Ellen Siegel

By Rex B. Wingerter

Early one Saturday morning about 30 armed Phalangist militiamen came to Gaza hospital, located in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, and ordered all foreign staff members out of the building. In single file some twenty doctors and nurses were marched away. When they turned the corner of the road the soldiers ordered them to line up against a nearby stone wall. At that point, the medical personnel—including Ellen Siegel, a Jewish American nurse—believed they were to be executed. Ms. Siegel stood quietly, thinking about her parents and friends, the places she had lived, people she had known and loved. A nurse from Holland grabbed Ms. Siegel's hand and squeezed hard. Just then, a Phalangist officer appeared and ordered them to a building where they were questioned for an hour and released.

According to Israeli news sources, there is only one reason why Ms. Siegel and her co-workers survived the three-day massacre that ended that day, Sept. 18, 1982. An Israeli military officer (a doctor in civilian life) monitoring Phalangist radio communications overheard the order to shoot the medical staff and ran to the site to stop it.

Struggling for Principles

How did "a nice Jewish girl from Baltimore," as Ms. Siegel jokingly describes herself, come to find herself before a firing squad in a Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut? The answer lies, in part, in Ms. Siegel's personal struggle to remain faithful to her Jewish principles and ethics.

"I was born and raised in a conservative/orthodox Jewish household," she explains. Her grandparents escaped pogroms in Eastern Europe by coming to America, where they spoke only Yiddish and strictly observed religious holidays. Ms. Siegel's parents followed suit. She attended Hebrew school twice a week, she says, and went to an orthodox synagogue every Saturday, as well as a religious school every Sunday. "It was only when I went to high school that I learned there were people other than Jewish people," she recalls. After high school, Ms. Siegel went to a Jewish nursing school and then practiced in Jewish hospitals in New York and Washington, D.C.

With a history like that, you would expect Ms. Siegel now to be working for the pro-Israeli lobby. But that was not to be because, she explains, "I did things and saw things that other people did not." Her most crucial experience was to visit Beirut during a trip to Europe in 1972. Up to that time she had met only one Arab. "I had been taught that there was no such thing as Palestinian people and I never knew about a land called Palestine. But then I went through the Borj El-Barajneh refugee camp and it was a real mind blower."

Before returning to the U.S., Ms. Siegel visited Israel for the first time. She worked on a kibbutz, traveled to the West Bank and Gaza, and found all this to be a "horrible" experience. "All these religious symbols that I grew up with were being used for very secular, political purposes. It was very hard to find a synagogue in Israel. The people were not observant; it was not a religious state."

But what most disturbed Ms. Siegel was the pervasive racism against Arabs. On a visit to El Arish, her Israeli taxi driver told her that "she didn't want to spend the night with dirty Arabs." Ms. Siegel left Israel the next day. "I couldn't take it anymore." But upon returning to America she could not find any of her Jewish friends willing to work on the Palestinian issue. It became a time of ostracism and isolation.

Questioning Israel's Policies

In the midst of Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon, Ms. Siegel volunteered to work at the Gaza hospital. Following the massacre at Sabra and Shatila she testified before the Kahan Commission, the official Israeli inquiry into the killings. Ms. Siegel believes the 1982 war was "a turning point in Jewish history" because for the first time a large segment of Jews in the diaspora and in Israel questioned Israel's policies. During the war, she finally found Jewish Americans willing to work for Palestinian rights, and less than a month after it started she and others formed the Washington Area Jews for an Israeli- Palestinian Peace.

"It is a group of Jews of all political persuasions who want a real peace in the Middle East," says Ms. Siegel. Its members support mutual recognition and negotiation between Israel and the legitimate representatives of the Palestinian people, including the PLO, as well as the establishment of an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. They are seeking to make themselves an alternative voice to the Jewish establishment in Greater Washington.

Ellen Siegel works part-time as a nurse in Washington, D.C., and devotes the rest of her time to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. But it remains at times a personally difficult task. Recently, she bumped into her "very dearest, best friend" from grammar school days: "When I went to say hello, she said 'I don't think what you did was so great' and then walked away. That hurt." Yet, continues Ms. Siegel, "I decided a long time ago that it didn't matter if I lost every friend I had because what I was doing was right and if I cared about my people I would have to keep on doing these things."

Rex B. Wingerter, a long-time student of U.S. foreign policy and the Middle East, currently studies law in Washington, D.C.