Fateful Decisions
Do not be afraid; go and tell the brothers to go to
Galilee: there they will see me. (Matthew 28:1-10)
Oh my defiant wound,
My homeland is not a suitcase
And I am not a traveller.
I am the lover and the land is the beloved. (Mahmoud Darwish: The
Diary of a Palestinian Wound.)
A Return to the Galilee
Soon, my wife and I
will leave Hawaii again.
It is always a
struggle. The hardest was in 1970 after I finished my medical training. Beyond
lucrative job offers, Hawaii’s comforts and beauty tugged at our heartstrings.
But the Galilee won. I was needed there — and I owed Arrabeh more than she did Honolulu.
My family had sold
land to our neighbours to put two of my four brothers and me through high
school in Nazareth. In our subsistence farming culture, that was blasphemous.
Land was holy and farming was worship. Still, with the promise of returning as
a physician, I persuaded my father to sell another acre of land to pay for my one-way ticket to
America. It was his last plot of land in our fertile Battouf Valley, believed
to be the home of the ancient Natufians, the first settled agricultural society
in human history. He held onto his olive grove and apricot orchard on the
mountainside. Those roots go deep; to cop out when I became a physician would have
been more than blasphemous; it would have been treasonous, un-Palestinian.
When I returned,
there was no other physician among Arrabeh’s 6,000 people. Sheikh Kaid, the
village imam, had led a committee of civic activists and brought running water
into homes, a great public health feat. But no one had thought of liquid waste
disposal. Soon, sewage seeped into the dirt alleys and pooled in puddles. This
public health nightmare alarmed me more than the lack of garbage collection,
electricity, telephone, paved roads and adequate public transportation combined.
As I surveyed the situation, I discovered that it was black and white: All the Jewish
settlements in Israel had a functioning sewage network, but no Arab village had
one, nor could afford installing one.
I wrote memos to my
superiors in the Ministry of Health. It wasn’t their responsibility, I was
told. Arrabeh had elected a village council, an ineffectual invention
representing the Zionist central authority in the village and the punching bag
the state could blame for all its shortcomings. Israel was the state of the
Jews, and we were left to stew in our own foul juices. After all, we didn’t
serve in the Israeli army, the IDF. Israel was “a light to the nations,” but we
were no nation; we were hardly human in their eyes. Incidentally, I should use
the term bnei-miutim—minority
members—in my reports and not Arabs or, God forbid, Palestinians, I was
advised.
Though specialised in
public health, I had to double as general practitioner. Among the Galilee’s
rural Palestinian citizens of over 200,000, there were only two other
physicians. Fast-forward to the present, and Arrabeh claims the highest
physician-to-resident ratio in any town of its size in the world, thanks in
large part to the sacrifices of parents and siblings that toiled away in
construction and manufacturing to support those doctors’ studies. The mainly
foreign-trained physicians, pharmacists, dentists and other health
professionals among Palestinian citizens of Israel are fast becoming the
backbone of Israel’s healthcare system, contrary to its planners’ vision. In
1976, an internal government document known as the Koenig Report recommended
that the state should encourage our brain drain, among other measures.
Despite this, not a
single hospital has been licensed in any Palestinian community in Israel, as Arrabeh’s
own self-made media star, journalist Maqbuleh Nassar, has repeatedly pointed
out.
“A Cruel Border Crossed Us”
In 1948 Arrabeh and a
few dozen Palestinian villages miraculously escaped the ethnic cleansing of
Palestine and the systematic “erasure from space and memory” of 531 Palestinian
towns and villages by Israel’s own count.
Like Arrabeh, many of
those erased had previously survived the riptide of history for as many as four
millennia since the Canaanites first established them. With the arrival of the
invading Zionist forces, the 11-year-old child that I was at the time faced a
weighty decision: carry the cage in which I kept the two blackbirds I had
collected from a nest in our apricot orchard or abandon them.
My parents,
meanwhile, faced the impossible choice of staying in Palestine, and likely
suffering the fate of Deir Yassin – a Jerusalem village where Zionist forces
massacred men, women and children – or leaving and becoming refugees like the
distraught people of Suffoureyeh we had seen passing through our olive groves,
some of whom lost children along the way. But soon, crossing to Lebanon was no
longer possible. Every home in Arrabeh and in the two neighbouring villages,
Sakhnin and Deir Hanna, planted a stick on its roof and tied a white sheet to
it. The Haganah, a Zionist militia, took able-bodied, Palestinian men to labour
camps as prisoners of war, and collected our milking cows and work bulls to
feed its soldiers.
In the Nakba
(catastrophe) of 1948, Palestine lost its cohesion as a nation; all Palestinian
urban centres in what became Israel were ethnically cleansed. Our major human,
cultural, and financial capital was decimated. But Nazareth was an exception: a
commander of the invading Haganah, based on his exceptional awareness of the
war crime they encoded, disobeyed the orders of his superiors. Still, countless
Palestinians on its outskirts were forced from their homes and villages, and
pushed into exile. In the 1950s, Ben Gurion saw this Palestinian geographic
continuum as a demographic threat and wedged the Jewish Upper Nazareth,
Natzeret Illit, in its heart. On one occasion, some three decades later,
reverse xenophobia led to Upper Nazareth letting its collected sewage flood
parts of its downhill neighbor, Kufr Kana or Cana of Galilee. When I, the
regional public health official at the time, demanded they stop the public
health menace the city countered with the demand that Kufr Kana stop their
“sound pollution” of dawn-time call for prayer.
In 1948 Aunt Samiyeh
Rustom, exiled from her home in Sheikh Dannoun, one of three such aunts, passed
through Arrabeh with her family on their way to Lebanon. They bequeathed us
Arrabeh’s first radio and second Singer sewing machine, both adding to the
prestige and livelihood of the Kanaanehs. It was only after Israel’s takeover
of South Lebanon and its propaganda ploy of The Good Wall – during which Israel
opened the gates in the barbwire border with Lebanon to allow workers and some
visitors from South Lebanon to enter – that we briefly reconnected with our
cousins again.
Shortly thereafter,
the Sabra and Shatila war crime — the massacre of Palestinian civilians in two
refugee camps in Beirut — shocked the conscience of the world. Ariel Sharon was
then Israel’s defence minister. Under his command, Israeli soldiers besieged
Sabra and Shatila and watched as the Lebanese Phalangist militias they sent in
perpetrated the killings.
After the 1956 Kafr
Qassim Massacre, Israeli military Commander Issachar Shadmi was fined one cent
for ordering the execution of 49 Palestinian civilians, including 23 children.
In contrast, Sharon fully escaped punishment for the Sabra and Shatila massacre
and even went on to become Israel’s prime minister. That reconfirmed our
convictions that Zionism was intent on expelling, if not exterminating, us. The
IDF had contingency plans.
Then came the Oslo
Accords, in which we, the 48 Palestinians (Palestinian citizens of Israel),
were totally excluded as possible caddies for either side. In part,
then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin paid with his life for even flirting
with us in election politics; his 1992 government relied on non-coalition, Arab
support in parliament.
Then, at the start of
the second millennium, Sharon played the fanatic religious card with a visit to
Al-Aqsa mosque grounds in Jerusalem, and inflamed the Second Intifada.
Demonstrations broke out within the Green Line, the imaginary armistice line
that separates the occupied West Bank from Israel proper, in solidarity. Israeli
police, most notably its snipers, killed 13 of our youth, including two from
Arrabeh: Aseel Asleh and Ala’a Nassar. The earth rose and wouldn’t sit, as the
Arabic exaggeration goes.
An Israeli
investigative committee, The Or Commission, was appointed to look into the
events. It fed media cycles for months before a hefty, final report blamed the
violence on unequal access to state resources between Jewish and Palestinian
communities. Plans for development funding for our communities were drawn then,
but they are still being debated by the Israeli settler cabinet of today. No
one was punished for the execution-style deaths of October 2000. Cynics discern
a pattern of periodic punishments meant to keep us in line, not unlike Israel’s
genocidal attacks on Gaza that its commanders call “mowing the lawn”.
When Palestinian civil
society launched its boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) campaign to hold
Israel accountable under international law, we were represented. By this time
we had already established the Galilee Society (see later) and it had spawned the
umbrella organization of Ittijah—the Union of Arab Associations in Israel.
Ittijah was led and energized by Ameer Makhoul, a civil society champion if we
ever had one. He apparently played a role in placing the ending of Israeli discrimination
against Palestinian citizens as one of the campaign’s three central demands. Not
long after that, and with his continued international activism, Makhoul was
arrested on drummed-up charges. He is currently serving a nine-year prison
term.
A Will to Resist
All along, the
central tenet in our state’s dealings with us has been the use of “legal” land theft.
Israel’s Declaration
of Independence spoke of equal citizenship for us, but binding laws were
promulgated to grant special rights to Jews, starting with the Law of Return,
which bestowed Israeli citizenship to any Jewish person, regardless of where
they are from in the world. Nationality trumped citizenship. On its website,
Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, lists dozens of
laws discriminating against us.
As leaderless peasantry,
we were placed under draconian, Israeli military rule for nearly two decades
(from 1948 to 1966), a period during which our land, our youth, our culture and
our minds were targeted. The “abandoned property” of refugees, including
internally displaced Palestinians, reverted to the state for the benefit of
Jews only. We were elided from the beneficiaries of Israel’s “public domain,”
for which our land was appropriated disproportionately. The cumulative effects
of dozens of specifically-fashioned laws, and the discriminatory practices of
the Jewish majority, led to the current situation in which Palestinian
citizens, despite constituting one fifth of Israel’s population, own less than
three percent and have legal access to less than seven percent of the land.
Despite this constant
pressure, we made a fateful and subliminal decision. We decided that we would
remain culturally Arab, nationally Palestinian, and emotionally still peasants,
even when the land was being stolen out from underneath us, “a dunam [1,000
square metres] here and a metre there.” On all these fronts, Israel’s daily
practices only reinforced our will to resist.
Organised land defence
took the form of an attempt at establishing the Al-Ard Movement, a Nasserite, pan-Arab stirring that so alarmed
Israel that a special law was passed to outlaw it. Its activists quickly found
themselves behind bars or forced outside Israel’s borders, if not assassinated.
At the other end of our community’s identity politics, Mapai, Israel’s leading Zionist Labor party, bribed and threatened mukhtars (appointed leaders) and clan
chiefs who were losing their traditional roles. Some such co-opted figures
successfully ran for parliamentary seats on “independent” Arab lists. Such
lists were organised, financed, promoted, and carefully controlled by Mapai. They raised their hands when they
were signalled to do so, often not understanding what they voted for or
against. After all, Knesset deliberations were conducted in Hebrew, a language
they did not speak.
Meanwhile, the
Israeli majority’s open enmity to the Communists as the only legal, non-Zionist
political party led to a contradictory phenomenon: “The Party” of international
brotherhood of the proletariat became the only legal outlet for our Palestinian
national sentiments. The advent of radio and print media helped. We locked the
doors to our rented rooms in Nazareth and sat next to the dimmed radio to
listen to Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Egyptian president who called for pan-Arab
unity. We held nightlong parties in secret, where we drank strong tea, ate
knafeh (a Palestinian cheese pastry soaked in syrup), and listened to legendary
Egyptian diva, Umm Kulthum. The likes of Rashid Hussein, Mahmoud Darwish, Samih
El-Qasim and Taha Muhammad Ali crossed all restrictive borders to help us
assert our identity. Their voices were heard across the Arab world.
Then the Naksa of 1967 — the setback, during the war of 1967 — connected us once
again with our Palestinian brothers and sisters in Jerusalem, Gaza and the West
Bank. We regained our legitimacy in their eyes and in our own.
The Beginnings of
Land Day
In 1976, as the
Israeli state continued its mockery of justice and moved to codify greater
discrimination against us, wide swaths of privately-owned, Palestinian land
were targeted for another wave of confiscation. This hit three neighbouring Galilee
villages the hardest: Arrabeh, Sakhnin and Deir Hanna, which have since become
known as The Land Day Triangle.
But by this time, the
stirrings of open nationalism were in the air. A Committee for the Defence of Land
had been established.
Nazareth had
conceptualised all of our inner sentiments, aspirations, and contradictions, in
the persona of its new, young mayor, the communist party parliament member and
eloquent poet, Toufiq Zayyad. He sensed the pulse of our community and forged
ahead with a “revolutionary” decision: For the first time since the Nakba, we
all stood as one and said “NO!”
A call was issued for
a one-day strike, March 30, in objection to the planned confiscation of our
land. The Zionist shadow theatre operators had organised a forum of Arab mayors
in the hopes they would rubberstamp their dictates. Using his many gifts — a
shrill voice, full command of the Arabic language, group psychology and great
sense of humor — Zayyad outwitted the collaborators; he turned the tables
against the defeatists, silencing their kiss-ass whimpering, and the one-day
strike was unanimously endorsed at the meeting originally held to cancel it.
Alarmed, Prime
Minister Rabin and his Defence Minister Shimon Peres imposed a curfew, and sent
Golani Brigade troops in tanks into our villages to enforce it. Six young
Palestinians were killed in the ensuing atrocities, the first being Kheir
Yassin of Arrabeh. Ever since, Land Day has become a national memorial every
year, commemorated by any and all Palestinians that survived.
That morning, on
March 30, 1976, I made another fateful, personal choice: a neighbour called
from across the field for me to come help his wife, who had gone into labour. I
could see soldiers in a tank on the other side of the field. I waved at them
with my stethoscope, and they pointed their automatic weapons at me. I went
back inside, and told my wife that we were moving to Hawaii for the safety of
our two children. I wrote a letter of resignation to the Minister of Health to
the effect that I can no longer serve in a system that does what this one is
doing to its Arab citizens.
But two years later,
using the same justification of wanting to keep our children safe, we returned
to the social warmth of our Palestinian rural community. I returned to my former
ministry job, but this time, I had a clear partisan agenda: to mine the system
against its wishes for the benefit of my people.
That’s where the plan to establish a non-governmental organisation, the Galilee
Society for Health Research and Services, first came from; the NGO was legally
registered in 1981. The Galilee Society fast became my public health forum. Repeatedly,
I took leaves of absence from my MOH position to challenge the system to
respond to my community’s health needs. Twice, in 1986 and 1992, while on such
leaves, I led the process of organizing the first and then the second Arab
Health Conferences with “my” MOH banning its employees from participating. The
Follow-up Committee for Arab Health was thus established to work alongside and
advise the political structure made up of all elected Arab officials in Israel,
the Higher Follow-up Committee. The GS continues to serve the community today
guided by its independent professional vision.
Uncovering the
‘Unrecognised’ Villages
The first significant
project we, at the GS, addressed was the sewage problem in Arab villages. But
along the way, and guided by the likes of Mohammed Abu-Elhaija and his
indigenous NGO, The Association of Forty, we stumbled across another dark
corner of Israel’s manipulation and land theft: the unrecognised villages.
The Planning and
Building Law of 1965 had left scores of existing, Palestinian villages off its
official maps, thus rendering them illegal and their residents trespassers. The
state ultimately wanted the villages to be replaced by Jewish settlements. In
the meantime, they were deprived of basic services and amenities.
Abu-Elhaija’s own
village, Ein Houd, illuminated one side of this riddle. In 1948, as the
residents of the original, Palestinian Carmel Mountain village were driven out
of their homes, one family decided to camp out in their olive grove. This
encampment grew into the new Ein Houd. Meanwhile, Israeli artists, some internationally
famous, took over the original village, using it as an artists’ colony, Ein
Hud.
Every time I take
foreign visitors to the site, I let them stop for a beer at the bar, which is
the former village mosque. I tarry in the designated parking area, the levelled
and paved-over former cemetery, to read al-Fatiha (a prayer, the first chapter
of the Quran) in memory of all the dead beneath it. Then, I drive up the narrow
road to visit my friend, Mohammad, and his family, and reassure them that I
didn’t forget their dead.
Normalisation, one
might call it. Except that another friend, Susan Abulhawa, has featured the
village and its exiled in her novel, Mornings in Jenin. Each of the
scores of unrecognised villages has its own heart-wrenching saga.
Countless Bedouin
villages in the Naqab (Negev), in southern Israel today, are also unrecognised.
David Ben Gurion,
Israel’s first prime minister, romanticised the region as an empty desert in
which he could expand his personal colonial project; it was “a land without a
people,” like all of Palestine, according to Zionist propaganda. Israeli
authorities have dismissed the centuries-old native claims to the land, and
moved indigenous residents at will, denying them their land-based lifestyle and
property rights. The current, settler-dominated government of Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu coordinates its aggression to exile Bedouins from
their villages with the Jewish National Fund, a quasi-state agency that holds
and allocates land for Jewish purposes only.
The Israeli
authorities have demolished the Bedouin village of al-Araqib, in the northern
Naqab, over 110 times, to make room for a JNF-sponsored forest. The nearby
Bedouin village of Umm El-Hiran, meanwhile, is to be replaced by a Jewish
settlement of the same name. The list goes on.
The crisis of the
Negev Bedouins is current, but the ill will against them is longstanding.
We at the GS had
operated two mobile Maternal and Child Health clinics in their remote locales,
one in the Galilee and the other in the Negev. We agitated for health services
and water supply as basic rights. With the aid of two international volunteers,
both human rights lawyers, we sued Israel in the International Water Tribunal
and received a ruling against its inequitable treatment of its Palestinian
citizens based on their race. The system tolerated my manipulations for a
decade and a half before forcing another decision on me: leave the Galilee
Society, or leave the Ministry of Health, where I was the highest-ranking
Palestinian professional employee.
It was no brainer. The former health minister who forced me to leave his team
is currently serving a prison term for bribery and corruption.
Divide and Rule
Another especially
dispossessed group within the deprived collective of 1948 Palestinians is that
of the residents of Arab neighbourhoods in Israel’s so-called mixed cities.
These residents were
mostly internally-displaced villagers who sought refuge in abandoned city
homes. The “legal owner” of their city residences, the Custodian of Absentee
Properties, often prevented them from repairing their squatting quarters. Internal
exile, social alienation, unemployment, physical disintegration, the apartheid
policies of the state, and the daily practices of its field-level operatives
turned the congregated former farmers into slum-dwellers. In turn, the
burgeoning Zionist middle-class of these cities sought to protect its
privileges by walling itself off from such “hostile” others. “Their suburban
ethnic purity, their total residential segregation, and their social
engineering” resulted in mental and physical walls of separation between the
two groups, which were manifested through harsh policing practices, concrete
and barbed wire.
Recently, the advent
of millennial, Palestinian professionals and entrepreneurs has brought a breath
of fresh, Levantine modernity into places like downtown, Arab Haifa, where, on
occasion, it can feel like I am in Beirut, an experience I can only imagine.
While residential
separation by race, like the separate-and-unequal educational system, is not
absolute, the reality of persistent inequality is nearly omnipresent. Rural
Palestinian communities in Israel are hemmed-in by the invisible borders
imposed by the Zoning and Planning Law. Foot-dragging by the central
authorities on requests to enlarge our building zones on the one hand, and our
high population growth rates on the other, have resulted in young couples
frequently building “illegally” on our remaining agricultural land. Tens of
thousands of such homes face the threat of fines and demolition. Another zoning
law, known as the Kaminitz Law, was recently passed to expedite the demolition
of such “illegally” built homes.
As the Israeli state
took shape, Ben Gurion set an upper limit to the country’s Palestinians at 15
percent of Israel’s total population. Decades later, Rabin raised that to 20
percent. Political scientists and demographers have since debated the nature of
this demographic cap, using terms like a “ticking demographic time bomb” to
describe us.
Then came Azmi
Bishara, a Palestinian intellectual, political leader, and one-time member of
the Israeli parliament from the Galilee, who popularised our demand for “a
state of all its citizens”. This was intolerable, and Bishara escaped “with his
feathers intact” — another apt Galilee expression — to the Gulf.
All these measures
and the growing pressure on the state’s Palestinian citizens are taken in lockstep
with the rapid takeover of Israeli politics by fascist, settler elements. Their
poison is fast spilling across the vanishing Green Line.
The Genetics of One State
My wife and I could
not have married in Israel; she and I nominally belong to different faiths. In
its blatant divide-and-rule manipulation of its Palestinian citizens, Israel
categorises us by religion: Muslims, Christians, and Druze.
Yet we resist these divisions,
even if only symbolically. In response to Israel’s recent law restricting the
call to prayer (the adhan) in mosques,
for example, some Palestinian priests performed the call themselves from
churches in a show of solidarity with their Muslim neighbours.
The divisions Israel
tried to impose on our community have been increasingly rejected. Occasionally,
youth in my extended family come to me as an elder for advice about their
interfaith love affairs in college. But they don’t need much encouraging.
Palestinian DNA, after all, is one of the most mixed on earth. We can trace
bits and pieces of genetic flotsam added to our Canaanite (Kanaaneh?) roots
over the millennia: from the Hexos, the Hebrews, the Persians, and the Arabs,
all the way to the Crusaders and the Turks. The supposed racial purity of any
group of people between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea is a myth, a
falsity. Turning our survival into a form of resistance is our number-one skill
doubly fortified with education.
Clinicians rarely
retire, a reflection of their endless commitment to whatever they set out to
achieve in their work. When I retired, I needed to reconcile my commitment to
my people with leaving my clinic and centre stage at the GS. Nine-eleven was
still fresh as the world finally discovered that we existed and made up 20
percent of Israel’s population. Zionist hasbara
(propaganda), including by way of Christian Zionists, successfully
conflated Arab and Muslim in the world’s media with terrorism. The image of the
Palestinian changed from Yasser Arafat’s olive branch and gun, and Edward
Said’s intellectualism, to a violent “Paradise Now” version of Hamas. I decided
to contribute to setting the rerecord straight through my hobby of writing.
This current exercise is in line with that quixotic decision.
A Birthday Gift
As I put the final
touches on this piece before leaving Hawaii, I discovered an eight-year-old
video online in which I had joined two indigenous Hawaiians in comparing the
struggles of native Hawaiians and Palestinians. The video reminded me that
while the odds for success may be narrow, solidarity is tangible.
Twenty-five years ago,
the GS hosted a conference for health professionals from 18 ethnic minorities
in western countries. Between us, we counted over a dozen commonalities in the
health field alone. Since that time, awareness of the similar circumstances,
and challenges, faced by oppressed groups around the world has spread even
further – and faster.
One can hardly keep
up: Palestinians are at Standing Rock, showing support for Native Americans,
and at Black Lives Matter demonstrations. Such inimitable human rights
luminaries as Stephen Hawkins and Arundhati Roy acknowledge our cause. The BDS
movement is catching on at a much faster rate than its anti-apartheid
predecessor in South Africa ever did. The future of humanity is inseparable
from that of peace and equality in historic Palestine. It is in the hands of
those on both sides to stand up, be counted, and be ready to cross racist
divides.
Adalah, the smart daughter
of “my” Galilee Society, is another light guiding us all in Israel out of the
Zionist nightmare. The group recently partnered with Visualizing Palestine to
launch a new media project, unEQUAL, that
will figure in an upcoming virtual exhibit titled Freedom, Bound. The project is “inspired by and rooted in the rich
legacy of Black-Palestinian solidarity,” and evidence that lasting and critical
links are being forged between the two oppressed groups.
The project’s
creation was music to my ears! Not only that, but it was launched on Nakba Day,
May 15, which also marked my 80th birthday. What better present could I have asked
for?
