This is an interview our host conducted with Dr Bill Slaughter, a Cambridge MA psychiatrist affiliated with Harvard Medical School who is a frequent traveler to the West Bank and, remarkably, Gaza.
"I met Bill on his first trip to Palestine in 2008. We were both attending a mental health conference in Ramallah that was actually originally scheduled to be held in Gaza, but the Israeli military would not allow participants to enter Gaza and so the conference was held in Ramallah with participation by Gazans held via the internet. The closest any of us got to Gaza was the Erez gate on the border of Israel where we all went to protest our exclusion from entering Gaza.
"Subsequently Dr Slaughter returns to the West Bank and Gaza almost every year, and is scheduled to return for his next visit this coming March of 2014. I sat down with Bill to discuss his commitment to the Palestinian struggle and to get an idea about how he relates to the Palestinian population both as an activist and as a physician whose skills as a psychiatrist are so welcomed and so needed by this population of people living under an oppressive occupation."
Dr Slaughter recounts the barriers, which he has amazingly managed to surmount, in order to get inside Gaza most years.
Award-winning and unique, This Week In Palestine airs at 8am ET Sundays as part of WZBC's Truth and Justice Radio. Listen in the Boston area at 90.3 FM or anywhere by internet at wzbc.org; the last two weeks can be found at that same website; go to tinyurl.com/twiplist for many earlier editions.
This Week In Palestine 1-19-2014
Interview with Dr Bill Slaughter, a psychiatrist who visits Gaza yearly