There are many ironies in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; most are tragic, but some are hopeful.
Among the latter is the story of Shayna Gould, a 19-year-old Jewish student who was shot in January by a Palestinian from the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, then resuscitated and treated by Palestinian doctors working at a Jerusalem hospital.
Gould grew up in the United States. As has become customary in many observant Jewish families, she left to study at a religious seminary in Jerusalem after graduating from high school and prior to enrolling in university back home.
She was halfway through her second year when the attack occurred. Standing on a crowded street, waiting for a bus, Gould was speaking on a cellphone to a friend in London when 24-year-old Palestinian gunman Saeed Ibrihim Ramadan emerged and opened fire in all directions.
A bullet hit her in the chest and Gould collapsed immediately. Two other women died that day and dozens of other people were wounded.
When she arrived by ambulance at Shaare Zedek Medical Centre, Gould was clinically dead. The attending cardiothoracic surgeon, Dr Maher Deeb, a Palestinian Arab with Israeli citizenship, had to reach into Gould’s chest and massage her heart as blood was re-routed into it from an artery in her leg.
Her pulse returned, but Deeb and his colleagues realised they would have to remove her damaged left lung if Gould was to survive. They operated for four hours before placing her on a respirator, not knowing how much damage Gould’s brain had suffered from the loss of oxygen.
Gould was transferred to the care of Dr Salah Odatallah, director of post-operative intensive care at the hospital — and also a Palestinian Arab, raised in Ramallah and now an Israeli citizen. Like Jewish doctors who have treated Palestinian casualties, Odatallah invoked the Hippocratic oath: ”As a physician,” he explained later, ”I have to treat everybody.”
Over several weeks Odatallah nursed Gould back to a more stable condition and accompanied her when she returned to Chicago to complete her recovery. The two became quite close and at a recent press conference, they stood together, laughing and smiling. ”We are a big family now,” he said. ”I have three kids and now I can tell you there are four.”
Gould is almost back to full health, though she still struggles with fatigue, pain and short-term memory loss. But she is effusive in her gratitude towards her Palestinian doctors, with whom she is still in regular contact.
She has often been asked how she feels about her attacker, who was killed by Israeli police on the scene. ”I don’t really feel angry,” she says. ”It was just sad. We all have a family. We all have loved ones. And so did he. I’m really sorry that he was brought up in a way that he was taught to hate.”
Although she is set to begin her university studies in Chicago in a few weeks, Gould is still strongly attached to Israel and yearns to go back. But she tries to avoid politics. ”I want peace,” she says. ”I don’t believe in what the militants are doing.”
Her doctors share her sentiments. ”We can live together in a peaceful condition,” says Odatallah. ”We can have a very beautiful life in that country, Arabs and Jews.”