Carob

Mqiqa
September 1, 2008:
Summer is a trying season when it comes to deciding on the choice of fruits from my garden for breakfast. And whether to indulge my cholesterolophobia by skipping the couple of fresh eggs from my free range chickens. This year, for the past month I have been savoring the various fresh fruits added to breakfast cereal doused with a cup of delicious mqiqa. The problem already looming large on the horizon is how we will survive without mqiqa in another month when my carob ripens and loses the special heavenly, slightly astringent flavor of its unripeness.

For seventy years I had survived ignorant of the fact that carob is actually edible before it is fully ripe and its fleshy seedpods are totally dry. Till my octogenarian friend, Juma’a, Arabic for Friday, informed me about it. Last summer I went to visit him at home, to take him a bushel of carob as a gesture of gratitude for allowing me to take pictures of him and his wife in their traditional costumes, and to collect one of his handmade flutes, a gift he had promised me. He chided me for not bringing the carob a little earlier before it had fully ripened and dried up. As a young man Juma’a had tended goats in the Galilee Mountains before he joined the British armed forces. He still has his British ID card of which he is sentimentally proud. Showing it to me brought back memories of his days of youthful vigor and romance that spilled over into tales of wedding celebrations at which he played the flute to the accompaniment of the extemporaneous love songs of the prettiest girl in the village, now his old and weathered wife, Im-Mahmoud. Reverberations of the pleasant days of village celebrations accompanied the man throughout his life. Many years later, when he became a welder in an Israeli pipe factory, he had the chance to drill holes in lengths of stainless steel pipe and manufacture a plentiful supply of village style flutes. Now he gave me one of his favorites. Alas, I can’t whistle in its open end to produce the tunes.

Juma’a was my patient before I retired and turned my clinic over to my trusted namesake, my physician nephew. When he retired from the active life as a day laborer, occasionally a welder, and as a hobby farmer, abandoning both his welding skills and his land to his five boys, he quickly sank into the addictive lifestyle of a village retiree, spending most of his waking hours stretched out on his side on a mattress with his head propped up on his bent arm supported on a soft pillow or sitting cross-legged staring at the TV screen. The only interruptions were occasioned by an intruding grandchild, by the daylong well-spaced sips of black Arabic coffee, and by the five yogic exercises of prayer. Recently the wife of a retired fellow villager found him lifeless at mid-day still maintaining the classic reclining position in front of his blaring TV screen still clutching the remote control in his free hand. It brought back to Juma’a the classic dirge glorifying the hard life of toiling farmers sung by Palestinian rural women at funerals: “Mat wi-elminsa bidu wi-elbaqar yija’ar a’leh – He died clutching his plough and his oxen bleating over him.”

Shortly after retirement Juma’a started complaining of chest pain on exertion. My diagnosis of angina pectoris resulting from the narrowing of his coronary arteries was confirmed by a consulting cardiologist. I explained to him the basic anatomy underlying his complaint and the benefit of walking. I also put him on appropriate medications but these gave him headaches. So he went off his medications and started walking. He walked to the mosque five times for the prayers he did at home before; he walked to his land and interfered in his children’s less traditional cultivation methods; and he walked the dirt roads out of the village in all four directions. Soon enough he lost his chest pain.

Juma’a is not highly educated. He is functionally illiterate though he can write his name and read the Koran. He even makes out the headlines in the newspaper. But he is an intelligent man and has an analytical mind, albeit a quirky one. One of his most entertaining medical insights was about diabetes mellitus, a disease rapidly on the rise in the village in recent years. He made the right observation that diabetes strikes the better off families that could afford some semblance of Western lifestyle and Western diet. His first intuitive explanation was based on his limited understanding of modern technology and of electricity. He based this on his observation that most families afflicted with diabetes had indoor toilets with a water seal and a flushing mechanism. “It is all because of your fancy new toilets. A man with diabetes urinates in the toilet bowl and leaves it un-flushed. Another healthy man uses the toilet and as the flow of urine emanating from his body hits the content of that diabetes-charged bowl diabetes strikes him on the spot. And he takes it home to his family. Water is conductive, you know!” I took my time and explained to Juma’a the difference between electricity and diabetes. He argued back but eventually yielded reluctantly to my point of view. Then he came up with another explanation that I was less able to debunk and not so interested in debunking: “You notice that only the rich have diabetes,” and he proceeded to name the families in the village who have the disease. “These are the same families that bossed us around, we the poor of the village. They made our lives bitter and enjoyed all the sweet things in life. God is just. But He has no stones to throw at those who disobey him, as the saying goes. So what does He do? He makes those families’ lives bitter with excess sugar. God’s wisdom works in obscure ways, praised be his name!”

Then he went off on a tangent: “You wait and see. God doesn’t abandon his humble servants. If you are patient and do no harm to others, God will take revenge for you. What did we do to deserve the loss of our land to the Zionists? Look how they have driven us out of our homes in 48 and continue to starve us in Gaza and kill our children in the West Bank. God’s punishment is sure to come. We may not see it clearly. We may not even realize its purpose at first, but He knows what he is doing. Look at their dissolute youth! And at ours for that matter! When the punishment comes we too will suffer for our sins.”

On the occasion of my visit with my carob gift, Juma’a waxed nostalgic about “the good old days before the Zionists raped the wilderness with their settlements, barbed-wire fences, and cypress forests.” About his preference for the unripe carob he went on to explain: “The way we used to savor the early sweetness of the carob was to pick a few pods just as their green color faded into brown. The mountains were full of wild carob and we would be desperate for something sweet. Those were not days of toffee and chocolate and we would be hungry by the end of the long summer day. Early in the morning we would pick few unripe but sweet carobs and pound them with a clean stone on the rocks. We would put them in a container and milk a goat directly over the pulp, hide it in the shade of a bush, come back in the late afternoon tired and hungry, strain the milk with the corner of our shouras (gauzelike white head covers) and drink it with a piece of bread. You guys fret over your milk and cornflakes for breakfast. But you can’t imagine the taste of mqiqa with a piece of dry bread to the palate of a hungry shepherd.”

So now I do it my way, combining the old and the new, mqiqa and cornflakes. Often I add a couple of ripe figs though I like them fresh from the tree before I commence my daily gardening chores. Here too Juma’a’s traditional skills proved useful. One of the afflictions of the fig at the height of the summer heat is the tendency of the fruit to turn sour and rot just as it is ripening. The process starts at the tip of the delicate fruit where there is a tiny opening that admits the insect causing the damage. I had consulted with the expert at a nursery and he knew what pesticide would stop the infestation but gave me the wise advice to go natural. “You are not into figs commercially. You will always find enough healthy figs for your own consumption. So why use chemicals?” I certainly hope that the firm keeps him even if he dissuades customers from buying merchandise.

Then Juma’a came for a stroll in my orchard and saw the rotting figs. He rolled a tiny ball at the end of his gauzelike headdress, the size and shape of a Hershey kiss, and demonstrated to me what to do with it. So now every few days I spend an hour or two going around dipping a tiny cloth ball in olive oil and planting Hershey kisses on the mouths of the plump figs about to ripen in my garden. It works.

As a reward for his delightful tips I shared with Juma’a some of my learned acumen about carob: its drought resistance; the subsistence of holy men and ascetics on its fruit and hence its honorary name ‘St. John’s bread’; the use of its goat horn-like pod in ancient Egypt as the hieroglyph for ‘sweet’; and the ancient tradition of using its seed, the carat, as the weight standard for diamonds and gemstones and hence as the measure of the purity of gold. He wasn’t all that impressed. I have to come up with a more meaningful reward.

Rubb
October 24, 2008:
Earlier this month, as the azure summer Galilee skies began clouding over, Juma’a gave me another piece of advice: “You better pick your carob before the rains. Unlike its sister, the olive, the carob doesn’t embellish its fruit with the rains. Those plentiful sweet pods will rot on the branches if you don’t gather them.” On the spot I finished sipping the cup of coffee his unmarried handicapped daughter had made us, convinced my friend Toufiq to abandon the morning paper I found him reading and to join me for the ardent task of knocking down a dozen bushels of ripe carob pods off my tree. For two hours we balanced on its hefty branches, hung with one arm, trapeze artist-like, from higher ones, and swung with a stick in the other arm at the plentiful chandelier-like clumps of fruit. Then we descended to gather the several inch-deep dark brown layer of carob pods from the net we had spread under the tree.

You have to be gentle with the carob. By the time it has readied its fruit for the picking abundant bunches of minute flowers are already decorating its hard wood. Palestinian mothers ask a tease question to their little children that describes this phenomenon: “Shew hamli ow-mirida’a ow-tala’a a’jabal tidawa lalhabal? – Pregnant, breastfeeding and has climbed the mountain seeking fertility treatment, what is it?”

Way back in 1979, Didi and I, having already made our fateful choice of Galilee over Hawaii, started to build a permanent residence for our family on the near one acre piece of land on the then outskirts of Arrabeh that I inherited from my father. With a rough site development scheme in mind we started puttering around the still evolving structure of the house. Didi adopted a good-sized area on the sun-exposed south side of the house for her herb garden. Miriam Petrokowski, Aunty Miriam to our children, an expert horticulturalist provided advice, seeds and good company for Didi. Neighbors would look in admiration at the older blond German Jewish woman swinging a pickax with her one functioning arm and beaming her sunny smile at them. She and Didi spent as much time visiting with neighbors and relatives as they did gardening.

I had the lion’s share of the remaining space around the emerging house and planted a couple of seedlings of each fruit tree I found at the local nursery. As the years went by and exotic trees I planted, coffee, Mango and avocado included, succumbed to cold winters, I replaced them with more suitable and less demanding varieties. Eventually figs, grapes, pomegranates, and citrus fruits attained a majority in my orchard. At the edges I planted a variety of native Galilee seedlings: olive, oak, hawthorn, wild maple, pistachio, myrtle, rock rose, bay leaf, Judah’s tree, terebinth, and carob.

In our enthusiasm for our chosen rural lifestyle we even raised a nanny goat and built her a special abode that carries her name to this day. Then the animal proceeded to damage my trees and to bend her neck around and suckle at her own udders forcing us to overrule the objections of our children and part ways with her. Among the seedlings to which the nanny goat helped herself was the carob by her house. After the goat left us the carob sprang up again with two healthy new sprouts. I was delighted with this development and over the years took to cross-grafting branches from each trunk onto the other, thus making a natural ladder to climb up the tree. In due time, I added a well-camouflaged tree house to entice our grandchildren to visit us. And that is how Toufiq and I can now climb up the tree at a gallop.

Now comes the hard part: new technology. In past years I had neighbors collect my carob crop and received a share of the delicious and healing molasses extracted from it. Carob molasses goes well with many recipes for sweet dishes and it is the standard replacement health food stores offer for customers afflicted with chocolate allergy. It is an excellent treatment for mouth sores and is effective against diarrhea in children. I used to receive one or two liters of the stuff a year at most. Then I discovered a neighbor who extracts carob molasses for a living and I joined him in the meticulous process from beginning to end. I netted some fifteen liters. The others had been underreporting the quantity of produce.

That is not so unusual. I have grown used to a kind of overvaluation of my taste and financial means. After all, what would a doctor and his American wife need ‘rubb’ for? It is a traditional food item, not the stuff for educated palates. Besides doctors are well off and need not bother with cheap homemade items. With a similar logic, on the rare occasion that fellow villagers are willing to accept payment from me for a home produced item they often overcharge me; their gamble on me is always double or nothing.

This year I decided to do it on my own with Toufiq’s help. The plentiful crop needs to be crushed first. I remember my mother and two older sisters spending hour’s pounding the tough dry pods, looking and feeling like so many goat horns, in the stone pestle with the heavy wooden mallet, the implements otherwise reserved for tenderizing meat for kubbeh niyeh, the Middle East take on Tartar steak. But now the rubb specialist in the neighborhood has a mechanical crusher and charges little for the process. Later the pulp has to be washed and soaked overnight in water. Then comes the hardest part, squeezing out the sweet liquid to be boiled down into thick molasses. My mother and two older sisters would spend the whole day at this backbreaking chore. They would surround the family ‘lajan’, the wide, high-rimmed, round copper basin usually reserved for the daily chores of washing clothes and of kneading dough. Each would sit on a stone, bend down at the waist with her extended legs hugging the lajan from her side, and would commence mashing the wet pulp and pressing out the sweet liquid from it. We, the young ones, would hang around pestering them with our impatient thirst for the heavenly juice.

I would sit close by for hours enchanted as I watched my sisters constantly switching arms, alternating the hand holding fistfuls of soaked pulp against the metal with the other pushing down piston-like in a vigorous twisting motion to force the juice out. Mother would eventually excuse herself saving her energy for taking care of her baby and busy herself cooking the main meal of the day, leaving the more demanding task to my sisters’ better preserved muscle power. Every so often she would interrupt her own chores to come out and encourage my sisters to keep at it a little longer. She would repeatedly prod them on, addressing herself to God on their behalf with her favorite prayer: “Allah yirda aliku qad ma darro bzazi aliku – May God favor you in proportion to how much my breasts let down their milk for you!” What daughter could resist such beseeching especially when accompanied by a cup of homemade lemonade or fresh pomegranate juice? They would keep at it for a full ‘Arabic day’ – from daybreak to sunset. For days afterwards they would complain of sore muscles.

I have no intention of imitating my late sister Fatmeh or my sister Jamileh, now old, frail, and a citified Nazarene who smiles fondly remembering the good old days of strenuous daily chores, from gathering firewood to carrying water from the village spring on her head, not to mention the special ‘festivals’ of rubb making or olive picking. Twice when I travelled to India I brought back many a picture to share with sister Jamileh of Indian rural women still performing the same old tasks of fetching firewood and water on their heads, their colorful silk saris adding a romantic touch to their enslavement. She loved those pictures.

The rubb-making challenge has weighed on my mind the whole year since I made the momentous decision to attempt it myself. Last May in Hawaii I had an inspiration. We were invited to the graduation luau -Hawaiian feast- of Didi’s youngest cousin’s youngest daughter. The Girl’s grandfather, our ‘uncle David,’ was a marvelous handyman in his younger days. As a part Hawaiian, he excelled in making haupia, the delicious coconut pudding specialty that is a must dessert at all authentic luaus. He had made his own mechanical press for extracting coconut milk using a metal frame, a washing machine drum, and a car jack. I was fascinated by the contraption and took several pictures of it from various angles. The inventor was intrigued and I explained the cause of my interest. He offered to make me one. But with his stroke, from which he was still recuperating, I knew he couldn’t. Besides it was too heavy to carry back all the way to the Galilee. With the new limitations airlines have placed on luggage it would cost a mint.

Back in Arrabeh I showed the pictures to Toufiq’s son, Morsi. He teaches mechanics at a technical school and is clever with his hands. He volunteered to secure a copy for me. His father-in-law is a welder and has all that is needed in his shop at home. I offered to reward both with a share of the produce. The deal was sealed.

Last week Morsi informed me that his mother-in-law had let it be known that the strange machine her husband was working on should be finished by the afternoon. I readied my Subaru outback by putting down its backseats flat, picked Toufiq up and headed to Yaffa, their village on the outskirts of Nazareth. As we arrived at his front yard Abu-Ahmad was still busy putting the final touches to the mechanical press. We sat around sipping the compulsory freshly-made Turkish coffee and nibbling at a selection of seasonal fruits. Soon he was finished and proudly presented his new creation to us.

Abu-Ahmad is a retired welder, a little younger than our age. Toufiq and I had dealt with him before in negotiating all the social minutiae of the engagement and then the marriage of his daughter, Nidaa’, to Morsi. She is now approaching the due date of her first pregnancy, ready to fulfill the first major duty of a new village daughter-in-law, to deliver a grandson. On multiple occasions that we exchanged visits with the man we came to know Abu-Ahmad as the retiree with the diminutive stature and quiet reticent demeanor, slow of motion, deliberate of action, and always smiling. This time, as we caught him at work in his metal shop, he was a different man: vigorous, quick, almost feisty, a slight scowl on his face, energetically rushing around in his backward baseball cap and rust-stained blue denim overalls. He was in his true mettle, so to speak, a totally different man.

He apologized for the slight delay and proceeded to show us the details of his handiwork, reassuring us that the whole rubb production business was a breeze to him. After all, as a welder, in his younger days he had worked for years on the construction of the Elite chocolate factory in Upper Nazareth and therefore was familiar with the flow mechanics of viscous fluids, rubb not being much different from molten chocolate. Too bad the bastards fired him in favor of Jewish welders for the permanent maintenance jobs. Security considerations were given as the excuse. Not unlike Tnuva, the dairy industry giant that supplied some of its butter, milk and cheese to the Israeli armed forces and hence couldn’t employ Arabs.

Abu-Ahmad was adamant about refusing payment for his work. We eventually relented and offered to cover only the price of the materials he used. He still refused and now we owe him much in rubb when it gets made. We lifted the heavy machine to the back of the car and drove away with our trove. As we left Yaffa Toufiq half jokingly raised the security issue again: “This thing looks suspicious, too much like a catapult. What if there is a security check tonight, what if they have one of those impromptu checkpoints on the way home? If whoever looks in the car is Russian we are in trouble. An Ethiopian immigrant or a Bedouin would likely accept our explanation; they would be familiar with carob and homemade molasses. But a Russian immigrant from the city is sure to think we are on our way to a hilltop to shell the Haifa port, the oil refinery, or the armament factory outside Sakhnin. Let us change course and drive home by way of Eilaboun.” Equally in jest I explained that driving in that direction is even riskier. The munitions depot there is infinitely more sensitive and if a Russian immigrant soldier is to accuse us of a planned attack with our catapult it would be Israel’s atomic arsenal we would be accused of targeting. In a more somber tone I shared with Toufiq the assertion made in a detailed report by the Arab Human Rights Association of Nazareth after the 2006 invasion of Lebanon that our Galilee Arab villages have been deliberately selected for locating Israeli military installations, witness the above examples of Sakhnin and Eilaboun.

Fortunately, we traveled home unimpeded and my press has undergone inspection by dozens of curious friends and relatives, adults and children alike. I have emailed pictures of it to Hawaii with acknowledgement of the original patent rights.

Bseesi
November 03, 2008
Two days ago it was a balmy autumn day, sunny and warm with a cool westerly breeze. The first rain of the season had cleansed my trees of their summer dust while they still retained their green foliage and ripe fruit, and the wall of cascading red jasmine separating the center courtyard from the Saturday bustle of Arrabeh was still in bloom. Everything looked clean, ready and welcoming for the grand occasion. I started the morning with a freshly brewed pot of drip hazelnut-flavored Kona coffee, so appreciated by my expected guests and partners in the physically demanding and time consuming venture. Quickly the place came alive with the beehive-like spontaneous single purpose hum of activity. At its height, counting children, there were near two dozen rubb-thirsty volunteers scurrying around the yard.

Saturday is our official day of rest in this country, bracketed in Arab towns by Friday for Moslems and Sunday for Christians. Except that the latter two days are mainly for the unemployed and for those holding office jobs in institutions that have cut their workweek down to five days. The racially segregated geography of Israel, combined with its legally enforced status as ‘the state of the Jews’ has some peculiar side effects in our communities: Saturday is the day of rest in Arrabeh, a town of twenty thousand with no Jews residing in it, except for one woman married to a cousin of mine. Two other imported wives were rescued long ago by religious organizations committed to guarding the purity of the Jewish race, each leaving behind a brood of confused children. I know because I had to deal with the social and health consequences of the breaking up of the two love-based unions. To add to the confused community calendar, some schools take Saturday off while others don’t. There is hardly a family that has the same day of rest for all of its members. Still Saturday is the prime day of the week for weddings and festive occasions, and we chose it for our rubb-making mini-festival.

By nine in the morning the basic contingent of volunteer experts had assembled: Jamal, a school teacher and a former student of Didi’s, brought his mega gas burner and two large plastic containers; Toufiq, my buddy, came with a hydraulic jack borrowed from a mechanic nephew (We had already tried our press squeezing pomegranate with my screw-type carjack and found it tedious); Abu-Ahmad, the out of town press-making welder, and his wife came with a humongous aluminum pot in hand; and Imad, my nephew and gardening helper, arrived with his teenage son, the latter with shirt sleeves rolled up over well-formed bulging biceps. Soon the center courtyard was abuzz with the bustle of the experts each busy with his self-assigned task. The day before Imad had taken the carob for grinding and then we left it to soak overnight in two plastic barrels purchased for the occasion. After I looked for a barrel all over town and failed to find one, Imad found two at the scrap-metal dealer who scrounges for them among the refuse of a major soap factory in Haifa.

That left Juma’a. Two days earlier I had presented him with a sackful of ground carob. He doesn’t fit well with the younger crowd and I didn’t want to deprive him of the pleasure of reliving a day from his past. As we were working at our yard, I am told, he was busy at his. He had invited his four married daughters and they all went at it all day hand processing the carob.

Rubb news travel fast and some uninvited company showed up as well: Ali, an expert neuropsychologist showed up to lecture us on the neuropsychological (what else!) benefits of rubb and a second Ali, the internationally accredited movie producer Ali Nassar, came intent on directing; the action packed scenario had unfolded smoothly till he came and started bossing all of us around. I know Ali Nassar well and share some doubtful credit for his well-deserved prominence beyond the narrow confines of our community. Some three decades ago, while shooting his first film, The Milky Way, he commandeered my old Peugeot for the purpose. He could standup through its sunroof and film the Land Day Procession crowds while in motion. One night, high on the promise of success, he totaled the junky car. I had to buy another dirt-cheap car and register it in my name. Otherwise I would have lost the travel allowance for which I qualified as a government employee.

Ali proceeded to update me about his last film, one reverting to the glories of Saladin. He had been approach by the organizers of the Cairo Film Festival but they backed off because some Israeli fund is credited with sharing in financing the production. “Most Arabs lack the finesse to appreciate our struggle; for them it is all black and white,” he complained. I understood Ali well because I had to deal with the same curse in my NGO days. We struggle tooth and nail to recoup some of our tax moneys and to get a share of ‘our country’s’ centrally administered resources to be stigmatized for it by our Arab brethren as collaborators. I thought those days were behind us and we had proved our cultural and national separateness, both self imposed and state decreed. But Ali says I am wrong.

By sundown we had pressed the carob clean of its sweet extract and dumped the dry pulp on the compost heap. For the next four hours, we, the hardy few that persisted, were charged with the task of concentrating the watery extract, itself a delicious drink but too voluminous and susceptible to fermentation to be kept as is for long periods. For four hours we boiled, decanted and strained the slowly thickening liquor till it was just the right consistency: thick, heavy, and sticky. Then we left it overnight to cool. In bed, Didi, dead tired, decried the loss of a favorite caftan that she donated to be used for the final straining.

A byproduct of this last tedious process is the collected putty-like strained fine solid particles. Jamal, an intelligent, sensitive and adventurous man with past forays into Greece, Czechoslovakia, and Canada, leaving two wives behind him before he settled down with a distant relative for a wife and produced four handsome children, two of whom joined him here after school, reverted to the parsimonious ways of true rural Galilians. He encouraged me to save the muck and to taste it. It was quite tasty, not unlike soft chocolate. Then I had an idea: why not mix it with roasted sesame seeds and roll it into small balls? It tasted and looked just like Bsieesi, the sweet treat made by mixing roasted sesame seeds, rubb, and roasted wheat flour. Here the starch came from the carob itself, perhaps with some indigestible cellulose. We all know roughage is good for you. My new version of Bseesi went over well.

Khabeesa
Next morning, another perfect autumn day, the crowd, somewhat diminished in size and vigor, gathered again in our center courtyard. We had filled two dozen large soft drink bottles, one and a half liters each, with the thick molasses. Before we proceeded to divide the loot we sat to a tasty brunch: freshly baked flatbread dipped in rubb savored admixed with fresh olive oil and/or tahini.

Rubb and olive oil must have been the bane of the local cuisine for we still use the expression of ‘rubb ow-zeit, zeit ow-rubb– Carob molasses and olive oil and vise versa’ to express disinterest in any boring and tiresome repetitive act. Someone happened to use the phrase in referring to the banter of the impending local elections, thirteen different lists for the thirteen member council, while we were still eating. We all realized how absurdly jaded our elders must have been to trivialize such a delicious treat. Then we proceeded to debate when and where to meet next for making the even more delicious sweet dish, Khabeesa. Toufiq came through again with a local saying: “‘a promised bite is better than one already eaten.’ Let us put it off for a while. Let us not be such pigs! It is only in the West that people demand immediate gratification. And look where it is getting them. Look what is happening to their economies. We can wait. We will make do with what we have. We are stoic like the Chinese. If there is no milk they drink melamine.”

Toufiq’s cynical self mockery didn’t stop Didi and I from falling back on well-tried honorable Palestinian traditions; Of the eight rubb bottles that we were awarded, we kept one and the rest went to uninvolved ‘friends and relations’. We know we stand to win at the end: we are rewarded with a share of any dish the rubb goes into and of many other traditional dishes. Over time, it balances out to our advantage.

This morning it was ‘rub ow-zeit’ again. Not only that Didi and I ate that for breakfast, but also that the figure of speech came back to haunt us as the unending screech of Israeli jets streaming through the Galilee skies interrupted our intimate morning chat. It has become boringly repetitive. They have been at it all nightlong. Our skies are the regular pathway every time the Israeli air force decides to buzz Hizballah in Southern Lebanon, to blow up a suspicious factory in Syria, or just to bully the neighbors and threaten Iran. Or it could be simply maneuvers. Personally, I am getting bored with hearing the noise all nightlong and then waiting for the official interpretation on the news. Can my relatives on the other side of the border afford to get bored with it, I wonder.

With the tantalizing promise of Khabeesa we have come full circle. It all started with haupia in Hawaii and Uncle David’s invention for pressing-out coconut milk. I am not sure he will ever taste khabeesa, the very same pudding served at Hawaiian luaus except for the carob flavor replacing that of coconut, yet another feature shared by natives in Hawaii and Palestine.

I am repeating myself! Enough ‘rub ow-zeit, zeit ow-rubb, …’!

Mahmoud Darwish

Mahmoud Darwish

10 Aug. 08: Zhang Darwish

The sight was familiar: a busy nook across from the train station in a Chinese city with milling crowds. But the faces all had familiar Palestinian features which didn’t change their Chinese likenesses. And as we sipped our delicious noodle soup THE MAN came in and greeted us warmly. He was at once Mahmoud Darwish and Zhang Yimou. And I was comforted by his presence and warm embrace.

Gazpacho is one of my favorite summer dishes and Didi outdoes herself with embellishing it with local greens and spicy flavors. I can’t resist it though I am a doctor and I know the consequences. I have a serious problem with stomach acid and I normally avoid spicy foods late in the day. But gazpacho is too delicious. Toufiq, my best friend, came over in the late afternoon and for a couple of hours we trimmed hedges in the garden while exchanging expressions of awe at the Olympic opening ceremony we had watched together the night before. We marveled going over the details: the costumes, the spacewalk, the magic globe, the fireworks, the magic stamps, the new meaning imparted to body painting, and the scale of it all. And I related to Toufiq the privilege of having eaten noodle soup at Zhang Yimou’s favorite noodle bar. As we sat down to a bowl of gazpacho Didi helped me bring to life for Toufiq the production by the same magician we had seen in Guilin two years back, thanks to our hosts there, Michael and Limei. Then we raided the fig trees in the garden.

Shortly after sundown Didi and I made a courtesy call at my sister’s. We had missed the wedding party of her first grandson and we had to congratulate the newlyweds. Much as I resisted, I had to accept some of the sweets and fresh fruits offered. It would be too rude not to. They had gone out of their way preparing for our visit. They had set up an outdoor TV screen and a DVD player especially for us so we could enjoy the cool westerly evening breeze while watching a rerun of t the ceremony, the dancing, and the feasting that we had missed.

I had unreasonably overstuffed myself. Just as I was falling asleep the telephone rang. It was my nephew Abed. He wanted to share with me the sad news of the passing away of Mahmoud Darwish, the poet of the Palestinian cause, resistance and conscience. “Is that the closing note in the rhapsody of hope we all had dreamed of and nurtured in our hearts?” he wondered. Abed is another Kanaaneh with dormant literary aspirations. He worships Mahmoud Darwish and has memorized many of his magic lyrics. He wanted to come over to cry on my shoulder. I sought to console him on the phone with a list of the promising young Palestinian poets, not least among them Abed’s own up-and-coming poet nephew, Bashir Shalash. At the mention of Bashir’s name he sounded like he stopped moping and sniffling. And I managed to hold back my own tears and to doze off into fitful sleep.

Twice I got up to swallow some antacids. But the crazy dream would come back as soon as I closed my eyes: Zhang Darwish would come back too, all smiles and slurping his noodle soup with hearty appreciative little noises. But there were three little girls in the shop and they spoke of having a hidden atomic bomb. “We are refugees. Benny Morris invited us,” they kept saying. Mahoud Yimou tried to dissuade them from using their bomb at the demonstration they were heading to in his ruined village of al-Birweh. “Some one will belittle me for this. Israelis are clearing the cemetery in al-Birweh to put up cowsheds. They are disturbing the peace of our dead ancestors, fathers and mothers. And here I am telling the girls not to use violence in resisting the criminal acts. But atomic war is a crime too and you don’t resist one crime with another. There are a lot of flowers in the Galilee. Why do these girls not use wild Galilee flowers? Flowers are as powerful and more becoming for girls. Here in our Olympics opening ceremony we are using songs and flowers to soften the hardened criminals in attendance.”

In the dream when he said those words they sounded so much deeper and more eloquent. They were pure magic. “You must stop those girls from doing it. Have Abed and Bashir help you,” he concluded.

But the girls seemed unconvinced. Laughing coquettishly they ran out of the shop. As I got up to run after them I headed to the medicine cabinet for more antacid. But this time I didn’t go back to bed. I stayed up and wrote.

12 Aug. 08: Punishing the Cactus:

Gardening has come to be a part of my life at a level that I rarely comprehend. Earlier today, as I sat at my computer for my usual morning session of correspondence and of putting down in words some of my free floating anxieties, my mind kept straying away from the task at hand. I simply lacked the needed concentration and the will to perform in routine mode. Frustrated and distracted I abandoned my study and headed out to my garden still in my pajamas. On the way out I unthinkingly grabbed the Brazilian machete I brought home as a souvenir on one of my trips, not fully aware exactly for what purpose. I turned the hose on to drench the earth around my ancient olive tree, the second time I water it this year. It is well rooted in its new location already and over the period of two years I have weaned it from the initial twice a week watering schedule aiming to reach to its natural state of total dependence on rainfall only. I fed the cats and topped the water dish for the free roaming chickens I had let loose in the garden earlier this year as an added attraction in anticipation of the summer visit of my grandchildren. Didi has been bending my ear every day about the social life of the brood and the masterly performance of the rooster. I sprinkled a handful of wheat for it just to see again its mastery of the art of chivalry in calling all the lady chickens to come eat first.

Then I had my morning quota of figs from the tree and approached the long row of cactus. It has overgrown its desired double function of serving as hedge and source of delicious fruit. It stands nearly three meters high. I usually hack down a few high cactus leaves, enough for my daily supply of prickly pears. But today I seemed to savor the act of hacking down the hardy cactus fronds. As I proceeded with the vengeful act I found myself thinking the unthinkable: I should finish the whole hedge off. Its roots have extended far into the field and seem to be affecting the health and productivity of the neighboring figs. I should get rid of the whole thing and start anew in a different location and keep it constantly trimmed to size. Just by replanting one or two leaves and by next season they will bear enough fruit for us. I am having difficulty distributing the plentiful yield this year. Friends and relatives have stopped showing up to pick their share expecting me instead to pick it, clean it and deliver it to them myself. The hell with them all! I am going to cut it all down and free myself of the thankless task next summer.

It took nearly two hours before I stopped hacking at it. By the time I tired out I had a heap of mangled cactus about my own height and several square meters wide at the base. I was totally exhausted and dripping wet with sweat. I had cleared nearly half of the hedge. Only then did it dawn on me what exactly had I been doing. Many a time in the past, when particularly frustrated, I would take an ax to an old dead tree and strike at it till I could hardly move anymore. Once when my late brother and father figure, Ahmad, had a stroke and I, as his trusted doctor, couldn’t find a way of offering him meaningful help, I took out my electric saw and cut down some two dozen cypress trees with the excuse that they were blocking the westerly breeze from brother Sharif, my next-door neighbor. By the time I was done I had perfected the art of determining exactly in which direction a tree would fall and hence acquired the formal position of the neighborhood’s woodchuck. Ever since, my services are sought after by relatives and neighbors to take down this old neem tree without harming the house it shades or to cut that mulberry tree without ruining the chicken coop next to it.

But cactus is different. It, the olive and the fig are so hardily adapted to the Palestinian terrain that they have become landmarks identifying the sites of the hundreds of Palestinian villages razed off the face of the earth by Israel . It never occurred to me before, but it seems that faced with its failure to submerge this living evidence of its ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, Israel has turned around and decided to adopt it as its own in the image it cultivates of its native born sons and daughters as ‘Sabras’, Hebrew for the hardy and thorny cactus. It is as flagrant an assault on Palestinian culture as is its assimilation of our original fast food, the Falafel, as an Israeli innovation. Israel even tried to appropriate the colorful Palestinian hand–embroidered dresses as uniforms for its airline till some alert Palestinian raised objections through UNESCO, not to mention the ‘Hura’ imitation of the Palestinian Dabkeh.

Today it is Mahmoud Darwish I am taking revenge for. All day yesterday I struggled to take my mind off him and his passing away, off what a loss to the Palestinians, to all Arabic speakers and to humanity it was, and off what I could do to quell my anger about it. I had planned to travel to Ramallah to attend the State funeral planned by the Palestinian National Authority, the first since Yasser Arafat’s. I could join members of the Arab Human Rights Association who were travelling in a chartered bus from Nazareth . But would I be able to keep out of trouble should the Israeli armed forces stop us on the way and start questioning and searching us? Perhaps I should travel there the night before and stay overnight. But what would my presence mean beyond paying respect personally to the dead man. At least with the HRA, an organization to which I belong, we will make a formal collective statement conveying the message of our co-ownership of the man, a message of belonging with the rest of the Palestinian people.

I called Moslih, my nephew who teaches at Bir Zeit University, to see if he is travelling to Ramallah. He said he was not and that he had just written an explanation of that on his website. I visited Jalili48.com and was absolutely dumbfounded by the eloquent piece he had written in Arabic decrying the loss of Darwish in a very personal yet representative way of the revered image the man has in the average Palestinian’s heart. He ended with promising Mahmoud that, while his body would be laid to rest in Ramallah, he, Moslih, would be searching for the ruins of his home in al-Birweh.

I felt annoyed and frustrated at my inability to give expression to my own feelings towards the late poet, in the language he loved and lived wherever his exile took him. I speak and read Arabic fluently. But I never learned to type it. And I have lost the creative command I once had of literary Arabic. Linguistically I clearly resemble the axiomatic case of the crow that is presumed to have had its own satisfactory unique gait till it tried to imitate the enviable gait of the pigeon. By the time it accepted its failure it had already forgotten its own way and thus was stuck with the permanent wobble it uses for perambulating. The last time I wrote anything halfway intelligible in Arabic was in my last year in high school as a member of a circle of aspiring poets at the time. Two years later, lonely and disenchanted as a foreign student in Yankton College in South Dakota, I attempted to write in my mother tongue again. My poems were stillborn and I keep them till today as a memento of the loss of creativity I once had.

Now I don’t even have Arabic letters on my keyboard. Makbula Nassar, a fellow Arrabeh villager who made it into media circles in Israel through her twice-weekly radio program and her photos of the ruins of Palestinian villages on the back page of al-Ittihad, the only Arabic news daily in Israel, wrote informing me of the planned symbolic funeral to be held tomorrow in the cemetery of the poets ruined native village of al-Birweh. In passing it on to other locals on my list I felt the need to apologize for writing in English.

What a shame at a time when others are brandishing their literary Arabic skills in memory of its last great icon! To Arabs their language holds a magic power beyond comprehension. God himself offered them no proof of the authenticity of his prophet and of the truth of his message save for the miracle of the Koran’s Arabic eloquence, held by all believers to be beyond the ability of all earthly composers. I still recall to this day the greatest compliment that I ever received from a teacher on my own literary attempts which amounted to an admonition to stop imitating the Koran and develop my own ‘competing style’. Native Arabic speakers can be easily held spellbound by word crafters regardless of subject matter or content, a fact that gives a clear edge to poets and demagogues. But Mahmoud Darwish was an authentic literary innovator building on his early command of the language to promote shared Palestinian sentiments and aspirations to a global audience. With his wellspring of creative energy and provocative thought and with finely sculpted solid images of Palestinian suffering and incessant resistance he confronted humanity with the reality of its abandonment of its essence in our case. If Arafat embodied Palestinian resistance to the world’s revolutionaries, Darwish challenged the world’s collective conscience to acknowledge it. And his living images lost little in translation, evidence of their deeper human appeal in substance and not in style only.

I lasted for two hours of the hard physical work of hacking down the cactus hedge I had worked as hard to establish years ago and of carrying the loads at the end of a fork to a clearing in the orchard to be left there to dry out thoroughly in the heat of the summer sun before I can return the remnants to the soil. As usual for the whole period I had donned my radio receiver in the shape of a headset to stay abreast of world political and cultural events thanks to the BBC and to Monte Carlo. Suddenly I heard a news item that I comprehended. For two hours my thoughts had revolved around Mahmoud Darwish and what his death meant to all of us Palestinians and to our cause. I had not comprehended anything that I heard on the radio for the entire two hours. And now I did: Hugo Morales of Bolivia won a plebiscite about public approval of his presidency. Whoopee! I am happy for him. He is native like me. Fuck the conquistadores!

14 Aug. 08: A Galilee Funeral

Makbula’s idea had caught on. At four in the afternoon Didi and I arrived at the entrance of the industrial zone just to the east of the hill that once was el-Birweh. We joined the funeral procession by several hundred Galilee youth, in black and with Palestinian flags, that proceeded up the dirt road to the ruins of Darwish’s native village’s cemetery. I sought the company of Hanna abu-Hanna, himself a revered Arabic literary figure and a friend of the late poet. Hanna has aged into a shadow of his old vigorous self, now struggling to keep his balance as we wound our way between the strewn cemetery stones and the single barbed wire coiled randomly at its edge. Someone must have attempted to protect the venerable site at one point. Traditional Moslem village cemeteries lack the pretentious raised platforms and showy headstones inscribed with names, dates and prayers. The villagers seem to abide literally by the spirit of ‘dust unto dust’. Each grave is simply outlined by an elliptical row of fist-size local stones. No indication of identity or rank with the exception of a dozen pointed larger bare headstones, possibly attesting to a special status once had. The whole area of the cemetery is overgrown with dried and thorny wild grasses that made it that much more difficult for Hanna to negotiate. A few times some young person would offer his or her help. But Hanna insisted on struggling unaided, perhaps energized by the thought of making a last gesture to his dead friend.

To the south of the forsaken cemetery the skeletal frame of a new industrial-size cowshed juts out encroaching on the serenity and abandonment of the scene. At the far edge to the west are the stone piles and rock foundations of what once were the homes of Mahmoud Darwish and his fellow Birweh villagers. And further to the west are the modern homes and green yards of Ahihud, the thriving settlement that now claims el-Birweh’s very same space and attempts to erase it from living memory with telephone poles, electricity grid, a modern paved access road and a gated entrance from the main road further west. And further west yet is the blinding sheen of the sea, ‘Bahr Akka’- Acre’s Sea as we all once knew it, at the far end of the extensive Sahl el-Birweh, the village’s share of Palestine's coastal plane. The setting sun insists on making a point we almost forgot: This is a choice Mediterranean setting for romance, for a poet to be born, to live, to love, to procreate, to struggle, to die, and to be buried in an unmarked grave and missed by family and fiends. Where did Mahmoud go wrong? Where did we all go wrong? Damn the Zionists!

The empty coffin, draped with the Palestinian flag, was placed in a suitable clearing at the top of the hill in the midst of a multiplicity of unmarked graves, one stone-edged ellipse next to the other. The clearing is suitably demarcated on two sides by a hedge of thorny wild cactus still loaded with overripe fruit and a few hardy pomegranate shrubs with their still unripe fruit. A woman, shrouded in black, sat, cross-legged and leaning her head on one arm, across the clearing from where I stood and picked at the ground with a tiny stick, totally absorbed in her repetitive movement. Someone broke a small green twig with a shiny emerald pomegranate and placed it on the coffin. Others followed suit with lemon, fig and olive branches. Didi had brought a bunch of dried wheat stalks from a vase in our living room and we laid it on the coffin. The only flower he had ask for, were it available, was a Galilee red poppy and it is not the season now. So wheat, the second item he asked for, was right, though he wanted it green and we had none. He died unseasonably.

A child of seven or eight and several young men and women recited from Mahmoud’s poetry, a flutist played some sad tunes, Hanna delivered a moving eulogy and a young woman accompanied on oud sang his “Ahinnu ela khubzi ummi – I long for my mother’s bread” set to music by the Lebanese revolutionary singer/musician Marcel Khalife. Then she sang a Palestinian classic dirge about the horse returning home without its knight. That brought tears to my eyes as it does right now.

In hearing the young woman’s beautiful voice leading the many other young people who sang along I suddenly realized that this was my dream encounter with Mahmoud from a few days ago come true: No violence; just flowers and songs.

Benny Morris to the Rescue

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/18/opinion/18morris.html?th&emc=th

It is one thing to have the renegade father of Israel’s new historians spouting off standard war-mongering rhetoric; It is another thing to read his delirious thoughts on the op-ed page of the New York Times. And I have a theory about that, one nurtured by my own firmly established paranoia and conspiracy-based frame of analysis.

Benny Morris made his name on the strength of daring to expose the falsity of Israel’s previously internationally accepted claims of innocence in the 1948 creation of the Palestinian refugee problem. From the very beginning he faltered a bit and fell short on the honesty component of interpreting his fresh historical account, still allowing an escape route for Ben-Gurion et. al. by devolving responsibility for the war atrocities that drove the Palestinians out of their homes to the field commanders’ level. In recent years, as he saw the fanatical rightists’ light, he started to blame Ben-Gurion for not doing a thorough job. He ought to have completed the ethnic cleansing job, Benny now thinks, and driven out all Palestinians between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. That includes the disorganized group of near 150,000 mainly rural Palestinians who in 1948 became Israeli citizens. True, one quarter to one third of this minority was internal refugees who lost their homes, land and other property. And true the remaining two thirds have lost over 80% of their land to the holy mission of the ingathering of the Jews. Still their demographics are disturbing; they have managed to maintain their relative proportion of the total population of the ‘Jewish and democratic state’ and have even increased some. It is not too late, Benny and his elk now think; ways can be found to fix up the fateful mistake by population exchange, border adjustments and forceful persuasion. When the opportunity presents itself, the entire Palestinian population west of the Jordan River should be transferred out of what Benny thinks should be the minimal natural area of Israel.

Still the man is a recognized authority who has worldwide name recognition. So why not use him now to address the troublesome issue of Iran’s refusal to accept the American-Israeli hegemony in its neighborhood. A message has to be conveyed to the world, whither for short term tactical bluffing or as an actual warning of things to come. Iran has to believe that Israel will attack it and destroy its nuclear facilities even if that means unleashing a nuclear catastrophe on the world. That kind of message is too hard to swallow. So how does one go about getting it across with its full ferocity but without the expected world opinion backlash?

There is a well-tried method. It even has a physiological basis in nature. The good lord, evolution, or whoever designed the cow, has given it the ability to deal with the indigestible-on-the-first-round foods by regurgitation and chewing the cod over and over again till it becomes truly digestible. And that is exactly the way Israeli liberal intellectuals and media stars have dealt with another difficult-to-swallow agenda item that its policy makers decided on: transfer. It is a precedent in which Benny himself has taken a part, though it has been mainly a national level debate with limited international concern or participation. Yet it sets the style of how to go about making the unconscionable sound familiar and less resistible if not less repulsive. In my book of memoirs, A Doctor in Galilee, there is a brief account of this:

“September 5, 2005:

Things do change in this country, but not always for the better. By now, ‘transfer’ in its various forms – whether ‘population exchange’, ‘demographic security’, or even ‘development of the Galilee and the Negev’ – is an accepted part of the political discourse of all the Zionist parties and their leaders. It is part of the current political consensus, neither denounced by civilized people nor denied a central place in ‘normal’ news by the Israeli media. Recently a Palestinian child was shot dead by the occupying Israeli forces. His parents donated his organs to five different patients, including a religious Israeli Jew who declared that, had he known in advance, he would not have accepted an Arab heart in his body. The media presented the item as mildly humorous news, with barely a word of condemnation. A country that has elected Sharon, a veritable war criminal, as its leader and promoted him to the point where the most powerful man on earth, George W Bush, pronounces him ‘a man of peace’, does not have to shy away from policies that are crimes against human rights. Spin-doctoring – known locally as hasbara – is a highly developed art in this country, especially when dealing with Palestinians or when reporting to ‘our American allies’.

Let me explain again: Not long ago transfer was a highly negative term imbued with connotations of war crimes and gross human rights violations. It ranked in most people’s minds with such indecencies as ethnic cleansing and genocide. Till some of Israel’s leaders decided to agitate for removing the major impurity that had sullied the Jewishness of the ‘Jewish and democratic state’ since its establishment, the Palestinian Arab minority that has climbed to near the 20% limit that those leaders and their predecessors, including Yitzhak Rabin, have set for it. Suddenly ‘transfer’ appeared on election platforms of right-of-center Zionist parties. The left was outraged and the media, both private and state owned, made noises of objection. But they all engaged those ‘outrageous transfer-minded rightists’ in active civilized dialogue. They were invited to none-stop academic symposia and to open-ended debate forums on and off the air. Transfer proponent’s views were patiently listened to, analyzed and duly refuted by opponents. Soon you started to hear less convinced middle-of-the-road politicians, and even some of those counted as leftists, declare their objections in more understanding tones. Refutations were prefaced by such half-accepting phrases as ‘granted … but …’ or ‘assuming you are right, still …’. And soon the transfer parties were gaining high approval rates in public polls and doing well in local and national elections. The most outspoken ‘transfer’ party leader, Avigdor Lieberman, was invited into the coalition government and became a minister then a deputy prime minster. And the same transfer objectors continued to participate in the same government.

To fully appreciate the racist flavor of the Israeli mainstream’s cooptation by transfer politicians one has only to remember the loud cries of foul play and the louder denials of the taint flung at liberal leaders accused of consulting with Arab parties about the latter’s possible support of a coalition; not inclusion in it mind you! Just support from the outside. And every last one of them had to come clean on this one and show how distant he or she is from all local Arab politicians.

In no time we found the term ‘transfer’ entering the Israeli parlance as part of the daily verbiage of reporters, newscasters and commentators. It started to be window-dressed into something innocuous and acceptable such as ‘population exchange’, ‘border adjustments’, ‘assisted outmigration’, ‘the socio-economic push and pull factors of population dynamics’, ‘demographic balance’, … etc. etc. Hardly a decade after it all started, the storm was over and ‘transfer’ in Israeli media became a casual innocent term that raises no eyebrows. It is discussed in most circles only as a question of when and how, never if.

The well-tried method is a combination of two basic components: smooth spin-doctoring to camouflage the evil core of what is being said in such a way that it sounds vaguely desirable, and repetitively impinging the senses with it till it becomes familiar and you stop thinking about it when you hear it.

The current topic for obfuscation has added advantages in that the concerned audience is the general American public, the automatic guarantor of Israel’s superior moral rectitude. How many members of the masses in the west and especially in the USA, have the time for the luxury of giving Iran the benefit of the doubt or of engaging in some deep thinking about its affairs! The average middleclass folks can’t be bothered. They will not be easily sidetracked from the daily barrage of mind-gripping minutia from the sex scandals and financial embezzlements in Washington to the little infidelities or wardrobe secrets of superstars in Hollywood. And many are too busy making a living. So it is much more practical to leave worrying about the world to the better informed leaders who are elected and paid to do the job and to those suave experts at all the think tanks and their media conduits that never tire of picking their brains. All in all deep thinking about strange happenings in faraway places is best left for politicians and the media. The fact that groups with money and well-formulated political agendas can buy both genres and turn them into propaganda mouthpieces is too much of an insult for most to consider seriously. A vicious circle ensues whereby the bigger the lie the deeper the ignorance and the insult of facing up to it and the stronger the denial.

That is where Benny Morris’s services come handy. He is an automatic shoo-in, an already well-established credible member of the inner circle of Academia and Middle East expertise; he has name Recognition; like the great majority of Israeli academicians he must have done few stints in service to the Israeli defense forces; And he has what it takes in terms of deep mistrust, if not total contempt of Islam and Muslims. So why not have him pave the road in mainstreaming the idea of a nuclear attack against Iran? It has already been bandied around by Israeli top generals and politicians. It is time to air it out as part of the common secondhand ware on the media market; let people handle it, smell it, fumble it, and get familiar with it even if they were not to buy into it right away.

You would think that the editors of the New York Times would have the common sense to spot such foul intrigue and the decency to nip it in the bud. Here is a well-respected historian who dared to expose the lies expounded by his own national heroes. So committed he is to airing and documented the facts that he didn’t back down on consolidating impressive new evidence confirming the Palestinian narrative regarding their Nakba or catastrophe. Yet he espouses an immoral stand in full contradiction of the lessons his expose teaches. To any one with a minimum of logic this should have raised a red flag. It should have signaled either schizophrenia or the onset of senile dementia.

Yet neither is likely judging by the man’s cold logic; he is not totally off his rocker. Accepting his premises, which the New York Times seems to allow for if not to subscribe to, the conclusions he reaches are not ‘crazy’. Building on patently false premises he proceeds to speak approvingly of a nuclear strike against Iran as a preemptive option. Among other concepts, he mentions quite casually the prospect of “a ratcheting up of the Iranian-Israeli conflict to a nuclear level”, “an Iran turned into a nuclear wasteland” and “a Middle Eastern nuclear holocaust” with “radioactive pollution of the earth's atmosphere and water” being “in the cards”.

If the man is not ‘crazy’, then what explanation can there be for his delirium-like spouting off? That is where I revert to my well-entrenched intrigue and subversion theory: The man has been obviously put up to the job; someone is setting him up as an academician to chew the nuclear cod. People may object to what he says and will sound off their objections. But in doing so, they will be repeating his nuclear mantras, just as I have been forced to do here. Slowly but surely, the terms loose their abhorrent first-encounter effect; a disconnect sets in between the sound of the words and their deeper meaning. People all over the world, but especially in the West, get hypnotized by the repetitive sound-bites, especially as the concepts get sanitized into less offensive sounding terms, though that may come only after the fact. Whoever invented ‘collateral damage’ and ‘targeted elimination’ is capable of whitewashing nuclear terminology into innocent sounding alternative phrases.

It remains to be asked: Who may have put Benny up to this task? My guess is whoever put Bush up to invading Iraq.

So get ready for ‘Operation Maximum Middle East Peace’.