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Wild Goose Publications - Runa Mackay

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71 pages

English

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An account of forty years in the life of a British doctor working with victims of war and exile in Israel, Lebanon and the Occupied Territories.

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Lettres et linguistique

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Publié par	Wild Goose Publications
Date de parution	15 avril 1995
Nombre de lectures	1
EAN13	9781849520898
Langue	English

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Extrait

EXILE IN ISRAEL
A personal journey with the Palestinians
Dr Runa Mackay
Copyright © 1995 Dr Runa Mackay First published 1995, reprinted 2010 by Wild Goose Publications 4th Floor, Savoy House, 140 Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow G2 3DH, UK www.ionabooks.com Wild Goose Publications is the publishing division of the Iona Community. Scottish Charity No. SC003794. Limited Company Reg. No. SC096243.
eBook ISBN978-1-84952-089-8 Mobipocket:ISBN978-1-84952-090-4 PDF:ISBN978-1-84952-091-1
All rights reserved. Apart from reasonable personal use on the purchaser’s own system and related devices, no part of this document or file(s) may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Runa Mackay has asserted her right in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
For my three sisters whose constant love and support sustained me and enabled me, and for Samiha whose friendship lightened all my days in Lebanon.
I would like to thank my niece Anna Woolverton for her computer expertise and Moira Baikie for drawing the map.
CONTENTS
Introduction by Dr Swee Chai Ang
Map
1     The Beginning
2     History of Palestine
3     Refugees
4     Nazareth
5     The Sixties and the Six-Day War
6     The Seventies and the Yom Kippur War
7     A Change of Direction
8     Life in Lebanon
9     Lebanon’s Wars
10   Baptism of Fire
11   The Intifada
12   Hebron
13   The Gulf War
14   Return to Lebanon
15   War Again
16   Peace At Last
17   Voices From ‘The Meadow of Flowers’
18   Religion
19   Epilogue
FOREWORD
Take us “outside the camp”, Lord. Outside holiness. Out to where soldiers gamble, and thieves curse, and nations clash at the cross-roads of the world.
Rev. George F MacLeod, The Whole Earth Shall Cry Glory (Wild Goose Publications, p. 45), © 1985 The Iona Community.
INTRODUCTION
Why would a Christian medical missionary doctor from Edinburgh devote her life to working for the Palestinians? When we read Dr Runa Mackay’s moving answer, you will see why this book is indeed a treasure to read, its pages embodying a half-century of devotion to the people of the Holy Land.
I have always been in awe of Runa’s commitment. I am now even more impressed by her clarity of thought. Her book has deepened my limited understanding, helping me see the wider picture of the triangle linking all Palestinians together. Having lived in Galilee, in Lebanon and in the Occupied Territories, she bears witness for Palestinians living within that trinity — in Israel’s ‘Green Line’, in the diaspora of exile and under occupation. She shows how all three, separated by geography, are united by a common history, struggle and future. The resilience, courage, generosity and warmth of a nation living under extremes of wretchedness and confronting the greatest of odds comes through in page after page of this remarkable book.
Compared to what Runa has lived through, mine has been a pale shadow. In 1982, I worked among the Palestinians of Beirut’s Sabra-Shatila camps, like her, because I was a Christian and because I was a doctor. Many of those camp-dwellers were exiles forced to flee Galilee, the region within today’s Israel in which Runa first worked. Within the camp, we had no contact with those who remained in Galilee, no direct means of knowing what became of Galilee and what Galilee’s Palestinians felt towards the diaspora. Runa has helped fill that gap. When news of the Sabra-Shatila massacre reached Galilee and the world later that year, she tells us Galilee grieved and mourned the murder of friends and relatives. In much the same way, I witnessed how Lebanon’s Palestinians rejoiced when they first heard of the Intifada uprising in late 1987 in Gaza and the rest of the Occupied Territories. And I can verify how Gaza reacted to the continued plight of those in exile in the Lebanon.
Runa remains with the Palestinians even when she returns to Britain. A few years after some of us founded the charity, Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP), in the wake of the Sabra-Shatila massacres, I recall being speechless when I first heard a new member speak these words at a MAP public meeting: ‘I have joined MAP after having retired from thirty years of work as a full-time medical missionary in Palestine.’ Runa has since been a pillar of strength and an inspiration to all of us. Tireless as ever, calm and steady in a crisis, she now chairs MAP ’ S branch in Scotland and joins us on the board of management. We know God has provided a true friend for the Palestinian people.
This book is a celebration of faith, hope and love for, and of, a dispossessed people. Through Runa, we are all challenged to meet God’s call to serve our brothers and sisters in a still troubled part of the world. For Runa’s friends, genuine peace and justice can only come to the Middle East when all of them can come home to end their exile and to secure their right to statehood, freed from occupation and domination.
Dr Swee Chai ANG ( FRCS ) consultant Orthopaedic Surgeon 1995
(author of From Beirut to Jerusalem, published by Grafton Books, UK, 1989)

1
THE BEGINNING
‘Take time to be, to feel, to listen to the stories, dreams and thoughts of those who have no voice. They’re wounded for the want of being listened to: they cry and too few hear; they slowly die and too few mourn. ’
Kate Compston, ‘Seeds of Hope’ 1
‘Then they called me a refugee’ — these were Abu Hassan’s bitter words which have been engraved on my heart since 1987 when I heard them in Qasmiyeh, a Palestinian refugee ‘camp’ in south Lebanon. Abu Hassan was a Beduin and he used to ride freely over the hills of Galilee — until the day in 1948, when he and all his tribe had to flee north into Lebanon to escape the advancing Israeli army. In order to explain how I came to be living with Palestinian refugees in a camp in south Lebanon in 1987, I have to go back some seventy years.
My early years were spent in Hull where my father practised as an eye surgeon. At the beginning of the Second World War I went up to Edinburgh to study medicine — following in my father’s footsteps — and I graduated in 1944. When my father had been a medical student, he had worked in the Livingstone Dispensary in Edinburgh’s Cowgate, the poorest area of Edinburgh at that time, and, naturally, when I became a student I too went to work there. The Livingstone Dispensary was run by the Edinburgh Medical Missionary Society ( EMMS ), which had been founded in 1841 to train doctors to serve overseas as medical missionaries. At first the assistance offered to students was mainly financial but in 1895 a medical mission dispensary was opened in the Grassmarket area by one of the directors of the society. As the years passed the dispensary was adopted by EMMS and was used by the university for the training of its medical students, both those who were planning to be medical missionaries and others, like me, who had no thought of ever working overseas. In my student days, in the 1940s, there was a busy outpatient clinic with a pharmacy and a dental surgery. Short daily services were held, as well as a Sunday School, women’s meetings and Bible classes, all of which activities the students shared. It was a valuable experience for me. I would plod up and down the tenement stairs visiting patients and I still remember one little boy who was very ill with pneumonia. In those days there were no antibiotics, not even penicillin. I told the medical superintendent of the dispensary, Dr Lechler, how worried and helpless I felt about the child. He said to me, ‘You can only do your best, the rest is in God’s hands’, advice which has stood me in good stead throughout my medical career.
The work of the Livingstone Dispensary was eventually made redundant, with the coming of the National Health Service, and closed down. The work of EMMS in helping to finance prospective medical missionaries, however, continued until government grants made such financial help unnecessary. The student hostel remained open until 1989. EMMS also had the responsibility of running two hospitals, one in Nazareth and one in Damascus.
Medical work began in Nazareth in 1861 by Dr Kaloost Vartan. At that time Nazareth was a small town in Palestine in the Vilayat of Beirut in the Ottoman Empire. Dr Vartan was born in Istanbul, capital of the Ottoman Empire, in 1835 to Armenian Episcopalian parents. He could speak Armenian, Turkish and English and was employed as a translator by a British officer in the Russian/Ottoman War of 1853. His work took him among the sick and wounded so he vowed to become a doctor. At the end of the war he was able to study in Edinburgh with the help of EMMS . In 1860, in the wake of the terrible massacres of Christians by Druze in Mount Lebanon, Dr Vartan was sent by The London Society for Sending Aid to the Protestants of Syria, to help the survivors who had fled to Beirut. Later he was invited to go to Nazareth and to open a dispensary there. In 1865 he was adopted as the ‘agent’ of EMMS in Nazareth. He soon saw the need for a hospital and presented plans to the Society and, in 1871, the first EMMS Hospital in Nazareth was opened, with eighteen beds. The site of the present hospital was purchased from the Turkish government in 1906. There were financial problems at first and then when the hospital was nearly completed the First World War broke out. The building was commandeered by the Turkish army and vandalised. By 1924 it had been repaired and was reopened and continues to this day to serve the people of Nazareth and Galilee. The hospital in Damascus was opened in 1884 but was forced to close down in 1957 after the Suez War.
The work of EMMS was thus known to me, but, when I qualified in 1944, I was set on making my career in paediatrics. The state of Israel had been declared in 1948, but that fact and the resultant flight