A DOCTOR IN GALILEE

Nabeel's Funeral

2012-01-26T00:40:00.000-08:00

January 15, 2012:
I have spent the six days since I arrived back in Arrabeh in sad and dreary nonstop social formalities. I arrived at the height of the cold and rainy Galilee winter to be directly drafted to the receiving line of family elders accepting the condolences of people, many I had never met or seen before, on the occasion of the death of my 51-year-old nephew and namesake, the son of my younger sister who was born shortly after I left the first time to study in the USA. In fact part of the rationale for this three-week-long home visit, a break in my academic year At the Writers’ Institute of CUNY, was to see Hatim before his expected death from Renal Cancer against which he had battled for the past three years. At every step of his losing battle he had enlisted my mainly moral and psychological support against his awful disease. He knew I had retired from active medical practice but, like other members of my extended family, he sought my opinion and reassurance regarding what the oft-impersonal modern medical care system dished out for him. “Thank you uncle. Visiting you gives me encouragement to go on,” he would tell me at the end of each visit, usually accompanied by his ever-smiling properly hijab-clad wife and their toddler first grandchild.

Four months ago I left to join my daughter’s family in New York for the current academic year as a fellow of the Writer’s Institute of CUNY in the fiction track. I thought it would be nice to escape from the maddening buzz of New York’s life back to the quiet of my garden in the vain conviction that it was certain to need my special attention. We had collected seeds of wild flowers last summer and I wanted to spread them myself in the right places in the garden once I had turned the weeds over. So far it has rained daily and I have had no chance to work the ground. And I had counted on seeing my friend and namesake before his departure. He died and was buried 24 hours before I arrived. After all, giving the dead a proper burial is the honorable thing to do, the sooner the better according to local tradition. After three days of receiving people who came to pay their respects I was all set to visit with other family members and friends.

I started with my late second brother’s household. A niece prepared coffee and another updated me on family news while I teased a couple of her children playing a game on an electronic gadget. Suddenly her melodramatic husband barged in and, skipping the proper greetings, shouted that Nabeel died in a car accident. Everyone started inquiring, shouting, cussing and running confused in disbelief.

“Who told you?” I asked.

“Mohammad, my son. A friend called him.”

I called the friend. He confirmed the news and explained that Nabeel was his friend and that an hour earlier he identified Nabeel's body lying on the side of the road by the totaled car half way down the road to Acre, not far from the water reservoir. There was no doubt about it; Nabeel, my 19-year-old grandnephew and favorite gardening helper, son of Rudaina, my favorite nurse, orphaned youngest child of my late nephew, grandson of my favorite late brother, had died.

I got in my car and drove the half-mile to Rudaina’s house but no one was home. I called her mobile but it was out of range. Accompanied by another nephew I met on the way who had also heard the news I headed back to my brother’s family home, the home in which I grew up as a child right next to al-Zawieh, the Kanaaneh clan guest house, fronted by a small space that once was the village’s main square but now is the conversion point of four different paved village alleys. We arrived to a scene of total confusion: A crowd of all ages and from all parts of the village had gathered in the tiny space blocking the homeward traffic of laborers returning from the city and of Nabeel’s age mates driving up to verify the rumor regarding their friend. I left my car running and went up to the second floor of my late brother’s compound where a confused Rudaina was begging to get any information about her son. I held her to my chest and said:
“Nabeel was in a car accident. His condition is serious. Come with me to the hospital. We will find out what exactly happened.”

“No! Uncle! Please God, let me see Nabeel alive!”

Of course, that was not to be. I played for time and gave Rudaina a valium. As we got in the car another cousin of Nabeel’s, the deputy mayor of the village, stuck his head in and said in an officious tone of voice:
“I just spoke to the police officer at the scene. Nabeel died and his body is at Naharya Hospital. No sense in going there. I will bring the body in the morning.”

I turned the motor off, helped Rudaina out of the car and back into the house, pushing my way through the crowd of screaming women and children relatives and their doting and supportive men repeating the Islamic mantra of “God is great. There is no power but God’s.” As we climbed the stairs to the second story living room, the gathered aunts, uncles and cousins realized the absolute certainty of the news. An ear-splitting cacophony of shrieking women, men and children shouting Nabeel’s name nearly caused me to faint. I managed to hold steady with Rudaina leaning on my shoulder and whispering her son’s name: “Nabeel! My beloved son!”

A while later I managed to leave her in the care of a fellow nurse, her trustworthy neighbor and friend, and to leave the womenfolk to assume my expected role as the elder member of the bereaved household. By the time I entered el-Zawieh more than one brass decanter full of thick black coffee had materialized in the brazier in front of my cousin Derwish, the diwan’s chief attendant. The strong coffee is the final outcome of days-long slow concentrating process on low fire of the magic potion most respected old men in the village occupy themselves with preparing and intermittently tasting till it reaches the desired thickness and mature flavor. Kanaaneh practitioners of the art who had heard of the death of Nabeel must have sent their coffee in anticipation of its possible shortage with so many visitors, both men and women. Other neighbors had sent bags of wood coal for the coffee brassiere that will be kept burning for the next three days, cartons of mineral water and boxes of dried dates, the other obligatory items in receiving of will-wishers who had already started arriving to pay their respects.

Shortly, several bearded young men arrived in a pick-up truck with hundreds of plastic chairs, a tent, two gas space heaters and two projector-style electric lights and proceeded to prepare an additional receiving space to el-Zawieh for the womenfolk. I enquired who in the family had the presence of mind to request their services and was told that this was done automatically and offered gratis by the village’s Islamic Movement. The portly ex-mayor of the village, a former teacher of Nabeel and member of the Islamic Movement who specializes in the sordid but required task of washing the dead, arrived and offered a few consoling Koranic verses. He then left to the mosque for the after dusk prayer, the fifth and last prayer of the day, after which he announced Nabeel’s death on the mosque’s loudspeaker:
“The young man, Nabeel the son of the late Khaled Ahmad Abdul-Kader Kanaaneh has departed to the mercies of God the Almighty. His remains will be entrusted to their last resting place tomorrow after the noon prayer. We all are from God and to him we all return.”
Across the ancient thick walls of el-Zawieh where we, the men of the family, sat I heard the shrieking cries of Rudaina and her two daughters from the receiving area for women next door. It touched something very deep in me. Alas, men are not supposed to cry or scream openly; I played by the rules hiding my silent tears with my Kafeyah scarf. By ten o’clock that night the crowd had dispersed. I begged Rudaina to accept a Valium tablet or a sleeping pill but she refused. After much convincing and explaining she and her three remaining children accepted Melatonin.

Over the next three days I alternated between fulfilling my traditional duty as an elder among elders of the clan and offering my shoulder to Rudaina, her son Ahmad, her two daughters: Laila, a teacher, and Muna, a nursing student, to act out their loss in tears and repeated objection to whoever decreed it. Nabeel’s aunts and uncles on both sides, his many cousins, friends and classmates were left for others to console. With my older brother, Prof. Sharif Kanaaneh, in attendance, I was relegated to the rank of second in command in terms of formalities. But because I am a resident of the village, despite my temporary absence in NY, while he lives in Ramallah, and because of my professional association with Rudaina over the years, I was the one to bear the brunt of tending to the practical minutia: the police and traffic department reports, the hospital papers, the burial permit, etc. etc. When I learned of the passing away two days before of a respected old farmer from another clan in Arrabeh, I accompanied a calling party of Kanaaneh respectable elders to the mourning family, the Yasins, who would make a return visit to our quarters that same evening. Two days later, similar visits of a dozen elders from each side would be exchanged with the Aslis who would loose a middle-aged laborer to heart attack.

In playing my role and fulfilling these duties I was aided by many nephews, cousins and neighbors who stood at my beck and call, not to mention relatives and friends from half a dozen Arab communities in Galilee who were more than ready with their advice and counsel as well as cars and muscle power when needed for a chore. Such volunteerism reached its peak when the body arrived as scheduled, one hour before the noon prayer, in the special Islamic Movement’s hearse, the service with the special driver again provided gratis without being requested by the family. The waiting crowd of men swooped down from all directions to help with the highly commendable task of carrying the body in the temporary casket into the house where the heart-rending screams of the women reached to high heaven. After half an hour I had to use my authority to snatch the body from the grieving crowd of women and let it be carried upstairs to a room where it was washed, perfumed and anointed and a proper ablution performed on it in preparation for it to enter the mosque and, after the prayer for the departed and the burial, to meet its creator and His accountant angels who would tally up Nabeel’s few minor sins and many good deeds. It was then wrapped in stitch-less white cloth and placed in the casket to be carried for its last trip. I then asked Nabeel’s brother to assist me in taking his mother and two sisters to kiss Nabeel a last goodbye. I figured that assigning him this task would lighten his burden of sadness and bereavement.

As I walked down to bring Rudaina and her two daughters, two teenage boys begged me to permit them to go in and cast a last glance at their friend. When I agreed the asked to be accompanied by a third classmate, Nabeel’s girl. I was awestruck. What will that do to the girls reputation in the village? I recalled that I was attacked and narrowly escaped being knifed because a girl in my high school class laughed at my jokes. And more recently, both of my children finished high school without ever admitting to having specific friends of the opposite sex. And it is only two generations from the days when the only men a woman could talk to were her husband, father and brothers. The boys saw through my anxiety and sought to reassure me.

“It is alright, uncle. They are together on Facebook.”

I went down and found the girl crying in Rudaina’s arms. I took her in one arm and Rudaina on the other, Ahmad held Mona, his younger sister, while her fiancé, a Christian boy, supported Laila. I knew I was outdated. What amazed me most was the total silent acceptance of all of these ‘transgressions’ by the crowd of mostly hijab-clad women surrounding us.

The rain let up just long enough for the funeral procession from the mosque to the Kanaaneh cemetery on a rocky knoll best known as the sight of the grave of a holy man, formerly well-respected locally until recent years when it was monopolized and walled off to locals by Jewish fundamentalists as that of Rabbi Hanan Ben Dosa. Because of crowding Nabeel was buried at the same site with his late father who died in his forties because of diabetes. I have never seen a bigger crowd at a funeral in Arrabeh. Nabeel’s popularity with his age mates, his mother’s years of service as the maternal and child health nurse for the largest, and, not incidentally, the poorest neighborhood in the village, his aunts’ services as nurse and teacher, his brother Ahmad’s rapid climb to the deputy CEO of the largest Arab transport and tourism company in Israel, his late father’s and grandfather’s well respected memory and wide circles of friends, and perhaps my own service as the first local physician added up to where they made attendance near compulsory to all the adult male population of this 24-thousand-strong town still behaving in the classic intimate village mode. I stayed away from the actual lowering of Nabeel’s body in the ground. Instead, I turned my attention to observing the ongoing social interaction. It dawned on me for the first time that the whole process involved men only even if the dead were to be a woman. Come to think of it, Allah Himself and all of his prophets since Adam, as well as all His angels, are always referred to in the masculine form. Strange visions floated up from my subconscious regarding the inappropriateness of male angels squeezing into the subterranean narrow spaces of dead women. I dared not raise the question with the better-informed sheikhs.

After the lowering of the body in the ground and the religious invocation, the Kanaaneh elders stood in a receiving line in the street outside the cemetery and accepted the condolences of participants from outside Arrabeh. The inclement weather led to excusing locals from the traditional gesture of paying their respects right after the burial.

“We will be honored to see all of you at el-Zawieh,” the cousin heading the line announced apologetically. “We know you will honor us with that so we can skip the additional kindness here.”

Indeed, we then returned to the clan’s guesthouse to welcome men visitors all the waking hours of the next three days. They arrived mostly in groups of family constellations or friends from all over Galilee and beyond. Few independent or lonely souls arrived alone such as Yoav, a longtime dear family friend from Tel-Aviv. Though he was the only Jewish man to call on this sad occasion, he felt close enough to join the receiving line as another member of our family. Our near total social separateness from the majority population of Israel was not as total when it came to women. Female visitors were received separately next door in the much-overhauled old house in which I grew up that had since devolved down the inheritance line to Nabeel’s paternal uncle, my nephew, as the ground floor of his nuclear family residence. Rudaina’s nurse colleagues from the Ministry of Health, both Arab and Jewish, showed up in a group to console her. Shosh, one of my former secretaries at the ministry’s district office dared to drive up alone later on and insisted on seeing me. Simona, Her friend and my personal French-Moroccan secretary, had already retired, I was informed. I was pleasantly surprised to find Shosh still her old blond sweet self despite the years. Her boys are both in their thirties now, she told me. And the office never recovered from the loss I inflicted on it by leaving it, she insisted.

The single large room that constitutes el-Zawieh was empty of furniture except for a wood-coal-burning brassiere functioning as space heater and to keep the coffee decanters hot and a small table with a set of damascene demitasses. The perimeter of the hall had built-in seating with thin mattresses along three walls. We, half-a-dozen older men from the bereaved clan, sat on chairs against the remaining wall by the entrance. Additional seating for the human overflow beyond the capacity of el-Zawieh was provided at the balcony that had been protected from the elements by plastic sheeting provided by the local Islamic Movement and heated by a space heater from the same source. All visitors on this sad occasion were accorded the same level of proper respect and attention: We stood up to exchange individual greetings and standard niceties and epitaphs, conveyer-belt one-on-one style, before they took their seats around the perimeters of the room. Young adult men of our family promptly poured each a sip of the extra-concentrated, cardamom-flavored black coffee. Two concessions to modern public health were in evidence: Water was offered instead of cigarettes and it was poured in plastic single-use cups and not in the same metal or glass mug being passed around as was formerly done. However, the black coffee was offered in only two porcelain cups offered in alternating style down the line. Dried dates followed, but this is a practice frowned at by many and not sanctioned by most religious authorities except in the case of old people who had done the Haj to Mecca. On more than one occasion I managed to keep awake by performing simple statistical analysis on the 3-4-dozen men sitting around the circumference of the room at a time: No more than 10% wore traditional attire; about half smoked cigarettes at a time; the other half busied themselves with their worry beads; and half of the total were visibly obese. As a new wave of well-wishers arrived, the previous crowd would get up and proceed to shake our hands in reverse order and repeat the same slogan utterances on their way out:
“May God have mercy on his soul.”
“May this be your last sad occasion.”
“May God protect your youth.” Etc. etc.
And we responded with equally standard appropriate responses:
“May Allah repay you for your consolation.”
“May you never experience the loss of dear ones.”
“May you and your youth live long.”

And so on and so forth with the only break in the near mechanical three-day-long repetitive sequence of getting up, shaking hands, siting down and starting over again afforded by invitations to the homes of second degree relatives for our meals. The same households sent large amounts of food for the women of the bereaved household: fresh bread, rice with roasted pine nuts and spiced ground meat, lamb or chicken cooked in yogurt with vegetables and beans, various combinations of salads, pickles and preserved olives. Sleep was a welcome escape from it all followed by early morning Skype conversations with my wife, children and grandchildren in The States.

On the facing wall from our seats in el-Zawieh the enlarged photograph of my late uncle who, in his British Mandate days had brought the guesthouse into prominence regionally, peered at us from its wooden frame. On both sides hung the photos of his deceased sons and grandsons who had occupied respected positions in the family constellation. My grandfather, the original founder of the institution who had guaranteed its survival with a generous land endowment, lived during the days of the Ottomans when photography was highly uncommon in these parts. This all was recent, I realized. So were the whitewashing of the walls and the four decorative plastic panels affixed to the ceiling. I appreciated the attention paid to maintaining this traditional communal space in use. Except that the panels looked out of place; they had a French Renaissance pink curlicue flare to their stylized flowery motif. I inquired about this and was told that Derwish, the current titular operator of the guesthouse had refurbished it recently to his own taste. He had wrestled control of the prestigious institution when its former more traditional occupant, triply his cousin, passed away. An alert young relative reached to the wall and took down a framed hand-written document hanging there as well. He wiped the dust from the glass and proceeded to read the Arabic language consensus statement of representatives of all the individual households of the descendants of my late influential uncle, Darwish’s domineering grandfather that he tries now to emulate. The statement was replete with claims of peaceful family relations, brotherhood and tranquility. Then the young man showed me another larger document in cursive Arabic script, the message the Caliph Omar sent to reassure the Christian residents of Jerusalem before its Islamic conquest. It is a most honorable document promising peace, equality and justice. Its humanitarian spirit is worthy of admiration and respect not by Arabs and Muslims alone. I felt moved by the fact that the simple folk in my village saw fit to honor this example of magnanimity and justice by posting it at their most prominent and respected communal public space in the same manner that most Muslims honor their scriptures. The young man pointed to the four signatures of prominent Islamic leaders affixed to the document as witnesses to Omar’s declaration. Only then did he show me the signatures of the witnesses to the local smaller handwritten document, all of whom are run-of-the-mill members of the younger generation of relatives and the last of whom had signed his name in poorly written Hebrew.

“The two documents are hung together,” he commented.

I couldn’t help but surrender to a most inappropriate chuckle, given the sad circumstances.

This kind of lighthearted fun-poking chat with members of the younger generations beyond the first circle of nephews and nieces provided a sort of soft underbelly to the sad occasion of Nabeel’s departure. In fact, his loss has brought members of the two formerly closest households to me in Arrabeh, those of my two late oldest brothers who were married to two sister cousins of theirs, each bringing up nine children and those in turn having their own children, including Nabeel, and, in several cases, their grandchildren. As expected, competing for the scant attention from adult family members in the less than attentive rural setting has resulted in continuous friction between the two near identical households with competing and contradictory land claims, nearly a reenactment on a small scale of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Much as I tried to stay out of it and play the role of the impartial third party, I was eventually drawn into the fray. The last few days have seen members of the two parties back together till the next conflict. I wondered if I shouldn’t try my hand at resolving the Middle East conflict. Or would it need a major disaster first?

A much more tender affair was also noticed on this sad occasion: Laila’s Christian fiancé didn’t leave her side throughout the mourning period. The two clung together from the moment the news of the passing away of her brother, Nabeel, had reached them in Jerusalem. Rabi’i proved to be supportive and ever attentive and helpful to Laila’s and to her mother and two siblings. Their love and sincerity showed through the sadness and the confusion. They did away with all caution and no one dared criticize their open loving relationship despite the gloomy miasma of conservatism and religious fundamentalism all around. Few in our family failed to notice and to appreciate this open show of commitment of the two young people across the presumed religious barrier.

In the receiving line at the cemetery as well as later while receiving the droves of well-wishers in el-Zawieh, my anthropologist brother, Sharif, inquired frequently about the identities of fellow villagers. My residence in the area and service as local physician afforded me more contact with Galilee folks than him. At one point, during a meal break, Sharif remarked about the effect of advanced age on our former schoolmates and friends:
“It is peculiar how deleterious age is esthetically to humans,” he, the social scientist, observed. “No other animal species suffers from bad looks in old age as much as we humans do. Dogs, cats, donkeys and fowl don’t deteriorate in outward appearances as badly as we humans do.”

“It is because you look at them with human eyes,” answered our carpenter cousin who is the oldest living man in our clan and hence leads the pack of Kanaaneh elders. “If you were a donkey all humans, young and old, would look the same to you. As an old turkey you probably would notice the change in the plumage and crowns of other turkeys.”

One interesting aspect of the above standard socio-religious stage-like routine acted out by all concerned on the funerary occasion is the self-assigned role played by the many Muslim sheiks and aspirant imams. Like other guests, they show up uninvited, usually accompanied by a small entourage of disciples and followers. After exchanging the standard greetings and sipping their black coffee, they would call all those present to attention with a catchy prayer and then proceed to deliver a sermon addressed mainly to us, members of the bereaved family. They would advise us to accept what fate had decreed and not to loose faith in Allah’s mercies. Then they would turn to reassuring us of Nabeel’s guaranteed place in paradise, given his Islamic faith, his youth and innocence, and his many good deeds and knowing the good Lord’s boundless forgiveness and love for all those He created in His own image. Then they would delve into warning the living regarding the certainty of death and the darkness of the grave except for those who had lived a virtuous life and performed their religious duties. Each of these points was usually highlighted and illustrated by a story. Then they would end with a sequence of prayers asking the good Lord to favor Nabeel with His blessings and favorable treatment. Some of the favors requested give away their Arabian Desert origin such as asking Allah to bathe his body with hail and snow.

The lectures varied in creativity, eloquence and width of horizons but they often repeated the same illustrative stories. What I found entertaining was hearing the very same content, phrased slightly differently by the young Catholic priest from the neighboring village of Sakhnin. And he was respectfully answered with the same platitudes from our side. Only one sheik with a bell-like baritone voice departed from the routine by singing verses from the Koran that covered all the usual points. I enjoyed his melodious performance so much that I asked him to return on the third and last evening to recite more Koranic verses to celebrate the end of the mourning and guest-receiving period in place of the standard final sermon by a local imam. Alas, another talkative sheik arrived with him and forced us all to listen to a repeat of the same well-worn religious lesson. All of this was beamed to the women quarters next door over a loudspeaker. They had their own share of women lecturers, sheikahs, but the pious male Koran reciters would not enter their circle live.

One oft-repeated story caught my fancy. I must have heard it a dozen or more times during the three day mourning period as part of the captive audience for the sheiks. It related an incident that allegedly took place in the court of King Solomon who is regarded by Muslims as a miracle-performing prophet of Allah. One day the angel of death entered King Solomon’s court in the form of a regular human. Later, as the angel in human form left, one of those present wanted to know who he was? King Solomon informed him of his true identity. The man broke down and cried in fear:
”Woe is me! The angel of death didn’t avert his eyes from me for a single moment. Please, King Solomon, save me from him!”

King Solomon accepted the poor man’s plea and, on the spot, transported him to hide all the way in India. The next morning the angel of death appeared in the prophet’s court again. The prophet asked why he, the angel in human form, had looked so intently at that poor man the previous day.

“I was trying to resolve a conundrum: My orders from the good Lord were to proceed to India to collect the man’s soul last night. And yet he was sitting here at your court. Finally, confused, I obeyed and proceeded to India where, lo and behold, I met my man right there. God is great!”

“Brothers,” the sheik who narrated the same story to bring the three days of public mourning to an official end glowered at us in el-Zawieh. “There is no escaping from death.”

“May God preserve your tongue,” a macho older cousin responded in agreement on our collective behalf. “The Arab poet put it well: ‘He who doesn’t die by the sword dies by other means.’”

A smile lit the face of the young man next to me.

“Where is the pun?” I demanded.

“What threatening belligerence!” he whispered back. “The poet said that line urging his fellow tribesmen to go to war. I guess the sheiks have repeated that story one time too many for our man.”

Oh, No! Bagger Befriends Cashier. You Need a Whip to Teach People a Lesson After Something Like This Happens

2011-07-28T04:06:00.000-07:00

The following is an exercise in open plagiarism. Even the title above is taken from the text of the article as it appears in the Tuesday, July 26, 2011 issue of the Israeli paper,Haaretz, and on its website at the following link:
http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/israeli-grocery-store-keeps-arab-baggers-and-jewish-cashiers-apart-1.375301
Someone posted the comment: “It's really a pity that this kind of news doesn't get into the US media.” Upon reading that, I decided to take up the challenge. The article was featured on the first page of the English version of the respected Haaretz Paper as another news item with no editorial comment or fanfare and the reporter’s tone lacked any sense of bafflement or condemnation. To give the piece the right ring I decided to alter the setting to one more familiar to US citizens who are not that involved in Middle East politics. I reverted to my limited acquaintance with Hawaii and the continuing struggle of Native Hawaiians against racism and the theft of their land. I realize that the simile would be even more striking if I were to choose the Navajos for example. But I know little about that nation. So bear with me please and imagine reading the following in the Tuesday, July 26, 2011 issue of the Honolulu Star Bulletin. At the end I appended a list of the terms that I have changed:

American grocery store keeps Hawaiian baggers and white cashiers apart
It appears that RL chain has given in to a demand from local pastors at Nanakuli branch, in wake of romance between a Hawaiian bagger and White cashier.
By CL

In an effort to prevent fraternizing between the Hawaiian packers and the female White cashiers, baggers are no longer working at the checkout counters most of the week. An exception was made for the Wednesday and Thursday night shifts, when the checkout counters are so busy that there is little opportunity for conversation.
The decision followed a storm that arose in the Nanakuli White-only suburbs after it was reported that a local (White) girl working as a cashier had become romantically involved with one of the Hawaiian baggers.
Workers at the supermarket and a leading local pastor say the Hawaiian worker was fired, but RL denies that, saying, “He’s gone off to California. When he returns, we’ll see.” The cashier quit on her own.
Ever since RL Marketing opened its Nanakuli branch, it has been a source of local controversy. It is located near a gas station and not within a white only suburb, making it possible for Whites and Polynesian shoppers to mingle freely. Most of the workers are Hawaiians from the area, who handle deliveries, bag groceries and stack shelves. The cashiers are mostly young women from the Whites-only suburbs.
While there have been periodic media reports lauding the supermarket as an island of Hawaiian-White coexistence, right-wing groups and some locals have issued calls to boycott it, saying it was leading to inter-religious relationships. These campaigns did not fare well. In fact, the supermarket has been so crowded that small grocers in the area’s communities have started to fear for their business.
Over the past two weeks, however, after reports of the cashier-packer affair spread, Pastor GP, the pastor of a neighboring Whites-only suburb, met with chain owner RL and demanded that he take action to prevent a recurrence.
“There was an affair between a cashier and a bagger that nearly resulted in her leaving home,” GP told our paper. “There was a plan to take her to his village.
“I was asked to talk to RL and his staff about the problem, and told them that one of the things we had feared when the store opened a year ago was exactly this.
“I’m pleased by the steps RL has taken. The Hawaiians don’t particularly like this [interreligious relationships] either, and it seems that RL understands the problem. The worker was fired and will not return. You need a whip to teach people a lesson after something like this happens.”
RL denies the worker was fired. He declared himself “against assimilation” and insisted that “there was suspicion of an affair. There was no affair. These extremist groups keep getting involved and making everybody crazy. “This is the ‘peace supermarket,’ he said. “Extremist Hawaiians and Whites don’t like it.”

Changes made from the original article:
Israeli to American
Palestinian to Hawaiian
Jewish to White
Chaim Levinston to CL
Rami Levi to RL
Gush Etzion to Nanakuli
Rabbi to pastor
Settlements to Whites-only suburbs
Jordan to California
Rami Levi Shivuk Hashikma to RL Marketing
Arab to Polynesian
Settler to White
Gideon Perl to GP
Alon Shvut to a neighboring Whites-only suburb
Haaretz to our paper

The Olive Conversion

2011-07-20T23:18:00.000-07:00

The Olive Conversion
Review of Pamela Olson’s “Fast Times in Palestine,” Mason Hill Press, New York, 2011

Right after glancing at the first page, I knew I fancied this book and envied its author. For a few years now I have been struggling with the urge to write an account of life in my community that would attract readers not because of its subject matter or politics but because of its style and plot. It would be read for pleasure and inform incidentally. Right away I realized Pamela Olson had done exactly that. The first blurb on the first page said it: “The result is a moving, inspiring account of life in Palestine that’s enormously informative yet reads like a novel.”

Yet, as I speed-read through the enchanted account of Olson’s year and a half in Palestine, I realized that my scheme was easier dreamt than implemented: In Ramallah she adopts and adapts to Journalism as a default profession, and on a couple of occasions she lapses into pure journalistic and political discourse, such as when she reports on the results of the presidential elections, on the issue of East Jerusalem or on her visit to a settlement. But then, how else does one convey the reality of the wicked injustices committed in connivance with the misinformed Western public? Olson gives an early inkling of what she was up against (p. 66):

“I got my first clue when I began talking with friends about what I had seen. Some were skeptical, which was understandable. Others refused to believe things I have seen with my own eyes. Several, who had never been anywhere near the Middle East, informed me that I was naïve and I must have been brainwashed. More than one made vicious generalizations about Arabs and Muslims that they would never dare make about any other race or religion. It was so bizarre to see friends turn into different people around this issue, I almost began to question my own sanity.”

As a young American college graduate, Olson had shared the usual media-inspired preconceived ideas (p. 3):

“I’d always hazily pictured the Middle East as a vast desert full of cave-dwelling, Kalashnikov-wielding, misogynistic, bearded maniacs, and I figured anyone without an armored convoy and a PhD in Middle Eastern studies should probably stay out of it.”

Fortunately, eventually she found herself in the West Bank village of Jayyous through a combination of curiosity, adventurism and sheer luck. Like Rachel Corrie shortly before her [Let Me Stand Alone, Norton, New York, 2008], Anna Baltzer at about the same time [Witness In Palestine, Paradigm, Boulder, Co, 2007], and scores of unpublished international activists before and since, she was in the throes of her private search for meaning in life. “That spark I’d had as a kid, the passion for learning about the world through my own senses, was reigniting,” as she puts it (p. 96.)

That was when she discovered the ultimate contradiction of a people, oppressed and dehumanized through her own unwilling and unknowing connivance, extending extreme hospitality to her. This is the moment I will call Olson’s “olive-ahlan-wa-sahlan” conversion: a sudden realization that the Palestinians, victims of her own government’s policies, were not only human but also generous and welcoming beyond belief. “If you ask for directions, you get invited to dinner.” They took the wayward American tourist as one of their own, repeating their incessant welcoming mantra beseeching her to “Be at ease, like one of the family.”

As if to prove the point, they take her to pick olives in their fields, ravaged by the American-funded occupation and violated by Israel’s apartheid wall. Beyond the camaraderie of toiling together in the presence of the historic witness that each ancient olive tree stands for, the experience inspires a miraculous spiritual enlightenment of sorts: Not only are Palestinians generous (like most Middle Eastern natives are), they also display stunning resilience and lack of bitterness despite all their suffering, a kind of grace the author finds incredibly inspiring. Soon Olson begins to fall in love with this land into which she has stumbled (p. 118):

“The thought of olive oil literally flowing like water out of this land enchanted me beyond all reason. As we turned to walk home I was infused with a sensation I’d never felt before, a feeling of having arrived, of finding myself in just the right place on earth at exactly the right time. Suddenly I couldn’t imagine living anywhere but Palestine, close to olive trees and white stone houses and Bible hills turning blue as the sun set over a sea we couldn’t walk to and touch without crossing walls and checkpoints. Life here was hard and lonely and confusing, but it was also full and exciting, cynical and funny, and often lovely beyond description. For the first time since I’d arrived in Ramallah I wasn’t looking forward or back anymore. I was just here, now, and happy.”

Or again (p. 165):

“We harvested each day until we couldn’t see anymore, then we would take tea and watch the last lights of sunset fade, chat or just think our thoughts while the stars broke out of the crystal sky one by one. In those moments, leaning against an ever-growing pile of ripe olives, breathing in the deep, rich subterranean scent of a hard day’s work, I felt completely content and at peace… On evenings like this, in a world like this, it seemed downright ungracious ever to despair. It was, after all, absurd to hate the slaughter and waste and hardship and destruction without acknowledging the flipside: that life was here, that the whole reason we hated waste and destruction was because we loved life and this world so much.”

Olson’s conversion was not purely of the intellectual or spiritual variety, however. She also met a handsome young Palestinian named Qais who, like her, had studied in Russia and spoke Russian, which served them, I imagine, as a means of illicit communication in conservative rural Palestine. Eventually, in her role as journalist and foreign press coordinator for Dr. Mustafa Barghouthi’s bid for the presidency of the PNA, she befriended many Palestinian peers, including her “loud-mouthed Gaza Communist” roommate, as well as countless international volunteers and activists. She even ventured some cross-border visits with Israeli friends, which must have served as subconscious reality checks and occasional escapes to her more familiar former sociopolitical surroundings, the usual Western milieu. And more than once she tour-guided Jewish and/or Israeli friends, some not even all that liberal, on tours of Palestinian towns, villages, and refugee camps.

Before I commenced reading ‘Fast Times in Palestine,’ I had been emotionally immersed in the journals of Rachel Corrie. Now I missed Rachel’s intimate conversations with her parents in her emails home as she tried to explain to them what she was doing in Gaza. I was curious about the trickledown effect of Olson’s intense exposure to the lives of Palestinians under occupation on her next of kin. Just as the suspicion started sneaking into my mind that here we were dealing with a super-intelligent but rootless and freaky American kid on the loose, she revealed that she had been writing home regularly. She then gives a moving account of her parents’ experience on visiting her in the Holy Land, an experience best summed up with the line (p. 278):

“Good Lord,” Mom said. “How can this be happening over here and no one in America even know or care?”

And again (p. 280):

“Seeing a soldier arbitrarily deny my mother a glimpse of one of the wonders of the world on her once-in-a-lifetime vacation awakened a primal rage I didn’t realize I was capable of. For the first time I experienced the literal truth of ‘seeing red.’ I started yelling at the soldier, much to his amusement and my mother’s horror… I can’t imagine what I would have felt, or what I might have been capable of, if the soldier had been denying my mother life-saving medical treatment instead of just messing up her vacation.”

That evoked vivid memories of my own parents-in-law on their first visit to Israel and of their fretful sobbing over the depravity their daughter had chosen to live under with her Palestinian husband in Galilee. And we weren’t even under occupation in the narrow sense of international law; we were Israeli citizens.

All through the book, Olson writes in an animated, lively, engaging, witty and intimate style. But in expressing her inner feelings and her acute sense of empathy with the other, she often waxes touchingly poetic (p. 176):

“But who could watch so many proud young women and dignified old men humiliated at checkpoints? Who could watch the obscenity of helpless, impoverished, dispossessed people being bombed in Gaza like fish in a barrel? [‘Like cockroaches in a bottle,’ an Israeli leader once put it.] How long could and should someone stand it? A diminished life was better than no life. There was always a secret space no oppression could ever touch. But how could a valiant or a sensitive soul bear it?

We all thinking it, Qais. We all miss God, or whatever you want to call the pure thing that runs through all this. And you’re trapped here, imprisoned, in a way so obscene it’s impossible to contemplate. And still you have to live it. You, a lucky kid who made it past his twentieth birthday.

Qais asked why I was crying. He said he didn’t want to hear me cry; he couldn’t endure it. Sometimes I wasn’t sure I could endure it, either. How I was supposed to think about a world where the life of a Palestinian was utterly disposable?…

I thought about suicide for the first time not as an abstraction but as a genuine option – a way to drop out of the whole diabolical game. But I dismissed it immediately. When I thought of what I would go through if Qais was killed, by his own hand or anyone else’s, it was impossible to justify putting anyone else through that just to ease my own conscience and end my own pain.”

Or take, for example, her brief, acerbic, almost photographic rendition of a common Palestinian scene (p. 272):

“It was standard fare for a Palestinian refugee camp -- narrow streets, concrete buildings, cramped alleys, and occasional touches of bougainvillea or decorative tiles to lend a whiff of dignity.”

Olson’s empathy and good vibes envelop even those literally on the other side of the fence: (p. 222)

“But [the Israeli soldier] was, after all, just a teenager. Wars and occupation were innately abhorrent things, poisoning the soul and society of all involved. Here was another kid caught in the maw of it, standing at a checkpoint instead of off at a college somewhere studying and partying. It seemed like such a pointless waste.”

And she never loses her sense of humor. It flows throughout her narrative and seems to come handy in tight spots as a form of comic relief:

“Abir and I agreed the soldier was cute, but I said, ‘Does that ever work? Picking up chicks while you’re oppressing them?’
‘Who knows?’ said Abir. ‘Why do construction workers whistle at girls who pass by?’
‘I guess men with big metal objects in their hands get overconfident or something.’”

No less poetic are her descriptions of scenes of the wilderness and relaxed romantic settings she finds herself privy to, whether in the Sinai, Jordan or the West Bank (p. 287):

“The moon had a bright ring around it twenty moon-diameters across, which made it look like the dome of a great cathedral. The jagged stone mountains were like pillars conjured by God. The surrounding sea of silken sand softly refracted the moonlight’s radiance. The stars, subtly colored, brilliant, three-dimensional, embedded in the silvery ink of unlikely existence, were unbearably beautiful. The breeze, neither warm nor cool, seemed to blow through me.”

Poetic and romantic when feeling one with nature, fun-loving yet acutely observant and closely connected to the people around her, and moving in her compassion for the downtrodden and oppressed, Olson comes across as innately humane and witty. Palestinians couldn’t have befriended a better advocate.

Yet, as a Public Health specialist, I permit myself to end on a critical note: All through her beautifully written book, Olson romanticizes the Nargila [hookah], the new scourge of youth in the Middle East, a much more harmful fad than cigarette smoking. Unintentionally she sows the seed of harm in her endearing description of life in Palestine. I do hope, and plead, that she will insist on banishing that from the film version.

Contradictions Be Damned: Colonel Pinky’s Last Stand in the Case of Rachel Corrie

2011-07-12T07:08:00.000-07:00

The last session of the Rachel Corrie court case in Haifa had been repeatedly postponed on account of the weightiness of the witness. Colonel Pinhas Zuaretz, better known by his nickname, Pinky, was the commanding officer of the Gaza Division’s Southern Brigade at the time the late peace activist was killed. I decided to display my solidarity with my fellow countryman, to wear my heart on my sleeve so to speak. Lacking pink in my wardrobe I donned the loudest Aloha shirt I had with large off-pink flowery pattern. Pinky turned out to be weighty indeed: a rotund, dark-skinned, middle-aged man with closely cropped salt-and-pepper scalp, thick black eyebrows and bulldoggish jowls. Despite the reassurance of our shared Semitic features, his presence evoked in me the same gut-level discomfort I had always sensed whenever seeing Ariel Sharon or our current foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman.

Don’t jump to conclusions, please! Some of my best friends are rotund. I have a teenage neighbor who on occasion helps me collect my free-range chicken eggs. He has a low IQ and an inborn glandular disorder that stores excessive fat on his short torso. Also I have many American friends who tower a foot or more over me. Whether a war criminal, a bar bouncer, a simpleton, or an average well-fed person, the sheer bulk of a corpulent man is enough to intimidate and rile me on the inside. Today’s witness was no exception: I wished I had worn black.

Even before he spoke, I decided that I wouldn’t want to wrestle with the man. His body language and his automatic assumption of priority in communicating with the judge, whose ruddy complexion suggested another longish repose on some tropical seaside, did little to reassure me. But Husain Abu-Husain proceeded right away to tangle with the man and to try to cut him down to size: How can a man of his rank make so many spelling mistakes in his written affidavit, Abu-Husain asked? Would he care to comment about the sexual harassment case a woman soldier once brought against him? Would he commit to the principle of protecting human life? To this last one Colonel Pinky acquiesced begrudgingly after stressing his first allegiance to protecting the life of his soldiers. And was he still convinced of his conclusion after his rushed investigation of the case of the late Rachel Corrie only hours after his soldiers’ D9R Caterpillars had crushed her to death that their conduct was flawless? To this he responded in the positive stating that Rachel had died through her own carelessness and willful interference on the side of the terrorists who had sent her to disrupt the soldiers’ orderly carrying out of their duty of leveling an area. The presence of the home of a certain Dr. Khalil and another ‘yellow house’ repeatedly mentioned in the military investigations was considered immaterial not only by the witness but also by the judge who struck the line of questioning from the record.

In Colonel Pinky’s logic there seemed to be no place for doubt: things were either white or black. What he repeatedly asserted was that the whole area was a war zone and anyone present in it was as good as dead, “ben mavit -- mortal” by definition. Rachel was on the side of the enemy and her death should have been a forgone conclusion. How could someone miss such simple logic? Pinky shook his head repeatedly in exasperation at the unbelievable stupidity of his doubters. And his soldiers were performing their duties in a war zone. That included the killing of enemy combatants or of their supporters and messengers, he seemed to imply. And yet his soldiers acted in a humane manner. They tried to give first aid to the accidentally injured woman. Pinky emphasized this ‘humane gesture’ that his soldiers extended to another victim whom they had shot dead as well. This last bit of logic made perfect sense to me: When you willfully shoot to kill someone, why would you want to extend first aid to him or her? Indeed this was beyond the call of duty.

When Abu-Husain pointed out a contradiction between Pinky’s written affidavit and other documents on record regarding an injury he claimed he had suffered, the judge stepped in to rule that as irrelevant. This protective intervention was to be repeated by the judge several times, usually in response to the objection of the defense lawyer raised with such animated movement of her brightly manicured pretty hands over her head out of synch with whatever she was saying. I figured the woman would be something to behold with her favorite witness on a dance floor; she seemed so twirly and sympathetic to his preposterous who-the-hell-is-this-Arab-questioning-my-judgment stance.

Twice, in his attempt to shield the witness from the aggression of his unjust doubters, the judge made pronouncements so damning of the IDF that I expected Pinky to get up and slug him in the mouth: When Abu-Husain brought up the case of a soldier under Pinky’s command who had killed another international activist, lied about the circumstances of the murder and his story was taken as the honest truth by Pinky, the judge did not allow that into the record because he thought it was irrelevant to Rachel’s case. Besides, the judge rationalized, soldiers lie just as others do including in his court. Then there was the issue of drug abuse in the unit the members of which were involved in Rachel’s demise. Again the judge threw that out explaining that drug abuse was widespread in all units of the IDF. I expected Pinky to maul him so hard that he would need to go back to R&R at some far off rehab facility. But the commander swallowed the insult quietly. After all, from the start he gave signs of a common understanding between him, the defense, and the judge, not the result of some collusion, God forbid, but of each doing his duty in repulsing the onslaught of so many goyim on “the most ethical army in the world.” But especially Pinky had an expression of disgust at being badgered by a team of Palestinian lawyers. It didn’t make sense to me: True Abu-Husain is of darker skin and that may have justified Pinky’s look of condescension in his own eyes. But Dakwar, the second prosecution lawyer, is as fair-skinned as they come, fairer than the judge himself. I figured it must be size that decides status this time around.

In Colonel Pinky’s clear-minded view, the last question that Abu-Husain lobbed at him must have looked like the nastiest of curveballs: Abu-Husain must have seemed to him to be intent on adding insult to injury. He, a former ranking colonel and currently the Deputy Head of the FIDF (Friends of the Israeli Defense Forces,) had been already dragged enough through the mud: He had to defend himself against the attacks of a scrawny (by comparison) dark-skinned (also relatively so) Palestinian (also relatively so since his Palestinianism had been compromised by an Israeli citizenship in Pinky’s black-and-white world,) reminiscent in his private thoughts, no doubt, of the standard IDF practice dummies. And now the dark-faced, kaffiyah-clad, hole-riddled scarecrow wanted him to apologize to the parents of that foreign pro-terrorist provocateur! These Ishmaelites, our leaders told us, were supposed to serve us as “Hewers of wood and drawers of water.” Look at them now, biting the hand that feeds them. How terribly insulting it must have felt to the colonel. Thanks God the judge interfered and promptly halted the assault on the defenseless soldier even before the defense lawyers objected. He angrily explained the inappropriateness of such a gesture before He Himself had a chance to issue His ruling.

In rural Galilee the older folks tell a story about a wild Bedouin’s first encounter with the law. He was dragged into town and kept overnight in a cell repeatedly threatened by his jailers with having to face the judge. After the affair was over he was heard explaining gleefully: “I was scared stiff by the prospect of tangling with the judge. But the judge turned out to be a man.”

After all, our judge turns out to be an Israeli man. I bet you my last Aloha shirt the Corries will not get the one dollar they are suing for.

Breast Milk Joe

2011-06-18T23:46:00.000-07:00

Joe was known to all in Arrabeh by his Arabic nickname, one that is best approximated in translation by “breast-milk dandy,” referring to his five-year long suckling at his mother’s breast in her affectionate consecration of her youthful body to the memory of her late husband and first cousin. He had died while Joe was only a mere formless glob with a pulsating center in her womb kicking up a storm of mothering hormones and tender longings for the purloined intimacy in their constrained undercover privacy. Joe now occupied the vacant space of her man next to her in the midst of their other eight young children carefully arranged each night under shared covers on the floor of their single-room abode. Joe grew up pampered, envied and constantly intimidated by his siblings and innumerable doting but domineering uncles and aunts and an endless string of cousins on both sides of the family, nearly one and the same, with varying ratios of the love and hate admixture that comprises the essence of all clan relationships. By the time he entered school Joe had acquired a reputation for sneakiness and slight of hand, though his feats of deceit and small-time trickery were tolerated or even encouraged as displays of childhood cleverness and cute pranks. Except that Joe had the fair skin and shifty blue eyes to go with the cunning and treachery that he started perfecting into an art form by the time he hit his teen years. Some crusader must have jumped the fence and left his telltale genes in the family line to be reinterpreted after we came under the British mandate in line with the ambivalence of all natives towards their masters. Hence the white man’s skin and eye color are much desired but suspect and distrusted nevertheless.

By a stroke of good luck, at the relatively late age of xx Joe married a childless divorcee who had struggled and, against all odds, regained her freedom from an arranged first-cousin marriage to a drug-addict and a wife beater. Like Joe, she had fair skin and pale blue eyes, the faint hints of familial Albinism. Except that in the female these are even more appreciated as signs of beauty. The young woman proved to be the serious and independent type. Not that it helped her avoid a miserable second union: After all, at first glance, Joe seemed like a good catch: Her match in looks and the descendent of landed village bosses with a good name and better than average rating on the local social scale of liberalism. In fact the Kanaaneh men were reputed to pamper their women, not to allow them to do the backbreaking fieldwork, and to conserve them for their amorous peruse. Alas, Joe turned out to have spent some of his youthful years on the periphery of modernity in Tel-Aviv where he picked up the habit of smoking marijuana. It was too early for AIDS. This connection might well have had something to do with him finding out , through the addicts’ own grapevine, about the breakup of the woman’s first marriage. As Joe slid down the slippery slope of drug use, drug pushing, underworld dealings and jail time, his wife earned a living for herself and for the four boys that she bore him by joining a fruit-picking crew.

I liked both Joe and his wife. Usually they came to my clinic separately. Most of the time when he came he would tell me his diagnoses and what medications he needed and I would find his diagnoses to be correct. And there was nothing suggestive in the kind of medications that he requested. He had a calm and respectful way about him and seemed as straight as an arrow. His wife came mostly with a sick child. She wore a constant smile, an aura of self-confidence and satisfaction with life as a whole. She never complained to me about any marital problems and had no suggestive psychosomatic complaints herself. Our family blood connection and my social and professional position were sufficient to warrant a measure of expectation and openness on her part. Yet she never took advantage of the escape door that this situation opened for her. What rumors I heard about Joe came from other distant relatives his age.

Like most young men in the village and with the help of so many brothers and cousins skilled in the various manual construction crafts, while still single Joe had built himself an adequate home. It was located at a relatively remote spot in the middle of a good-sized olive field he had inherited. After the standard one-day honeymoon of dining out and shopping in the city of Acre, he moved with his bride into his new home. Shortly after he had domesticated his first catch, a beautiful gazelle as per the consensus of all neighbors and friends, he started to take interest in the surrounding relative wilderness: He trapped rabbits, hedgehogs, coyotes, partridges and the like. He tried to raise several species in his yard next to the goat he kept for his morning glass of coffee with fresh milk. On the rare occasion that I found the time and an excuse to stop at his house for a delicious cup of coffee latte, he would insist on showing me all his collection of wild animals and the alterations in his yard he was making to accommodate them. There was a cave with clear evidence of ancient human habitation, possibly from the time of the Canaanites that he discovered in the sheer rock wall he had cut in the side of the hill to level the ground for the house. There was the artificial cave-like structure he fashioned out of loose rocks and mud for a pair of hedgehogs. And there was the huge pigeon tower he constructed to house the half dozen types of doves and messenger pigeons he raised.

Soon Joe’s lone homestead was overshadowed by a larger adjacent home. It was the home of a known crook and a polygamist who managed to keep three wives, illegally in Israel, and to spend time in jail in lieu of paying traffic tickets and fines for various and sundry small-time thefts and the like. Where the man found the money to purchase the land from Joe and to build his house will remain always a secret though it is assumed that he never paid for it in full. For that, it is assumed, the relations between the two neighbors have always been strained.. Additional neighbors eventually materialized as the extensive olive grove was gradually transformed into a new habitable neighborhood, Joe and his co-heirs benefiting from the inflated price in the process.

With the advent of urbanization to the neighborhood, Joe’s property shrank with successive sales of one parcel of land after another. But his relatively spacious front yard assumed a strange and arty look: whoever would think of placing a single ancient olive tree and an imposing life-size olive press in the center of his yard? The man had much to recommend him in terms of visual display of what a paradise of nostalgic rural life his yard could potentially be. He recreated a village scene from bygone days with a large pile of dry wheat stalks arranged in a circle, complete with the threshing equipment and all. The impressive sight was further extenuated with a backdrop of red bougainvilleas draped over a row of pine trees.

Joe had a touch of madness in imagining what he could do with his yard: He planned to develop a tourist attraction in his yard with accommodations for B&B alongside it. Soon he started constructing the facility with much flare and creativity as to what the youth who would use it would find attractive. Single-handedly he fashioned two-dozen adobe-walled cabins, each with built-in shelves, mirrors, cabinet space, mini bar, and an elevated platform with a mattress. There were single and double occupancy cabins. There even was one with a platform that sleeps three “in case some pervert arrives with two women. You haven’t seen Playboy?” Joe explained in defense of his own perversion. He then added a dining room and a series of showers. The outer walls of the entire structure were inundated with hanging village antiques and memorabilia. He then started a campaign at the local authority to have the dirt road leading to his property properly paved. When the response was slow to come, Joe tried to contact the Ministry of Tourism to bring pressure on the village council. But the MOT required a licensed facility with a proper building permit in accordance with a plan submitted with the stamp of a civil engineer, etc. etc. Joe had worked in Tel-Aviv and thought he knew how to handle government officials. “A bottle of fresh olive oil goes a long way in smoothing things over whether it is the lowly Arab inspector or our Jewish cousins in charge of the planning department,” he reasoned.

Alas, Joe’s originality and spontaneity backfired. What finally brought the deathblow to the ambitious plan was the second intifada at the turn of the millennium. In it Arrabeh and neighboring Sakhnin figured as lead Palestinian localities within the green line where young men and women demonstrated and some were picked off by snipers. Development dreams of local entrepreneurs like Joe were nipped in the bud by the near total boycott of Arab businesses and locales by the Jewish majority in the country. With that went the expected internal tourism that was to provide the customers Joe dreamt of hosting. Government officials limited their contacts with our villages and work crews of such public facilities as water, telephone and electricity would not enter them except under the protection of the security forces. Joe’s fancy rural pension started with zero occupancy and never rose above that. Local cynics gloated at his failure with expressions of satisfaction that Joe never attracted all the city and foreign youth he had dreamt of corrupting with his secret drug trade. It is generally assumed in our community that at this stage he turned to local youth as potential customers. To his disappointment, the consumer base was too limited, what with the remnants of traditional tribal allegiance and communal solidarity working against him.

As the bottom fell out of his ambitious scheme he must have sought solace in the drugs that he handled. The downhill spiral of his planned business enterprise led to the loss of any land that he had inherited other than the plot on which his house and dream project stood. Still his debtors demanded cash and he became more aggressive in his forbidden sales, with the occasional slipups landing him repeatedly in jail. In his free intervals he would try to get cash from his wife who never stopped working at her fruit-picking job. She refused and he threatened to kill her. To buttress his threats he accused her of cheating on him, an accusation that, in accordance with local customs would justify the death penalty on basis of protecting the family honor. Then the husband of one of her sisters, while on leave from the mental hospital, slit his wife’s throat in broad daylight. That forced Joe’s wife to complain to the police about his threats and occasional practice of physical violence against her and they locked him up again and again. Once while on furlough he was enticed into a rendezvous with debtors. Later that night passers-by, alerted incidentally by his beeping mobile phone, found him by the village road all but dead. He was rushed to the hospital where he was revived ad the fractures in his skull and limbs treated.

Joe never recovered fully from his injuries, the psychological ones apparently being more severe and longer lasting. To add insult to injury, he received a court order to demolish his never-used B&B facility. With the threat of fines and confiscation, he was forced to do the unthinkable: He physically demolished with his own hands the fruit of years of his diligent handiwork and artistic creation. After a stint at a mental hospital he was released on multiple drugs that left him looking physically disabled and pitifully ancient. And he was a social wreck as well: he was so constantly agitated that he could hardly sit down to sip his cup of coffee when he visited a neighbor. Most relatives and neighbors no longer extended the accepted social graces to him: He would enter the men’s diwan and say the standard greeting of ”Salaam – peace!” and most of those gathered there would pretend not to have heard him. To that was added the most insulting rumor spread by the malicious neighbors whose own son had stabbed one of Joe’s sons. They spread the allegation that his own brother had stabbed the boy.

Joe turned inward and withdrew into his own lonely shell. He seemed constantly preoccupied by his own inner demons. He took to intimidating those around him with the threat of hanging himself. The accepted axiom among psychiatrists is that those who threaten suicide often do not carry out their threats; it is the silent depressed that require the most attention. A neighboring pair of cousins had set the date for their son’s wedding and Joe promised not to sully their fun. “I cann’t stand it anymore. I have the rope. But I will let you finish the wedding celebration before I use it,” he told his cousins the night before they found him hanging from his ancient olive tree.

Flamenco For Beginners

2011-05-31T19:55:00.000-07:00

In Arrabeh most people of all ages recognize me on sight. Unfortunately, the reverse is far from true: Age, my retirement from active medical practice, and my reserve and limited social circulation in the village have made most young faces new to me. Still, there is hardly a face I cannot pin to a specific clan in the village. Even when I am unable to specify whose son or daughter a young person is, I recognize the general features and am able to categorize the individual as the descendent of a specific age-mate or acquaintance. Facial features alone, if one were to liken the mental process of recognition to that of artificial intelligence, provide endless possible combinations necessitating perhaps a decimal bit and byte system instead of the binary one currently in use. Integrate that, if you please, with the range of variations in skin color, physique, gait, voice quality, etc. etc. and you end up with a failsafe system that leaves little to brag about for me. It would be the first sign of Alzheimer’s for me to fail the test of clan categorization of members of the new generation in Arrabeh.

This is all to explain to myself the strange sense of comfortable familiarity that I experienced at the Flamenco club we attended one evening in Seville. I know little about musicology and less about dance. Still, sitting in the front row I struggled all through the performance against the urge to jump to the stage and join the riotous footwork, the fast-paced clapping and the incomprehensible inspired singing. The entire act spoke directly to my heart in familiar and meaningful ways. It was as if I were revisiting a long-lost childhood friend, enigmatic but loved and trusted. Toufiq, my co-villager and fellow traveler, read the singing as an expression of pain and suffering. “Those Gypsies are singing their anguish,” he declared. It brought to mind my previous encounter with the musical genre from fourteen years before. I had travelled with my two dear international brothers and former roommates from college days in Hawaii, Djon the Indonesian and Jagy the Indian, to celebrate our sixtieth birth year in Andalucía. In Seville we stumbled on a major Gypsy occasion. The pope had beatified the first ever Gypsy on the way to sainthood and the best of their artists celebrated the occasion by composing a Flamenco opera to be performed at the famous Seville Cathedral, the gesture of the pope no more usual than the flock’s response. Though the only explanation we received was in a written sheet in Spanish, which no one among us three spoke, I remember understanding the entire opera and sympathizing fully with its Gypsy heroes.

As an Arab heir to the culture of Al-Andalus and perhaps a descendent of one of those most enlightened of humans of their era, I felt fully entitled to stake a claim to emotional, artistic and intellectual ownership of Flamenco as ‘ours,’ in partnership with Gypsies and native Spaniards. More convincingly, as a Palestinian, the olives of Southern Spain were truly mine. After all, the olive started in the hills of greater Syria and it suckled our forbearers with its delicious oil long before the Romans took a fancy to it and caused it to go viral across the far corners of their pan-Mediterranean empire. No wonder I feel such closeness to the olive and derive so much comfort fro the sheer sight of olives in a field. Wandering leisurely between its former Arab capitals, from Malaga to Granada, Cordoba and Seville, the limitless vistas of well-tended olive fields enveloping one hill after another of rural Andalucía stirred in me a feeling of deep comfort and belonging admixed with pride and romantic attachment akin to what I remember feeling on my return to my family and village after an absence of ten years. I wanted just to sit in the red dirt in one of those fields and do nothing. And that is exactly what we had the luxury to do. We lodged for one day at a hacienda in the midst of the olive groves of the village of Zuheros an hour’s drive from Cordova. The name of the village was derived from the Arabic word for ‘little tree,’ its church was once a mosque and its museum, hanging precipitously at the edge of a rocky cliff, was once an Arab fortress, both features that apply to many Andalusian rural communities. It seems that those Arabs and Moors of old had a fetish of sorts: wherever they came across a rocky crag they had to hang a fortress over it for the world to admire and a mosque with a high minaret for the inquisition officials who were to come later so they would have something physical about which to grill the conquered infidel souls. And the tall minarets made perfect bell towers.

The spacious rooms we were assigned in the hacienda were in the center of the compound. When we asked for ones with windows opening out on the fields the clerk explained that they would rather not use those for a couple of weeks: the heavy pollen of the olives covers everything in those rooms when guests open the windows, which they always tend to do. Indeed, the olives were so completely covered with flowers that the dark green of the fields yielded to a pearly whitish gloss that enveloped the entire land. I was struck by the fact that the olives in Andalucía looked much more youthful than ours in Galilee. I read and discovered the secret: In Spain the farming tradition dictates that an olive is allowed to yield its life-giving fruit for a hundred year cycle before it is cut. Two or three vigorous new shoots rising from the old root system are selected and nurtured into young adulthood for another one hundred year cycle. That is why all the fields look in their prime and why one sees two, three or sometimes four beauties in each flamenco circle of olives in the field. When I closed my eyes for a moment at the edge of the hacienda I could hear the clicking of heels and the sentimental crooning of Gypsies singing their pain and hope.

Toufiq, my fellow traveler from Arrabeh and closest soul mate in the village, and I spent hours delving into our most charged deep sentiments and attempting to put in words for each other and for our accompanying wives the rapacious yearning Andalusca awakened in our souls. Toufiq was enchanted with the proposition that the time has come for a new interpretation of history. He started his theorizing at the Cathedral in Cordoba: The accepted standard narrative is about a church that Abdul-Rahman tore down to build the Great Mosque only for part of it to be torn down by the Catholic Monarchs for it to revert to a church. Essentially the same narrative applies to the sequence of historical events relevant to Seville’s Cathedral and its bell tower, the Giralda, and to many a church currently in use in Andalucía. Why not reconcile history to fit with peace and friendship between peoples? Why not look at these miraculous edifices as the fruit of the integration and not the clash of two peoples and their combined cultures. I understood this to be Toufiq’s communist rhetoric resurfacing on demand to deal with an irksome and conflicted reality. But no, he insisted, it is his sincere wish to see the people of Spain and the Arab world linked in a positive way to allow for the culmination of such a promising possibility. He kept repeating that he felt at a loss as to how to share the same elation he feels at seeing the integrated architectural skills of the two peoples. And why is there not a single brochure in Arabic about all the rich archeology of the Arabs in all the sites we visited from Alhambra to the Giralda and Alcazar? And there are so few Arabs touring those sites, despite the fact that in Marbella there is a whole compound for the Saudi king and his family. But that is the money speaking, not the people. Why shouldn’t Arab and Islamic tourism thrive in Andalucía? I told my friend that I read somewhere that Spain is having problems with fundamentalist Moslems wanting to claim part of the Great Mosque in Cordoba. He immediately dropped part of his grand plan: “Leave Islam and Christianity out of it. Give me a few million dollars and I will start a cooperative effort with the Spanish ministry of tourism based on all the positive aspects of what the Arabs and the people of Spain have achieved and could do together,” he shouted. “It is the greatness of our two peoples that excites me, not their religious conflicts. Look at those red and white stone arches soar into that white vaulted space of the cathedral. Doesn’t that magic integration excite and inspire anyone but me?”

My own incredulity came to stymied and confused expression when I tried to express my enchanted elation at the site of the endless vistas of olive groves enveloping the entire terrain of Andalucía through which we were traveling. An Arabic expression that defied my translation skills came to mind. The verb implies that a scene or a scent opens one’s heart – qalb in Arabic -- or inspires the soul. But that is not all. The meaning of ‘yashrahu al-qalb’ transcends that; the verb actually implies a degree of violence and forced entry. Its closest English literal equivalent would be ‘to splay’ one’s heart or to slice it open. I struggled with attempting to share the full sense and flavor of the expression with my wife. To my admittedly limited knowledge, no single word in the English language, her mother’s tongue, carries the same psychological and sentimental connotation. The linguistic field having failed to serve my full purpose I tried to explain the word through examples from our shared experience: The olive scene we were looking at ‘yashrahu al-qalb,’ I explained. So does the vista of wind-swept endless expanses of brown wheat we saw earlier in the foothills after we left Malaga, its vast sea stirred into wave-like motion. And so does the smell of wheat bread fresh out of the oven. Pleasure aroused through the auditory sense doesn’t qualify for the expression; it is limited to sight and smell but not the other senses. But listening to Fairuz’s lilting rendition of Andalucía’s romantic Arabic poetry comes very close to the experience of something that ‘yashrahu al-qalb.’ And so does feeling the gentle caress of the afternoon Mediterranean breeze in our front yard in Arrabeh. I think my wife understood the concept. But Toufiq nearly ruined it for me by claiming that for him the thought of the synchronous greatness of human minds from different cultures ‘yashrahu al-qalb’ as well. I contested that claim at the experiential level.

Then, toward the end, my friend and fellow traveler threw a monkey wrench in the works that nearly ruined the whole trip for all of us, especially as I felt challenged to match his misgivings with a corollary of my own. Toufiq acknowledged that he found meandering down the Arabian memory lane in Andalucía in springtime particularly refreshing. Alas, a vague sense of impending aggravation had accompanied him all through the spree. He did not dwell on it but could not free himself completely of its nagging. As he shared this with the rest of us, its exact nature dawned on him: At the end of this most liberating two-week sojourn, he knew deep in his subconscious, we will be returning to Israel and its oppressive airport security procedures. Our Arab identity, the very same secret source of distinct pride and elation in Al-Andalus, will serve to discredit and disadvantage us in Israel. And it won’t end at any foreseeable geographic or temporal deadline like our trip does.

My own vague sense of trepidation came from different psychological concerns. All through our trip I couldn’t but harbor a mild feeling of guilt, an undercurrent of negativity that nearly always perturbs my joy and comfort in any pleasurable circumstance: By what right did I qualify for such a treat while so many others who I knew would have enjoyed it just as much did not? I know all the standard responses I could marshal to justify my occasional forays into pleasurable adventure. And these are likely to be convincing to most. Still, I failed to submerge completely the uncomfortable tug of so many disadvantaged others at my heart.

In the privacy of my dreams I came up with a plan that frees me from all guilt: What I doubt others would have contemplated after such a trip is my secret plan for endless joy and rejuvenation: I will open a school for Flamenco in Arrabeh. True, I lack the musical bend, the booming voice, the rhythm and the physical agility. But I have the suffering and the hope.

The Rachel Corrie Case: Reality imitating the Dream

2011-05-25T22:24:00.000-07:00

The stage was set for the strangest of dreams but my dreams revolved around what was actually happening: I had arrived back on a night flight from a two-week pleasure tour of Andalucía and taken the train to arrive in Haifa at six in the morning. I got off at the central train station by the port and proceeded to walk around aimlessly till the district court opened its gates. I hadn’t wandered around these parts since my high school days when I used to tour the racy port area of Haifa with some local friends. At the time our inexperience and lack of funds limited the extent of our engagement in the area’s burgeoning sex enterprises to ogling the skimpily dressed professionals out on their hunt. Sadly, all that is but a vague memory now. Not a single hooker accosted me on this occasion. I wondered if it was my age, the hour of the day or the area’s dismal failure in terms of business, all thriving shops having moved up to the fancier sections of the Carmel Mount in recent times. I stopped at the one café that was open at this early hour. The host welcomed me in the best of local Galilee Arabic dialects but was equally proficient in Hebrew, English and German with other customers; he seemed to figure out people’s language preference by their looks. I sipped my coffee slowly over the next hour, paid my bill, answered the host’s questions about where I was from and what I did, and headed to the court just as the guards were setting up their security check apparatus and opening the doors. I directed my steps to the coffee shop for a second cup of coffee in the hope of keeping awake in court.

The Corries arrived and then their lawyers and the regular small crowd of correspondents, translators, American embassy staff and sundry Israeli leftists. As I chatted with Cindy Corrie, Rachel’s mother, I discovered to my absolute surprise that not everyone in the world is fully aware of the glorious history of the Arab rule in Spain. Who in the world but Arabs is to be credited with the original contribution of the Arabesque designs one finds in all kinds of Spanish-made tiles I wondered. In another millennium or two, when the whole Middle East is awash with the Star of David, will it be credited to Saudi Arabia for instance and not to Israel? Or would Saudi young women dancing the Hora take full credit for it? Why then doesn’t the world credit the Arabs with evolving the Flamenco? I was on the verge of launching an exposé of the Arabs’ salubrious contributions to Europe’s renaissance and enlightenment for Cindy’s benefit. Alas, others arrived and interrupted our conversation. It occurred to me that, with a little stretch of the imagination, I could personally lay claim to having contributed, through my ancestors in Andalucía, to so many valued underpinnings of science, the arts and American culture from the invention of the zero and the introduction of the guitar all the way to the very name of such familiar landmarks as Guadalajara in neighboring Mexico. And what did we get in return through this incontrovertible romantic chain of historic events? The tobacco weed and Israel!

In the courtroom at the top floor of the modern building, the setting was dreamlike: The morning sunrays shone through the tall windows on either side of the judge’s elevated platform rendering his seat not unlike what I imagined King Solomon’s throne would have looked like. The session started with a faux pas by the Corrie’s lawyer that left its damaging effect on the entire uninterrupted four-and-a-half-hour session: When the judge was finished with a minor procedural issue in an unrelated case he called for Hussein Abu-Hussein but was informed that the lawyer had gone to answer the call of nature. The Judge was visibly upset and stormed out to his adjacent private quarters. When he came back, the stenographer, who with the advent of the electronic recording equipment apparently has taken on the added task of modulating the judge’s mood, seemed to attempt to assuage his anger with one teacup after another till he returned to his usual level of tense normality. The session then proceeded with repeated angry outbursts at Abu-Hussein for not comprehending the witness’s answers the right way. I was not fully convinced that this all was because of the faulty start and theorized to myself between nodding in and out of light sleep about an alternative explanation. The judge had a ruddy tan and I hit on the explanation that he must have spent his Passover vacation in some resort on the Red Sea and was aggravated by the Egyptians’ new-found sense of dignity after their Spring uprising. The judge missed Mubarak, I figured.

The witness was none other than the spokeswoman of the IDF at the time of the Rachel Corrie ‘incident.’ I was disappointed. I had imagined such a high-ranking officer, the woman once charged with justifying the nation’s entire struggle to implement the dream of greater Israel on grounds of security needs, to be armed to the teeth. And I imagined her to be a big fierce hussy of Germanic stock, trained in martial arts, dressed in military uniform, and ready to shoot me at first sight, plant the extra handgun she always carries on my corpse and issue a statement to the press regarding her action in self-defense. None of this! In fact the woman was a diminutive but spry middle-aged run-of-the-mill oriental civilian with salt-and-pepper shoulder-length hair ending in a breezy curl. The magic morning sunlight streaming from the windows framed her in profile from where I sat rendering her rather attractive. I was impressed by her apparent charm and self-confidence. She fit my mental image of queen Sheba of old.

Alas, the changing play of natural light and the constant chipping of Abu-Hussein at her display of self-confidence blemished her image despite the judge repeatedly coming to her aid. By noon she was diminished in my eyes to a mere shadow of her former charming self. The midday sun now emphasized her actual features revealing a dour menopausal white-haired damsel in considerable distress under the focused questioning of the bullying Palestinian lawyer trying to cast doubt on her former role and current credibility. Amazingly, in the process of dragging her through the mud of the IDF record of human rights violations, Abu-Hussein caused even the cute upturn at the neck of her initially fancily styled hair to slacken to a frizzle. He kept quoting to her from various press resources, managing in the process to call her ‘a liar,’ ‘Israel’s Goebbels,’ and more. The poor woman had to resort to some terrible means of verbal self-defense despite the judge’s obvious sympathy. At one point, when her opinion was asked regarding a statement to the effect that the IDF has a tradition of lying and manufacturing misleading information, she spit out the same venomous charges against the Palestinians.

By this time I had nodded off again to the domain of light sleep. In my dream I saw the women entertaining the troops battling at the borders of Greater Israel. She danced a wild Flamenco while holding a tray with Mahmud Abbass’s head on it over her head. I woke from the hilarious dream to find the woman still talking away at a-mile-a-minute speed about the antics of the Palestinian National Authority. A couple of times she stuck out her tongue in midsentence with a ghastly effect. As I dozed off again the image I visualized changed from a crow to a snake. I ran away in panic and the person next to me found it necessary to wake me up with a jab in the ribs. The judge was at it again admonishing the translators to lower their voices. “I am not sure in the USA they would extend the privilege of translating for the audience like I do for you,” he scolded. At this stage I dozed off again but this time into deeper sleep. My friend was there. She kept sticking her tongue at me. Except that it was definitely forked. It must come with the job description, I figured.

Reading Between The Lines

2011-05-05T07:13:00.000-07:00

I knew already that Haaretz bore a grudge against me: The editors never saw fit to publish any of my pieces, topical, deep and insightful as they all were. Now they let the cat out of the bag: In the first sentence of their April 20, 2011 editorial they call me “immoral wealthy.” They are cagy enough not to mention me by name. Rather they lump me along with all sorts of other villa-owning rich and mighty Israelis involved in the shady business of transplanting ancient olive trees into their front yards. You might be tempted to call me paranoid. But the whole world knows about my Roman olive tree; I wrote an account of my search for it and of the act of smuggling it into my garden in my book of memoirs, A Doctor in Galilee, Pluto Press, 2008. Who doesn’t know of that book! Don’t tell me Haaretz editors want to play dumb and make believe they didn’t spend days peering through it to pick up hints of Israeli delegitimization so they can have an excuse to avoid reviewing it in their book section. After all, it now appears that some of their correspondents double as anti-Israel-delegitimization workers. Here, check it for yourself: http://alethonews.wordpress.com/2010/12/23/haaretz-journalist-doubles-as-anti-delegitimization-operative/

Believe me, I was not above having a mild quiver of excitement at being mentioned, by implication if not by name, in the same breath with the presumed operatives involved in this olive tree business, all those high military commanders and those multimillionaires of Savyon and Shavei Zion, even if we all were presumed to be criminally tainted by our front yard ancient olive trees. It took the reading of the investigative report that was published over a week later in the English version of Haaretz to appreciate the full significance of my being associated in the readers’ mind with that economic upper crust. In attempting to criminalize us, the upper economic crust of Israel, the editors identify me as one of the “upper thousandth percentile.” I did the calculation and it put us among the wealthiest twenty or so households in the country. Someone should inform my wife. She still feeds me leftovers and greens she picks with her own hands from under that same symbol of our filthy rich status.

Actually Maya Zinshtein, the investigative report who started it all in Haaretz, has a kinder outlook on the plight of some of those caught in the act of owning an ancient olive tree in their garden. She allows a certain way-out for those amongst us who are less than full members in the true olive mafia. “The other type of buyer is the person who loves the olive tree and invests in it the way a real art lover invests in a work of art – with no regard for the cost,” she states. I like that. It does not reduce me to a pauper economically while still distinguishing me from the other criminal types involved in ancient olive tree trade. After all, you have to be affluent to be one who “invests in a work of art.” Then Maya goes out of her way to be kind to me: “Arabs do not remove trees from the ground,” she declares. I really appreciate the gesture, Maya! I do have a very soft spot in my heart for the name. Maya was our part-poodle dog that was very close to my growing children. In fact Maya the dog was so loving and kind that she breastfed our two orphaned baby cats. I have pictures to prove it.

You can’t really blame the woman for her timidity in her pro-Arab bend of mind. After all, the whole shady business is fraught with Arab mendacity, witness ‘Al-Bustan’ the name given by its Jewish owner to the major nursery involved in the trade and located next to an Arab town to boot. As if that were not enough of a taint, the whole process of inventive maneuvering around the multiple authorities in moving an ancient olive tree is likened in the report to the documentation of a thoroughbred Arabian horse. All of this while we all know that such smuggling is fraught with “the introduction of disease and blight.” No wonder we allow Palestinians like those in the village of Hableh separated (what else?) by the separation wall from their olives to visit the trees only twice a year. It is dangerous!

As a matter of fact the editorial also reeks of the same pro-Palestinian prejudice, in itself a noteworthy rarity bordering on the criminal. “Many trees have been stolen from their owners in the territories, and in other cases, heavy pressure is brought to bear on Palestinian farmers to sell their trees, taking advantage of their powerlessness and making huge profits at their expense,” it states. Don’t let this fool you though. The olive tree is declared to be “one of the hallmarks of the land of Israel.” Never mind the Palestinian adoption of the olive as a symbol of their resistance and steadfastness. Like falafel it has been hijacked by the Israelis as part and parcel of their native culture and intrinsic identity. The day may yet come when the image of Arafat holding an olive branch as he addresses the United Nations General Assembly is adopted as a Zionist symbol and the white dove with the olive branch in its beak stands for Golda Meir. Don’t tell me the world is not ready for that! Remember, President George W. Bush declared Ariel Sharon “a man of peace” and no one seemed to mind.

The fading of the line between the real and the imagined in this experimental undertaking of mine in attempting to read between the lines of Haaretz reaches its most ridiculous in the parallel the reporter and the editors imply between the law enforcement authorities in Israel and in the Palestinian National Authority regarding the protection of olives “in the Land of Israel.” In fact some Israelis involved in the murky olive tree trade are reported to complain “that the PA has been making life difficult for them.” Just for the record, we should note the PA has no military camps, no settlements, and no illegal settler outposts inside Israel, and no security wall cutting through Israeli communities and separating their residents from their farms and olive trees. Notice also the multiplicity of Israeli authorities officially charged with the task of the legal powers to protect the olive both in Israel and in “Judea and Samaria,” the land of our forefathers in which we, the Israelis, are temporarily tolerating the continued presence of some Goyem: Two separate departments of the Ministry of Agriculture, The Jewish National Fund, The Police, the Border Police, the IDF, the Civil Administration, and the Tax authority, to name only those mentioned in the article. It takes little imagination to figure how many palms one has to grease for a safe trip from source to final destination. No wonder we, the select few, have to be multimillionaires to afford those trees.

If a simile is to be made on the other side of the defunct Green Line, there are only Hamas and Fatah with whom to negotiate on the way of a stolen olive out of its native Palestine to its new home in Occupied Palestine, aka the Zionist Entity to the newly reunited Palestinian leadership. The olive is such a potent Palestinian symbol that most likely one has to deal directly with the entire reconciled Palestinian leadership, Mahmud Abbas and Haneyeh themself included. And, barring their occasional pre-occupation with such weighty guests as Tony Blair, they probably will tend to the actual digging, hauling and replanting of the ancient olive for you. But you better have a lot of grease at hand.

I recall how intimidated I was by the massive monster of a tree hanging above me from a cable at the free end of a crane as I stood at the bottom of the hole I had dug in my front yard to receive my olive. Indeed, it is a risky undertaking, especially for a group habitually accident-prone and used to trusting others with its own fate. Who do you think would be interested in making that cable snap at the right moment above the group’s head? And will they be buried at sea like Osama or will they be left to push that olive tree?

High Fever

2011-04-23T19:06:00.000-07:00

This is the second sample of my writing posted here in the process of applying for the Writer's Institute. It is the first chapter in my forthcoming book called "Chief Complaint."

“On their faces are their marks, (being) the traces of their prostration.”
From the holy Koran

In the middle of a rainy dark night there was a knock at the door. Didi went to the door to deflect another disturbance to my fitful sleep. It was in the days when I had little choice but to receive emergencies regardless of how many there were in one night. She came back and shook me out of sleep into another physician’s nightmare:
“It sounds serious enough. And it is another house call. You think you could drive or should I drive you?”
I stumbled to the door but had to rub my eyes twice before I could believe who was there. It was a classmate I hadn’t seen since high-school days. Even under the exceptional circumstances I had the presence of mind to make the socially required gesture of asking him into our humble abode: “Tfaddal –honor us and come in!” I blurted after a vigorous hug.
“Not at this hour, thank you. And we need you to come see my father at home right away. You remember my father, old man Abd-el-’Athim – Servant of the Almighty --, don’t you? He is boiling with fever and has started to speak shatt wmaghyabani -- abstract nonsense.”
I got my bag and we were on our way on foot. The house was not far.

We found Abd-el-’Athim at the door of his single room home with his wife and daughter hanging onto his arms as he attempted to escape. And indeed he was speaking shatt, wanting to be let go off so he can fetch something black he needed. None of us understood exactly what that was or where he wanted to go. He was dressed in his standard three-piece outfit of blotchy and tired white shirwal, a gray woolen shirt thoroughly drenched with sweat, and a long lambskin coat, its bedraggled locks heavy with years of accumulated grime. And he looked exactly like I remembered him some fifteen years earlier when he came to see me off as I readied myself for my fateful departure to study medicine; nearly every man in the village attended that occasion, of course. He was a giant of a man, cause enough for his fellow villagers to contract his name simply to ‘Almighty,’ with roughhewn rock head over a short neck and broad sloping bearlike shoulders, red eyes with lash-less lids, a week’s worth of white stubble on his face that seemed to merge imperceptibly into his thick chest hair and around to his ears, and a tuft of thick matted curly graying red hair under an old hand-sewn skullcap. He immediately recognized me and treated me as his guest extending his huge hand in greeting. Despite its bulbous joints and firm locking grip around my hand, his rough hand felt feverish. He asked me in and welcomed me as best as he could, explaining that he was actually preparing to come to my home next to the diwan – classic men-only guesthouse -- of my uncle Salih, his former boss, and that he needed that black ointment from his friend, my father. I tried to explain that I no longer lived at that address and that my parents were both long dead and gone as was my uncle. But he didn’t seem to comprehend. He insisted that as soon as his wife finished making tea “lawajbak -- for your due welcome” and he di his morning two compulsory prostrations to God we would be going to my father’s place. His wife didn’t make tea; she went out the backdoor to the adjoining shed, we heard their cow moo in objection to being disturbed at that hour of night, their donkey responded with sharp braying, then the wife came back with some milk and made us fresh café latte on the rekindled embers in the primitive earthen fireplace right next to the couple’s sleeping floor space.

With the help of his son, my classmate, we managed to get Abd-el-’Athim to lie still in a supine position on his sheep’s-wool stuffed mattress. In the faint kerosene lamp’s light, augmented intermittently by the flickering of the revived fire in the hearth, the moss-like white fuzz on his ears and the permanent bemused smile of acceptance with undetermined reservations on his wrinkled face created the eerie impression of being in the presence of a sacrificial lamb, or rather a sacrificial ram. And his face spoke medical history to me: The moonscape, lit up only on one side, betrayed deep creases spreading out from the depth of his eye socket down to his ear, intercepted at right angle by deeper furrows around his toothless mouth, with the entire terrain interspaced with many dark craterlike depressions, the pockmarks of childhood small pox. Two brothers died and one sister went blind but Abd-el-’Athim escaped with only permanent deep scarring.

And there was that darkened fig-size coarse protuberance in the middle of his forehead declaring to the world that he was a practicing good Muslim prostrating himself in private communion with God five times a day. The repeated touching of the forehead to the ground, when done with enough vigor to emphasize devoutness and seriousness of intent, especially when the supplicant’s head is particularly heavy or dropped down with abandon, confirms the prescription in the holy Koran of “simahum fi wujuhihim – On their faces are their marks.” And Abd-el-’Athim had all it takes to cultivate a large and angry identifying sign. A neighbor was known to avoid standing next to Abd-el-’Athim at the Friday noon group prayer because the sudden collapsing style of his prostrating himself and the forceful pounding of his forehead on the mosque’s floor would distract this neighbor from his own focused attention on God in heaven. But then, this neighbor had a questionable commitment to the faith as per his family’s reports of his repeated doubts concerning the validity of the promised rewards in the afterlife for keeping on the straight and narrow path in this one. Especially on cold winter mornings when doing his ablutions with cold water in the open yard and after finishing the washing of his genitalia he would be heard talking to himself: “And what if there is no afterlife?” And when tilling one of his fields in the Battouf Valley he always chose to pray at the southeast corner of the field, leading people to speculate that as he prostrated himself on the ground he would nudge the border demarcation stone a few millimeters into the neighbor’s field.

I did a cursory medical examination in search of the source of Abd-el-’Athim’s 41 centigrade fever. It wasn’t hard to decipher; his leg was red, swollen and tender and his wife confirmed that the chronic pus flow from the open wound in it had lessened for the previous week. I touched his leg. He jerked it away and started hallucinating about needing to visit my father to bring that black ointment for his wound. It now dawned on me what residual memories must be swirling in his head. He must have heard his family discussing the need to call me over and remembered a pertinent incident from our shared past.

I explained, more to his wife, son and daughter than to him, that in my judgment he needed to be in a hospital and promised to visit him in a day or two. They must have already thought about that; they wouldn’t hear of it. “Is he that bad off?” they wanted to know. And if so, they preferred that he die at home. Much as I tried they stood their ground and enlisted the man of the house, in his massively incoherent way, to refuse the suggestion. Some of the best tricks of the medical trade that I had learned at Harvard came from its School of Public Health not Medical School. In the face of the family’s intransigence I recalled the words of Dr. Maurice King on the one occasion that he guest-lectured us on international health and the practice of medicine in developing countries based on his experience in Africa: “If you were to go out in the wild and were given the choice of taking a single medication with you, take an ampoule of Penicillin.” Any prescription of a broad-spectrum antibiotic meant waiting until the morning and a trip to the city. I gave Abd-el-’Athim a massive dose of intramuscular Penicillin and requested to see him in six hours at my clinic. I begged him to drink a lot of water, figuring that in his confusion he was no better than a child who may slip into dehydration. With his rough and redundant flaps it was impossible to judge his state of hydration based on skin elasticity.

The old man showed up only the next evening during my regular clinic hours. His wife explained that he had slept through the morning hours. And he ate a hearty lunch of Mjaddara, the local heavy-sinking near-daily stable dish of cooked bulgur wheat, lentils, olive oil and onions, the consumption of which is considered a testament and a supplement to a peasant’s health and vigor. Abd-el-’Athim’s elephantine appetite was legendary in the village. People claimed that in his youth he came home one moonlit night to find the family tin-plated copper dish on the floor next to the hearth with the moonlight from the chimney striking it at an angle. He mistook the light reflection on the empty dish for the scrumptious shine of homemade yogurt, sprinkled a little salt on it and polished off five loaves of his mother’s homemade bread dipped in the imaginary delicacy. Another account I have heard of his voracious appetite speaks of him in his teenage years. Because of his bulk and the absence of any caution, much less fear, in the way he conducted himself in confrontational circumstances, he once was entrusted with the task of guarding a whole neighborhood in the Christian village of Rama. A dispute had erupted between the Nakhlis and the Khuris, the two prominent clans there. The elders from other Galilee villages were alerted, interfered, separated the two warring parties and left one physically fit peacekeeper in charge of each of the two neighborhoods overnight. ‘The Almighty,’ armed with his hefty nabbout –fighting stick-- was put in charge of protecting the Nakhlis should the Khuris think of attacking them. That evening when he dined with his host family and managed to polish off all the prepared food for a dozen people before they had a chance to start, Jamil Nakhli, the respected head of the family, relieved him of his duty with the admonition that “My enemies, the Khuris, can never be crueler to my family than you!”

In my clinic Abd-el-’Athim was clear as a bell; no hallucinations; he remembered none of the previous night’s events. But he knew what black ointment he thought he still needed:
“You were a little child, not older than two years when those mules dragged you and bashed your head against the stone,” he now confirmed my suspicions. There is no doubt that my seemingly vivid recollection of the traumatic event is the result of having heard the story repeated so many times by my parents and others of their generation, and not a true memory. To this day, and right now as I stop typing and press my finger on the bare spot at the vortex of my scalp, it feels as if it gives way a little. Before I became a doctor and had a chance once to see a scan of my head, I had always assumed that a piece of bone was missing there.

It happened on a hot summer afternoon. My father was having a smoke and a sip of black coffee in the shade of the pomegranate tree at the gate to our compound. We, his two youngest children, were playing with age mates in the village square fronted by the entrance to our compound, with my uncle’s diwan on one side of the road and on the other by the wall of the same uncle Salih’s compound. Then there was the cross street and to its far side the huge round stone with a hole in its center that formed the opening to a communal rainwater cistern usually covered by a metal flap. Such hand-sculpted stone was called kharazi –a bead, because of its shape and next to it a stone trough fom which the work animals drank. A run-away team of two mules of my uncle’s came racing from the east with Abd-el-’Athim shouting, cursing, and running after them. Somehow, I became entangled in their reins. I was swept away by the mules that headed straight to that big stone, one on each side of it, and my head slammed against it causing the rope to snap and me to be released. Abd-el-’Athim abandoned his mule chase, grabbed me and brought me to my father who had seen it all happen and was sapped out of his ability to move at all. He was surprised that I was still alive; scooping a handful of coffee grounds, he pressed it against the gash in my scalp till the bleeding stopped. Others gathered at the scene and someone took a knife to his leather belt and scraped away at it to produce some organic powder to apply to the wound as a supplement to the coffee grounds. In the meantime, the team of wild mules was subdued and Abd-el-’Athim was dispatched on the back of one to Nazareth to bring ‘black ointment,’ a medicated petroleum jelly, from the French Nuns Infirmary there. My survival was taken by relatives to be a proof of my hard-headedness, some even claiming that there was a permanent chip in that kharazi stone. Abd-el-’Athim still remembered the beneficial effects of the black ointment that the nuns had given him gratis.

Abd-el-’Athim came to my clinic for his daily penicillin injection for a couple of weeks. I managed to take care of the acute flare-up but the chronic Osteomyelitis persisted. He lived most of his adult life with that running sore in his leg where he had taken a bullet in the 1936 Palestinian peasant uprising against the British Mandate Government and against the creeping implementation of its Balfour Declaration. Partially because of it he had become a veritable living legend in the Arrabeh of my childhood, a role model of peasant simplicity, ingenuity and steadfastness, stretching all such noble qualities beyond reason and the acceptable. He was reputed, for example, as having once trapped a British army commander and made him the laughing stock of the village and his own company: British soldiers at the time often entered Palestinian homes and reeked havoc with the peasants’ stored food items for their families and animals of flour, grain and olive oil. They would spill it all on the house floor in one pile, mix it together, and leave feeling victorious, all as a punishment for the villagers’ presumed sympathies with the revolt. What Abd-el-‘Athim did was to dig a hole in the floor large enough to house a barrel of olive oil which he covered casually with a strawmat of his own handweaving, all before the army entered the house for their ‘peaceful’ exercise of authority. As the officer exited the house drenched with oil, he was cerenaded by a band of children raining stones over his head.

‘Athim was reputed also to have participated in the two seminal Palestinian resistance movements to British Mandate designs, the 1936 revolt and the 1948 war, armed with nothing more than a gun with no bullets and a dozen disabled hand grenades strung around his waist. Damarjan, a Syrian of Armenian descent who was the commander of the Arab Liberation Army (ALA) in Arrabeh in 1948, tried to train Abd-el-’Athim in the use of hand grenades. When Abd-el-’Athim accidentally struck Demarjan with the defunct grenade in the chest, the latter dropped the attempt and went back to his favorite pastime of the war era, that of lying in his hammock in the shade of the cypress trees at Arrabeh’s school that his troops used as their headquarters with a couple of underlings swinging him in the breeze. Till now, this and other shameful such acts as demanding to be fed and commandeering donkeys from farmers are reported by surviving villagers as typical of the fighting skills, the help and the protection offered us by the ragtag ALA, actions spun by Zionist propagandists into “invasion by the armies of seven Arab countries.”

Abd-el-’Athim is remembered more for his daring and sheer physical strength than for his smarts. In his youth, caught stealing olives from the fields of the neighboring village of Dier Hanna, he was imprisoned in a second-story room. He swore to put all of that village’s farming efforts out of commission. At night he escaped by jumping out of a window while a pursuer broke his leg doing the same. On the way home he carried away a total of seven wooden plows from the village, each usually heavy enough for a mule.

Now, the old worrier related to me when and how he took that bullet. His sentimental reminiscing and the circumstantial details were almost as interesting to me as the clinical case:
“I was still young and used to be a loner, just me and my gun in the mountains harassing the British whenever I had a chance. But I spent most of my time at Ein Natif (the natural spring east of Arrabeh that was once copious enough for the entire village. Now Mekorot, the Israeli Water company, had tapped the source and reduced the spring’s flow to a trickle. To add insult to injury, by now the meager source is most likely contaminated by the settlement of Hararit on the hill above it.) You see, those were hard times and I had fashioned my own boots out of raw cowhide. But it kept drying up and getting tight and crinkly around my toes. So I would go to the spring, sit on the edge of the pool and dangle my feet in it for hours on end to soak those boots of mine. Not much of a fighter, believe me. Still one time they got me in the shin. I managed to hobble away and hide in the bushes where I nearly bled to death.”

Abd-el-’Athim’s ineptitude in the arts of war did not diminish his attachment to his old gun. In 1948 when all of Arrabeh’s men had surrendered what few guns they had, he hid his gun, camouflaging it as another stick in the roof of an abandoned shack in his yard. Next to it he stretched out his broad belt, strung with a supply of live bullets. A few months later, in early winter when the refuse from the pressed olives provided plentiful fuel for it, his wife decided to activate her taboun -- the outside oven -- in the abandoned shack. The very first night, when the temperature reached its peak in the shed, Abd-el-’Athim and most of his neighbors were awakened by volleys of live fire. He immediately tried to come up with another camouflage, this time for the disturbing telltale rapid-fire explosions. He reached for his nabbout -- fighting stick -- and started banging with it on an old corrugated iron sheet by the shed. The few neighbors who had slept through the initial disturbance were now awakened. Someone ratted and Abd-el-’Athim had to surrender his weapon and spend several months in jail.

Some ten years later Abd-el-’Athim had another brush with mortality. If he were not much of a fighter, as he himself admitted, he was not much of a farmer either, as his meager annual agricultural crops from his land proved. Like most of his fellow villagers, he owned a modest share of land mostly in our fertile Battouf Valley. He would let his relatives farm it and, on occasion, when not acting the rebel, would serve as a plowman for big landholders in the village like my uncle Saleh. He was a repository of great muscle power but not of much help in managing and directing that resource. When lining up say with a team of reapers in a wheat field, he would volunteer to “tame the field” by running wild with his sickle changing direction at random from one end to the other and then again crosswise. He claimed that this way the field would be terrorized into submission to fellow reapers as they moved in one organized sweep. His style became known by his name, Abd-el-’Athim’s reaping technique. On one such random venture he came across another unexploded mine left in the fields by the British armed forces and tried to examine it with the tip of his sickle. The explosion was heard clear across the valley but, miraculously, his only injury this time was to the area of his genitalia. News of the accidental explosion reached his wife and she ran down the long road wailing and shouting out Abd-el-’Athim’s name. A cynical old man who had been at the scene gave her the most enigmatic and unsettling news, reassuring her with the assertion that “Abd-el-’Athim will be all right. It is only your share in him that has gone missing.” And, in fact, they never brought into the world any more children other than the one boy (my classmate, who began this chapter by interrupting my sleep) and the one girl whom they already had.

Those two children would one day, so late in the game that many people had forgotten and others had never known Abd-el-’Athim or his wife, bring shame to the remaining traces of good memory of their parents. It all started at the turn of the millennium when the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories were cleverly goaded by Sharon of Sabra and Shatella ill repute, on his way to becoming Israel’s prime minister, into launching their second intifada. The inheritance of the late Abd-el-’Athim and his wife had been settled in favor of their boy as is customary in Galilee Arab families, the girl not only accepting the Shari’a-based half share of the property in preference to a civil court option of an equal share to her brother’s but also signing over her half share to him. Each of the two siblings had started a new family, he in Arrabeh and she in a village in the occupied West Bank. Her husband was another Palestinian illegal worker in Israel who crossed the border in search of livelihood. At first it was forbidden for him to stay in Israel overnight and Abd-el-’Athim hid him in his humble abode as another member of the family, Then it became forbidden for Palestinians from the Occupied Territories to enter Israel altogether and the young man sneaked across in the belly of a five-kilometer-long sewer line wading in the liquid refuse of settlers like a rat. On occasion, a group of occupation soldiers would be waiting at the exit and they would force him to wade back in the sewer line to its Palestinian exit. Then his marriage itself became forbidden on this side so as to temper the Palestinians’ animalistic propensity to reproduction. The newly-wed couple had to escape back toٍ his West Bank village.

The siblings’ relations were normal till the sister lost her husband in the violence of the Al-Aqsa Intifada. Her husband dead, she found herself with a slew of kids and no source of livelihood. That is when she reneged on her former traditional decision and asked to be given back her share of her parents’ land. The brother stonewalled and the two became avowed enemies. Then the brother’s kidneys failed and he needed a transplant. I was now brought again into the family’s saga as a physician and as someone whom both parties could possibly trust. The feud between the two had simmered long enough for most relatives to have taken sides and gained the enmity of one sibling or the other based on factual stand or, more often, on rumored pronouncements on the matter. I tried to seek some form of rapprochement between the two, enough to convince the woman, found to be the most appropriate match, to donate one of her kidneys to her sick brother. I spoke to the man about his sister’s need and dire circumstances and expressed my own conviction that she may have been unfairly pressured by next of kin to sign away her due share to him.
“Whoever heard of a man giving up his father’s land to a stranger? She was married to an outsider, not a relative. And her children are likely to sell the land to the government or to the Jewish Agency. Whoever heard of girls inheriting in Arrabeh? I ask you: Have you ever heard of a farmer agreeing to the sale of his father’s land to strangers, man? Here in Arrabeh, just last year, our neighbor killed his cousin over a disputed border between them. How can I give away my father’s land? It would disgrace his good name and memory as a pious farmer who lived and died by the dctates of his religion and local tradition”
She, in turn, stood her ground: “I never knew what I was signing. Besides, he has proven to be a stranger to me. He is no longer my brother. In fact he is so ugly that he could not have been the true seed of Abd-el-’Athim; he is a bastard. We are so different that my parts could never fit his body regardless what the doctors’ tests show.”

Regardless of his sister’s opinion, in the eyes of most villagers, Abd-el-’Athim’s son was no monster. He simply was acting in the best tradition of Galilee native farmers: To them land was not for sale or trade, not even for a promise of a new hold on life. I remember him making fun of his old man when we were in sixth grade and he reached the height to hold down the wooden plow and be trained in the honorable task of tilling the land:
“My old man drives me crazy. I make it all the way across the patch next to the house until our work team of ox and donkey pulling the plow are half way inside the cactus hedge and he still insists ‘a little further; keep going; a little more!’ Only when the animals refuse to go any further does he permit me to pull up the plow and turn around. And then he gives me the hoe and asks me to turn over the last bits by hand. You would think it is going to grow gold, that land, and not fava beans.”

Little of Abd-el-’Athim’s legendary tales was openly mentioned in my clinic as he came for his daily injections, though it all hung in the atmosphere like a pleasant familiar scent. On the last day, when he offered to make the extra payment for the initial house call, I refused to accept, considering it not only a justified step in the line of my professional duty but also a neighborly visit for the sake of the good old days. Abd-el-’Athim thereupon waxed poetic quoting from the Koran and sayings of the prophet and from the traditional elders of the faith. “They didn’t name you Hatim for nothing,” he ended, referring to the legendary pre-Islamic Christian Arab legendary model of generosity and good deeds with whom no Arab fails to identify the name. “I hope you don’t mind me saying it, but regardless of how hard you try, you will never be more of a friend to me than was your late father. As you know, people in Arrabeh consider me another simpleton who is happy to live from his land and do his required prayers. But your father never gave me that feeling; he always treated me as his equal.”
I don’t know if it worked, but I tried to give him that same feeling through the proper use of local parlance. I said that the course of treatment was now over. Then, to bridge the age gap between us, I added a differential parting endearment, a jovial pat of my hand on his shoulder just as I imagined my father would have done:
“Fargini a’rd ktafak –Show me the width of your shoulders!” I used the lighthearted colloquial way of saying ‘You can leave now.’

Abd-el-’Athim, my classmate’s venerable father, seemed pleased.

Olive Enchantment

2011-04-23T18:59:00.000-07:00

Note: This is the last chapter in my book of memoirs, A Doctor in Galilee, Pluto Press, 2008. It is posted here as the first sample of my writing in the process of applying to the Writers' Institute.

April 30, 2006
My central gardening achievement this spring has been the realization of my long-held dream of transplanting an ancient olive tree to grace the entrance to our yard. Friends and relatives have not stopped coming to view it. To guard against the evil eye of so many potential jealous admirers, my sister Jamileh has adorned its gnarled two-meter wide trunk with a huge blue bead and an amulet purchased on her pilgrimage to Mecca. Since its arrival I have reshaped the western side of the yard to measure up to its imposing stature and majestic look. I have refashioned the iron-gate, the ‘mosaic’ entryway, and the metal fence around the entire property. I find myself obsessed with daily tending to its welfare: watering its roots, manicuring its bark, and checking for signs of new growth sprouting from its branches, stripped clean during the transplanting process.
In Palestine, and probably in the wider Middle East, olive trees are described in terminology used to specify their relative age. ‘Rumi’ olives are those whose age is counted in millennia, their origin attributed to the golden era of the Roman Empire when the planting of olives was popularized throughout its domain -- though at one point a local ruler was apparently enraged enough to decree the destruction of all olive trees in Jerusalem. A local tour guidebook identifies as a ‘must-see landmark’ an olive tree on the Wadi Salameh hiking trail that winds among neighboring hills -- the location from which I moved my own tree. The guidebook estimates the age of that landmark tree to be over six thousand years. That is sacrilegious, of course, if you are a strict follower of the Jewish faith. According to that calendar, we are now in the year 5777 after creation. Obviously, that puts my tree at about the same age as God himself. Such an assertion is not so blasphemous to Galilean ears accustomed to hearing local bards declaim their lovesick song: ‘Tathal ahibbick ta-yikhatier rabbina’ -- I will still love you when God turns old and feeble.
The second age category is that of Amari olive trees, generally assumed to be from the era of Arab rule in the area. The age of Amari trees is estimated in centuries. A Rumi or an Amari olive tree is also known as a’amoud -- a pillar, in recognition of its stability, permanence and stature, physically, figuratively, and economically. This is in contradistinction to a nasbeh, Arabic for a monument or a memorial structure. A nasbeh is valued far in excess of its actual economic worth. To me as a villager, the term has romantic connotations evoking youthfulness, vigor, and the promise of future material wealth.
Ancient cultures had a mystical fascination with the olive. Adam was buried with an olive seed in his mouth, Noah eased his ark on land after the dove brought back an olive leaf as a sign of the return of tranquility, and the olive branch is the universal sign of peace and reconciliation. The Greeks received only two special gifts from their Gods: the olive and wisdom. Athena herself bequeathed the olive to her city, Athens, as an inviolable symbol; anyone desiring to harvest its sacred fruit had to take a vow of chastity. Olympic victors were crowned with olive wreaths and rewarded with huge amounts of olive oil, up to four tons. Hippocrates recognized the salutary health benefits of olive oil, while the ancient Egyptians used it for mummification and stocked their Pharaohs’ tombs with cured olives. The aphrodisiac powers of the olive fruit are legend the world over. The olive tree inspires and amazes: its majestic solitude in the stony Mediterranean terrain and magnanimous silence in the face of draughts and downpours have echoes of immortality.
In this, our holy land, the arrival and eventual hegemony of monotheism did little to contain the olive’s godly pretensions or to dislodge it from the inhabitants’ hearts. Jews incorporated the wood of the olive into their Holy of Holies on the Temple Mount, and their most glorious revolt against the Romans was energized by the miraculous performance of its oil. The entire Christian church is referred to as an ‘Olive Tree’ and its prophets were anointed with olive oil. What Christian does not know about the Mount of Olives! In our local churches, till the present day, no baptism is complete without the priest marking the forehead of the baby with the cross, his forefinger dipped in holy olive oil.
Mention olives in any rural social setting here and an air of seriousness and veneration bordering on awe materializes instantaneously, even in the most secular of circles. People start mumbling the name of Allah and his blessed prophet, or the Blessed Virgin Mary, in due respect. Of all fruit-bearing trees only the fig, perhaps the first plant to be domesticated by humans anywhere on the face of the earth, has an equal moral stature, weighty enough for Allah to adorn with it the opening passage of a chapter in his holy book, the Koran. In another setting Allah, the creator and light of the universe, compares his own luminescence to that of a star-bright crystal lamp in a niche, the lamp fed oil from a blessed olive tree, the tree existing in a mystical location ‘neither easterly nor westerly.’ Could that be my tree, I wonder?
An olive tree produces more oil and of a higher quality as it ages. Like wine, the older the more rewarding and intriguing. Yet, a local turn of phrase in our region attests to the special emotional investment traditional farmers have in their olive seedlings. When someone commits a particularly heinous crime or speaks utter nonsense violating other people’s sensitivities, villagers commonly condemn the act as a deed deserving retribution by doing damage to the aggressor’s olives. ‘Haki bitqashshar aleh nasib’, they would opine, --talk deserving of stripping the bark off of young olive trees’, the harshest of all possible punishments short of physical elimination of the person himself.
In our fourth grade reader, a collection of Arabic literary gems selected by the venerable Palestinian educator Khalil Sakakini, we read a story about Khisru, the wise Persian king. Seeing on one of his royal outings an old Arab farmer planting olive seedlings, the king questioned the man about the meaning of his labor. He must realize, he reasoned, that the trees would never come to fruition in his lifetime. “They planted, we eat; we plant, they will eat,” the old man responded, enigmatically summing up the multigenerational interdependence of olive farming. The king was struck by the simplicity and astuteness of the explanation. “Zih!” he shouted to his servants, using the Persian royal codeword for ordering a monetary gift for a subject.
“You see, your majesty, my olive seedlings have already yielded their first crop,” said the farmer pocketing his prize money.
“Zih!” the king shouted again, “and let us get away from this Arab before he robs us of all of our imperial reserves.”
For the past five years I have had an urge -- no, more, an infatuation -- to add an ancient olive tree to my garden. It started when I found the remains of an ancient Rumi olive tree lying on the edge of a field belonging to a fellow villager. I was taken aback by the crime of allowing such a living record of farming life in these parts to be chopped for wood. My attempt at resuscitating it apparently came too late, the tree trunk having been out of the ground for a couple of weeks before I saw it. Still, as I did my utmost to bring it back to life, it responded to the attention by sending a new shoot out of the ground. The trunk itself was never revived ,and now I use it as another stand for displaying my fossil finds from Mount Carmel.
As my failure fully to revive that wisp of ancient history sank in, I developed an obsession with Rumi olive trees, so firmly rooted, generously predisposed and wisely accepting of history’s perturbing turns and twists. Something about those trees evokes in my heart fond memories of my early childhood, days when we lived and labored in our olive orchards. I had to have one in my front yard. Every hike I took in the Galilee wound up being a hunt for the perfect Rumi tree. I saw thousands but each had something missing: some were not majestic enough in shape, squatty or too tall; the trunk of others was hollowed out to a mere thin shell that would not stand the physical injury of the transplanting process; and still others were not old enough. Last year, when a neighbor decided to pull out half a dozen old olive trees to empty the land for construction, I accepted his offer of one tree as a present. It was not exactly what I wanted but, then again, it was free of charge and I would be saving another venerable eyewitness to the history of our village. Even if its trunk was not carved that beautifully by the exigencies of history and natural phenomena, it still was of an age and height that compared favorably, for example, with those venerated olives in the Garden of Gethsemane. But alas, in the process of moving it, the trunk was damaged and I was left dreaming of my perfect olive tree again.
Then one weekend I accepted the offer of a friend to drive to his own olive grove in Wadi Salameh. He owed me a favor and had heard of my Rumi olive prospecting. We saw several worthy a’amouds that he or one of his relatives owned, but none fit the picture I had in my mind, my imagined tree occupying the space in my redesigned garden, a tree whose mere sight would inspire visitors and passers-by to reconnect instantaneously to our ancient roots in this historic land.
But leaving the site, my eye was caught by a beauty of an olive tree, a Rumi a’amoud of imperial stature, imposing configuration and monumental proportions. It stopped me in my tracks. I knew I belonged to that tree. It was the long-lost mother I had been searching for. It took total possession of my senses. The struggle of proving our relationship, our belonging to each other, to the rest of the world started right then and there. I had to find the person who had formal title to ‘my’ tree. That took the better part of a year. No one seemed to know to whom the well-tended piece of land around it belonged. A search of land records in the surrounding villages yielded the promising result that the land belonged to the Nassar family in Arrabeh, my village. I started inviting friends and distant acquaintances from that clan for rides in my new Subaru Outback. The rides invariably took us past that a’amoud. I had to be careful not to divulge my love story with the tree for fear of driving its price beyond my financial means. Eventually the trail led to the land’s owner, a school friend from my childhood days.
It was then that I discovered a historical curiosity about olive trees that is common knowledge to most farmers in the Galilee. Although the old school friend owned the land, he did not own the tree itself. That honor belonged to another former classmate of mine, one from Dier Hanna.
In the shadows of the Ottoman Empire, subsistence farming and heavy land taxes had yielded a real estate system that valued the productive olive tree more than the land on which it stood, thus allowing one to own a tree independently of the land. Once I uncovered this strange system, everyone in the village with whom I discussed it quoted an example of conflict and intrigue between neighbors or relatives prompted by this separation between ownership of the tree and ownership of the land on which it stood. Apparently, such circumstances obtain only in the case of ancient olive trees; no other tree has the permanence, status and traditional value as a source of livelihood to rate a special custom or even an Ottoman law recognizing its sanctity.
Though the owner of the tree does not own the land, he or she has at their disposal, for as long as the tree lives, 64 square meters of land around it, an area traditionally recognized as the olive tree’s mihrath or cultivation space. In other words, the olive tree ‘owns’ the land around it. In fact, that is the wording of a local axiom: ‘Ezzatoun bumluk’ -- Olives own, it states simply. At least in my case, that depicts the true relationship between me and my tree: it possesses me more than I it. And in the constricted perspective of rural life, that meant forever: the ownership of such an a’amoud devolved down the generations in patrilineal inheritance, just as the land did in a parallel, separate fashion. When the male descendants divided an inherited field between themselves, such a division took the number and known productive potential of the olive trees into consideration and not the area of the land.
No self-respecting villager would ever think of messing around with these sacred inheritance traditions, even when everyone knows that the rules of tree ownership would never stand the test of modern reality in an Israeli court of law. Both sides to such a conflict would probably end up losing out, somehow, to the superior interest of the Israel Lands Authority. So, everyone keeps away from the courts and settles land claims internally, in the traditional manner of consensus seeking among honorable neighbors. Only in one known case in Arrabeh did a farmer violate the honor code of conduct and set fire to an a’amoud on his land belonging to a distant relative. With the death of the tree, no further claim could be made to its mihrath. End of conflict. Shortly, though, he lost a son and one of his work oxen broke a leg.
The wife of the landowner from Arrabeh on whose field my Rumi a’amoud stood was effusive in welcoming my proposal. It would free their land of the intrusive presence of another family’s tree. She went as far as equating this intended good deed of mine with the time I cared for her little son, now himself a physician, when he came down with polio. I graciously accepted her thanks, black coffee and dish of home-made sweets.
Then I made a second visit, this time to my former classmate from Dier Hanna. He is a huge man and he gave me a long and sincere bear-hug leaving me momentarily breathless. After coffee and fruits, I broached the subject of the tree. He turned pale, twirled the tip of his mustache with his fingers, coughed nervously, while his breathing became noticeably labored. He seemed to be in a real bind. Apparently he found it difficult to deny me my first ever request for a favor from him, especially after the welcoming hug, but found it equally difficult to commit such a treasonous act as selling an olive tree that has been in the family for who knows how many centuries. He excused himself and left the room to consult with a brother. A short time later he returned beaming. Eureka! “The last wish of our late father when we gathered around his death bed in this room was that we guard our land, our olives and our womenfolk; in short, our honor. But you took good care of him in his old age; he was always pleased with the way you treated him when he fell ill and came to your clinic. We know he would have given you that tree if you had asked him for it. It is yours on two conditions: No money will be involved and you will put a sign identifying the tree as a present from the Khalaileh clan.” The deal was done and I tried to thank Ahmad with a failed bear hug of my own.
Last spring, when I first saw my tree, I started digging a hole in my garden where I planned for it to stand. In the cool afternoons I would be joined by Bashar, one of my many solicitous teenage grand-nephews. We would take turns digging and shoveling the earth out. By the time the rains started in late autumn, we thought we had accomplished the task; we had dug a circular hole, two meters across and one and a quarter meters deep.
On Thursday, two days before I was due to bring my bride home, I consulted with a friend, a civil engineer. We visited the tree together and he took exact measurements. Bashar’s and my labors had not been totally in vain. The depth of the hole was adequate but we needed to double its area. Bringing in any mechanical equipment was out of the question; it would mess up my garden. I contacted Camal, a good manual ditch digger, and he estimated the assignment would require a minimum of two days’ labor. He wanted to start on Saturday, the day the tree was due to arrive, as Friday was set aside for praying at the mosque. I pressed him and finally he agreed to do the work in a day, provided I pay him for the two days’ work. I did not quibble; I wanted to get the job done before somebody changed their mind about my tree.
On Friday morning, he showed up early. By noon he was finished, making it to the mosque just in time for the noon prayer. He even had enough time to do his ablutions in the hole he dug, an auspicious sign for the success of the transplanting operation. The water used in washing the head, face, hands and feet of a good Muslim in preparation for entering the mosque and standing before Allah has near-magic powers, almost sacred in its value. After he collected his money, he picked a bunch of grape leaves and a pocketful of green almonds from my orchard for his wife to satisfy her cravings in early pregnancy. She was carrying a boy this time, after four girls, so Camal was catering to her every wish. Camal is a borderline mentally handicapped young man, mainly due to cultural and environmental deprivation. But, boy, does he dig ditches! At this stage in my biological life, and with my current range of interests, I think I would opt for his muscle power if it were on offer for exchange with other bodily systems of mine.
Then came the mechanical part: the heavy equipment to dig my tree out; the lift with a minimum capacity of ten tons to raise it out of the ground and then lower it again into the welcoming womb Bashar, Camal and I had prepared for it; the wide platform truck to carry it the ten-mile distance between the two locations. Finally, Camal would return to cover its roots with few tons of fertile soil.
Fortunately, the operation took place on Saturday, the Sabbath day when Jewish agricultural and forestry inspectors rest. An Ottoman law, still on the books in Israel, prohibits endangering the life of an olive tree. To enforce it, a permit has to be obtained before an olive can be moved from one location to another. I learned of the requirement, however, only after we had finished digging around my tree. I could not leave its damaged roots exposed and jinx the whole project. But equally the contractor I had commissioned to do the task was afraid for his livelihood; if caught, he would be heavily fined and his equipment impounded for a month. It makes one wonder how Israeli contractors and military commanders have been arranging so easily the ‘transfer’ of so many ancient Palestinian olive trees from the occupied West Bank. According to reports in the Israeli media, this is big business, with the stolen trees sold for tens of thousands of dollars to the wealthier residents of Israeli suburbs.
To allay the contractor’s fear, I personally guided the truck over a rocky unpaved back road so as not to be seen with our illegal heist on the open road. The scariest part, though, was negotiating the roads through Arrabeh. Not only did we have to move through some particularly narrow alleys but also the height of my tree on top of the moving platform exceeded that of the electricity, phone and cable TV lines strung haphazardly across the village skies. The contractor wanted me to sit atop the tree and manually lift or cut obstructive wires. The thought of parading through the village in such fashion did not appeal to me. I paid him an extra amount and he enlisted the help of a friend for the task. I prayed for Allah’s protective graces all the way home. Mercifully the clandestine operation was completed, but not without the typical rural communal fanfare and curiosity-engendered assistance and interference from a dozen curious neighbors and twice as many children.
I do not feel any inkling of remorse about having broken the law. After all, the wise Ottomans wanted to protect olive trees, and mine shows every sign of being alive and vigorous. Had I been a Hellinic subject, however, I might not have taken the risk. In those days endangering the life of an olive tree was punishable by death, and I certainly want to be around to tend and enjoy the new addition to my garden.
The horrific sense of history inspired by this continuous biological link between me and my land is simply awesome. Are the Palestinians not the historical descendants of the Minoans of Crete? Were the Minoans not the first olive farmers in recorded history? Did Minoan culture not revolve around the trade in olive oil? Was the trade by way of Phoenicia? Could the Phoenicians, Canaanites, Israelites, Egyptians, Hyxos, Romans, Greeks, Persians, Arabs, Moguls, Crusaders and Turks have played a role in influencing the life and physique of my own tree? Yes, indeed, they may have. Any or all of them may have enjoyed the afternoon Mediterranean breeze in its cool shade. Any or all of them may have tied their trusted mounts to its sturdy trunk and cut a fresh shoot from its base to hurry the steed along -- the reason, most likely, for all the beautiful, football-size knots on its trunk. Any or all of them may have seduced, or raped, one of my maiden progenitors, leaving his telltale imprint on my amalgam of genes. And any or all of them may have dictated their rules and regulations to my ancestors, who submissively incorporated them as ‘ours’.
But at bottom, it was those Minoan olive oil traders and their Palestinian descendants, clinging to their land and subsisting in the shadow of their olive groves, that morphed into an ambitious nation laying claim to Arab culture, the last dominant culture of significant impact. My tree knows and attests to all of that; that is how it all started. This horrendous behemoth, with its two-meter wide, beautifully sculpted trunk and over ten square meters of in-your-face exposed root system saw it all. I can prove my belonging to this piece of the earth’s crust through it; its roots are my surrogate roots. And they are taking hold in my land that I inherited from my father, who inherited it from his father, who …

Tearful April Mornings

2011-04-21T20:52:00.000-07:00

“April is the cruelest month.”
T. S. Eliot.

In rural Palestine we belittle men who cry. Only women let their tears flow freely. It is considered less than manly. Real men are stoic and conceal their pain, physical as well as emotional. At least in public, I try to conform to the dictates of village culture in matters that do not impinge greatly on my personal freedom. Perhaps that is why I rarely attend funerals in Arrabeh. But also I attend few weddings. Now that the village is large enough for weddings and/or funerals to be daily occurrences I avoid both extremes of village social interactions. Instead I celebrate and grieve privately on YouTube, enjoying a daily portion of Arabic song and dance on or commiserating with fellow peace and justice seekers on our various cyberspace powwows.

A rural tradition I have come to observe recently is early rising: I am up each morning at the crack of dawn, just as the seven youthful muezzins commence blaring their cacophonous calls for prayer from the loudspeakers atop their minarets, strategically dispersed around the village to reach its every bedroom. Not that I have anything against praising the good Lord early in the morning. In fact on occasion I enjoy a visit on my tape recorder with Sheik Kaid, the old village muezzin and my former Arabic language teacher who used to dock me points for not appearing at the mosque for the Friday noon group prayer. After I came back from my studies in the States and before he went on his mosque building spree resulting eventually in six additional mosques in the village, I took the trouble of making my own recording of his beautiful call for the dawn prayer. I did it one early calm summer morning when there was nothing to disturb the village peace. It was when the sheik still did not have a loudspeaker; he sang his praise of God and call of the faithful to the mosque from the lofty balcony of the old minaret in the center of Arrabeh in the serene calm of Galilee. Only an occasional rooster would crow, a dog bark or a donkey bray. It was before the advent of electricity, the innovation that threw the roosters’ timing off and made them crow every time an electric light is switched on in the village.

Once the muezzin’s morning competition in praising God is over calm returns except for the melodious singing of blackbirds in my garden. By then I have prepared my morning cup of coffee and switched my computer on. I start with a quick glance at my email inbox for any special messages, loaf around cyberspace for a few minutes, and then proceed with the morning’s writing assignment for the next few hours.

On Saturday, April, 09, 2011 I connected to The Rachel Corrie Foundation for Peace and Justice http://rachelcorriefoundation.org/ to check if the website had acknowledged the piece of bitter sarcasm I had just added on my blog about the last two sessions of the Corries’ court case against the State of Israel. Bam! Rachel’s glorious smile went right through to my heart. I was devastated. How could I have such emotional crush, fatherly as it was, on a young woman I never met in person? I craved for a hug from that beautiful woman to quench my longing for her. It was two months since the last time I had held Rhoda, my daughter, in my arms. I leaned back in my chair and closed my eyes. Here was Rhoda being run over by the blade of that D-9 Caterpillar. Oh, my God! How can they do that to my sweetheart? I held Rachel closer to my heart to protect her from the biblical cruelty she sacrificed herself to protect other humans from. I squeezed hard and broke out crying. I was afraid I might wake my wife. I gulped silently for air and let my tears flow quietly down my unshaven face. What kind of man was I? I had to take control of myself. I gave Rhoda a tight hug and kissed Rachel on the cheek before I opened my eyes and walked over to the washbasin to splash some cold water on my face. I refilled my coffee cup, went back to my computer and wrote a couple of emotional pages in my novel about Galilee, Palestine and Israel.

After a breakfast of fresh citrus fruits and fried eggs from my two surviving free-range chickens I puttered around in the garden for a while. By now I felt exhausted. I took a rest. [How did He manage to slug at it for six days straight before taking a rest? Perhaps He didn’t have much on His mind. Bad thoughts are more exhausting than ditch digging; take it from one who practices both regularly. It must have been before the Internet and all its disturbing tidings.] Soon I was up again with my laptop. I saw another video, this one posted by Kate on Mondoweiss, the online periodical that proclaims itself as the locus for “The war of ideas in the Middle East” and hence the place where I occasionally give expression to my frustration and bitter protesting. April 9th is the memorial day of the Deir Yassin massacre. [He simply couldn’t have seen this video and kept quiet. Please, don’t be upset with me. I am giving Him the benefit of the Doubt. After all, He must have slept on the job and didn’t see the actual event in 1948, just as he did earlier when the holocaust was in progress. But at least, later on, when He found out about the holocaust He tried to do something about it; He compensated His favorite children politically and financially. Never mind that He screwed us, the Palestinians, in the process.] Here is the link for it should you want to rid your body of excess salt and accumulated fluid. I for one cried my eyes out: http://mondoweiss.net/2011/04/63rd-anniversary-of-the-deir-yassin-massacre.html

The over-half-an-hour-long video opens and ends with the saddest o‘ud music. In between it maintains a balance between Arab and Jewish narrators and covers a range of relevant information, from the three existing Deir Yassin memorials in New York, Scotland, and Wales to the orphanage and school established by the grand Palestinian philanthropist, Hind el-Hussainy for Deir Yassin’s children. In an entry in her diary she specifies 138 Palestinian liras as her total savings at the time. But she had the goodwill and the moral reserve to make a go of it after she found the 55 lost children let loose by the Irgun and the Stern gangs at Jaffa Gate in Jerusalem.

I am pleased that Hiam Hussein, the proud daughter of the neighboring Galilee Palestinian village of Deir Hanna, has done Hind justice in playing her role in Julian Schnabel’s controversial new film, Miral. It is a film based on the autobiographical novel by the same name written by his girlfriend and former Dar el-Tifl el-Arabi resident, Rula Jebreal, another proud Palestinian with local roots, Haifa to be exact. Also I noted with displeasure that the video producers gave no credit to my own brother, Prof. Sharif Kanaana of Beir Zeit University, to the best of my knowledge the first researcher to document the actual number of Deir Yassin Palestinian residents murdered by the Zionist armed gangs and the Haganah and to stipulate that the numbers previously quoted were inflated by both sides of the conflict for their own convenient ends: by the crime perpetrators to sow panic among Palestinians and by the victims to maximize the blame for the crime.

Mind you, I am beating around the bush here. I am speaking of tangential issues to avoid crying again: The mere sight of the serene stone homes, now housing the Givat Shaul Mental Health Center, released a flood of tears. When I got to the part where a former Deir Yassin resident, likely the wife, the daughter and the sister of the village’s stonecutters of old and the descendent of seven centuries worth of stonecutting toil and sweat, was aided to walk next to her villages current barbwire perimeter and she reached to touch a tree branch to her face, I nearly collapsed stifling my urge to sob and to scream out my pain.

The next morning, Sunday, April 10, I rose before the muezzins. By the time the village regained its morning quiet I was scouting the Internet for fresh news. A mailing from a friend contained a title that piqued my curiosity: “Juliano Mer Khamis Predicted His Assassination,” it said. I clicked and followed the link to a half-minute long English language You Tube video that said it all exactly as it would actually happen to him. Here is that link. See for yourself what raw courage is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSPUxYMoKRs&feature=email For some ten minutes I shook with silent tears of outrage and disappointment. How could someone be so stupidly misguided? And to kill such an enlightened bright promise presumably in the name of Islam! Seven guys in Arrabeh alone had just finished noisily shouting the praises of God’s mercy and justice to be totally discredited by the bullet of a “fucked-up Palestinian” as Juliano had put it! . And the guy is not only insightful. He is a good actor; you can see it even in the half-minute video. And his blonde wife is reportedly pregnant with twins. Oh God! Now I am sobbing for the orphaned unborn twins.

That indeed was the ultimate conspiracy. Juliano was literally the embodiment of integration and understanding, himself the product of interracial love and idealism. I had met his parents, the Russian Jewess Arna and the Christian Palestinian Saliba, both protesting commitment to higher ideals of revolutionary justice, humanitarianism, and internationalism, all under their communist convictions before that pipedream turned sour. And I had met Juliano on more than one occasion. I remember him informing an audience in New York that, as a parachute trooper in the IDF before he discovered peaceful resistance, he took it for granted to carry an extra handgun in his backpack to plant on any civilian Palestinian he may kill. He was an acquaintance, not close enough for me to claim him as a friend. Now I was crying for having failed to open my heart wider for this former soldier, this brave comrade in the struggle for freedom, justice and equality.

The weekend before his senseless murder my wife and I had planned to travel to Jenin to see his adaptation of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland performed at the Freedom Theater, his life’s unique project and answer the world’s barbarity, to occupation and to apartheid. Alas, a friend dissuaded us from taking the trip with the explanation that on Saturdays it would take several hours to clear the checkpoint at the border. There were that many Palestinian shoppers from Galilee making the trip on their day off to take advantage of the cheaper prices in the depressed economy of the Palestinian Occupied Territories. Now I was crying for the poor Palestinian brothers and sisters who toil endless hours to wind up with worthless produce, not intrinsically worthless but rendered so by the imposed boundaries and regulations. That was what Juliano tried to tear down. Why didn’t I bother to know him more closely? Why had I never hugged him or kissed his handsome face? I had to hear him posthumously on You Tube to fall in love with him! What a rotten deal we both have had.

Saturday, the 16th of April I slept late. The night before I had stayed up past midnight at a nephew’s wedding celebration. Juliano would have felt at home at the banquet hall: a mix of village locals and communists from across the land, Arabs and Jews. The groom is one. My sister, mother of the groom, had spent the better part of a week dancing the local feminine style, alternatively clapping her hands and twirling them over her head. Finally her rheumatism kicked in and her wrist swelled up with an acute flare of inflammation. We call that “repetitive motion injury.” Doctors are striking. I had to rush over at three in the morning to put her arm in a splint and give her a painkiller. Was she crying in physical pain or for her last gosling abandoning the nest?

By sunrise I was up but not fully alert, still dazed and in a contemplative mood. A dove was romancing another on the red bougainvillea bough sweeping across the full width of my view through the window of my study. I opened the window to hear their melodic chatter. An announcement on the mosque’s loudspeaker lamented the death of a young man in another car accident. It ruined my joyous repose and I decided to check the news. Quickly I reached http://mondoweiss.net/2011/04/gaza-mourns-vittorio-arrigoni.html/ Another stab in the heart of solidarity, freedom and moderation. I read and reread all the standard platitudes: “One of the most passionate supporters of justice for Palestine.” “Full of the joy of life.” “The man with the big smile and gentle nature.” I never met Vittorio Arrigoni, but he had a cause: “Stay Human,” he was known to admonish all concerned. Why would anyone kill such a refreshing soul? And why the torture and willful cruelty?. Who stands to gain from this or from the murder of Juliano Mer Khamis? Or from the murder of the settler family in the outpost next to Awarta in the occupied West Bank for that matter? Not who the press reports say it is, I am sure. Check with me in fifty years when the secret documents are released and I will score another I-told-you-so point, I am sure. Or else join me in signing the appeal to keep the Wikileaks founder free.

I run the video, a collection of photos of the Italian freedom fighter set to music: He is handsome, muscular and imposing with a disarming smile and a big tattoo. Just like my son, Ty, nearly of the same age. I haven’t seen my boy for four months. What keeps me away from him and his kids, God damn it? Then I reach Carlo Latuff’s cartoon portrait of Vik holding the hand of Hanthala, Naji El-Ali’s immortal symbol of Palestinian diaspora, dispossession, resistance and survival against all odds. The floodgates open again and I cry my eyes out, not only for Vik but also for Hanthala who lost another friend and protector and for all those among us who have not learned to heed those two friends’ admonition to “Stay Human.”

I wanted a fruit. I headed to the citrus side of my garden. On the way I walked over with the key and opened the cage for my dozen new chickens. I had learned a lesson: Freedom may cost a chicken its life. Only in the security of the full light of day can my chickens be safe from the murderous mongooses. I rummaged through the navel orange branches for the last fruits of the season. The perfumed scent of the flowers was overwhelmingly pleasant. Still, picking the very last orange of the season on my tree saddened me. Unexpectedly, the pleasure of admiring my citrus trees in full bloom in the rays of the rising sun evoked sadness in my heart. And my flowering apple trees and ripening kumquats and all the red poppies underneath them. How long will I have the pleasure of connecting to my chickens and trees and to the poppies in my field? Avigdor Lieberman and his fascist followers claim them as their sacred property. After all, geographically, I live in Israel and he thinks it is his exclusive property: “Israel Beitainu –Israel is our home,” he proclaims victoriously.

How many times must I repeat: “Stay Human!”
“Shanti, Shanti, Shanti.”

The Rachel Corrie Case Revisited

2011-04-09T19:05:00.000-07:00

A Bedouin Goldstone Moment:
April 03, 2011:

I arrived an hour late to court this morning; in my hurry to make it on time I was picked up by the traffic police for speeding. “Winds blow contrary to the whims of ships,” a famous Arab poet once said. As I entered the court a whole new set of actors was there with the exception of the judge who addressed the defense lawyer as ‘Mr. Salameh,’ Arabic for Mr. Safety. I quickly assumed that there had been a change of mind at the highest level and that ‘they’ had decided to give the Corries a sympathetic hearing, switching to an Arab as the defense lawyer and picking one with a symbolic conciliatory name. Alas, the whole thing was a misconception. The judge was handling a totally different case and doing away with a quick procedural issue before starting the Corrie case. I wasn’t all that late, after all.

It is pitiful to see bumbling fools stray far afield and miss their opportunity to prove their point when the answer is right at hand. That was my thought when I read the full text of the Goldstone retraction of his former condemnation of Israel’s slaughter of Palestinian civilians in Gaza in the winter of 2008-9 as ‘possible’ war crimes and crimes against humanity. I read the good judge’s retraction in the paper the night before this day, spent in contemplating the charade that passes for proper proceedings in a court of justice in Israel. Had he bothered to attend just one session in the ongoing saga that I have followed for nearly a year, Richard Goldstone would have learned the efficient way for a judge to reach his independent decision regardless of the facts and not to dillydally with assertions, retractions and the like. The man has formulated his foregone conclusion and no marching of evidence to the contrary will make a difference: The Corries will not get their shekel irregardless of facts. You will see.

We all have returned from a four-month hiatus in the proceedings of the civilian case brought by the parents of the late Rachel Corrie, the ISM activist killed by an armored military D_9 Caterpillar on March 16, 2003 while trying to prevent the IDF from demolishing Palestinian homes in Gaza. It happened in bright daylight and Rachill wore a florescent orange vest. But the soldiers in the D-9s simply didn’t see her. The IDF had conducted a “thorough, credible, and transparent investigation” as the Israeli prime minister at the time, Ariel Sharon, told his friend, President George W. Bush of the USA. The investigation had revealed that the young woman had hid behind, under or over ‘a pool of dirt’ as the various participating soldiers have testified so far. Sharon’s credentials on the matter at hand are beyond doubt: President Bush had dubbed him “a man of peace,” and he was the father of the practice of clearing wide swaths of land of homes in Gaza from the days of the First Intifada. The specific activity that the ISM activists objected to was in the same ‘defensive’ military tradition, involving this time the continued clearance of some fifty-kilometer perimeter road in the Rafah border area known as the Philadelphi Axis, a random computer-generated IDF designation that has come since to signify civilian imprisonment, underground tunnels, F-16 air raids and underground steel barriers. But Rachel’s and her friends’ objection was totally alien to the wholesomeness of the original plan: The axis road had been already established and all the IDF was doing was to “level the ground” alongside the road, including a Gazan shack here and a home or two there to forestall the possibility of terrorists hiding in such incidental geographic adulterations of the purity of the original Sharonian military conception.

With such essentiality of the Philadelphi Axis and the qualifications of its founders, how could any sane person doubt the IDF’s conclusions regarding what had happened to the foreign intruders? Yet, here are these folks from Olympia, USA, claiming that the Israeli Defense Forces were negligent in protecting human life in a case that happened to be that of their 22 year-old daughter, Rachel. But their own lawyer, a Palestinian who is even more intent on discrediting the only democracy in the Middle East, has just heard representatives of IDF declare under oath that as early as 2006 they had used Caterpillars equipped with remote control electronics and bore the exorbitant expenses to avoid the loss of life of human beings that happened to be their soldiers carrying out the cleansing of areas cluttered with Hezbollah and Palestinian terrorists. With such record, how can anyone accuse us of inattention to preserving human life?

No wonder both the judge and the head state defense lawyer seemed disinterested and even a little bored with the proceedings. The lady looked like she had aged a decade or more during my four-months away from her, explanation enough for her limited energy this time around. Every time she stood up to say something she would twirl her two diminutive hands high above her head in a dance-like motion of emphasis of what she said. But the motions were slow, and, in the absence of music accompaniment, seemed a bit silly. As to the judge, he was so relaxed he hardly twitched or strained at all; only a few loosening motions of his necktie and an occasional sipping of his tea. I know he has reached his decision a long time ago and all the proceedings were now a waste of his time. That is perhaps why he interfered to cut the claimants’ lawyer, Husain Abu-Husain, short and to ask him to close his line of questioning so many times. To expedite the process of establishing the facts in his court he had to step in more than once and explain to the badgered witness what he, the witness, had wanted to say. Why all the bother when we already know the facts? And that is what I wanted Richard Goldstone to come see and learn from: consistency; the system had already looked into the case and made its decision. Why confuse everyone and fowl up the case with useless reconsiderations. Get it right on the first try, dude!

The first witness of the day was another army technical expert in charge of D-9 driver training and he stuck to his narrow expertise and avoided treading on relevant case-specific grounds, falling back on failure of memory only when Abu-Husain would edge close to the fatal ‘incident’ itself.

The second witness was much more engaged and engaging, a bright-looking Bedouin man of obvious intelligence. His ready smile, his constant readjusting of his sitting arrangement, and his darting eyes betrayed a level of discomfort akin to that of a caged raccoon. He partially gave away his identity by responding brightly to Abu-Husain’s Arabic language greeting. The thought crossed my mind that the good judge must have thought that the man was dispensable because of tribal considerations: All previous witnesses directly involved in the murder case were shielded from the audience’s evil eyes by a screen. Except for this man who was present at the scene in his armored tank as the units commander protecting and overseeing the work of the two Caterpillars. Was he considered dispensable because of his DNA, ultimately a Bedouin Palestinian, even if an Israeli soldier, a sheep in wolf’s skin? After all, nearly the entire ‘Desert Division’ of the Israeli Army, the division in charge of the Philadelphi Axis, about the most dangerous assignment in Israel’s military adventurism, was mostly made of Bedouins. Arab volunteer soldiers in the Israeli security services, such as these hardy heroes have their reasons, mainly financial, my daughter, Rhoda Ann Kanaaneh, says in her recent well-researched book on the subject entitled “Surrounded.” And they do feel altogether unequal in the army, she also found. Might their feeling of unequal treatment stem in part from different levels of exposure to danger?

My irresponsible doubts were later explained away. The man’s identity had been already exposed in the press and it was no use trying to hide it beyond calling him by his initial as Mr. R. instead of using his full name. The man was not your camel-driving Bedouin type; he had used his privileged status with the Israeli armed forces to get a college education and a BA degree. And he used his accumulated acumen and native intelligence to deflect Abu-Husain’s obvious attempts to trip him on his possible involvement in Rachel’s demise. He kept to his former conclusion in his own investigation immediately after the incident, which he had not seen, that a concrete slab must have fallen accidentally on the woman and killed her. And he was alert and committed enough to his IDF identity to insist on correcting loaded terms whenever they were used: His D-9s were involved in ‘leveling the area’ not demolishing homes, he insisted, even if in the process homes were demolished. And all Gazans were terrorists to him not ‘civilians.’ The judge himself, at a later stage in the proceedings had a similar enlightening objection: When Abu-Husain asked another witness if he saw the event of killing the late ISM activist, the judge corrected him rather angrily for his choice of words. He thought ‘killing’ implied guilt and intentionality, as judge Goldstone would have put it.

Despite R’s presence of mind and caginess, qualities that served to make him creative to a fault and oftentimes self-contradictory in reconstructing his role in the fateful day’s events, Abu-Husain managed to show him as an ignoramus. The soldier thought that the court case was being brought by the state of Israel against the late Rachel Corrie. And at one point he seemed to be cowed by the lawyer’s aggressive questioning to where he tried to shift responsibility up to his commander. He admitted to having worried about the safety of the international activist scurrying around in the operational arena to where he considered stopping work. But his commander insisted on continuing the mission despite the disturbance by the pesty ISM group.

Eventually Abu-Husain found a way to bridge the attitudinal gulf that separated the two of them, both lawyer and witness being ultimately fellow Arabs despite the state’s categorizing them differently on its scale of good-to-bad Arabs. The lawyer kept praising the witness’s intelligence and his achievements and high rank and dropping hints about his tribal identity and inclusion in the Bedouin, and hence the Arab, collective till the officer seemed to relent. Quite visibly, he waxed more at ease, nearly closing his eyes in a blissful repose. And Abu-Husain, his former tormentor, flashed a winsome smile at him. From there on the good Bedouin started referring to Gazans as ‘citizens of the area’ and not using the standard term ‘terrorists’ for the entire lot. It dawned on me right then that the young man was having a ‘Goldstone moment,’ an imagined fleeting instant of reacceptance in the fold and of lulling in the warm lap of tribal comfort and solidarity.

Alas, that is when the contradictory identities of the two current antagonists in court, not counting the judge, had to remerge and the separation walls re-erected: As he picked up another line of questioning of this central witness, lawyer Abu-Husain tiptoed gently around the man’s doubtful record of previous arrests and possible falsification of evidence. The judge sprang to the witness’s aid and declared the topic off limits. Abu-Husain relented but only to pursue another suspicious line and question the man about the mysterious bargaining by another free-range Bedouin offering to have the same commander switch sides and testify in court for the claimants against the payment of a certain fee. That line was quickly terminated as well.

The Dry Lab Technique:
April 6, 2011

Today the court had a relaxed atmosphere, brimming with palpable leisure and ease. All except for the pimply young Sephardi geek who serves as the technical clerk in charge of all the electronic equipment and who spends a good part of his day dozing off. The defense lawyers were fully at ease: The head of the three-lawyer team seemed to have regained at least five of the ten years in youthfulness I had thought she lost only three days ago. She had a constant bright smile that ebbed and flowed the whole day but never completely faded away. Her facial muscles relaxed and tensed alternatively, like a pretty jellyfish floating in sunny waters, without ever loosing its inner-tickled demeanor. As I secretly enjoyed my inspired analogy, drawn from my years in Hawaii, it dawned on me that the heavy makeup shined brightly in the well-lit court not unlike the sheen of the residue of an oil spill over distant still waters. The lady strode across the room to the door and turned her head to ascertain that the curtain that had been erected to shield the morning’s mystery witness didn’t permit the audience to see him. Her proud stride and threatening deliberate glance over her shoulder reminded one of a lioness in her den. But I have also seen our kitten, Bumblebee, practice the same game with mice he catches in our garden.

The second in command in the defense team, a dark-skinned tense and angry young man, appeared also to be more at ease: He sat calmly with his back to the audience alternatively bending his thick neck forward and straightening it up. For the first time I noticed a well-healed two-inch straight-line scar in the scalp at the nape right where the roundness of his shaven head yields to the muscular com adipose couple of horizontal rolls across the top of his thick neck. It brought to mind an old lawyer at the edge of Little Italy in Lower Manhattan where I used to stop on occasion to buy stamps, to make an additional copy of a key, or to notarize a document. The man was reputed to have been connected to the Mafia in his younger days and his shop, stocking tobacco and various NY memorabilia and offering whatever services were in high demand, was still considered a front for them. He sported many old slashes across his head and face.

The Corries’ attorneys also seemed to be in a relatively relaxed mood: Jamil Dakwar, the second in command, usually constantly on the move like a hyperactive child, running to whisper a suggestion to Abu-Husain, to hand him a document, to fling a photo at the judge’s table, or to operate his laptop and broadcast the soldiers’ famous last words on the audiotape from the murder scene, the incidental exchange of “Did you kill him?” and “God bless his soul!” that no one in uniform seems to have ever heard before, was now rather sated. Likewise, the judge showed no sign of high anxiety the whole day except on a couple of occasions to cut Abu-Husain off. Also on one occasion he noticed someone in the audience drinking from a water bottle and shouted at him rather angrily to cease and desist; only lawyers were allowed to drink in his court, he declared. As if to confirm his privileged position and gain favor with the good judge, Abu-Husain took a long swig from his bottle making loud gurgling noises. It didn’t seem to faze the judge one bit.

The first witness of the day was another post-camel Bedouin, an ambitious one with a master’s level education who had risen to become Deputy Commander of the Desert Division and who happened to have been in charge of the entire arena on the day of Rachel’s demise. A fleeting thought crossed my mind as to how high in the IDF hierarchy was an Arab allowed to rise and whether allegiance to one’s profession can ever trump his allegiance to the tribe. The image of Libyan crowds celebrating the defection of pilots from Gaddafi’s forces to join their next of kin in revolt insinuated itself in my conscience along with the imagined image of Richard Goldstone being chased in the streets of Johannesburg by his tribe, the angry mob emerging from the synagogue where his grandchild’s Bar Mitzvah is being celebrated. I struggled to reign in my wild imaginings from running even more amuck by applying my mental breaks. Alas, they have been worn thin by the regular practice of free association of thoughts at overdrive speed. I never realized before how many blacks have infiltrated Goldstone’s bloodline.

As I rejoined the courtroom proceedings, the soldier was speaking from behind his curtain and seemed quite convinced of his own gravitas, or so the casual observer may surmise from the quality of his voice. To me he sounded like he could benefit from an adenoidectomy. He indicated that on that specific day he sat in his command post some five kilometers from the site of the ‘incident.’ He kept track of what happened all along the fifty-kilometer length of the Philadelphi Axis through the watchful eyes and ears of a series of women soldiers, each in charge of tracking electronically what happened along a certain length of the axis. He admitted to having observed from the safety of his lair the forced evacuation of the same pesky foreign crowd of ten to fifteen activists from the roof of what his soldiers came to refer to as “the yellow house” before they proceeded to ‘level the ground’ on which it stood. Quickly, in my mind, I capitalized the name and populated the house with a dozen screaming children of various ages, four or five women in traditional attire letting out shrill cries of distress, an old lady singing dirges about the precious Yellow House she and her husband had toiled all their life to build and about her dead and imprisoned children, and a stoic old patriarch leaning on his cane and uttering the repetitive brief prayer of “May God punish the oppressors!” And, indeed, a group of foreign young men and women were clambering up and down the stairs to the roof. I couldn’t make out their faces except for that of Rachel Corrie, with the most serene and angelic look of concern and empathy beaming out the pain and suffering of Palestinian civilians to the whole world. Dignity enveloped her head to toe.

A new revelation in my slow and painful familiarization process with the IDF through Husain Abu-Husain’s piecemeal unveiling of its mundane closet ware came to light at this juncture: Commanders keep a ‘mission file’ for each assignment, a sort of ledger in which missions are listed and their actual execution is reported upon completion with the required details. It brought to mind my teaching days’ standard weekly lesson plan ledger in the late 1950’s. I had just successfully finished twelfth grade and was assigned to teach kindergarten in a neighboring village. I was supplied with the two essential pedagogical tools: a pointer, which served the additional function of whacking misbehaving and less studious pupils, and the planning and reporting ledger. Given my level of skill and experience, a typical entry in the log would look something like the following: Time: 8:00-9:00 AM. Lesson: Arabic Language. Planned Activity: Free practice of calligraphy. Execution: Implemented fully. The next line would be music, for example, and the activity free singing, then physical activity with free play, art with free drawing till the day was finished. All planned activities were reported as ‘implemented fully” or, to avoid repetition, “carried out in accordance with plan.” I now could imagine the IDF’s typical mission file being crammed full of free target practice, free bombing, free leveling of houses, etc. etc. And all missions would be reported as “completed successfully,” I presume.

The deputy commander had not seen the ‘incident’ of Rachel’s death. When he was informed of it, he reported, he quickly conducted four different investigations among the troops and came to the conclusion that a concrete slab had fallen on the woman and killed her. What irked me most was the diminutive term, betonada, sounding like a romantic term of endearment, that the witness used for the imagined concrete block. I say ‘imagined’ for I understand that no one ever saw such a block being scooped by the D-9 or falling from its blade at that moment. Rather it was the only conclusion that made sense to the investigators. The said commander asked, imagined and came to his conclusion. He and all the other investigators that were to come later never visited the site of the presumed accident. The official military police investigators, as I understand it, didn’t even speak directly to the D-9 drivers. In my college days we had a name for this type of practice: We called it “dry lab.” For example, you were given the assignment in the chemistry lab of identifying a certain substance by analyzing it chemically. You looked at it and knew what it was by right away. You went home and performed the mental exercise, starting with the end result and working backward. You put down all the relevant steps of analysis and the various calculated weights of the intermediary products in the analysis to the level of micrograms. You submitted the details of the presumed process of analysis and got a perfect grade. I was good at dry-labing. That is why you can still find my name engraved on a stone (or perhaps concrete) slab at the entrance to Bilger Hall at the Manoa campus of the University of Hawaii as the top chemistry student of the class of 1964. Unless, of course, if that slab has fallen accidentally and killed someone nice.

By the end of the session everyone was tired and irritable. Abu-Husain wanted to know from the commander how many drug-smoking soldiers were deployed to perform the house demolition in the process of which Rachel’s killing took place, or something to that effect. You would think that after all the judge’s interruptions and admonitions over the past year the man would have learned to watch what he says. It was enough to make one’s blood boil. We all know that the task was ‘leveling’ the area and that Rachel was not ‘killed.’ And now the man is accusing our good soldiers of smoking hash on the job, five or six of them in the same tank with the mission’s commander. The judge had to prohibit that line of inquiry and he did it with the appropriate level of anger and display of tic-fraught irritability.

The next soldier witness apparently was not college material. No use wasting time and precious resources on one whose retentive ability is that limited. In the eight years since he witnessed the event he had forgotten all its details. About the only relevant memory that Abu-Husain could extract from the poor man was that he judged the foreign activists to be American by the lightness of their skin color. He couldn’t even remember if they were men or women, where they stood or anything else about them other than their skin color. I identified him in my mind as Mr. Forgot, another sad case of early onset of Alzheimer Syndrome.

There is more to come in another couple of months. Still, as we left the court, my friend, Mohammad Zidan, Director General of the Arab Human Rights Association in Nazareth, who has followed the proceedings, declared to me: “This all is not in vain. At least now when I read in the papers that the IDF has conducted an investigation I know what that means.”

Goldstone's Hemorrhoidectomy

2011-04-04T07:10:00.000-07:00

The call issued by angry human rights diehards, incensed by judge Richard Goldstone’s rebuttal of his own former ruling, solidified in its original undiluted form by his well-paid UN position, confirming Israel’s criminality in its attack on Gaza civilians, to dismiss him as a victim of senility makes my blood boil for reasons beyond my age-related infirmity of intentionality, the said judge being my junior by over five hundred days and much more capable of grammatical contortions in hiding what he wants to say so that you are at a loss as to where the subject of his sentence ends or senility sets in. Got that? And I am not a lawyer, mind you. If you didn’t get my drift, let me delve a bit deeper. Here is what the man says in a nutshell:

“Although the Israeli evidence that has emerged since publication of our report doesn’t negate the tragic loss of civilian life, I regret that our fact-finding mission did not have such evidence explaining the circumstances in which we said civilians in Gaza were targeted, because it probably would have influenced our findings about intentionality and war crimes.”

Let us not forget that the man had proven himself beyond a doubt as a veritable artist at adapting to constricting circumstances, a first-rate compromiser and double-dealer if viewed from the vintage point of his former employers. Imagine serving for fourteen years at the top of the Apartheid court system and coming out smelling like a rose. I wonder if anyone has tallied up the list of all the blacks in South Africa whom judge Goldstone sent to jail while he deliberately “undermined apartheid from within the system by tempering the worst effects of the country's racial laws,” as Wikipedia would have us believe. I actually appreciate the man’s slaving away at making a dent in the system while not abandoning his basic commitment to his own self-interest including, I presume, promotions and a better salary. In my delusional younger years I, for example, tried to work to improve the health of the Palestinian minority in Israel from within the Zionist state system while collecting a good salary and heading a good-size office. And I achieved some miniscule positive results. I appreciate the logical and moral acrobatics that such professional compromising exercises require. It is confusing and I can see why the good judge can’t quite come out and say what is on his cluttered mind at this late stage.

If I have lost you there for a moment, let me backtrack. The man never said he was anything other than Zionist. That does not allow condemnation of Israel under any circumstances. He seeks a moral compromise out of the conundrum: He makes his acceptance of the UN assignment to head the international committee to look into Israel’s possible war crimes in its 2008-9 war against Gaza conditional on investigating Hamas as well and the UN grants him his request. Had he relied on his common horse sense he would have saved himself and us all much time and effort: Hamas never denied targeting what Israel calls its civilian population. So what is there to investigate? Still, we all were impressed by the man’s conclusions putting the blame on both sides and implying equivalency between Israel and Hamas. Richard Goldstone must have thought this was enough of an achievement to blunt the expected outrage of fellow Zionists. Seen from Bibi Netanyahu’s angle this looks very bad for Israel and for Zionism. Richard was identified as another self-hating Jew and targeted for excommunication by the tribe.

I still live in a rural Palestinian community where the clan dominates social relations. For an individual to be shunned by his or her clan spells the ablation of that person’s social and psychological comfort zone. Imagine how much more painful it must be for one to be excommunicated by the entire tribe; your own family threatens to throw you out of your grandson’s bar-mitzvah, not to mention random threats of physical harm. Had Richard been physically eliminated, it would probably have fallen under the rubric of honor killing, not an unknown entity in tribal societies including my own. After all, it has happened in Israel before, and Bibi seemed to have given it an a’priori nod at the time. Would Bibi have named a major square in the center of Tel Aviv after the good judge had it happened to Goldstone before he found a way to appease his critics?

Let us not speculate. The fact of the matter is that Richard has wised up in due time and tried to recant. But he has his international name to worry about too. After all, the Palestinian National Authority saw fit to play with the man’s report as if it were a set of political playing cards, threatening to use it to trump Israel, then magically hiding it for a while and threatening to pull it out of a hat at the right moment. So Richard sets out to bamboozle all concerned with empty doublespeak. “If I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document.” Wow! How profound. You could change a comma and, technically, it would be “a different document.” Yet the trick has worked wonders: It gave Richard another chance to come down on Hamas as if we all had thought he had fallen in love with them before. And Bibi is ready to accept the prodigal son back in the fold of the family, provided Richard issues a proper and full formal apology. The problem is that there were some other minor characters who had penned their signature to that document and some of them may not have strong tribal connections here.

It behooves the UN, and I hesitate to extend the generalization to the US, for that would render the recommendation impossible to implement, to refrain from putting the fox in charge of the chicken coop: You cannot appoint an avowed Zionist to investigate Israel unless you want to get a quick clearance. Mind you, I am not accusing my junior friend, Richard, with ill intent or anything unsavory, other than being a Zionist. What I am talking about is the standard precaution that we, physicians, are repeatedly admonished during our training to observe: Never treat a member of your immediate family, except in an emergency of course. The rationale is that you don’t want to let your emotions cloud your medical judgment. This is doubly so when we are dealing with self-diagnosis and treatment. And yet many physicians disregard such advice and treat their next of kin or even themselves. I recall the story in my medical training days in Boston of a third-year surgical resident at a Harvard-associated top-rate hospital who was fired for going overboard in disregarding the above accepted principle of professional conduct: He was caught operating on himself, lying supine on the operating table and using a series of large mirrors to enable himself to perform his own hemorrhoidectomy.

You shouldn’t have, Richard!

Land Day Tigers

2011-03-30T23:30:00.000-07:00

The headline in Haaretz announced: “Police gearing up for possible Land Day trouble.” I called my village buddy and asked him what to make of that. Toufiq agreed that it foreboded ill. Thirty-five years have taught us all how to avoid violent confrontations between large numbers of Palestinian youth and armed Israeli policemen.
“The ball is in their court: If they want to stir up trouble they will show up in force at the licensed demonstration site; If they keep their distance our youth will shout out their anger at the imaginary enemies and go home peacefully,” Toufiq explained the obvious.
“It says in Haaretz that ‘the security forces are not ruling out the possibility of unrest given the recent events that have engulfed the Middle East in recent weeks.’”
“That shows how feeble-minded their big shots are. We don’t have the critical mass, the sheer numbers that are needed for the Tahreer Square phenomenon. And we can’t speak for the country as a whole. We are still struggling for the right to have rights in Israel beyond the gilded right to vote. After all that is what Land Day was all about: the right to say ‘no’ to the dictates of the Zionists. And it has gone from bad to worse. Just yesterday the Knesset passed two more racist laws specifically to disadvantage us. But we need to keep shouting. Perhaps the world will hear us one day even if Netanyahu and Lieberman remain deaf.”
“Some of us are hearing them clearly though. You heard about the dispute in the Bedouin village where the mayor chose to take all his employees on an all-expenses-paid picnic on Land Day instead of striking.”
“Will, he is ahead of his time. Remembering the Nakba is now banned. Land Day is next.”
“Sea you at the demonstration tomorrow.”

You don’t maintain your dignity in Arrabeh and keep away from Land Day events. Arrabeh, together with neighboring Sakhnin and Dier Hanna, was at the heart of the mini-Intifada in 1976 that established the landmark memorial now observed throughout the Palestinian community the world over. So, three days ago, Toufiq and I attended a youth function in honor of Land Day at our newly-constructed Mahmoud Darwish Cultural Center. A shy and aspiring artist, one of my many nieces, waxed very effusive in conducting a tour for us of the many Land Day paintings by local artists on display at the center. By the time the evening started, the five-hundred seat auditorium was full. The Communist Youth Club in charge of the event added an extra row of plastic chairs up front for us, for the mayor and his wife who also arrived appropriately late, for Abed Abidy, the famed Palestinian Artist who designed the Land Day memorial in Sakhnin, and for few other Arrabeh elders. No singing of national anthems, no recitation of the Koran, and no flags on display; this was a strictly local and secular function. The mayor was invited to the podium and spoke. He sang the praises of so many men and women who made history in 1976, bragged about his administration’s achievements, chief among which was the newly appointed committee for street names, (Arrabeh is 22 thousand and addresses are still designated by clan areas), and finally complained of the continuing government neglect and the authorities’ continuing designs on our remaining village land. To this day, he explained, ‘they’ refuse to implement a combined winter drainage and summer irrigation scheme for our fertile Battouf Valley, the only agricultural land of its size in all of Israel that continues to lack irrigation. And what excuse ‘they’ give? ‘They’ want to guarantee the survival of a rare insect that lives only in the Battouf Valley, he reported. “They give priority to insects over us!” the mayor explained at the end of his speech to the tumultuous clapping of the large audience. I wasn’t sure if they clapped that hard in admiration or out of impatience.

Next came the star of the evening, the home-grown crooner Amal Murkus, a beautiful young woman from another Galilee village with big black doe eyes who couldn’t possibly be mistaken for anything other than Arab and with a voice quality that matched the best of them in the whole Arab world. In midlife, she had put on a little weight, just enough for the perfect belly dance sexiness were she to dare and wiggle her god’s gifts a little. But no, she is a proper honorable Arab diva and she conducts herself with the proper aplomb. She sang a selection of songs of longing and hope from her various albums. The one song that really brought the house down with the entire audience clapping rhythmically and singing along was a catchy local tune with appropriately adapted words about the loss of land: “Pour out your copious tears, oh my eyes, for they have taken my land by oppression and rape,” the refrain went. At the end of the evening a hoard of teenagers stormed the stage for a closer look at Amal and perhaps a touch of her hand. I walked up and got a big hug and a kiss on the cheek. I had been to her house a while back to pick up some of her albums for my grandchildren in NY and California.

I asked Amal to give my kind regards to her aging father. Briefly, in the early 1950s he was my Arabic language teacher before he was fired because of his communist leanings. He was small of build but had a very firm earth-molded farmer hand that left one’s cheek smarting for hours on the occasion that he punished one for some grammatical mistake. His name is Nimr, Arabic for ‘Tiger.’ We called him ‘Little Tiger’ in contradistinction to ‘Big Tiger,’ our other teacher by the same name who was large of build, darker of skin, and an internally displaced Palestinian or ‘present absentee.’ Big Tiger went on to become a school principle, on the strength, it is rumored, of having persuaded several relatives of his to sign away their right to their land in their former village, now a thriving Jewish-only community. He even was reputed to carry a handgun; he was that close to the authorities. Little Tiger, Amal’s father, made a living as a day laborer in Haifa and become a full-blooded communist, rising in the party’s hierarchy as his means of survival dwindled. To this day, every time I meet Little Tiger, a mysterious twitching develops in my left cheek, a sign of fondness I presume.

Yesterday, just before sunset, I heard the sound of a loudspeaker. I stepped out to my garden to make out what kind of announcement: Was it a wedding invitation, a death announcement, the call for another religious lecture in one of our seven mosques, or just another door-to-door salesman? It was none other than Zahi in his pickup truck, another communist, reminding all of their duty to turn out in mass today for the memorial march of Land Day. Zahi – Arabic for ‘the one who shines brightly’ – has a distinctive booming voice that I would recognize anywhere. It runs in the family. I knew his late father and his late grandmother before him and they all seemed to have boom boxes for larynx.

And successfully wrestling with boulders also ran in the family. Zahi had worked for years at a stone cutting shop in the village while his late father was the strongest compressor operator who would be called on by contractors when they encountered an especially solid layer of quarts. The grandmother, known in her time by her nickname of Dallua’a – the spoiled widow –was a legend in her own time. She lost her husband at an early age and raised her three young boys by the sweat of her brow, single-handedly clearing a good stretch of mountainside land of rocks, spurning many suitor and eking a living for herself and her three orphans against all odds. The three grew to be among the earliest communists in the village even before Israel’s rejection of communism made it the fashionable thing for Israel’s Arab citizens to stream to it in their droves. When the state contested her ownership of her land Dallua’a turned to Hanna Naqqara who found in her an admirable subject for his defense of Palestinian land. He was a city dweller, a graduate of the American University of Beirut, and a licensed lawyer when lawyers were so rare that ‘they could be found only in brides’ trousseaus,’ as we say locally. Still, when he would stay overnight in Arrabeh he would insist on spending the night at Dallua’a’s hovel and no one in our conservative community of the time would blink an eye about it; she was that independent a sole. In court, with Naqqara’s coaching, she put on a veritable show for the Israeli judge: She brought the prickly pears from the cactus she grew on her cleared land to prove how delicious, how healthy, and how natural the process of growing and eating it was: No need for any ploughing, for any watering or for any tending whatsoever. And you could collect and peal the fruit with your bare hands. That is why all those agricultural experts had testified to the court that her land had laid fellow for three years and hence should revert to the state. She even challenged the judge to come and see for himself if he could make any of the boulders she had pushed to the perimeter of her land budge at all, or alternatively if he were interested in wrestling with her as her way of proving how healthy the fruit was for you.

Commitment to land and Land Day runs in the family as well: in 1976 on ‘the mother of all land Days’ itself, women in Dallua’a’s neighborhood were rumored to have trapped an Israeli tank in a narrow alley and forced its commander to negotiate a withdrawal under a hail of stones. On the eves of the following Land Day memorial marches Abu-Zahi, her son, would be routinely arrested and fined and warned to behave to no avail. And to this day, no Land Day march is complete without the shrill voice of Zahi on the mobile loud speaker urging all to show their “commitment to Galilee, to Palestine, to the blood of our martyrs.”

By 13:00 hours a near thousand youth and striking men and women in Arrabeh marched to lay wreathes of wild spring flowers on the grave of Kheir Yasin, the first of the six unarmed youth who were killed 35 years ago in the mass protest against the confiscation of Palestinian land in Israel. A liberal Jewish friend showed up and gave me a sympathetic hug in full view of the military blimp that appears regularly on our southern horizon every Land Day. I suddenly remembered the many meetings I had attended in my days in the Ministry of Health for no other reason than to be counted as the token Arab participant. I insisted on giving my friend a second extended hug facing south. He had lost a son in a bus explosion and I felt the deeper significance of his solidarity. “Take our picture together!” I wanted to shout at the blimp. We marched to the Western entrance of Arrabeh to meet the gathering thousands from the rest of the country, mostly Arabs but with a few busloads of Jewish leftists. The three speakers at the farmers market where the official event took place this year were mercifully brief and said all the expected blather. Only one theme surfaced that was new: the repeated call for unity. Perhaps the police were right to be on the alert. But they saved themselves the trouble of showing up in force and the entire event ended peacefully enough.

Deaf and Blind of the World: Unite!

2011-03-22T21:06:00.000-07:00

It is March the seventeenth and the morning is beautiful. It is the first day in a while that I feel physically normal, almost fully recovered from a nasty cold that made me continuously aware of every muscle fiber in my body as an uncomfortable liability and of every hair follicle in my scalp as a separate entity screaming for individual recognition in its suffering. It is the first time ever that I felt defeated by a cold, forced by it to skip my morning writing routine and to cancel my gardening activities for over a week.

I start with a quick foray into the citrus fruit corner in the garden for my morning supply of fresh juice and get nearly knocked over by the sight of the bodies of seven out of my nine free-range chickens, including all three beautiful roosters, strewn under the trees. Earlier in the month I had trimmed the citrus trees severely. Could I have somehow disturbed their nightly perch and exposed them to danger with that? But why did the damned mongooses kill seven birds if they didn’t plan on eating them, I wonder? Random evil, pure and simple. The mongoose is no better than humans, I conclude.

The sight of my dead chickens consolidates the mental anguish I continue to experience seeing all the death and destruction nature and over-industrialization have visited on the people of Japan. I am tempted to blame the Japanese for what they are suffering: After all, the term ‘tsunami’ was part of Japan’s heritage gifted to the world adorned with the associated image of Japan’s former stuffy and self-reassured full readiness for earthquakes and natural disasters. My chickens had the option of staying in a safe coop but chose to sleep in the trees. The Gods must be furious with my chickens and with the Japanese. It behooves us all to consider what the Japanese have done to deserve all of this punishment, the worst disaster that Japan has suffered since WWII. I am no expert on Japan’s national character and collective sins. I have a deep-seated admiration for Japan’s achievements in trade, industry, science and the arts. It was only a couple of weeks ago that I was captivated by the magic of their first robotic marathon. And I harbor a great yearning for the comfort of cavorting with geisha girls and for the breezy sweep of their kimonos as they serve me Saki or whatever the hell they serve in those teahouses. That is as far as I can venture in my imaginings of what the Japanese could possibly have done to deserve all the punishment I see them receiving on TV.

I halt in my thought process to reconsider: Could Aljazeera have been feeding me its “propaganda rubbish” as so many Middle Eastern powers now call it? In recent weeks it has targeted such prominent Arab leaders and succeeded to label them as dictators, thugs and thieves including such long-serving dependable allies of the West as Zine al Abidine ben Ali, Husni Mobarak, and Muammar Kaddafi. The guys had such beautiful blooms and crowed with such shrill voices every morning even before the villages six different muezzins called for the dawn prayer. Shouldn’t we have preserved them for decorative purposes?

What trick does Aljazeera now have up its sleeve? Might there be a grand plan to prepare the Japanese to join Al-Qaida? If they can be convinced that the punishment comes from no one but Allah and that it is punishment for Japan’s lack of mosques and for their excessive cavorting with geisha girls even in the holy month of Ramadan, and if the punishment is hard enough, then perhaps they might turn around, face Mecca, and join Al-Qaida. At least to me, this sounds realistic enough a scenario for the Saudis to introduce Japanese in the curriculum of their madrasas.

But then, sheers in hand and teetering high atop my gardening ladder, poised to commence reducing the cumulative exuberance of my Indian jasmine and South African lily hedge, I hear on my radio headset a Japanese father and his two children recount the heroism of the family’s mother who managed to save her two children but, as a result, was herself swept away by the wall of water. Then I hear the two children chime something in Japanese in unison: “We will come back tomorrow and find our mother.”

I don’t know if it was the tenderness in the children’s voices, the image in my head of the death and destruction wreaked on Japan by the quake and the tsunami, or the still mounting threat of massive nuclear explosion, but something in that mix of fear and hope of a family for their loving mother released a flood of emotion in my heart and I started sobbing. Why did those mongooses kill my chickens if they did not want to eat them? Copious warm tears streamed from my eyes down my unshaven face and stirred a wave of quivering and pain in my facial muscles. I rushed in for some painkillers but the bigger torment of my soul continued.

The BBC now was reporting on Ireland’s economic woes: one interviewee after another decried their bad luck and the loss of their racehorses to slaughterhouses or euthanasia. I placed a call to my friend, Rita MacGahey and left a message wishing her a happy St. Patrick’s Day. I could hardly hide my sobbing till I finished recording my message.

I checked my email: Well, I was only one day late. March 16 was the eighth anniversary of Rachel Corrie’s murder while defending Palestinian homes in Gaza against Israel’s army caterpillars. I uploaded two brief videos from U-Tube in which Rachel’s parents remember their daughter and remind us all of her universal message of care and love, a message that has succeeded to involve Cindy and Craig Corrie in human rights issues in Palestine and beyond. “She became our eyes and ears in Gaza,” Cindy declares and goes on to read from her lovely daughter’s letters home. What motivates youth to face up to injustice that threatens lives totally unrelated to their own? What did Gaza and the Palestinians have to do with Rachel? Why bother with people so different from your own in the first place? Or are all people one and the same?

The answer comes to me in the rush of tears in my eyes. I am overwhelmed with sadness and sympathy for the Japanese, for the Libyans, for the Irish and for the Corries. But many questions remain unanswered: Did the Israeli D-9 Caterpillar driver realize as he obeyed orders to crush Rachel to death that he was robbing her parents of their ability to see and hear us the Palestinians? Or was that the reason he committed his crime in the first place? He seemed to have taken leave of his memory and his humanity with that split moment of murderous decision. Hate may have rendered him blind and deaf to Rachel’s humanitarian message. How can we reach the humane core in all of us, even the criminal ones, and appeal to its yearning to preserve its own senses? Why the unnecessary and random killing? How can we reach all the loose nasty mongooses and the hyenas?

I have practiced medicine for some four decades without having had a clue as to this surprising symptom of a common cold: becoming emotionally labile as an early sign of recovery.

A Cancelled Picnic for Mubarak in Galilee

2011-02-12T00:33:00.000-08:00

Mjaddarah is a traditional vegetarian dish that once was the default daily mainstay in rural Palestine. Few among the younger generation desire it or know how to prepare it nowadays. In a sort of nostalgic throwback to the good old days, Toufiq, my childhood friend, and I, on occasion, ask his wife to prepare Mjaddarah for a picnic lunch out in the lap of nature in the Galilee hills. It so happened that over the years every time we embarked on such a wistful venture an Arab leader would pass away. Faced with Hosni Mubarak’s recalcitrance in the face of the largest participatory popular uprising in human history asking for his departure, Toufiq and I planned a Mujaddarah picnic for him tomorrow. Hosni saw the writing on the wall and escaped just in time.

Friday is the Moslem’s weekly day of rest, prayer, and visitation. A grand niece of mine, a nurse, invited me to officiate at the reading of Al-Fatiha, the opening chapter of the Koran, in confirmation of her formal relationship with a young man from another Palestinian town. This is the pre-engagement first step intended to introduce the families of the prospective couple to each other. We sat at my nephew’s living room amidst piles of fresh fruit and Arabic sweets and watched TV while waiting for the guests. There was no flipping through stations; like in every other living room in the Middle East, Al-Jazeera kept us on edge and up-to-date. Minutes after six o’clock Omar Suleiman’s tired long face filled the TV screen and he made his one sentence announcement with one glaring Arabic grammatical faux pas. Mubarak escaped being peacefully trampled in his palace by the Egyptian masses. We all broke out in spontaneous praise of Allah’s and Google’s miraculous feats, in exchanges of congratulations and backslapping and in happy laughter.

In two more minutes the sound of fireworks filled the village evening hush. I stepped out for a fuller appreciation of the event and heard the distant sound of fireworks from neighboring Palestinian villages and the beeping of horns in our streets. We rang the late guests and were told that they have been held up at the entrance to Arrabeh, our village, by the flood of cars on its main street. Minutes later another nephew of mine returned and described the seen in the main square of Arrabeh as being in full spontaneous celebratory mode. He likened the atmosphere to that of the day Iran beat the USA 1:0 in the World Cup football tournament. Toufiq called to congratulate and to cancel our picnic. Al-Jazeera ran a steady listing of Arab capitals where the jubilant crowds broke out in celebration of Egypt’s historic achievement. Another nephew sent an SMS message that said: “Crowds poured out in the streets of Arrabeh.” But Al-Jazeera didn’t show it. Ali, a retired teacher from Arrabeh who happened to land in Cairo’s Independence Square on January 25 and whose Journalist son was detained overnight by the Egyptian police, jokingly took credit for “stirring things up there.” Then he added: “I am off to Amman tomorrow.”

I told Toufiq over coffee this morning: “This is the most pan-Arab solidarity I have seen since 1970 when we walked in the funeral procession for Jamal Abdul Nasser.”
“But this is different,” he said. “This sets a precedence.” Then in a low conspiratorial voice he confided: “Mark my word: The day will come when scores of millions of young people from the Middle East and Europe will march peacefully as one man on Israel and Palestine and force freedom and civility on us. We have to start preparing to meet them at the borders. It may require another Mjaddara picnic for the current bosses. Who knows?”

Flippant About the Philippines

2011-01-30T09:21:00.000-08:00

It has become my standard practice, perhaps even a tradition, one is excused to say, to report early each year on another trip to a distant land in search of sun, beautiful beaches and warm company. Vacationing with our daughter and her family for the Christmas season has become an established practice, ten consecutive years being in my judgment adequate to solidify the claim for such a practice as a sort of tradition. It is in the spirit of such a tradition that I seek now to report about our three-week trip to the Philippine Islands. Over these ten annual trips we have functioned as travel companions and babysitters to our two beautiful granddaughters, Malaika and Laiali, the trips always preceded by a lengthy sojourn with my son’s family to entertain and run around with our other two grandchildren, Hatim and Callia, in the lovely California Autumn weather.

The relaxed and worry-free travel has encouraged in me a certain irresponsibility and superficial sophistry that allows the identification of each country we have visited, as well as many we have not, with a single overall characteristic or image in a classic free mental association style: China is a country of youthful energy, Costa Rica a peaceful nation of nature preservation emblemized by a nesting turtle, India evokes the image of Taj Mahal and beggar children, with South Africa the image of a giant Mandela flashes across my mental screen, California has Disneyland and Israel brings up mangled corpses of Palestinian children superimposed over a borderless map. But you have to be flippant about the Philippines if you want to give your reader a flavor of the country and its people. The Philippines seems to lack a single solid identifying characteristic: It is a tropical green island nation with poor but extra friendly smiling people. Then out of the blue a far-fetched iconic image materializes: Mahmoud Abbas. Yes, the president of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA.) Don’t panic! Seriously! I will explain:

I just read a piece on the Internet by an astute political analyst about America’s relationship with the PNA. He claims that America’s plan for Palestine has been one of making the PNA an American security arm. The model after which the PNA is being fashioned is the one in which America has shaped democratic Philippines. That is to say that it will always be a subservient agency dedicated to serving the security needs of the USA in the region. Except that the PNA was intended to serve as a security mechanism to aid America’s major defense contractor in our region, Israel. Secret documents just aired by Aljazeera expose the method in which such shaping of the PNAs behavior has been practiced: It amounts to making it dependent on the USA for its continued survival but punishing it sternly if it strays from the straight and narrow path. It is reminiscent of a workhorse with blinders, except that ours block not only the sides but also what is in front. A current trick question Palestinians ask is: What animal has two eyes and sees just as much front and back? Formerly, the surprise answer used to be ’a blind horse.’ You already know the new answer.

In preparation for our visit to the Philippines I rejected the temptation to leaf through the standard tourist guidebooks and instead read a couple of classic novels, “Noli Me Tangere,” Spanish for “Touch Me Not,” the revolution-inspiring novel by Jose Rizal, the acclaimed father of the uprising of the Philippines against three centuries of Spanish colonization of the worst kind, and “Don Vincente,” by F. Sionil Jose, part of the Rosales Saga quintet depicting the social turmoil following the overthrow of the Spaniards and their replacement by ‘the enlightened’ Americans then the brief Japanese occupation of the WW II and what followed afterword. From this brief introduction and from what I saw and experienced over a three-week period I came to see the island nation as a characterless actualization of America’s globalization dream: A mass of consumers poor enough to strive non-stop for American goods and the American lifestyle, sustaining a thin crust of corrupt rich who do live the coveted American middle class life. Don’t misunderstand me, please: I am not exempting myself from this generalized condemnation of the better-off few. On the contrary, I admit to enjoying the servitude of the hard-working poor slaving at an average wage of no more than a hundred US dollars a month to provide excellent and luxurious accommodations and services to tourists like us at high prices, even when these are reasonable by comparison to facilities of equal luxury in Europe and the USA. The generous returns from such enterprises go to the European and American owners with a smattering of successful local entrepreneurs. An established and well-accepted fact tells the whole story in a nutshell: The law of the land prohibits the ownership of real estate in the Philippines by foreigners with the exception of citizens of the USA. Several European resort owners at whose facilities we stayed seem to have gotten around this hurdle by marrying a local, all of those that I can now recall being European males married to Filipina woman. In the posh middle class neighborhoods of Manila, the capital, one enters a shopping mall and is transplanted, body and soul, to USA suburbia with its standard fancy outlets and restaurants. One is excused in feeling a sense of abhorrence at the steep economic gradient between the haves within and the have-nots without. I couldn’t but assume that such vast gap underlies the heavy security precautions on display at the entrance to such facilities or upscale hotels, the privatized security providers being another stroke in the socioeconomic collage that spells out this reality of globalization in practice. As we used small airports for our internal flights I noticed more than once the sniffing dogs guarding the security of the public asleep. Not at the gate to the private hotels.

This is the place to bring up a unique phenomenon, that of transvestite male Filipinas: At a resort where we stayed, owned by a Dane who, upon learning that I was a physician, introduced himself as the son of the inventor of vein stripping surgery, the cook was named Amanda. She was of overly muscular build and doubled as a masseur but sashayed in a convincingly feminine way; her fellow women kitchen workers seemed to take her as a total equal. I asked a veteran European resident of Manila vacationing at the resort about the country’s male transvestites and he opined that this was an accepted and traditionally tolerated practice and that, to his knowledge, some 20% of Filipino males undergo such behavioral sexual conversion. He ascribed this to the simple economic principle of supply and demand, starting, to his opinion, around the major American military base at Subic Bay. There simply was such a high demand for female companionship that the custom of male transvestites thrived and spread out to the rest of society. It then flourished further due to the greater job opportunity for Filipino women care providers in the international arena, a fact supported by formal statistics showing the country to be heavily dependent on the money transfer from such employment abroad.

I checked with a popular tourist guide: No exact figure was quoted but it was stated that the practice was indeed common and that it was looked at with kindness by society despite the doctrinaire Catholicism of the country. In fact, this resource stated, the feminine dress and body language did not necessarily imply true homosexuality. Rather the phenomenon is taken by all to be that of the heart of a girl residing in the body of a boy, what leads naturally to their genre being known as “boy ladys.” I wanted to speak about the subject with Amanda but my wife warned against it in light of what she had read about the pride and social sensitivity of Filipinas. I did the next best thing and enquired about this from a local friend who accompanied our party for several days. He concurred about the commonality of transvestite behavior among males but thought that the demand for their companionship was highest among Japanese young men tourists. He supported his statement with the assertion that many such transvestites wind up traveling with their rich Japanese lovers to Tokyo where they undergo an all-expenses-paid combined sex-change operation and wedding celebration. Later I googled the topic and learned that there is an official organization for the group in Manila and that they hold an annual beauty contest at which a queen is elected annually.

Despite my son-in-law’s jibes about my attentive focus on Amanda’s behavior, I did not submit to a massage from her nor have I lost much sleep over what part of all this to buy into. Still, it does seem that there is some validity to the socially-based reverse penis envy phenomenon, though one could support the opposite point of view with equal validity: It is a well-established fact that Filipino women are traditionally known to be entrepreneurial and very often the bread winners in their families. Presumably, this is based in the preferential status of the husband whose favor is to be gained and loving approval to be sought, won, and maintained by the dutiful wife in the face of the ever-present threat of the socially tolerated concubine. The wife, it is assumed, is to blame if her husband feels neglected enough to seek a concubine or two. Hence the constant and often furtive effort at excelling in a side-business in addition to house duties.

And another bit of Philippine tradition brings that nation close to the Arab heart, that of strong and binding family loyalty. Family relatives, including those gained through godparents, are the back-up team and the responsibility of a person at all times. American-style individualism and privacy concerns take a low position on a Filipino’s list of priorities. Additionally, the folks are known to be quite touchy about anything that might be interpreted as publicly insulting. Reportedly, fights are often started on basis of what is interpreted as an unkind look in a public arena. I experienced none of this myself, but my wife warned me repeatedly about it in light of my constantly darting eyes at so many public and not so public spaces. One last connection to the Filipino people that I experienced on this trip and that I need to mention here is that of meeting more than one young woman that would greet me in Arabic. They had worked or were still employed in the Arab Emirates.

The Philippines is a nation of over seven thousand islands, the archipelago having been united for the first time by the colonial Spaniards who ruled it with a holy iron fist for over three centuries, the natives being treated with heartless disdain that gives slavery a bad name. It is reliably reported that the Hispanic clergy not only conducted themselves in the most worldly manner, accruing massive wealth, multiple wives and many descendents, but also discouraging the natives from learning Spanish, the language of the master race, for fear of the rabble becoming too uppity. Such transgression was commonplace to such a degree that having priestly blood in one’s veins became a mark of distinction, Imelda Marcos, for one, bragging of such honor in her days of glamour as the country’s first lady. In my mind she stands out not only for her famous collection of thousands of pairs of shoes but for two additional distinctions: While she and her husband, Ferdinand, were still ruling the Philippines as their dictatorial private fiefdom, they enjoyed the full backing of America under Ronald Reagan. As Reagan’s envoy, George Bush the father famously thanked the couple for their defense of democracy. This reverberates deeply with me for its setting the stage for George Bush the son, as president of the USA, to anoint Ariel Sharon, probably the most belligerent man in the history of the Middle East, as “a man of peace.” Furthermore, with her husband’s fall from grace, Imelda escaped with him to Hawaii where she associated with, among others, the exiled family of King Farouk of Egypt. When I would visit Hawaii each summer I would hear reports about both royal families from a Palestinian friend of mine who had settled in the Islands and who was a connoisseur of good times and special wines and hence had the temerity to rub shoulders with such has-beens.

Religion apparently was pounded into the natives’ primitive heads and sinful souls through scare tactics and rote memory, such that on occasion illiterate headmasters ran their schools relying entirely on brute force. And the affairs of the entire country were managed in proxy via the Spanish colonial administration of Mexico. I am at a loss as to how to avoid demeaning the Filipinos for the crimes of the Spaniards: It does seem to me, from my most limited vantage point as a visiting tourist, that the country, even today, lacks the social cohesion of a nation: The official language of the country is English, which, though it is taught in schools, still is spoken by a select minority. India suffers from a similar colonially-based contradiction in terms of language. But India had unifying historical and cultural roots that seem to be lacking in the case of the Philippines. Since, because of my Israeli passport, I have not visited Malaysia or Indonesia, the closest country with which I can compare the Philippines culturally seems to be Thailand. Again, Thailand has a longstanding history of independence as a cohesive unit despite the many encroachments by neighboring enemy countries and the resultant historical border adjustments. This is lacking in the case of the Philippines, a country which seems to have gained unity and nationhood through the aggression of colonialism. Indeed, its independence came about through the interference of seemingly helpful outsiders hiding selfish motives and colonial ambitions. Prior to Spain’s aggressive colonization the archipelago seems to have been a collection of separate native Malay groups with varying degrees of language similarity and the classic north-south gradation of skin color that can be discerned still today. With little need for apology, given Europe’s penchant for justifying the theft of the world’s riches with the selfless need to civilize and redeem the natives, Spain stuck around for three frightful centuries ending with enough intelligent natives questioning its motives to rock the boat and demand independence at the risk of martyrdom. At the turn of the nineteenth century the USA came to the aid of the Filipino rebels to turn around at the moment of victory and try to subjugate them to its own expansive dreams, liberal and enlightened as these may have seemed to the new masters. With that the enchantment of the Filipino elite with the former Spanish masters and their ways gave way to the total worship of all that is American, a total cultural surrender that thrives to this day. True the Americans introduced an extensive public educational system, albeit English language-based. Then the Japanese empire-building mania led them to supplant the Americans with a logical appeal to Asian pride and pan nationalism. The ill-conceived and heavy-handed bloody interference lasted only few years before the victorious Americans returned, this time with true concessions to Filipino nationalism and liberation dreams. Except that by this time America had devised its own model of remote-control style of occupation with all the required military bases that victory necessitated and justified. All of the Philippines became, as if, an extension of America’s military bases and a human and physical buffer zone around them.

This history of continued subjugation, vicious or benign and direct or otherwise, and my own limited, twisted, selective, and expedient understanding of it is perhaps the cause for my occasional disorientation while on this trip: In my days I have seen Filipinos in groups, usually of young adults, in various parts of the world: I recall hearing the rapid-fire Tagalog language in the marketplace in Nazareth and at shopping centers in more than one European capital. And of course there was the Filipino population of Hawaii with their typical rendition of the letter ‘f’ (which their native language lacks) as ‘p,’ thus being known locally as ‘Pilipinos.’ In fact, as an intern at Queens Medical Center in Honolulu, I had the pleasure of providing medical care to a large group of single old Pilipino men who apparently came to Hawaii as indentured plantation workers and never had the chance to return to their native land or to be fully absorbed in Hawaii’s multi-ethnic society. In old age they lived in dorms in downtown Honolulu and formed distinctive cliques in their lonesome old age. For a while I was quite close to several individuals in this group. Still, I always viewed Filipinos as an out-of-place collection of individuals, even now that I was the intruder in their country. This led to the repetitive strange psychological phenomenon that resembled that of ‘deja vu:‘ I would be in the back seat of a taxi, waiting for my change at the cashier in a shop, or waiting to be served in a restaurant and all of a sudden the thought crosses my mind that I was looking at a Filipino individual. It then would take me a moment or two to remember that I was in the country named the Philippines and that everyone around me was a Filipino. I have traveled to many countries and this never happened to me anywhere else. The only explanation I can come up with for this strange feeling is that I am psychologically denying the Filipinos a country of their own; they are citizens of the world, the domestic aids and caregivers to all of humanity.

In our ambitious island hopping on this vacation we stayed at four different resorts selected for their diving facilities, diving and snorkeling being the main enchantment of the trip planners, my daughter and son-in-law. Getting to each resort involved flying back to Manila, flying out to the nearest airport to our destination, boarding a boat to an adjacent smaller island and finding our way to our destination, mainly by small boat or tricycle, both being amazingly efficient ways of transport though they couldn’t hold a candle to the national favorite means of transportation, the ubiquitous excessively stretched-out Jeep known to all as the jeepney, apparently another relic of America’s military presence of recent times. The local boats, however are original: a central hollowed hull extended sideways for better balance by two thick bamboo outrigger pieces of equal length attached to the central body by several cross-links of thinner bamboo. With midsized boats, the outrigger contraptions are attached such that cross-connections come down from atop the cargo and passenger central hull, giving the boat the overall look of a giant spider. I found this fascinating enough to rate several dozen photos to capture the spidery shape. I even felt personally insulted when one of our hosts, a less enchanted European resort owner, gave this traditional boat a failing grade for stability in rough weather by comparison with European sailboats. In fact, I found it to be so stable that for the first time in my life I needed no preventive seasickness medication. And I am so extremely sensitive on this matter that even writing about it now gives me a queasy and nauseous feeling.

I hope that you understand that I recount these adventures with much pride, for I fear the sea and, despite my ability to swim or to float around for hours if need be, I panic whenever I attempt to stand and my feet do not reach solid ground. Given such real reservations, it was no small matter that I didn’t only go snorkeling more than once but even was enticed to try scuba diving. The half-hour period that I spent in diving attire and with an oxygen tank on my back was the full responsibility of the German diving instructor who took me to the depth of some ten meters to inspect the wreck of a Japanese gunboat from WWII. Conveniently, my sinus headache, the physiologic outcome of the lack of pressure equilibrium between my innards and the liquid depths in which I was immersed, prevented me from extending my enjoyment of the reef and the rich variety of fish and sea life and from repeating the adventure again. What I found most striking about this existential experience was the ability of sea diving experts to contract the entire range of human communication to a total of three signals when submerged under water: a circle made with one’s thumb and index finger to indicate good comfort level, a quivering of the open hand to say “my condition is so so,” and thumbs up to say “get me to the surface,” the one signal I excelled at. Safe on land I found an explanation for the brevity of my diving experience. This time last year we were in Costa Rica where I learned to signal ‘thumps up’ to indicate comfort and full approval. That, I now claimed, was what I was trying to tell my diving instructor. Apparently, with his limited Costa Rican exposure, the young man thought I wanted out. What can you do? Not everyone is a world traveler who recognizes Costa Rican sign language.

Be that as it may, scuba diving over a Japanese gunboat has some other untoward consequences: Somewhere on that dive I must have come in contact with a vicious jellyfish. I removed my diving suit to find the skin of the whole front of my left thigh red as strawberry. Within the hour it started to blister, itch and burn. That night I dreamt the follow-up to my adventure: I climbed the steep cliff of the small island by the sunken boat in hope of rescuing any escaped sailors that may have hid in the jungle for the past sixty some years. Sure enough, there was one. But he turned out to be a Samurai and he slashed my left thigh with his sword. And a second frightful event, in reality and not in a dream occurred early on when the resort hosts encouraged us to raw out in their two small boats beyond the safety buoy. Just as we got there and as we jumped out of the boats for a swim, one of us broke the bamboo outrigger piece. As I rushed to climb into my boat to come to his aid I tipped the boat with my wife and three-year-old granddaughter in it over and we all had to be saved by a motorized rescue boat.

And one more embarrassing near brush with disaster: We celebrated New Year’s Eve with Filipino friends at the beachfront resort owned by their friends in Boracay, dubbed ‘the Waikiki of the Philippines.’ The food was plentiful, the music loud and the dancing wild, all led by a Brazilian singer and her Samba dancers. As the count down for the New Year started the whole width of the miles-long beachfront exploded into one massive and continuous bonanza of fireworks. We have seen New Year celebrations in a dozen countries; this was the wildest and brightest ever. Couples kissed and embraced nonstop and total strangers matched the closest of lovers in intimacy as they celebrated the occasion. And we were right there in the midst of it all participating fully. It left one with the thrill of youthful escapades and the prurient pleasure of having broken the usual bounds of good taste. Then came the surprising downside of the night to remember: The New Year issue of the Philippine Chronicle reported that a local TV station had aired footage of lovers lolling naked on the beach where we had spent a good part of the night. It further reported that the Parliament is considering passing legislation to criminalize such acts of innocence. What happened to freedom of expression!

Ameer's Day of Judgment

2011-01-30T08:08:00.000-08:00

"Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning."
--Franz Kafka

So far I have missed two sessions of Ameer's court case. What no one among us, his friends, seems to realize or accept is that Ameer kasar muzrab el-ain -- has broken the outlet of the community spring -- as Fairuz would put it; he has drilled a hole in the bottom of the world, an unforgivable sin that no one can prove or disprove. Look what he has gone and done! Look at Tunisia and Egypt, and perhaps Yemen, and what remains of Palestine! Who knows where the fire he has started will burn next? Perhaps in Jordan, Saudi Arabia, UAR, or Morocco. Who knows if it may not reach Syria or Iran?

No! Not Libya and Israel; the lid of democracy is screwed on too tight there. The will of the people who count in both democratic systems is given full expression to the detriment and exclusion of those defined out of its frame. It is democracy for those who count in the way the system was designed: for eighty percent of the population in one case and for one person in the other.

Ameer, our man was indicted, by his own admission in a negotiated plea bargain, of committing the nebulous crime of coming in contact with an agent of an enemy state. This was a cut below the treasonous crime with which he was originally accused, that of aiding an enemy in time of war, an accusation that was sure to carry with it 25 years to life. And what are we talking about? Let us think about it: It boils down to having spoken to someone not fully sympathetic to Israel’s case during one of its wars with one of its neighbors. It is having spoken Arabic abroad during a time of war, for what else would a Palestinian use his mother’s tongue to communicate with another Arabic speaker, say a Lebanese you meet in Jordan in the Summer of 2006 or a Gazan you meet in Egypt in the Winter of 2008, if not to inquire about how Israel’s current aggression had affected them and their families and dear ones? But then the exact dictum you use may be interpreted ‘intelligently’ by ‘the enemy at war with Israel,’ i.e. Hezbollah or Hamas, to gain ‘sensitive information about Israel’s military installations and the locations and movements of its troops.’ Those enemy bastards can mine every word you say innocently (and you should try once as a Palestinian to prove your innocent intentions in an Israeli court of justice!) for its possible security content. Even your tone of voice and inflection could have been coded to transmit information to an enemy agent. We have evidence of you doing that, Ameer, but you don’t expect us to share such sensitive intelligence information with you and your lawyers. No, it is enough that we let the judge peek at our thick secret files about your secret exchanges of information, which constitute an existential threat to the state of Israel.

And we have photos showing you sharing the same physical space with agents of enemy states under the guise of attending international conferences. And, mind you, we have tracked your movements on your way to more than one such international spy ring meetings. We know that on your way to the airport you passed by more than one military installation to update your information on our military camps. Israel is one intensive grid of secondary and tertiary dirt roads but you always chose to travel from your home in Haifa on the freeway in order to monitor our military installation adjacent to it. Your brother Issam before you, using his parliamentary privileges, went ahead and openly betrayed the country that gave him those privileges and discussed Israel’s nuclear weapons openly in international forums. We will take all the necessary preventive steps to stop you from passing information to the enemy about our military installations even when they can obtain better-detailed information from Google Maps.

You should be thankful we don't use all the evidence we have at our disposal to put you away for good. Should we decide on it we can generate proof of payments made to you for services rendered to the enemy through secret and circuitous channels for money laundering disguised as funding agencies for civil society and human rights activities on both sides of the Green Line. We have proof that the NGO that you head receives funding from the same anti-Semitic agencies in Europe that fund troublemakers groups across the Middle East. Who knows better than us what behind the scenes arrangements and exchanges of monetory favors can be promulgated on your behalf. We even can bring forth proof of your organization's banking activities abroad and we will share the privileged information with the court. And we will tighten the screws on all of your organizations with specific laws to stop the whole lot of you from functioning. But we will hold back on all of that for later when we want to banish you out of the country as we did your friend Azmi Bishara before you.

As if to thank us for not using such lethal weapon, look what you and your international civil society and human rights rabblerousing friends have done to the stability of the Middle East and North Africa. We know for sure, based on our information resources, that Mohammad Bouazizi had heard the slogans all of you have been repeating. His mind had been poisoned by your misleading discourse. He was brainwashed by your empty talk about freedom, equality and the promise of peace and a better future for all. You and your friends in all those international gatherings you use to conduct your behind-the-scenes treasonous activities appropriate the moral high ground and presume to represent your people. You take advantage of the attention lapses of such responsible fellow Arabs and stalwarts of regional stability and progress as Ben-Ali in Tunisia and Mubarak in Egypt to badmouth them when they had been elected by over 100% of their fellow countrymen. Perhaps the next thing you will be telling us is that Mahmoud Abbas doesn’t represent you when he and his cabinet negotiate away the right of return of Palestinian refugees or agree to accept you as his subject in one of his Bantustans.

Of course, I am only speculating. I am in New York and have not heard the news about the judgment scheduled to be issued today in Ameer’s case. I expect the worst. Still I hope the news about Tunisia and Egypt reaches Ameer's cell for it is sure to cheer him up regardless what those bigoted judges slap him with.

******

Below is what I had written about the last session I had attended before leaving to visit with my two children's families. I had held back from posting it for fear of possibly affecting the court's decision:

My African Mona Lisa
Oct. 28, 2010

I am contemplating submitting my candidacy for judgeship in Israel. I like the Haifa courtroom’s high-ceiling and air-conditioned interior with all the modern electronic equipment and secret passages from two opposite sides, one for the judges and the other for their trembling customers. Better yet, I like the attention a judge gets with everyone rising as he enters and as he leaves and all those scurrying around to cater to his wishes from the half dozen security guards who regularly shout at us, the audience, to squeeze tighter in our two rows of seats and to stop taking any photos though the room is half-full with journalist and their cameramen zooming on our faces. But best of all, there is the secretarial staff who always seem to distinguish themselves from the judges by donning the tightest of blue jeans and the wildest of T-shirts, including one with “Rabble Rouser” inscribed across her ample bosom. My aspiration to become a judge is buttressed in my own mind by my total ignorance of all matters judicial. The goddess of justice is always depicted blindfolded and in the two cases that I have been following recently, the case of Rachel Corrie and that of Ameer Makhoul, I am willing to bet my last penny on the outcomes without seeing or hearing the arguments of the lawyers or the statements of their witnesses. In both cases I can decree my judgment as well as the next guy with my eyes closed. Or look at the equally wasteful judicial system in Iraq: It took them all these years to condemn Tariq Aziz to hanging, the delay apparently just because he speaks English well. I would have hanged the whole lot of them from day one. Speedy justice is more my style.

It is not only expediency and economic considerations that encourage me to apply for judgeship in Israel. A precedence or two come to mind: For years in the 1970s, we in the Battouf region of Galilee had a social worker, a fulltime government employee, whose only qualification was that he was a licensed taxi driver who rented his vehicle and personal services to the right political party during elections. He was very sociable, which is the essence of social work, it was argued. I personally almost acted in this egalitarian fashion on one occasion as well. At the time I headed the regional office of the Ministry of Health. A man from my village with a well-earned reputation for non-convoluted thinking showed up at my home one night with a couple of watermelons, some freshly picked okra. a few squashes and a bagful of tomatoes from his fields. He was quick to reassure me that it was just a neighborly visit. After coffee he divulged his secret mission: His newlywed daughter had been barred from finishing her high school studies. She wasn’t the brightest of students to start with and now the law gave the principle an excuse to dismiss her altogether: The law at the time did not allow a married woman to study in a regular high school. The system had to guard against promiscuity, I guess. What the father came to enquire about was whether, given the circumstances, I wouldn’t be willing to appoint his failing daughter a nurse.

Last Tuesday there was an emergency meeting at Adalah, the legal center for Arab minority rights. Ameer’s defense lawyers, his family and the committee for his defense were all represented at the meeting. It is no secret that the secret police has trouble with the folks at Adalah. Once they raided Adalah’s offices and did their best to ruin it altogether. The incident had figured prominently in the local Arabic press at the time but has since faded into the cloudy background of anti-Arab routine incidents compacted and stored away on disc D in my brain. I no longer remember its details or exact nature. I vaguely recall an incendiary attempt by police agents aborted by the office cleaning woman. Be that as it may, Adalah, Arabic for ‘justice’ will meet its own just punishment when the time is right. I recall one case early on in Adalah’s career in which they took the Ministry of Health to task for not providing Bedouin villages in the Negev with Maternal and Child Health services and in which I served as an expert witness. The Supreme Court judge openly praised Adalah’s lawyers and I held my breath expecting the worse. Shortly I heard the news of the fire arson attempt and scored another ‘I told you so’ point against myself.

Now, the defense lawyers proceeded to explain to the rest of us the nature of the plea bargain they had been haggling over with the state prosecutors. [Two terms were made clear to me by my English-native-speaker wife in the process of writing this piece: “It is ‘plea’ and not ‘flea,’” she explained to me when she reviewed my writing for spelling and grammatical errors. All my life I had taken it to mean bargaining as one would in a flea market. For the non-Arabic speaker I should add that Arabic lacks the sound ‘p.’ “And it is the state ‘prosecutor’ not ‘persecutor,’” she added.] We, the laity, wanted to know why someone as innocent as we all knew Ameer was should accept a minimum jail term of seven years? And who started the defeatist negotiations in the first place? A lawyer with a penchant for similes and folksy sayings explained in a circumspect manner the trap in which he thought Ameer had fallen: “He who has swallowed turtles has a hard time sleeping; they keep rattling inside him,” he explained. “We are the ones running scared of a life sentence for our man, not the prosecutors. Why should we be so worried, you ask? In all criminal court cases, admission of the accused is the prime proof of guilt. Israeli statistics show that in 96% of criminal cases the accused is found guilty, another Israeli world record. To that should be added the weighty consideration that here we speak of a security violation and that the accused is a Palestinian. And he happens to be a Christian who signed an admission of cooperating with Hezbollah. Think of the special lesson the powers that be must think they have to teach all of us through this case. We should also consider the poisoned racist atmosphere currently dominating Israeli politics, and you reach near certainty that Ameer will bear the full brunt of Israel’s ire by way of its system of justice.”

The fact that Ameer was sleep-deprived to a point where he could no longer remember his own home phone number or recall the features of his two teenage daughters is immaterial in Israeli courts. Sixty two years of experimenting with physical, psychological and possibly pharmaceutical modalities in manipulating the Palestinian mind are not about to be thrown out the window in this or any ‘security case’. That the admission was extracted under duress is impossible to prove in Israeli courts. The review just published of 645 such cases of Palestinians interrogated at the same specialized facility in Petah Tikva (Window of Hope!!) shows the efficiency of the system: Admission of committing the crimes that each was accused of was achieved in 100% of cases. It is of little help that there was no factual evidence to corroborate the accusations against Ameer. The police investigator in the case admitted in court “with the bone of his tongue” that surveillance of some 30,000 of Ameer’s phone calls, years of his emails, ten computer hard discs, and masses of files from his office and home lead to zero evidence against him. Even the money safe at Ittijah was expectantly opened and yielded only 200 Euros and 5 Egyptian Ginehs And yet, the lawyers expected the court will find him guilty as charged.

At Adalah, as we sat in judgment of the Israeli system of justice, the logical conclusion was clear: We all should be on the run. The moment the Shin Bet targeted any of us he or she is as good as guilty by his or her own admission. Stay under their radar screen.

Amira Hass has just reported in Haaretz on a rare case of a Palestinian in the Occupied Territories, from the village of Na’alin to be exact, who was found innocent in a military court. “The translator in the courtroom was confused. He looked around him, wondering out loud how one translates ‘innocent’ into Arabic.” I find that the report of Amira, the Hebrew feminine namesake of our man, resonates with me for another reason: She mentions that 28 other fellow Palestinians were found guilty on basis of the testimony of the same mentally compromised man. They all were advised by their lawyers to accept a plea bargain and admitted to whatever the mentally compromised witness accused them of doing so as to submit to shorter terms of jail. But that all happened under military rule, and our lawyers now long for those good old days. Which brings back a well known case in Arrabeh during our two-decade-long experience with the military rule in Galilee Palestinian communities: In Arrabeh we had a mentally compromised young man as well and he was interrogated as the sole witness who admitted to seeing the two criminal neighbors who had taken down the Israeli flag from atop the school in the center of the village. And he identified the two by name. Except that in court the witness changed his story and testified under oath that the two friends whom he had seen taking the flag down actually were not his neighbors, Ali and Yusuf, but rather Ali’s rooster and Yusuf’s puppy dog. Still Ali and Yusuf served time based on their admissions.

Then the lawyer advising us on Ameer’s case added a well-known classic Arabic line: “It is compulsion not heroism that drives your man,” meaning himself. “When faced with the near certainty of 16 years to life, I hardly have a choice but to recommend the 7-10 years bargain to my client.” Another lawyer thought it was advisable at this stage to lie low and cease and desist from statements that might irritate the judges even when the statements were true in content and spirit. A third lawyer pointed out an article that Ameer had published in an Arabic weekly calling on Arab youth in Israel to stand up to racism using all ‘legal means.’ He thought that this should continue to be his proud stand in court when he is called on to recant and apologize: “The lower you stoop and beg for mercy the harder the system will come down on your head,” he opined. He then ventured the cruelest of jokes: “We should challenge the court to rise above the racism and fascist atmosphere of the Israeli street,” he suggested. He seemed to forget that ours is a true democracy in which leaders lead and ‘the street’ is only responding to the prompting and dictates of Netanyahu and Lieberman.
“Why should we blame the street when the Knesset is favorably considering a law proposal to withdraw citizenship from security violators like Ameer?” a fellow member of our Public Committee objected. “It comes right on the eve of this session of Ameer’s court case? Are we fools enough to believe this is a coincidence?”

On Wednesday I attended Amir’s court case. I arrived early in the morning to find that the case was delayed, obviously by the wasteful haggling of lawyers, till later in the morning. I went for coffee at Ittijah, the organization Ameer and I had shared in the conspiracy of founding. The two young women in the office were going crazy with answering phones, sending and receiving deliveries of posters, flyers and emails. It was the eve of the World Education Forum, an activity in the planning of which Ameer had played a key role. To start with, his plans were for Ittijah and other lead Palestinian NGOs, here, in the Palestinian Occupied Territories, and in Lebanon, to host the World Social Forum. But more cautious actors deemed it too much of a risk to hold such a function in the tall shadow of Israel’s occupation. They downgraded the Palestinian hosting role to the education segment of the original forum. Be that as it may, I arrived at Ittijah with Abu-Asa’ad, another Palestinian activist who shared Ameer’s prominence on TV screens across the world during the UN Anti-Racism Conference in Durbin and served time for his role, I am convinced. Our hostesses were so busy that we men had to make our own cup of coffee. Imagine! Abu Asa’ad and I considered how we all can turn the table on Ameer’s persecutors and prosecutors and the best way for Ittijah to continue on the path of international solidarity and networking that Ameer has launched it on.

Back in court, after Ameer had arrived, raised his cuffed hands in a sign of steadfastness, and beamed his big sunny smile at us all, I withdrew into my imaginary private cocoon and proceeded to doodle. I was once the top dog in a government office, many of whose workers had already burnt out, their motivation verging on the nonexistent to start with, witness their need to carry a handgun to protect themselves from the mothers and children they were serving. Over the many years of boring routine, I had perfected my doodling skills. I had become such an expert doodler that I could produce likenesses of people attending meetings in my office that were recognizable enough that the models would ask to keep their portraits in their scrap books as precious mementos. Especially when they needed such favors from me as an approval of a pay raise, such staff members would remind me of how fund they were of my drawings. Still, I never realized what an artistic flare I had developed over those long years. I was truly surprised and greatly elated when I discovered, just as the judges arrived in the courtroom, that I had created a veritable likeness of the Mona Lisa that sat directly in front of me. I had captured the Mona Lisa image with her beautiful hair allowed in a studied and meticulous casualness to stream around her beautiful face with her quizzical smile and that magic gaze of her sumptuous eyes that forever follow all of her viewers regardless of which side of the room they look at her portrait from, the hair then flaring out and down over the tips of her lovely shoulders, so sensuously inviting with the imagined suggestive exposure of their soft skin just beyond the generously wide semicircle of the collar of her dress. Alas, the only view that I had of the Mona Lisa was from the back and hence the exact likeness I drew may look to the casual viewer as a simple triangle of wavy lines spreading from a small rounded tip, indicating the top of her small head, down to a wide horizontal line suggesting the end of her waist-long hair. That is all that can be seen by the casual unimaginative viewer of my art.

The woman prosecutor with the long hair had the edge over our defense lawyers, for she had swallowed no turtles. I knew already what was going to happen and I didn’t quite like it. I was bored. And my mind was preoccupied with my own private affairs: I had asked a fellow farmer to bring me a load of the dark brown gold his goats produce for my garden. What if he were to arrive and find the gate locked and unload his cargo of goat manure on the street outside the gate? He might end up fouling up the air of the whole neighborhood if the residents had to drive over the smelly soft stuff. For the uninformed among you, let me elaborate: Goat manure comes in two distinct forms, the nice rounded small hard pellets and the softer clumpy teardrop-shaped tufts better known as ‘dingle berries.’ The latter are usually the result of a goat being afflicted by diarrhea, apparently a common occurrence considering the less-than-selective diet of the animal. [I recall once seeing goats eating plastic sheeting and considering approaching responsible world environmental agencies with a proposal on how to solve the problem of plastic waste.] As the soft fecal matter flows out and down over the hind quarters of a goat, it sticks to the goat’s leg hairs cumulatively forming those teardrop-shaped berries. If they are allowed to dry fully, they produce a characteristic soft rhythmic sound as the goat ambulates, a sound not unpleasant to peasant ears. And the smell is not entirely offensive to my nostrils either. But do I dare admit such damning confessions to my readers?

Those were the thoughts that weighed on my mind as I dosed off while waiting for the judges to dismiss us all. In my dream, I was still preoccupied with the goat manure problem. Still, my deeply felt pride in my artistic achievement broke through from my subconscious into the dream: I recall once seeing on the National Geographic channel some African tribal beauties using cow dung as a form of hairstyling. The beautiful Mona Lisa was now transformed into a tribal woman. Perfectly shaped dingle berries hung from the end of her long hair in a straight row across the width of her back. As she twirled her head in triumphant condemnation of Ameer and his supporters, her hair swished about releasing the pleasant smell and soft musical clinking of dingle berries.

A Complaint Worth Repeating

2010-11-28T20:16:00.000-08:00

Note: This is the review I posted on Amazon about Raja Shehadeh's new book entitled "a Rift in Time: Travels with my Ottoman Uncle" published by Profile Books, London, 2010.

I beg forgiveness for stating my first reaction to Raja Shehadeh's second book of hiking memoirs, this one with the emphasis provided by the desire to retrace the steps of a respected forbearer: We have been through this before. I had attended the author's reading in East Jerusalem and had my autographed copy for keepsake. Especially as a fellow involved Palestinian who reads on daily basis many a pained statement of our loss at the hands of the Zionist colonialist project, I was tempted to put the book aside. Except that the tale of Raja's legendary Ottoman uncle was compelling enough for me to keep on reading. Its setting in Galilee and the adjacent environs of the upper Rift Valley kept me going. After all, my own facination with Galilee and committment to its native residents had launched me as an author with my "A Doctor in Galilee: The Life and Struggle of a Palestinian in Israel" thus, not unlike Raja, switching careers from a physician to a writer.

As I followed Raja and his wife Penny on their meanderings in and out of Galilee, his frequent asides about our loss as Palestinians and about the Zionists' well-planned and mercilessly executed dislodging of our people by diliberate force and geographic fragmentation, the elimination of their cultural and archeological heritage, and the spacial confinement and physical control of those who remained gained in freshness and legitimacy with repetition. It started with the bit of information about Najib Nassar, Raja's Ottoman uncle, being the first Palestinian writer to address the potential threat of the Zionist colonialist project to our people's future and continued clear through to the end of the narrative that I managed to get through by the end of the night of the same day I had started it: 'The best heir of the best forbearer' as we say in Arabic, I had to admit with tears in my eyes as Raja stands at his great great uncle's grave in Nazareth.

I was particularly taken by the artfully intermixed narrative of Raja's own present day nature walks with that of the forced flight of his predecessor into the wilderness: The two accounts are nearly seamlessly interwoven, so much so that I found the repeated assertions of the similarities between the two protagonists in thought and predilictions perhaps unnecessary, even though I found myself equally often thinking how much resemblance I also had to the two. The only part that I was surprized to read when I reached it was about Najib's second wife being the granddaughter of the Grand Bahai, founder of the Bahai faith. I would have baited the reader with a hint about it very early in the book.

And a second artful tactic that Raja Shahadeh uses as if it were the most normal of practices is the mixing of the intimate with the public and the general: Personal and family affairs are brought casually into focus to be transcended at will to historical events and world affairs. Had I not been open to similar villification I would have accused the auther of slight of hand magic. But then again, the focus of the whole account is family centered while it is the entire world, particularly the West, that is Raja's target readership and potentially his accused perpetrators of neglect if not agression against the Palestinian people. Hence it is only natural that Raja zooms in and out of focusing at homes and family life in Ramallah, Haifa, Nazareth and Eyn-Anoub rendering their evident humanity accessible to his world audience.

Also for the non-Palestinian there is much more to savor: the reflective pauses about the human condition at large, about nature, about the geology, the fauna and flora of Galilee, Palestine and the Rift Valley, and particularly about understanding the basic nature of Israel's agressive pursuit of the Zionist dream of a Jewish state west of the Jordan River. And, yes, indeed the repetitive message in the enlightening discourse woven around the record of Raja's and his Ottoman uncle's nature walks, one compelled by his Ottoman and the other by his Israeli persuers, is worthy of repeating to the wider world again and again. We will not be silenced by the world's inattentiveness.

Obsessed with Fear

2010-11-09T21:18:00.000-08:00

It is olive gathering season and people in Arrabeh are at it again. Fellow farmers no longer beat the dickens out of their olive trees as they did during Ottoman days. In ‘the good old days’ the tolerant trees, like submissive village wives then, took the abuse silently. That is no longer the case: The violent thrashing breaks so many fresh twigs that it affects the crop of the following year. As the rain comes the silently suffering trees lick their wounds and repair the damage with fresh growth. But that will bear fruit only the year after. That, it is now understood, leads to the periodicity of the olive yield alternating between good and poor years. That message from the rebellious olive has sunk in the conscience of the farmers and few of them beat their olives any more. Or their wives for that matter.

This year the crop is good. A friend from Jerusalem had asked us for two jerry cans of fresh olive oil direct from the press. Raja Shehadeh was scheduled to have a book launch in Jerusalem and we decided to kill two birds. That morning, the next session of the Rachel Corrie case was being held in Haifa. We loaded the olive oil and headed to Haifa to start the day with this third bird. Knowing our friends in Jerusalem to be olive oil connoisseurs we loaded the new fifty-liter Italian-made stainless steel special container that we had purchased for our own use in the trunk of the car and headed out for a day of adventure and Palestinian camaraderie.

But there was a hitch: how much hassle will the security guards at the entrance to the parking area under the Haifa court building give us? Will they insist on opening our overnight bags? How alarming will the empty container seem to them? Will they insist on verifying the nature of the liquid contents of the two jerry cans? Will they alert the special explosive experts in the Haifa police department? Will they hold me till the end of the proceedings? Will I miss the Corrie case session altogether? Might chemical analysis of the oil reveal traces of fertilizer, perhaps the explosive type? And what if the sneaky farmer who sold me the olive oil at the press had tampered with the olive oil? Recently there has been some friction between the youth of our two clans in the village. What if he decided to take revenge on me? And I had let him load the two oil containers in the trunk of my car in my absence. Who knows what he could have thrown in the trunk while I was busy sipping coffee with the press owner and talking nonsense about the year’s olive crop? I worried myself sick. That sneaky son of a bitch!

It was already too late; I had already arrived at the entrance to the underground parking area. In my anxious trembling I almost drove over the toes of the gate attendant sitting on his chair. He extended his arm out to stop me, made an attempt to stand up, but then put his hand on his back with a pained look on his face and motioned me to proceed. Wow! There is little that an Arabic saying didn’t cover: “God kills a big camel to feed a lame jackal.” He, in His wisdom had afflicted a good Jew with a painful back condition to save an Arab the trouble of inspection. It was a good omen for the day.

I found a parking space in the center area of level minus-two but I decided to skip it acting on a hunch. I circled the entire building three times thus descending to the bottom floor. I chose the furthest corner where I backed into a stall till my fender touched the wall. That way no one can pass behind my Subaru Outback and notice the suspicious load visible through the glass of the backdoor. The location also allayed my vague sense of insecurity: should any thing happen while I attended the court on the sixth floor, the damage would be most unlikely to reach me all the way from the depth of the far corner of minus-five. I walked across to the elevator feeling rather pleased with my level of smarts. As we emerged at ground level the day looked particularly bright. I gave my wife a tight hug. Even the security guards at the gate to the court complex seemed exceptionally kind. The first one motioned me through without a question. The second man did not sound as if he were mocking me with the standard question of “Do you carry a weapon on you? Any knife, scissors, fingernail clippers?” As I emptied my pockets of their contents of coins, car keys, mobile phone and wallet and walked through the metal detector, it occurred to me that there must be an easier way to confirm my innocence. So many others bypass the checkup by showing a certain certificate or a tag around their neck verifying their identity as lawyers, judges, or security people. Perhaps I should show them my card and explain how careful I had been in parking my car with its suspicious cargo. Perhaps that will help. But then I recalled an American senior citizen friend of mine who had happened to show her visiting card to inspectors upon arrival at the Tel-Aviv airport. She had already given them my address. That and the logo on her card from her previous position with the March of Dimes for the disabled which read “We shall overcome,” cost her a few hours of explaining as to what she was planning to overcome while visiting a Palestinian village in Galilee. I didn’t toy with the idea of showing them my card for too long. The voluntary gesture together with the address would have sufficed to make somebody suspicious. I kept the entertaining possibilities to my self, collected my belongings as they emerged from the x-ray machine and made it to the bathroom of the café on the ground floor; I always get an urge to evacuate when scared. It is physiologic.

We arrived late as is my usual deliberate timing. (This is one more of my secret code messages to the world announcing my independence and uniqueness: I will not be beholden to European standards of punctuality! Rebellion knows no limits.) In court it was the same circus act as before: Husain Abu-Husain trying to force another mystery witness testifying behind a screen to jump through ignited hoops of logic and memory to no avail. Except that the atmosphere in court was more relaxed, almost jovial. For one thing the room was larger than before with more than double the space for audience. The Judge seemed to be in a tranquil mood. It could have been because of the seeming more elevated position of his seat in this room. In the two weeks since he had performed for us last he had grown a white beard that came to a point at its lower end giving him a sort of grandfatherly agreeable look with a faint hint of Mephisto-like mischief. He had a kindly twinkle in his darting blue eyes. Three times he descended from his elevated perch to help the witness orient himself and find his D-9’s position relative to other items on a photograph he was shown. This gesture, I should admit, uplifted my spirit, not unlike tales of the great royalty of old mixing with their subjects or of Greek deities consorting with earthly devotees. The judge’s kind condescension knew no limits: At one point, when the lawyer questioned the witness’s inability to distinguish Rachel Corrie from local Palestinians, the judge entered the fray arguing that some Palestinians can be as light-skinned (read: pretty) as Americans. A subdued titter went through the court in appreciation of the cross-cultural compliment.

The court session closed early; another witness had not shown up. A new date was set and we were on our way to Jerusalem: before leaving Haifa we stopped at Moshe’s Falafel and Shawarma joint, manned by Arabs and frequented by Asian foreign workers. In Jerusalem, to reach our destination we drove along the outskirts of Mea Sha’arim, the neighborhood of Ultra-Orthodox Jews. The street was crowded with pedestrians of all ages, all with the outwardly display of their religious identity. We delivered the consignment of olive oil to its destination and headed to The Swedish Christian Study Center at Jaffa Gate to listen to Raja Shehadeh read from his new book, A Rift in Time, retracing the wanderings of his great-great uncle in this corner of the Ottoman empire. In this part of the old city soldiers and policemen on duty were outnumbered only by Christian nuns and monks. Later we ate fish and slept well. The next morning we took our leave from our friends, visited the Educational Book Store on Saladin Street then walked around Arab East Jerusalem. It was Friday high noon and people of all ages were streaming to Al-Aqsa Mosque for the weekly group prayer. I could hardly believe my eyes: These were the very same folks I had seen the day before at Jaffa Gate and in Mea Sha’arim with the very same hurried and purposeful stride of conviction and commitment. Except that their whiskers were trimmed differently and their women were enveloped in alternative wrappings. My Christian wife and I, a Moslem, both secular, felt we didn’t belong; we were triply excluded and insecure. What if one group or the other took umbrage at my wife’s bare arms?
“Let us get the hell back to Galilee,” I said in my manliest gruff voice.
My wife sought to deflate my contentious ego. She reminded me of our daily reality: “Why? The Galilee lacks bearded men and draped beauties? Or did you forget the Chief Rabbi of Safad and his fatwa against renting rooms to Arab students?”
“You are right. Galilee is next only to Jerusalem in holiness.”
“And it will get holier as time goes on. Judaizing Galilee will bring us more of what you are running away from in Jerusalem. It is not Moslems versus Jews only. The Christians are into it to their necks with moral and financial support from all the fundamentalists in Texas and DC.”
“Don’t let the religious veneer fool you. You know it is a fight over land and who tells whom how and where to live and when to breathe.”

Still, we headed home to Galilee. As we neared Arrabeh we remembered that our nephew’s family had begun gathering our olive crop of the year. We stopped in the field, a mere show of solidarity. My two dozen trees came down to me from my late father, one fifth of his field that had been in the family for centuries. As we were hanging around shooting the breeze with our relatives and milking away the ample fruit supply from the laden branches, a strange figure flitted across the field. It was an Orthodox Jewish young man. He obviously was heading to one of the hilltop settlements established by Sharon to guard against me and my people “stealing state lands.” He made as if he did not notice us. His fellow settlers in the Occupied Territories are reported to be active on daily basis driving Palestinians from their olive fields and confiscating their produce, right under the watchful eye of the IDF. How long it would be, I wondered, before he and his fellow settlers will start taking action against me, the usurper of their god-given Galilee holy land? Would his settlement decide one day to clear my field for their development needs? Would they call in the Army D-9s? Will I dare to put on a bright orange jacket, carry a bullhorn and challenge the Caterpillars like Rachel did?

Help, somebody! I want to keep my olives!

Rachel Corrie’s Parents on the Attack

2010-10-24T20:15:00.000-07:00

Craig and Cindy Corrie should try their luck at Saturday Night Live. They make a good stand-up comedy team. Yesterday, right after hearing the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth from the horse’s mouth, from the Caterpillar driver who was the closest to their daughter when she was discovered dead ‘in a pool of dirt’, they stood before the press and tried to fool us all with their put on: Their daughter, we were asked to believe, died defending the humanity of all of us. Granted, she was the idealist type and had set out to show solidarity with other humans regardless of borders, language or color. The story would have been a touch more believable had Rachel chosen to show solidarity with a less violent group, with a people who still maintain some respect for the image of God in which they, and we all, were created. Why in the world would an idealistic person choose to show solidarity with a nation of deranged terrorists who elect to erect their homes in the path of our victorious IDF, forcing us to clear thousands of them out of our way. I wonder if you, dear neutral reader, can understand, much less accept, the Corries’ claims of their daughter’s humanitarian motives when she had chosen to express them by associating with terrorists. To show humanitarian solidarity, one has to start with humans not with reprobate miscreants like their daughter managed to do.

Take for example the issue of human life itself: Where else, except perhaps in such dismal dead-end dumps as Iraq and Afghanistan, is life so cheap that mothers send their own children to die with the a priori plans to replace them in another nine months? No wonder we Israelis are trying to raise our boys’ ‘exchange rate’ in the battle field beyond the one-to-a-hundred level that we achieved when our hand was forced to hit Gaza the winter before last. Besides, theirs were run-of-the-mill Palestinians of all ages and classes while our boys were high-quality trained soldiers at the prime of their lives. The simplest of cost-benefit analysis will show that we should aim at a higher exchange rate still.

And consider what the Corries have now done out of their own free well as cool-headed, well-informed adult Americans: They decided to sue our government and the IDF for damages. True, their demand for compensations is not that exorbitant: one dollar. But why, in the devil’s name should they choose a pair of Palestinian lawyers to represent them? Does Israel lack smart Jewish lawyers? Now they are getting what they asked for: their lawyers fail to comprehend what the witnesses from the scene of their daughter’s death ‘incident’ are telling them. Worse yet, their lawyers are behaving in the same incomprehensible, rejectionist and greedy manner in which Palestinians have behaved throughout recent history: Again and again our leaders have made them attractive peace offers to resolve the conflict they had initiated with us, all to no avail. From the UN 1947 division plan, to the Camp David agreement, to Sharm-El-Sheikh, to you name it, and they continue to refuse one offer after another. And here, this very day, the Corries’ lawyers, following the same well-established rejectionist pattern, are continuing not to accept whatever explanations our ex-soldiers offer them under oath: One D-9 Caterpillar soldier driver had already told the court that he saw Rachel’s body on the other side of a pile of dirt. The lawyers didn’t seem to be happy with that. Today the driver of the D-9 that killed her tried to please them and said he saw her on this side of the pile of dirt. They still were not pleased. He had said in a previous investigation that, sitting inside the driver’s cabin, he had a three-meter blind spot in front of his machine. The lawyers didn’t seem to be satisfied with that. Now the man tried to humor them by increasing that blind spot to thirty meters. But to no avail. They still sounded like they didn’t believe him. You think a hundred meters would have satisfied them? Not on your life; not Palestinians. You give them a finger and they will take a hand.

The driver had suffered the badgering of the two Palestinians all morning before I caught the tail end of his testimony. The court was so full of government observers, of Corrie sympathizers, and of newspaper reporters that I had no chance of getting a seat till a couple of them had left. The poor man was shielded behind a screen from the vindictive stares of all those goyim and self-hating Jews in the audience. He too was quizzed about that last bit in the video recording of the events of that fateful day, March 16, 2003. Like the commander of his unit and the driver of the second Caterpillar, he also had forgotten most of what transpired that day but knows for a fact that the recorded incriminating broken Arabic single question and answer on the intercom was not of him and his commander or of him and the second driver. This poor driver, like other soldiers at the scene or involved in its investigation later on, had either not seen, not heard, or forgotten most details connected to the event. Besides, Rachel’s birthday happens to fall on the same date as the driver’s. Why should he allow details of a tragic event to intrude on his conscience and rob him of the pleasure of celebrating his own birthday? Imagine Palestinians and other goyim demanding that we remember the time and details of how each of them dies. Golda Meir said it best: We, Israelis, will never forgive them for forcing us to kill their children. The Corries don’t seem to comprehend the deeper meaning of such wisdom. Or take the pronouncements of the wise Rabbi from Safad made this very week: Goyim were created to serve us. Go explain that to someone who has deluded himself into thinking he is your equal!

Listening to the man behind the screen I conjured an image of him: judging by the quality of his voice and hesitant speech pattern, I judged him to be small of build; he has a smallish head with congenital absence of the pinnae, the external ears; he wears thick glasses; and he is dark skinned. I reached these conclusions not only on the basis of the quality of his speech, but more on the basis of its content. First the absence of the ears: You, the laity, do not appreciate the significance of the outer ear and the importance of the extent of its flare in gathering the sound vibrations in the ambient air and funneling them into the ear canal and onward to the middle ear. The ear is a complex and sophisticated piece of detective instrumentation. It is the ultimate listening device. One is tempted to think it must have been invented by Israeli scientists for the use of the Mossad. But it all is dependent on the pinna and if that is missing the hearing is minimal, as is the case here. As to the thick glasses, they are needed for the rapidly receding visual acuity. If in seven years the man’s blind spot expanded from three to thirty meters, he is as blind as a bat in the bright sun; ergo the thick glasses. And as to the small head, your guess is as good as mine. Perhaps I am giving a literal meaning to the figurative Hebrew slang term of ‘rosh katan’ – meaning small head – used to describe one who doesn’t bother himself with the deeper meanings of things or one who follows orders without questions asked. That is exactly how the driver responded to the lawyer’s questions about the standard instructions in the military manual on operating a D-9 Caterpillar. It is stated in the manual that the driver should not operate the machine when civilians are present within ten meters from it. Our man said that he had received orders from his commander to ignore that warning and to continue working and he did. In Hebrew we call that kind of unquestioning obedience of one’s superiors ‘rosh katan.’ I guess you could also call my own simplistic interpretation of the figure of speech to mean an actual small-size head a second level of small-headedness. As to the man’s skin color, he seemed to be a bit cowed by the Arab lawyers. No true blood Ashkenazi would be. Sephardim usually have dark skin. The riddle is solved.

The spiteful streak that Cindy Corrie displayed in addressing the press when her turn came up went beyond all limits of fairness. First of all, she repeated in so many words the same claim that her husband had made of their daughter having felt empathy with the Palestinians as human beings. That, of course, puts Rachel in her own parents’ mind at the same level of scum as her subjects of empathy, the Palestinians. I am not sure how can parents say such an insulting thing about their own dead child. If that proves any thing, it proves that the Corries are a self-hating breed. Except that our media in Israel, in line with our top historians, our top opinion leaders and our top Rabbis alike, have appropriated this term for our exclusive use. It is akin to the usage of holocaust or shoah: When the Armenians wanted to stake a claim to the term to describe what the Turks had committed against them in the early decades of the twentieth century, we objected and put an end to their cheap attempt. And here too: whoever heard of a self-hating Palestinian or of a self-hating Moslem. It is redundant. You just use the identifying genre of Palestinian and the ‘hate’ element is automatically implied. The term self-hating’ dangles precipitously when cut off from its natural ending of ‘Jew.’ What gives it its zing is the contradiction of the adjective with the subject. We invented self-hating, as a concept to describe our own renegade anti-Zionists. To use it out of context to characterize the behavior of anybody else is to rob it of significance and us of our exclusive right to a discovery. Too bad such concepts are not covered under international intellectual property laws and conventions.

Then there is Cindy’s claim that putting the driver behind a screen and his never expressing a word of remorse or apology robbed her of the chance to empathize with him as a human being. I beg to differ, at the risk of being accused of narrow partiality towards my co-citizen: Who should be apologizing to whom, I wonder? The man said more than once during the court session that he was surrounded by terrorists. In Israel, and especially in the IDF, we are realists. We call a spade a bloody spade and don’t beat around the bush with such terms as ISM and the like. You don’t empathize with a terrorist unless you are one yourself. All the terror sympathizers who come from the end of the world to terrorize a diligent member of the most moral army in the world carrying out the orders of his commanders to clear another swath of our holy land, the land of our ancestors promised to us by our God, of the haphazard anthills the Palestinians call their homes, should stop their rabble-rousing or accept the consequences.

The late Prime Minister Sharon (I use the term ‘late’ here in the rosh-katan sense of him being delayed or ‘late’ in the process of crossing over from this life to the next) had officially promised the late President George W. Bush (ditto, but just an expression of a wish; it applies to Tony Blair as well) to conduct a “thorough, credible, and transparent” investigation of the Rachel Corrie ‘incident.’ We did exactly that. Twice! And no one in the world believes us. But that has been our story with the international community since day one: No one believes Israel. That is not all that terrible. Not as long as the world needs us in the basic spheres that make it go round: Arms, money and influence with America.

A bright young journalist asked the Corries’ lawyer, Hussain Abu-Hussain, about the significance of the toy blue whale that he used to represent Rachel’s body as he tried to have the Caterpillar’s driver recreate her ‘death incident’ scene from memory. Hussain blew it: He said that he just stopped by at a kindergarten and picked up the first toy he found. Think of the symbolic possibilities though: The free spirit of the blue whale darting, like Rachel, across the oceans. And the threat of extinction of the species.

Mystery Witness Proves Rachel Corrie Committed Suicide in a’ Pool of Dirt’

2010-10-18T21:25:00.000-07:00

Hussain Abu-Hussain, the Corries’ lawyer, thought his was a depressing profession. I sought to cheer him up by pointing out the dismal case of the oncology specialty in medicine. It didn’t seem to work; he had spent the whole day trying in vain to trick witnesses of the murder of the late ISM volunteer into telling the truth. But the relevant portions of those witnesses’ memory were hermitically sealed behind an impermeable wall of forgetfulness. Limited in my scope of knowledge and understanding to the field of medicine, I am intrigued by the mystery of what effective mind-altering drugs the Israeli Defense Forces have at their disposal to wipe out selective segments of their soldiers’ recall and to effect such precise lacuna of brain damage.

Hussain and his fellow international human rights legal expert, Jamil Dakwar, spent the morning interrogating the young and aggressive head of the Military Police unit that had investigated and dismissed as incidental and irrelevant the fact of Rachel’s death in close proximity to two IDF D9R Caterpillars operating in the Gaza Strep. Despite his striking alertness and wide-eyed combative demeanor on the witness stand, he still lapsed into a state of amnesia when a question crept to within touching distance of the prohibited black hole of truth. On more than one occasion he would throw up his hands in a dismissive private gesture of exasperation to the judge as if in intimate private conversation with him. He seemed to do that every time he felt that he had succeeded in debunking a clever ploy by Abu-Hussain or in adequately deflecting another of the latter’s attempts at reminding him of details he had consciously forgotten. He confirmed, albeit indirectly, the statement previously made in court by one of his colleagues to the effect that “in war there are no civilians.” But he did so in such a circumspect and disconnected manner that the judge seemed to miss the point, for He (and the capital here is intentional, for that is how He seems to consider His position in the domain of His court of judgment) did not display any sign of distress or aggravation in line with what I have come to expect neurologically. Abu-Hussain grilled this witness on the specific point of what rules and regulations there existed on the subject of operating a D9 in the presence of civilians in the area. The witness, whose name, Shalom, said it all, wavered between the written prohibition of operating the Caterpillar as a battle implement in close vicinity of civilians and the definition of what constituted a war arena and who were civilians and who were not and under what circumstances, etc. etc. ad infinitum. All that Abu-Hussain could prove was that it is very difficult to trick a man who is intent on forgetting to remember.

Two thoughts crossed my mind as I pondered the implicit oxymoron when one speaks of willful forgetfulness, thoughts that separated me momentarily from the court’s surroundings and carried me to my own private dream world causing my wife to poke me in the side every time my snoring disturbed her: inexplicably I found myself as a child in pre-1948 Palestine in the midst of my father’s apricot orchard. It was Ramadan and I was fasting. I had learned that morning in our religion class that if a fasting person forgets and mistakenly eats or drinks something, it does not annul his or her fast and he or she gets full credit for the day despite eating or imbibing his or her fill. I had figured that if I spent enough time in the orchard I would be likely to forget and consume few delectable apricots from my father’s trees. But hard as I tried, I couldn’t forget the fact that I was trying to forget; the harder I tried to forget my fasting state the more I was aware of it. I spent the whole afternoon focusing on selecting the fruits that I wanted to eat accidentally. My wife poked me in the ribs and admonished me to stop snoring. I came to and glared at the state’s defense lawyer who had a habit of moving her delicate hands in animated circles in front of her face as she raised an objection. Her motherly fine features and the hypnotic motion of her tiny hands put me back to sleep. I was back in my physiology class at medical school: My favorite lecturer was asking us to try to tickle ourselves. It was impossible, he explained, because the tickling experience depended on the surprise element in it. Since our mind is incapable of surprising its own self, one cannot tickle one self. But apparently I succeeded in breaking this rule of basic physiology. My wife poked me in the ribs again: “You shouldn’t giggle in court either!” Now, fully alert in the wee hours of the morning, I still fail to make full sense of these dreams though they seem not to be totally irrelevant to the subject of tricks our minds play on us. Can a clever lawyer make a witness forget his premeditated forgetfulness?

As I came to, the same witness was still on the stand. (I wonder if I shouldn’t capitalize Him as well. He did display certain godly pretensions in his upright combative posture and physical display of readiness to appropriate the space fronting him.) How comical it must have seemed to him: A civilian barrister putting words in his mouth in a futile attempt to force him, a military colonel, to remember facts long expunged from his memory, active and inactive, long and short, and filed away under ‘forgotten.’ And the barrister looks distinctly Arab and must have, it is safe for loyal Zionist citizens of Israel to presume, dislodged from his own memory any residue of the implicit oath of loyalty to them he must have taken. We all know Abu-Hussain received his law degree from the Hebrew University and should never be allowed to forget the civilizing influence of associating with ‘real citizens of the Jewish state.’ He should have been made to swear such an oath before getting his license to practice. I recall swearing loyalty to Israel and its laws when I became a state employee. Nothing was new in that. But then I swore loyalty to Israel as my country and not the country of someone else. I assumed at the time that my Jewish colleagues may hold different interpretation of what Israel was. And I never knowingly broke Israeli laws, objectionable as many of them were. But, at the time, I could convince myself that I could work to change such laws and to adapt the nature of the state to accommodate me. The question for my Zionist fellow citizens remains whether when I swore allegiance to Israel I meant it and whether it was specific enough as to whose state Israel was. No wonder so many legislators are now working hard to clarify the point: making citizenship contingent on declaring loyalty to Israel as a Jewish state. That will be followed in due course by mechanisms for the verification of real intent. Now that I have retired I am out of the loop, no longer professionally active in the public arena. That is why I can only speculate on how others will react to the new laws of verifiable intent: Imagine a legal mind like Abu-Hussain’s grappling with the Kafkaesque quandary of swearing loyalty to an entity that excludes him out of its definition. To fall back on my field of expertise, how can a doctor who presumably had dedicated his life to preventing pain and saving lives swear allegiance to promoting illness? By swearing such an oath he would cease to be a physician though the law requires him to do so in order to be one. Let me give another simile for my differently-inclined fellow citizens: How can a member of the Yakuza swear an oath of allegiance to the Japanese police. There is a deeper psychological point here to which I will return later. It is enough to drive one to distraction.

The afternoon session was dedicated to a witness that the defense lawyers had asked that he be allowed to testify incognito for reasons of personal safety. He was the commander of the army unit operating the D9s in the vicinity of Rachel’s death incident. The court was adapted specifically for this occasion: a screen was set up between the audience and the witness stand. The plaintiff team moved their seats closer to the judge’s stand to be able to see the witness. Abu- Hussain requested that the judge allow members of the Corrie family to move to that side of the court as well so they can see the witness but the request was denied. I could understand that: If all the Corries and their entourage of translators and reporters were to be exempted, my wife and I would be the only ones left. My wife is not a threat. She is not the violent type. And I would probably be asleep half of the time anyhow. Or else they could have blindfolded the two of us and did away with the screen altogether. No such luck: the judge asked to have an armed guard at the door of the courtroom and warned us all not to take pictures at pain of arrest on the spot. This castigation induced in me a sudden urge to empty my bladder. I resisted till I could resist no more. As I tried to exit, the guard tried to prevent me and I insisted. He went in and asked permission from someone, perhaps the judge, for me. Fortunately, the request was granted. To hear people in the Arab world criticize Israel’s judicial system as unjust towards its Arab citizens, you would think such gesture was impossible. Here was my proof to the contrary. Believe me, given the circumstances and with the pressure mounting inside me, being allowed to relieve myself was the greatest act of justice I had ever experienced in this country.

The mystery witness was the commander of the unit operating the D9s on the day and in the arena of Rachel’s death. Judging by the witness’s voice I figured he was a male in his forties of medium build and a smallish balding head that allowed for the evaporation of much of the previously stored bits of information in it in Israel’s hot sun. All he could remember from that day’s incidents was seeing the late peace activist sitting in a “pool of dirt.” Nothing more and nothing less. He also had little to enlighten the court about the rules of engagement with civilians for operators of D9s. There were civilians, a dozen or so of them, in the battlefield, the battle that raged between D9s and Palestinian homes with the civilian foreign combatants in bright red and orange clothing running as decoys for the anti-Israeli structures which must have caused one D9 to mistake one of them for a menacing Palestinian home. That, at least is my best interpretation of the events of the day. But the commander had a different story to tell: All he saw is the dead body of the late Corrie woman in a “pool of dirt.” Taking his testimony as ‘the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth,” one is left with the question of what was he talking about when he spoke on the wireless from inside his D9 to the driver of the other D9 under attack by, and closer to, the civilian foreign combatants in the battlefield. He is heard to ask in Arabic “Did you kill him?” The answer comes loud and clear: “Allah Yirhamu -- May Allah have mercy on his soul.” Did he think the dead person in the “pool of dirt” was a man? He, of course, couldn’t remember any of that. What is more amazing is that this brief vocal exchange, recorded on video, was left out from the written transcription of the video’s soundtrack. None of the investigators, whether in the internal operational run of the army or in that of the military police, ever took notice of that last conversation. It was the Plaintiff’s lawyers who picked out the small gem. What remains is to figure out who exactly said what and what did he mean?

‘Allah Yerhamu’ is part of the well entrenched military jargon in Israel. Since whoever says it usually lacks full understanding of the meaning of each of its constituent words, the phrase is a less painful way of indicating the act of killing. Additionally, the phrase is a distinct high point in the collective memory of our community, the Palestinian citizens of Israel. On October 29, 1956 it cost us 49 innocent lives: children and elderly, woman and men. Britain, France and Israel had declared war on Egypt earlier that day to retrieve the Suez Canal, which Jamal Abdul Nasser had nationalized, to its lawful colonial owners. Military instructions were issued from on-high to impose total curfew on Arab villages in the center of Israel including the village of Kufr Qassim. The unit commander asked the specific question of how to deal with farmers who might be out in their fields and would not have learned of the curfew. The answer came in clear and simple military jargon: “Allah Yerhamu!” With that farmers returning home from the field were stopped at the entrance to their village, lined up and mowed down; 49 of them including 23 children.

“Allah Yerhamu” is not the only connecting thread between Kufur Qassim and Rachel Corrie. The war came and went and Kufr Qassim didn’t even register on the Israeli military or government radar screen. Till communist agitators started doing what they knew how to do best: agitate. An investigation was launched and brigadier commander Issachar Shadmi was found guilty of a minor administrative offence and fined one Israeli cent. Emile Habibi, the master of tongue-in-cheek Palestinian writing, made ‘Shadmi’s cent’ a household term in our community.

This is where my blood starts to boil in anger against the inflated claims of the Corries: If the price of 49 Palestinian lives was set at one cent, how dare they ask for a whole dollar for the life of their daughter? Consider for a moment, please, the relative ratio of one Corrie life to one Palestinian life: One Israeli cent was one hundredth of a lira; the lira was scrapped and replaced with the shekel which was equal to ten liras; then that was scrapped and replaced in turn by the New Israel Shekel (NIS), a thousand shekels to one NIS. At the current rate of NIS 3.6 to the dollar

1 Corrie = $1 = 3.6 NIS = 3.6 x 1000 x 10 x 100 / 49 = 73468.8 Palestiniens.

And the world dared to question Israel when its fatality ratio during the recent Gaza ‘preventive military action’ stood at one to hundred.

Just to give the Israeli judicial system its due and just credit, I should add that some half dozen low-ranking soldiers were found guilty and received sentences of several years in jail each. In verifying the details of the Kufur Qassim account I called on my communist age-mate cousin, Toufiq, who served time with the same imprisoned Israeli soldiers. At the time he had been sentenced to a dozen years in jail for playing a leading role in a youth demonstration in Nazareth in which he was accused of shouting pro-Nasser slogans. To this day he claims that I was the one who shouted “Long live Jamal Abdul Nasser!” not him. But I was not caught. Besides I was not a communist. Very early in the game I decided to wipe that incident off of my hard disc and to this day I have no memory of the event whatsoever. Another thing that riles Toufiq to this day is that shortly after their imprisonment the soldiers were pardoned by Israel’s president while he served his full term. “If you do the right calculation, taking into account the nature of the crime and the number of days served in jail,” my cousin insists, “the value of an Israeli soldier is worth over a million Palestinian communists like me. I didn’t even shout the slogan about Nasser, for God’s sake!”

Be that as it may, in the current court proceedings, our mystery witness refused to be drawn into the memory lane that the plaintiff team labored so much to animate for him with the set of toy caterpillars that they had purchased for the purpose. And he refused to be drawn into creating a matching human form with the putty that the lawyers had brought for him. For the rest of the afternoon Abu-Hussain used the soft fistful of putty as a tool of physiotherapy for his arthritic left hand. I had already noticed that the man had a habit of pressing his extended fingers against his neck to crack the aching joints. (I told you already that once I was a good diagnostician.) Still, all that the witness could recall was that he saw a dead person in a ‘pool of dirt.’ I wondered if Abu-Hussain was going to pull out a sack of soft dirt from his bag. As to the proximity of those D9s from the pool of dirt and similar specifics of the death incident, the lawyers’ efforts were unrewarded. Personally, I reached the conclusion that Rachel, Allah Yerhamu, had committed suicide by drowning in a ‘pool of dirt.’ After all, those were members of the most ethical army in the world and would not lie under oath.

This interpretation is not as farfetched as all that: Imagine a young idealist woman who dreamt of a just world including a just Israel. She arrives in Gaza to act on her commitment to let justice reign in the world. She discovers that Israel is unjust beyond redemption. She realizes that back in her own country campaigning against Israel’s injustices committed against the Palestinians will gain her the label of anti-Semitic. To wipe your slate clean of such a foul label you have to work for Israel’s benefit as per its own definition of itself. That, of course, includes throwing the Palestinian usurpers out of ‘our’ sacred holy land. To try to change the accepted American consensus regarding the just claims of Israel is another mission impossible. So, to fight against the threat of the smear of anti-Semitism, the prime label of bigotry, Rachel must have realized that she would need to become a bigot. Now that is another Kafkaesque quandary enough to send one into despair. For an idealistic young woman trapped in such an insane vicious circle, suicide must have seemed to be about the only remaining logical choice. And what means are there in Gaza for committing suicide. Dirt is abundant. One looks for an appropriate ‘pool of dirt’ and, while everyone around is not looking, one jumps in and holds his or her breath under the soft cover of dirt. Or should it end with a soldier instructing Rachel to ‘take a deep breath’ as some other people were once instructed in the process of their execution?

Rachel Corrie’s Revenge: Israeli Young Adults Struck by Early Onset of Alzheimer’s

2010-09-16T12:58:00.001-07:00

"Human kind cannot bear too much reality."
T. S. Eliot.

I arrived at the Haifa District Court with a deep sense of foreboding. On my way there, as I drove through Arrabeh’s sleepy streets (It is Ramadan and most fellow Moslem villagers go back to sleep after their dawn meal and prayer.) I saw clear signs of trouble: Two police cars with their lights flashing entered the village just I was on my way out. Stopped in my tracks by the daily traffic jam on the outskirts of Haifa, I turned the radio dial from my usual BBC morning news to the local Arabic FM station and heard the name of my village on the news: A seven-month pregnant young woman whose name I recognized had been slain by her mentally-ill husband in full view of her four children. She bled to death in the bathroom from her seven stab wounds before the husband escaped.

“The man is mentally ill,” I imagined the mayor explaining away our collective shame.

“We all are to blame; it is a symptom of an ailing society in the throes of disintegration,” I could hear Toufiq, my village friend since childhood, arguing back.

At the entrance to the new and imposing courthouse complex, built over the cleared area of an entire neighborhood of old Haifa, I greeted the few members I recognized among the group of mostly Jewish ‘peace junkies’ holding signs of solidarity with Rachel Corrie’s family and cause. Rachel’s rather spry-looking parents seemed duly impressed, thanking people for their good sentiments and expressing their hope to a couple of journalists that finally here was their chance to show the formal investigation of the IDF of their daughter’s death for the hasty slipshod cover-up that it actually was. The small crowd of demonstrators and media people were cordoned off against the wall to the side of the spacious entryway to the courts complex so as not to affect the security processing of arrivals. Except that the parking area elevators emptied out on the cordoned-off side of the yard. My wife recorded visually and communicated to me a ratio of ten to one who crawled under the red plastic tape rather than bothering to take the extra dozen steps required to get into the queue at the entrance. Two women dressed in lawyery black and white clothes belonging to the latter variety, the minority of upright and obedient citizens, shouted insults at the demonstrators.

My wife and I introduced ourselves to the Corries and exchanged visiting cards with them. Rachel’s mother wore an appropriate brooch on the lapel of her light summer coat, a mother-of-pearl peace dove. I used to give the same dove, handmade in Bethlehem, to foreign visitors at the Galilee Society when I headed it. We thought it only proper to extend an open invitation to the Corries to honor us with a visit to our home should they get bored with Haifa, another port city, and wish to spend a day in a rural setting and pick their fill of figs, passion fruit, pomegranate, and carob right from the tree. We felt this was the least a Palestinian family could offer to reciprocate Rachel’s own gesture of solidarity and ultimate sacrifice.

As we lined up to go through security, the young officer asked the usual “Do you carry any weapons?” and I shot back a comical “Nooo!” She explained in a rather plaintive tone of voice: “A knife is a weapon, you know!” She caught me off guard. Was she referring to the murder in my village, I wondered? How did she know I was from Arrabeh?

We cleared security, stopped at the cafeteria for a quick cup of coffee, chatted with a couple of other Palestinians of similar convictions and made it to the sun-drenched courtroom on the sixth floor.

In the court I sat next to the American consul who used the waiting time to study Hebrew from a phrasebook he must have downloaded to his I-phone. He looked so Semitic I had to resist the urge to give him a hug: We Semites have to stick together in the face of the alien hordes. The Corries sat in the front raw and a translator leaned forward from the second row to whisper the translated proceedings to them. They were so obviously Nordic-looking that a touch of hostility almost snuck into my heart. Awaiting the judge, another fellow Israelite, to commence the proceedings, I busied my head with assessing the relative inequality of the resultant triangular configuration of relationships: the consul, the judge and the Corries. I fantasized a world of peace and stability in which a level of international solidarity and cooperation is attained in which the diplomatic corps representing one state, say France, to another, say Saudi Arabia, would be drawn almost entirely from citizens of the host country. That is the level of trust and understanding that has been reached between the USA and Israel. But how well would such chummy relationship serve the interests of the Corries, I wondered? Quickly, I reached the conclusion that it all depended on the individual diplomat and his allegiance to his country of origin vis a vis his country of assigned diplomatic mission. The double jeopardy of belonging to both is a bind that only the most committed of nationalists in one or the other can maneuver through.

Soon the start of the Corries vs, the State of Israel case was announced and I prepared for the full engagement of my senses and intellect in absorbing the details of all that was going on around me. I was aware of the tremendous potential the Corrie’s case had in blowing Israel’s cover in its well-rehearsed claim to the high moral standards of its armed forces. Admittedly, I am a physician. But I am not a neurologist and I had no intention of focusing on medical issues. I had missed the chance for that back in March when Dr. Hiss, Israel’s organ-snatching chief forensic pathologist who had done the postmortem on Rachel’s body had taken the stand in this same courtroom. Still, unexpectedly, my attention was drawn to all sort of neurological phenomena. Suddenly and against my conscious attempt to follow the details of the question and answer exchange between the lawyers and the witnesses, the whole court instead became the scene for my innovative observation of certain behavioral peculiarities of the human species: I had noted that the judge had a mild form of tic where he would seem to prepare to rise up by leaning forward slightly and stretching out his neck with a slight turn of the head to the left, as if he were straining to butt an oncoming football in midair, but would then stop in mid motion, stick the index finger of his right hand under his shirt collar as if to loosen it and then, with a shake of his head, would return to his master-of-the-court upright posture. My attention was now fully engaged in the scrutiny of this seemingly insignificant involuntary motion. It shifted my attention from the proceedings I had fought the morning traffic for an hour and a half to follow. I started making mental notes of the shape and frequency of the odd motion: I studied its different permutations to such a degree that I thought I could observe its initial onset even when my patient, (for in my own mind this was how I had started to relate to the man,) could suppress it to a mere blink of his right eye. I knew this was a sign of psychological stress, though a certain suspicion started to surface from my subconscious about my own need to escape from the stress of the reality that was unfolding around me: Here was a most capable pair of Palestinian lawyers bearing down with full force on a series of witnesses representing the best Israel could produce in its defense, formerly in the face of the intruding ISM and now to counter the petty claims of a sad family set on discrediting ‘the only democracy in the Middle East’ and its valiant soldiers, members of the ‘most moral army in the world.’ I had seen and heard of innumerable cases where again and again the Israeli judicial system squeezes Palestinian defendants literally lifeless. But here I was witnessing the reverse process: Palestinians pressing proud Israelis, former and current members of Israel’s proud and mighty field units, into a state of denial, meekness, confusion and regression. The novelty of the unusual situation I was observing for the first time made me distinctly uncomfortable. I knew something was grossly amiss when I suddenly realized that I was concentrating so intensely on the body language of all the actors around me that I lost tract of what they were saying. I made a quick mental note of the fact that my interest was so piqued by the psychodrama unfolding around me that I had totally lost the ever disturbing chronic tinnitus in my ears.

I shifted back to observing the judge. I had been warned in advance that his record is most lean on rulings in favor of human rights defenders. Is that why he gave such clear signs of so much mental anguish? I returned to my observations of his neuromuscular oddity. Readers may think this a crude comment on a judge of justice. Yet we all do this all the time. All drivers rely on observing the lights in the back of the car in front of them to pick up the indications of its driver’s intentions. That is how a physician relates to the physical signs of those ‘cruising around’ in his vicinity. So, please, excuse this casual attitude to what you may consider to be a sensitive issue. Overall, the tic was quite frequent, perhaps once every one and a half minutes on average. But it was not regular. First I noticed that it did not occur during the rare occasions when the defense team of lawyers from the State Prosecutor Office spoke. It also occurred very rarely when the witnesses spoke. One witness made a clearly outrageous statement he should never have made: “In war there are no civilians,” he declared. The good judge strained his neck so vigorously and stuck his head out so far he nearly swept the computer screen in front of him off the table. At another juncture, the judge had a cascade of successive neck-stretching exercises as he admonished the Corrie’s lawyer, Hussein Abu-Hussein, to abandon the line of questioning he was pursuing with the witness. It was irrelevant, the judge decided. I felt the lawyer was treading very close to the red line sequestering the truth behind it. Obviously, the witness was being bamboozled.

Suddenly, the judge cut my intense inner hilarity short: He had to leave the court early for a physician’s appointment. Was he seeing a neurologist? I could certainly assist the physician with my professional observations, I thought. Or perhaps he had something more serious, a terribly bad heart or a nasty brain aneurism? Don’t rush to conclusions about possible wishful thinking on my part, please! At Harvard Medical School they taught us always to start by ruling out the worst case scenario. That is also the reason I figured that at least two out of the three witnesses who appeared before us were probably examples of a rare form of Alzheimer’s Disease. Not only that they had forgotten nearly all the relevant facts, detailed or general, of incidents in which they had taken active part some six years earlier, but also that, by the time they left the witness stand, they appeared to have been pitifully reduced physically to mere shadows of the imposing macho figures that had strode into court earlier in the day. I am not a bad shot when it comes to diagnosing medical entities, believe me. I assure you that in my active clinical career I was an astute diagnostician able on occasion to figure out what brought a patient to see me from the way he or she walked into my office. I swear to you that on occasion I would start writing my hospital referral letter while a case of Appendicitis or Maltese Fever was still changing into the examining gown behind the examining curtain, not to mention the occasional term pregnancy of a teenager brought by her anxious parents because of excruciating abdominal colic. So it was no major challenge for me to pick up the clear signs of Alzheimer’s, though, going by the rapid physical deterioration they evidenced, these probably were some of the fastest developing such cases ever reported in the medical literature.

In a ten-minute break in the court proceedings, I strode to the back of the spacious hallway to feast my eyes on what I could see of Haifa’s wonderful views. Lo and behold, the view was one of extensive ruination and well-guarded abandonment of the whole base of the Carmel Mountain as it slopes down toward the port area. The entire neighborhood, once the thriving residential area for the well-off and nouveau-riche Haifan Arab families, seems to have been cordoned off from the outside world, with its majestic multi-arched façades’ dignity still preserved thanks to its stone structure. One could imagine the pleasure and the pride of the former residents of such homes on a breezy late afternoon, sitting in their luxurious living rooms or northern balconies with Haifa’s port and the many ships taking refuge in it in full view as the sun tipped behind the soaring Carmel Mount. Now the Custodian of Absentee Property and his colluding housing agency, Amidar, seem to have decided to deny such imagined pleasures by continuing to deny the area the option of residential use. One can only hope that the former residents of such majestic homes, still awaiting return in their shacks in Lebanese refugee camps, will never see the intolerable neglect to which their palaces have been subjected.

I looked at Rachel’s parents and they seemed tired, worn out, no doubt, by the rigors of the intense delving into details of their late daughter’s death. I felt like offering them my sympathy and physical support as they ambulated out of the court. Till I went to the bathroom and took a good look at myself in the mirror: I should have asked the Corries to help me to my car, I decided.

Heading home I was elated by the prospect of my impending rise to fame in medical circles by virtue of my forthcoming first-ever report of two consecutive cases of the instantaneous onset of Alzheimer’s Disease. To rest my mind and gain some emotional respite from the excitement of it all, I turned my car radio on: The dial had been left on the local FM station. Arrabeh’s stabbing murder case was still dominating the free-for-all call-in program. Callers were speculating about what could have irked the presumably insane husband to act in the murderous way he did. For a moment I entertained the thought of calling in and alerting the program’s host, whom I knew personally, and his audience to the Corries versus the State of Israel case. I wanted to let everyone know that here was another case of murder by way of insanity. Except that here, a whole nation had gone insane.

Ameer Makhoul's Day in Court

2010-07-21T10:19:00.000-07:00

I have known Ameer Makhoul since the day he came to my office at the Galilee Society to be interviewed for the position of director of our then new and ambitious project called ITTIJAH, the Arabic acronym for Union of Community-Based Arab Associations. I knew of him before as another troubled Arab student at Haifa University who couldn’t square away Israel’s bogus claims to democracy, as in ‘the only democratic state in the Middle East,’ with his experience as a member of a minority gagged and shackled by draconian security-based regulations. This had led at the time to his dismissal from his studies and banning from entering the university campus as another ‘trouble maker.’ Ameer went on to obtain his Bachelor’s degree through the accumulation of credits in after-hours and off-campus courses. Two decades later the administration of Haifa University was still formally advising its foreign students and other international guests against visiting Arab communities for their own safety. In1964-6, during my own university studies, I had rented a room in Vermillion, South Dakota from an old lady that warned me daily against the ‘wild Indians’ in the Prairies. I could relate to the deep-seated apprehensions of the aggressor.

The decision to hire Ameer over several other candidates, including an accomplished lawyer, was unanimous for the simple reason that he inspired greater trust and had his own independent vision of what ITTIJAH could become. At the time, my own concept of the future of the project was rather hazy, clouded among other things by the promise of generous funding from the Ford Foundation on a track to parallel the Shatil Project it had started funding for the nascent New Israel Fund in support of its grantee organizations. One Zionist Israeli citizen after another came to represent the Ford Foundation here and a day came when all of its grantees in the Middle East were asked to sign a declaration distancing them from and denouncing terror organizations. Ameer argued with his constituency on one side and with the funders on the other as to the definition of terms such as ‘terror.’ He rightly sensed an admission of guilt in the text of the form he was required to sign. He refused to do so at peril of the loss of funds. He veered further to the left in his search of funding resources internationally. With this came further alignment of ITTIJAH with Human Rights issues and structures in the various world forums including the gaining of special consultative status with the UN ECOSOC Council.

This process and Ameer’s unbending leadership style gradually led to ITTIJAH having its own stand on significant national level and international policy issues and Human Rights campaigns. This has meant that Ameer was charged with representing his constituency of over eighty local and national Arab NGOs in Israel and had at the same time to reflect back to them the sense of the international community’s rising struggle against neocolonialism, globalization, degradation of the environment and the infringement on the rights of the poor and the indigenous communities. Inevitably, Ameer gained prominence in the international struggle for freedom and equality, the very same issues he had long struggled for on the home front. At Durban, South Africa in 2001, he stood out as another front-line freedom and human rights advocate. Israel’s security services could no longer ignore him. Seeing him and Abu-Asa’ad, the head of the Sons of the Village Movement, in the frontline of protesters whose images, with clenched and raised fists, were splashed on TV screens across the globe I couldn’t help imagining the handcuffs on those raised arms. Abu-Asa’ad’s turn came first. He is more confrontational and rash. It took the responsible parties this much longer to spread the right bait and drum up the right charges against Ameer. In the meantime he has added insult to injury in the authorities’ eyes by establishing and heading the national level forum of the Committee for the Defense of Freedom which aimed to raise public awareness, locally and internationally, to the recurrent infringements of the Israeli Government on the freedom of its Arab citizens both individual and collective.

This morning, Ameer had the same confident, iron-will look, the same victorious self-confident smile, and the same massive heavy-knuckled clenched and raised fists thrust up in the air, this time with real handcuffs. I sat in the same front row in court with members of the Makhoul family including, among others, his wife, Janan, his two daughters, and four siblings. It dawned on me that Ameer’s prominent politician brother, Isam, the former member of the Israeli parliament and head of the Communist-led Jabha coalition and the current Director of the Emil Touma Institute of Palestinian and Israeli Studies was on trial as well. Second to Vanunu, Isam has done more to alert the world to Israel’s nuclear weapons than anyone I know. Except that he has done it openly and within the limits of the law. Still, to have dared to raise such taboo topic in the open and at international forums is a step beyond courageous. Cameel, my former associate at the Galilee Society and a brilliant genetics researcher, was there too. Very likely, he was on trial by proxy as well. Except that I couldn’t pin any specific violation on him. He did research at all the right places: the Weizmann Institute and Haifa University. It had often occurred to me that this branch of the Makhoul clan would make a nice group for a social science investigation regarding the factors contributing to the production of such a fantastic array of prominent individuals in one generation. Could it be that Ameer is paying the price for their collective prominence? Palestinian villagers in Galilee are supposed to survive modestly on the meager remnants of their land. This bunch is too proud and worldly successful for its own good. Somehow, everyone in the audience (all but two were Arabs) was on trial as far as I could tell from the expressions on their faces and the opinions they expressed later outside the court.

In front of the glass barrier, (not the full-height one Jonathan Cook featured symbolically in his book “Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State” but a more symbolic low one,) sat the lawyers: The defense team consisted of four well-known attorneys including Avigdor Feldman and Hussain Abu-Hussain who heads ITTIJAH’s board. At one point I had a chance to greet my two friends and to ask about the absent Adalah lawyers. They had other involvements today. The prosecution team consisted of one lady attorney and her student assistant. She busied herself with the frequent smoothing down of her constantly straying locks of waist-length scraggly hair spread across her back from the tip of one shoulder to the other. I, in contrast, busied myself with imagining a less messy haircut for the petit woman: a shoulder-length cut should do, I thought. Perhaps an aggressive masculine haircut would be more in tune with her assignment. Then I came up with the perfect style for her: a straight shave. Perhaps she will discover a form of cancer that would force her to take chemotherapy and loose all of her hair. I shuddered: Why such vengeful thoughts? She is only doing her job as part of the system, no more. She is not there because she hates Ameer Makhoul personally. The system! That is exactly the problem. Her representative role is what makes her a monster to me and makes Ameer and possibly all Palestinian Citizens of Israel enemies in her eyes. But that is also what gives her power: Here she is, standing up single-handedly to a team of dedicated world-class lawyers knowing from the start that she will win. She and the three judges that have now entered the court to the subdued hiss of the audience’s motion as we rose from our seats and sat back again, were two different arms of the same system, there to tame the same beast they all know all of us to be. At one point I could see the woman in profile. She was a spitting image of Marcie, the cartoon persona in Peanuts.

This may well be a worldwide phenomenon: a system of control designed to disadvantage the disadvantaged. The three judges, the court secretary and stenographer, and the half-dozen jailors and guards are all part of the same system, a whole institution created and functioning in a way to control the likes of Ameer. Conceptually, they all owe their living to the continued perceived need to prosecute and punish the elements of society that object to the hegemony of which they are part. Not only that, but also they are fed by the same zeal and perceived duty to find, apprehend, convict and punish those who dare to disapprove of the essence of their system. Ameer and everyone in his audience today surely do disapprove of the imposed Zionist system of the State of Israel. Everyone in the court system as well as those in the security apparatus internalize their duty as being that of stemming this perceived threat to their very existence and livelihood. And this coalition of interested parties, this collection of invested partners, proceeds to assign different roles to its various members and to put on a well-orchestrated show to give the impression of impartiality in performing the very function for which they exist in the first place: to put Ameer in jail.

I need to pause for a breath here. I am sure this is not news to juridical experts and scholars of the philosophy of jurisprudence. Yet, relying entirely on my own logic, I am reaching the end of my wits. (Please, Raif Zraiq, bear with me for the next thought. I know you are laughing by now. But I lack your scholarly training.) When two contestants, say over the exact border between two adjacent pieces of land, go to court to settle their dispute, the judge and the entire court system are presumed to be neutral, unless if one party had managed to bribe them. But in our case one of the contestants is the very system of whom the entire court structure is part. All those sitting in judgment of Ameer have been bribed a’priori by holding the positions which they hold and fulfilling the duty for which they are being paid a monthly salary. And they are full partners by definition: the police who arrested him, the Shin Bet that torture him, the jailors who incarcerate him, Ms. Marcie who is prosecuting him, and the judges who will judge him together with all of us, his undeclared collaborators. We all seem to resist swearing allegiance to Israel as a “Jewish and democratic state”. We seem to have our doubts about subscribing to a scheme whereby the state defines itself exclusive of us. I wonder how many Americans would swear allegiance to an America that is defined as white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant?

Here finally come the formal charges against our man: meeting an agent of an enemy state abroad. What evidence does the state has against Ameer? There is a lot of it but it is all of a secret security-related nature and hence cannot be shared with the defense team. All except for one piece of evidence: the fact that Ameer saw his physician after his return from a trip abroad with the complaint of dizzy spells which the prosecutor takes as proof of the mounting internal psychological pressure of the accused over his guilt feeling about meeting the Hizbollah agent. In contradistinction to the secrecy enveloping the entire affair, the prosecutor here repeated half a dozen times the name of Hizbollah, apparently for no reason other than wishing to incriminate the accused through the mere mention of this feared bogeyman. The rest of the two-hour-long session was wasted on technicalities related to the claims of the secret and sensitive nature of the information that can be shared only between the different arms of the establishment Mafia: the prosecutor, the judges, and the secret police.

In the absence of an alternative system of justice we all will meet here again in two months. The courts’ collective holidays are upon us. The judges, the guards, the police, and the prosecutor need to spend their summer vacations with their families that had missed them all year. Ameer’s family will be visiting their next of kin in Makhoul Village in Upper Galilee. Ameer’s prison cell is reported to be comfortable: it has a proper bed.

Musings of a Lowly Scribe

2010-05-09T21:36:00.000-07:00

Usually I only leaf through Al-Ittihad, the only Arabic daily in Israel, glancing rather fleetingly at its headlines. This morning, however, I read the text of the speech delivered by the chair of the Arab (meaning us, the Palestinian citizens of Israel) High Monitoring Committee at the meeting of our political spokesmen (including one single woman!) with the Libyan Leader in his capacity as the head of the recent Arab summit. It struck me as a significant document for more reasons than one: It apparently spoke for the consensus opinion of all attendants of this meeting, a rare display of unity worthy of celebrating; it covered our most significant issues; it was relatively brief, frank and to the point, or so I thought at first; and the occasion was unique, for, with the exception of the late Arafat, no Arab leader has ever condescended to this level of collective discourse and interaction with all factions of our community. This was an unprecedented breakthrough in another way, the first official recognition by a standing head figure of the Arab world of our community, we the Palestinians within, as a potential player in the field of inter-Arab politics, murky as this field usually is. We have been excluded from consideration by all concerned since ever we were separated by the events of Nakba as a suspect, maligned, and neglected, or intentionally side-stepped, group.

Both Israel and the Arab world have preferred to deal with us as individuals, or at best, as a collection of separate faith-based groupings lacking a unified voice, identity, or influence. Conveniently, we have adapted to this unnatural mold and adopted daily ‘struggle’ (I almost shudder at the mendacity of this overused term when others use it) for individual survival as our modus vivendi. As Toufiq Zayyad, the late poet Mayor of Nazareth, had put it, we will always be a thorn in Israel’s [Zionist] throat. To the Arab world, we are a less significant but more nagging disturbance to their figurative anatomy, not unlike a hemorrhoidal affliction: a constant bother and embarrassment. And here, out of the clear blue sky, comes a unifying and significance-laden gesture of recognition. It comes not from the prince of Arab liberation dreams, the Saladin plotting his hour of glory just north of the border, not from the obstinate ophthalmologist to the north-east, who had inherited his father’s long breath and extended vision, not from our tame and impoverished son-in-law to the east, nor from the latter-day pharaoh to the south, but from the original and inventive high-wire trapeze artist. Much can be said about the man but one thing is sure: he has gained his kosher certificate from the Americans, and though he is no Zionist, of late, contact with him has gained legitimacy. The whole thing sounded right. I made up my mind that this was a historical document worthy of the widest possible distribution in the international media.

Out of the group of two dozen invitees two were barred from attending by Israel: The first was Ameer Makhoul, the Director General of Ittijah (The Union of Arab Community-Based Associations, an umbrella organization that I had initiated while still active in the civil society sphere) who was informed at the border crossing to Jordan that the Minister of the Interior considered him a security threat to the state of Israel and hence he could not leave the country for two months. The second was Omar Said, a political activist and a pharmaceutical scientist and entrepreneur who had cut his professional teeth at the Galilee Society for Health Research and Services, the civil society home-base that I had established in 1981. He was arrested at the border and barred from seeing his lawyer and family. Though I was pleased I wasn’t the subject of Israel’s civic terrorism, I still felt good about being so closely associated with the two that were. Indirectly and perhaps subconsciously, this must have added to my initial enthusiasm about the piece that I read: I decided to translate it and place it on my blog. I called Ameer, jokingly congratulated him on having reached the level of being acclaimed as a peril to Israel’s security and enquired who exactly wrote the piece and if it had the approval of all participants. His answer confirmed my suspicions, a fact that, somehow, fed into my cumulatively escalating self-esteem this morning.

I sat down and started the task of translating. I had just finished reading Tariq Ali’s “The Book of Saladin” which is narrated by the fictitious scribe, the Jewish Ibn Yakub. As I commenced my mechanical function, a sense of rapid deflation came over me: Like Ibn Yakub, I felt lowly and subservient: If this is such a worthy document how come I had nothing to do with its drafting? Mohammad Zidan, the community leader who delivered it orally in the presence of Colonel Gadhafi, is a good friend of mine from the good old days of the Galilee Society when we ran a Ford Foundation-funded project in his village while he served as its mayor. I know my mastery of high classic Arabic is no less than his. So how come I am relegated to the role of his scribe, offering my uninvited services and on voluntary basis at that?

With considerably devalued sense of duty I continued the thankless task of translating. This meant that I had to ponder the exact meaning of every word in the one newsprint page-long speech and to select the best English word that carries the hidden meaning and exact flavor and nuance of so many highfalutin pronouncements. My God! Why couldn’t my friend cut through the fog of flowery and pretentious wording and say what was on his mind directly? Perhaps I should do that for him in translation. But that would be inaccurate if not dishonest. In the sociopolitical context in which the speech was given, the ostentatious language and the hyperbole serve a definite purpose; they are an integral part of the message being delivered; you can’t skip the flowery verbiage and say what actually is on your mind. The inner meaning is conveyed to a great extent by the style itself; I am reminded of the famous axiom: “The medium is the message.” But this still doesn’t say exactly the sense of obligatory grandiose mantle in which an idea has to be cloaked to be befitting when one is making a formal presentation in high places. To hell with exactitude; I am going to skimp on some of my friend’s superhumanly pompous idioms and let the English reader suffer!

I still am less than comfortable with my rendition of the content of the speech I found so impressive only an hour ago. Something else is nagging at my subconscious and I am having trouble dragging it up to the surface where it would stop belonging to the “sub” category so I can confront it; I want to deal with it frontally. I am uncomfortable with what I am writing in English though I had just read the piece in Arabic and thought so highly of it. I look at the paragraph I have reached and read it in Arabic. It is an accurate statement of what the great majority of Palestinians, and possibly most Arabs, would consider factual; the discourse is sensible and civilized. I turn to my English translation of the same and it reeks of sloganism and of anti-Israel language that verges on rejectionism and would surely qualify in average Israeli thought as anti-Semitic. Americans would dismiss much of it as Israel-bashing rhetoric. Now I think I understand the source of my insecurity as a scribe: When I read the Arabic version I was an Arab who had internalized all the cultural and psychological residues of the historical Islamic-Christian clashes from the conquest of Constantinople, the battles of the Crusaders (in nearby Hittin and Acre, and extending, as per George W. Bush, across a millennium to Iraq and Afghanistan) and the rape of Andalusia (who was raped by whom depends on who you are.) I took for granted the Arab/Palestinian discourse with all its sense of injured pride and suffered injustices at the hands of the West and their Zionist colonial project. As I switched over to my English version I was unconsciously transformed into my ‘American’ alter-ego; I read the piece through the Israeli-inspired American spin-doctored miasma of prejudices and ill-assumptions; I was instantaneously transformed to an American reader, mindful of the accepted American ‘civility’ based on decades of the internalized sense of ‘our’ special relationship with ‘the only democracy in the middle East’ and on centuries of wary orientalist alarm at the subterfuge designs of Mohammadans (after all, the spokesman of the group in Libya is named Mohammad and several other members carry other names of the Islamic Prophet) inimical to ‘our’ Judeo-Christian traditions.

I have to stop this confusing pursuit of self-interpretation. The subject of my admiration in the original Arabic turns out to be a piece of trash when rendered literally in English. It simply sounds different in English. I shouldn’t have translated it. I can sleep better with it in the original. Here it is:

Speech delivered by Mr. Mohammad Zidan, Chair of the Monitoring Committee, at the Meeting with Colonel Muammar Gadhafi on 25 April, 2010
(Unauthorized Translation)

The leader of the Libyan revolution, brother Muammar al-Gadhafi;
Brothers in dear Libya,
Peace and Gods Blessings upon you.

Let us open by thanking brother and leader Colonel Muammar al-Gadhafi and our brethren, the people of Libya for this kind gesture of inviting a delegation from the 1948 Palestinians for a meeting with you. This invitation reveals many a meaning in its name and content, especially with you heading the current Arab Summit of Serit in which capacity you have been conducting a series of Arab meetings. Even before we landed on Libyan soil, we felt proud in anticipation of this meeting and brotherly embrace.

We highly value, dear Colonel and brother, your initiating this brotherly meeting. We hope that it will be a good start for more meetings and communications so that, with your rich experience and insightful vision, the meeting of the branch with its mother-tree and of the child with its family and people is complete. This meeting empowers us with a moral energy that we need greatly in our strategic position so as to continue our steadfast and existential trip in confronting the challenges that has faced us repeatedly as we stayed in our ancestral lands,

At about this time sixty-two years ago, the Nakba earthquake leveled some 530 Palestinian villages and cities. The Zionist movement, backed by colonial powers, drove out the majority of our people leaving only some 150 thousand whose persistence in their homes was not unlike ‘grasping embers’ for decades. We have remained on our lands, maintaining a grip on our identity, our language, our traditions and our convictions despite all Jewishizing and falsification attempts, till we have become today about one million and three-hundred thousand, the equivalent of one-fifth of the country’s population.

The dust of the Nakba’s volcanic eruption continued settling till we realized that we have experienced two heavy nightmares, the first the handiwork of the racist practices of Israel’s governments, and the second shown by the Arab world’s estrangement from us.

Six decades have passed while the suffering and threats have mounted, covering all walks of life: land, residence, education, labor, unemployment, poverty, budgets, and all civic and national rights. Six decades have elapsed with the citizenship imposed on us still conditional and constrained due to racist policies and practices against us.

Despite the nightmares and the variety of subjugation and suffering, the ‘internal Palestinians’ have achieved the near impossible, thanks to their struggle, their belief in the truth and justice of their claims, their attachment to their culture and history which infused us with tremendous ability to crystallize our national identity and to maintain the solid basis of our national struggle. In the past, racism against Arab citizens was practiced secretly. Currently its slogans have become a basic part of the establishment and the mainstream. Tens of unprecedented racist laws for Jewishizing space and the populous are now passed openly and affect Palestinians on both sides of the Green Line, while the world continues to deal with pampered Israel with silk gloves.

In parallel, with talk of negotiations and the peace process, land theft in the West Bank continues while Jerusalem faces nonstop Jewishizing and cleansing of its Arab population as the recent decision of evicting seventy thousand of its residents and of the residents of the rest of the West Bank using various excuses.

In the Jewishizing and falsification campaign, the al-Aqsa Mosque, as a religious, a cultural and a national symbol, faces continued assault: tunnels are dug under it, synagogues surround it above, calls for breaking and entering it are rife, and plans for tearing it down and for constructing the presumed temple are drawn by settler groups under the protection of occupation authorities. They do not shy away from soiling Islamic and Christian holy sites: Mosques and churches have become cowsheds and wine cellars while others have been converted to synagogues with little attention to the laws of heaven or of this world.

Despite the policies of control and oppression and despite persecution of their political leaders and the subjugation and domestication attempts, the Palestinians within did not change their skins but rather persisted in accumulating gains, struggling collectively with ant-like diligence to extract our basic and national rights with blood and tears as the native people of the land who put down their permanent deep roots in the face of threats, impositions and danger.

In keeping what is left of their land, and in maintaining their identity and ties to their people and humanity, the Palestinians within paid a heavy price: tens were martyred and hundreds were injured in Kufr-Qasim in 1956, on the first Land Day in 1976, and in the uprising of Jerusalem and al-Aqsa in 2000, all in defense of rights, land, holy sites and belonging, while tens were killed between these blood-drenched landmarks. Every day, the Palestinians within, whether in Galililee, in the triangle and costal cities, or, especially, in the Negev, face up to expulsion and ethnic cleansing operations with their bare bodies, full hearts and conviction as solidly founded as the mountains of Galilee that, if it must be, then death is better than departure.

Under the weight of confinement, oppression and persecution we continue in our struggle to solidify our presence in our homeland for which we have no alternative and to secure a decent living with nothing less than our full national and civil rights. We are part of this land and didn’t immigrate to it. Born and rooted in it as the hyssop and the olive, we find “on this land much that deserves living” [as our poet Mahmoud Darwish said.] It is truly the mother of all beginnings and, despite the pain, we will not abandon the path of justice and belonging.

Brother leader,
We come to you from our land to our land, so that Nazareth, Haifa, Acre and the rest of our cities and towns will embrace their sisters Tripoli, Benghazi and Serit. We come to seek your moral support, to connect, to consult, and to complement one another while still nurturing a sense of blame toward the Arab world, the blame between brothers. After our people’s Nakba, and for long decades, we suffered doubly: the bitter taste of oppression, Jewishizing, dispossession and expulsion at the hand of Israel, and, in parallel, the injustices from our brethren who blamed us, we who remained on our land, falsely and cruelly. We were viewed with suspicion and doubt as if we had sold our souls and abandoned our roots and religion, all because we preferred staying over departure and were forced to carry blue [Israeli] identity cards and accepted a citizenship we inherited and practiced against our will.

Within sight of the oppressors, the wheat grains grew to fill the precious land with wheat spikes and the fields of Jezreel Valley swayed with joy in welcoming those who remained to reap it and to grind it into flour from which they made historic monuments and proof of the Arab nature of the place. Those who were abandoned as orphans at the feast of the wicked grew and filled the land and its prisons with their freedom songs, awaiting the dawn of that long night. The land sang with them like a mother, happy for her growing children morphing literary figures, poets and freedom lovers. They have become a symbol of resistance literature and human creativity. Indeed, our giant poet, Mahmoud Darwish, has expressed our love and priorities well:

We love the rose
But we love wheat more
And we love the perfume of roses
But the wheat spikes are purer.

We did not shirk our responsibilities in our homeland. We stood high in the face of our oppressors even as barefoot and naked orphans. Today, recognition by the Arab world, most of which is ignorant of our achievements, is still lacking.

Despite all of that we repeat the song of hope by our famous poet Samih al-Qasim:

Despite doubt and despite sadness
I hear, yes, I hear the footsteps of dawn
Despite doubt and despite sadness
I will not lose my conviction
That the sun will rise
Spreading victory flags
Spreading all that it carries of longing and hope
My red pronouncements
My green pronouncements

Therefore, we value highly this visit to Libya. We view it as a form of return, as support for us and for our issues, and as recognition of the need for parts of the same nation to connect and for the lie of normalization to be eliminated. Nothing is more natural than for brothers to meet, even if after a long absence.

Before this august gathering we offer our thanks to the descendents, the followers and the emulators of the martyr Omar al-Mukhtar and his school of struggle and sacrifice, for hosting us. We call on our Libyan brothers led by brother Muammar el-Gadhafi to move toward ending the historic injustice that has blocked our way by promoting, supporting and institutionalizing this natural reconnecting between people of the same nation.

Brother Gadhafi,
We need the moral support of the Arabs and for them to stand with us in the continuing struggle for our survival and our rights. Likewise we look to your help in extracting our brethren in occupied Gaza and the West Bank from their plight of internal conflict and to lift the oppressive external isolation of Gaza.

We take this opportunity to emphasize that all Palestinian blood is one, all their pain is one, and the road to the realization of our nation’s dreams is one: and that is through unity and agreement. Without that we will continue to be lost in the darkness of the unknown.

With you heading the Arab Summit, we hope that your good efforts will aid in ending the Palestinian internal conflict and in stopping the dangerous hemorrhage so as to reunite the Palestinian people. Unity is the only guarantee for guarding the national project of freedom and independence in a Palestinian State with holy Jerusalem as its capital.

We hope that your presidency of the Arab Summit will be the start of Arab unity, of speaking in one voice regarding all issues in our area. That will aid in resolving obstinate problems and promote stability and progress in the area.

Last but not least, based on what we have said and to correct the mistakes of the past and protect future ambitions, we hope that Libya, as the current head of the Arab Summit, will seek to extend to us the moral support of the Arab world against the campaigns and plans of evacuation and Jewishization. Again, we thank you for this festive reception and generous hosting hoping that God will preserve you and that the Libyan people will advance under you

The Winds in Nosara

2010-02-26T14:29:00.000-08:00

The winds at Nosara blow warm and furious for three days at a stretch, we were told. Our informants failed to inform us that the three-day cycle could repeat three consecutive times as it did shortly after our arrival. They call it ‘The Christmas Winds’ and it is reported to be always strong enough to tear down the town’s infrastructure, maintained artificially primitive by choice: Electricity and telephone lines regularly get torn and roads blocked by falling trees, water supply is interrupted and internet connections go silent for few days at a time, all repeatedly repaired year after year with dogged resistance to the obvious alternative of a sturdier underground routing of such vital public utilities. This is part of the community’s conscious resistance to official modernity, the sane and calculated risk Nosara’s Civic Association (NCA) has chosen thus far in an effort to keep rampant development at an arm’s length. The most torrid local controversy to have raged over the past ten years in Nosara is reported to have been that of whether to approve the construction of a gas station on the edge of the American Project or not. It seems that the NCA, mainly well-established expat Americans, controls new development through the exclusive right it has to the water supply in the area. Anyone considering building a house or opening a business within its vicinity has to weigh his or her options in light of this reality, despite the fact that the law of the land guarantees everyone the right to water supply. But here as elsewhere the wheels of justice grind slow and one may be doomed to failure awaiting its final resolve if the NCA considers the project detrimental to the ecology.

With the same tenacity, the NCA, anxious to keep the area free of the onslaught of ecotourism and the insatiable greed of so many ambitious new businesses has stiffly resisted paving the town’s streets or the main roads leading to it. Better employment and easier living conditions for the locals in the original village of Nosara who don’t all own SUVs has to be sacrificed in the process. With the seasonally dry weather the dirt roads generate such a cloud of dust every time a motorcyclist or an ATV driver ventures by, usually sparingly clad and with a bandito-like facemask in an effort to avert the threat of pneumoconiosis, that visibility is cut down to near zero. In their fight against this combined curse of the primitively-inclined NCA and the unforgiving winds, the locals have come up with another ingenious solution: sprinkling the dirt roads with the liquid refuse from sugarcane processing plants. It holds the dust down till the next rain soaks away the sugary glue and turns the roads to a messy mud stream awaiting the next cycle of dry weather to return it to dust blowing with the fierce winds. The temporary relief from the dust clouds is further enriched by the heavenly stench of putrefied sugar molasses for the few days after it has been first sprinkled. When I first experienced it, it brought to my senses the same nostalgic pleasant scent of Arrabeh’s streets in late autumn with the liquid refuse from the four olive presses of the village, the same raw olive aroma that helped endear Crete to my heart when I first toured its rural environs. Something about the scent of the two fermenting residues is nostalgically similar. The rainy season here starts in April and lasts for some six months. It rains hard enough, I am told, to flush army ants out of their subterranean labyrinths in search of a dry refuge, the ants in turn breaking and entering human residences and driving people to abandon their homes; it rains that hard!

Now, in mid-February, as most treetops have recovered from their shameless deciduous nakedness, another forceful wind is blowing fierce enough to masquerade and envelope the morning’s howling of the howler monkeys. Nosara is in the dry forest of Costa Rica as distinguished from the rain forest and the cloud forest ecosystems such as Monte Verde further up the mountains. I step out on the deck with my coffee and laptop to add a few lines to something I had started about my Palestinian identity and how my state defines that to conflict with its very being. I straighten out the rocking chairs that the wind has toppled overnight and proceed to tackle my assignment for the morning. But the fresh green canopy of the forest, just recovered from the height of the dry season, beguiles my eyes with the extreme swinging back and forth in the warm gusty wind. The relentless wavelike motion of treetops on all sides of my perch claims my full attention. The coquettish swaying of so many flowering mangos, veritable brunettes adorned with their holiday best attire, overwhelms me. I focus momentarily on one magic beauty then the other and a third. It brings to mind the most erotic TV shows from the Arabian Gulf stations, fully clad babes except for their bare heads swinging violently side-to-side or back and forth and flinging their loose hair in tune to catchy love songs. Sharif, my anthropologist brother, thinks the conception of this flinging of hair, totally innocent by Western standards, as pornographic eroticism underlies the consensus by its target audiences regarding the need to cover the sexually explicit baring of hair and hence the requirement for hijab or head cover. A fellow villager of little education who gained a passable skill as a TV technician after a work accident in his original employment as a bricklayer, showed up one day to calibrate my TV dish and selected two such ‘pornographic’ stations, assigned them to the last two slots on my remote control and sought to convince me of the usefulness of the arrangement, declaring in a muted voice and in local Arabic code to keep the information secret from my foreign wife:
“I have the English Al-Jazeera and the BBC as numbers one and two as you requested. But should you get bored and need to spend an hour or two viewing lewd material for your manly entertainment all you do is to press downward from your favorite news channels and you have the best erotic stations I can recommend.” I checked the two stations and let the arrangement stand. Not long afterward I heard from friends and neighbors that the gentleman had started offering this recommendation as “Dr. Hatim’s choice for male entertainment.”

******

I am home alone in this rented ideal vacation spot atop a steep hill in the natural forest along the Costa-Rican Pacific coast, part of what locals call “the American Project.” The house is part of a development that was pioneered by an American businessman in the mid-twentieth century and now populated mainly by retired well-off Americans or younger fellow expats, my son-in-law and his family amongst them, fleeing the nosedive of the American economy and taking temporary refuge in this warm, friendly and relatively inexpensive tropical Paradise with its unthreatening business climate. Yet I find the prices unreasonably high in comparison to labor wages: Anything beyond rice and beans is half again as expensive as it costs in Manhattan, our last stop. If a laborer were to eat out at the cheapest café here he would have to spend above his daily wages at $3 an hour.

That is as far as my business acumen allows me to speculate on the motives of the over one hundred ruddy and tanned American surfer couples and their young children that I see daily on sultry Guiones beach, the five-mile stretch of fine sand welcoming the gently rolling waves across the shallow half moon of water expanse that fans out to the infinite crimson evening horizon that has just swallowed a huge sun. I survey the waters from my position clear above the downhill canopy and can make out dozens of surfers on their boards and more sun worshippers ambling on the shore. I am able to judge the tide to be low by the distance from the tree line where the rolling white breakers succumb to the calming embrace of the shore and by the relative prominence of the rocks battered by the surf at the bay’s right tip.

Walking the full arch of the half moon beach at the early hours of the morning is a visual delight beyond my artistic comprehension. The mixed constituent of its sand, from black grains of volcanic lava to glistening white quartz, with all the varying hues in between, fine gray silt from the rush of the waters from the many inlets in the rainy season, brownish crushed bits of coral reef, and all sort of components whose origins I fail to ascertain, add up to an unimpressive overall gray mix. But the sifting effect of the receding tide, each wave crashing and rolling gently back just short of the last, patiently sorts out the various ingredients of the sandy shore, each according to its origin and specific gravity. With the endless minute interferences and physical interruptions by the beach’s community of live forms, from ever-dredging tiny mollusks and busy hermit crabs to the pesky sandpipers forever racing to comb the shallow waters of the beach, it all adds up to magnificent line patterns that would take me a lifetime of admiring, interpreting and imagining as postmodern visual creations of muted hues on recycled paper, bark sheeting and native cloth. I am enchanted enough to box several line combinations out of the many hectares of magic drawings in photo frames that I snap to my later disappointment and chagrin at my instrument’s failure to capture the magnificent play of morning light on nature’s random doodling.

For now, I am lounging on the deck of the MB (Monkey Business) compound: A garage and parking lot at the top level, a two-bedroom, a large living room and kitchen combination with an equal-size wooden deck facing the sea to the west at the second level, and a guests’ quarters, the casita –little house- with a kidney-shaped swimming pool and concrete lounging area at the lowest rung. Each of the three entities occupies a distinct and separate plane on the steeply sloping hillside. None of them juts out above the forest canopy to betray our presence in the hideout. Mango trees, coconut palms and frangipanis are the only tree species familiar to me from my days in Hawaii. They also happen to be the tamest and least expansive out of the over two dozen tree varieties enveloping the house on all sides. Members of the largest variety are currently blooming and seem to attract an over-a-dozen-member brood of howler monkeys on their twice daily journey up and down the forest at dawn and near sunset. The youngish male leader surprises me by its sudden shameless flashing of his scrotum at me in a most unexpected manner, a bright milky white bag contrasting sharply with his gray-black thighs and reddish chest and torso hair. Lulu, my three-year-old granddaughter has learned to imitate their howling as they forage for tender leaves and the stem and base of flowers. Their tremendous roar, possibly the loudest in the animal kingdom, is loud enough to be heard up to five kilometers away. It belies the friendly animal’s small size and benign nature, its worst offence that any naturalist has ever documented in a book is its tendency to surprise curious eco-tourists by sneaking secretly up to a branch directly above them and releasing some liquid or solid excrement at them. Alas, Lulu lacks the prehensile tail to swing across treetops for they do encroach on the perimeter of the balconies of our residence and she would be able to join them by extending her arm over the railing. It is easier for her to play the role of the iguana, the Pyzote, or, best of all, a baby sloth.

Everyone has gone to swim with the turtles today. Considering my proclivity to seasickness and my stage of recuperation from my recent surgery, I have decided to abscond and, instead, to take in the full brunt of another sunset from the deck all alone. Last night was another turtle watching adventure and I took part fully. Playa Ostional, the beach half an hour’s dirt-road drive crossing four rivers on the way from here, is the world’s premier nesting grounds for the Olive Ridley Sea Turtle. A huge nature protection area, the Ostional Nature Reserve, has been established by the environmentally aware Costa Rican government and we paid our fees and went with a teenage guide, Malaika, our fourth-grade granddaughter serving as our translator on this bit of ecotourism. The young man led us to the beach and easily located the huge turtles busy digging their nests or on their way out of the water to start the fateful task. The time that the turtles come for their egg-laying fest, known locally as arribada -the arrival- is not entirely predictable though it is somehow tied to the phase of the moon and to the season of the year. Major arribadas have already taken place this year. On those phenomenal occasions the beach gets entirely covered by the invading turtles, driven berserk by their maternal instincts and competing aggressively to the point of climbing atop one another in their mad race.

None of that for us though, our guide having to use his red-tinged flash light (regular light distracts and confuses the mother turtles and drives them back to the ocean, mission unaccomplished) to locate the dozen Olive Ridley Turtles we saw. We chose one that had already progressed well on her sand-digging task and stood around patiently to watch the magic process. In about half an hour she had finished digging a foot-and-a-half-deep hole by flinging the sand with her hind legs to the side. Now she finally balanced her egg-laden rear abdomen over the hole and proceeded to exude volleys of golf-ball-size reddish white eggs glistening with the protective copious antibacterial mucous that oozed in intervals. In about another half hour the arduous patient procreation process was completed with a total of several dozen eggs, perhaps near one hundred. The majestic creature then proceeded to cover the nest with the repetitive inward flipping of her hind legs in equal knowing consistency to the earlier outward directed flipping away of the sand. Soon the hole was filled and a small mound accumulated over it. Our queen then swiveled around, first in one direction then in the other, with forceful up-and-down patting motion of those powerful hind flippers, pouncing her whole bodyweight repeatedly in a sort of jumping aerobic dance exercise to pack the sand over her hidden treasure into as solid a state as sand on a beach can possibly be packed. The sand was then smoothed over to obfuscate any remnants sign of her nesting accomplishment and the clever thing moved this way then that way and back and forth well away from the actual site of the nest to leave evidence of her having visited the area at a distance from the actual treasure site, a clever and convincing camouflage to mislead the cleverest of predators. It was impossible for me as I watched this fellow creature not to read intelligent strategy, willful planning and comprehension of cause and effect in this presumed instinctive grand performance. In another few days the same mothering instinct will bring her back to lay another batch of eggs and thus redouble the chances of survival for some of her progeny. Perhaps one in a hundred of those buried embryos will survive to where, in another twenty more years, it will swim back to Ostional Beach in another procreational fest. As we followed our exhausted heroine shuffling her tremulous hind legs to push off back into the Pacific I could hardly contain my own sense of satisfaction and achievement for having shared the miraculous act of creation that I have witnessed. Not since I walked out of the hospital’s maternity ward on the eve of the 1973 war swaddling my hours-old child in my arms after having participated in his delivery have I sensed such a rich personal fulfillment and exuberance admixed with the vague sense of eminent danger.
******
‘Scholars also calculate happiness by determining “happy life years.” This figure results from merging average self-reported happiness … with life expectancy. Using this system, Costa Rica again easily tops the list. The United States is 19th, and Zimbabwe comes in last,’ wrote Nicholas Kristof in a NY Times op-ed piece about the same time we arrived here, few days into 2010. It brought back to mind a story from my village lore about a hapless man named Jebir. (That had to be his name so it rhymes with the Arabic word for ‘grave’ –Qebir- to facilitate the creation of a catchy phrase that makes a well-known local saying.) Poor Jebir led such a miserable existence, not a single bright day or a happy occasion, he decided to seek a new life in a different location. Any man worth his salt should be able to have a new start in some other corner of God’s wide lands. He packed some wheat bread dipped in olive oil and sprinkled with sea salt and an onion and hit the road in search of a better fortune with no specific location in mind. He went for seven days and seven nights till he came to a small town on the banks of a lovely river in a lush valley, a paradise on earth if there ever was one. He decided to seek his fortune in this locale. To start things right he did his ablution on the riverside and spread his white headdress on a green batch on the side of his new town’s cemetery. As he finished his religious duty of the morning he looked around and found that the headstones of the graves had a strange peculiarity: They all recorded the lifespan of the dead in extremely short periods: One of the dead was reported to have lived a year, another two and a third four or five years. No one had lived over the number of the fingers of your two hands of years. Jaber’s amazement was even greater when he saw the people of the town on their way to their farms or to the market. He judged their ages to vary, like members of any other community, from the newborn to the middle-aged and the few elderly. Failing to comprehend the mysterious contradiction he greeted the next man he saw with “Peace unto you” and asked directly for the explanation of what he had read on all those headstones. “Of course, that is correct. It is our tradition in this town to count only the years a person had lived happily.” “I see!” Jebir said. “I am new here. Should I die in your beautiful town, please let it be recorded on my grave: ‘Jebir, min batn immu lal-qebir’ –from his mother’s womb to the grave.”
No matter how you cut it, Ticos, as native Costa Ricans call themselves, are the happiest people on earth. It could well be constitutional, cultural or the warm weather, plentiful rain, fertile soil and beautiful beaches spanning the country on two sides, its Pacific and Atlantic coasts. More likely and quite in tune with my personal logic, it is the fact that the country had abolished its army and invested the savings in education. I haven’t met a nasty Tico so far, or a physically threatening type despite the abundant machismo demeanor among men; it seems to be expressed more in line with the virile natural abundance of the place than against other humans. The first contact ever that I had with a Tica, at the airport as it happened, she was extra friendly, apparently in an effort to make up for the immigration system’s technical shortcomings; the Christmas winds had blown the electric wires down and we had to wait patiently till they were fixed before we could be processed through. And it had to happen exactly as the lady inspector held my passport and was trying to ascertain that the youngish photo in it did belong to the aged specimen standing before her. I took the opportunity to rush to the bathroom and take off the thermal underwear I had donned earlier in the day in freezing New York. I came back and waited patiently, occasionally breaking the boring wait with tickling my little granddaughter and then glancing at the lady inspector with a friendly smile, proud of my happy relationship with the child. As the electricity came back to the excited applause of staff and travelers alike, my first Tico friend swept the electronic edge of my passport through her desktop computer and beamed a ‘Thank you and sorry for the inconvenience we caused you.” Then she leaned over with her rather hefty chest and whispered half secretly to me: “You have such a beautiful smile! It is good to welcome you to our country.” Then she got more personal: “And I like your thick moustache.” I wanted to tell her the explanation that my friend Toufiq gives for growing a thick moustache, but people behind me in the arrival line were pushing impatiently and I had to move on, incidentally negating the very statement I was about to make on behalf of my friend: “People nowadays have lost all sense of shame and propriety,” he thinks. “The only way you can get anyone to respect you is to instill fear in their hearts with the ferocious first impression you make on them, and a mean-looking moustache is part of that.”
The second Tica was no less friendly, a young receptionist at the Nosara Reef Hotel where we spent our first night. She enquired about my rather unfamiliar last name. I said it was the Arabic form for Canaanite and that I come from that part of the world. “My mother is originally from Lebanon. She speaks the language but I never learned it. Here is our home phone. Should you ever need a couple of dancer to liven up your birthday part, we would be happy to be your guests. My mom has taught me raqs balady –Arabic folkdance. And it never seems to end: Since I returned from my surgery in the capital, San Jose, everyone in this small community seems to have heard about my ordeal with a misdiagnosed (I am to blame partially) ruptured appendix that necessitated emergency air evacuation. The cleaning woman, the gardener, the clerk at the car rental office, the waiter at the internet café, the parking lot attendant at he Guiones Beach and the partner of my physician, all seem to know what has happened and to really care about my health. They greet me with a big smile, the men thrusting their clenched fist high in the air with their motto for all that is cool and worthy in Costa Rica: “Pura vida –pure life!” There is something endearing and quite telling as well in the physical statement one sees in every town, village and hamlet in the country: At the center of the communal life of each is the traditional sacred triad of a church, a school and a football field, always adjacent to one another. It beats the defining landmarks of the smallest communities I remember noticing in rural Wyoming in my two summers of rough-necking there as a college student: a gas station and a bar.
There is a certain softness about these people; the most muscular Tico, bare-chested and with muscle masses rippling underneath nasty-looking tattoos on his shoulders, and the most aggressive-looking Tica hussy, in short shorts and Bikini tops, turn out to be absolute softies the moment you ask for directions to the beach. “Latin countries generally do well in happiness surveys,” Kristof opines. “…Perhaps one reason is a cultural emphasis on family and friends, on social capital over financial capital.” I must admit to a twinge of jealousy at arriving in late afternoon at a neighboring location, Pelada Beach, to find a group of native seaside squatters, a half dozen young adults with few older people, lulling on the edge of the soft surf with children of various ages running in circles around them and an infant or two at their mother’s breasts. The idyllic setting and relaxed social atmosphere said it all for me. The only question that I had was what in the world were they all so intently chattering about? Surely not Obama’s recent state of the Union! Like folks back in Arrabeh, 80% of Ticos are construction workers, mostly unemployed currently. That helps focus topics of discussion closer to home.
The super-macho image society here maintains of itself didn’t prevent it from electing a woman president, the fifth female president so far. Contradictions seem to be the rule: In this most democratic and least corrupt of Latin American states, two ex-presidents are serving jail terms and a third has fled to Switzerland. The countries efficient railroad link between the interior and the Atlantic coast, hauling coffee and other merchandise from the countryside was simply abandoned and left to rust in favor of another president’s cousin’s trucking business. Or so another mild mannered Tico tells me. A Mexican politician reportedly explained it all in one wisecrack: “A politician who is poor is a poor politician.” When those Christmas winds caused another light airplane to turn around and leave after few failed attempts at landing, I joined my son-in-law on a drive to San Jose. The road to the capital, which houses half of the countries total population, and back was so over-choked by that president’s cousin’s fleet of trucks that it took us over twice the estimated time of travel.
In the capital I asked a Tico colleague who doubled as our guide to take me to see one of its many sprawling slum neighborhoods. He explained with dismissive and disturbing body language that those slums residents were all Nicaraguan refugees from the years of war there or current economic refugees. “They take advantage of our socialized educational and health care system. The moment they enter the country, legally or otherwise, they have automatic coverage. And look how they are dragging our entire welfare state down with them.” He proceeded to warn us against the danger of entering one of the slums because of the resident’s habitual criminality. Three times he promised to drive us through one and three times he reneged on his promise. It all confirmed the stereotype Ticos have of their less fortunate northern neighbors, a smaller and darker version of themselves. Nicaraguans are Costa Rica’s Jordanians in Israel, Egyptians in Jordan, or Sudanese in Egypt, a lesser and cheaper version of oneself. You can observe the same cascade of social worth and labor prices in South East Asia: Thai-Burmese-Chinese and the chain is probably longer for the knowledgeable.
******
A different issue now comes to mind: what difficult patients doctors themselves make. In my case it was actually out of my control. I did follow orders and paid adequate attention and fully trusted my physicians. It was more the attending staff’s own self-consciousness about their performance after they were told that I was a physician and that I wanted to know about every step and every medication in advance. It put a slight damper on their performance and led to some of it being a little clumsy. Laiali, my little granddaughter awaiting her third birthday in another week, was a little alarmed by her visit to me in the hospital where she couldn’t quite overlook all the tubes and catheters leading in and out of my body. Now, after the abdominal surgical wound has healed well, she seeks to overcome her fears by playing doctor and tending to my presumed abdominal problem as I lay in the hammock on the deck. She feels my stomach and proceeds to apply imaginary cold compresses all over it reassuring me that I am the best howler monkey patient she has. She then wants me to know that her cold compresses work wonders in helping to cure me. “These will stop farting too,” she assures me.
The perforation of my appendix apparently had taken place unannounced several days before I became fully aware of anything really wrong with me. Whatever it was, I managed to keep my panic threshold rather high: First, the afternoon before the night I became alarmed, we went to the local physician in Nosara where he (and I) had to rely on clinical signs only; in the present case those led us astray. I was subjected to an injection of a massive dose of a long-acting broad-spectrum antibiotic for a presumed kidney infection. My symptoms persisted and late that night I became certain I had an inflamed appendix, though I didn’t know it was already perforated. I made the diagnosis based mainly on my interpretation of the right lower abdominal pain associated with a certain movement of my right leg, the classic Psoas sign that surgeons look for, spontaneously elicited from within. It had woken me from sleep that night. Next Seth, my son-in-law, drove me ever-so-carefully in his small SUV over the 20km of dirt road to reach the paved road to Nicoya, the region’s capital. A perforated appendix tends to accentuate the gut-jarring bumps a passenger in an old standard-shift car speeding in a race against time experiences. Seth was anxious that a major bouncing on a rut in the road may well rupture my appendix, a development that could end in sudden shock and possible death. At the same time, any extended delay could well yield the same calamitous result. Weighing the odds of one disastrous development against the other, he tried to adjust his speed to match the condition of the road a few yards at a time. We finally made it just before dawn to the hospital at Nicoya where the sleepy staff made the right diagnosis. Surveying the seen at the hospital while awaiting the arrival of the surgeon, I was intrigued and charmed by the quaint and casual atmosphere of the dozen inpatients sharing the same open space at the end of the open corridor. I started considering which corner of the corridor would be the airiest in the heat of the day.
Only one factor made me finally opt for an emergency medical evacuation to CIMA hospital, a modern private hospital in San Jose: I couldn’t communicate with any of the bed occupants. And a slight doubt still lurked in my mind: I had undergone a hernia repair elective procedure some ten years earlier and I recall the surgeon speaking to me about the option of taking out my appendix while at it. I was convinced they had done that. My nephew, a senior surgeon in Germany was involved in the decision and I finally reached him on the phone. Though he had opted not to participate in my hernia operation, he recalled clearly that his colleague chose a surgical approach that didn’t allow for the optional appendectomy. This finally clinched the diagnosis for me. Seth accompanied me throughout the debilitating saga. He tried to keep a step ahead of the medical game by acting on his instinctive early panic leanings and by reverting to his I-phone internet connection and running simultaneous consultations with his infectious disease specialist uncle in NY and with my surgeon nephew in Germany. The surgeon chose first to perform the procedure through the less invasive endoscopy. When she realized the complexity of the situation, a well walled-off perforation of the appendix, she converted to an open abdominal surgery. Despite all of that I had no real early warning of what was happening in my gut. Toufiq, my friend back in Arrabeh, later explained it on the phone with a chuckle: “In some old clunkers the motor may well go kaput without any red light ever flashing on the dashboard; your fuses are all shot to hell already.”
Now, in retrospect, I am aware of another strange aspect of this potential brush with mortality, another ‘shot fuse’ phenomenon: I chat on the phone with a colleague back home and he expresses his longing and interest in hearing my ‘new outlook on life after the scary experience.’ Except that throughout the ordeal it never crossed my mind that there was a threat to my life: I knew what was happening and had full trust in the competence of those in charge of the system to which I succumbed. It never occurred to me to consider the alternative of a possible failure of the system, rare as that is statistically. It could have been happening to a total stranger and I wouldn’t be less concerned or uncertain of the outcome: A burst appendix that had to be cleaned up and covered with massive doses of intravenous antibiotics, a procedure not so unfamiliar or complicated once the underlying problem was discovered; it was the same if it were happening to me or to any other human. And it went well with no untoward delays or unexpected complications. Why would this necessarily inspire a new outlook at life still escapes me.