An Arab-Israeli Paramedic Was Killed, His Cousin Speaks Out

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CHIEF INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: Such partnership in such division and such divisive times. Also, a message shared by our next guest. Mohammad Darawshe is an Arab citizen of Israel. And in a recent article, he says he feels as though his state is fighting his own people. Mohammad’s cousin, Awad, was killed in the Hamas attacks on October 7th whilst working as a paramedic at the Nova Music Festival. He shared his story with President Biden, recently during his visit to Israel. And now, he’s sharing with Michel Martin and with all of us.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MICHEL MARTIN, CONTRIBUTOR: Thank you, Christiane. Mr. Darawshe, thank you so much for speaking with us.

MOHAMMAD DARAWSHE, DIRECTOR OF STRATEGY, GIVAT HAVIVA EDUCATIONAL CENTER: Great pleasure to be with you, Michel.

MARTIN: And I’m so sorry about what brings us together. I wanted to offer my condolences on the loss of your cousin.

DARAWSHE: Indeed. Awad.

MARTIN: I will tell me about him.

DARAWSHE: Well, Awad was your average 23-year-old handsome young man, full of life, full of energy. At age 16, Awad decided that he wants to be paramedic already and he started his life in the medical field very, very early. He was the first person to volunteer to any activity in the community, always smiling, lots of friends. And, he went to study medicine. He went to medical school in the country of Georgia, but then COVID hit. So, you have to come back and he didn’t want to waste his time. He went straight to improve his skills as a paramedic and became also an ambulance driver, and enjoyed it. And then, he started thinking how to make his own company of ambulance services. So, he was a very aspirational kid.

MARTIN: He was at the music festival that we have now learned so much about because this is one of the, the big sites of the killings when Hamas attacked on October 7th.

DARAWSHE: Indeed, he was stationed there already from Thursday and doing basic medical services. You know, someone that scratches their legs, someone that drinks all too much. Those are the things that he was expecting and actually was treating. He didn’t expect this thing to happen. He didn’t expect the attack and it caught everyone by surprise, definitely him. And he started treating the first casualties, the first people that got wounded. The head of the team, asked to evacuate immediately. He refused. He said, no, I think I can manage because I speak Arabic. And they started running away, begging him to leave. And he insisted to run from yet to another injured person and they’re trying to close their bleeding wounds. That scene lasted for very short, for maybe 30, 40 seconds, no longer than that, because when they looked back at him, and they were still screaming at him to leave, and they saw him getting shot. His teammates came later and shared the story of his bravery and how he was a selfless person that just wanted to be there, to fulfill his human and medical duty to the end. I know that he would have treated any person on the scene. I mean, that was the kind of human he was. That was the kind of a professional he was. He didn’t ask the people treating what’s their cultural identity, ethnic identity, religious identity, what are their political perspectives, he just was kept running from one wounded person to another until he met his destiny.

MARTIN: How is your family doing?

DARAWSHE: Not easy. You know, it’s — it was still a deep tragedy for us. But because the war and the violence is continuing, it’s hard to overcome it. It’s hard to move on because we continue to see scenes of killing and it’s part of the same story. So, the story of his death keeps repeating itself for us. And we’re not having really the space and time to say, OK, we move on to the next event in our life. The event is still rolling.

MARTIN: One of the reasons we found you is that you published an opinion piece in “Haaretz,” where you talked about what it has been like for Arab Israeli citizens or Israeli citizens of Arab descent in the weeks since the attack. I just want to say there are, what, 2.1 million Israeli citizens of Arab descent and they are of different religions, right? I mean, some people are Muslim, some people are Christian, some people are Druze.

DARAWSHE: Indeed.

MARTIN: People speak Arabic. They speak Hebrew. They speak English. And here’s one of the things that you said. You say, Arab citizens of Israel, like myself, find ourselves in an extremely awkward position in times of war. But this war in particular has put us under unprecedented stress. Could you say a bit more about that?

DARAWSHE: Well, I added one more interesting sentence that then I said that it’s difficult to be when your country is at war with your people. And from one end, you want to be close to your countrymen and your fellow countrymen. The Israeli casualties — as I mentioned, the Israeli casualties, some of them are children and nephews of my friends, people that I associate with, and I have them for dinner in my house. And now, I feel their pain. And on the Palestinian side, you know, we are not just Israelis from our descent, we’re also Palestinians. You know, we’re Palestinians in our ethnic identity. We did not immigrate to Israel. I always say Israel immigrated to us. We’re the indigenous Palestinian population, but we accepted the fate from 1948 that we live as a national minority in the State of Israel, as a separate different ethnic group in the State of Israel. So — and we know how to live in peace with Israeli Jews. We then know how to live in war with them. Because in wartime, they relate to us as an extension of the enemy. They treat us as an extension of the enemy. We feel a great deal of witch hunting during this period where we are silenced in a way that they prevent us from — and they try not to disallow us from expressing our compassionate feelings towards our Palestinian brethren. It doesn’t mean that we support Hamas and we support terror and we support the attacks on Israelis, but we feel compassion to the Palestinian civilians that are paying such a heavy price. And that seems to be an illegitimate feeling in the Israeli public scene today.

MARTIN: One of the things you also said is that, we have every right to feel safe in our own country and not live with fear in our workplaces and on university campuses. How is what you’re talking about manifesting itself, this fear that you’re experiencing?

DARAWSHE: It’s already beyond fear. It is manifesting itself in practical matters. The Arab citizens have been arrested since the beginning of the war for placing some kind of a post on social media. What’s happening is that the police is trying to create a culture of intimidation towards the Arab citizens. And then, that’s what we feel intimidated by this. We’re not able to allow ourself to express even a prayer. It’s — you know, it’s impossible to even express it — to put the prayer to say, we pray for the souls of our Palestinian, same for Palestinian civilians, women and children. That would be seen as an illegitimate act that could get you for one or two nights in jail. There were chance against Arab students in the City of Natanya to kick Arab students from the college there. And the chance were, death to the Arabs, and the kids had to be evacuated and they can go back to their university today. There are some universities that expelled Arab students. And without even asking them to take — you know, for their opinion, just the fact that they posted something on social media. The worst part is that the minister of internal security, who’s a very well-known racist, he’s the minister of internal security, he started arming Israeli Jews. And we ask ourselves, who’s that weapon going to be facing? In a personal weapon in the hands of Israeli Jews, I see myself and potentially, God forbid, my Children that would be on the other end of that weapon. It is scary to be around Israeli Jews in Jewish sphere. That’s why my brothers do not go to work because they work in Jewish areas, and they’ve been sitting at home and not working, afraid. Arab men and women that work in households, whether it is cleaning or anything of that nature, they’re afraid of going to work. A third of the medical industry in Israel are Arab citizens. Seven Arab doctors have been kicked out of the hospitals, despite the fact that they show up to their shifts, treating Israeli Jews as well as Arab citizens without any distinction, exactly what Awad, my cousin did. They go and fulfill their civic professional duty and still they’re supposed to be silent, not having any compassion to their — other component of their identity. Our civic identity is Israeli, but our ethnic identity is Palestinian, and we want to be able to at least feel that without having to be afraid of expressing it.

MARTIN: What about where you live? I’m making — I’m pronouncing it correctly, Ixal (ph)?

DARAWSHE: Indeed.

MARTIN: And so, you — talk a little bit, if you would, about your family’s connection to Ixal (ph) and how it plays into this story. And then, of course, I want to talk about your work. I mean, part of your work — the work of your life has been to forge partnership among Arabs and Israelis and Jewish people and people of other religions and so forth.

DARAWSHE: Well, we live just outside the City of Nazareth. My family has lived in this town for almost 800 years. And I’m here with my wife, who’s from East Jerusalem, and our four children. It’s a community of about 15,000 people, all Muslim. We feel we are in our homeland, and the question is, are we in our state? Is this country our country? And we don’t feel we lack a sense of belonging to the homeland. We feel that the state is lacking sense of belonging to its citizens. Israel defines itself as the state of the Jewish people, not the state of its citizens. They even passed a law called the Nation State Law that defines Israel as the state of the Jewish people, not the state of the Israelis. So, in a way, you know, I am in my homeland, I am in my town. I still see the same sunrise and sunset that my ancestors saw 500, 600, 800 years ago. But the change is the political scene that is not seeing us as legitimate citizens, as legitimate members of the State of Israel. Regarding my work, and I’ve dedicated my life, Michel, to working with an organization called the Givat Haviva for the last 23 years. And Givat Haviva is the first and by now still the biggest peace education center in the Middle East. And almost 20 years ago, we won the UNESCO prize for peace education because we know how to educate for peace. And just simply, we bring Jewish and Arab youth together, youth that have never met with each other. Give us two, three days, we know how to bring down the rate of racism from an average of 65, 68 percent to 10 to 12 percent. What we do is we get them on a path of humanization of each other. We allow them to engage in dialogue also about differences so that it’s an honest dialogue, but we focus on interdependency. The fact that we share the same buses, the fact that we share the same universities, the fact that we go to the same hospitals, we have the same economy. We have the same environment to try to connect people together. We work on cross sector teachers’ programs. We send Arab teachers to teach in Jewish schools, Jewish teachers to teach in Arab schools. In America, you tried the busing in the ’60s. In Israel, if we talk busing today, they’ll send me to a mental hospital. So, what we do is we bus teachers because we can’t bus children. It’s very hard to bus children. So, we bus teachers. And we almost covered 20 percent of the Arab educational system and 20 percent of the Jewish educational system. 93 percent of the cases, this is the first ever encounter with the other.

MARTIN: It sounds like you’re saying that there is an appetite for this kind of teaching and learning. It sounds like there’s an appetite among just the citizenry to to do this kind of work. Are you able to do that now?

DARAWSHE: You know, during tense times, there’s a rise in hatred. There’s a rise in polarization. There’s a rise in shying away from such activities. But also, as an institution, we learned that during time of war, you don’t stay silent. You go and still engage. We are engaged. As we talk right now, our teams are trying to minimize damage, trying to talk to mayors, to tune down the damage to try to prevent a friction between their communities, talk to the teachers that we have. And out of the 2,500 teachers that I talked about, almost 2,300 of them are actually still teaching as we speak right now. I think what is happening in the war is proving to us that our way is the way. The fact that we’re almost able to hold 90 percent of the work, even at this time, tells you that there is still goodwill, despite the anger, despite the frustration, despite the easiness of going back to the stereotypical thinking of the other as the enemy and I don’t want to engage with them. But at the end of the day, we ask the question, well, what’s the solution? The problem is not the bottom up. I think the problem is the top down. The problem is the political leadership. We have a failing leadership in both the Palestinian and the Israeli side that cannot deliver peace. I think that the public, at the end of the day, will be willing to engage in peace.

MARTIN: You know, a lot of people are trying to figure out where to be in this moment, you know, where to plant their feet. You are an educator. What would be constructive in this moment? What would you want us to do?

DARAWSHE: You know what I would say to the youth that come to the Givat Habib Center today is be part of the solution, not part of the problem. We — you know, everyone is now asked to take a side, and I would say don’t take sides, take the side of the solution. And I think that the Israeli Palestinian conflict is an over negotiated conflict. We need to go back to negotiations. We need to go back to implementing the solution, which basically means that — in my view, the Palestinian Israel leadership cannot deliver a solution. We need global intervention. We need the U.S. government, the U.N., god knows who else, to come in and impose a political solution. That’s the two-state solution. That’s more or less around the 1967 borders. We cannot bring this from here. We cannot deliver that result by our own capacity. Someone with greater might and power needs to come and do that. So, if anyone can have any impact on that intervention, that’s where we need it. I see people demonstrating on the side of the Israelis and people demonstrating on the side of the Palestinians, and I do connect with the pain on both sides, but I think that’s not — should — that’s not where it should end. We need to talk about the day after the war. Hopefully, the day after the war is tomorrow, but it doesn’t seem to be that close. But the day after the war should be the beginning of implementation of a solution and not just dragging us for yet another 10 years of failure that promises the next October 7th clash. If we continue in the path of clash, we’re promising more and more casualties on from — for both sides. And I think — I don’t think it’s in the interest of Palestinians and Israelis just to have people siding behind them. We need to side behind — stand behind the solution and not stand behind one party over — behind the other or the other today because taking sides is not the solution, but taking the side of the solution is the solution.

MARTIN: Mr. Mohammad Darawshe, thank you so much for speaking with us.

DARAWSHE: Thank you for having me, Michel. And hopefully, we’ll speak in better days.

MARTIN: I hope so.