Israelis who advocate for a more equal society and better relations between Israel’s Arab and Jewish citizens often point to Israel’s health system as a model of how things should work.
Arabs make up only a fifth of Israel’s population, but represent half the country’s pharmacists, a quarter of its nurses and just under a fifth of its doctors. Arab doctors lead departments in some of the country’s top hospitals, and nurses and other health care providers play key roles in the Israel’s health delivery system. Several of the experts frequently cited during the current pandemic are Israeli Arabs, including a leading virologist.
When you visit an Israeli hospital you see a micro-society of dedicated staff working together without regard to ethnic group or religious beliefs. And you see a patient population that reflects the broad diversity of Israel’s population: Arab and Jew, black and white, Ashkenazi and Sephardic, religious and non-religious.
It’s a potpourri of the sick and injured. There have been times when a terrorist has received treatment in the room next to or on the same floor as a victim of terror.
This “we don’t care who you are, we’re going to take care of you” extends to our Palestinian neighbors, despite ongoing tension, violence, and terror. For years, as Hamas, which controls Gaza, digs tunnels meant to be used to infiltrate and to inflict violence, as they shoot missiles at Israel’s civilian communities, and as they call for our destruction, Gazans cross the border and are driven to Israeli hospitals for care. Many who have received Israeli health care would have died without it. Some come regularly for ongoing treatment for an illness or condition.
Gazans coming for treatment must go through a border checkpoint. The check can be intrusive, uncomfortable, and lengthy. There have been incidents when the delay caused someone to get worse or die or for a pregnant woman not to get the immediate care she needed. Israel takes a P.R. beating when that happens.
But there have been occasions when a supposedly ill person is carrying a knife or when a pregnant woman has a bomb buried underneath her clothing. Then there was the time a Palestinian woman was filmed telling a doctor that she was grateful that Israelis had saved her baby son and that she would be proud if he were to grow up to be a “martyr” as a suicide bomber. Go figure.