Published: 4 December 2023
Last updated: 6 September 2024
Palestinian doctor, author and bereaved father IZZELDIN ABUELAISH is adamant that Hamas does not represent his people and that both sides need fresh leadership.
In 2011, I interviewed Izzeldin Abuelaish at the Sydney Writers Festival about his global bestseller, I Shall Not Hate. The memoir is a compelling, heartbreaking call for peace following the tragic death of his three daughters, aged between 13 and 21, killed by Israeli shelling of his home in Gaza in 2009.
Ever since, Abuelaish has been an advocate for dialogue and understanding between Palestinians and Israelis. His book was referenced in a speech by then US president Barack Obama during Abuelaish’s Australian book tour, giving him a sense of hope that turned out to be short-lived. And yet he continues to be a rational voice for a different kind of dialogue.
Today, Abuelaish is Professor of Public and Global Health at the University of Toronto where he lectures on women’s health in times of conflict. Five of his children live with him in Canada, but he returns to Gaza twice a year, where he has an extended family of more than 90, including brothers who are engineers, pharmacists and teach at the university, as well as sisters, nieces and nephews, that he supports from afar.
“All up, I have more than a thousand relatives,” he tells me via Facetime. Most live in the Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza, where he helped his brothers build a multi-storey family compound.
Abuelaish was in Seattle when he learned of the attacks of October 7, speaking about Daughters for Life, the charitable foundation he set up in memory of his three girls. The foundation gives scholarships to girls to pursue tertiary education internationally, no matter their nationality or religion, from across the Middle East, from Israel to Jordan, Morocco and Syria.
“In July 2023 we gave a scholarship in Israel and at the ceremony, I met the recipient’s mother and realised that I had actually delivered her daughter at the Soroka hospital in Beersheva,” says Abuelaish, who was the first Palestinian doctor to be employed at an Israeli hospital.
