I stand beneath the archway of the YMCA on King David Street in West Jerusalem, warm in the morning sun, waiting for the taxi to take me to Ramallah. My transportation and lodging have been arranged by the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund (PCRF), an NGO that coordinates care for a wide range of medical needs of children under occupation.

My expertise is pediatric cardiology. I'm a heart doctor for kids, and for the next four days, Palestinian kids. The PCRF staff told me to expect to see up to thirty children a day. I glance at my watch. It's almost 9 AM. If I'm going to examine that many children, it's time I got started. I look down at the street.

No taxi.

I close by eyes and draw a deep breath, tasting the morning air of Jerusalem – air tinged with sunlight, stone, conifer, and dry brown earth, with a hint of the Judean Desert and the Dead Sea. The aroma was part of the fabric of my life here between 1966 and 1977, between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine. I love that smell, the memory of those years.

I look back down at the street. Still no taxi. But I do see a slight man, out of place in his dark suit with high starched collar, wandering along the narrow sidewalk bordering the YMCA, his head swiveling from side to side, peering through wire-rimmed glasses. He seems to be searching for something.

I think I know who he is – Asher Ginsberg, early Zionist activist and Hebrew essayist of the late 19^th century, who wrote under the pen-name, Achad Ha’am, meaning One of the People. Actually, I'm sure it's him.

I raise my arm, waving at him to join me at the top of the steps.

He turns into the driveway and moves up the cobblestone lane away from the street. But before mounting the first tier of steps, he pauses. I can tell that he's reading the inscription on the tiles below the balustrade – a sentence taken from the dedication address for the YMCA building given by Edmund Allenby on April 18, 1933. “Here is a place whose atmosphere is peace, where political and religious jealousies can be forgotten, and international unity fostered and developed.” Ginsberg's a sucker for stuff like that. Sure enough, he takes out a small notepad and copies the inscription. That is so him – always shopping for words and images to use in his next essay. He mounts the steps as he tucks the notepad into his jacket pocket. I can see that he’s smiling.

“You’re late,” I shout over the noise of the traffic on King David Street. “I thought you weren’t coming.”

“I got lost.” He shrugs as he mounts the final stone steps and looks up in disbelief at the YMCA tower. “All this wasn’t here before. It was hard for me to find the way. You should have met me at the railway station.” With his thickly accented Hebrew, he sounds like a new immigrant from Russia. But his vocabulary and construction, though archaic, are flawless.

“When did you arrive?” I ask, knowing that the old railway station hasn’t seen a train in ten years, knowing that the tracks are largely hidden beneath weeds and spring flowers, knowing that he's been dead for seventy years.

“8:30. The train was about a half-hour late – goats on the tracks outside Battir.” He turns to me and smiles, sunlight glinting off his glasses. “The station looked familiar enough, though, and the old Khan was where I remember it, right across the way – but everything else…” his voice trails off and he shakes his head. “I could barely cross the street by the filling station with all the motorcars. And I see that they’ve widened Julian Way and renamed it King David Street.” He takes in the view with a sweep of his hand. “I passed Jabotinsky Street on my way up the hill. Jabotinsky! I couldn’t believe my eyes.”

“You all have streets named after you now – all the giants of Zionism – Nordau, Herzl, Weizmann, Pinsker, Ushishkin…”

“All the giants of Zionism!" he smiles and shakes his head. "What about my street? Can I see it?”

“If there’s time…” Ginsberg, indeed, has a street named after him under his nom de plume, Achad Ha’am. But it's just a small lane off the much larger Jabotinsky Street. I don't think he'd appreciate the symbolic irony. Better he shouldn't see it. I glance at my watch. It’s already 9:10. Finally, the taxi is here.

I hand Ginsberg my computer bag, which also contains my stethoscope, calipers, pens, and colorful stickers for the children. I hoist my suitcase. Together, we go down the steps toward the taxi.

“Dr. Mike?” calls the driver as he steps toward us. “They send me from PCRF to take you to Ramallah.” The driver doesn’t seem to notice Ginsberg as he takes my suitcase and stows it in the trunk.

I open the rear door, letting Ginsberg enter before me. I follow him in and the cab pulls away.

Ginsberg is still trying to get his bearings, searching for familiarity. “Wasn’t this Mamillah Street?” he asks as the cab comes to a stop and idles at a red light.

“Not anymore,” I reply with a nod at a road leading off to the right with tall limestone buildings marching toward Jaffa Gate, “Like endless Jehovahs,” I murmur.

"Endless Jehovahs," he repeats, "nice image."

"It's from another Ginsberg," I reply without explanation. I hate the over-building of Jerusalem. More lines from the other Ginsberg pop into my head, Moloch whose buildings are judgment. Moloch the vast stone of war. Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows. Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb.

"I remember there were lovely shops here, restaurants, and small hotels." Ginsberg remarks as he peers down the street through his wire-rim spectacles.

"Speaking of hotels, there was a plaque commemorating one where Herzl slept. But all that's gone now, the plaque, too."

"I also slept at a hotel here. Was there a plaque for me?"

"I think so," I lie. Thankfully, the light changes and the cab sweeps forward and up the hill, passing what used to be Barklays Bank on the left, the Old City wall on the right. Then, turning north, the cab picks up speed on a highway that knifes through East Jerusalem. After a few minutes, I too have no idea where we are.

Asher Ginsberg settles back, turns to me, and makes polite conversation.

“So, you’re a heart doctor for children?”

I nod.

“Do children have heart problems?”

“They’re usually born with them – leaky valves, walls with holes – that sort of thing.”

“Do you usually work in Ramallah?”

“No. This is my first time. I went to medical school in Tel Aviv, but that was thirty years ago. I now live and work in the United States.”

The cab passes the Kalandia check-point and doesn't slow down. I'm surprised. Leaning forward, I ask the driver. “Is it always so quick getting through?”

“In this direction, it usually is, but going the other way…” he nods toward the line of cars and trucks waiting to go into Israel from the territories, “they’ll be delayed for a few hours.”

A gray wall, at least twenty feet high and studded with guard towers comes into view just past the check-point.

“What is that?” asks Ginsberg, his mouth agape.

I try to explain the separation wall. The slow death of the peace process. The growing dislocation and despair. The terror of the suicide bombings. I try to explain how the wall has been promoted as serving, and indeed does serve, one purpose – protection, while also serving another – the creation of discontinuous cantons – ghettos, if you will; cutting Palestinians off from school, family, work, farmland, and healthcare – a slow strangulation in the unspoken pursuit of demographic change.

The taxi bumps along a cratered road next to the wall. Ginsberg isn't writing now, the notepad lays open on his knee as he leans back and closes his eyes. He's sweating heavily. He loosens his black tie, opens his high starched collar, and takes deep breaths. After a minute he opens his eyes and asks, "So that's why you're here – you come to heal the holes in the walls of little hearts."

The metaphor doesn't escape me. I nod. “Healthcare is difficult because of the wall and the other travel restrictions within the West Bank. Without doctors coming in and seeing these children, many would die waiting for care – waiting for permits – waiting at check-points, waiting to be seen.”

Ginsberg rubs a hand over his face and fixes me with his eyes. “But this looks like a war zone and you're on the wrong side of the wall. You're a Jew. Why are you here?”

“Because of you, Asher."

"Me?"

"Your notion of Zionism with justice, with regard for the other. You saw the need for this when you visited Palestine during the First Aliyah. It's in your pamphlet, The Truth about Palestine. Don't you remember?"

"Of course I remember," Ginsberg whispers as he looks out the window at the wall. "I remember I wrote that Palestine was not a land without a people. Indeed, the land was populated and richly cultivated. I remember I wrote about what our brothers do here, though they should know better. Though they had been serfs in the lands of the Diaspora, they suddenly find themselves free in Palestine, and instead of showing regard for the stranger, this change awakens in them an inclination to despotism." The wall outside the cab window continues to flick by, seeming to go on forever.

“But all my writing was apparently for nothing. My words have been forgotten."

"Not at all," I say as the cab comes to a stop next to a three-storey building of dressed stone.

"Here we are," the driver announces.

I look up at a sign, which announces in English and Arabic; "Medical Relief Prevention and Diagnostic Center of Cardiovascular Diseases." This is the place. A pretty woman with a headscarf approaches the taxi.

"Welcome, Dr. Mike. I'm Sharifa B'shara with the PCRF. This is where you'll be working. The children and their parents are waiting upstairs. Come. I'll settle with the driver. We have many children for you to see today."

I step out of the cab while Sharifa pays the driver. I lean down for a final word with Ginsberg. "Your words haven't been forgotten, Asher, not at all. It's because of you that I'm here. It's because of you and those you inspired with your writing, all those who have come after and realize that a true Return to Zion must be infused with a sense of justice and with acts of loving-kindness. It's true, Asher. Many people today in Israel and throughout the world value your words and honor your legacy."

"Enough to name streets after me?"

"Yes – streets in Israel, and perhaps someday, streets in Palestine."

I push the door closed and Ginsberg smiles, raising his pen in a kind of valediction. As the cab pulls away, I see that he's back to writing in his notepad.

* * *

Postscript

Over the next four days I saw about 80 children, from newborns to teenagers. from Ramallah and other parts of the Palestinian Authority. Sharifa, as managerial assistant of the PCRF, and Ameera, the agency's social worker, set up the clinic and helped with translation and documentation of clinical findings. They also arranged for my transportation and hotel.

The children had a wide range of congenital heart defects; I determined that the defects in about two-thirds of the children weren't particularly severe and would require only ongoing elective follow-up in the context of subsequent missions. A third of the children, however, had more severe defects and would require catheterization and/or surgical intervention. These children would be processed and directed with the active assistance of Sharifa and Ameera for care either in East Jerusalem (Maqassad Hospital on the Mount of Olives) or in Israel (Tel Hashomer, Haddasah, or Wolfson Hospital). A few children seen in clinic, however, had profound cardiac disease with either severe congestive heart failure or cyanosis (blueness). I determined that these children required immediate hospitalization at a cardiac center for evaluation and management. But I was informed that "immediate" would take at least five days – the time required to obtain the necessary papers for the family to leave the Palestinian Authority and travel to East Jerusalem or into Israel. When I expressed my concern over this delay, the PCRF staff assured me that there were no exceptions.

I decided to discuss this with Achad Ha'am the next time I see him. He might be able to help. He knows people. He has streets named after him. He's got connections.