Only in Israel!
There can you find a terrorist and his victim in adjacent hospital beds, being treated with equal compassion? At Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem.
It is a strange situation that Hadassah doctors have come to take for granted and that speaks volumes about Israel’s commitment to human rights.
For example, in November 2002 a suicide bomber boarded an Israeli bus in Jerusalem that was so packed with Jewish schoolchildren no one noticed him. He waited until the bus was full, then exploded himself, killing eleven people and wounding forty-nine, half of them under age eighteen.
That evening on Arab TV, his father lamented that he did not have more children to send out as suicide bombers. The next day this father experienced chest pains and was transported to Hadassah Hospital. There he was treated by Jewish doctors with the same high standard of care as any other patient.
The hospital’s situation is so unusual that a film has been made about it and BBC News reported on it, saying, “Jerusalem hospital where there is no distinction between Arabs and Jews.”
In another incident, a Jewish doctor operated on a terrorist responsible for two bus bombings. The doctor told the BBC he had no hospital bed in his section for a top Israeli intelligence man because he needed it for the terrorist. So he put the Israeli somewhere else. “I’m telling you,” he said, these situations “can be only in Israel.”
Of the one million patients seen by the staff annually, some 2,500 have been terror victims— Jewish, Arab, and others. The hospital itself has been bombed by Arab terrorists, and today the emergency room doubles as a bomb shelter.
The 300-bed facility on Mt. Scopus is one of two facilities now called the Hadassah University Medical Center. Staffed by both Arabs and Jews, it opened officially in 1939. But its real start came in 1913 when Henrietta Szold, the scholarly, courageous daughterof aBaltimore, Maryland, rabbi, organized a medical team to go to Jerusalem to treat the awful illnesses she saw there.
Her passion was to provide medical care for both Arabs and Jews. She founded Hadassah Women, the largest Jewish organization in America and the primary source of funding for Hadassah Hospital.
