Israeli Arab physician found road to success

Fahed Hakim, M.D., clearly loves the practice of medicine, and loves working at the Rambam Health Care Campus in Haifa, Israel.

In his presentation at Congregation Sinai to about 50 people on Oct. 16, he spent much of his time enthusiastically talking about the facility — what it does, what it offers, and its ambitious plans for the future that include an underground hospital, a children’s hospital, and a cardiovascular hospital, among other projects.

But almost inevitably, Hakim — a pediatric pulmonologist now studying sleep medicine at the University of Chicago — has to be about more than medicine. He is a Christian (Greek Orthodox) Arab and a citizen of Israel, born in Nazareth.

So the Rambam Campus staff members may pride themselves on how “in the suffering individual, we see the human being,” and never ethnicities, religions, or regional politics, as Hakim said.

But Hakim in his life sometimes has to negotiate uncomfortable situations. “To the Israeli side, I’m an Arab; to the Arab side, I’m an Israeli,” he said.

And the questions from the audience members predominantly were devoted to this topic.

Hakim acknowledged that problems have existed. When he goes to the airport in Israel, he often gets intensely scrutinized by the Israeli security people, purely because he is an Arab; and he said that this makes him feel like a second-class citizen.

And he said that he is “not committed to every word” of the Israeli national anthem “Hatikvah,” which includes a line about “the Jewish soul yearning.” But in public, he said he respects the feelings of Jewish Israelis.

Yet there also were Israeli Jews who mentored and encouraged him from the time he at 13 participated in a program for gifted children at the Weitzman Institute of Science in Rehovot. So he does not dwell on the negative.

“It’s easy to hate,” he said. But in Israel, “If you try to do it [achieve success], you will get it.”

And Hakim also has a sense of humor about some of the situations in which he has found himself. He has been a guest at and participant in Jewish weddings, including in the haredi Orthodox Mea Shearim area of Jerusalem — and he said that for some reason people there “wanted to get me married” (which he is).

Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics states that in 2010 about 1.6 million Israeli citizens are Arabs, about 20 percent of the population. Of that group, about 117,000 are Christians.