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DOCTORS WITHOUT POLITICS  
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Mary Turfah
January 6, 2025
The Baffler
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_ What can medical workers do to stop genocide? _

, Ricardo Tomás

 

A letter signed by ninety-nine American health care workers and
addressed to the “honorable” president and vice president of the
United States of America went viral in October 2024, a year into
Israel’s genocide in Gaza made possible by the Biden administration.
In its first paragraph, the doctors, nurses, and midwives who
altogether spent 254 weeks in Gaza perform the requisite
throat-clearing trifecta: they condemn “the horrors committed on
October 7”; they clarify that they have volunteered, in their
professional capacities, elsewhere (though only “Ukraine during the
brutal Russian invasion” is mentioned by name); and they reiterate
their “medical and surgical expertise.” The health care workers
blame ignorance—the human toll, they say, “is far higher than is
understood in the United States.” Everyone in Gaza (this includes,
they stress, the Israeli hostages) is sick, injured, or both.
Palestinian children have watery diarrhea. Pregnant women are having
spontaneous abortions. C-sections are performed without anesthesia.
Surgeons have so few resources they can’t appropriately wash their
hands, let alone establish a sterile field. New mothers whom “the
world abandoned” cannot breastfeed (“the world” here refers to
the West and its client states). Each of the letter’s signatories
has treated children who “suffered violence that _must_ have been
deliberately directed at them.” Rather than concluding that the
Israelis are doing what they’ve always done—targeting
Palestine’s present and future—the doctors enumerate mangled
bodies and the locations and patterns of the bullets in children’s
heads and chests. The American professionals say they cannot fathom
why the U.S. government continues to arm a country deliberately
killing children. The limits of listening to the body, as medics are
trained to do, is that the body can’t tell you that genocide suits
American foreign interests.

Another letter, signed by about one hundred Israeli doctors,
circulated months prior. Whereas the American medical professionals’
letter treads carefully, the Israeli physicians’ letter—urging
their government to show no mercy where Palestinian hospitals, i.e.,
“terrorists’ nests,” are concerned—exudes the ease that comes
with anticipating warm receipt. Drawing from a seemingly bottomless
well of unbridled racist supremacy, the Israeli doctors’ call for
the bombing of hospitals may be more honest about the fact that
doctors are political actors, medicine a tool for various ends. The
American health care workers stay in their lane. They put aside
Israel’s past and current motivations to write from the place of the
first responder at work, committed to holding open a shrinking
present. Their letter ends by recognizing that they “are not
politicians” and are “simply healing professionals who cannot
remain silent.” And so, they speak out with the urgency of those
haunted by nightmares they wish Biden could see. They censor
themselves so that, despite all indications to the contrary, he might
listen.

None of the information the American health care workers present is
new. Palestinians in Gaza have for the last year lifted their
children’s corpses in front of cameras for the world to see.
What’s new is the packaging. Edward Said explains in his essay
“Permission to Narrate,” written in the aftermath of Israel’s
1982 destruction of Beirut, that “facts do not at all speak for
themselves, but require a socially acceptable narrative to absorb,
sustain and circulate them.” The American health care workers know
their audience. They announce that their testimony will focus on women
and children. To a bomb, a body is a body; sex and age make little
difference against the weight of a collapsing home. To the West, the
Arab man and male teenager are killable; the doctors’ reticence to
mention them reflects an accommodation of this narrowing of the human.
The right to life of Palestinian women and children is less
contestable in words—though it is denied every day by deeds. In
Gaza, more than one year into what the American health care workers
call madness, it’s hard to ignore the human toll. Acknowledgment
alone doesn’t interrogate whether Israel’s genocide still
constitutes self-defense: a reflexive, albeit disproportionate,
“retaliatory attack” from a frantic, cornered ethnostate driven
into fight or flight.

Rather than challenge the dehumanization that allows one group to
permit or deny another’s narrative, American doctors often leverage
the perceived differences between _us_ and _them_ to emphasize
their own credibility. Two doctors asserted in their eyewitness
testimony that they don’t speak Arabic, aren’t Muslim, and
aren’t religious. Why not understanding the language of the people
one is claiming to help—or on behalf of whom one speaks—is a good
thing is unclear. The health care workers explain that, as Israel has
denied foreign journalists entry into Gaza, they are “among the only
neutral observers” available. Setting aside whether neutrality is
desirable or even possible here, because Israel has killed hundreds of
Palestinian journalists—those whose coverage the health workers’
audience considers compromised—the humanitarian medic is obligated
to play both journalist and healer.

The Ethic of Refusal

In June of 1944, Dr. Maurice Rossel was delegated by the International
Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to inspect Theresienstadt, a
supposedly “model” concentration camp with its own symphony
orchestra. Flowers were freshly planted and buildings painted in
advance of the ICRC official’s visit. Rossel would go on to meet
with the commander of Auschwitz at the camp itself. As a matter of
“neutrality,” the ICRC refused to condemn the ongoing Holocaust.
Later, the Red Cross apologized for its “impotence” and
“mistakes.” In December 1996, the organization declassified
documents showing just how much it had concealed. Had it spoken out,
its logic went, the organization would have jeopardized its ability to
inspect facilities on both sides.

On the ground, the enemy of life is not death. The enemies of life are
the people who kill innocent people, for reasons we
call “politics.”

Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), known in much of the
English-speaking world as Doctors Without Borders, was born out of
this moral stain, repeated in Biafra in the late 1960s. Founded in
1971 by a group of journalists and physicians disturbed by the hollow
ethics of the Red Cross’s neutrality-for-neutrality’s-sake,
MSF’s first mission to an active warzone was Beirut, in 1976. The
previous year, a bus carrying Palestinians on their way to the Sabra
refugee camp had been attacked, its twenty-seven passengers massacred
by the Phalange, a group funded and armed by Zionists and inspired by
the “discipline” of Nazi Germany. The _Times_ reported it as an
attack on “militants”; the massacre was said to be revenge for a
drive-by shooting at a Maronite church earlier that day, in which
bullets were fired from a car suspiciously marked with the insignia of
a secular Palestinian militia (who presumably knew better than to
identify themselves in a hostile neighborhood). Different theories
circulate regarding who was actually responsible for the event that
ultimately ignited Lebanon’s so-called civil war and set the stage
for Israel’s ground invasion in 1982.

Consisting of a surgeon and small assisting crew, the MSF volunteers
were stationed at a hospital in the Nab’a, Bourj Hammoud area, an
impoverished part of Beirut near the Tal al-Zaatar Palestinian refugee
camp, where many Armenians had also sought refuge from the Ottoman
genocide. The area was besieged by anti-Palestinian factions,
including the Phalange. A couple of years later, MSF redirected their
attention to Zahle, an area the organization highlighted as
majority-Christian. MSF was guided not by politics, it said, but by
the need to stay close to “the most vulnerable people, who are also
the least visible.”

By treating “both sides” in Beirut, the organization established a
reputation of serving all comers, a readiness to work under fire, and
a willingness to condemn aggression wherever they saw it. MSF, like
the rest of the West, understood the Lebanese civil war as motivated
by blind sectarian hate, Lebanese Christians versus their Muslim
compatriots. Such framing, _very much_ informed by a politics that
is invisible to those who don’t know to see it, denies Arabs the
logic of cause and effect. In MSF’s case, it allowed the
organization to rehabilitate the language of neutrality—treating
both sides—because here the violence stemmed not from
historico-political events but from identity. This frame leaves no
room for leftist Lebanese Christians, as their presence on the
Muslims’ “side” would suggest the conflict wasn’t about
religion. Palestinian refugees in Lebanon—Christians and Muslims
alike—are visible only as troublemakers. Had MSF acknowledged that
the fighting was motivated by the endorsement of Israeli occupation,
distancing itself would have been less conscionable. Instead, because
the fighting was rendered politically incoherent, MSF had no
obligation to take a side. This was not
neutrality-for-neutrality’s-sake. Rather, in Beirut, the
organization found that it could be politically neutral without being
ethically so (à la the Red Cross). If anything, MSF’s lack of
formal affiliation freed its ethical compass: the organization
condemned illegal actions by all warring factions.

During MSF’s Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech in 1999, the
president of its international council, Dr. James Orbinski, said,
“Our action is to help people in situations of crisis.”
“Ours,” he added by way of self-awareness, “is not a contented
action.” MSF knows what you’re thinking; they’re not happy about
it either. But humanitarianism intervenes where “the
political”—an ameboid entity to which Orbinski gestures without
defining, except as what the humanitarian is not—has failed. The
humanitarian “has no frontiers” while the political “knows
borders.” The political is the thing to engage once the bleeding
stops. The failure to act substantively, lastingly, is displaced onto
actors who have the time and space to think about the bigger picture.
MSF’s logo is literally called “the running person” (a.k.a.
“running man”), their gaze directed at what is in front of them.
To MSF, this is not a matter of shortsightedness; it is this limited
scope that makes their work sustainable.

MSF formalized this morality-beyond-politics as an “ethic of
refusal.” The term appears in the Nobel speech three times. Orbinski
explains that MSF was designed to counter the assumption that
political neutrality requires silence. While the material impact of
words varies, he is certain that “silence kills.” Unlike the Red
Cross, in the face of injustice, MSF’s doctors _condemn_. They
discern morally and ethically. They do not, however, offer anything
specific in place of the structures they refuse, as this would require
a political vision. As doctors, they are on the side of life, against
death. On the ground, though, the enemy of life is not death. The
enemies of life are the people who kill innocent people, for reasons
we call “politics.”

Empire of Trauma

The humanitarian doctor’s interventions are of limited impact
against forces committed to killing civilians. The work becomes an
exercise in futility: you stabilize a patient and bandage their
wounds, only for them to leave the hospital an easier target. To
compensate, MSF volunteers commit to “bearing witness,” what the
organization calls _temoignage_, from the French _temoigner_, “to
testify.” Implied is that the witness serves as evidence—here,
against ongoing suffering—not for the sake of achieving a particular
political end but to mobilize political actors who _will_ and to
supply them with the raw data so that they _can_.

The Israelis have one day, October 7, that has been replayed without
question by Western media for over a year in order to present genocide
as an understandable human reaction.

_The Empire of Trauma_ by French anthropologists Didier Fassin and
Richard Rechtman traces the rise of humanitarian psychiatry and the
narrativization of harm through the lens of trauma. The two describe
how post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), introduced to the American
psychiatric lexicon in the 1980s through the third edition of
the _Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders_, took
some time to gain traction internationally, especially in the world of
humanitarian medicine. It wasn’t until MSF’s work in Gaza in 1988,
providing physiotherapy to the injured during the first Palestinian
uprising, or intifada, that the organization began prioritizing trauma
as such. In 1994, after the Oslo Accords ended the uprising, MSF set
up its first mental health program in Jenin, a refugee camp in the
West Bank. In Jenin, MSF worked with youth who had witnessed people
they loved arrested, tortured, and killed, and who still lived under
an occupation that insisted their lives had no worth. A couple of
years later, the mental health program in Jenin closed, and others
started up in its place, addressing the needs of various
subpopulations (including former prisoners) on a more or less
individual basis, until 2000.

That year, as part of his prime ministerial campaign, Likud leader
Ariel Sharon, flanked by more than one thousand Israeli colonial
police and soldiers, stormed the al-Aqsa mosque compound, an obvious
provocation that triggered the second intifada. MSF sent surgeons and
support staff to Palestine, only to realize, as MSF’s Middle East
programs director remarked, that “in the Palestinian territories
they’ve got a well-equipped hospital system with skilled staff. You
can’t bring any added value.” MSF pivoted. It identified a gap in
mental health care and announced, in a statement that doesn’t use
the word _Israel_, the opening of a new mobile clinic in Gaza to
provide support, both medical and psychological, with a focus on
children younger than twelve. Here, there was no PTSD to treat—the
“traumatic stress” wasn’t exactly “post”—but the diagnosis
did provide tools, especially in the realm of testimony, to rally
international attention against the occupation.

Part of the concept of _temoignage_ is for the doctor to find words
for what the mind on some level already knows and to help others see
it too. _Trauma _filled a preexisting gap, engaging the interiority
of a people suffering beyond the periphery of skin. For an
organization operating in times of crisis, trauma and PTSD were less
diagnostic tools than a means of summoning empathy. The Palestinian
had been presented for decades in Western media as terrorism
incarnate: think anonymized face, wrapped in a black-and-white
keffiyeh. Trauma provided a humanizing alternative. The
Palestinian—disarmed, emotionally vulnerable, in need—could be
fashioned, with the right sound bites, for a hesitant audience (say,
your average _New York Times_ reader) into a human being.

The phrase _humanitarian crisis _freezes political inventory and
clarifies that those suffering are people. If you know this already,
the term grates. A former president of MSF, after stepping down,
remarked in 1996 that “if Auschwitz were operating today, it would
probably be described as a humanitarian emergency.” In a recent
interview with CNN, an MSF-affiliated pediatrician who has worked in
Gaza and was speaking in her own personal capacity clarified the news
anchor’s phrasing, “This is not a humanitarian crisis . . . and
I’m going to say it very clearly for your viewers to hear: this is
genocide.” _Crisis_, like _trauma_, emphasizes suffering to elicit
pity. But introduce into the frame a gun, or a rock, and things get
muddy again, the human being replaced by the threat. The formerly
pity-stricken _Times_ readers see themselves in the tank. Trauma
does nothing to challenge this frame; at best, it asks us to ignore it
for the sake of the _human_ story.

Trauma shows you a person folding inward, shearing their tether to the
world. Trauma cannot get one to struggle, in the sense of committing
to something bigger than their person—a cause—because it only
recognizes a world mediated by individual human bodies. And, because
trauma faces the past, the traumatized native is only able to
recognize themselves through what their colonizer has done to them.
They are stuck playing catch up, evening the score, serving that
ouroboros called revenge. Palestine is motivated by a horizon beyond
occupation, one inaccessible through the narrowing language of trauma.

MSF initially leveraged personal narratives of trauma as one facet of
the harms of Israel’s occupation, alongside records of human rights
violations—taking doctors hostage, targeting ambulances, imprisoning
children—that were demonstratively systematic. In the 2000s, amid
rising fear about international sympathy for the Palestinian cause,
donors threatened to withdraw funding from humanitarian organizations
operating in Palestine if they didn’t fix their “anti-Israel
bias.” Trauma narratives absent political valences offered the
possibility of parity: occupiers suffer too. Personal testimonies are
raw material, malleable and manipulated by political actors to serve
various ends. A 2024 essay in _Politico_ titled “We Volunteered at
a Gaza Hospital. What We Saw Was Unspeakable” enumerates horror upon
horror committed against civilians by the Israelis but ultimately
packages these as the unfortunate consequence of the ugly
“Israel-Hamas” war, rather than as a core tenet of Zionism’s
eliminatory logic. On X, below a photo of a small child crying in a
red tank top, her bilateral lower limb amputations exposed, a former
CNN producer commented, “I am horrified and sorry, but what did you
think it’s [_sic_] going to happen after you attacked Israel on
October 7, 2023?”

The Israelis have one day, October 7, that has been replayed without
question by Western media for over a year in order to present genocide
as an understandable human reaction, while Palestinians have the last
one hundred years. The juxtaposition, though satisfying, is flawed:
what matters in the case of Palestine, as in all struggles for
liberation, is not that one side’s quantified suffering eclipses the
other’s, nor that half of its martyrs are children. What matters is
not that the other side has cowardly soldiers encased by tanks and no
issue running over children. It’s not Palestinians’ suffering that
makes their cause worthwhile because suffering is not a moral good,
power not a moral harm. What matters is that Israel is a settler
colony, built on stolen Palestinian land and sustained by Palestinian
blood. Otherwise, we might find ourselves in a world, as the power gap
between oppressor and oppressed narrows, where Israel is the victim.

Better Than Nothing

As part of its ethic of refusal, MSF has a long history of terminating
projects where it finds itself instrumentalized by belligerents. In
Afghanistan in 2004, the U.S. military had blurred the line between
the work of humanitarian organizations like MSF and U.S. forces,
including by dropping leaflets threatening to condition humanitarian
aid on civilians’ willingness to provide information on fighters’
whereabouts. Five MSF workers were killed in an ambush by the Taliban,
who accused MSF of collaborating with the United States. MSF withdrew
its operations. In response, Western media condemned MSF’s naivete
for insisting on an ethics without politics—politics which, for the
United States propaganda arm, meant medical doctors serving the
interests of an occupying military. In Libya in 2012, MSF found itself
treating patients who were subject to torture by the government
imposed on the country by NATO forces, a situation _Reuters_ termed
“awkward,” as if the intentional destabilization of a country was
subject to the same etiquette as a dinner party. MSF insisted that
their role should be to provide medical care with the goal of
improving prognosis, not the Sisyphean task of “repeatedly
treat[ing] the same patients between torture sessions.” Again, MSF
withdrew.

In Gaza, especially since the tightening of Israel’s siege, an
animating question for MSF is whether something is better than
nothing_._ Israel’s Operation Protective Edge in 2014 prompted an
MSF member to write a short reflection on _Crash_, the blog of the
organization’s think tank, about the necessary limits of any MSF
intervention. He opens by telling his reader a little bit about Gaza:

An entire population is trapped in what is essentially an open-air
prison. They can’t leave and only the most limited
supplies—essential for basic survival—are allowed to enter. The
population of the prison have elected representatives and organised
social services. Some of the prisoners have organised into armed
groups and resist their indefinite detention by firing rockets over
the prison wall. However, the prison guards are the ones who have the
capacity to launch large scale and highly destructive attacks on the
open-air prison.

In the blog post, one heading consists of a single word, inflected as
a question: “Complicit?” At what point does MSF simply refuse the
conditions it is sustaining, as it did in Libya or Afghanistan? A
decade later and under an exponentially escalated targeting of
Gaza’s health care system, these concerns persist. Today, both its
modes of intervention—medical care and witness—are compromised,
especially as the latter is only as effective as the media coverage it
receives. MSF’s “voice of outrage” against Israel’s
destruction of medical infrastructure has been drowned out by the
propaganda war that moves in lockstep with Israel’s needs.

The doctors she sent to serve Palestinians should understand that they
were serving Palestine. Otherwise, they could choose a different
medical mission.

Even MSF’s condemnations are careful not to overstep Israel’s red
lines. During the first months of the genocide, volunteers were
instructed not to use the word _genocide_ except if they clarified
they were speaking in their personal capacity. (Orbinski, in his Nobel
speech, had condemned humanitarians’ unwillingness to use the word.)
Gideon Rachman of the _Financial Times_ offered in 2023, by way of
advice, that “the best chance of preventing a humanitarian
catastrophe in Gaza is to support Israel.” Over the years,
humanitarian organizations have learned that, if they wish to provide
aid to Gaza, they must accept that Israel will remind them who is in
charge, often by killing some of their members. The deliberate
targeting of the World Central Kitchen staff must be understood as the
Israelis saying that no one, no matter how famous or non-Arab, should
perceive themselves as beyond Israel’s reach. Israel has killed
Americans, such as Rachel Corrie, for getting in their way—in
Corrie’s case literally, by offering her body as a barrier between
an Israeli bulldozer and a Palestinian home in 2003.

MSF has insisted on the net positive of the organization’s ability
to use its voice to testify to the “indiscriminate and massive
killings of civilians.” The term _indiscriminate _is misleading;
civilians are the target. The other thing MSF can do with its voice, a
response to the _Crash_ reflection offers, is to remind “the
warring parties” of their responsibilities “in theconduct of
hostilities.” MSF speaks from a place of musts and must nots,
without any means of enforcing these modal verbs. After Israel kills
another doctor or bombs another hospital, MSF responds by issuing
statements that urge Israel not to do what it does, sprinkling its
social media posts with hashtags like #notatarget. In a short tribute
to one of their murdered colleagues, a physiotherapist named Fadi
killed on June 25, 2024, MSF elaborates the circumstances of his
death: Fadi was cycling to work and was killed along with four others,
three of them children. Surely he was not engaged in terror activities
against snipers spawned from a culture that relishes in neutralizing
children. MSF, wagging its finger, “has reached out to Israeli
authorities asking for clarifications about the circumstances of
Fadi’s killing. Only an independent investigation can establish the
facts.” The facts that matter, of course, are obvious; this
insistence on so-called independent investigations into a genocide,
sustained by the countries that launch so-called humanitarian
interventions, gets old.

Ilana Feldman wrote for _The Journal of Palestine Studies_ in 2009
that “humanitarianism is sometimes deployed as a strategy for
frustrating Palestinian aspirations,” even when these interventions
are well-intentioned. After the successful destruction of much of
Gaza’s medical infrastructure this last year, Israel gave MSF
permission to set up a field hospital. Members of the organization
protested this move internally, recognizing it as filling a gap Israel
had created in order to leave Palestinians dependent on foreign aid.
But a hospital is a hospital. Within a humanitarian frame, it
doesn’t matter who is treating or how, so long as people receive
care. Some of the backlash to the field hospital was prompted by the
actions of Israeli soldiers, who set up a photo op and took pictures
of themselves delivering boxes of supplies there, making MSF look like
the organization is collaborating with those committing genocide
against the people MSF is treating. In response to this accusation,
what can MSF meaningfully say?

شهادة

Witness inaugurates a beginning. Over the past many months, various
writers have offered the Arabic root of the word _shaheed_, martyr:
it is _sha-ha-da_, “to bear witness.” For the religiously
inclined, a _shaheed_ does a number of things. The martyr’s act
refuses, as it resists, an ongoing injustice. On Judgment Day, the
martyr will testify before God to the harms committed against their
people. Until then, the martyr-as-witness does not die—one verse in
the Quran reads, “Do not say of those killed in the cause of God
‘dead;’ verily they are alive, although you do not sense them.”
Instead, in the sharpened wake of aftermath, the martyr obliges those
of us who have not yet borne witness with the whole of ourselves to
resist the world that let this happen, so that one day the will for a
dignified life won’t require a person to forfeit theirs. Doctors
born in Gaza, working in the few hospitals still partially functional,
have shown us another way to bear witness: to surrender yourself for a
people’s sake, with the intention of remaining within our sensory
world.

The deliberate targeting of the World Central Kitchen staff must be
understood as the Israelis saying that no one, no matter how famous,
how non-Arab, should perceive themselves as beyond Israel’s reach.

As of this writing, Israel has killed over one thousand health care
workers in Gaza. It has broadened the practice of targeting health
care infrastructure to Lebanon, bombing medical clinics and hospitals
and ambulances and paramedics, including those stationed in the annex
of a church. Israel has taken over three hundred health care workers
in Gaza hostage. In April 2024, Dr. Adnan al-Bursh, the head of the
orthopedic surgery department at Gaza’s al-Shifa Hospital, was
likely raped to death after four months of detention in what the
Associated Press called “shadowy hospitals.” Before they killed
him, al-Bursh had refused to give the Israelis false testimony to be
used against his people. In July, Dr. Mohammad Abu Salmiya, the head
of al-Shifa Hospital, was released from Israeli dungeons seven months
after he was abducted while treating patients. Immediately, he spoke
to reporters of the abuse he faced. He testified to the torture
enacted by Israeli doctors against Palestinians. And then, he returned
to work. If his role is to doctor, his project is to liberate.

Part of my aversion to MSF’s brand of testimony is that it shrinks
the potential of witness. As Fassin and Rechtman point out, the more
medicalized the language, the closer to the individual human body, the
more the role of “war loses potency.” The conversation slips into
what the doctors are treating instead of what the people—doctors
among them—are fighting for. In response to a careful compilation of
testimonies published in the _New York Times_ from American doctors
who volunteered in Gaza, debates raged about whether the X-rays
showing intact bullets in children’s skulls were real or fake. These
discussions propagated entirely in parallel to, and as a distraction
from, the actual issue, which is that tens of thousands of children
have been killed by the Zionist state to fuel Zionism. Credentials
were questioned and reaffirmed, including by the _Times_, which has
played a frontline role in manufacturing consent for this genocide.
Enumerating Palestinian suffering without saying what for, these
testimonies do not have liberation as their aim. At best, they get us
another short-lived ceasefire.

Some of the foreign doctors who enter Palestine perform the role of
old-school humanitarians, without allegiances except to an abstracted
thing called _life_. Quickly these doctors realize they have nothing,
as doctors, to stop the bombs. And their witness, when facing those
poised with a professionalism that accommodates genocide, emphasizes
bodies over people. It is incomplete. Realizing this, there are
doctors who reach for something more. The Palestinian pharmacist,
resistance fighter, and martyr Bassel al-Araj spoke of being
Palestinian in the “broad sense, meaning everyone who sees Palestine
as a part of their struggle, regardless of their secondary
identities.” The orthopedic surgeon Swee Chai Ang first traveled to
Beirut in 1982, where she witnessed the Sabra and Shatila massacre.
Soon after, she founded Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP). During
MAP’s early years, she required her volunteers to read Rosemary
Sayegh’s _From Peasants to Revolutionaries_. The doctors she sent
to serve Palestinians should understand that they were serving
Palestine. Otherwise, they could choose a different medical mission.

Daily Routines

As Israel bombed the area around Beirut’s airport in 2024, I
revisited Mahmoud Darwish’s “Memory for Forgetfulness.” Darwish
is trying to get to his kitchen to make coffee one morning in Beirut.
The month is August, the year 1982, and Israeli warplanes break the
sound barrier, disfigure the earth, target buildings and history.
Americans of an earlier generation say a place looks “like Beirut”
to mean “ravaged.” I took a screenshot of this excerpt:

The hysteria of the jets is rising. The sky has gone crazy. Utterly
wild. This dawn is a warning that today will be the last day of
creation. Where are they going to strike next? Where are they not
going to strike? Is the area around the airport big enough to absorb
all these shells, capable of murdering the sea itself? I turn on the
radio and am forced to listen to happy commercials: “Merit
cigarettes—more aroma, less nicotine!” “Citizen watches—for
the correct time!” “Come to Marlboro, come to where the pleasure
is!” “Health mineral water—health from a high mountain!”

In my square of text, the word _health_ hangs, as though Darwish
balks at a world that could raise such a consideration now. There are
elements of the absurd in his stubborn commitment to preserving
routine as the bombs rain down around him. The poet’s descriptions
drip in hyperbole, but they’re not enough—no words are—to
capture what’s not a matter of language in isolation but of witness,
something that requires all the senses to know it. The end of a world,
without punctuation.

Darwish’s attention is not on the human body but everything around
it: the sky, the sea, consumerism’s escapist beckoning. He is alone,
his annoyance at the disruption of his morning solitude—the static
that buzzing war machines impose in place of his thoughts—a feeling
any writer will recognize. His body is intact, out of frame; it could
just as easily be my body or yours, the subject rather than the object
of this story.

Speaking with a reporter about his time in Gaza, the Palestinian
plastic and reconstructive surgeon Ghassan Abu-Sittah admitted that
the gore hadn’t bothered him. Among his patients was a nine-year-old
with “half of her face missing, who had no one left.” Only after
he had washed away the blood and mud caked onto her body did he begin
“to see the child before the injury.” Hair ties decorated with
plastic flowers, nail polish painted onto tiny toes amputated by the
blast—these jolted him out of his clinical stupor. Before him was a
little girl. Abu-Sittah found himself sobbing: someone had loved her
enough to take the time, in the middle of a genocide, to braid her
hair.

MARY TURFAH is a writer and resident physician.

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