This week’s episode of Scheer Intelligence welcomes someone with extraordinary courage and experience not only in Palestine but the Middle East as a whole. Dr. Tarek Loubani, a Kuwait-born, Canada-based Palestinian doctor, who also serves as the medical director at Gila, a global humanitarian healthcare organization, provides an indispensable account of what he knows is Palestine.
Despite his various missions providing medical care and assistance to those who need it most in often helpless regions in the Middle East, Loubani was still on the receiving end of brutal punishment and treatment for simply being Palestinian. Israelis, Loubani said, do not fundamentally understand Palestinians are people.
“They don't fundamentally understand that Palestinians' No. 1 interest is their own freedom, safety, dignity. They think, in the typical colonizer way, that all the actions of Palestinians revolve around them, around wanting to do something to them rather than revolving around Palestinians and what Palestinians want for themselves,” Loubani noted.
Loubani describes a moment where he was severely beaten by an Egyptian policeman for stating he is Palestinian rather than Canadian and Loubani thinks, “That's a microcosm of what I experienced as a Palestinian, because everybody tells me the same thing: Tell me you're not a Palestinian and I'll let you be and I'll leave you alone. But say you're a Palestinian, I will beat the f*** out of you.”
Even through nonviolence, as with the Great March of Return in 2018, where thousands of unarmed Palestinians demonstrated near the border of Gaza and Israel, Loubani experienced the same treatment. “I was shot in 2018 through both legs by an Israeli sniper and that happened while I was in full medical garb at one of these protests with nobody armed. One of my colleagues was killed shortly after I was shot.”
The message Palestinians receive on a daily basis and have received for almost all their history is one of denying their existence and agency, Loubani expressed. Host Robert Scheer agreed and points to the Jewish experience as being ironically identical. “Every Jewish person who heard what you said should cry. They should see themselves. Why they don't is the greatest betrayal of the whole Jewish tradition,” Scheer, who is Jewish, said.