Palestinian surgeon predicts disengagement won’t be enough

At the end of the workday, many of Dr. Maheer Deeb's colleagues get in their cars and drive on the bypass roads to Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

But Deeb's commute is a bit more difficult, passing through two checkpoints to reach his home in Beit Jallah, an Arab village right over the Green Line, also in the West Bank.

Deeb is a thoracic surgeon at Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem. And as a Palestinian Christian with Israeli citizenship, his life and politics are different from almost all of his colleagues.

There are many Orthodox Jews among his hospital colleagues, so Deeb doesn't often talk politics at work. "My political ideas are quite different from most people at Shaare Zedek because of who I am, but it doesn't affect anything in my relationships with my colleagues," he said in a recent interview with j.

And making it clear that he was only representing himself, and that his political views were not necessarily those of the hospital, he said Palestinians would never be content with only Gaza for their state.

"If the disengagement will be a final agreement, no Palestinian will accept it as a final solution for the Palestinian problem," he said. "This will be an invitation for a third intifada, with more violent confrontation."

He continued, "If it's to start a peace process toward two states on the 1967 borders, then it's fine. If it's not, no one will accept it, even the most reasonable, nonfanatic people. No one will accept Gaza as the ultimate Palestinian state."

Born in Rama, a tiny village in the Galilee, the 41-year-old surgeon was in the United States recently to attend a medical conference in Los Angeles, making a few stops in the Bay Area to help with hospital fund-raising.

His recent visit to the United States also included a fund-raising dinner in Chicago, where he was reunited with a young Orthodox Jewish woman whose life he saved on the operating table. Shayna Gould, of Skokie, Ill., lost a lung in a terrorist shooting attack in downtown Jerusalem, and was expected to die, if not for the treatment she received from two Arab doctors at Shaare Zedek.

As a Palestinian with Israeli citizenship, Deeb said the hospital is one of the few places in Israel that he feels no discrimination at all. He graduated from Hebrew University and completed his residency at Hadassah Medical Center and his fellowship in Pennsylvania. And now, Deeb said he feels he has the same opportunities as his Jewish colleagues.

But, while the hospital is a haven of coexistence — where it doesn't matter if a patient's surname is Moskovich or Mohammed — the same is not true on the other side of its doors.

"I've never felt like an outsider in five years of being at the hospital; I've never felt any discrimination. I serve on the most important committees of the hospital," he said.

But, he continued, "Outside the hospital there is discrimination against the Arabs who are Israeli citizens. This is a well-known fact."

His association with the hospital has provided other special benefits.

At the beginning of the second intifada in 2000, Palestinian extremists were using his village as cover during the night, in order to shoot at the nearby Jewish neighborhood of Gilo in Jerusalem.

The hospital paid for him and his family to rent an apartment in Jerusalem for the next two years.

"Israel's response was bombing, so the general director of the hospital called me at that time, and said 'I know you're having difficulties, I want you to go out of your house,'" he said.