In Nazareth at the tender age of 19 in the early 1990s, I was confronted with such a profound challenge to what I understood of the world that it made me consider doning the veil of Islam. Ultimately, I decided that switching one patriarchal religion for another wouldn’t answer the deepest questions about life that had presented themselves to me in the appalling prejudices my Arab colleagues at the Edinburgh Mission Hospital faced.
A mixture of desire for adventure and serendipity had taken me to Israel. When I applied to Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children to train as a children’s nurse, a nursing elective abroad was part of the programme. By the time I had enrolled, the elective had been scrapped; I was the only one from my set who insisted that I be allowed to take up the opportunity that had been promised and spend a month in a foreign hospital. I initially planned to go to Botswana to explore the cross-overs between traditional and western medicine but for reasons I don’t remember, it didn’t work out and as I looked for an alternative, a church friend suggested Nazareth.
I grew up in an evangelical home where Zionism was assumed. It wasn’t an overt political position; it was presented as a biblical imperative. The bibIe said Israel belonged to the Jewish people so it must do, was the oversimplified logic. I never grasped the evangelical reasoning that singled Jews out as a chosen people, preached that only Christians who made a special kind of prayer to Jesus were saved and tarred Jews with responsibility for the death of the saviour, which was considered a grievous blot against them, even though it established the whole salvific arc of Christianity. This was a loose thread in the fabric of evangelicalism for me.
On the wards at Great Ormond Street Hospital where I met for the first time people from other religions and children dying, the entire garment of my faith began to unravel. Where in its privileged story of salvation was the Hindu child dying from an incurable condition and his mother who loved him with her heart and soul? I asked ‘what about children who are dying?’ at every church event. I was at this stage in what became a long drama of deconstruction when the suggestion to go to Nazareth arose.
I was given a grant and furnished with the appropriate contacts at the hospital’s school for nurses. My flight was time-tabled to arrive in the early afternoon and my plan was to take a bus from Tel Aviv to Nazareth. However, long delays meant we touched down in the middle of the night. From the airport I telephone the hospital to ask what I should do. They were horrified that I was considering taking a bus at that time. ‘It’s way too dangerous’ they insisted. Instead they gave me the name of a hostel and told me to travel on in the morning. It’s hard to describe what that journey felt like. Our family holidays had always been a six hour car journey to a caravan on the Welsh coast; I’d made it across the Channel a couple of times for a day trip to Calais and I’d spent a week in Paris with a friend and a week with her relatives in Washington DC.
The taxi driver took me through the night warm streets lined with palm trees to the guest house where he woke up the landlady with a sharp rap at the door. I was ushered into a dark dorm room. I walked straight into the bedpost of a bunk jarring its occupant awake. ‘Welcome to Israel,’ she whispered. In our brief exchanged introductions I discovered that she was the same age as me and had just arrived from America to join the Israeli army. I was utterly perplexed. I couldn’t image joining the army let alone travelling half way across the world to do so. At the bus station in the morning the young female army recruits shocked me even more as they strolled about with huge weapons slung across their shoulders the way my friends and I carried our school bags stuffed with books and notes on care for the sick. We were confronting death on the wards where we were learning everything we could about how to prevent it; they were parading the streets with a device that could end a life in a blink. My mind was in such a whirr as I mistakenly queued at the lottery office to buy a bus ticket. I had so few clues to navigate my new surroundings; the letters of the Hebrew language were incomprehensible to me and my peer group had values and jobs that were anathema.
Disembarking in the dusty streets of Nazareth and finding my way to the hospital brought a new swathe of impressions. Here the antiseptic smell of the wards was familiar and the uniforms of my peer group made sense. English was spoken by both doctors and nurses. I felt more at home but as friendships blossomed with my fellow student nurses, I began to see how utterly different their lives were from mine. To start with, the Israeli state only allowed Arab nurses to train as far as the Enrolled level of nursing, a two year course, by comparison to the three year Registered level course I was on. This meant that native nurses in Arab hospitals were prevented from developing their expertise beyond the basics. In addition to this they faced prejudice from their own community because nursing with its contact with the male form and body fluids was taboo for a lot of traditional Muslim women; this was made a whole lot worse because the hospital in which they were employed espoused ‘Christian’ values and didn’t allow the young nurses to cover their hair. I found this last stricture particularly incomprehensible. Despite my cultural naivety, I could see no reason why the nurses shouldn’t be allowed to preserve their dignity in a religiously appropriate manner especially given the courage it already took them to embark upon a nursing career and the immense restrictions the state placed upon them.
It was in this state of confusion that I began to toy with the idea of conversion to the religion of the oppressed – might it be the answer to my spiritual quandaries? Even before I discovered feminist theology, I was disillusioned with the ideological framework that cast women as the underdog and sin-bringer within evangelicalism. In the end I reasoned that I’d be unlikely to find in a headscarf the inclusivity and religious tolerance I was seeking, so I turned away from the notion of conversion. As the years have past and my spiritual maturity grown, it’s been the Islamic mystical writings like The Conference of the Birds that have found their way to my heart.
During my stint at the hospital, a badly injured Israeli soldier was rushed to the Edinburgh Mission where he received life saving treatment. In the staff room I heard this event discussed over and over again, everyone hoping that this would force the State to acknowledge the presence of the hospital because up until then Arab medical facilities were not marked on the map. In these conversations I began to understand the extent of the oppression the Arabs lived under. I heard of coffee shops they couldn’t enter, worry about relatives in the West Bank, and peace collaborations between Jews, Muslims and Christians.
At the end of the elective, I had a few days to travel. I visited the beautiful Sea of Galilee, the Baha’i Temple where I discovered a religion that most represented what I was searching for, but I was still too indoctrinated in the evangelical way to fully appreciate, and Jerusalem. I have two abiding memories from my encounter with this ancient city. The first is my response to the tour guide’s invitation to visit the holocaust museum. I felt such revulsion. Not for the people who had suffered and died at the hands of the Nazis for whom I had great concern and compassion. No, it was a complex, twisted feeling of disgust at the invitation to consider the unprecedented suffering of the Jews in a place where the Jewish State was meting out such heinous cruelty on the Palestinian native people. The second is seeing an elderly Ethiopian Priest seated atop a roof. This was my first introduction to the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewehado Church and marked the beginning of an important relationship with Ethiopia.
Back in the UK, my spiritual dilemma persisted as I completed my training as a nurse and took a job on a paediatric oncology unit in Cardiff. The confusion that my visit to Israel set in motion has rumbled beneath the surface these past thirty years. I’ve watched with horror at the increasingly punitive measures taken against the Palestinians. I have Jewish friends – it hasn’t felt like an either/or but the inner conflict I have felt about what I witnessed in the State of Israel and the plight of its Arab inhabitants has felt a very personal confusion. Until recently. The widespread discussions about how Zionist murderers use the language of the holocaust and anti-semitism to cloak their crimes has awoken the realisation that it wasn’t just a private dilemma about how to square Zionism with the history of the Jews and the genocide they were put to by the Nazis, it has been a deliberate subterfuge designed to disguise the actual thrust of Zionist intent to annihilate all native peoples in their own version of the holocaust in which they play the part of oppressor. I am chilled to the core at how cleverly Israel has inserted its tentacles into the machinery of the governments around the world. So much so that in the UK, a human rights lawyer turned prime minister says publicly of the starvation of Gaza that Israel has a right to defend itself. Does he sleep at night?! Can the rest of us pretend to be blind to the humanitarian catastrophe that Israel is embarked upon with the sponsorship of worldwide democracy?
I cry every day at the pictures of what is being done to the peoples of Gaza. I look at my children over breakfast and imagine the awful horror of what a Palestinian mother faces as she attempts to feed her offspring and shelter them safely. I can not image her suffering. The boy climbing amongst the rubble of his grandparents house calling for his grandpa breaks my heart. What does the future hold for him even if he survives?
Seven of the intervening thirty years since my trip to Israel was spent in Ethiopia where I researched healing in the Orthodox Church. There I met a man with whom I had a child. He knew too much about famine having been a young boy in the north of the country during the infamous famine that was splashed across our screens in the 1980s. His mother sold him as a slave to a farming family where she reasoned, at least he would have milk. She was right. He did survive but at a cost; something broke inside him as a consequence of the monumental suffering inflicted upon his young mind. The trauma that has past from one generation to the next has been a heavy price. I know from first hand experience that long after the war is over, long after the famine hungry are fed, the suffering continues even amongst those who were not even alive to experience the pangs of hunger or fear the rattle of gunfire.
I tremble for the generations of Palestinians to come who will have this deep wound in their lineage. It’s takes great fortitude, courage, resources and structural support to bring equanimity to the tortured mind, the harm of which spills from one generation to the next.
A subsequent experience in the family courts brought up an echo of the confusion I felt about the holocaust museum in Jerusalem. In a meeting with the Cafcass officer (a court appointed social worker) handling our case, I was explaining that I thought my former partner was behaving in the manner he was because of the trauma he had endured. I was asking for protection for me and our child and compassion and treatment for him. On an internationally recognised domestic abuse scale, I was deemed at high risk of being murdered. I could not make head nor tale of the social worker’s response,
‘Are you saying all Jews are abusers?’
Neither me nor my ex are Jewish. We had connection to neither the religion nor political entity related to Judaism. I was at an utter loss as to the meaning of this question until I noticed her name on the report that dropped through the door days later with her assessment that everything I said was lies. Cohen. She was the Jewish entity in this scenario and, for reasons I can not fathom, had taken deep offence at the idea that someone who had experienced famine and slavery during childhood might need psychological intervention to enable them to relate in safe and loving ways.
The impact she had on our family has caused untold damage to my daughter, to my ex partner, to me and my subsequent children. What is even more disturbing is her appointment to a prestigious institution known worldwide for its treatment of childhood psychological illness. That she was able to infer an antisemitic slur in the request for help to deal with the lifelong impact of childhood trauma that resulted from famine and slavery makes her entirely unsuitable to work with children at all, let alone those who are psychologically unwell. Now, in the horror of what’s unfolding in front of us, I have a little more insight into the insidious twisted rhetoric that has disguised humane responses to trauma as anti-semitism and the way political Zionism pervades every institution from government to court to police. It shapes business deals and frames those who hang posters and spray paint as terrorists for drawing attention to the real time killing and torture of human beings, men, women and children; the direct targeting of medics, aid workers and journalists; the desecration of ancient lands.
That complex twisted feeling of disgust that arose in my gut thirty years ago was a sense of something I didn’t have the resources to understand. It foreshadowed everything that is happening now. We must act quickly to disentangle the organs of justice and humanitarianism from its poisonous tentacles and return Palestine to the Palestinian people and do everything we can to facilitate their restoration. Restoration that includes the deep work of mourning and healing so that the generations to come are nourished in their capacity for compassion and provided the psychological resources to thrive.