Healing Bodies, Not Hatred

"We have patients of all kinds coming in. It doesn't matter who they are. We treat them all."
"It's surreal, but that is the way we are. Jews and Arabs mingle and shop at each other's stores and work at each other's businesses and they lie at the hospital together."
Daniel Weiss, chief resident, Surgery Ward A, Hadassah Medical Centre, Jerusalem

"It is very, very hard to have a victim next to someone who tried to murder. I understand that the hospital has to take them. I just don't know why they aren't treated in prisons."
"That's the reality."
Odel Bennett, Hadassah patient

AP Photo/Tsafrir Abayov    Odel Bennett lies on a bed as her mother Miriam Gal holds Odel's 2-year-old son Natan at the Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem. Bennett has been hospitalized since a Palestinian stabbed her husband Aharon to death on Oct. 3, seriously wounded her and lightly wounded Natan.

"We are a terror-stricken family who is hurting, suffering and bereaved."
"It is disgusting and outrageous. She [Palestinian teen, stabbing perpetrator] has no right to even live and then you put her here? [among the victims of Palestinian terror]."
Miriam Gal, Jerusalem

Odel Bennett knows the terrifying reality of being attacked. She, her husband Aharon and their infant son Natan were assailed by a dagger-wielding Palestinian when they were out on the street pushing their two-year-old's stroller. In the commotion that ensued, another, older Israeli man, Nehemia Lavi, hearing the cries for help, rushed to the scene where he along with Aharon Bennett were killed.

Odel, a knife wedged in her back, pleaded for help from passers-by, all Palestinian Arabs.Their response was to mock her, to jeer at her pleas, to recommend that death would be the very best thing that could happen to her.

She has since been hospitalized at the Hadassah hospital, seriously wounded. The 22-year-old widow discovered that in the same hospital, being treated four doors down the hall from where she was, a Palestinian woman who had stabbed an Israeli man was present; someone whose act of violence in a terrorist attack was similar to what she had experienced.

And she protested. Her mother, witnessing the woman's family roaming about the hospital halls, one of the relatives engaged in a fight with the police office stationed at the hospital, demanded that the 18-year-old would-be assassin be moved elsewhere in the hospital. In agreement, the hospital moved the woman to another ward. And when she was discharged, she was turned over to police.

The hospital is the Jerusalem region's major trauma centre, taking in both victims and perpetrators of violent attacks. And it feels pride in the fact that it is neutral and non-judgemental, focused entirely on treating the wounded, irrespective of how their wounds were occasioned. In the case of the 18-year-old Palestinian woman who tried to stab an Israeli man to death, the wounds were occasioned by the man saving his life by shooting his assailant.

Over 20 members of the hospital staff were killed or had lost close relatives in the past decade through Palestinian violence. They leave their emotions as individuals at the hospital threshhold in the greater interests to their calling of using their medical expertise to treat those in need of medical attention.

AP Photo/Tsafrir Abayov    A Palestinian woman and her husband Walid Zreina, a brother-in-law of a 31-year-old woman that critically wounded herself and lightly wounded a police officer on Sunday, when an explosive device went off in her vehicle in the West Bank, visit the Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem.