Listening in Gaza- 1990-2005

By Leah Green

Leah Green is the founder of the Compassionate Listening Project and co-Director. She wrote this article in November 2023 with the hope of increasing understanding, empathy, and compassion.

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In these horrific times for Israel and Palestine, I’ve been thinking about Dr. Eyad El-Sarraj, an internationally renowned Palestinian psychiatrist in Gaza who passed away in 2013. He was a remarkable human and always one of my favorite people to listen to in Gaza. I think that Dr. Sarraj holds wisdom for us now, and I’d like to share some of his story.

I met Dr. Sarraj during my first visit to Gaza in 1990, when the First Intifada (Palestinian Uprising) was raging. It was a war zone. Our U.N. guide and driver waited for the Israeli patrols to leave the street in order to sneak us into our host’s home in Gaza City. Our group spent two nights with Palestinian families under total curfew, which meant that anyone who walked outside could be shot.

Fear was palpable. We could hear Israeli military jeeps, sirens, gunfire and soldiers patrolling on foot - so close sometimes that we could hear them speaking in Hebrew. Family members told us that the soldiers could break into their homes at any time and take people away, as they had experienced several times. These were the years where a majority of the younger men and teenagers, both in Gaza and the West Bank, had endured the “force, might and beatings” that the Israeli Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin had ordered in an attempt to crush the uprising.

Dr. Sarraj always helped us understand the situation. Trained in Egypt in medicine and in London in psychiatry, he became Gaza’s first psychiatrist and founded the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme. His life mission was to end violence and treat the widespread trauma in Gaza caused by conflict, political oppression and torture. He was also a tireless human rights defender who called out both Israeli and Palestinian human rights abuses and was imprisoned by both Israel and the Palestinian Authority for speaking out.

In 2000, the Second Intifada erupted and terror attacks by the military wings of the Islamic Resistance factions soon increased dramatically. Dr. Sarraj told us at that time that, “the people who are committing the suicide bombings in this Intifada are the children of the First Intifada – the ones who witnessed and experienced so much violence and trauma as children.” Most males I met under a certain age in Gaza had undergone torture by the Israeli military. The large Ansar II prison camp in Gaza opened in 1986 and boys and young men aged 13 - 19 were routinely rounded up by Israeli soldiers for collective punishment and torture. The Israeli military also ran the notorious Saraya prison in Gaza City between 1967 - 1994. Torture practices against Palestinian prisoners continued at Saraya prison after the Palestinian Authority took over running the prison under a self-rule agreement in 1994.

Israelis and Palestinians are highly traumatized people. I remember Dr. Sarraj telling us a story during my last visit to Gaza in 2005, just before the Israeli settlers were forcibly removed and Gaza was sealed off from the world. Dr. Sarraj had been arrested for speaking out against Arafat and the Palestinian Authority’s human rights abuses and was put in prison. His Palestinian interrogators had all once been prisoners there, themselves, under the Israelis. Sitting in his cell one day, Dr. Sarraj overheard another Palestinian prisoner being interrogated and when he didn’t answer, the Palestinian interrogator became increasingly loud and angry, until he suddenly erupted, stopped speaking in Arabic and began shouting in Hebrew – the language of his torturers. This story demonstrates how violence perpetuates. And it reinforces for me what my mentor, international peacemaker and Compassionate Listening pioneer, Gene Knudsen Hoffman said, that “at the heart of every act of violence is an unhealed wound”.

Dr. Sarraj told us he was once stopped in Gaza during the Intifada and ordered by an Israeli soldier to extinguish flames from a burning tire with his bare hands. He refused the order. When the soldier threatened to take his identification card, Dr. Sarraj didn’t protest. “Go ahead, take it, I don’t care,” he said. Then the soldier threatened to beat him, and Sarraj said, “Go ahead, but before you do, I want you to know that there is a real human being behind that uniform, and I would like you to show me that person.” The soldier got tears in his eyes, and then he walked away.

The cycles of wounding and revenge have taken on epic proportions. It’s important to remember that both sides have used terror to achieve political aims. Menachem Begin, who became an Israeli Prime Minister, was wanted as a terrorist by the British for his part in blowing up the King David Hotel in 1946, site of the British military command in Jerusalem, killing 91 people. Israeli historian Benny Morris documented 24 cases of Jewish massacres of Palestinians during the 1948 Israeli War of Independence - called the Nakba (the Catastrophe) by Palestinians. These mass killings were part of the forced expulsions of over 500 Palestinian villages. According to Israeli historian Ilan Pappé, during the 1948 war, 80% of the Palestinians who lived in the territories that became Israel, fled or were expelled from their homes. Of the total 720,000 refugees from 1948, 250,000 ended up in Gaza. These refugees and their descendants now comprise two-thirds of the population of Gaza - 1.7 million people, who are almost all now displaced many times over, yet again.

As history has shown us, there is no military solution, and I’m already terrified witnessing what has emerged from the seeds of this current escalation. Can we hold the complexity of this conflict and the humanity of people on both sides, caught in it? Holding onto our humanity is the only way out of these endless cycles of vengeance and revenge. Dr. Sarraj exemplified the profound wisdom and courage it takes to recognize and call forth the human being in the other. May we learn from him.

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Leah Green is Founder and Co-Director of the Compassionate Listening Project. She holds a Master's in Public Administration from the Evans School at the University of Washington, where she also completed her coursework for a Master's in Middle Eastern Studies. Leah is recognized as a leader in Jewish-Palestinian reconciliation. Since 1990, she has led 26 training delegations to Israel and Palestine and produced three documentaries about the conflict, including Children of Abraham, and Crossing the Lines: Palestinians and Israelis Speak With the Compassionate Listening Project. Leah has led delegations to Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon, and co-founded the Jewish-German Compassionate Listening Project in 2002. She is a facilitator of Systems and Family Constellations and integrates Constellations into her trainings. Leah is a past recipient of the Yoga Journal’s “Karma Yoga Award." She mentors new facilitators through the certification program and is available for coaching sessions by phone.