The High-Tech Oasis of the Desert

"We explored the expansive campus of Ben Gurion University in Be'er Sheva."

Be’er Sheva is a big, ugly, modern city stuck in the Negev Desert like a high-tech artificial oasis. Even so, the city has some ancient importance: the name Be’er Sheva means “the well of the oath,” traditionally held to be the site where Abraham (also known as Ibrahim) made a covenant with the Philistines. During the 1948 war, the Israelis captured the spot, which at the time was an Arab village of 2,000 people. In the last sixty years, Be’er Sheva has grown to become Israel’s fourth largest city with a population over 185,000. People must be flocking there because of the nightlife, because there is not much to see during the day.

We drove south out of Jerusalem after a long visit with Mahmoud. The lights of Be’er Sheva became visible on the horizon as the sun began to set. Dr. Aya Biderman, the Vice Chair of the Department of Family Medicine at Ben Gurion University, met us on the outskirts of the campus. An extremely friendly lady, my dad and I stayed with her family while the other three bunked in with generous medical students. She said little about the rockets from Hamas that had recently fallen on Be’er Sheva, only that the city closed down and everyone waited in fear until the attack was over.

We spent the rest of the week touring and conversing about the Israeli healthcare system, which is one of the best in the world, replete with advanced research and technologically-innovative facilities. Their national healthcare would serve as a sharp contrast to the developing Palestinian system next door.

Many of these conversations were over my head. Medicine is mostly a foreign language to me, especially when people are translating from Hebrew. My dad didn’t educate me much about healthcare systems and such growing up, but he might have if I had actually shown much interest. I never thought I really needed to know too much about the systems, because when I was sick I just waited until Dad came home from work.

Dr. Aya Biderman and our group stand in the midst of a war memorial with Be'er Sheva in the background.

On Monday, we were given a tour of pioneering Ben Gurion University by Dennis Weintraub, Director of Development for the Faculty of Health Sciences. We followed the short balding man around the expansive campus of the university, where 17,000 students are enrolled, passing by armed guards and imposing Modern architecture. Mr. Weintraub’s round face wore an incessant proud smirk that pushed his rosy cheeks into little mounds under his glasses. He kept his hands in the pockets of his dark fleece jacket except when he wiped his nose with a much-used tissue. A Jew originally from the United States, Mr. Weintraub described his immigration years ago as a return home.

“This land belongs to us,” he said smiling. “Since the Diaspora we have only been on a temporary leave of absence from Eretz Israel.”

He then added that this temporary leave of absence lasted nearly two thousand years, a rather extended vacation by any standard. Deepa asked him to share about the many medical services that Ben Gurion provides to the Bedouin in the region; he wiped his nose with the much-used tissue and replied, “I would rather talk about my cold.”

Later that day, we met with Dr. Howard Tandeter, a bearded and broad-shouldered man who spent much of his early years in South America. We went into the basement of his clinic where he gave a slideshow presentation about healthcare in Israel, comparing it to systems in other countries. In almost every statistical area (such as life expectancy, infant mortality, and per capita expenditure on healthcare) Israel surpasses the United States. Israel provides free healthcare to all its citizens, believing that healthcare, like education, is a right. The United States does not. The system in the U.S. is employer-based, favoring those who have jobs where health insurance is provided as a benefit; the poor must rely on government aid, or go without. When a national system is proposed in which everyone would (theoretically) receive equal treatment, the majority cry “Socialism!” However, the poor (theoretically) receive the same garbage services and police protection even though the upper and middle classes pay more in municipal taxes. But when it comes to allowing the struggling families on the other side of town an equal opportunity to see the doctor, those with the cash and the insurance become strangely obstinate. Instead of paying less and everyone waiting equally, the majority want to pay more and keep swift access to themselves.

On our last evening in Be’er Sheva, we ate dinner with a group of medical students studying at Ben Gurion through a program with Columbia University. The lively conversation mostly revolved around my dad’s experiences revitalizing a failing healthcare center in the impoverished hills of Appalachia, where I grew up. My family originally moved there for three years in order to pay off medical school debt before moving to the jungles of Honduras. Twenty years later, my parents were still serving the poor and uninsured of East Tennessee, just recently accepting a new position in Texas. Dad answered questions about the struggles of raising a family in the midst of his vocation and described how the art of storytelling in medicine can be a way to deal with the intensity of patients’ suffering. The vocation of healing, he explained, can be extremely draining and heartbreaking, because healing involves more than dealing out prescriptions and performing surgeries; my dad has lived on the edge of burnout for over twenty years because of the dangerous necessity of compassion, in Latin to “suffer with.” Compassion fatigues, but it is vital in order to heal.

Earlier that week, one of the students asked my dad via email to steer away from any controversial political topics related to the situation there. Several students were concerned that the conversation might offend people with certain religious and political convictions if we discussed Israel and Palestine, or used words like “Zionism” in relation to the conflict. To offend someone’s ideology is apparently the very worst offense, not for someone to use that ideology to ignore desperation and the plight of neighbors. Even though these Americans decided to study medicine in a foreign land afflicted with violence and injustice, in a city that is eighteen miles away from Gaza and ten miles from the West Bank, some of them did not want to hear the other side of the story because it might complicate their fixed beliefs. Life is much easier when there is no other side to the story. Some people do not want to know, because nothing is safe when you begin asking questions. For some people, compassion only goes so far.