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Like millions upon millions of people around the world, including a much higher percentage of the Jewish population than Zionists would ever care to admit, I have been haunted by the profound helplessness I feel in response to the ongoing genocide that Israel is committing against the Palestinian people. I’ve protested at length, I’ve been extremely outspoken about the slaughter online, I’ve raised aid money for the children of Gaza, and I’ve watched so many of my peers do just as much, if not a whole lot more, in an effort to confront one of the worst and most unapologetic humanitarian atrocities since the Holocaust — an atrocity committed in my name, and paid for with my tax dollars.
And to what end? There are no moral victories in an ethnic cleansing. It’s estimated that Israel has killed more than 1,200 Palestinians since the “ceasefire” went into effect last October, and that is only the official count. One day, sooner than you might think, everyone will indeed have always been against this, but that will be of little consolation to the dead, just as it will be of little comfort to those of us who failed to stop them from dying.
Poh Si Teng’s bracing, tortured, and utterly vital “American Doctor” is a documentary born from — and in constant dialogue with — that gnawing sense of helplessness. Directed by a disillusioned veteran of America’s media industrial complex (Teng quit her job at ABC News in order to finance this project with $150,000 of her own money), it’s a film that powerfully, if counterintuitively, addresses that helplessness by looking at it through the lens of the most heroic and capable people among us: a trio of medical practitioners who travel to Gaza in order to provide their services to patients at the embattled Nasser Medical Complex.
Each of these men is willing and able to save Palestinian lives with their bare hands, even if that means traveling to a place where children are murdered at 600 times the rate in Ukraine, and doctors are targeted with similar impunity. Likewise, and in spite of their extraordinary abilities, each of these men is also wrestling with their individual limitations in the face of such institutional depravity. Teng’s film — a moving patchwork that was shot by Gaza-based cinematographers Ibrahim Al Otla and Christopher Renteria, directed from New York City, and palpably shaped by practical limitations of its own — harnesses its subjects’ frustrations as much as it salutes their valor.
The result is a documentary that implicitly honors these incredible doctors, but more acutely leverages their plight to address the numbing exasperation that such an atrocity is designed to instill among otherwise good people. It’s a documentary premised on the idea that nobody can stop the madness on their own, and how that’s all the more reason for everybody to resist it on their own terms.
“American Doctor” is able to broach the genocide from that angle because, for all of its barbed criticism of the global news media, the film never presumes to know the best way of cutting through the noise. On the contrary, its unformed shape and melange of styles add to the sense that Teng is actively searching for the answer to that question with every cut.
The director seldom appears on camera, but her first appearance casts a long shadow: Dr. Mark Perlmutter, a curmudgeonly Jewish physician who never hesitates to speak his mind, shows her a picture of dead children, to which Teng reacts by suggesting they’ll have to blur the image in the film to protect the dignity of the deceased. Dr. Perlmutter fires back that doing so would be a grave disservice to their memory.
Teng heeds the doctor’s orders in the moment, and sure enough, we see these unspeakable pictures on screen. But rather than embrace that way of thinking as her ethos going forward, Teng chooses to elide much (but not all) of the most stomach-churning footage at her disposal. Forcing people to face such awful barbarism is one way of shaking them into action, but it has its drawbacks, and so Teng begins to complement it with other, less hostile approaches.
Some of those are interrogated in real-time. Joined by trauma surgeon Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, a Zoroastrian of Iranian descent whose unflappable demeanor is an Avengers-worthy superpower, Dr. Perlmutter participates in a TV interview that’s soiled by the anchor’s skeptical posture towards Israel’s war crimes; after signing off, the two doctors debate whether there’s any use in offering themselves to such a broken media apparatus (a point Teng supplements with clips of Israeli news shows and an interview with CNN’s Dana Bash, who could easily transfer to Tel Aviv without changing any of her talking points).
Later, the doctors will be joined by Chicago-based emergency medicine physician and organizer Dr. Thaer Ahmad, and will suffer through a series of useless meetings in the halls of Washington; we don’t see any footage of those sit-downs, but the fact that Ted Cruz’s staff didn’t even bother to bring notes back to their boss says it all.
For all of their efforts, each of these doctors is haunted by their own strain of guilt. As a Jew whose father once provided care to people in Hitler’s concentration camps, Dr. Perlmutter feels a multi-faceted obligation to go to Gaza. As a tax-payer who’s sick to his stomach about his — and our — role in subsidizing the genocide, Dr. Sidhwa only feels at peace while he’s performing surgery at Nasser, where, in spite of the horrors around him, he’s comforted by the knowledge that he’s actually making a difference. As a Palestinian-American who’s become a leader in his local Muslim community, whose family is still in the West Bank, and whose cheery young child is a constant reminder of the carnage being inflicted upon babies just like them in Gaza, Dr. Ahmad can’t bear the thought of being in the Loop while his people are erased from existence.
“American Doctor” is ambiently sensitive to the various shades of privilege attendant to these doctors — to the different frequencies at which a Jew and a Muslim might communicate the same message, and to the different responses that each of them might receive in return. That’s most evident in Dr. Ahmad’s struggle to re-enter Gaza; while Drs. Perlmutter and Sidhwa are allowed back in, Dr. Ahmad is denied entry because of his Palestinian heritage. Because his relatives have certain I.D. cards as part of the apartheid state. Bureaucracy is often the last straw to break during an ethnic cleansing.
The other two doctors arrive at Nasser during the “ceasefire,” and much of their time is spent providing the sort of routine care that is pushed aside during a crisis. They work alongside Palestinian doctors who continue to come to work amid the worst of all heartbreaks, including a doctor who refused to leave work even as his own child slipped away at home.
‘American Doctor’There’s a careful sense of calm after the storm to these scenes — there’s quiet, and even laughter, but never even the faintest appearance of safety. At one point, the unflappable Dr. Sidhwa shakes his head while discussing a dire career-first: Moments after he performed surgery on a child who had been maimed by a bomb, another bomb killed the patient right in his hospital bed. Some viewers might recognize Nasser as the site of a double-tap Israeli drone strike that was targeted at the hospital shortly after production, an attack designed to lure journalists and rescue workers to the stairwell where they were then obliterated.
There are several heartfelt and poignant moments with which she might have ended the film, including an extraordinary scene in which Dr. Ahmad FaceTimes with his wife and children from a Jordanian restaurant overlooking their homeland, but Teng — eager to rouse us into action, but loath to leave us with the soothing balm of inspiration — decides to cap things off with a violent montage of the ultra-targeted horror that Israel has rained upon Nasser since last summer. “You don’t bomb hospitals,” one of them says while referencing back to the Geneva Convention. But Israel does.
Teng’s doctors leave Nasser before the worst of the strikes were visited upon it, and for all of their heroism they return to America more demoralized than when they arrived in Palestine. As painful as it is to rue the genocide from the comforts of my couch, “American Doctor” makes evident how much deeper that hurt goes for the people who’ve gotten their hands dirty — who’ve risked their lives to save any number of others, only for the crisis to grow even worse while they were there, and worse still after they went home.
Speaking at a Jews for Peace conference, Dr. Sidhwa can’t help but succumb to a moment of complete surrender. He lowers his head over a microphone and tells the assembled crowd that he has lost any hope for the future of Gaza. An older man stands up in the back of the chamber and encouragingly shouts back: “That’s a ridiculous statement!” In a room that’s full of people who have come to internalize Dr. Sidhwa’s example on their own terms, and to their own ability, the man reminds him how long it took to end the war in Vietnam. He reminds him that the struggle for hope is also the fuel required to keep searching for it.
Dr. Ahmad has since told me that his local mosque was filled to capacity when he went to speak about Nasser, because Chicago’s Palestinian community was so galvanized by the notion that one of their own had been there — by such direct testimony about the tangible and continued existence of their homeland, in spite of Netanyahu’s efforts to reduce it to a memory. Despair comes for even the most capable and determined of us all, “American Doctor” insists, but it will only win out when people stop asking themselves what more they can do to fight it.
We may not be able to save lives with our bare hands in the same way as Teng’s subjects, but if these doctors can share in our helplessness, then it stands to reason that we can share in their agency.
“American Doctor” is now playing in select theaters.
English (US) ·