The setting was Bali, more specifically the Ubud Readers and Writers Festival in October 2011. I was invited to speak about my newly published book, had flown in from Jakarta and landed at Ngurah Rai International Airport. My arrival coincided with four other speakers from Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

A van came to pick us up, and we all bundled inside. I sat behind the participant from Canada, a stocky middle-aged man and struck up a conversation with him. I leaned forward in my seat, poking my nose through the gap between his head rest and the side of the car so I could hear him amid the loud whirring of the engine on the bumpy one and half hour ride as the van made its way up the winding road to the hilly, touristy cultural town of Ubud.

Nevertheless, I managed to hear his life story, or rather, the most tragic experience in his life, which caused him to lose three of his eight children after he had lost his wife to leukemia four months earlier. I listened with shock and disbelief at his horrifying, jaw-dropping story. How could anyone experience what he had experienced and not only maintain his sanity but turn it into a message of hope, love and peace to the world?

This amazingly inspiring man was Izzeldine Abuelaish, famously called the Gaza doctor. He grew up in the Jabalia Refugee Camp in the Gaza Strip and was the first Palestinian doctor to work at an Israeli hospital, one of the few Gazans who had a permit to work in Israel. In line with what he considers his humanitarian calling as a doctor, he treated everyone, Arabs and Jews alike.

But on Jan. 16, 2009, during the 2008-2009 Gaza War, an Israeli tank shelled his house, killing his daughters Bessan, 21, Mayar, 15, Aya, 13, and Nur, his niece. In the room where they had been quietly doing their homework, he found his daughters decapitated, their brains splattered in the walls, blood everywhere. He escaped with minor injuries, while other family members were wounded, some very badly.

Can you imagine yourself in a situation like that? Most of us would lose the will to live or be filled with intense grief, despair, bitterness, rage and fury, with perhaps only one thing in mind: revenge.

But despite the anguish and pain, he faced his tragedy with incredible stoicism, if anything, the death of his three daughters made him even more determined to devote his life to humanity and reconciliation between Palestinians and Israelis. He believed hatred was not the answer.

This belief is what caused Izzeldine to write a book with the title I Shall Not Hate, published in January 2011, only nine months before we met in Bali. The Globe and Mail in Toronto wrote, “His story is important not only for its message of peace but for the fact that it personalizes the Palestinian experience.”

The book has been translated into 23 languages and adapted for the stage in Germany, France, Austria and Belgium. He has received numerous awards for his humanitarian efforts and continued campaign for peace, and has been nominated five times for the Nobel Peace Prize. If there is someone who deserves it, it is he, much more than some Nobel laureates (not mentioning any names here!).

Izzeldine has been living in Canada since 2009, is an associate professor at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto, and gained Canadian citizenship in December 2015. 

I have not seen Izzeldine since we met in Bali in 2011. With the recent escalation of the violence in Gaza, I emailed him. He responded almost immediately by calling me. We chatted at length as if not a day had passed since our time in Bali, where we had bonded through our common belief in humanity.

Obviously, I asked him about the conflict in Gaza. His voice rose slightly, “It’s not conflict; it’s occupation. Conflict is between two entities of equal strength.”

Strangely enough, it was through Ireland that I found out what kind of occupation it was: settlement occupation, which Ireland experienced from the English. Settler occupation, or colonization, seeks to replace the original population with a society of settlers. This is the reason why Ireland is the most pro-Palestinian country in Europe and the most anti-Israel, going so far as to boycott Israeli products.

But settler colonization is more common than you think. In fact, it’s a historically global phenomenon, occurring in the ancient world and through the middle ages. In modern times, think the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Russia, Africa, the Middle East, China and many Asian countries, including Myanmar and Indonesia.

Naturally, Izzeldine and I spoke about Myanmar, as the Muslim Rohingya had been making headline news worldwide because of their displacement from the Rakhine state of Myanmar. They are described in the media as being among the most persecuted minorities. They have suffered a similar fate as the Palestinians and in fact, have been referred to as the next Palestine.

Indonesia supports both the Rohingya and Palestinian causes. If Ireland supports Palestine because of their common colonial experience, for Indonesia it’s because of the Muslim connection.

There are a number of issues with that. Despite Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi’s protestations that Indonesia has not been silent on the persecuted Muslim Uighurs in China, there is a lot of criticism that the government has been silent when it comes to this ethnic group. When Prabowo Subianto was in opposition to Joko “Jokowi” Widodo in 2019 while he was also a presidential candidate, Irawan Ronodipuro, Prabowo’s foreign policy spokesman said, “The president’s failure to speak out on the Uighur issue is proof China holds Jokowi hostage.” Is that true, and is it still the case now?

The second issue is of Indonesia’s own record of colonial settlement, in Papua and in East Timor, which Indonesia invaded as soon as it gained independence in 1975 from Portugal, its former colonizer. Indonesia has committed human rights abuses galore à la the Myanmar toward the Rohingya, and Israelis toward Palestinians!

While East Timor, now Timor Leste, has been an independent state since 1999, human rights abuses persist in Papua. It is not surprising that Papuans too, through the Free Papua Movement, have been seeking independence since 1965.

Izzeldine likened Israel and Palestine to conjoined twins. Is that also the case with the Rohingya and Myanmar, and Papua and Indonesia? We know the complications of separating conjoined twins. Either one dies, or both live and thrive.

Izzeldine believes that “hatred is a contagious, destructive disease”. I agree. In fact, it’s much worse, more infectious and deadly than the coronavirus. So how come we’re more obsessed with an invisible virus than we are with blatant and rampant hatred, bigotry and cruelty, which unleashes unspeakable suffering and claims many more lives?

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The writer is the author of Julia’s Jihad.