It is not meant to be a reasoned blueprint for the future, “Mohammed will make the coffee.” It does not carry the cadenced weight of the biblical Joshua’s disposition of the conquered Gibeonites, forever “to be of you bondmen, both hewers of wood and drawers of water.” That the Arabs and Palestinians of Israel today shall be the makers of our coffee—that is a casual remark, facetiously, flippantly spoken. A joke? A very bad joke, then, a dangerously bad joke, given the bloody conflict that has riven Jews and Arabs.

But it is not a joke. And it is not to be passed over. Mohammed will make the coffee has become an epigram in the discourse of the far right, a dismissal of the other in the utopia envisioned for the State of Israel by the camp of the extremists. It is indeed a derivative, a not very distant derivative, of the sentence to bondage of the once inhabitants of Canaan and it expresses a mean contempt for the humanity of the Arabs in our midst.

I have known many Mohammeds during my more than 35 years in Israel. Some I have cause to fear. Some I have learned to respect. Some have become friends.

Ahmed is attending to my wife, Judy, as she lies in the recovery room after six hours of emergency surgery at Hadassah Hospital in Ein Kerem. I sit at her bedside during the long hours of late afternoon and evening, watching her struggle to come back to consciousness, trying to help. But an immunologist, such as I am, is at a loss in the recovery room.

The one who is not at a loss, who is constantly on guard over the flickering dials of the machinery that monitor her life, is an operating room nurse, Ahmed.

At midnight he insists that I leave. “You need strength for the coming days,” he says. “Both of you have a rough time ahead.” I am exhausted, drained. When I leave, Ahmed gives me his personal number. “I am on duty till morning,” he offers. “You may call me any time. I will take care of her.” He does. In the morning she is out of recovery and up on the surgical ward.

There are complications over the following days and severe pain. The operation has proved only partially successful. Two weeks later, a second operation, a “revision,” lengthy, difficult and risky. This time recovery is slow.

I come to know two other “Mohammeds”: Hassan and Muayad. Surgical nurses, tall, powerfully built men, “Hassan, Muayad,” the young female nurses call when a patient in a heavy plaster cast has to be turned in bed or placed on a trolley for a procedure in another wing, and one or the other lifts the patient with a deceptive ease and a very real gentleness.

Now an infection has set in. The bacterium is sensitive only to one antibiotic. But as the drug enters her veins, Judy has an acute allergic reaction. The treatment is aborted. The infection hangs on. The antibiotic must be administered again, but first the standard physiological infusion is replaced by a steroid drip to prevent an anaphylactic episode. Infusion, steroid, antibiotic, infusion—a fine balance. It works.

While Muayad is manipulating the I.V. drips, I take a few moments’ break in the visitors’ alcove off the corridor. The T.V. is on: The disengagement from the Gaza Strip, another round of mortar fire on the settlements. In a corner of the room a group of women are gathered, orange ribbons wound around their necks and on their pocketbooks: Orange stands for opposition to the disengagement. The women are bitter. Jews must not evict Jews, they proclaim in unison with a settler leader being interviewed on the screen. “What the Arabs want is our blood, all of them,” one says very loudly. “The terror won’t stop, no matter what we give them,” says another. “In the end, they’ll just have to go back to where they belong,” adds a third.

Go back? I wonder to myself. They’ve farmed this land for centuries, long before these ladies’ forebears arrived from Europe. I leave to go back to my wife’s bedside. As I go, I hear one of them say: “They can stay and make me coffee, if they’ll behave themselves.”

Muayad has just finished with the changing of the drips. “She’s doing fine,” he tells me.

Next morning, Judy seems better, no fever. In the nurses’ staff room, Hassan is going over the roster of patients with a young man completing his nursing internship. Hassan and the trainee work closely together, they form a team. “With God’s help, she’ll be alright,” the trainee assures me. He wears a large kippa, and his tzizit, the threads of the ritual undergarments worn by Orthodox men under the shirt, dangle from below his belt. He is always in good cheer and he prefaces all his remarks with those words, With God’s help. Hassan repeats the words: “Insh’allah.”

We are going home, after more than five weeks. The nurses crowd around us as Judy is moved from her bed to the stretcher that will bring her to the ambulance waiting below. An air of celebration. Congratulations. They will miss her, with her wonderfully cheerful disposition despite all that she has gone through.

We leave at the change of the nursing shifts. Hassan and Muayad are there. Muayad pumps my hand, hard. Hassan puts his arm around my shoulders. I find it not easy to speak. In the elevator, I begin to cry.