“His attitude is, ‘We can do it better than anywhere in the world,’ ” Dr. Gordon said. “It’s, ‘Let’s not be as good as the Germans, as good as the French, let’s be even better.’ ”

THOUGH he became a Romanian citizen in 1998, the fact that he was an immigrant, working for an adopted country rather than his native land, added to the sense of selfless sacrifice. “Nobody is a prophet in their own house, in their own homeland,” Dr. Arafat said.

Bald, with his remaining hair clipped extremely short on the sides, Dr. Arafat is intense and assertive without being aggressive or overbearing. He gives the impression of someone you would want in the back of an ambulance if you had a heart attack. More often, his volunteer shifts are on one of his agency’s helicopters, where, he said, patients sometimes recognize him if they are conscious. “ ‘It’s Dr. Arafat,’ they say.”

As a boy growing up in the West Bank, Dr. Arafat had memorized the book “First Aid Without Panic” cover to cover, learning “every page, every picture by heart,” he said. Born in Damascus, Syria, and raised in Nablus, West Bank, he described his attitude as “medicine by any means.” At the age of 14 he not only rode with the fire department on emergency calls, but also began teaching the firefighters techniques he had learned from his well-thumbed first aid manual.

By 15 he had begun volunteering at the hospital in Nablus, where he was allowed to give tetanus shots and stitches under professional supervision. His neighbor was a surgeon and head of one of the hospitals, and he spent his school vacations helping out in the operating room.

Young Raed was also accepted by a university in the United States. If not for his parents’ intervention, his future would have turned out quite differently, in a country that could have used his talents but certainly did not need them as badly as Romania. His parents were afraid that if he studied in America, he would stay for good. They did not tell him about the acceptance letter.