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Whatever their politics, those who work at the hospital have generally risen above the conflict. Until he took a leave of absence to serve in the Israeli Knesset as a representative of a party that advocates the "voluntary transfer" of Palestinians from the West Bank, Arieh Eldad, head of plastic surgery, who used to operate with a loaded pistol in the back pocket of his green scrubs, worked closely with Khaled Abu Ajamia, a Palestinian physician who lives in Hebron. "Outside they are big enemies, but in here they are forced to touch," says hospital director Shlomo Mor-Yosef. Hadassah was founded by the eponymous U.S. Jewish women's organization with the hope that it would be a place where Jews and Arabs worked together--a broad current in early Zionism that eventually was overridden by the more separatist ideas of rival Zionist leaders. Now 20,000 people pass through the hospital daily.
In the child oncology department, toddlers who would never meet outside the hospital play together. This is a city where people, for fear of either attack or arrest, immediately take note of the ethnicity of those around them by examining hair color, hairstyle or skin tone. That makes this department a confusing place. It's impossible at first to distinguish a Jewish child from an Arab one, because the children playing on toy trucks and fitting jigsaw pieces together have lost their hair through chemotherapy. Parents sit on plastic chairs, ultra-Orthodox Jews in black suits and Homburg hats next to Palestinian women in traditional embroidered robes, watching the kids play. Chief nurse Fatma Hussein believes it's not just the outward signs of suffering on the children that increase tolerance among people who would be suspicious of one another beyond the hospital confines. "In this community of the sick, everyone understands what pain is," she says. "Nobody has patience for anybody who would inflict pain on others."
The hospital also has to tend combatants at times. Samer Qawasbeh was one of 40 Palestinian gunmen who took refuge from invading Israeli troops in Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity in May last year. During the Israelis' 14-day siege of the church, Qawasbeh was shot in the stomach. By the time he reached Hadassah, his abdomen and bowel were gangrenous and filled with maggots. "He was pretty much dead," says E.R. chief Avi Rivkind, who treated him. After a series of operations that left him with only 12 inches of small intestine, Qawasbeh went home a month ago to his family in Bethlehem. "Thanks to God, Master of the Universe, he came home safe--and thanks to the Israeli doctors who didn't treat him any differently from an Israeli," says his mother Hilweh.
Qawasbeh, 27, came back to the vicious realities from which he was sheltered at Hadassah. He returned to his parents' house and a room next to his sister Suheir and her two children. She had gone back from her home near the village of al-Khader, west of Bethlehem, to live with her parents after Israeli troops shot her husband. He had been caught in the street when gunfire erupted and was felled by a shot to the chest. Qawasbeh needs to visit another hospital in Jerusalem for further treatment every two weeks. The last time he tried to cross Checkpoint 300 between Bethlehem and Jerusalem, Israeli soldiers turned him back.