By Lynn Wexler-MargoliesPhotographs by Simon Haddad

Triaging

TragedyIsraeli Hospitals Open Their Doors to Syrian Civil War Victims

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Israel is at it again — caring for those who depict the nation as the enemy. Israeli medical personnel are known

for their rapid response and state-of-the-art, humanitarian aid to countries when disaster strikes. At home in the Jewish state, however, hospitals quietly are o�ering aid to victims of the con�ict in neighboring Syria. According to local Israeli media reports, doctors have treated more than 100 Syrians at various Israeli medical facilities, and that number is climbing.

“�is is a very cruel war,” says Dr. Oscar Embon, director of Ziv Medical Center in Tzfat. �irty-three of the 100 Syrian refugees were treated at Ziv, the only hospital serving the upper Galilee and northern Golan Heights, which borders Syria.

“But it’s a source of satisfaction and pride that we can realize the values of our profession to cross borders, be humanistic and treat those in need,” Embon continues.

More than 100,000 people have died thus far in the 28 months since the Syrian civil

war began. �e �rst patients treated at the Center were rebels involved in the con�ict, Embon says. “Now it’s simple citizens … innocent civilians caught in the �ghting and seeking medical attention in Israel.”

A recent arrival was a 15-year-old severely wounded by shrapnel while working on a tractor. According to medical center doctors, he was brought by ambulance, along with a blood-stained note in Arabic summarizing his unsuccessful treatment in Syria.

�e youngest patient that Ziv doctors have treated was a 9-year-old boy who lost his eye to shrapnel. �e child’s slightly wounded father carried him into the Center.

An Israeli Defense Force medical team delivered a 13-year-old Syrian girl to the Western Galilee Hospital in Nahariya. She su�ered serious facial and bodily injuries that required surgery, according to a local news report.

�rough Israel’s Save a Child’s Heart program, doctors at the Wolfson Medical Center in Holon recently saved the life of

a 4-year-old Syrian refugee with a serious heart condition. Similar treatment was o�ered to three other Syrian children in Jordan with similar conditions, but their parents refused.

“Apparently, they fell victim to their own anti-Israel propaganda,” an anonymous government source told the Arutz Sheva Israel News service. Doctors in Israel are still hoping the parents will change their minds once the �rst girl returns to Jordan healthy and happy.

IDF soldiers rescued �ve seriously injured Syrians from that nation’s southern most border with Israel and took them to the Rambam Medical Center in Haifa. “�ey asked for humanitarian aid and Israel extended its assistance,” according to top Israel Defense Ministry o�cial Amos Gilad. “IDF solders stationed in the area can clearly see what’s happening over there. �ere’s some pretty �erce �ghting going on. It’s very close to us.”

�is incident prompted the IDF to consider

Ziv Medical Center in Tzfat.

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setting up �eld hospitals near the border in the Golan Heights to treat the growing number of refugees crossing into Israel for much needed medical care. “First and foremost was the humanitarian aspect,” Gilad says.

Israel’s national security was among the other reasons. With a facility near the border, Israeli doctors could treat refugees without having to take them into Israel. O�cially, Israel and Syria are at war. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad accuses Israel of inciting the violence in his country and siding with rebels. Israel’s stated policy is that it is

not involved in the �ghting between the Assad regime and opposition forces. �e United Nations 1951 Refugee Convention prohibits any government from forcibly repatriating asylum seekers. Political analyst Yossi Alpher says Israel consciously limits its humanitarian assistance, to avoid giving Assad more political ammunition against Israel. ‘’�e idea is to do the minimum that human morality demands from us as neighbors, but not to be seen as the medical corps of the rebels,’’ he says.

Elevating life above hatred, fear or political agenda has long been the creed of the Jewish state, and the Jewish system of values, whose source is the Torah (the Old Testament). Medical care for potential hostiles isn’t reserved for Syrian refugees. It’s also extended to patients from Gaza and the West Bank, a moral obligation that amounts to business as usual for the Jewish state.

According to a Tel Aviv newspaper, this past February a Palestinian wounded in a clash

with Israeli soldiers near the West Bank city of Nablus was taken for treatment 40 miles away to Hadassah Hospital Ein Kerem in Jerusalem. Nablus doctors realized they could not treat 27-year-old Hilmi Hasan’s gunshot wounds and asked Hadassah to admit him.

Against the concerns of some of the hospital’s nearby residents, senior anesthesiologist Micha Shamir traveled to Nablus to accompany Hasan back to Hadassah.

“It was a bit unpleasant,” said Shamir, “but at no time were we under any real threat.”

�e Hadassah organization was

established in 1912 in New York City to provide health care in then Ottoman-occupied Jerusalem. In 2005, the Hadassah Medical Organization was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for its equal treatment of all patients, regardless of ethnic and religious di�erences, and its e�orts to build bridges to peace.

Hadassah hospitals have gone a step further. At the Ein Kerem facility, Jewish, Muslim and Christian medical personnel work side by side treating patients.

Manar Igbarya, 25, is a nurse at the hospital. She is also a Palestinian Muslim and wears a hijab (a scarf that covers the head). “All they care about here is how I do my job. We all speak Hebrew, and above all we are a team and the task is to treat the patients,” she says. In some cases, she says, Muslim nurses treat Israeli soldiers wounded in �ghts with Palestinians, even as their Jewish colleagues attend Palestinians who attacked Jews. “�is is a

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learning process for all of us,” she said. “But we treat � rst the patient, and then maybe later we hear what the story was.”

Hadassah’s mandate to treat without prejudice or malice was demonstrated recently when Palestinian Authority Health Minister Hani Abdeen visited Ein Karem Hospital. According to the o� cial PA daily, Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Abdeen said that “30 percent of the patients who are children here are Palestinians.” � e paper also reported that Hadassah is training some 60 Palestinian doctors, who will return to

serve the PA’s constituents.Despite evidence to the contrary, the

World Health Organization has adopted U.N. resolutions stating that “� e Palestinian health situation faces many challenges under the oppressive Israeli occupation of Palestinian land.” Another resolution condemned the “deterioration of the health conditions of the Syrian population in the occupied Golan as a result of the suppressive practices of the Israeli occupation.”

Middle East expert and commentator Daniel Pipes says it is “disgraceful that an otherwise respectable organization like the WHO would lend its countenance to these farcical resolutions. “But it’s an excellent lesson in why the positions of the international community are often deserving of derision, especially when it comes to Israel.”

Jonathan Sacks is the chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of Great Britain and the Commonwealth. He explains

in his book, To Heal a Fractured World: � e Ethics of Responsibility, that the essence of Judaism is a call to human responsibility, or, as he puts it, response-ability — the ability to respond. He takes a wider view of the Jewish role in the world. He views Judaism as a constant demand for our attention and action; a tradition of dissatisfaction with the broken state of things.

“Religion should cultivate an uneasiness with the injustice of the world,” Rabbi Sacks believes.

� e Jewish value of Tikkun Olam (Hebrew for repairing the world) comes to mind

here. So does Love � y Neighbor As � yself and Do Unto Others As You Would Have Others Do Unto You.

Rabbi Sacks suggests that our global community has increasingly fallen prey to moral balkanization and to individuals and groups prioritizing their own faith, community, needs and wants above those of the greater good, including life itself.

� e world has always been in need of healing. According to Sacks, we ought to be wary of splintered societies and cultures that attempt resolutions at the often brutal expense of others. Our ability to respond to this should perhaps be triggered by the extreme discomfort we feel from watching others su� er. Israel’s medical professionals demonstrate this idea of heeding the call to heal the world each time they set aside di� erences in favor of preserving the sanctity of life...no matter whose life it is.

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Oscar B. Goodman Jr., MD, PhD.Medical Oncologist, Comprehensive Cancer Centers of Nevada/Adjunct Professor and Researcher, Roseman UniversityFar from the spotlight that his mayoral parents, Oscar Sr. and Carolyn, command, Dr. Oscar Goodman Jr. has quietly carved out his niche in cancer research. He received the Young Investigator Award from the American Society of Clinical Oncology and was named a Regional Top Doctor by U.S. News & World Report. After completing medical school and starting his career on the East Coast, Goodman came back home, joining the Nevada Cancer Institute in 2007. With the unfortunate loss of the cancer institute, Goodman and other colleagues have picked up the pieces and are looking for ways to make Las Vegas a bigger part of the national cancer research conversation.

DAVID: What is your primary research emphasis right now?

GOODMAN: We’re trying to get a clinical trial open based on our lab research at Roseman University. It’s a partnership between our patients, Roseman and Comprehensive Cancer Centers of Nevada. Our lab work looks at new approaches to make hormonal therapy work better in prostate cancer patients. Hormonal therapy works in about 90 percent of men with advanced prostate cancer. But the problem is that after about 18 months to 24 months the treatment stops working. � is leads to the growth of resistant cells and results in the life-threatening form of cancer known as castration-resistant prostate cancer.

DAVID: What is your approach to improving this prostate cancer treatment?

GOODMAN: We believe by targeting both the blood vessels [of the tumor] and the cancer cells themselves, the treatment will work better for a longer period of time. A key target is the � broblast growth factor receptor [present on both cancer cells and blood vessels] that appears to be a critical requirement to providing the proper environment to develop resistance [to therapy]. Our hope is that this [understanding] will lead to a new tool in combating advanced prostate cancer that is not hormonally based. � e trial, therefore, involves combining standard hormonal therapy with a pill that prevents the � broblast growth factor receptor from functioning, and compares the combination approach to hormonal therapy alone.

DAVID: How many patients will be involved?

GOODMAN: We’re hoping it’ll be 84 patients. It’ll probably take 18 to 24 months. It might also open us up to other

organizations (to expand it). � ere has been some interest expressed by some other academic medical institutions and centers around the country.

DAVID: You’ve referred to this as translational research. Explain that term, which has been popularized in the past decade.

GOODMAN: It’s basically opening a channel of communication between the laboratory and the patient, who basically becomes a partner. It’s really a back and forth, bidirectional approach. We can deliver the ideas in terms of therapies to the patients, and at the same time we can learn from the patient, gather additional information in the clinic and bring it back to the lab.

DAVID: What are some of the funding challenges you face?

GOODMAN: � e work that actually led to this trial is funded by the Department of Defense. But I would say, at this point, it’s even harder (to get funding) being in Nevada. Most of the funding is going to major academic centers around the country. … I think we’re going to have to think outside the box. I think we’re going to have to partner with some of the pharmaceutical companies, as well as some of the private foundations. I think we’re going to have to � nd new ways of funding the work. It’s going to be very hard.

DAVID: Do you ever feel you need to go elsewhere?

GOODMAN: A year ago it was starting to feel that way. But things are moving in a direction where I’m pretty pleased, right now. Some organizations tell me that unless I leave Nevada they will not fund me. � at may seem o� ensive, but I also understand. � ey don’t view us as an area where there’s a lot of research going on. But I think we can change that. We just have to prove to them that we’re for real. And I’m hoping that some of these e� orts will lead to that.

DAVID: Roseman has the largest presence in the $50 million Ralph Engelstad building on the former Nevada Cancer NVCI campus? Is that site the new cancer research incubator for Las Vegas?

GOODMAN: I believe it is. And the Engelstads are hoping that’s what happens in time. It’s a phenomenal building and it would be a shame to see it go to waste. I’m very hopeful at this point. — BS

grill

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