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56 Crossing cultures Partnerships ✡

Imagine a Christian organisation joining forces with an Israeli medical team to

save the lives of Arab babies... now that’s a news item you won’t see on your

TV screens every day! And in reality the story is even bigger than that...

A life-saving change of heart

hen American journalist Jonathan Miles opened a copy of ‘The
Jerusalem Report’ magazine in 1996 and read of three Ethiopian
W children brought to Israel for open-heart surgery, he called the
surgeon, Ami Cohen to ask, “What about children from Gaza?” Miles and
his family had just moved to the Gaza Strip, and found many children dy-
ing untreated of congenital heart defects which could be fully repaired in
neighbouring Israel. “Those are just the children we want to reach,” Cohen
replied. “But we can’t get anyone there to talk to us.”
And so a partnership was born
which has now flourished over two ‘Choking back tears,
decades. Cohen inspired a generation
of Israeli doctors to win discounts of he said, “I see kids
more than 50 per cent from the man-
agement of their government hospitals, like this all the
and then give up their personal time to Shevet Achim’s Jonathan Miles with
a Yazidi refugee girl in Israel for heart
raise funds and care for children who time, and can’t do
have no hope of treatment in their own surgery
countries. anything for them.”’
Christian volunteers from many which may prejudice the civil and re-
nations help find children anywhere ligious rights of existing non-Jewish
in the Middle East, get them to Israel, says, “and to find their child treated as communities in Palestine,’” Miles
adds. “This in turn calls to mind the
and provide a home for them before and if they’re just as precious as any other promise to Abraham that started this
after surgery. child on this earth. They’ve never been whole story: ‘In you all the families of
“There’s something tremendously treated that way anywhere else.”
healing for a refugee family to turn to “It’s reminiscent of the Balfour the earth will be blessed,’ (Genesis 12:3).
We are committed to sharing this truth
their ‘enemy’ as their last hope,” Miles pledge that ‘nothing shall be done
with our non-Jewish neighbours in the
Middle East.”
Miles was on hand when the first
Iraqi child came to Israel, shortly after
the fall of the Saddam regime in 2003.
“There had never been any relations
between the two countries, and I didn’t
have faith that there could be. But we
were visiting an American army doctor
in Kirkuk, Iraq, when a family came
through the door and laid a two-day-
old baby girl on the desk in front of
him. He examined her with a battle-
field sonogram device and told us she
needed emergency surgery within two
weeks. Choking back tears, he said, “I
see children like this all the time, and I
can’t do anything for them.”
“All I could think was, that if she
could reach the doctors in Israel, they
would take care of her. It seemed im-
Save a Child’s Heart senior surgeon Lior Sasson returns an Iraqi boy to his mother after possible, but God gave just a spark of
surgery: another family is offered life through this unique partnership faith to take the first step to go and