A Bridge to Life

Media Coverage

A Bridge to Life

Jonathan Miles is an American on a mission who helps bring desperately ill Palestinian children from the Gaza Strip to Israeli hospitals

The Jerusalem Post 26 September 2001

By Patricia Golan

It's early morning at the Erez crossing. It's guarded by a series of formidable IDF checkposts and barriers. The heat is already stifling, but Jonathan Miles, an American Christian, is on a mission.

Miles greets several Palestinian mothers holding infants with serious heart defects and shepherds them into a waiting ambulance. They're on their way to Wolfson Hospital in Holon for urgent medical care. Several times a week, Miles travels between Israel and Gaza to help Palestinian children get desperately needed medical care that is unavailable where they live.

Passage for Palestinians into Israel is always difficult - these days during the continuing Palestinian-Israeli violence, it is almost impossible. Miles has managed to obtain permits to allow the babies, who suffer from serious heart defects, to leave Gaza to go to Wolfson Hospital.

The soldiers on duty all seem to know Miles, chatting with him in Hebrew.

Between the Israeli and Palestinian checkposts there's a long stretch of empty, paved road. On the Palestinian side, Miles is as chummy with the Palestinian soldiers as he is with the Israelis. The Palestinians call him "doctor," ask after his family and joke with him about having to push his minivan to get it started.

The soft-spoken and self-effacing Miles has become an unofficial yet persuasive liaison between desperate Muslim families in Gaza and Jewish medical personnel in Israel.

The continuing conflict has left a terrible toll on an already suffering and impoverished population in Gaza. Medical services in Gaza are basic. For want of sophisticated procedures, children often die mere kilometers away from fully staffed hospitals in Israel.

Through Light to the Nations [now Shevet Achim], the Christian charitable fund Miles founded and directs, he acts as a conduit for desperately ill Palestinian children to receive emergency lifesaving open-heart surgeries in hospitals inside of Israel.

The Israeli doctors and nurses volunteer their time, and the hospitals make their operating rooms and equipment available at cost. But a great deal of money must be raised to pay for medical services and equipment. Around 80 percent of the cost of open-heart surgery is borne by Israeli government hospitals; Light to the Nations covers the rest.

"We appeal [for funds] to followers of Jesus from different countries around the world," explains Miles. "For the most part, these are people who have an interest in Israel and what's happening here, and we let them know about the efforts the Israeli hospitals are making to reach these children and ask them to encourage them in that. These aren't rich donors, but people who give from what they have." The organization has no formal affiliation with any churches. Miles and his wife, Michelle - both aged 39 - locate the children in the field, liaise between the Israeli and Palestinian health services and patiently juggle the endless bureaucratic hassles. A small group of dedicated Christian volunteers in Israel handles the administration.

Before starting out in his minivan on the day's mission, Miles says a prayer from Lamentations asking for God's protection. He recites the verse in Hebrew - a way, he later explains, of acknowledging Christianity's connection to Jewish sources.

Miles begins his rounds in Khan Yunis, visiting families with children who are candidates for care in Israeli hospitals. Two-year-old Yasmin had open-heart surgery last year, but, says her mother, she may have to return for further surgery. The family's immaculate, nicely furnished apartment is a sharp contrast to the building itself, a rundown block of flats with a filthy, crumbling stairwell leading onto a garbage-strewn street.

Yasmin's mother, Um Sheyma, has four other children. She praises the attention given to Yasmin, and how quickly Miles manages to arrange checkups in Israel.

In the rural outskirts of Khan Yunis, donkeys pull carts heavily laden with wood along narrow roads. Four-year-old Said lives with his family in an unfinished cement house. In one room, a tiny baby girl lies on a bed covered with gauze to protect her from flies. Said had open-heart surgery two years ago, but the local doctors think he might need a second operation.

Miles learns that an American volunteer heart surgeon will be receiving patients in Ramallah next week, and Said has been put on the list. But the doctors at Wolfson who performed the original surgery want to see him. "This is an unusual situation when two people want to help these kids," remarks Miles. "Usually these children are unwanted."

Miles relates that when he first came to Israel, in 1990, as a committed Christian Zionist, he was far more interested in helping Jews from the former Soviet Union immigrate to Israel than in helping Palestinians.

He was inspired by a group of Israelis who were trying to find funds to help non-Jewish immigrants get medical care. "That was an eye-opener for me, seeing great medical care available in Israel, and a lot of neighbors around Israel who need that help but can't get it on their own." Then one day a fellow Christian volunteer took him to visit the Gaza Strip.

It was a period when the Palestinian health system was breaking down. "I started seeing these families with little blue babies in their arms, desperate, knowing that the treatment that can change their child's life is an hour's drive away, and no one would help them," says Miles. "We were in a situation where to be faithful to Jesus we could not just turn away and walk away from that. We were compelled, if God would help us, to get involved and to help make a way for those kids to get their treatment."

Beyond being an intermediary, Miles threw his lot in with the people of Gaza by moving his wife and six children to the town of Rafah, despite the nightly shelling. Recently they relocated to Jerusalem, amid the rising tensions. While in Rafah, his oldest daughters, Renana, 18, and Rebecca, 16, attended a local high school, wearing head coverings and long dresses, and speaking a nearly accentless Arabic. The other children, Joshua, 13. Elana, 10, Benayah, eight, and Zachariah, one, were home schooled.

Back in the minivan, Miles receives an anxious call from Palestinian pediatric cardiologist Bashir Afana, the main contact in Gaza for locating and referring children to his professional colleagues on the Israeli side.

A two-month-old girl has been diagnosed with serious heart failure and must be treated immediately. Miles calls Dr. Akiva Tamir, a cardiologist at Wolfson Hospital, a member of the volunteer team in the "Save a Child's Heart" program at Wolfson. It's the largest program in the world providing urgent pediatric heart surgery and follow-up care - free of charge - for children from Third World and developing countries.

"Can you send her over right away?" asks Tamir when he's heard the symptoms. "She may not make it till tomorrow." Now Miles needs to get all the paperwork done as quickly as possible. The Palestinian medical liaison says it's too late today; he'll try to do it tomorrow.

In one of the wards of the pediatric hospital in Khan Yunis, the tiny baby girl, Riman, lies with a blue pallor. Her father, a nurse, hovers over the crib. Her mother is dressed completely in black and has also covered her face with a veil, indicating she comes from an extremely conservative Muslim family.

Two days later, Riman is in the pediatric intensive care unit of Wolfson Hospital. Attached to an array of tubes and monitors, the infant has stabilized and will be successfully operated on in a few days.

Afana explains that babies with severe cyanosis, such as Riman, would die without this urgent intervention. He concedes that because of the virtual war going on with the Israelis, if it wasn't for the work of Miles and his organization it would be nearly impossible to get children like Riman to the Israeli hospitals.

Afana, who has studied medicine in the Gulf and in Scotland, doesn't regard the use of a Christian intermediary as odd. "Our job is not between Israelis and Jews and Muslims; our job is sincerely coming from the heart. We must help each other, and I think we have a good relationship with the Israeli doctors who are helping our patients." But Wolfson's Pediatric Intensive Care Unit director Dr. Sion Houri is frankly frustrated that his staff has almost no contact with the Palestinian doctors in Gaza. They never call him directly, he complains.

"The relations between us and the Palestinians are via a Christian organization; they're the ones who are actually approached by the Palestinian doctors when they know they are in trouble with a child who has a heart problem. It's part of our Middle East where nothing is simple, but the truth is that not only is it complicated, but it does not allow us to do what we can do. So it's sort of borderline ridiculous," laments Houri.

(In addition to Wolfson, Sheba, Rambam and Schneider hospitals have also treated Palestinian children for a fraction of the usual cost at the request of Light to the Nations.)

This particular day is a sad one at Wolfson. The founder and chief surgeon of the Save a Child's Heart project, Dr. Amram (Ami) Cohen, died suddenly the week before of apparent altitude sickness, at the age of 47, while climbing Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa. Cohen performed some 80 percent of the heart operations on the children rescued by Light to the Nations. All morning, Miles has been on the phone to the Israeli authorities in Gaza to persuade them to allow a baby boy, Muhammad Hijazi, and his parents from Rafah to attend the funeral.

Three months earlier, Cohen had performed complex surgery on Muhammad, which saved the boy's life. Eventually the Hijazis were permitted to go to the burial and spoke on behalf of the other parents in Gaza whose children had been treated by Cohen.

John Lawrence, an Anglican minister from the United Kingdom, drove the organization's ancient Peugeot to Gaza to pick up the family. He and his wife, Dawn, came to the country a year ago to volunteer for the Light to the Nations project.

They live in a flat near the hospital and help out with the arrangements and bookkeeping. Lawrence always carries a Bible and a dictionary in his bag - one or the other, he laughs, helps in communicating.

"My Christian faith is being lived out with people who, perhaps, have a very distorted view of Christianity, often for very good reasons because of the history of the Church and what it has done, both to Muslims and to the Jewish people," declares Lawrence. "I'm really seeking, in the midst of that, to be a bridge between the different faith communities and to be a witness and an example of God's love in this situation."

Christians who live and work in the Holy Land tend to be drawn into the polarization of the region. Protestant ministries, especially those with an Evangelical thrust, are usually ideologically committed to Israel, while other Christian expatriates, the Catholic and Orthodox churches and local Christians, identify strongly with the Palestinian cause. The pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian Christians are often at loggerheads.

Biblical scholar Joseph Frankovic, a board member of Light to the Nations, believes Miles's work "represents a new model for a Christian ministry; one in which Jew and Palestinian are brought closer together through the efforts of Christians. This [kind of] encounter between Jew and Arab paves over suspicion with trust, and hate with goodwill.

"I think what's so interesting about Jonathan," he continues, "is that it's not just a case of him being able to find that delicate and narrow course to chart; he identifies ideologically with the Evangelical charismatic group that itself is polarized in a very definite direction towards Christian Zionism. He's like a fish swimming against the current in his own community." Miles, too, is keenly aware of the polarization of the Christian community here, which tends to be either uncompromisingly pro-Israeli or pro-Palestinian. Yet he seems to be able to bridge this polarity.

"It's true that there is a lot of bitterness in the Land. For those of us who come from the outside, we will always be seeing some offense, or even be offended ourselves personally, one way or the other," comments Miles. "If I wanted to be someone who was a partisan of one side or the other, I could tell horrifying stories from Israelis and from the other side as well. I mean, these things happen, and if we don't have a way to be set free from that and to forgive very quickly whoever has offended us, the worst is going to become your enemy, and we'll find ourselves the friends of their enemies."

Our name Shevet Achim is taken from the Hebrew of Psalm 133: How good and how pleasant for
brothers to dwell together in unity...for there the LORD commanded the blessing--life forevermore.