by Judith Sudilovsky
ARAB-ISRAELI AFFAIRS: When the shooting began at the Supernova event, Awad Darawshe stayed behind to treat the injured, sacrificing his life to save others.
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Huda Darawshe called Awad Darawshe her “hugging son.” Even when she was just watching television, he would sit next to her and hug her. That is what she will miss the most. The 23-year-old paramedic was among the 260 young people murdered in the Hamas terrorist attack at the Supernova dance festival outside of Kibbutz Re’em on October 7.
He could have left, along with the six other paramedics from Yossi Ambulances, a division of United Hatzalah, but he wouldn’t abandon the wounded he was treating and believed that, because he spoke Arabic, he would be able to protect himself and the wounded, said his cousin Mohammad Darawshe, a well-known coexistence activist who works as director of strategy at Givat Haviva.
Awad’s other colleagues, including another Arab paramedic, fled as they saw the armed terrorists approaching. They all survived. Maybe Awad was naive, or didn’t assess the situation correctly, said Darawshe, but maybe he did and nevertheless decided to be true to his medical calling and remain with the wounded. When they found him, he still had bandages in his hands.
Paying the ultimate sacrifice to save lives
“He was the only one who stayed to treat people. When the shooting became too heavy, the others decided to evacuate the tents, but he was treating one of the injured people and said ‘I speak Arabic, I will manage.’ But he didn’t even get a chance to tell his attackers anything and they shot him from a distance,” said Darawshe. “Maybe he really believed he could talk sense into the gunmen, maybe he was a naive soul that thought he could save someone even during that time. Maybe it was bravery, and the hard choice he made, knowing that he will pay a heavy price. But he felt he should not leave wounded people; that is the medical oath he wanted to fulfil. I wish I would have his bravery,” he continued.
Awad had initially wanted to become a doctor and had begun medical studies in Georgia, but the COVID-19 pandemic cut his studies short and he returned home, thinking he would continue when the pandemic was finally over. But in the meantime, as was his nature, he decided to do something with his time. Already a volunteer with MDA since the age of 16, he began advanced paramedic studies in Israel and found his true calling, remaining even after the pandemic to serve as a paramedic, with plans to own his own ambulance company. He liked the fact that he was saving people in real time, said his cousin.
“He wanted to become a medic more than a doctor sitting in an office waiting for people to come to him with a cold so he could give them Acamol,” he said. “It connected him more to what he wanted to do in the medical field. It takes a brave soul to see people always bleeding in car accidents and not break apart. You need a lot of strength and power in your personality... but you also need compassion and an open heart to give you the strength to go to work the next day after the horrific things you see in accidents. It is an intense job to have wounded people in your ambulance... and you need to make decisions in a fraction of a second whether you will save that life or you will give up. He was the kind that didn’t give up.”
That fraction-of-a-second decision was his specialty, and it was that decision that he made in a fraction of second on October 7 that cost him his life. But despite the pain and sorrow the family is feeling now, they are proud of the decision Awad made, said Darawshe, because it means that in the face of unspeakable evil, he remained human and humane. “Because that is what it means to be human, to be humane: to think above yourself, and not just in comfortable times but also in difficult times. He thought in selflessness. He didn’t care about the culture, identity, or the ethnicity of the people he was treating,” said Darawshe. “On the contrary, he thought [that] because he had a different ethnicity, he could probably save them because he spoke Arabic, and he wanted to save the Jewish and international kids there.”
Darawshe's final resting place
THE GENTLE and giving soul, the one who was always first to volunteer in the village for whatever task was needed, was buried in his home village of Iksal on October 12 with a full motorcade of 20 rescue motorcycles and 10 ambulances from Yossi Ambulances with their sirens sounding, winding through the entire village to the cemetery to his final resting place.
The motorcade was accompanied by 20,000 people – including 1,000 Jews. The village itself only has a population of 15,000 people, said Darawshe, and people from all the surrounding communities came to pay their last respects. Young people stayed by his grave for hours after the funeral.
His Jewish and Arab colleagues who had been at the attack and 50 others from his ambulance company wept over his grave for a long time, he said. “They gave him a very respectful good-bye and remembered him for his bravery and his compassion, and for keeping the oath,” he said. In a rare occurrence, the imams from all three of the village’s mosques spoke, and the word that kept coming up was “shahid,” he said. While for Israeli Jews that word might conjure up images of suicide bombers and terrorists, its true meaning is a pure soul that goes straight to heaven because of the deeds they did in their life, he said. “The political association is a minor association, and the Israeli perception is very ignorant and twisted,” said Darawshe. “Because each and every one of us should aspire to die a shahid, [which means] dying as a pure soul, meeting your God with a pure soul for the deeds you have done in your life. You are promised heaven because of the good deeds you have done in your life. That is how we understand the word “shahid,” how we have been brought up to understand it, and that is how we relate to Awad: a pure soul who didn’t lose his humanity, and he refused to save himself, in order to save lives of the wounded.”
Awad is survived also by his father, Musa, and a brother and three sisters. And though they are strong believers in God and destiny, which helps them put Awad’s death into perspective, the sorrow is very deep. “They continue to break into tears every couple of hours. We never know what will be the trigger, just a memory of him. Words of comfort actually bring tears because [it brings back memories],” Mohammad Darawshe said. Friends and extended family have found, over the past few days, that the best way to support the family is just to be with them, to sit with them in silence and let them talk if they want to and smile about the memories they have of Awad: how good he was, how human he was, and how proud they are of his actions and choices. In his grief Musa, the father, says he, too, would like to die like his son, saving the lives of others.
“We are all proud; his whole community is proud,” said Darawshe. AND YET, the Arab community as a whole is not in a comfortable place right now, he said. “War is not a comfortable place for us to be in,” he said. “Maybe in time of peace we can act as a bridge for peace, but at the time of war we are less comfortable. Whenever we are in the middle of a tragedy, our tragedy is that our state is at war with our people and we don’t want to pick sides. We pick the side of humanity, and that is what Awad picked.”
Still, he said because of the inability of Israeli authorities to understand the complexity of their national ethnic identity, some 100 Arab citizens who made comments of empathy for the Palestinian civilians in Gaza were arrested. In addition, the Arab-Israeli legal rights center Adalah noted that 40 Arab-Israeli university students received letters of expulsion or suspension from their academic universities for social media posts deemed to be supporting Hamas.
On the other end of the spectrum a bicycle shop owner in the central Arab-Israeli city of Taiba who donated 50 children’s bicycles to evacuees from the South had his shop burned down. A crowdfunding campaign for him amassed $150,000. According to the nonprofit Mossawa 15 Arab citizens, most of whom were from unrecognized Bedouin villages in the South, have been killed since the beginning of the war.
Majed Ibrahim, 19, died after he was wounded by shrapnel that landed near a mosque in Abu Ghosh from a rocket fired by Hamas toward Jerusalem on October 9. He died in Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem several days later. “We can’t see Palestinian human beings getting killed and not feel towards them,” said Darawshe. “That does not mean we are acting against Israel by voicing our pain and anger about the killing of Palestinian civilians. This is our human duty. Just as it is the human duty of Arab doctors to save Jewish people.”
DARAWSHE WAS among family members of those massacred and taken hostage who were invited to meet with US President Joe Biden during his brief visit to Israel on October 18. Darawshe described the meeting as “very compassionate” and said he had been able to highlight the value Arab citizens of Israel bring to the medical profession. Tensions surrounding the war remain high, and Standing Together, an Arab-Jewish social activist group, noted in a social media post on October 19 that some members were arrested in Israel the night before for hanging posters which read “Jews and Arabs: We will get through this together,” and police in Haifa violently dispersed a demonstration against the war in Gaza and arrested six people, including two Jews.
Following the massacre, Standing Together started a group “Arabs and Jews Together” to bring together Jews and Arabs to organize initiatives and solidarity actions, and help ward off acts of revenge and violence. Their WhatsApp group has 800 members. Darawshe noted that despite the calls by Hamas to Arab citizens of Israel to pick up knives and weapons to “kill the occupier,” nothing of the sort happened.
“How many Arab citizens took up that invitation? No one. Not a single person,” he said. A lot of that had to do with the preparation by civil society organizations, such as Givat Haviva, in light of the riots of July 2014 and May 2021, following Israeli military operations in Gaza, and even before that, of October 2000, in which Israeli police killed 13 Arab citizens during demonstrations in northern Israel, at the outbreak of the Second Intifada, he said. Now his teams at Givat Haviva have shifted gears into crisis management, he said, and they are in almost daily contact with hundreds of people, including mayors, business leaders, teachers, and youth leaders in some 78 cities and towns throughout Israel, to keep their hands on the pulse of the daily atmosphere in the cities, he said.
“We trickle down this message to keep the neighborly relations,” he said. “We are in touch if they hear of something before it grows, so we can speak to the people [before it gets out of hand]. We find this control to be very helpful, preemptive engagement. This is real-time active engagement to try to reduce damage so the day after we don’t have that much damage to fix and repair. This is the lesson we learned after the October 2000 clashes that took a decade to heal.” This preemptive strategy was put into action in 2006, and he believes it is the reason that, despite occasional flare-ups, Jews and Arabs “know how to live together most of the time.”
“It is not an ideal situation; we are improving with time. We continue to make mistakes, sometimes by leaders, sometimes by individuals. But we are trying to do something... with a sense of more inclusiveness, more tolerance, and more interdependency that is developing, yet there are a lot of missing components – especially equality. We don’t have equality, and that is the worst part,” said Darawshe.
There are also politicians like National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who called for a “Guardian of the Walls II” against Arabs following the massacre; politicians who make a “nasty career” by trying to create more friction between communities, he said, but this time mayors – including the mayor of Lod – are doing the exact opposite. “All mayors and activists in mixed cities are working with great heroism, preventing an escalation which would cause the loss of more human lives and that will derail us from the successes we have had in Jewish-Arab partnership and the building of a shared society,” he said.
For now, on a more personal level, together with Awad’s more extended family, Darawshe is concentrating on how to commemorate his young cousin’s name and legacy. Some thoughts have been around about a scholarship for Jewish and Arab paramedic or medical students, or a dedicated room at the Givat Haviva campus for Jewish-Arab dialogue between youth. “We are tossing up ideas of how to maintain his legacy of heroism in medical care and his humanity in Jewish-Arab cooperation,” said Darawshe. “That is what he stood for, this is the lesson he has taught us, and this is the lesson that needs to be taught over and over again.”
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Judith Sudilovsky
Source: https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-769319
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