Trailblazer: Israel's first Arab manager of a gov't hospital
In his first interview as director of the Galilee Medical Center, Dr. Barhoum speaks of the difficulty of succeeding as a minority: 'All majorities oppress minorities, and every minority works a thousand times harder to prove that he is equal.'
"I didn't expect a carpet," he says, "and on the other hand I didn’t expect the welcome to be so difficult."
What actually happened?
"Do we have to talk about it?" he asks. "There was a problem and it was unpleasant. I wanted to change things and some of the people didn't like the changes. Some," he emphasizes. "I encountered fighting and struggles that unfortunately got to a low point."
Don't play dumb: Your appointment lit a fire mainly because you were the first Arab doctor to be selected director of a government hospital in Israel.
“True,” he admits, “there were people in the hospital and outside of it who didn’t like the appointment. ‘Didn’t like’ is putting it mildly. There was the case of a department head whom I wanted to transfer positions. He was an excellent doctor, but management wasn’t his strong suit. When I called him in for a talk, a controversy erupted. How dare I, an Arab, fire a Jewish doctor?”
“The same thing happened when I wanted to close a certain department and merge it with another, because it wasn’t operating at full capacity. And following the professional rift that was created with the department head, there were local papers who came out with headlines saying that ‘An Arab director is harassing a doctor who survived Egyptian captivity’. I didn’t know he had been in Egyptian captivity and I had nothing against him personally. My concerns were strictly professional, but the responses were not.”
“I understood that it was an attempt to lure me into a trap I didn’t want to go into. I wouldn’t deal with the topic of Arabs and Jews. I had a little experience in life, and knew that it was an issue I should stay away from, and I’m glad I chose that path. If I had opened my mouth and returned fire, it would have harmed my performance as director.”
You’re still trying to downplay the level or protests against you. In your first two years as hospital director, you were on the front pages of local papers almost every week. The large number of complaints caused the Ministry of Health to establish a commission that would examine your performance.
“True, they photographed me from every angle, like I was some model,” he smiles. “Do you expect me to say I slept well at night? No, I didn’t sleep at all. My wife and three daughters had a hard time as well. I wanted them to examine the complaints so that I could end this witch hunt once and for all. The commission asked me to cooperate, so I collected all of the documents and handed them over. I also sent out an email telling everyone who complained to come before the commission, even if it was at the expense of work hours.
“Raya Strauss, who was active in the association of friends of the hospital, said ‘I don’t want him’, because she was told all sorts of stories about me. After the whole mess ended we became great friends, and today she’s the association’s president, donates her own money to the hospital, and even brings in donations from abroad.”
Raya Strauss Ben-Dror confirms Dr. Barhoum’s words, “It was a very intense period. Many accusations and stories about Dr. Barhoum were spread, and I didn’t know who to believe anymore," she said. "Until Ilan Oppenheimer, the owner of the 'Penguin' restaurant, which has operated in Nahariya for 75 years, took me aside and told me, ‘Raya, I believe in him. Come with me and become president of the association of the hospital’s friends.’ Once I started working with Dr. Barhoum, I was enamored. I saw a smart person with a lot of ambition standing before me, he was putting patient care first, and together we were moving the hospital forward.”
Strauss says that the opposition to Dr. Barhoum wasn’t just due to him being an Arab man. “It’s true that he blazed a trail,” she says, “and the lives of pioneers, in every area, aren’t easy. But there were other facts standing against him. Doctors were bitter, they were saying ‘he’s young, he came from a private hospital and doesn’t understand public hospitals.’ It was a fear of the unknown, just like what’s going on with the police now.”
This is the first time Dr. Barhoum has given an interview since he entered the director’s office. “Up until now I’ve only given responses on specific topics, and kept my personal story to myself”, he says. ”I ran away from exposure, mainly due to the mess in the beginning, among other reasons. Now, I have achievements to show. The Galilee Medical Center was announced as one of only six hospitals to reach all of its quality criteria. Out of the six, it’s the only government hospital. We’re in a period of development and productivity.”
We?
“Yes, we. My biggest opponents have become my friends. It’s all behind us, thank God.”
Thank God?
“Of course, I’m a believer.”
Taking inspiration from Aharon Barak
Dr. Masad (Not Masud, a fairly common mistake) Barhoum (many mistake the name for having an Iraqi-Jewish origin) is a Shfar’am-born Christian Arab. When he was 13, his family moved to Haifa. “My parents wanted to raise their children in a stronger education system,” he says. “We lived in Abbas, the neighborhood for Arabs who wanted a good quality of life. I studied at a public Jewish high school in the city for a year, and then transferred to the Greek Orthodox high school after that.”
In order to strengthen your religious identity?
“No, my Christian identity developed on Sundays, in church, where I wore a robe and carried the holy water and learned the most important lesson in life – compassion. I transferred to the Orthodox high school because it was ’73 (the year of the Yom Kippur War), with casualties and wounded soldiers and captives, and it wasn’t easy for an Arab to study at a Jewish school. The other students brought to school what they heard at home from their parents, and I became a pariah.
“I was a 13-year-old boy and I was ashamed to tell my parents how hard the situation was, but I have a trait I inherited from my father: When you say stuff about me, it passes by me and I don’t react. My father once told me something that has stayed with me to this day: ‘Look back to learn from history, and look forward so you can study and work in Israel.’ I don’t hold a grudge against anyone who sent abuse my way. Today, I’m even able to understand them.”
What do you understand?
“That the Israeli education system teaches Jews that Arabs are the enemy, and I, as an Arab in Israel, have become an enemy. Unfortunately, nothing has changed since then, not in education and not in perception.”
Barhoum decided to study medicine as early as the eighth grade, when he devoured an anatomy book his father brought him, but actually signed up to study accounting at the University of Haifa.
“After the third class, I understood it wasn’t for me and left,” he says. “The Registration period for the medical department was closed, so I transferred to Jerusalem, studied math and physics, and when the year ended, I signed up to study medicine at the Technion.”
Was military service an option for you?
“No, and the concept of volunteering was non-existent in my environment. My parents raised me on a different path: School, high school, university, work. I didn’t even think of taking a break from it. But my two eldest daughters did national service and I think it was a wise, and correct step. Even if they had wanted to enlist in the IDF, I wouldn’t have stopped them.”
There are those who claim that the high percentage of Arab students in medical schools is also due to the fact that instead of going into the military, they keep taking the psychometric entrance test (the standard test for college and university applicants in Israel) again and again, and improve their scores.
“I’m familiar with that argument. There are also those who claim that in certain places Arab teachers help their students pass the high school final exams, but I don’t want to respond to rumors. In my day, 60 students applied to the Technion’s medical school. Seven got in, including me. My eldest daughter, Ghadir, who’s 25, told my wife and me that ‘it’s because of you that I’m not going to study medicine, because you’re both doctors and I didn’t see you.’
“Rana, our 23-year-old, didn’t see us and still picked medicine. She took the psychometric test twice and improved her grade, and still didn’t get in. So she decided that she wasn’t going to get a degree here and went over to study medicine in the Czech Republic, in an English-language school.”
At the Technion, Barhoum met Mari Nufi, who was studying three years below him and today runs a child endocrinology practice in the town of Shlomi. “With the education I got at home, it was clear to me that I’d marry someone like me, a Christian Arab,” he admits, “obviously not with a Jewish woman, but also not a Muslim Arab woman. Not because I disqualify those who aren’t Christians, but because of the cultural differences that make life difficult, especially after you have kids.
“In the US it’s easier to mix and celebrate Hanukkah with Christmas. In Israel it’s still complicated. The Medicine Department had three female Christian Arab students, and I picked the prettiest.”
Weren’t you worried about marrying another doctor, whose schedule was as busy as yours?
“In my parents’ home, long before the rise of feminism, my father and mother were partners in everything, and I am following in their footsteps. When I started my residency in internal medicine with the plan to carry that on into cardiology, my wife started a residency in pediatrics. Each one of us did 10-12 shifts a month, and my parents helped us with our eldest daughter, but I didn’t agree to let her sleep at their place. I told my wife, ‘each of us will do shifts separately, so there will always be someone sleeping at home, with the kid.’ And so it was. We didn’t have a life. We got to a situation where a significant change was in order. I decided to forgo my cardiology dreams and focus on family medicine, and fell in love with the field while in it.”
After a year living on Mount Carmel, the family moved to the Ramat Hashofet Kibbutz, and Dr. Barhoum ran the Yokne’am clinic for ten years. “And I was worked to the bone down there. At the beginning they gave me ten minutes per patient, and since there are people over there from the entire region, it was cut down to five and I felt that I can’t give them everything I need and want to,” he says. “Happily, Clalit Health Servives offered me the position of running a unit that continued care at patients’ homes, I developed it in an advanced way, and that’s what paved the way for me to run the Italian hospital."
When he was given the role of managing the Italian Hospital in Nazareth, Barhoum and his family moved to the city, and when he was given the job at Nahariya, the family moved to the Kabri kibbutz, then to Kfar Vradim.
Is your choice to live in these places an attempt to integrate into Jewish society?
"No, I'm not running away from my identity. I am a Christian Arab, I am a minority in this country, and I like living a quiet life, without noisy neighbors and weddings during the three months of summer, and without being questioned 'where are you headed?' when I enter my car at two in the morning to go to work, and above all I wanted my daughters to study in a good school.
"When my father raised me he said: 'Sit down now' or 'It is forbidden to interrupt adults when they are speaking'. That's how children are raised in Arab schools. When I arrived at Hebrew University I was shocked. I could not believe it when I heard how the students talked to the instructor and how they put their feet on the chairs. I thought they were rude . It took me a while until I was able to unwind."
And your daughters put their feet on the chairs?
"No, but they know how to express their views, they respect others, and during the tense days of Operation Protective Edge my high-school aged daughter did not experience discrimination. On the contrary, she felt that the system that taught its students tolerance embraced her. She did not experience what I did during the Yom Kippur War."
What language do they speak?
"The girls prefer Hebrew, but they speak Arabic perfectly. I express myself in Hebrew much better than I do in Arabic. When I started to run the hospital in Nahariya, in which many of the doctors are Arabs, I told them 'when you work, speak in Hebrew. Outside of work, do what you want. As long as we are the minority it's not polite to speak in an unknown language around others.'"
As a manager, do you continue to practice medicine?
"Unfortunately not. As a family physician I find it difficult to do so, and when you do not deal with it on a daily basis you get rusty. I want to believe that I have no problem removing the rust. In order not to make it worse, it I continue reading articles and department heads keep me up to date."
If you knew you would have to give up on professional satisfaction, why did you desire to get into hospital management?
"I wanted to get ahead, it's natural. In Yokneam I serviced 100,000 people wheras the Galilee Medical Center services about 600,000 people - Jews, Muslims, Druze, Christians and Circassians from Acre, Carmiel, Misgav, Sasa and Rosh Hanikra. I changed the name to the 'Medical Center', and to the Galilee I added ' professional and humane medicine'.
"I was inspired by Justice Aharon Barak, who wrote 'we do not expect a man to behave towards his fellow man as an angel, nor as a wolf, we merely beseech him to act as a human being'. The slogan 'being human to a human is human' appears on posters in every corner of the hospital, from the departments to the elevators. For me it's not a slogan, it's a way of life. Every person entering the hospital ceases to be Jewish, Arab, rightist or leftist. In this place there are only two kinds of people: Patients and caregivers."
Did a Jew ever refuse to be treated by you because you are an Arab?
"Never, but I guess I would not be hurt in such a situation. If that happened I would turn to a colleague, ask her to go to the patient and I would tell the patient, 'You wanted a Jew? Here she is. I prefer to solve problems in a straightforward manner.
"I live in a nation that has racist manifestations and I am able to understand what the blacks feel in the United States. That's how it is all over the world. All majorities oppress minorities, and every minority works a thousand times harder to prove that he is equal. So I work a thousand times harder and don't complain. C'est la vie."
