Two Hearts in the Holy Land: The Conflict in Microcosm

By Richard H. Curtiss

"Politics won and life lost. The conflict dominates every decision here. When there is a contradiction between human rights and politics, whether it is Israelis or Palestinians making the decision, politics wins by a landslide.” —Dedi Zucker, Israeli human rights advocate and Knesset member, quoted Jan. 20, 1989 in the Washington Post.

A tale of two hearts, one belonging to a Palestinian and one to an Israeli, encapsulates the political choices facing their countrymen. Like most such stories from the Holy Land over the past half century, it does not have a happy ending.

The story began Friday, Dec. 16, with a funeral procession for a 14-year-old Palestinian boy who had died the previous night after being shot by Israeli soldiers in the West Bank town of Nablus. As the procession passed the hillside shanty where he lived with his parents, a 20-year-old tailor's apprentice, Mohammed Nasir Hawwash, ran outside to join it. Ten minutes later another youth returned to the shanty to tell Nasser Hawwash, an unemployed plasterer, that his son had been shot.

Mohammed Hawwash was one of eight young men fatally wounded that day, now referred to as "Black Friday" in Nablus, when Israeli soldiers fired upon funeral marchers who had draped the coffin with the forbidden Palestinian flag. Three of the victims, including Mohammed Hawwash, had been struck in the head by plastic bullets and were kept breathing by respirators in Makassad Hospital in Arab East Jerusalem, although all were eventually pronounced brain dead.

On Sunday, Dec. 18, a 41-year-old Israeli businessman, Yehiel Yisrael, underwent what was supposed to be routine heart valve surgery in Hadassah Hospital in Jewish West Jerusalem. His heart suddenly stopped, and doctors kept him alive by attaching him to an artificial pumping device. They said that without a new heart he would die within 72 hours.

Someone determined that the brain dead young Muslim tailor on a respirator in East Jerusalem and the heart dead young Jewish businessman in West Jerusalem had the same blood type.

How Peace Wasn't Made

The first telephone call was made by a woman friend of the Yisrael family to Mohammed's older brother, Ghassan, keeping vigil at the hospital. When she asked if his family would accept Jewish visitors, he asked why.

"She said, 'We have someone who is sick and he needs a heart. Can we have it?... Ghassan Hawwash recalls. "I told her it was impossible. Then she told me, 'This is how we'll make peace.' I told her, 'How can you make peace when you shoot someone and then you take the heart to give life to another Israeli?...

Desperate, the Yisraels, a family of wealthy contractors, asked prominent Israelis respected in the Arab community to intervene. Among them were two Knesset members, Yossi Sarid and Dedi Zucker, both outspoken supporters of Palestinian human rights.

"It wasn't easy for me to get involved," Zucker later explained. "My wife was disgusted. She told me, 'We shoot Palestinians and then use them. You have no right to ask them for this."'

Palestinian tempers rose as well, and discussions became increasingly politicized. Among those urging Nasser Hawwash to give permission for removal of his dying son's heart were two prominent Palestine Liberation Organization supporters, Nablus businessman Said Kanaan and East Jerusalem editor Hanna Siniora.

Against their arguments that the gift would be a sincere gesture of support for peace between Jews and Arabs, Arab radicals argued that granting permission to use a Palestinian's heart to save an Israeli would only encourage Israeli soldiers to shoot more Palestinian youths in the head. Opposed from a totally different viewpoint were Islamic fundamentalists who, like Orthodox Jews in Israel, reject on religious grounds either organ transplants or autopsies.

As the three-cornered debate continued within and around the young Palestinian's family, the young Israeli his heart might have saved died on Wednesday, Dec. 21. Then, just as suddenly, recriminations were replaced by regrets.

"I thought it would be a gesture of peace," Kanaan recalled sadly. "Now everyone is angry at me. There is too much anger in all this. The idea of such kindness cannot be absorbed. The question came down to: 'If we give them the heart, they will just go out and shoot some more of us down."

"From a human standpoint, it was possible to consider giving the heart," said Mohammed's father, Nasser Hawwash, who maintains that on behalf of the Yisrael family he was offered half a million dollars for his son's heart. "The way they came, with money, after the soldiers shot him, we could not give up the heart."

"My husband, my children, and I were very far from politics," said Yehiel's widow, Yehudit Yisrael. "With all of the pain the Arabs have suffered, and it hurts me, my children would like to have their father back, and I would like to have my husband. In a situation like this, there should be no borders. We are all people and if we cannot help each other, then we have no values, we have no basis upon which to live."

Making one last try for a winner-take-all showdown with Palestinian extremists before giving in and accepting a compromise peace with Palestinian moderates, however, is just as shortsighted as arguing politics while hearts are dying.

Regrets, as usual, were too late to help either the Arab or Jewish victims. The political deliberations which led to the tragic ending, however, were a microcosm of the obstacles, and opportunities, confronting Palestinian-Israeli peace.

The Palestinians are divided into three groups. These are the radicals, backed by Syria and unwilling to settle for anything less than the traditional "democratic secular state" in all of Palestine; the fundamentalists, backed by Khomeini's Iran and unwilling to settle for anything but an Islamic republic in all of Palestine; and the PLO mainstream led by Yasser Arafat and backed by 18 members of the League of Arab States, who have agreed to a two state solution—a Jewish state within Israel's pre-1967 boundaries and a Palestinian-Arab state in the West Bank and Gaza.

Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, however, has chosen to reject the compromise peace offered by the PLO. His forces have been arresting and imprisoning the PLO's moderate supporters in the occupied territories, opening before their extremist rivals the opportunity to seize the leadership of the Palestinian uprising. Shamir is betting that the radicals' reputation for terrorism, and the fundamentalists' uncompromising anti-Westernism, will dissipate present worldwide support for the Palestinian cause.

Making one last try for a winner-take-all showdown with Palestinian extremists before giving in and accepting a compromise peace with Palestinian moderates, however, is just as shortsighted as arguing politics while hearts are dying. Just as in the tale of two hearts, future delay in the tale of two states could be fatal to both.

Richard H. Curtiss, a retired US Foreign Service information officer, is the chief editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.