From Gaza to Chow Kit: An evening with Dr Ang Swee Chai — Helmy Haja Mydin

Malay Mail

16 hours ago

AUG 13 — The lobby of the boutique Chow Kit Hotel was overflowing with those invited (and gate crashers including hotel guests) from across political divides, including cabinet members, top lawyers and business leaders, as well as corporate and society figures.
All were there for one reason: to listen to the long-time humanitarian and Palestinian activist Dr Ang Swee Chai, and to learn, and to reflect on her close to five decades of dedicating her life to the cause.
Penang-born Dr Ang, 87, a staunch Christian, first saw the horrors of Israeli brutality when she volunteered to go to Lebanon during the Sabra and Shatila massacre of Palestinian men, women and child refugees in the early 1980s.
She was with the NHS in Britain by then and eventually quit her job to dedicate her life to a people the world has, until today, largely forgotten and who, as she said, are murdered every day like sport by the Israelis backed by Western powers like the United States and Europe.
The event, organised by The Edge financial publication and the ECM Libra Foundation and moderated by influencer and former health minister, Khairy Jamaluddin, centred on Dr Ang's medical humanitarian work in one of the most dangerous parts of the world. It had the audience riveted for 90 minutes and many were teary-eyed.
As Dr Ang recounts in her memoir, From Beirut to Jerusalem, she was a Zionist living a secure life in London when the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon unfolded.
An appeal for orthopaedic surgeons to volunteer in Beirut drew her to the region. There, she treated the wounded and witnessed the aftermath of the Sabra-Shatila massacre — an experience so searing it changed her beliefs and the course of her life.
From that period came her deep commitment to the Palestinian cause and the founding of Medical Aid for Palestinians.
Dr Ang's presence in Kuala Lumpur was not an exercise in nostalgia. Instead, it was a sober assessment of Gaza's present reality and a call to action.
The blockade imposed by Israel has now entered its seventeenth year, cutting the territory off from the outside world by land, sea, and air.
This isolation has only worsened. Since October 2023, more than 60,000 Palestinians have been killed and over 144,000 injured - mostly children and women.
Famine thresholds have been crossed, the few hospitals that have not been destroyed are collapsing for lack of basic amenities, medicines, and equipment, and entire neighbourhoods have been leveled.
What makes this crisis even more chilling, Dr Ang stressed, is that the destruction is not incidental. It is designed as a strategy to decimate the Palestinians.
Journalists, schools, hospitals, and essential infrastructure have been systematically and strategically targeted. In Gaza today, there are no medical specialists left. None.
Furthermore, the killing of healthcare workers with impunity has made it dangerous for anyone to enter to provide assistance. The result is a health system not just under strain, but dismantled.
In this environment, the question arises: what can those far from Gaza realistically do?
For Dr Ang, the answer lies in sustained, layered action. First, tell the story. The lack of journalists in Gaza means that outside voices must help ensure that accurate information continues to circulate. Amplifying Palestinian voices is not simply an act of solidarity — it is a way to counter disinformation and keep the crisis in the public eye. Second, support the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, using economic and consumer choices to apply pressure where diplomatic channels have failed. Third, act at every level — individual, institutional, and political — because change is rarely the result of a single act, but rather the accumulation of persistent, deliberate steps.
An aerial view from a Jordanian military aircraft shows the Gaza Strip before humanitarian aid is airdropped on August 9, 2025. — Reuters pic
The significance of the evening lay in how it connected the global to the local. The Gaza crisis, as vast and entrenched as it is, can seem beyond the reach of individual action.
Yet Dr Ang's own life story shows the opposite — that choices made at the personal level can ripple outward, shaping institutions, mobilising communities, and influencing political will.
Likewise, Malaysia's domestic choices on refugees and human rights influence its credibility and standing when speaking on international crises.
Leaving the room that night, one could not escape the sense that the worst response to injustice is silence.
The blockade, the targeting of civilians and institutions, the dismantling of Gaza's healthcare system — these are not intractable forces of nature, but human decisions that can be challenged and changed.
The responsibility to do so does not belong only to governments or activists. It belongs to all of us, in the ways we speak, the causes we support, the policies we press for, and the solidarity we extend — both to those far away and those already among us.
Dr Ang's message was not one of despair. It was a reminder that action, however small, matters. A conversation, a donation, a boycott, a letter to a policymaker — these steps, repeated and multiplied, can shift the boundaries of what is possible. The task ahead is to ensure they are taken, consistently and with purpose, until justice is no longer an aspiration but a lived reality.
* Dr Helmy is a consultant respiratory physician at Pantai Hospital Kuala Lumpur. He is passionate about the challenges affecting society and is co-founder and Chairman of Social & Economic Research Initiative (SERI), a Malaysia-based think tank dedicated to advancing evidence-based policies to address issues of inequity. He can be contacted at [email protected]
** This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of Malay Mail.