Joint Medical Teams Help Propel Healing Process in the Middle East

Sarah Capelovitch gently clasped 2-year-old Khalil around the waist, then motioned his anxious grandmother to join the group already kneeling around him on the floor of the health clinic in this West Bank village.

“Grandmothers like to be close,” the Israeli physical therapist said reassuringly, and asked a Palestinian colleague to translate her words.

Smiling broadly, Malika abu Dabbou knelt on a green exercise mat beside her daughter and grandson, whose small legs dangled listlessly, his feet turning out.

Capelovitch slowly stretched the boy’s back and legs, demonstrating to his relatives and to Palestinian health care worker Tagreed Masri how to help him learn to stand.

Just outside the room, other families waited in the clinic’s crowded reception area, eager for their children to be evaluated by the Israeli-Palestinian medical team that comes once a month to Idna, a village of about 15,000 in the rural West Bank.

The visits are part of an innovative project uniting Israeli and Palestinian doctors, nurses and therapists. Now more than a year old, it is aimed both at identifying and treating Palestinian children with developmental disabilities and at training the Palestinian health workers who will provide them with long-term care.

The project also has deeper goals, participants say: to break the psychological barriers that still separate Israelis and Palestinians, and to plant seeds of cooperation and coexistence. And at those objectives, too, it is succeeding, the participants say.

Nearly seven years after signing their first interim peace agreement, the landmark Oslo accords, Israel and the Palestinians are still struggling to reach a permanent peace. Despite years of negotiations, they often seem no closer than ever to learning to live together or to solving the complex issues at the heart of their conflict.

But far from those formal negotiations, small but heartening signs of progress are emerging.

A new study indicates, for instance, that joint Israeli-Palestinian efforts in the medical and health fields, including the one here in Idna, are more common than might be supposed. Many have managed to endure despite the ups and downs of the peace process, according to the study carried out by the Israeli branches of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, a New York-based aid agency, and Al Quds University, a Palestinian institution in Jerusalem.

During a two-year period, the researchers studied 148 cooperative projects, ranging from doctor training programs to cancer research efforts to workshops on allergies and asthma. An estimated 4,000 people and 167 organizations were involved, the study found.

Participants in the projects cited a variety of factors motivating them. Numerous Israelis and Palestinians said they wanted to contribute in some way to ending the long conflict between their peoples. Many others, especially Palestinians, hoped either to improve their professional skills through their efforts or to help build the underdeveloped health care system in the Palestinian territories.

“These were not only peace activists who got involved and wanted to work together,” said Tamara Barnea, the main Israeli researcher. “We found that people recognized that there are many professional and other benefits from these projects too.”

The researchers found that the projects had continued despite funding problems, political tensions and logistical difficulties, the latter often linked to the peace process as well. For example, many Palestinian respondents said their ability to take part was hampered at times by the difficulties they faced obtaining the required travel permits from Israel or by closures imposed on Palestinian areas by the Israeli army during periods of high tension.

Two-thirds of the Palestinians and a third of the Israelis said working on their joint projects had changed their attitudes toward coexistence, with most--70%--describing the change as positive. Many others said their attitudes were positive to begin with.

And many said the cooperative efforts had given them the chance to learn, often for the first time, about the other side, to replace views based on stereotypes with firsthand observations. Both Israeli and Palestinian respondents said they were surprised by their partners’ knowledge and the quality of their work, as well as by their enthusiasm and goodwill.

The project in Idna grew out of a dialogue session in 1996 between peace activists from the Israeli city of Rehovot and from the Palestinian village, which lies just west of the divided and often tense city of Hebron. Several of those who engaged in the dialogue were doctors, and one came up with the idea of starting a grass-roots program in which they could work together to provide better health care in Idna and promote peace at the same time.

Dr. Kate Sugarman, who had immigrated to Israel from the United States a short time before and was one of the Rehovot representatives, remembers how moved she was by the dialogue and by the warmth of the Palestinians. Sugarman, a family physician, said she had never met a Palestinian before.

“When I got home, I realized I was thinking to myself, ‘But these people are not terrorists. They’re nice,’ ” she said. “I had never considered myself a prejudiced person, but meeting these people had blown away stereotypes I didn’t even know I had.”

Sugarman helped launch the grass-roots effort, whose outgrowth was the screening and treatment program for children with developmental disabilities--those who lag behind their peers in learning to walk, talk or play with others.

The project, which is funded by two charitable foundations, combines direct care with training, enabling the Palestinians to build a network of health workers in Idna and nearby communities. Participants say they hope it may evolve into a full-scale child development center in Idna.

The team, which consists mainly of volunteers, schedules appointments in the village’s medical clinic one day a month, then sits down for a late lunch that combines socializing and discussion of cases. Those involved say they have found both the professional and personal contacts rewarding.

“I think it’s developing very nicely,” said Dr. Mustafa Barghouthi, the founder of the Union of Palestinian Medical Relief Committees, a Palestinian nongovernmental organization that runs the clinic in Idna. “This project is doing very positive work because it is emphasizing the development of the Palestinian professionals and is also helping the village.”

Residents of the village, which lies in an area of the West Bank under the joint control of Israel and the Palestinians, have welcomed the project, as have people from neighboring communities.

“When they can work together in this way, it is very good for us,” said Yussef Mohammed Brijit, 31, a farmer from nearby Beit Umar. Brijit and his wife brought their 2-year-old daughter, Manal, who has Down’s syndrome, to be evaluated by the team.

In the clinic’s outer room, Mashhour Battran, who was waiting with his niece to see a doctor, said he is an unabashed enthusiast of the project. Battran said he has been very pleased with the success of the effort and the village’s warm reaction to it.

“This helps to show us that we can live and work together in the future too,” he said.