Dr Ang Swee Chai is back in Singapore! Attended her Wed afternoon talk about the genocide in Palestine, held at NUS School of Medicine, w former Attorney-General VK Rajah as moderator.
Ang: “The Palestinians have taught me so many things about struggle, about justice. They are a people who will never live on their knees, but who will die standing.”
It’s all kinda amazing, cos she’s been in self-exile since 1977, when her husband, the human rights lawyer Francis Khoo, had to flee SG. Turns out the Harvard Club invited her back to speak for a formal dinner, & despite her doubts (“Are you suicidal?” she asked), somehow the paperwork went through… whereupon her alma mater pulled together a lunchtime lecture for her in just 3 days. (I only found out cos of a poster at Yale-NUS!)
Her work in Palestine is well known: she’s co-founder of the charity Medical Aid for Palestinians; Yasser Arafat himself awarded her the Star of Palestine. But, she says, for the first 33 years of her life she supported Israel w all her heart.
Then in 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon (they called it Operation Peace for Galilee), & there was a call for orthopedic surgeons to help. So she resigned from St Thomas Hospital, volunteered w a Christian aid team…
Which was when she saw the carnage for herself. She had to do operations in field tents in car parks until a ceasefire was called—the PLO evacuated, but she saw people weeping, cos they knew they would no longer have their protection—& worked in a place called Gaza Hospital, cos every site was named after the refugees’ old homes in occupied Palestine.
When the Israelis invaded again, she saw the hospital fill up w patients & people seeking sanctuary. She saw her own nurse get shot; she saw gunmen order all the foreigners out of the hospital, & later learned that the patients were only spared cos one Swedish nurse refused to leave. She saw piles of dead bodies, each one holding an Palestinian refugee identity card as proof of their humanity; she saw thousands laid into mass graves & newly rebuilt camps bulldozed, still coated w fresh paint.
(What I didn’t quite realise was that as a doctor in a school of medicine, she’d have no qualms about showing the jaw-droppingly graphic wounds & corpses she photographed during her work. These are the effects of Israeli weapons, she said. They sell them all around the world after they’ve tested them on Palestinians.)
She told an old woman named Khajar of her 13 year-old grandson’s survival, but instead of joy, heard mourning for everyone else she’d lost. “Our doves are still here, our carnations still give fragrance, but my children are all gone. Beirut, you took all I have. I tell the stones, take care of my children.”
She met refugee children who called her the Chinese doctor. “Chinese are very very good. British are very very bad. They gave away our country. Let Israel come, we are not afraid. Show our pictures all over the world. Maybe we’ll die tomorrow. We are the children of Shatila.” She never saw these children again.
Back in the UK, she continued her work. She set up her organization, she faced accusations that she’d joined the PLO (it was actually the Palestinian Red Crescent), she co-authored Field Manual: War Surgery based on everything she’d learned from the Palestinians; she testified at a Commission of Inquiry; she lost seniority in the NHS cos of her activism but resolved that it was a greater honour to travel w them on their struggle.
& of course, she returned to Palestine. She showed us a beautiful farm she stayed at, & how Israeli soldiers shot the farmer’s brother, threw him out, took selfies w the book she’d given her hosts as a present, then shot the camels & donkeys & chickens & burned the 100-year-old olive trees before they left. She went on the Freedom Flotilla in 2018 to break a blockade on Gaza & was held prisoner in Israel; on her return to London, she was astounded to receive a stunningly embroidered dress from Palestinian craftswomen, one she’d have worn today if she could’ve been sure SG wouldn’t confiscate it.
& she’s seen SG change. You’d think she’d be bitter—Rajah himself admitted the nation hadn’t been kind to her—but she was aware of the debates taking place around her imprisonment, & she’s way more impressed than most activists here at the government forcing the Israeli embassy to remove a Zionist social media post. & while the UK government’s failed miserably to stand up to Israeli brutality, she was overjoyed to see a SG charity donated US$6 million to UNWRA when it was being defunded.
Everything she described in 1982, she says, is now taking place in Gaza, multiplied by 100. But her organisation’s still working there, w 11 officers refusing to evacuate. Her friends there have run out of antiseptic & are sterilizing wounds w vinegar & soap.
Ang: “I’m angry and I’m broken. I get up every morning and cry. Even when my husband died I didn’t cry, but Gaza makes me cry every day.”
She wasn’t asking us to protest—she was oddly careful about the legality of that—but noted that there’s still so much else we can do, from running coffee mornings to selling Palestinian embroidery to giving $, & people in the audience talked about what they were doing too, e.g. getting supplies to Palestine via Airlink.
But most of all—& I think this goes for activism in general—she talked about how we have to recognize the agency & privilege we have. Often, we *can* afford to be denied promotions & opportunities for speaking up. Often, we don’t have that much to lose—& so much to learn.
Ang: “Tragedy is not the end of everything. With tragedy comes hope, comes courage, the creation of a new people who are fearless.”
#freepalestine
From a Facebook post by a friend…
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