25 years later: we still care about innocent Palestinians

By Armin Weinberg, PhD, Guest Contributor

I’ve had the pleasure of working with the staff at the McGovern Historical Center for several years. The opportunity to place articles, notes, correspondence, photos, equipment, and books related to the academic and research initiatives that my colleagues and I at Baylor College of Medicine conducted is truly an honor. My wife, of course, appreciates getting it all out of our condo!

When I started contributing the material, I was unsure of its real usefulness or value. Over time I am pleased to say this question has been answered. It has served as a means of introducing young students and scholars to the topic of radiation effects and events through not only my papers1 but those of many others via their contributed collections as well. Indeed, we have also been able to create a significant, and growing, set of audio/video interviews of individuals from the US and abroad that shine a light on the human side of our work and collaboration. This has been done primarily through our affiliation with Rice University and its Medical Humanities Program/Institute and will grow with the new digital resource Dialogues Across Health, Science, Humanities and Archives (DAHSHA).

However, today I want to share what I believe is an important bit of history that is captured at the archive through an interview with a former Executive Director of the Texas Hadassah Medical Research Foundation (THMRF). As this is posted, it will be 124 days into the Israel/Hamas war. So you might wonder what does a collection about Radiation Effects and Events have to do with this? Nothing. Yet, it does.

THMRF began as an effort to establish funding and research collaborations between physicians/scientists in the Texas Medical Center and at the Hadassah Medical Organization in Israel. The first area the Director General of Hadassah asked us to help with was the large number of immigrants to Israel from the former Soviet Union complaining and concerned about their exposure to the fallout from the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant disaster. What we quickly learned was that we actually also had immigrants with these concerns here in the United States of America including many here in Houston.

As we were pursuing research projects, exchanges and dialogues, our Israeli colleagues asked us for help on a matter unrelated to radiation. They were concerned about their Palestinian patients, who with the implementation of the Oslo Accord agreement (PLO control and administration) of the West Bank and Gaza, would likely no longer have ready access to many needed medical supplies and drugs (that they had had via Hadassah Hospitals.)

At the same time, my colleagues at Hadassah became aware of my work in Kazakhstan. There our American International Healthcare Alliance (AIHA) partnership, assisted by the US Department of State and USAID, was able to deliver plane-loads of excess Defense Department military medical equipment and supplies, as well as pharmaceutical donations from other organizations like AmeriCares. These resources helped Kazakhstan overcome a 50-year history of being at the center of the USSR nuclear testing program. Could we do the same for the people in Gaza? Why not?

I of course asked our young energetic Executive Director of THMRF, Debbie Zarkowsky Goldberg, to engage. Her recollection is captured through a rich interview that now resides in the archive (McGovern Historical Center). It recalls a little-known effort that reveals how Israelis and Americans (Jew and non-Jew) came together to help provide resources for the Palestinian people in Gaza. It was our Israeli colleagues who helped identify–with their now former Hadassah colleagues– the needed resources that AmeriCares could provide. According to Goldberg:

“But the number one thing that they wanted to collaborate on, and remember the timing here, because this is probably like 1998 1997, it was very, it was very, it was soon after the Oslo peace accord. And the doctors, both in Israel and Texas, really wanted to do something related to peace, something because the medical community had always sort of risen above, there’s always collaboration happening every single day between Israelis and Palestinians in the medical community, and it continues to happen to this day*. But that doesn’t get like widely reported. So they wanted to leverage their relationships at a time where that people were very optimistic that there would be peace.”

Excerpt from interview with Debbie Goldberg. [*Interview took place on November 19, 2018.]

I reached out to our staff contact at AmeriCares who thought it was a great idea. My contact at the State Department could not commit to providing the plane but connected me to those with whom they had contracted for other airlifts. The idea was brought back to the board of THMRF, who agreed assuming we could also get the Arab and Palestinian medical community to participate.

“And so we we used every resource that we could, including we leveraged all of our relationships with the medical community, and including, you know, several very well respected Arab physicians that work at the Texas Medical Center. And they sort of became like a critical partner of ours. We worked with them to, to fundraise in essence, but they saw the value in participating in this project, they saw the value to the Palestinians. And so we worked with it. And we I think that we had like we created some type of match where we told the Arab physicians like any dollar that they put in the Jewish physicians would match. And it was great.”

Excerpt from interview with Debbie Goldberg. [Interview took place on November 19, 2018.]

And so we did indeed manage to charter an airplane, fill it with supplies, and distribute them to the Palestinian Authority on February 9, 1999.

“But in the end, we were able to successfully fundraise enough money to buy, to rent rather, a 747 airplane at a highly discounted price of $40,000. And in February of 2000, there was a cargo plane that flew that started in the United States that then flew to Europe, and then flew to Gaza and delivered I think 200,000 pounds were the medical supplies. And what’s interesting about the story is that the plane flew into the Yasser Arafat International Airport in Gaza, which is historically significant, because it was only open in the span of history for about two years. And this is to this to this day, the only cargo plane that ever landed there.”

Excerpt from interview with Debbie Goldberg. [Interview took place on November 19, 2018.]

It was our hope that this initiative would not only do good, but also get some much-needed positive news coverage showing that collaboration and caring was making a difference. Unfortunately, we got very little coverage as King Hussein of Jordan died the day before the plane arrived. The media paid little attention to our efforts thus an opportunity was lost, but this important bit of TMC history is captured at the archives. There were many lessons learned and a bit of humor that are recalled in Debbie’s interview.

“So it was a very, it was very interesting to be meeting having our meetings with the Palestinian Authority at this time, where basically he had died. But they couldn’t announce it because they were afraid of civil unrest. So a lot of our press outlets, we had all of our international media lined up, but they had to leave to go cover King Hussein’s funeral in Jordan. So there is a lot of press about this about this mission, but not as much as we had had hoped for.”

Excerpt from interview with Debbie Goldberg. [Interview took place on November 19, 2018.]

Fast forward to today as yet again, we worry about innocent Palestinians much like we did 25 years ago. As innocent lives are being lost, hostages remain captive, and demonstrations, violence and rhetoric further the hate, we’re left wondering what anyone can do. What can we do? What can I do?

I can share the history that showed we cared, wanted to enhance the opportunity for peace. We need to do so again today. Perhaps remembering and building upon this history will help us find another opportunity to show we care.

The archive having this brief interview allows me now to highlight the humanity seen then, and which I believe remains today.

“So this little tiny foundation in Houston, Texas, was able to touch so many people through their work internationally, not only through this peace mission, but also through the their work with, with radiation exposure as well. And then that’s just the tip of the iceberg. I mean, we went on to do other good things together. And, and it was great. It was a wonderful experience.”

Excerpt from interview with Debbie Goldberg. [Interview took place on November 19, 2018.]

I write to illustrate that although the events of today are separated by 25 years, at our core, we are all human and we all should care–and we do.

Armin Weinberg is a Clinical Professor at Baylor College of Medicine. Dr. Weinberg spearheaded international partnerships in the Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Israel on the health effects of radiation. He is currently an Adjunct Professor at Rice University where he mentors students in the medical humanities program helping build the archives related to his work in both radiation effects and events as well as cancer health disparities. Dr. Weinberg is a member of the Archives Advisory Committee for the McGovern Historical Center.

To explore the materials related to this post, visit Texas Hadassah Medical Research Foundation records on the McGovern Historical Center’s collection site.