I Will Keep Them From Harm and Injustice

An Israeli F-16 rumbled overhead, launching several missiles at a police station two blocks away from the home of Dr. Eyad El Sarraj in Gaza City. Terrible explosions shook the neighborhood, and shrapnel the size of a human fist punched ugly holes through his front door. Sarraj unplugged his refrigerator: "Every noise now sounds like an F-16," he said.

Sarraj is a Palestinian psychiatrist and an expert on post-traumatic stress disorder who frequently speaks at international conferences. He has both a personal and professional understanding of life under military occupation and feels that violence creates victims, and victimization creates depression, anxiety, and fear, which in turn creates more violence.

Dr. Ruchama Marton, founder and president of Physicians for Human Rights-Israel (PHR-Israel), is a psychiatrist and life-long Jewish-Israeli feminist and human rights activist. After hearing about the "breaking of bones" in the first Intifada in 1988, she arranged, with great difficulty, to visit the Shifah Hospital in Gaza City. The hospital was overflowing with young men and some children with broken arms and legs. "The first visit was such a shock – the cruelty – to see the huge number of wounded people, the underdeveloped hospital, the medical equipment, the dirt," recalls Marton. "I was really ashamed because everything being done there was being done in my name."

It was during that 1988 visit that Marton and Sarraj met and (with a few colleagues) decided to create Israeli-Palestinian Physicians for Human Rights – now PHR-Israel. Two years later, Sarraj founded the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme (GCMHP), and asked Marton to be a member of its board of directors. Today, both PHR-Israel and GCMHP are dedicated to the promotion of health and human rights in Israel and the occupied territories.

"Traitors" to Hatred

In the last 14 years, PHR-Israel has taken monthly – and, more recently, weekly – mobile clinics into the West Bank, has set up a permanent, free clinic for migrant workers, and has repeatedly challenged the Israeli government over human rights violations. The organization's biggest legal victory was in September 1999, when the Supreme Court of Israel declared torture illegal. In December of that year, Marton was awarded Israel's Emil Grunzweig Award for Human Rights. More recently, PHR-Israel has focused on negotiating the free passage of medical personnel, equipment, and patients to and from hospitals in the occupied territories.

When Sarraj opened the GCMHP, few patients would walk through his doors. To the Palestinians, mental illness was akin to demonic possession and witchcraft. Today, the GCMHP has a staff of more than 220 people and boasts a women's empowerment program, a video center, a home-counseling unit, and a crisis-intervention team. It also offers a two-year postgraduate diploma in community mental health and human rights.

In addition to negotiating better access to medical care, PHR-Israel and GCMHP document atrocities on both sides of the conflict, arguing that medical treatment should always supercede political considerations of any kind. PHR-Israel meticulously records Israeli military violations of Geneva Conventions. Marton and Sarraj are also frequently in the public eye: on television shows, in newspapers, and at human rights rallies. Their public denunciation of the violence and injustice carried out by both Israelis and Palestinians has been dangerous for them.

Marton is openly critical of Israeli leaders, who she feels propagate a collective mentality of fear and insecurity in order to justify any means of force against the Palestinian people. "It's as if there is no history, as if there is no past, as if only the present time is there, full of anxieties, hatred and revenge – giving our prime minister an incredible hold on society. When there is no past (or history) and no future (or vision), people are terrified and therefore are easily manipulated by their leader." Going public with her psychological insights has resulted in Marton being branded a traitor to her people. She is refused service in stores and is considered a public enemy by many Israelis. In early 2002, she received several death threats at her quiet suburban home in Tel Aviv.

In a similar vein, Sarraj (who is also the Secretary General of the Palestinian Independent Commission for Citizen's Rights) does not agree with some of the positions taken by the Palestinian leadership. In 1996, he criticized Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Authority for human rights violations. His words landed him in a Palestinian prison for more than a month, where he was interrogated and tortured. Colleagues and friends from around the world organized a massive letter campaign, which eventually pressured the Palestinian Authority to release him. Although Sarraj is now more circumspect in criticizing Yasser Arafat personally, he has not let the fear of prison silence him.

At Home in a Troubled Land

Having obtained her medical degree at the University of Jerusalem at a time when the medical school had a maximum female enrollment of 10%, Marton is a self-defined "feminist, human rights activist, and peace activist." She has fought for access to healthcare for Palestinians in the occupied territories and for social rights and healthcare insurance for Palestinian-Israelis living within the borders of Israel. She also runs a private practice and is a lecturer at Tel Aviv University Medical School Institute for Psychotherapy. Marton was chosen in 1998 for the Peace Fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as well as the Jeanne and Joseph Sullivan Fellowship for Middle East Activism. In May 2002, the Global Health Council awarded her the Jonathan Mann Award for Global Health and Human Rights, commending her for offering "the greatest hope for a humane resolution of the current Middle East conflict."

Sarraj does his best thinking during early morning walks on the beach. The bulk of his time is spent reading and writing about the issues of trauma and violence. Born in Israel "before it was Israel," he moved to Gaza City in 1948, when his family was forced to leave their home. Although he wanted to be a farmer, he wanted even more to please his mother, so he decided to go to medical school at Alexandria University in Egypt. Finding his medical courses "boring," he looked to other fields for satisfaction. Upon the recommendation of a professor, he completed an elective in psychiatry and discovered a passion for human rights because he was appalled by the degrading way in which mental patients were treated. He went on to study psychiatry at London University's Institute of Psychiatry in the UK, but reestablished himself permanently in Gaza after the start of the first Intifada.

Violence Leads to Trauma Leads to Violence

According to both doctors, physical wounds are easier to identify and heal than psychological ones: mental scars, when left untreated, are the ones that ensure the conflict continues forever. The psychiatrists stress that each act of violence creates resentment, anger, and, ultimately, retaliation. In psychology, it's called the cycle of violence. In the Israeli- Palestinian conflict, it manifests as military incursions, torture, and suicide bombings.

A father of two children, Sarraj has witnessed firsthand the effects the occupation has had on Palestinian families, particularly on children. In an April 2002 interview, he said, "You have a child, a young boy, who would be throwing stones and feeling like a hero in the morning: chased by the Israeli soldiers, running and jumping from one place to the other. And at night he would be bed-wetting, couldn't sleep, feeling restless, anxious, dreams full of blood and dead bodies, unable to concentrate at school." Sarraj believes that the first Intifada is directly related to the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict. "The militants of today, including suicide bombers, or martyrs, are the children of the first Intifada. Each and every one of them was a witness or a victim of a serious traumatic event."

Marton has witnessed similar psychological effects on Israelis. "People in Israel are not coming with a defined complaint about what we call 'the situation.' Things are coming up while talking about other things, personal things. We are talking, and then I hear: 'I'm so afraid,' 'I don't sleep well,' 'I don't let my children go out.'"

Therapists as Diplomats

One of the key elements that make Marton and Sarraj effective in their clinical therapy and political activism is their ability to feel the pain and confusion of the other side. In October 1997, Marton became the first Israeli to win the Gaza Human Rights Award for her activism. She regularly risks Israeli imprisonment for entering restricted areas of the West Bank with PHR-Israel's mobile clinics. She also met with Yasser Arafat during his confinement in Ramallah to try to broker a resolution to the standoff.

Sarraj has been tireless in calling for an immediate end to suicide bombings, even going so far as to suggest that the Palestinians unilaterally lay down their weapons. He invites the militant leaders in the Gaza Strip to dinner, trying to convince them to give negotiations another chance. "When you have a double message, it causes schizophrenia on the other side," says Sarraj. "If you tell the Israelis, 'We want to make peace, but we also want to kill you,' they become schizophrenic."

Inner Peace in the Midst of Conflict

Sarraj and Marton are colleagues and friends, with over 14 years of collaboration and shared hardship. They are strikingly similar. Both are strong-willed and uncompromising in their beliefs, yet their political activism hasn't erased the unmistakable aura that comes with being a doctor. Their voices rumble with textured emotion. People seeking guidance gravitate towards them, and they greet you with that therapist face: listening, their eyes focused with warm intensity.

In private, they both admit they are exhausted. Marton fears that Israeli "hearts will turn into stones." Sarraj worries about an Israeli invasion into the Gaza Strip that could destroy 12 years of labor. The challenge they face politically is the same as that encountered by any therapist: in order to succeed, the patient must want to change.

Now in his late 50s, Sarraj continues his work out of a sense of morality. "I have decided after being interrogated and tortured that I would rather die once in dignity than live every day in fear," he says. "And my dignity comes from my respect for myself and what I believe in, which is the freedom of people and the right to express themselves."

Marton is considered by many to be a key figure in the peace movement in Israel. She has chosen a path in life that by its nature has placed her in the position of an outsider among her own people. When asked why, she says: "I guess I cannot bear the idea of not seeing, not hearing, not smelling, and, therefore, doing nothing. I don't believe that I could tolerate myself, if I were a good Israeli, who didn't do anything."

Intifada is an Arabic word for shaking or shivering because of fear or illness. The term was first used in reference to the Palestinian uprising against the Israeli occupation of 1988 to 1992, now known as the "first Intifada." After the breakdown of Middle East peace negotiations in September 2000, a second Intifada – dubbed the Al Aqsa Intifada – broke out and continues today.

Discuss This Article

Have something you'd like to say? Tell us what you think! Read and post comments for this article.

Find a Job

Choose your career:

MedHunters is the world's biggest healthcare job board. Our job directory has 16,726 jobs with 2,440 hospitals and other direct employers.

We want you to find your next job on MedHunters. Need Help? Call us at 1-888-884-8242, email us at info@medhunters.com or sign up now.