Palestinian Doctor Crosses Borders

Dr. Rula Awwad listened to the heartbeat of a Palestinian baby, checked his vital signs and read his chart as she prepared to tell his mother that her one-month old son had Downs Syndrome.
 
While these activities are normal for any doctor, Awwad’s journey to medicine and the Wolfson Medical Center in Holon near Tel Aviv was a long road, not just in the three-hour commute she made that morning, but as a working Arab woman in a high-profile career.
 
Awwad is an anomaly in Arab culture. She is 33, single and a Christian living in a predominantly Moslem town.
 
Every morning she gets up at 5:30 a.m. and leaves her home in Beit Sahour, a Bethlehem suburb, taking a taxi to the checkpoint into Jerusalem. There she waits with thousands of Palestinians who have permits to work in Israel, most of them construction workers. The wait to get through security can be up to an hour most days. Then she takes an Arab bus to the Old City, walks to a Jewish bus stop, gets a ride to the Tel Aviv Central Bus Station and finally grabs a taxi to Holon.
 
With a half-smile smirk and deep brown eyes, Rula lives with her feet on both sides of the border. She identifies herself first as a Palestinian. But she doesn’t deny the incalculable advantages of working as a doctor in Israel. “It’s worth it because I can be in contact with a team and I can stay up to date on medicine,” she said.
 
And while she still hesitates to express any optimism toward Israel, her three years at Wolfson highlight the possibility of Israelis and Palestinians working together seamlessly. “I lived through the intifada [Palestinian uprising]. I have bad scenes in my mind of shootings and demonstrations,” Awwad told Israel Today. “In my mind, Israelis were always the soldiers. To come and work in Israel was a very big issue to me. I was worried how they would treat me and how I would deal with the Israeli people.”
 
But her worries were quickly allayed by her team of doctors and staff at the hospital. ‘We’re trying to cross borders,” said Dr. Alona Raucher Sternfeld. “We talk about people, not politics. As women we talk about how to accommodate a career.”
 
Sternfeld, who like Awwad is a pediatric cardiologist, recognizes the immense challenges facing her Palestinian counterpart. “It’s amazing for an Arab woman who grew up in a conservative community to reach out like this,” she said. “Rula had to do things that for us were obvious. It was obvious to my parents I’d go to university; it was obvious to my community that I’d go to work; it was obvious to my husband that the household would be 50/50.”
 
Arab society is very different. Awwad fought on many fronts: as a Christian minority in a Moslem town, as a woman seeking higher education and as a Palestinian crossing the border every day to go to work.
 
In order for her to assimilate fully she had to become fluent in Hebrew, a language she didn’t know despite growing up five miles from Jerusalem. In just one month of study and work, she learned the language well enough to write medical charts and communicate with the nurses.
 
Her ambition stems from hard-working and successful parents who encouraged all of their five children in their educational and career pursuits. Awwad graduated high school as the top student in all of Judea and Samaria, earning her offers to universities in Germany, Greece and Jordan. She chose to study medicine at the University of Jordan.
 
From there she moved back to Beit Sahour to live with her family and worked at Mukassed, an Arab hospital in East Jerusalem. After a few years, the Israeli organization Save a Child’s Heart (SACH) and the European Union sponsored Awwad for a fellowship at the Wolfson Medical Center. SACH, which has enabled 1,584 children from 27 nations to receive life-saving heart surgeries since 1996, also brings in doctors from developing countries for training so they can perform these operations in their own land.
 
In one instance, Awwad identified the problem of a Palestinian child who visited the clinic in Bethlehem and, through her contacts, scheduled him at Wolfson for open heart surgery.
 
“This is how we see the fruit of the project,” said SACH executive director Simon Fisher. “She takes the knowledge and expertise with her to save the lives of children. Not only was a child’s life saved, but there was cooperation between Israelis and Palestinians.”