Published by
NJ.com
NJ.com
He was only 4 years old when his family started calling him doctor. And the nickname stuck although it was acquired in the unlikeliest of circumstances. He was the 10th of 14 children, born in the al-Amari Palestinian refugee camp in Ramallah on the West Bank of the Jordan River to a mother who’d never learned to read or write and a father who not only worked to support his wife and youngsters, but grandparents and several cousins, as well — all the while acting as informal mayor of their crowded, impoverished block of jumbled flats. As a result of the 1946 creation of the state of Israel, fa…