Ailabouni is Palestinian American. He has made his home in Minnesota for over 30 years, practicing family medicine in Farmington. Recently, he decided to write a memoir for his children and grandchildren with the help of his sister-in-law, co-author and former Wayzata City Councilor Mary Bader.

“Leaving the Cave: A Palestinian-American Doctor’s Journey” details his experiences as a Palestinian child and young man in the first years following the founding of Israel.

“The Palestinian people are like you — we love children, we love to live and that’s why I came here and did not go back again because I didn’t want my kids to live under the same circumstances. I grew up as a fifth-class citizen,” said Ailabouni. “I’ve gotten encouragement from Americans to let people know who the Palestinians are. I can tell you that I lived here as a doctor for more than 30 years, I never committed any crime, but if you say the word Palestinian people think terrorist.”

Ailabouni was born in Palestine in 1946, two years before the state of Israel was founded, and he lived in Palestine for the first 22 years of his life. He moved to the United States in 1968 to continue his education, after encountering several barriers while applying to medical school in his home country.

The book documents the harrowing Ailaboun Massacre in 1948, in which 14 young Arab men were killed and hundreds of residents from Ailabouni’s home village, Ailaboun, were displaced, and over 500 other villages were destroyed. The book cites at least 31 documented massacres. A priest was assigned to Ailaboun, and he encouraged the Vatican and the United Nations to investigate the massacre. Because of his intervention, many residents were able to return to the town, and some who had been displaced from other villages claimed Ailaboun as their hometown and returned as well. Many others became refugees.

In “Leaving the Cave” Ailabouni recalls examples of prolonged prejudice experienced by the Palenstinian people over several years.

“In my town we did not have running water or paved streets. We collected the water from the rain and had no electricity,” Ailabouni said. “After high school once I tried really hard to get electricity. With a bunch of other young men, we went to other people and got support from residents, and set about to buy three generators, two for the town and one as a backup. As soon as the government heard about this, they sent us a letter saying, don’t even think about it. Their explanation was the electrical company is a government company, and you cannot compete against the government. This was about 1965 or 1966. In 1973, my wife and I went back to visit, and found out that the government had allowed the Arabs to buy their own generators for about $3,000 to $4,000. Then two years after that they finally gave us electricity.

“So for 10 years the people were not allowed electricity, then they paid $3,000 a piece for their own generators, and then they gave us electricity.”

From kindergarten on, students, Ailabouni said, are not allowed to mention the word Palestine, and the history is not studied. “On the day of independence we had to sing in Arabic and Hebrew for the founding of Israel, and after 50 years I still remember the songs, though it hurts me too much to say the words,” Ailabouni said. “If you were caught with a Palestinian flag or anything Palestinian, you would go to jail.”

Ailabouni’s family prioritized education, though it was difficult to advance in school. Students had to leave Ailaboun to attend high school as there was not one in the area, and getting into a university program posed its own set of challenges.

Ailabouni was a good student and applied to medical school, and was accepted to study history and Arabic, but entrance into medical school remained out of reach.“You have to be influential or a collaborator,” Ailabouni recalled, saying that as a high school student, he was contacted on a few occasions by Israel’s top law enforcement agency. “They came to the high school and asked me to spy on friends, and I said ‘Listen, I am studying science here, I’m not here to spy on my friends.’ That closed the door on medical school.”

It opened the door to a new life in another country, and Bader and Ailabouni explore the immigrant experience in the book as well.

After the Six Days War in 1967 Ailabouni knew he had to leave his homeland to study medicine. He went to the Church of Christ and its representatives helped him get into school at York Christian College in Nebraska.

When he arrived in the U.S., Ailabouni had to use the English he hadn’t spoken since school to figure out how to get to his cousin’s home in Ohio. “I came from a town of about 1,200 people.Then I landed in Chicago, and that was a shock, really in every way,” Ailabouni said. “I had never been on an airplane, the farthest I’d ever been from home was Jerusalem.” He had $300 and a suitcase.

He transferred to Creighton University in Nebraska and met his wife, then attended medical school at the University of Guadelajara in Mexico. He completed his residency at St. John’s in Mapelwood and worked at a hospital in Pittsburgh before opening his family practice in Farmington.

He never forgot his family in Palestine. He would write to them every Friday night, and eventually the family was able to exchange cassette tapes with messages. He and his brother helped pay one another’s tuition, and when his brother opened his own pharmacy it had a telephone, which the family could use to talk to their son and brother in the U.S. Three of Ailabouni’s married sisters stayed in Palestine, but eventually most of his family, three brothers and two sisters, ended up in the Twin Cities.

“Those of us who were born and raised here, I don’t think we can appreciate what it’s like to be in a situation where your country is being torn apart and your people are under stress,” said Bader. “Then you decide to leave and you assume an entirely new country and culture. I don’t know what all of those emotions are because I’ve never had to live them.”

Bader recalled a trip to Ireland with her family about 16 years ago, in which she, her siblings and two brothers-in-law helped her mother connect with her family’s immigration experience, as Bader’s grandfather immigrated to St. Paul in the late 1800s.

“We went to this immigration museum in Cork. We were all looking around, and then we hear Souhil say, ‘I know exactly how Matthew felt.’ He was interpreting our grandfather through his eyes for us,” Bader said.

The exhibit detailed the “American wake,” the party often thrown for immigrants before they left for the U.S., as it was often goodbye forever. Ailabouni recalled his family and friends throwing a similar send-off for him, and connected with his wife’s Irish ancestor over the shared experience of immigration.

Throughout his story, Ailabouni makes clear that the issue is not Jew vs. Arab, but Arab vs. Zionism.

“The whole conflict is presented here as Jews against Arabs, it isn’t it’s Arabs against Zionism, not against Jews. Zionism is a political philosophy,” Ailabouni said.

The book recalls the lifelong friendship Ailabouni’s family maintained with the Jewish captain who protected Ailabouni, his mother and his newborn sister during the terrifying massacre in 1948. He was drawn to their home after he heard screaming, and found that his soldiers had broken down the door, ransacked the home and threatened to cut off his mother’s breast as she lay in bed. He ordered the house cleaned up and the door fixed, and signed a message written on the door, saying the family inside should be left alone. He also saved Ailabouni’s father and a group of other men from the village in the days following the massacre. Ailabouni said that people of different religious backgrounds once lived in peace in Palestine.

“What brings hope is many of these younger Jewish guys saying, ‘what happened to us (during the Holocaust), we should have learned never to do that to anybody else.’ And that is the puzzling part of it. How people who were persecuted, and none of them persecuted in Arab countries, all in Europe, could do what they are now.”

In addition to preserving family history, Ailabouni and Bader hope to bring attention to the growing crisis in Palestine, the human rights issues facing people living in Gaza with inadequate access to enough food and clean water, in an area that some experts say will be uninhabitable by 2020. Additionally, American taxpayers support Israel by the billions, while many American citizens struggle to pay for medication and health care — something Ailabouni, a retired doctor, finds frustrating.

“We want people to know about the occupation, we want people to know it is 50 years on the Fourth of June,” Ailabouni said of post-1967 Palestine. “If that is just I don’t know what is just. Those people are now living under military rule, discrimination. When we went to Israel we were able to drive through the West Bank because we had an Israeli license, so we could go anywhere we wanted. There are roads in the West Bank right now that Arabs who live there all their lives cannot drive on them. I want American people to know.”