.
Hadassah and Augusta
Victoria have worked together on the venture in partnership
with the prestigious Brigham and Women’s Hospital in
Boston.
At the UN forum, sponsored by Hadassah and the
U.S. mission to the world body, participants described the
joint efforts in such areas as curriculum development, budget
procedures and emergency medicine training.
The
organizers said they are prepared to establish a full-fledged
Israeli-Palestinian institute, which will require at least $10
million in funding.
Like bridges, the Peace Through
Health program hopes to influence relations in the wider
Middle East, the organizers said.
‘Bridging’ The
Conflict
Israeli and Palestinian physicians supported
the creation of bridges, the idea for which was broached by
WHO a few months before Yasir Arafat died last year, Restrepo
says.
“It wasn’t hard to find people to be part of the
editorial board,” she recalls. “Everyone felt the need for
it.”
In addition to its editorial board, bridges
(www.bridgesmagazine.org) is guided as well by a 22-member
advisory board — half Israeli, half Palestinian. It has no
connection to either the Palestinian Authority or the Israeli
government.
“In recent years, war has been framed as a
public health problem,” Dr. Ambrogio Manenti, head of WHO’s
West Bank and Gaza office, wrote in the first issue of bridges
in January. “Indeed, war (including long-term ‘low-grade’
conflict) affects human health both directly through the
violence of bombs and bullets, and indirectly by disrupting
economic and social systems that address health
needs.
“Field experience shows that health-related
goals may be shared among conflicting parties, providing the
necessary basis for cooperation,” Manenti wrote. “This may
create an opportunity to build a framework for negotiation to
counteract the stereotypic dehumanization of the other, and
even to demonstrate the possibility of ending violence and
oppression.”
It is too early to determine what effect a
small, specialized, low-circulation publication like bridges
can have on wider Israeli-Palestinian relations, says Judy
Siegel-Itzkovich, medical writer for The Jerusalem Post. She
covered the magazine’s founding.
“I was a little
worried that some of the Palestinian voices [in the first
issue] were a little extreme,” Siegel-Itzkovich says, adding
that she has not closely read subsequent issues. “It may make
an impression” on people who had little contact with the other
side of the political divide. “It depends how open-minded the
people are.”
Articles in bridges, usually focusing on
health topics, frequently reflect the founders’ optimistic
political orientation.
“In a war-torn region such as
the Middle East, in which we keep producing more wounds to
heal every day, the importance of medical staff cooperation
can no be overrated,” Noa Vardi, a medical student at the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem, wrote in “Learning to Listen
Through Deafness,” an article in the current issue.
“As
future doctors, we have to understand that a patient is a
patient wherever he or she is, and above all to join our
efforts and resources to promote research of regional medical
problems and cooperative ways to treat these problems. We do
this in the hope that our cooperation will someday lead to a
shared and peaceful life.”
In a bridges article earlier
this year, an official from the Jordanian Ministry of Health
wrote: “I think we as professionals can do more than
politicians can. I hope the politicians can learn from
us.”
The article described a five-day gathering of 35
Palestinian, Jordanian and Israeli health-care
professionals.
Recent articles in the publication
include such topics as mi cronutrient deficiencies in the
region, “Palestinian Women: Reproductive Health and Human
Rights,” “Women’s Health in Israel: Progress and Gaps,” “Armed
Conflict and Food Security” and “Poverty and Social Services
in the Palestinian Society.”
Every issue features two
day-in-the-life profiles, a story about a Jewish doctor or
nurse written by a Palestinian journalist, and vice
versa.
Writers, cognizant of the magazine’s guiding
philosophy, have editorial freedom to express their
communities’ perspectives, and often do so — some
Palestinians, predictably, writing about the effects of the
Israeli “occupation” on Palestinian society, Abdeen
says.
“It’s an open forum,” he says. “Everyone can say
exactly what he feels from his point of view.”
Readers
— mostly health-care professionals, journalists, politicians,
teachers and officials in nongovernmental organizations —
express mixed opinions about the magazine, Abdeen says. Some
applaud the effort. Some criticize its editorial openness;
it’s too pro-Israeli or too pro-Palestinian. Some ask why
writers from the respective communities “air our dirty laundry
in public.”
“I always tell our friends that if we are
criticized by both sides, we are doing well,” says Dr. Itzhak
Levav, a bridges editorial board member and WHO
consultant.
Levav and Abdeen, sitting at the table in
the WHO suite a block from the unmarked border with West
Jerusalem, banter with the easy familiarity of old friends,
two men of the same middle-aged generation and professional
background.
Both sides have learned from each other,
they say.
Levav says that through his work with
bridges, “I became more aware of Palestinian public health
issues. I didn’t know the extent of some of the health
problems faced by the Palestinian population.”
The
publication “has enlightened quite a lot of the Palestinians,”
Abdeen says. Many had thought “there is no poverty in
Israel.”
WHO, which has assisted Palestinian refugees
for five decades and worked with the Palestinian Authority’s
Ministry of Health since 1993, now concentrating on emergency
assistance, has reached out in other ways to increase contact
among health-care professionals in the region. It recently
sponsored two videoconferences that linked physicians in
Israel, the territories, Jordan and other
countries.
“This is not just another telemedicine,” Dr.
Yehuda Roth, Israeli deputy director of the Canada
International Scientific Exchange Program, a co-sponsor of the
videoconferences, told The Jerusalem Post. “This is an
advanced and sophisticated tool, with a great vision and huge
potential power. We hope it will serve as a salient adjuvant,
as a peace-building component and as a technological support
for our anxious societies.”
Technology may serve
bridges, too. The magazine is considering holding its
Wednesday afternoon editorial board meetings by
videoconference when border closings prevent the Palestinian
physicians from attending. n |
