Southern Hospitality: The Baptist Hospital and the Postwar Healthcare Infrastructure of Gaza, 1954–67

In Gaza City, the onus to meet the medical needs of the Palestinians displaced and dispossessed by the 1948 War largely fell on two hospitals: Dar al-Shifa, originally a British military institution, and the Church Missionary Society (CMS) Hospital. This paper will focus on the (post)colonial afterlife of the latter as it remained a central institution in the Gaza medical infrastructure under the Egyptian Administration (1948-1967). In 1954, the CMS sold the hospital to the American Southern Baptist Foreign Mission Board (FMB), which had reached an agreement with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) to partner and provide medical care for Palestinian refugees. The financial support of the Egyptian state, FMB and UNRWA stabilized the medical institutions of Gaza and supported local physicians. But international involvement also created the conditions for sustained interference.

In this paper, I argue that the political economy of charitable care, combined with the pious practices inherent to evangelical missions, calcified a Gazan healthcare infrastructure persistently beholden to international finance and administration. I apply Melanie Tanielian’s conception of “distributive charity,” which “forges a continuous relationship between the recipient and the giver,” to understand how precarity, piety and the legitimacy of medical practice intertwined at the intersection of local, regional and global interests. At the same time, I push back on the binary of “the recipient and the giver” to demonstrate how local physicians, staff members and students defined aspects of the Baptist hospital. The practices of the missionary hospital, both medical and missional, provided a space for a variety of local actors to shape the meanings of the institution and its role in Gazan healthcare. This paper relies on missionary records, UNRWA reports and hospital-affiliated memoirs to explore the contested reconstruction of the missionary hospital and the Gaza healthcare system after 1948.