“In case you haven’t noticed, things don’t just change by themselves,” Santa Barbara dentist James Rolfe said a few days before hopping a plane to Tel Aviv on his way to Gaza. | Credit: Ingrid Bostrom

A lot of people lose their youthful idealism in their late twenties or early thirties. But somehow at the age of 85, James Rolfe never got around to losing his. This Monday morning, Rolfe — still a practicing dentist in Santa Barbara — boarded a plane bound for Tel Aviv with the intention of putting his skills to work to relieve the dental pain of Palestinians living in Gaza.

“I just felt compelled,” he explained during an interview last Friday. “Four days ago, Israel shelled a hospital in Gaza. Two days ago, they shelled two refugee camps. Israel has forgotten its heritage. It’s forgotten who it is. It’s starving the people of Gaza. For 70 days, no food was allowed in. … In case you haven’t noticed, things don’t just change by themselves.”

If all goes as Rolfe hopes, he will soon be working under the auspices of a United Nations healthcare organization. He reached out to see if he could help, he said. “They said sure.”

For three weeks, he expects to be working there along with other dental professionals. But conditions in Gaza — which, until Monday, had been the target of a total Israeli blockade preventing the delivery of any food shipments for 80 days — are anything but predictable. Rolfe is mindful he might not be allowed to get through but has been coached on the best way to improve his odds.

Rolfe is no stranger to living in shell-shocked environs. A quasi-hippified mix of Jeremiah Johnson and Indiana Jones, Rolfe operated a one-man dental clinic in war-torn Afghanistan for several years. Over time, he poured hundreds of thousands into what became the Afghanistan Dental Relief Project. He shipped converted a storage container from Santa Barbara to Kabul, which he converted into a dental clinic complete with three chairs, high-speed drills, and x-ray equipment. He would see people, he said, with as many as seven abscessed teeth in their mouth. Their pain, he said, was life-threatening. Amazingly, he said, many endured it.

Not only did Rolfe patch up people’s teeth; he trained new generations of dental technicians, people who could provide treatment after he left. When he returned to Santa Barbara, Rolfe brought with him the shards from four car-bombs that went off near him as souvenirs.

Rolfe is hoping to do in Gaza what he did in Afghanistan, though to a more circumscribed degree. Not until Palestinians have a state of their own, he said, does he think the violence can end. How that happens, he acknowledged, is another matter. But he said allowing new Jewish settlements to push more and more Palestinians off their land — as has been happening under the regime of Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu — was certainly not the answer.

Rolfe flew to Israel one day after Netanyahu — pursuing a policy of total surrender by Hamas and the release of any hostages still alive after the October 7 massacre that triggered this war — announced he would begin to allow a handful of food trucks in a day. According to CBS News, Netanyahu acknowledged he was doing so only under pressure from allies who he claimed could not tolerate “images of mass famine.” The following day, Netanyahu was denounced by the leaders of France, Canada, and the United Kingdom, who stated they were “horrified” by the military escalation taking place in Gaza, which they termed “wholly disproportionate.” To date, roughly 53,000 Gazans have been killed since the October 7 slaughter, which had claimed the lives of 1,200 Israelis.

Rolfe is totally at ease functioning in hard-scrabble, high-conflict environments that place a premium on improvisational survival skills. He grew up on a small farm in Boise, Idaho, with goats, chickens, rabbits, and every kind of critter imaginable. His parents enjoyed what’s known as a tempestuous romance, having married and divorced one another three times. His father held down a steady gig as a Greyhound Bus driver, but he was really all about the horses he raised.

“My father could do pretty much anything with anything,” he said. “He made me able to look at things that way.”

Rolfe especially likes to fix broken things. That’s part of what got him into dentistry, a profession that drew him over the years despite multiple interruptions and distractions. Like many during the 1960s, Rolfe traveled everywhere, got married, had four kids, and separated from his wife. He lived in Haight Asbury during the Summer of Love, but jokes he was “too busy to be a hippie.” Along the way, he spent nine years living and working at Santa Barbara’s famous Sunburst Farms, a prosperous and entrepreneurial commune populated by high-achieving, talented seekers before it eventually flamed out. There, ingenuity and competence mattered.

Today, Rolfe runs what he says is Santa Barbara’s only urgent care dental, open weekends and evenings. He practices a radical low-impact lifestyle; he drives a 30-year-old car, eats food discarded by supermarkets, and uses recycled construction materials for his office and home. He spends very little. Yes, he sports a few artificial joints, but he moves easily.

Rolfe is mindful of the risks in going to Gaza but appear unperturbed.

“I don’t worry about things. I just try to keep reasonably safe,” he said. “Besides, I’m 85 years old,” he exclaimed. “I’ve had a great life.”

Get News in Your Inbox

Login

Please note this login is to submit events or press releases. Use this page here to login for your Independent subscription

Not a member? Sign up here.