Faulty Design

Faulty Design

I am in New York with our daughter’s family for a combined vacation and treatment of a minor urologic problem. The procedure I am having is one for which Israeli physicians haven’t claimed priority and higher expertise yet. Whether it is weapons systems or high-tech medical gadgetry, we in Israel are used to keeping at the cutting edge of development, often by importing the parts from the USA at favorable terms, fitting the pieces together, then exporting the end product back to America and elsewhere. Trade agreements and dual citizenship machinations are such that the process turns out hefty profits and permits us to claim a front and center position in scientific and industrial development, way beyond our actual smarts. On this occasion, when I inquired about the new technology of microwave therapy for an enlarged prostate I was told that the one place in Israel that has some expertise in using this procedure uses equipment especially designed by and for Israelis. Recognizing my own questionable qualifications under those terms and wishing to avoid being experimented on by trainee prostate cooks, I sought to do the procedure here in NY.

The problem I have in common with many of my male cohorts is not as complex or mysterious as urologists make it sound. Basically it is a result of faulty design at source. It seems the designer was focused wholly on the new product and lapsed negligent when it came to the end result of utilizing this specific system over the useful life of the machine as a whole. Fresh off the production line and for many years to come, a man’s drainage system functions fairly well, better than that of the female counterpart for that matter. But as part of this intelligent design package, sex figures high on the list of improved functionality of the product. That is where testosterone comes into play, figuratively and literally speaking. And one of its unintended effects is that it pumps up the size of, among other things, the prostate gland, so much so that it ends up sealing the drainage system shut. Therefore the blockage has to be cleared away by scraping it with a sharp edged probe from inside, by buzzing it with a blue-light laser beam (don’t ask me why blue! Pink is definitely out of the question for this specific item) or by opening up your belly and peeling off the whole mess from around the discharge pipe. Then someone smart came up with the obvious solution of inserting a microwave-emitting rod up your penis and cooking your prostate to your plumber’s preference. Judging by the way I feel, mine goes for well done. And no, his name is not Joe! The advantage of this last procedure is that it doesn’t put an end to the co-functionality component, the sex thing.

The way it all came about for me was rather sudden: One day while sipping my after-dinner coffee at the home of friends in Nazareth, one of their children, a rambunctious four year old, suddenly stopped by my chair, poked me in the ribs and asked: “Uncle, how come your face is so pockmarked?” Before I could regain my equanimity and think of an answer he was gone chasing other children around the house. The question bothered me enough to excuse myself and go to the toilet where I could look in the mirror. And lo and behold, on close inspection the kid was right: blemishes of Senile Keratosis were all over the place, especially on my forehead. And the eyes informed of the same truth: For the first time I observed my Arcus Senilis, that darkened outer rim of the sclera that comes with old age, hence the ‘sinilis’ descriptive. It didn't look all that bad and I still recognized the image in the mirror as mine. But the terms, ones I had often flung casually as a doctor at other people, suddenly sounded awfully vulgar.

That night I didn’t sleep well, not only because of the shock of discovering that at age seventy I was getting actually old and starting to show it but also because of having to get up to urinate so many times. It might have developed gradually over time but I must have ignored it and tricked myself into accepting it as a variation on the normal. Till that night when it waxed pathological.

I recall the same kind of sudden awakening to my chronological age when I hit forty: That very same day I discovered a painful disfigurement on my foot, a bunion, and had to deal with hemorrhoids. And for the first time ever I felt short of breath running. I was born and brought up in rural Palestine where you run for your life from the day you stand up on two.

Faulty design is not the exclusive domain of the male of the species, mind you. The whole birthing thing, another side effect of sex, leaves much to be desired. The basic setup seems first and foremost to work to the benefit of the medical profession, witness if you will the terrible fate of so many women in the developing world who wind up with fistulas that leak out urine or worse, all the result of unattended deliveries. Why didn’t the creator, or Darwin or whoever is at the bottom of all of this, make little babies slip out early on and hide in a furry pocket on their mother’s abdomen?

If evolution has its way, at least Palestinian women are likely to develop a kangaroo-like reproductive system to avoid lengthy labor and delivery or even death at checkpoints. Evolution takes time but it seems the Israeli occupation will last long enough. And with the magic combination of American money and Israeli ingenuity we may start seeing experimentation with alternative evolutionary strategies such as Evolution on Demand and Fast-Track Evolution. Palestinians make the perfect species for such experiments: they look and act very much like humans, albeit a lower form of the genre; they have proven highly adaptable, witness how we have turned them all overnight into terrorists and suicide bombers and how we can set them at each other's throats at well; they have a fast reproductive cycle; and they are already conveniently in escape-proof cages.

On my way to an early morning appointment with my urologist I had to waste an hour. I went into a fast-food place and ordered a large coffee. Back in Galilee the same type of joint is the place where the well-off take their families for a treat. This one here, at the edge of NYU campus, is rather grungy and a little depressing despite the glaring music. As I sat watching the brisk human traffic I realized that there were a dozen more loafers like me who were seeking refuge from the cold. I counted five disheveled street people with their signal carts and/or backpacks and heavy coats. Three limped on canes. One looked around to borrow a pen unsuccessfully. My wife, Didi, finally donated to him one that was on the verge of drying up. He shook it to determine the level of ink and gave an understanding and forgiving smile. He sat down to his coffee, opened a torn bible and proceeded to underline every other verse with a repeated angry motion of his hand, nearly tearing the thin pages. He ambled to meet another street person, both with arms and necks heavily tattooed. Both fit the prototype of the army veteran who went off the deep end: middle-aged, bulky, white, broken and disturbed. They talked loudly, exchanged high-fives and slaps on the back, then parted before I had a chance to join them. I fought the urge to go over and let them know that I was their comrade, another misfit in this world, a Palestinian.

Another street person, black this time, walked out from the bathroom agitated and waving his walking stick in the air demanding to be given a mop to clean the floor. He insisted he had to do that because he himself was a janitor and had spilled soap on the floor. No one responded and he demanded to see the manager who waved his hand in a motion of dismissal. Eventually the cleaning lady, an Ethiopian-looking older woman, acceded and gave him a bucket and a mop. Later he emerged all smiles and explained loudly to his disgusted female colleague that he had jerked off at the wall and had to clean the mess.

The image in my mind of the American fast-food patron is that of an obese middle-aged person. Yet at this early hour the over one hundred customers that streamed in and out as I observed the scene from where I sat were mainly thin young people, mostly college students on their way to class: whites, blacks, Hispanics and Asian of all shades of color and slant of eye. The fat ones sleep late, it must be. One young Arab boy (perhaps he was Mexican, or he could have been Italian or Indian or Native American, or …) walked over with an endearing sway to the booth across from me with his breakfast roll, earrings, and ready smile every time our eyes met. A second beautiful smiling youth, a woman with West African broad features, ripe apricot skin, big expressive black eyes, and thick succulent lips completed the picture that epitomized to me the hidden potential of the whole human conundrum of New York: varied, cosmopolitan, youthful, full of promise, and potentially Palestine-friendly.

On the way back, having had my indwelling catheter removed after four days of feeling tethered from inside my gut to a heavy iron ball, I felt light footed, free and elated. The sun was shining warm and the Greenwich Village streets were full of smiling beautiful people. I kept thinking: ‘Wow! Have they all had their catheters removed?!”

Later in the day we went to the Chinese dumpling joint two blocks from my daughter’s house. Two years ago when we first found about it, it was a tiny hole in the wall with half a dozen cooks behind a counter that admitted one customer at a time. A line would form all the way out on the street for the dozen varieties of dumplings, sesame pancakes and soups, all prepared fresh as you waited. Despite its space limitations, Vanessa’s Dumpling House has been written up many a time in the New York Times as the place to quell one’s Chinese food longings at affordable prices. Now it is a big hole in the wall with the same half dozen cooks with knives and ladles still running every which way in the crowded space behind the same counter, a scene not unlike a public row in a third-world setting with machetes and sticks. But the customers now have a narrow wooden seat against the wall and a row of small tables to sit and wolf their chow down. Didi and I lucked out as another couple left their seats just as the cashier, who now pokes her finger at Chinese characters on a computer screen instead of writing on brown paper sheets, called our order number, one in the middle hundreds.

Half-way though savoring my soup some of the delicious liquid went down the wrong pipe engendering a cough-spasm that made some thirty heads turn and stare in alarm. Fortunately I quickly snapped out of my respiratory crisis. Now you tell me if it is the best design to have two passages, one for swallowing and the other for breathing, cross on their way down! Wouldn’t it be safer to have one’s nose under his mouth and have the two pipes completely separate? Esthetically, for people like me it should work well. For the two years that I was engaged to my half-Chinese wife, the only grudge her family held against me was on account of that prominent organ “sitting right in the middle of his face.”

Obama the Bedouin

October 30, 2008:
Nowadays things change fast, so much so that some worry we may be at the verge of bringing about our own demise as a modern civilization. That doesn’t keep me awake nights. I suspect that I may well be comfortable living in a cave. Recently I was delighted to discover a direct link, culturally and emotionally if not even genetically speaking, to some ancient folks. When I read in Wikipedia that the carob seedpod was the hieroglyphic for sweetness, I could easily identify with that at the gut level and a tender sentiment toward the Pharaohs tugged at my heart. I have a carob tree in my orchard and I know how sweet it is.

Admiringly, I was reminded of the oft-repeated Palestinian saying used in chiding fellow Arabs and the rest of the world for not daring to stand up to Israel’s aggression against them: “They asked Pharaoh who made you such a despot? He gloated: I practiced despotism and no one stopped me!” In the local slang, what makes the phrase roll off the tongue easily is its catchy repetition of one word. The two verbs ‘to make a despot’ and ‘to practice despotism’ are both direct derivatives of the name ‘Pharaoh’.
So, you see, I have a connection to the ancient Egyptian monarchs. I even have a friend named Ramsis in Hawaii .

But this is tedious stream of consciousness stuff. What I wanted to talk about is change, not continuity. This morning I woke up to the peculiar realization that we have come a long way in terms of the accessibility of world news. As soon as I made my morning cup of coffee and turned my computer on, I could instantaneously access news about the whole world. That may sound like an empty cliché. Except that for a ‘has-been’ like me where we have been matters no less than where we are now. I remember the days when a dozen or more grown relatives would be gathered at the edge of the Kanaaneh neighborhood of the village, in front of al-Zawieh –the clan’s guesthouse and gathering point, one of them with a newspaper in hand, all waiting for us school kids to come home and read the news for them. Then in 1948 refugees from the city brought a radio to the village. (I better watch out: Someone is going to claim that I said that the driving out of the Palestinians from their cities had a salubrious effect on their country kin; It could even be claimed that I implied that villagers greeted departing refugees, and especially their pursuing Zionist forces, with flowers because of the civilizing impact the process of cleansing had on them. If you think that is too much of a stretch of the imagination, let me remind you that you have swallowed equally valid fibs, spun out in your media into historical fact, for decades. Remember the ‘land without people’? That is where I lived!) Later, in 1970, when I returned from my medical studies in the USA, I found that my entrepreneurial older brother had bought a TV set and was still charging fellow villagers for watching the news or the Arab version of a chick flick, mostly inane narratives manipulated to allow Fairuz, and several other temporary competitors, to sing. She is still at it today and I worship her heavenly voice especially when she sings for Jerusalem and Palestine.

Then came personal computers and the internet and I started wallowing in its endless recesses. This morning the internet offered more news of change, not all for the better though all in the best tradition of democracy: At the height of the presidential elections mania in the USA, while my eight-year-old granddaughter is stomping with her father in rural Pennsylvania for Barak Obama, I am openly maligned for being who I am and for having been targeted for elimination by Zionism and resisting it. Good old McCain interjects with an accusation of treason directed at his opponent for having once associated with Rashid Khalidi, a recognized academician and authority on the Middle East whose undoing in McCain’s eyes is his justifying of Palestinian resistance to Israel’s occupation. Imagine that! A Palestinian who dares not accept Israeli occupation! A terrorist by definition! No wonder Palin spins the accusation a wee bit further and has Obama ‘palling with terrorists’ though Rashid is only implied indirectly. It pays to bash Arabs and with a name like Hussain, Obama is obviously one of them. McCain tries to deflect the blow with sweet civility: “No, ma'am. He's a decent, family man!” a classic ‘uthrun aqbah min thanb – an excuse uglier than the sin itself.”

I know and respect Prof. Khalidi. He wrote a blurb for my book which is the kind of damning evidence the crazies marshal against him. His intellectual and academic clout is way above needing to be defended by the likes of me. You don’t land a position like the Edward Said endowed chair at Colombia accidentally. My daughter got her doctorate there and I am familiar with their opinionated rigor. Looking at things from that narrow perspective, I am tempted to accuse Rashid of colluding with the enemy.

But enough of the silly pander! Prof. Khalidi is secure enough in his convictions not to argue back with his detractors. He is dismissive of the humdrum revile and I accept and honor his decision. What I am dealing with here is my own dilemma: how am I to keep my focus and balance in the topsy-turvy world in which I find myself? Not only that I keep observing solid basic facts turned on their head but also that it is happening at a dizzying speed. It was only yesterday when liberation movements, the PLO included, were glorified as inspirational standard bearers of the struggle for human dignity and freedom. Then a certain CIA trainee splits off from the pack and hits his masters hard in the stomach and in the pocketbook. And his family’s friend and business partner gets angry and lashes out at all those with the same shade of color, style of dress, and form of worship. He, the world’s only remaining heavyweight, refuses to define his terms, or perhaps he doesn’t comprehend the terms formulated by his neoconservative Zionist and fundamentalist Christian operators. Then Sharon , the Israeli nationally and internationally acclaimed war criminal, Mr. Bush’s own ‘man of peace’, sees an opportunity and sneaks into the command tent with the declared goal of maligning the Palestinians. Overnight we all become terrorists. Even I, a chicken-hearted Americophile, get caught in the net as a potential terrorist and am interrogated for hours at airports.

Like shit, rapid change happens, sometimes in undesired directions. It was only yesterday when a famed actor played his bit part shouting at an opponent “Mr. President, tear that wall” and biblical Jericho -like the wall shook and came tumbling down. The whole world fell in line and a new ice age of unipolar magnetism ensued. Then a Hebrew-speaking Georgian leader and his Israeli trained top general decided to play hardball with their former oppressors. Russia hit back hard and overnight the world was jolted into its former bipolar self. Hooray for Saakashvili!

And it is not only time that has contracted down, time-lapse-photography-like. Space has also collapsed down on itself as well: I travel to the far corners of the earth, from Brazil to China, and am greeted and regaled as another welcome member of the species, albeit with money, to return home and face biblical-era tribal exclusionism. The looks on the faces of immigration officials at the airport as they peer into my passport and recognize my Arab name tell me that I am still considered a threat to the peace of the only country in which I ever had citizenship, simply for being racially different. ‘My’ country’s policy-makers, most of them born abroad, consider me a ticking time-bomb, an undesirable contaminant of their Zionist-inspired racially pure dream society, a Jewish state, pure and simple. Their inspired leaders have bickered for decades over what limit to set for my demographic proportions, anywhere from the zealot’s zero tolerance preference to Rabin’s liberal 20%, tops, which we are rapidly approaching. Professors theorize, civic leaders hold public debates, and the media goes into a tizzy over my un-abating natural increase rate.
“We should have stayed in China ,” I tell my half-Chinese wife.

The debate dominates the ether waves and all public discourse except when other existential threats, such as Iran secretly seeking nuclear parity with us, take hold of our attention. How can we stop ‘our Arabs’ from naturally expanding their numbers without taking the drastic measures expounded by extremist proponents of forced mass castration? Educate their girls; differentially promote family planning to their women; annul their family unification rights; encourage their youth to seek a better life abroad? We have done all of that and they are still outpacing us demographically. Better yet, work on your side of the equation; increase your own people to beat them in the numbers game; bring in the Jewish masses from Russia and Ethiopia, even if admixed with Christian impurities.

07 November 2008
Change happens in the USA as well. The Obama mania is global. He caught all of us off guard and in a mood to celebrate; we all needed an excuse for a party, ‘siba limisiba’ as we say here in Hebrew. My daughter in New York had a party at her home with some sixty celebrants, mostly expats without the right to vote in the first place. But Malaika, my eight year-old granddaughter and her father had volunteered in the Obama election campaign and they deserved to celebrate the success of their efforts.

And celebrations are everywhere. This morning I received a call from Ibrahim, my Bedouin colleague, seeking an expert opinion on a minor public health issue he faced. He opened with a reproachful tone of voice:
“Why haven’t you come to congratulate me?”
“What is up? Another promotion or a new child?”
“Noooo! Haven’t you heard? The Americans have elected a Bedouin to the White House!”
He then proceeded to explain that the Hujirat tribe in the village of Beir el-Maksour has thrown a big party, feasting on rice and mutton, celebrating all night with songs and Dabkeh dance, and distributing sweets to well-wishers for the past two days. Obama’s great grandmother on his father’s side, they claim, was a daughter of the tribe. My informer reports that one of Obama’s acclaimed tribal granduncles was interviewed on the Israeli Arab language TV news. When asked why he didn’t divulge his kinship secret earlier, he replied in Hebrew: “I didn’t want to influence the outcome of the elections in a foreign country,” implying somehow that it would have worked to the disadvantage of McCain, Israel’s favorite.

I am not sure how much trust to put in this far-fetched story, and who in the tribe invented it. Manipulation and hidden scheming is a well-known Bedouin trait, if not a trait of Palestinians in general and perhaps of all Arabs. (Stretch that out another notch and it becomes a basic human trait, which is not far from the truth!) Some member of the Hujirat tribe stands to benefit from the rumor.

Early in the first decade of Israel’s existence, the movement of this semi-nomadic group with their extensive goat and cow herds in their traditional grazing lands in lower Galilee Mountains was curtailed and they were concentrated in the newly created village of Beir el-Maksour. Quickly their men were recruited into the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF, years before Palestinians coined the alternative term IOF = Israeli Occupying Forces) serving mainly in the Border Police as trackers, a cushy job by Bedouin standards. One of their tribal leaders was catapulted by Ben Gurion’s labor party, (Mapai) into big time politics as an ‘elected’ parliament member. It worked to the benefit of all concerned: He and his likes collected fat salaries and were regaled with accolades and gifts by fellow members of the Palestinian minority seeking protection from the excesses of the Israeli military government and tax collectors; the Mapai party could count on their illiteracy and uninformed automatic support in close parliament votes even when dealing with extending the mandate of the military rule over the Arab minority or with expropriating their land; and Israel could brag in international circles about its liberal democracy and egalitarian treatment of its ‘Moslem, Druze and Christian’ (never Arab or Palestinian) minorities, witness their representation in the Knesset (parliament).

What I tried to understand from my colleague was who stands to benefit from this rumor? It has to be the twisted connivance of a sick mind for some imagined personal gain. Does one of their current chiefs aspire to become Obama’s advisor on Bedouin affairs, or perhaps even on tribal affairs including those of Native Americans? If I am not mistaken such a position exists at the prime minister’s office in Israel. And Israel sets the standard for the USA and trains its emissaries to the Middle East, especially armed ones. The place is full of Bedouins and the USA is not about to abandon Arabia’s resource-rich deserts. So why not create such a post for the US president?

I am reminded of the claim made by the sheikh in one of the Palestinian villages in the Triangle region of Israel back in the nineteen fifties when I was still in high school. It was rumored then that the great Italian actress, Sophia Loren, had been raised as an orphan in an Italian monastery. The sheikh claimed that he also grew up as an orphan though he was raised by relatives. His younger sister, Safyieh, was taken in as an orphan by a charitable order of nuns from Italy and he had never heard from her since. This was long before DNA testing was developed. But the clever man could prove his claim beyond doubt: “Let me meet her once and I can prove it to you. My sister Safyieh had a distinctive birthmark on the inner aspect of her right thigh.”
To us in high-school, sexually deprived teenagers bubbling with excess testosterone, the sheikh’s motives were obvious.

A Friend's Reading of My Thoughts

The following comments were presented together with oral presentations by two other reviewers on the occasion of the launch of my book in Ramallah. It is posted here for the benefit of those who missed the launch.
Enjoy,
HK

Comments on Hatim Kanaaneh’s book A Doctor in Galilee: The Life and Struggle of a Palestinian in Israel. London: Pluto Press, 2008

Khalil Nakhleh

Ramallah, 5 Nov. 2008

Allow me first to contextualize my comments, briefly. Hatim and Didi are our personal friends, with whom we socialize, whenever we have the chance, and share our passion for gardening and preservation of nature. I came to know Hatim in the context of mustering funds for the work of the Galilee Society in which, as the book shows, he was fully immersed, professionally, passionately and politically. I was in Geneva then; he was between Arrabyeh and Rameh. Later, Lois and I got to know Hatim and Didi as friends.

This is a rich ethnographic and experiential narrative of local village culture, Hatim’s own village, culture and society. It is documented with immense passion, sensitivity, worry and a high level of personal doubt and torment. This is a narrative of what anthropologists dub as “little culture”, distinguished that is from “big culture”, or systems of beliefs, values, political economic structures, etc. Hatim does well in focusing on the “little culture”, and alludes to the rest.

At the political level, Hatim’s memoirs are an indictment of the racist system in Israel, by allusion. However, as the narrator progressed towards the conclusion of the narrative, and under the cumulative weight of racist and overtly discriminatory practices by the Jewish Zionist system towards the Palestinian Arab minority, his “allusions” became more pointed, clearer and less ambiguous, which led him to conclude (on p. 255): “I find myself needing to shake myself violently to snap out of the hypnotic trance I have been lulled into by all the sweet talk of coexistence—our coexistence as the lesser partner in the ‘Jewish first’, meaning ‘Jewish only’ democratic state”.

Since I accepted to comment on Hatim’s book, based only on the initial reading of small parts of it, and since I finished reading the whole book, I debated with myself on how to proceed. At first, I could not resist the temptation to expand, and attempt to put flesh on, the political allusions that abound in the book, at the risk of diverting the listeners from the richness and complexity of the “little culture” of which Hatim’s book is an invaluable record. However, following my wife’s insistence, I consented to divert my focus, without abandoning it.
Hatim’s memoirs urged me to frame the overall context by posing two interrelated questions to which Hatim alluded in the book: (1) what does it mean to be a Palestinian Arab in Israel? And (2) What does it mean to be a part of an indigenous minority that is a remaining fragment of the Palestinian people, living in a country—Israel—that is directly responsible for this historical evil?

By focusing on the “little culture”, Hatim addressed various, intermingled elements that could constitute the answer to these questions, for example:

 By putting together the various comments he makes about land, you start feeling and smelling the land, not as an abstract concept, but as a living thing, interacting with its people and they with it. You start feeling it as the anchor of subsistence and steadfastness, and as the keeper of its peoples’ history. It is symbolized by the olive trees, or, more accurately, by the “ancient olive tree” that graced the entrance to Hatim’s and Didi’s yard, which became the headpiece for their friends and relatives to come and visit, and which had to be protected from the evil eye of “jealous admirers” (p. 258).

 Reading one episode after another, you get a “real time” feeling what a traditional Arab extended village family, planted in its land for generations and solidified through history, is, how it works, and how it is lived and living. In one of the entries Hatim records: “Today I visited my old cousin, Abu-Faisal, who is the nominal head of the Kanaaneh clan though he has little actual influence these days. Every morning he still prepares a new pot of black Arabic coffee and sits in the clan’s traditional guesthouse or diwan, al-Zawieh, handed down since my grandfather established it. He shares his coffee with his daily circle of visitors, his elderly friends, and with the occasional passer-by …”(p 31-2).

 Village ethos, with all its stereotypes and blemishes, jumps at you from Hatim’s memoirs: “The residents of Sakhnin, Arrabeh’s larger neighbor, are known for taking much pride in their village. … In the Galilee, frictions between Sakhnin and Arrabeh are legend. Sakhninis look down on us for lacking both valor and the traditional Arab generosity when receiving guests. In return, we find them haughty and contentious. Their men strut around, noses in the air and head dresses … tilted to the side, walking in the middle of the road with an obvious chip-on-shoulder demeanor” (p. 88-9).

 At the personal level, Hatim’s narrative is very open. He takes you deep inside of him in his recurrent doubts, fears and worry … his constant vacillations between being back in his village and being in Hawii drawn by the spell of its beauty and the warmth of Didi’s family, and running away from the discrimination that the Jewish racist system practices against non-Jews.

Some concluding remarks

Upon finishing reading Hatim’s memoirs, I felt more compelled to draw these memoirs to their logical conclusion, by answering the two questions posed at the onset of these comments, namely, what does it mean to be a Palestinian Arab in Israel? And, what does it mean to be a part of an indigenous minority that is a remaining fragment of the Palestinian people, living in a country—Israel—that is directly responsible for the historical evil that transformed us into a minority?

In his introduction to Fouzi El-Asmar’s book “To be an Arab in Israel” (1975), Uri Davis wrote: “To be an Arab in Israel is to confront a political reality which excludes a priori … equal participation of non-Jews, first and foremost, the native population of the land: the Palestinian Arabs. To the extent that the state is Jewish it must deny equality of economic, political and national rights from its native non-Jewish population. It is not incidental that to be an Arab in Israel is to be thrown into the shadow either as a refugee or as an internally colonized, materially and culturally disinherited ‘Arab minority’” (p.5). This applies, of course, across the national board, to all of us, whether one is a “doctor” or not.

The only future for us, as an indigenous national minority, where we can exercise our inherited basic human rights, and where we can achieve true justice and equality, is to regain our status as a part of our national majority, in historical Palestine, after the dismemberment and dissolution of the Zionist racist system. Our future, as a national minority in our land, and as part of the Arab nation, is organically connected to the future of the Arab nation, and to the entire Palestinian people—the communities in the West Bank and Gaza, the refugees, and all those dispersed throughout the world; and it has to be realized in a democratic society in historical Palestine, where we would be ready to co-exist with non-Zionist Jews. Deconstruction of the racist Zionist-Ashkenazi system is a precondition for such a just solution. The existing Israeli system is, by definition, racist, exclusivist, and inherently and structurally incapable of providing justice and genuine equality to our people.

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, …’!

Walls of Separation, Physical and Mental

September 5, 2008:
I have just emerged from a week-long frustrating experience. It was exhilarating to spend the week in the company of our good guests, friends to whom we owe much. Yet now I am left with a certain bitter aftertaste of disappointment. I am battling an inner feeling of guilt and shame at having failed to communicate to them adequately ‘the whole truth’ about ‘my’ country

For a week Didi and I hosted Michael and Limei, the ambitious young Chinese couple who had spoiled us in China a year ago. Their intelligent two children accompanied them and we wanted to show them all the significant highlights of the Holy Land. In the last few years Limei has joined a Chinese Christian sect and we wanted to hit the main Christian sites for her benefit: Nazareth, Jerusalem and Bethlehem. This in addition to introducing them to my extended family, to Arrabeh, my village, and to the Galilee, especially since Limei has read my book of memoirs, A Doctor in Galilee, and is considering translating it to Mandarin.

And I had to set time aside for teaching the kids manqala, the two-player board game based entirely on arithmetics that Arab traders took with them everywhere they went. Village old men while away much of their time dealing fistfuls of pebbles around the 14-hole board, their silent concentration amplifying the mysterious tick-tick-tick playing out of their precisely calculated strategies. After the two warm-up rounds, ten-year old Marc beat me in enough consecutive sets that I quit.

The cultural distance between Arab Galilee and traditional China is vast. Yet rural farming communities the world over share many comparable basic experiences and attributes. Michael and I come from similar poor rural roots and share similar backgrounds and common attitudes. Even Limei, who comes from a better-off background, shares the respect the poor of the world show for items of sustenance, bread and water, and will not allow a crumb to be left on her children’s plates or a drop of water to be wasted. And we also share much in how we relate to our extended families and in the respect we show our elders; that is why the guests had brought with them a whole load of Chinese candies, rice wine, silk fans, silk scarves, good-luck amulets and moon cakes, nearly enough for our entire three thousand-strong Kanaaneh clan.

And we seem to share the high appreciation for each other’s features: everyone we visited admired little Mark and Laura’s looks while Limei and Michael were struck by how beautiful all Palestinian children were. And both sides of the mutual admiration society wondered how people in the opposite group can tell one child from the other, for they all seemed so handsomely similar. Also our guests appreciated local foods and home-made Arabic dishes while, in Galilee, Chinese cooking is considered the height of culinary delights. And, believe it or not, in Bethlehem we found a store that accepted Chinese currency, the RMB: The owner travels regularly to China where he has a factory employing sixty workers apparently producing imitation Hebron hand-painted ceramic cups and plates, part of which he sold back to our Chinese guests.

Politically, in terms of relevant local issues, the couple is nearly as uninformed as their two children. They are totally innocent of the basic prejudicial historical narrative imparted to Westerners with their mothers’ milk except perhaps for a minimum of the Christian mythology, mainly about the life of Jesus, that Limei has picked up through her new Christian socialization. On a couple of occasions she would state what she had absorbed through that connection as if it were her and my absolute truth: “But they told me God promised it to the Jews!” Still this was said as a neutral statement of fact, lacking the aggressive emotional investment that the committed born-again Christians have.

Having decided to avoid addressing Limei’s conversion issue, I let the little odd comments slip by unanswered. Still, to get a well-educated adult, raised and acculturated in the Chinese worldview, to appreciate the intricacies of current Middle East political realities in the space of six days is an impossible task, let alone trying to explain to a totally uninvolved novice the geopolitics of Israel/Palestine and their historical roots and current ramifications. To wit, how can a Palestinian make intelligible to a Chinese couple visiting Israel and the Palestinian Occupied Territories the different dramatic issues that have significantly impacted his life? Take fro example the European roots of the colonial Zionist project and its post holocaust empowerment by the offenders’ guilt feelings, the Palestinian’s mishmash ethnic make-up despite their just claim to Arabness, the sapping of our energies and resources by centuries of colonization by the Ottoman’s then by the British and now by the Zionists, our internal divisiveness and our rush of despair to fanaticism, the first Intifada, the second Intifada and the Oslo fiasco, the role and history of the Hashemites’ collusion, the Arab world’s ineptitude and abandonment, the shifting Israeli ethos from imagined ancient virtuous Jewish values to Zionist evil despotism and daily crimes against humanity, the Israeli right’s open calls for our ethnic cleansing and the Israeli left’s collusion … and the list is enough to make your head spin. The mere task of sifting trivia from relevant facts is daunting when it comes to informing the uninitiated about Israel-Palestine.

In despair I shifted to blank ‘statements of fact’ with little explanation. To illustrate, as we drove to Bethlehem we came up against the security (read: apartheid) wall. I had not visited Bethlehem for the past ten years or so. Heading there from Jerusalem I drove the way I used to in the old days intending to go through the main entrance to the city by Rachel’s Tomb. I started to explain to my guests the significance of the city as the birthplace of Jesus. I delved into specifics of my own conviction that there must have been a true historical virtuous and revolutionary figure named Jesus when I suddenly realized that I was driving full speed into the wall and breaked forcefully just in time. The jolt added to everyone’s surprise and disdain of the massive concrete structure. As we navigated few kilometers around it using a dirt escape route I simply stated that this is the wall of the open-air prison behind which the Palestinian residents of the occupied West Bank are kept. The children took to asking every time we stopped if we were in or out of the prison while their parents inquired about specifics of the conditions in it: numbers, employment, access to food, law and order, etc. I answered as best as I could, reassuring them that the conditions they are witnessing are much better than in Gaza’s open-air prison.

China has the mother of all walls and I could have revisited the discourse we had in China regarding the futility and tenuous nature of all physical separation walls. I could have pointed out other recently constructed concrete and barbwire walls segregating Arab from Jew residing in the same city within Israel itself. I could have demonstrated for my visitors examples of the ethno-national logic in those attempts by ‘the Jewish and democratic state’ to concretize the concept of ‘separate’ in its ‘separate and equal’ decrees for its two types of citizens. I could have delved into the imponderables of the psychological walls rendering Arabs invisible to Jews and visa versa in ‘the only democracy in the Middle East’. I could have described to my visitors the constricted telescopic tunnel vision of enmity that the Zionist system has imposed on its followers in viewing the other in the Middle East.

But I didn’t.

And I could have quoted from my talk to a less innocent crowd in Honolulu few months ago:
“The apartheid separation wall continues to be built with your tax money. It infringes on the rights of so many Palestinian villagers in the OTs and robs them of their land and livelihood. Yet, as all separation walls throughout history, this wall will also come down. What we all need to work on collectively is the mental separation wall of fear and hate that permits some of us to put themselves above others. It is the exclusivist mental separation wall that allows the Zionist majority of Israel’s citizens and their dominant political parties, even now, to self-righteously demand my ‘transfer’, my expulsion out of my home, witness the platform of such Zionist leaders as Lieberman, the ex-deputy prime minister, and the statements of Ms. Livni, Israel’s current foreign Minister. It is this exclusivist and elitist mental separation wall that permits the issuing of public theological dispensations allowing, nay even demanding, the slaughter of Palestinians, their women and children and even their cattle and the destruction of their crops and orchards, all based on the old tribal conflict with a group known in biblical times as the Amalikites, now revived in some sick minds as the Palestinians.”

But I didn’t

I could have given them a little insght into our confused psyche. I could have explained to them the little incident I had in Jerusalem while climbing up the Via Dolorosa. My guests stopped at a ceramics shop. Limei had a long list of souvenirs she needed to take back for family, friends and colleagues and Michael enjoyed the challenge of bargaining for each item. I was tired and slumped in the owner’s chair on the steps by the door of the store. As the owner came out he brought me a cup of cold water and offered coffee. He inquired where I hailed from and, learning that I am from Galilee, he went into an excited monologue: “The Galilee of Jesus our Lord. That is great! Upper Galilee, I hope, close to the border with Lebanon. Beautiful countryside and you can look across and see the Lebanese Resistance Army, the only worthy men in the Middle East. You can wave to them, can’t you? And they wave back to you. And you may look in the direction of The Man himself. Perhaps you have seen him in person. Let me hug you. Let me kiss your hand that may have waved to Sheikh Hassan Nasr Allah!”

But I didn't. I didn’t even mention the incident at all. Jerusalem, east vs. west, old vs. new, Arab quarters vs. Jewish, occupied vs. freed, and settlers vs. natives, was confusing enough for me to make sense of. The enigma of the holiness of the city to the three monotheistic faiths was challenging enough to explain to my impartial guests without the added complication of a Via Dolorosa Christian merchant in love with a Lebanese Shiite Moslem militia leader. For me this wasn’t new; I know it happened before in the days of Saladin when local Christians sided with him against the foreign Crusaders. But I didn’t dare venture into such shifty and land-mined grounds. Suffice it that out of the three holy sites to which I had promised to take my guests I could access only two; the alleyway to the Dome of the Rock was blocked by soldiers. I tried my luck at making small talk with one of them in Arabic. He frowned and shook his head in disgust; he must have had a long day and here was someone mistaking him for an Arab, an accusation enough to enrage American candidates for the presidency, let alone an Israeli soldier of Ethiopian descent.

Images of the ongoing conflict were hard to hide from our guests, of course. The day after they arrived was Eid el-Fitr, the festive occasion celebrating the end of the fasting month of Ramadan and hence the fulfillment by all good Moslems of one of the tenants of their faith. As some three dozen members of my family gathered for the midday picnic-style meal with roasted meat and a variety of homemade salads, the children overwhelmed the scene by their sheer number and their boisterous behavior. We sat in the second-story spacious courtyard overlooking one of the village old squares where kids gather for play. Dozens of them were there, all with realistic looking toy guns shooting tiny plastic pellets at each other. Marc, our ten-year old guest, joined the excitement. The children in our courtyard fought a battle with the larger army below. It looked like a real front with all kinds of automatic weapons and some shoulder rocket launchers. As food was served the adults had a hard time getting the kids to settle down. A tenuous and temporary ‘hudna’ or ceasefire was imposed. Limei, forcing her two children to sit down to eat, commented on the usual role of the international community in war: “China seems to supply the guns as well as troops in this battle.” Of course, all the toys were made in China.

For the rest of their stay with us, our guests repeatedly came up against the real thing. The, children and adults alike, would stare in astonishment at the abundant soldiers of both sexes, with and without skullcaps, seemingly leisurely parading around wherever we went, with fingers on the triggers of their automatic weapons. We encountered them among the mix of athletic young men, scantily-clad bikinied young women and their flabby-bodied decadent elders at the hot springs at el-Himmeh (Himmat Ghader in Hebrew, the old shared border point of Syria, Jordan and Palestine at the southern end of the occupied Syrian Golan Heights, the whole area having been declared unilaterally by Israel as its own, an integral part of the Land of Israel). And they were there, arrogantly inquisitive about our identities and the purpose of our visit, as we exited through the wall of Bethlehem’s open prison. In Israel soldiers are everywhere you go, not only at such sensitive points where Israel’s aggressive occupation necessitates its jumpy security alertness but also at the most normal of Israeli settings: at shopping malls and walking streets in the city and at scenic look-outs in the countryside.

Now, how could I have explained such phenomena to an uninvolved Chinese? And Palestinians need to explain it all to the 1.3 billion Chinese and to the over one billion Indians, the near-half of humanity destined to own the future, if they are ever to counter the propaganda supremacy of Israel in the West.

Busting a Myth

The following is lifted in toto from the website of my friend, the journalist and author Jonathan Cook.[http://www.jkcook.net/Articles2/0339.htm#Top] Jonathan has written the preface to my book, A Doctor in Galilee, and has granted me permission for this open plagiarism which I commit for the value of the piece:

Book refuting Jewish taboo on Israel’s bestseller list

Writer argues Zionist Jews created a national history by inventing the idea that their sect existed as people separate from their religion

Jonathan Cook
The National
October 07 2008

TEL AVIV // No one is more surprised than Shlomo Sand that his latest academic work has spent 19 weeks on Israel’s bestseller list – and that success has come to the history professor despite his book challenging Israel’s biggest taboo.

Dr Sand argues that the idea of a Jewish nation – whose need for a safe haven was originally used to justify the founding of the state of Israel – is a myth invented little more than a century ago.

An expert on European history at Tel Aviv University, Dr Sand drew on extensive historical and archaeological research to support not only this claim but several more – all equally controversial.

In addition, he argues that the Jews were never exiled from the Holy Land, that most of today’s Jews have no historical connection to the land called Israel and that the only political solution to the country’s conflict with the Palestinians is to abolish the Jewish state.

The success of When and How Was the Jewish People Invented? looks likely to be repeated around the world. A French edition, launched last month, is selling so fast that it has already had three print runs.

Translations are under way into a dozen languages, including Arabic and English. But he predicted a rough ride from the pro-Israel lobby when the book is launched by his English publisher, Verso, in the United States next year.

In contrast, he said Israelis had been, if not exactly supportive, at least curious about his argument. Tom Segev, one of the country’s leading journalists, has called the book “fascinating and challenging”.

Surprisingly, Dr Sand said, most of his academic colleagues in Israel have shied away from tackling his arguments. One exception is Israel Bartal, a professor of Jewish history at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Writing in Haaretz, the Israeli daily newspaper, Dr Bartal made little effort to rebut Dr Sand’s claims. Paradoxically, he dedicated much of his article instead to defending his profession. He suggested that Israeli historians were not as ignorant about the invented nature of Jewish history as Dr Sand contends.

The idea for the book had come to him many years ago, Dr Sand said, but he waited until recently to start working on it. “I cannot claim to be particularly courageous in publishing the book now,” he said. “I waited until I was a full professor. There is a price to be paid in Israeli academia for expressing views of this sort.”

Dr Sand’s main argument is that until little more than a century ago, Jews thought of themselves as Jews only because they shared a common religion. At the turn of the 20th century, he said, Zionist Jews challenged this idea and started creating a national history by inventing the idea that Jews existed as a people separate from their religion.

Equally, the modern Zionist idea of Jews being obligated to return from exile to the Promised Land was entirely alien to Judaism, he added.

“Zionism changed the idea of Jerusalem. Before, the holy places were seen as places to long for, not to be lived in. For 2,000 years Jews stayed away from Jerusalem not because they could not return but because their religion forbade them from returning until the messiah came.”

The biggest surprise during his research came when he started looking at the archaeological evidence from the biblical era.

“I was not raised as a Zionist, but like all other Israelis I took it for granted that the Jews were a people living in Judea and that they were exiled by the Romans in 70AD.

“But once I started looking at the evidence, I discovered that the kingdoms of David and Solomon were legends.

“Similarly with the exile. In fact, you can’t explain Jewishness without exile. But when I started to look for history books describing the events of this exile, I couldn’t find any. Not one.

“That was because the Romans did not exile people. In fact, Jews in Palestine were overwhelming peasants and all the evidence suggests they stayed on their lands.”

Instead, he believes an alternative theory is more plausible: the exile was a myth promoted by early Christians to recruit Jews to the new faith. “Christians wanted later generations of Jews to believe that their ancestors had been exiled as a punishment from God.”

So if there was no exile, how is it that so many Jews ended up scattered around the globe before the modern state of Israel began encouraging them to “return”?

Dr Sand said that, in the centuries immediately preceding and following the Christian era, Judaism was a proselytising religion, desperate for converts. “This is mentioned in the Roman literature of the time.”

Jews travelled to other regions seeking converts, particularly in Yemen and among the Berber tribes of North Africa. Centuries later, the people of the Khazar kingdom in what is today south Russia, would convert en masse to Judaism, becoming the genesis of the Ashkenazi Jews of central and eastern Europe.

Dr Sand pointed to the strange state of denial in which most Israelis live, noting that papers offered extensive coverage recently to the discovery of the capital of the Khazar kingdom next to the Caspian Sea.

Ynet, the website of Israel’s most popular newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth, headlined the story: “Russian archaeologists find long-lost Jewish capital.” And yet none of the papers, he added, had considered the significance of this find to standard accounts of Jewish history.

One further question is prompted by Dr Sand’s account, as he himself notes: if most Jews never left the Holy Land, what became of them?

“It is not taught in Israeli schools but most of the early Zionist leaders, including David Ben Gurion [Israel’s first prime minister], believed that the Palestinians were the descendants of the area’s original Jews. They believed the Jews had later converted to Islam.”

Dr Sand attributed his colleagues’ reticence to engage with him to an implicit acknowledgement by many that the whole edifice of “Jewish history” taught at Israeli universities is built like a house of cards.

The problem with the teaching of history in Israel, Dr Sand said, dates to a decision in the 1930s to separate history into two disciplines: general history and Jewish history. Jewish history was assumed to need its own field of study because Jewish experience was considered unique.

“There’s no Jewish department of politics or sociology at the universities. Only history is taught in this way, and it has allowed specialists in Jewish history to live in a very insular and conservative world where they are not touched by modern developments in historical research.

“I’ve been criticised in Israel for writing about Jewish history when European history is my specialty. But a book like this needed a historian who is familiar with the standard concepts of historical inquiry used by academia in the rest of the world.”

Ishkharlo

I just finished reading the news about riots and clashes between Arabs and Jews in Acre in Haaretz, the one Israeli paper that still attempts a modicum of balance in reporting on Arab/Palestinian issues. I have resisted cancelling my subscription as a reaction to the paper’s recent dropping of Amira Hass and demoting of Gideon Levy, the two main reasons for my subscription to start with. It is difficult in Israel to get a balanced picture of this inter-racial and interfaith blow-up, symbolic as it is of the entire Israeli-Palestinian and even of the whole Middle East strife

The clashes started on the eve of Yom Kippur –the Jewish Day of Atonement- and are continuing on for the fourth day. Acre is our regional administrative center and my old stomping ground as a government official. It is a half-hour’s car drive from my home and once, in an emergency, I even covered the distance in eighteen minutes flat.

Before the Nakba my maternal grandmother and two aunts lived in Akka (Arabic for Acre) and it was usual for people to travel there on horseback or, more commonly, on the back of a donkey. My grandmother would come to visit us in our village, Arrabeh, and surprise us with a variety of presents: candies for the young and silk kerchiefs for the adults. For my mother she brought the special gift of a piece of red rubber sheeting fashioned out of the inner tube of a car tire. The wooden cot my mother used for her babies was the envy of the village womenfolk for the rubber sheet that protected it from soiling. My grandmother, Sitti Rahmi (Grandma Mercy) we called her, pulled rank over her village hosts and would bring her own personal supplies and utensils with her including a lot of snuff and a private ‘sharbi’ or small ceramic water jug. If anyone drank from it she would smash it on the spot and demand a replacement. My sisters, all afflicted by housecleaning obsession despite their rheumatoid arthritis, blame both on genes from Sitti Rahmi. My influential uncle Salih, the head of our clan, had a second home with a second wife in Akka where he hobnobbed with the city’s effendis. On occasion he would come back with a camel load of Jaffa Oranges for his extended family here and we, the favored children, would get the special treat of a link of fresh sugarcane to suck on. Akka was truly our capital city.

Then my grandmother passed away and after her uncle Salih and then the whole country, Akka included, went to the dogs and my aunts became refugees in Lebanon.

The Zionists came along and cleansed Acre of its original residents and replaced them with Jewish immigrants, housing some in existing Arab homes and building for others public housing in new neighborhoods that fanned east and north from the ancient walled city. Some of the new housing projects replaced the former Arab Manshieh neighborhood better known formerly as New Acre or ‘Akka el-Jadideh’. The old walled city became the refuge for internally displaced Palestinians, squatters from neighboring destroyed villages, with a smattering of original residents who dared stay put. As in other cities such as Jaffa, Lidd, Ramla and Haifa, the system of the new state lacked the administrative capacity to stop their influx. Initially, most were tolerated by the official new owner of all Palestinian ‘abandoned’ property, the Custodian of Absentee Property. It failed to penetrate the emerging solidarity and minimal cohesion among the new Palestinian social collective in such cities. Left with no leadership but prodded on by need and fear this rabble held together against the pressure brought to bear on them by Amidar, the Israeli government housing enterprise that was accorded responsibility for emptied Palestinian homes by the Custodian of Absentee Property. Amidar’s first responsibility, of course, was to house and nurture newcomers, the self-engendered flood of Jewish immigrants.

By the time I broke on the scene in Acre again, two and a half decades later, as the sub-district’s medical officer in charge of the population’s medical services and health, a movement was in full swing to drive the residents of old Acre out to the neighboring villages of Jdaideh and Makir, both already overwhelmed by the 1948 influx of refugees from destroyed neighboring villages, famous among which is el-Birweh, the destroyed village of the late poet of Palestinian resistance, Mahmoud Darwish. A two-pronged justification was offered for the attempted second forced evacuation of those unwelcome ‘squatters’: The old city with its rich Crusader and Ottoman archeological treasures was a perfect site for development as a tourist attraction. The very same attribute, the cultural and physical seclusion of those dark dungeons of old, had rendered them the perfect hideaway for drug dealers and addicts. Old Acre then ranked even ahead of old Jaffa as the capital of drugs and sex trade. I was marginally involved in all of this in a couple of ways: One of my predecessors at the Acre Ministry of Health office was killed and another left paraplegic, the outcome of an attack by drug dealers. And on a couple of occasions I had to lean on my head sanitary engineer to declare specific residences of Arabs in the old city fit for occupation contrary to the wishes of the city engineer and the Acre Development Authority. The residents were denied the needed permits to repair the roofs over their heads. If a house was found to be in danger of collapse or in such a state of squalor that it was not fit for human inhabitance, the only option they were offered was to move out. The majority never moved out; no major calamities were recorded; Acre still struggles to sell itself as a tourist attraction; drugs are still plentiful on the streets of old Acre and have spread to new neighborhoods; and I was dismissed long ago from my position with the MOH for meddlesome activism.

As in other mixed cities, some better off young Arab couples have found their way to residences in the new, originally exclusively Jewish, neighborhoods. The rare Arab worker in the government offices in Acre was often made the attractive offered of subsidized housing in these new neighborhoods, specifically in the proudly anointed project of coexistence in the Wolfson neighborhood, Shkhonat Wolfson. Even the Ford Foundation invested in this ambitious project at one point. I remember turning down the offer of subsidized housing there along with that of a handgun for my personal protection. Both Wolfson and Akko Tzafon (North Acre Neighborhood) have been thoroughly infiltrated by Palestinian residents. Even now, sixteen years after my exile from my office in acre, I can claim half a dozen Arab friends there: two doctors, a lawyer, a nurse, a teacher and an income tax big boss.

Interracial trouble has been brewing in these mixed quarters from the start. The embers are kept live mainly by religious fanaticism: On the Arab side the young are increasingly turning to religion as is usual for members of deprived communities. On the Jewish side the fires of extremism have been further fanned by the recent arrival of a band of hardened settlers relocated from the evacuated settlements of Gaza. A religious study cum army service center has been established for and by them in Wolfson. A while back trouble started over their objection to the Arab Moslems’ broadcasting their calls for prayer on their mosque’s loudspeaker during the holy month of Ramadan. Violence broke out and a movement was set afoot for cleansing Acre as a Jewish city of its Arabs, as if that were new. Now clashes ensued over the ‘right’ of observant Jews to enforce a total ban, for Jews and Goys alike, on vehicle movement on the Day of Atonement. That is how they have internalized the meaning of the ‘Jewish and democratic’ state. And the young man at the center of the clash is accused of even smoking openly on the street and having his car radio on. “How come their youth were running around our neighborhoods drinking beer and making out in the open during Ramadan?” a young Moslem protested.

And now, as I write this, I receive an email in Hebrew calling for a total boycott of all Arabs. It declares: “A Jew is a descendant of kings. An Arab is a descendant of dogs.” It further calls for a mob to gather at a specific location after sundown assuring all that a group of 300 settlers will be arriving to lead the crowd. It ends with an online survey that shows 63% of respondents favoring attacking/finishing-off Arabs. Here is the link if you read Hebrew: www.akko.txt.co.il And finally, the annual Acre Alternative Theater Festival, one of the most significant art happenings in Israel, held annually during the Jewish Sukkoth holiday, has been cancelled. Gideon Levy opines: “To all, it was clear that Mayor Shimon Lankri's hasty decision to cancel the festival had one purpose, and one only: to punish the Arabs who earn their living from the event.” [http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1028078.html]

It is reported that a police source noted that violence between Jews and Arabs stems from gaps in infrastructure and services between the two communities, and is the responsibility of the state but often lands in the “police emergency room.” This is reminiscent of the conclusion reached by the Or Investigative Committee appointed by the government to look into the killing in 2000 of 13 Palestinian unarmed youth, 12 of whom were citizens of Israel, by the police. The conclusion was understood by the police as exonerating them. Their Department of Internal Investigations, Mahash, closed the file with the excuse that it was too late to gather evidence. 29 more Palestinian citizens of Israel have been shot dead by Israeli security forces since then and in most if not all such cases the murderers were exonerated. In the entire history of the state no Jew has ever been killed by the security forces in quelling a demonstration. And the Jewish citizens of Israel have always demonstrated big time. Adalah, (visit www.adalah.org) is busy educating itself, the local Palestinian leadership, and the families of the dead youth on the experiences of other disadvantaged groups who suffered from state-sponsored crimes against them in modern times such as in Northern Ireland and South Africa.

The killing of six Palestinian unarmed youth on March 30, 1976 by Israeli security forces under the direct oversight of both Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, to stop us from striking for one day against the stealing of our land, was committed in an era when we lacked the human rights acumen and political civil society savvy to do anything beyond consecrating the day as Land Day, commemorated ever since by all Palestinians. And two decades before, in the village of Kufur Qasim, scores of villagers returning from their fields were summarily executed for breaking a curfew that was announced after they had left their homes. The scapegoat Israeli officer, Shadmi was his name, was found guilty and fined one cent.

Listening to the news from Acre yesterday I was struck by two things: First, both Jews and Arabs in Acre accused the other side of committing a pogrom against them. Notice though that both sides use a term that subconsciously evokes sympathy for the Jewish people. Even when we accuse our Jewish counterparts, we use their terminology; we are accepting their definition of terms, their rules of the game. Second, I noted that every adult in my circle of a dozen radio listeners could recount an incident in which he or she was attacked by stone-throwing Jewish youth on Yom Kippur or on the day of Sabbath in one location or another. It is a wonder riots haven’t broken out before in every mixed city. The only explanation I can think off is the degree of submissiveness we, the Palestinian citizens of Israel, have learned to accept and practice. It is way past coexistence and several steps beyond tolerance, meekness at its best. This begs the question of why in Acre and why now? Here is my guess:

Akkawis -Acre Arab residents- are known in the Galilee for their chip-on-the-shoulder demeanor and contentious uppity ways. This is part of the city’s heritage of old. Acre’s residents have an oft repeated motto: “Ya khouf Akka min hdeer el-bahar – the Mediterranean is no threat to Acre.” And Napoleon camped outside its walls for a long time before giving up and lobbing-in his hat fitted on a cannonball so as to claim a symbolic victory. I remember my father telling the story from his younger days, long before Zionism messed up the place, about a fat woman, properly outfitted for a stroll on the Korneesh, Acre’s stylish seaside promenade, who slipped and fell flat on her butt on the stone pavement. He rushed to offer his help and got a proper scolding: “Get away from me you scrawny fellah! You couldn’t lift me up if you tried! And a fellah like you would have fallen flat on his face not landed safely in a sitting position like me.” He had to swallow his pride and move on.

A story is told in Galilee about the first pilgrim from Acre in recent times to gain permission to visit the holy sites in Saudi Arabia. As he entered the mosque in Medina where the prophet Mohammad is buried, he is reported to have casually addressed the prophet using the diminutive form of the addressee’s name the way Acre adults do in talking to their children: “Eishak Hammudi –How goes it my boy!” he is reported to have shouted from the door over the heads of thousands of pious supplicants. Akkawis are also known for sneering at people loudly for the slightest mistake. For any minor irritation a father would encourage his child to snicker at the offender by making the sound one makes in imitating a pig, a combined expression of disapproval, disdain, and challenge: “Ishkharlo ya walad!”

Now you understand why a Palestinian young man from Acre would dare to stand up to a bunch of Jewish youth throwing stones at his car.

I personally have never dared drive on the High Holiday of the Jews. I don’t smoke but I eat secretly at home.

Ishkharlo ya walad!