Doc Tales - Dr. Michael Alkan
Doc Tales Podcast: Oct 7, 2023 - Long-time NATAN active volunteer and member of NATAN’s governing board, Dr. Michael Alkan, speaks with his son, Yoni Alkan, about the events of October 7th and about his work treating the survivors at NATAN’s medical clinics for evacuees. Listen to the podcast to hear Dr. Alkan tell the story in his own words. The full transcript of the podcast is below.
Doc Tales
Episode 000.01 – Oct. 7th 2023 https://spotifyanchor-web.app.link/e/RTJyzG5auEb, (45 minutes)
Recorded Nov.4, 2023
TRANSCRIPT
Yoni Alkan
Hello and welcome to Doc Tales… The podcast where I get to interview my dad about his lifelong adventures as a doctor in Israel and all around the world. I'm Yoni Alkan.
Dr. Michael Alkan
And I’m Dr. Michael Alkan
Yoni Alkan
And he's here to tell you in his own voice his DocTales. We are recording this on November 4th, 2023. We wanted to record this as quickly as possible and put it up online as quickly as possible. Just that you understand we have over 20 episodes recorded and on the backlog.
We just didn't have time to edit them and to put them up online. But I wanted to put this one up because it is burning. It is the moment. It is what's happening right now. So, editing won't be perfect. You might hear a few things in here, us coughing because I just wanted to put it up as fast as possible, but it is from the heart and it is immediate.
I want to also give a short warning that this episode includes, highly emotional, experiences. A few graphical descriptions, but nothing too horrendous, I hope, but please be careful, with your listening. and make your own choices about how open you are to listening to, just witnessing, people in the, this horrible situation that has happened on October 7th in Israel.
I want to let my father speak and share his volunteering and experiences in the last few weeks. So let's listen along.
Dr. Michael Alkan
From October 7th and on, our lives will be divided into two parts, two sessions, whatever happened before and whatever happened since. The morning of October 7th was the worst morning probably in the history of the State of Israel.
It has been compared to the 1973 Yom Kippur War. There is no comparison. Yes, in both cases we were badly surprised by the enemy, but still. In 1973, the cry out for help was soldiers who were attacked by soldiers. On October 7th, civilians were attacked by a militant guerrilla gang that came to murder, rape, abduct, destroy, rob, only God knows where they have collected this amount of brutality and hatred. I would like to tell you a little bit about what happened since October 7th with me personally. It is the first time that I'm going to tell you a story in present tense because it is unfolding as we speak and there is no definite end game or date in which this will be over. It probably will take a long time and it will take much, much longer to heal the trauma, the wounds, the mistrust. The combination of no fear and no hope, which is terrible. And we went to war with the emotion that this is revenge. And revenge is the worst guide, because any decision taken with this emotion in mind is irrational. But how can you be rational after what happened on October 7th?
I was in total shock for about 2 days, after which I was approached by Physicians for Human Rights where I volunteer at the clinic. I’m not sure that we have dedicated a chapter of this podcast to my work of 18 years for this NGO that takes care of the undocumented people who in French are called ‘sans papiers’ – without papers – that provides healthcare to people who have nothing. And now this same NGO was the first to organize a makeshift clinic in a hotel to which the survivors of the massacre from one of the kibbutz were brought.
Yoni Alkan
This is from Kibbutz Be’eri?
Dr. Michael Alkan
Yes, this is from Kibbutz Be’eri which is the kibbutz that sits on the corner between the border with Sinai and the border with the Gaza Strip, at the southern end of the Gaza Strip. During that time the number of definitely murdered and missing persons was 104. It later grew to 120 in a community of about 600 people. And they were all in one hotel, including two nurses who survived but were badly and totally no help from them to the team of 2 doctors and a wonderful nurse who started the clinic from the red bags that we brought back from Morocco several weeks ago from our activity during the earthquake there. And I refer to the difference between helping the earthquake in Morocco and helping Kibbutz Be'eri. as the difference between the shirt and the skin. This time, it was definitely the skin. And the pain was shared in a way that no humanitarian activity in the past could ever compare.
Because there was no cultural barrier between us and the survivors. There was no language issue. We were like brothers who have lost a third brother, and a sister, and sons, and parents. It was awful. In kibbutz life, there is an assembly which gathers almost every Saturday evening. It usually is very boring because they discuss minor issues of how to lead the kibbutz in the next week or so.
Most of the elderly women sit there with their knitting, most of the men go out to smoke every five minutes or so, and some members are arguing at the top of their voices about minute things. In that hotel where the evacuees were concentrated, or shipped to, they had a kibbutz meeting. And I assure you, nobody was leaving the room.
Nobody was knitting. They started by reciting a poem where the refrain, the returning phrase is, And the wheat will grow again. And then came two lists of names. One of the ones who were known to be massacred and killed, whose cadavers were identified. And then a long, long list of people with whom the contact was severed.
It contained unidentified bodies. It contained people who were known to be abducted to the Gaza Strip. And in both lists, family names repeated themselves four and five times for complete devastation of a whole family. And I was supposed to sit there as a doctor if somebody needs medical help, and there were about 350 people, and everybody was crying, including the doctor and the nurse who were present.
It was one of the most difficult moments in my life. And as I said, It didn't touch the shirt, it touched the skin.
Yoni Alkan
And I will say, I'm, I'm looking up right now. The kibbutz Be’eri had, 1100 people and 130 of them were murdered on October 7th, 2023. So more than 10% of the population was gone.
Dr. Michael Alkan receiving patients at NATAN’s medical clinic for evacuees, survivors of the Oct. 7th attack and massacre.
Dr. Michael Alkan
You have counted the elderly and the children. 600 is the members, the backbone of the community. One thing I have to say in favor of that day: the resilience. The feeling of community. Hugging each other. Supporting each other. Taking care of the children together, was absolutely amazing. And all of this while we run a clinic, and listen to horrific stories. Because this is what needed to be done. It wasn't medical care. There were no casualties, injuries or severe illnesses,
It was a time to listen, to hug.
I left that place at the end of the work completely shattered.
Yoni Alkan
I want to ask you, I want you to, to share something that was shared with you, but I don't want to share horrors with the listeners, but I do want to at least share a little bit of what you've seen or heard about the pain or. Is there a story about a person, and not necessarily about what happened to them, but about what, I don't know, what they've gone through?
Is there something you can share?
Dr. Michael Alkan
I will give the example later in the story because it is in a different context. Okay, okay. It took me three days to gather myself and to volunteer to go down again to the Dead Sea hotels. Now, this is a place for hiking. This is a place for spa of the healing powers of the water of the Dead Sea or the mud on the beaches. This is not a place where you want to be when you're in need, because it's the end of the line. The civilian population is minimal, people live up in Arad, which is a thousand meters higher and about thirty kilometers away on a very winding road. The next hospital is a hundred kilometers away, and that is my hospital, Soroka. So the feeling was that whatever we can do in order not to send a howling ambulance up the hill with the people who might need a chest xray, we’d better listen to the lungs with our stethoscopes and make do with that, rather than increase the trauma and the hurt.
Dr. Michael Alkan, standing right, with the staff at NATAN’s medical clinic for evacuees, survivors of the Oct. 7th attack and massacre.
After two, actually three days of recovery, I joined the organization that sent me out to Morocco, NATAN, who started a [medical] clinic along with a dental clinic so there was family practice, primary care and emergency dental care. The history of the dental care of NATAN is interesting because they have started a volunteer clinic purchasing a mobile dental unit to help people who have no health insurance, no dental health insurance in downtown Haifa where poverty reigns, where there’s a large Muslim community. And they folded this unit and brought it down to the Dead Sea, to function as a Dental Clinic for evacuees. And this time it was very different. We were responsible in that clinic for 3 out of the 10 hotels along the strip of the Dead Sea shore. And the clinic was manned by doctors who regularly work for one of the larger HMOs in Israel, so that they come with their laptop computer, log on to their regular job computer system, open the patient’s file according to his i.d. number and make a permanent record of any visit, any prescription, any workup that is done in the clinic.
People don't line up, people come and are admitted immediately. There are two doctors. and a nurse and a clerk whose major job is to run the roster of the doc, of the dentists because they need to have a list of admissions to the dentist, unlike primary care where you just come in when the kid has a fever or when a boy was injured while playing football near the pool.
Here, these people need dental care. And it can only be done one by one, and the list is always longer than the time that the volunteer dentist and assistant can share. So, this is what we have done for a whole week, and it was very, very different from what I saw among the members of the kibbutz. These were people from development towns in the western Negev near Gaza.
Yoni Alkan
And this is more Sderot, right?
Dr. Michael Alkan
Sderot, Netivot, Ofakim. These were the towns . And let me assure you, no resilience. No sense of community. It’s every family for herself, and everybody else can go to hell.
Yeah. So the tender mourning and suffering seen in this tightly knit kibbutz community was nonexistent in the population that we served. I’ll give one example:
A father, mother and grandma bring in an 8 and a half month old female baby with a dislocated shoulder. And the first thing that Grandma says, she says “She woke up like this from sleep,” [Yoni: chuckle] And my response was the opposite from yours. I smiled and I said, ‘Okay’. Because I know that this injury is because you lift the child by the arm. Yeah. Anyway, they insist they want a pediatrician from the HMO that they are registered with, now. Yeah. I said, ‘Look, it’s not so urgent. Please sit. The family doctor, family practitioner from your HMO went for lunch. He will come back in about half an hour. He will see the baby. It will be okay.
“No! We need help now! Maybe the arm of the child is in danger!” And I keep my cool and I say, “Please wait.” And the door of the clinic opens and we have a visit of the headquarters of one of the two HMOs, Clalit. And lo and behold, it’s a doctor who I have schooled as a resident in Soroka, in my hospital a long time ago. And he hugs me and says, it’s so good to see you here. It’s so good that you still keep going. And I said, “My god, you’re a pediatrician, aren’t you? I have a patient for you.”
I send mother and grandmother to the waiting room, and daddy goes in with the baby. And within less than one minute, the shoulder is in place. The father is holding it in place, hugging the child. The mother comes in and says, “We want to go.” I said, “No, please wait another 10 minutes for the family doc to document this event in the baby's file, because this might recur. And we want the evidence of what we saw and what we've done.” Doctor came, opened the file, everything fell into place. The woman, the mother, comes up to me and says, “I want to apologize for the way I spoke to you.” I smiled and said, “We all are on edge. We're all in the same boat. It's okay.” And she said, no, I, I, I need to say how sorry I am. And I said, I'll say, first in Hebrew, [do you avoid touch?]
Yoni Alkan
Are you too religious to touch? Basically right?
Dr. Michael Alkan
Yeah. And she says, no way. No way. I said, Can I hug you? And she throws her arms around me and I hug her and everything falls into place and the four of them leave the clinic happy. So this is one of the happy stories.
The way we ran things there was that we started clinic at nine in the morning and ran straight through seven in the evening, ten hour shift. And one of us took the clinic phone and held it for the night as backup if anybody needs urgent help. Because this is the Dead Sea Shore. There is nothing there. There’s no clinic, worth mentioning. Some of the hotels have some nurses that take care of the people that come for the treatment of their skin lesions. Nothing like primary care. So we needed to have a night shift.
And on one of the nights I took the phone myself because the two doctors were so young. I said, ‘I will do the night shift.’ And still in the evening I get a call. A woman fainted in the hotel, and the hotel was the hotel of the people of Kibbutz Be’eri. So I drove there and the son of the patient was waiting downstairs and said, “She didn’t faint. She disintegrated from sorrow.”
She was about 60 years old, part of a group of people who came at the age of 18, 19, during their military service to join the kibbutz, Nahal. And the whole group except for her perished on October 7th.
Yoni Alkan
Oh my God.
Dr. Michael Alkan
The morning before I saw her, the charred body of her father was identified in what was the remains of his home in the kibbutz. And I go into the room and the woman is crying like, like a psychiatric patient, you know. Crying her eyes out and a minute later she’s laughing hysterically, very loud. One moment she lies in bed and can’t move any of her limbs. The other she’s kicking and beating and turning. There’s a very young social worker standing next to her, totally helpless. I sit at the bedside, take her hand, look her in the eyes and I know that this calls for everything I have, and maybe more. Yeah. And she says, “Who the hell are you?” And I say, “I am the doctor of Kibbutz Kfar Aza,” which is true. It was 35, no, 40 years ago. But still it was the second kibbutz that was hit so terribly like Kibbutz Be’eri. And she looks back at me and she says, “Wow. You understand me.” And I say, “Yes, I do. And what you’re going through is an absolutely normal response to a totally unnormal situation. You are okay. The world is not okay. And you are responding to a terrible world in the way that is the most adequate and most appropriate.” And she looks at me and she says, “Tomorrow morning there is a mass funeral for the members who were identified. Can I go?” And I say, “No. You cannot. You will stay here. I will give you medication. And I want you to sleep the night.” And she says, “I will not take any medicine.” And I said, “Look at the color of my hair. I have been a doctor for 55 years. I have been already through all of the movies. I have seen it all. And I know what I’m doing. And I put the first pill in her hand and gave her a glass of water and she swallowed. And I gave her another pill upping the dose to as high as I dared. And she was now calm. Not because of the medication yet, but because she felt better. I hugged her and I said, “You will be okay and I wish you good night and sleep well.”
Dr. Alkan with the leaders of NATAN Worldwide Disaster Relief meeting as they establish NATAN’s clinic in Eilat for the evacuees, survivors of the Oct. 7 attack and massacre. Left to right: Anat Belluco - Head of NATAN HR, Danny Kahn - NATAN Chair, Dr. Michael Alkan, Dr. Sharon Shaul - Head of NATAN’s Emergency Medical Relief Operations
Next morning, before clinic opened, I drove to that hotel and went straight up. The hotel was practically empty. All the kibbutz members went to the funeral. And I went. The door to the room was open. The Social Worker was there. The woman was completely calm, completely normal, and she said, “Who are you?” And I said, “I'm the doctor who took care of you last night.” And she said, “They told me I was crazy last night. I don't remember a thing.” I said, I must have done all right. I don't want you to remember. And the social worker says, You have run an emotional marathon. Yeah. Her face will remain for me, with me for the rest of my life. Her tears, deep sorrow.
And then I went home, back from the Dead Sea. A long shower, good night's sleep. And I gathered all my strength and emotions and drove to the hotel where the survivors of Kibbutz Kfar Aza were staying with one goal. I was going to visit Shay. Yeah, He lived across our house, for the two years we were members in the kibbutz, and I was their physician. Almost every evening we spent together either on the lawn in front of our house or on the lawn in front of their house.
Yoni Alkan
Yeah, I want to interject and kind of give a little bit of context.
I’m 44 years old today. From the age of zero to the age of two we lived in Kibbutz Kfar Aza. Aza is Gaza in Hebrew, So you can understand how close it is. It is right there. And it is one of the most impacted towns from the events of last month. And I remember, I do want to give this context that I remember when I talked with you when it, the first week after the happenings And you said that you were taking care of Be'eri people and you said I do not dare go to the Kibbutz Kfar Aza people because I will know too many people and it will be too harsh for me and I'm, I'm, yeah, so, so this was three, three, four weeks ago and now this has happened a week ago so please do continue.
Dr. Michael Alkan
So Chava and Shay, both 80 years old, were sitting with the remaining family members, mourning their son who was murdered. Shay was a member of Knesset, a member of parliament at a certain stage of his life. He was the head of the regional council for that whole region. He was chairman of the board of, Sapir College. And I say, Shay, when you get up from the seven days of mourning, will you go back to public life, to activity?
And he says, Chava and I are 80. We will go to and look for assisted living. Just the two of us. No kibbutz. And they will not put me in a caravan for two years until they rebuild the kibbutz. Which is actually a memory of the retreat of the Jewish settlements, the Israeli settlements in the Gaza Strip 2005. Yeah, right.
Yoni Alkan
Yeah, so just again context: in 2005 Israel withdrew from Gaza unilaterally and that included evacuation by force of Jewish Israeli citizens who lived in the Gaza Strip,
Dr. Michael Alkan
more than 6,000.
Yoni Alkan
Yeah, and which was a huge rift in the Israeli people at the time and I remember it very well and when they were evacuated they were put in uwhat people jokingly called caravilot, which is a caravan as if it's a villa, right and um, it was poor living and kind of like a mobile home, situation.
And people were very upset about that.
Dr. Michael Alkan
Another hindsight is that these settlements were, most of them were on, at the seaside of Gaza. And on October 7th, they would have all been slaughtered. For sure. For sure. For sure. And their lives were saved by this retreat from the Gaza Strip.
Yoni Alkan
I didn’t think about it that way, but you’re right.
Dr. Michael Alkan
Okay. So. The organization, NATAN, was smart enough to ask me not to go back to the Dead Sea. But I was quote unquote promoted to become the head of the next clinic that was started in Eilat. And Eilat is a different ballpark altogether. Eilat is a town, a resort with 30,000 inhabitants and, about 50,000 hotel rooms.
Yoni Alkan
It’s the southernmost city in Israel. On the Red Sea.
Dr. Michael Alkan
So again people from the development towns. Again a clinic with a second mobile dental clinic that was established in the same venue, which is the unused cellar of one of the hotels. And we really succeeded in establishing a clinic that served all Israelis. Not really asking anything but who is your HMO so we can document your visit. And I spent a week there . On one hand it was difficult to hear again more of the terrible stories of people. There was one woman who lived on the third floor of an apartment building across the street from the police station of Sderot, which was the first target of HAMAS. The first target on the attack was to conquer the police station and shoot whoever is in there and whoever is outside. And she took her phone and filmed everything. And ever since that day she’s looking at these movies over and over and over again, showing them to whoever wants to see them, whoever doesn’t want to see them. She was the only person that I asked to be evacuated for psychiatric help. Because she couldn’t sleep at night. She would sit and watch it over and again, the photographs that she took of the massacre that took place in that police station. And it was a very prolonged and very difficult battle. And it wasn’t until the police station was destroyed over the heads of the 12 infiltrators who were holding the fort there. And the bodies of the policemen who were killed earlier.
So these events really are marked like a tattoo on my skin, not like a flower on my shirt. And I must say, there are two lines of very difficult feelings. One of them is the complete failure of the Israeli government up to this day. We haven't seen any real activity of the government. We're on our own and we're an NGO. We are based on volunteers. And number two, the betrayal. The army wasn't there. So the disbelief in any authority is coming through. The second, the second leading emotion is the uncertainty of the meaning of the word victory. I really don't know how to define victory. The government defined the victory as the end of Hamas rule in Gaza.
Yoni Alkan
And the return of the kidnapped.
Dr. Michael Alkan
And the return of the kidnapped. Okay, and then? There are two hundred people in Gaza.
Yoni Alkan
Not just that. Like, What does that mean? Like, how are you going to save 200 people so easily? More than 200 people from, who got kidnapped? And what does it mean, dismantling Hamas? It is, it is a concept. It is an idea. It is not just people. And I have no idea what they mean by that as a goal for victory. I think it's ridiculous.
Dr. Michael Alkan
Look. One of the TV, anchors said today is the birthday, 62nd birthday of Hamas leader in Gaza, Yehia Sinwar. I hope it's his last. Yeah. Come on, come on. Is this, is this the leader? Is this is the voice of Israel? And you know, if, if we kill hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza, we will be like them. Yeah. Do we want this?
Yoni Alkan
You are voicing. You are giving voice to one of my deepest sorrows from this situation. And I will caveat this and say that I am far away. I am not living there, but I see my people. And I hear my people. And many of them are, are... on, on my, with my perspective, but I see quite a few who are just calling for destruction and annihilation and murder, and they do not see the irony in what they are saying. They do not see the, the, you are just justifying what the world is saying that, Israel is trying to, to, to create a genocide situation, which I don't believe that is the case, but your words are saying that's what you want, and it is ridiculous, and that includes one of the Knesset members, who, who we both, have a lot of criticism towards, who basically said I saw five minutes of the film about the atrocities of October 7th, and I had to step out.
I couldn't do any more. It was so horrible. And I'm like, yes, yes, that, that is very true. And then she says, and we just have to kill them all and, and destroy them all. And I'm like, no, you went the wrong direction. You don't understand that that is exactly the wrong way to go at it. And I'm sorry, I'm going off on a rant here, but it's, it's just in my, in my being right now.
Dr. Michael Alkan
Yes. I want to say something about the support for Palestine, the support for the Palestinians. Yeah. If we look at the long run, there has to be a solution for the struggle between Israel and the Palestinians. One hundred percent. And I agree. with the protesters who protest in favor of Gaza because genocide in Gaza will only perpetuate the problem.
Yoni Alkan
Absolutely.
Dr. Michael Alkan
And there is a growing feeling in Israel that once fighting is over, this right-wing vicious government has to fall.
Yoni Alkan
Yeah, and this is kind of where I was going. First of all, I think it’s extremely serendipitous that we’re recording this on November 4th, which is the date of the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, which was a huge pivotal point in Israeli history and politics and I want to remind the listeners that before the Saturday of October 7th was the 9-month count of Israeli protests in the streets for 9 straight months every Saturday. People had hundreds of thousands of peaceful protests every Saturday for 9 months opposing the government, opposing this right-wing majority that they managed to acquire and the horrors that they brought on our people.
And so when people say, Oh, Israelis are, are trying to, to do genocide, you have to understand that a lot of Israelis, and I think the majority, are opposing what the government is trying to do. And it's, it's so painful for me to hear it from, my liberal friends here in the U. S. that they don't understand.
the complexity of the situation, and it is not, there are reasons for things that are happening. There's a reason why October 7th happened, you know, the, the saying that the UN, said that it doesn't happen in a vacuum, that's correct. It's not the right thing to say at the moment in my opinion, but it's true. We have a very, very extremely complicated situation over there and people have been trying to solve it for years and the one bright point I'm hoping from this situation is that it will shake the Etch-A-Sketch and change the need for a solution, a peaceful solution between these people and that's my hope.
Dr. Michael Alkan
I think we should close here before I start crying.
Yoni Alkan
Too late. Yeah, this is extremely, extremely difficult for us, and I really appreciate you sharing these difficult times. And I appreciate your work and what you've done your whole life, but I hope the listeners who listen to other episodes understand just how Israel is important to you and how it is ingrained in your whole being and your whole history.
How you grew up with this country and fought for it and seeing this is, is extremely difficult. I hope that we'll be able to record an update at a later time, if you're willing to share more of your experiences. I really want to thank you, Dad, for all that you do.
Dr. Michael Alkan
You're welcome, and it was not easy to record this chapter, but it was very important for me to put things straight, to tell you my view, and it is only my view, but it comes from the heart.
Yoni Alkan
Thank you so much for joining us on today's tale. This show was recorded and edited by me, Yoni Alkan, and it would not be made possible without the wonderful help of my brother, Shai Alkan. The music you're hearing right now and in the beginning is by the awesome Jefferson Bergey. And you can find more about us at DocTales.org. I hope you join us again here at DocTales, and in the meanwhile, take care of yourself and take care of somebody else.