Dr Ola Ziara, a Gazan paediatrician who has only known a childhood and working life under occupation and blockade, and Dr Rachel Coghlan, a non-Palestinian, Melbourne-based palliative care practitioner privileged to call Ola her friend
We are grieving the deepest ache and sorrow we have ever known.
We are grieving the theft of all lives through murder and loss now, and through decades of violence and oppression.
We are grieving the carnage being wreaked on family homes and cities, and the screams of children who witness all and will be forever changed.
We are grieving the narrative that values certain lives and dehumanises others, that pays no attention to historical wrongs enacted with impunity, but brazenly reinforces and emboldens them through language of disproportionate vengeance and war.
We are grieving that the very essence of justice, democracy, freedom of speech, and legal truths are dangerously close to being annulled by those we trusted to lead us.
We are grieving we are drifting in moral darkness.
It is a grief that is so agonising, it is hard to pinpoint and hard to name.
That intensity of feeling that means we no longer have clarity on the right thing to say or do, that sees us wading in senselessness and noise, that leaves us lost and confused. That is grief.
Through this grief, we search to reclaim a story from one which exalts division, horror, violence and racism, to one founded in fostering a sharing of lives, understanding and compassion.
This is the story of our friendship beyond borders. This is the story of love.
February 2020, Gaza and Jerusalem
We meet for the first time over Skype. Ola has worked as a doctor through war and occupation, under missiles and in resource-bare hospitals, to care for sick and dying children and babies. Rachel is here to talk about caring in dying. Ola knows death and devastation. We share a vocation to listen to those who are suffering, and to support others to do the same.
Rachel: What is it like being a doctor in Gaza?
Ola: We feel trapped in Gaza. We are living in despair. We are not able to breathe. We are struggling to see tomorrow in general. We don’t have this sense that tomorrow is coming with good things.
Rachel: How do you carry on?
Ola: I try to have a long walk by the beach. I want to take it off. Sometimes I dance and cry in my room.
We provide support for every person in the hospital, the staff, the patients, just to say, “We are with you. We are supporting you. We are here to listen and to help.” No one is not important.
Ola’s first job out of medical school was as an Assistant Lecturer in medicine at the Islamic University of Gaza. In that same school, Rachel has been mentoring medical students in compassionate palliative care with a team of dedicated Palestinian and international colleagues.
That medical school, a place of learning and a place of safety for Gaza’s bright future doctors, a place of care and a place of healing, was bombed by the IDF this week and flattened to the ground.
November 2022, Gaza
We share a long, delicious seafood lunch at Roma restaurant, Ola’s family favourite. Ola chooses the fish, and a feast for a thousand men appears moments later. To Rachel’s embarrassment, Ola exemplifies Gazan generosity and pays for the meal. ‘Everybody, absolutely everybody, uses chopped cucumber and tomatoes to create an Arab salad or an Israeli salad, depending on point of view’ write Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi in their joint cookbook Jerusalem. We discuss cross-border hummus contentions. We hold kinship in the simplicity and universality of uniting over food.
Rachel: This is the most amazing seafood meal of my life!
Ola: The catch is good today! The fishing zone is wide for now, which means greater variety and healthier fish. Tomorrow, it could be different. Restrictions change all the time. Fishermen’s lives are not easy. They are shot at if they go past the fishing zone.
Roma is a little slice of Italy in Gaza’s corniche area of the Mediterranean. That seaside pleasure, where children dip their toes and families flock for beach barbeques – the one modest indulgence in Gaza – was bombed by the IDF this week. We do not yet know if Roma still stands.
July and August 2023, Gaza to the USA
We are both fortunate recipients of Fulbright scholarships to the USA this year – Rachel to Baltimore and Ola to Atlanta. For Ola, this means the rare opportunity to leave Gaza to see the world outside. We rejoice in our mutual thirst for travel, knowledge and cross-cultural understanding.
18 July
Rachel: Safe travels to Cairo – today? Good luck with the visa x
Ola: On the way! Was so hard to reach here. But I finally crossed the border into Egypt. So glad.
3 August
Ola: Hello dear. I made it finally! Arrived Monday night after a loooong flight. Glad you are home safe and sound. Atlanta is amaaaazing. I want to make the day 240 hours to enjoy!
It took Ola three weeks to make the journey from Gaza to the USA, with permit delays and denials, long and exhausting bus rides, and a journey filled with warfare tactics of humiliation simply for being Palestinian. Senator Fulbright had a vision for a cross-country exchange program to foster ‘leadership, learning, and empathy between cultures’ and ‘the achievement in international affairs of a regime more civilised, rational and humane than the empty system of power of the past.’ When Ola left her Gaza, she was not prepared to be saying goodbye to her memories in the city she loves and calls home. She will be returning from the adventure of a lifetime to a home she no longer knows.
October 2023, USA to Australia
We share a zest for life and big dreams.
6 October
Rachel: Hello! How is the USA? I am heading back to Gaza at the end of October for palliative care education. I am going to miss you!
Ola: I am travelling to New York City right now. So excited! I will miss going around with you and having good food as well x
Now, we are wedded in the horror of lives and dreams demolished.
8 October
Rachel: My heart is breaking for you.
Ola: Trying to live the moment here but my heart is aching. My family neighbourhood is bombed. My family are still at home. No place to go. They asked people to go to the city centre and then they started bombing the exact center. I am helpless here. Just thinking ‘Where to?’
10 October
Ola: Texting my friend in Gaza. She was able to text back after a long time of being disconnected. The whole neighbourhood was ordered to evacuate. Her mom is bedridden and she refused to evacuate. They decided to stay and die together.
Ola: I tried to shout now in the night of New York City. It was a shout of anger and pain. My friends thought it was of joy.
Ola: My other friend was killed. She is a doctor. A gynaecologist. She was killed. Just now. She was killed with her daughter. I saw her the day before I travelled. She told me to go to America and enjoy it. ‘You have a bright future ahead’, she said.
Through patchy communication, Ola receives intermittent news from home. These messages may soon cease. There is no electricity left in Gaza, for communications, for lighting the dark when bombs make grown men and children cry, for keeping alive the sick babies on ventilators Ola once cared for. There is no water. We start to speak the unspeakable. Gazans no longer feel they will come out alive.
October 2023, Gaza to the world
11 October
Rachel: Last night when we were having dinner, my 12-year-old son quietly asked, ‘Do Albo[1] and Joe[2] care more about the lives of Israeli’s than they do of Palestinians?’ When we were going to sleep, my 9-year-old son asked, ‘Why are they doing this?’.
Ola: Why are they doing this?
[1] Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese [2] USA President Joe Biden
The grief is not lost even on our children. Questions laden with a grief that agitates the very fibres of who we are as humans, and which we are bewildered to answer.
How do we tell our children that everything we thought to be moral truths of making right past-wrongs by our democratically elected governments and leaders now ring hollow?
How do we tell our children that everything we have strived to teach of human dignity, of life’s intrinsic preciousness, and compassion for all people, are vacant words in a world blindsided to heed them?
From all corners of the earth, we are holding a collective grief that the people of Gaza and Palestine have long known, Israel now feels deeply, and the rest of the world must bear. The tide has turned, and past indifference has been toppled. Attachment to racist power disparities couched in bandaids, palliative cover-ups and short-term sympathies can no longer be our default. This is a collective grief that cannot be mended with violent revenge, pitting against each other, or skewering ourselves on fences in the middle. Even fence-sitters choose in the face of suffering. We also cannot rely on the empty language of rights, justice and law alone, without a moral compass to steer them.
The only path towards healing through this collective grief is one of listening to history and seeing that our commonalities are greater than our differences. It is one of shared hopes, dreams and friendship. It is one of compassion and love. For French philosopher Simone Weil, it is ‘To know that this man who is hungry and thirsty really exists as much as I do – that is enough, the rest follows of itself’. It is a love so powerful it illuminates those whose humanity we have for decades tried to render invisible.
What our leaders and the world stand for now in the face of our collective grief will prove our callousness or humanity.
Who now will have the courage to ask, do I stand on the side of justice with love?