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She Studied on Weeds and Empty Staircases. Today, Nadia Khir Is Israel’s First Female Druze Doctor
Dr. Nadia Khir receives the Habama Shelahen award for becoming the first Druze woman to study medicine and for helping generations of Druze women seek care
By Maayan Hoffman / The Media Line
Dr. Nadia Khir says a quote often attributed to Mahatma Gandhi has guided her throughout her life: “Strength does not come from physical capacity. It comes from an indomitable will.” Just days after receiving the “Habama Shelahen” (“Their Stage”) award from Jewish philanthropist Miriam Adelson, Khir told The Media Line that those words reflect the determination that helped her break barriers and pave the way for generations of Druze women.
Khir is Israel’s first female Druze doctor. Today, she works at four Clalit Health Services clinics in the Galilee, including in Julis, where she lives, as well as Tamra, Jatt, and Yanuh. Currently, she is one of around 40 female Druze doctors in Israel, she said, but when she began studying at the Technion—Israel Institute of Technology in the mid-1980s, she was the only one.
Raised in poverty in Peki’in in the northern Galilee, Khir said that she “studied on the weeds,” because they didn’t even have a table at home.
At that time, Peki’in was a mixed community of Jews, Christians, Muslims, and Druze. She explained that when her Jewish neighbors moved to nearby Nahariya, she would sit on the stairs of their empty home to study because it was quiet.
“There was too much noise at our house, and I couldn’t study,” she recalled.
Khir, whose father abandoned the family when she was five, is still affected by her difficult childhood. During a phone conversation, she choked up while speaking about her mother, who struggled to raise five children on her own while suffering from a debilitating illness.
She said that watching her mother seek medical care and realizing the power of medical professionals “was a very strong motive” for her to become a doctor.
“It touches a painful place for me,” Khir admitted. “It still hurts,” she said of her childhood. “But I was strong. I overcame it.”
She said it was terrifying to watch her mother, who was both the sole provider and sole parent, become sick time and again. Every time her mother needed treatment, Khir said, she saw firsthand how doctors could help people in their most vulnerable moments.
“I said to myself, ‘I also want to help people. I also want to be someone who can take care of others and take care of my mother,’” Khir said. “I had no support growing up, no one to lean on, so I wanted to grow up and become support for my daughters.”
She said she still does not know how she managed to become a doctor when the odds were stacked against her. Not only was she underprivileged, but Druze society was very traditional, and at the time, women were generally discouraged from pursuing higher education, especially in medicine. Many feared that if girls left the village to study elsewhere, they would disconnect from their faith. As such, she had to prove that she could pursue higher education while remaining loyal to her traditions.
She said there were two people who encouraged her. First was her brother, who helped pay for her education and told her he supported her decision. He left the faith before he could be “excommunicated,” Khir said.
Even with his support, she was terrified that her religious mother would be ostracized, which could have devastated the family. Khir said she watched as families of two nursing students were punished. They were barred from places of worship and excluded from the community.
However, shortly before she left to study, Khir ran into former Druze religious leader Sheik Farag Fadool on the street. When she told him that she wanted to study but feared her mother would be punished, Khir recalled that he promised to ensure her family would not be ostracized. That gave her the peace of mind she needed to leave.
Khir said that she knew her decision would help change the community.
“I wanted that change to come,” Khir recalled.
But she never imagined she would become such a symbol for her community of around 180,000 people in Israel.
“Dr. Nadia Khir’s story is one of courage, faith, and perseverance,” said Dr. Yaffa Ashur, director of Yoseftal Medical Center and head of Clalit Health Services’ Eilat region, who helped present the award last week. “One woman who refused to give up on her dream and, in doing so, opened doors for an entire generation of women. She is a tremendous source of pride for Clalit and for Israeli society as a whole.”
When asked whether she ever considered giving up when things became difficult, Khir said, “That was never an option. Even today, I’m an extreme person in that sense. Once I start something, it has to be completed fully.”
She said the Technion was especially challenging. She was used to speaking Arabic, but suddenly she had to study, attend lectures, and communicate in Hebrew. She also found herself surrounded by some of Israel’s most elite students.
“Being among people from wealthy backgrounds was not easy for a girl from a struggling family in Peki’in in the Galilee,” she noted.
Sometimes she would visit the head of the student advancement unit and cry in her office. “She used to encourage me,” Khir said. “She would tell me, ‘Nadia, they’ll write a book about you.’ She always treated me like I was some kind of historical figure.”
Khir decided to become a gynecologist specifically to help Druze women and advance her community.
“It’s something I bless every day,” she said. “Being a gynecologist is so essential to women’s lives. … If they get married, they need guidance. If they want birth control, they need a gynecologist. If they become pregnant, they need a gynecologist. … It contributes tremendously.”
She said she always knew she would become a gynecologist because strict rules regarding physical contact between men and women in the Druze community meant that treating men would not have been socially acceptable. She needed to choose a specialty that fit within those cultural boundaries.
Today, she said, women’s status and attitudes toward women have changed dramatically. Women are no longer viewed as property or simply as workers in the home. Women are human beings with aspirations, desires, and the ability to make their own decisions. She also attributed some of this progress to the laws of the State of Israel.
She said she also plays a key role in discussions about contraception within the Druze community, where the subject is not always readily accepted.
“Women often need convincing. Also, today there is more sexual freedom, so I see more women in the clinic with sexually transmitted diseases. But it’s still very uncomfortable to openly lecture in villages about sex, sexually transmitted diseases, and related issues. There isn’t enough openness,” she explained.
Today, her three daughters are following in her footsteps. One is a doctor at Rambam Health Care Campus in Haifa. Another is studying electrical engineering at Tel Aviv University, and a third is studying software engineering at the Technion.
“When I left to study medicine, I never imagined I would become a symbol. I simply wanted to fulfill a dream and help people,” Khir said. “Today, when I see young women choosing to study and advance without fear of breaking boundaries, I understand that the journey was worth everything. It is a great privilege for me to be an inspiration to my daughters and to the next generation.”
She observed that Israeli society is “wonderful,” and that she does not believe it is as divided as people think. “I’m a Druze woman, an Arab woman, so you zezwould expect me to encounter racism from Jews. But the opposite has happened. The greatest encouragement I received came specifically from Jewish people. They were the ones who supported me and believed in me.”
She added that during the last two-and-a-half years of war, she felt that people from all sectors of society had united and supported one another.
“The people who unite society are the ones worthy of leadership, not those who divide us,” Khir declared.
She also said she was encouraged by the way Israel supported the Druze community in Syria.“I never imagined that one day Israel would be the country protecting the Druze in Syria,” she admitted. “The State of Israel, strong and stable, is an anchor and support for Druze throughout the Middle East, especially in Syria.”
Photo 3: Dr. Khir with the staff of the Clalit Clinic in Julis (northern Israel). Credit: Clalit Health Services
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