In Israeli city, a tribute to a Palestinian doctor

JAFFA, Israel – Freighted with memories, a bus carrying Najwa Dajani and her extended family pulled into this city by the sea, which she had left under gathering clouds of war more than six decades ago.

“We’re going home,” she said.

Najwa, 75, had not been back since she left for Cairo with her mother and siblings in January 1948 as fighting raged between Arabs and Jews in the war that accompanied the creation of Israel. The departure, part of a mass Palestinian exodus, was supposed to be temporary, until the hostilities died down, but became a lifelong exile.

On Sunday, Najwa, who lives in Amman, Jordan, was back in Jaffa by invitation with her sole surviving brother, Omar Dajani, who arrived from Baltimore, for an unusual tribute.

The municipality of Tel-Aviv-Jaffa took the exceptional step of naming a square in memory of their father, Fouad Ismail Dajani, a respected Palestinian physician who founded the first private hospital in Jaffa in 1933.

Serving both Arabs and Jews, the hospital was familiar to many Israelis who were born there over the years, and although its formal name has since changed, it is still widely called the Dajani Hospital. The doctor, who specialized in surgery and obstetrics, died in 1940 at age 50 from an infection contracted from a patient during an operation.

Sunday’s commemoration was a rare moment of recognition in Israel of its Palestinian past — in this case, the contribution of the esteemed surgeon from a prominent Palestinian family whose members are scattered across the globe, although some remain in the Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem.

“When we first heard about it, we were very surprised,” Omar Dajani, 72, the youngest of the doctor’s six children, said before the event. “I do not understand it, but I accept it with great pride.”

A group of about 20 Dajanis — children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the doctor — went to Jaffa for Sunday’s ceremony, some arriving from Saudi Arabia and Tunisia, which have no diplomatic ties with Israel, as well as from Jordan, Hong Kong, England, Switzerland and the United States.

They went to the old family house on the grounds of the hospital, now a geriatric center, where Najwa walked through the rooms, re-creating the mental map of her childhood. They prayed at the doctor’s grave in the courtyard.

Echoing the cooperation at the Dajani Hospital, which was designed by a Jewish architect, and where Jewish doctors and nurses were among the staff, the commemoration was the product of joint efforts by Arabs and Jews.

The idea originated with Samuel Giler, a Tel Aviv architect, who learned of Fouad Dajani from a televised documentary about two Palestinian and two Israeli women who, as girls, shared a room in boarding school during the British Mandate in Palestine. One of the Palestinian women was the doctor’s eldest daughter, and in one scene in the film, she lamented the absence of a headstone on his grave.

Giler helped arrange for a tombstone that was erected on the 60th anniversary of the doctor’s death, inscribed in Arabic, Hebrew and English, and went on to suggest that city authorities memorialize Dajani by naming a street after him.