Lucky You Come Hawaii

Lucky You Come Hawaii

“Lucky you come Hawaii!” locals exclaim in their pidgin English in a mix of welcoming and bragging about their blissful paradise. And it never felt more welcoming in the scores of times I have been in the islands: a combination of friendship and family bliss and of suddenly basking in a mini-celebrity status of media attention to my book of memoirs, A Doctor in Galilee. Within the span of one week in Honolulu my book has been the subject of one live radio program, one TV show, one newspaper op. ed., one bookstore reading and one talk to a church group. And today, with our children and grandchildren, we arrived in the island of Kauai, the island on which Didi and I had honeymooned eons ago. As we stopped for a snack it dawned on me that I had not paid for a single meal since we arrived in Hawaii; we had been wined and dined by friends and relatives for the whole period, one celebration after another.

Honolulu, Hawaii was the best place to launch my book. In fact the memoirs start while we were here for a two-year break from the strife-ridden career that I have chosen for myself. And Hawaii is the perfect antipode for Israel/Palestine not only geographically but also socio-politically. Despite Hawaii’s current governor being a Zionist, or at least a Zionist-supported Republican, Hawaiians are so far removed from the conflict that has shaped my life that they can justly claim innocence of any preconceived idea about it. It felt absolutely refreshing to speak to a group in America lacking the usual sprinkling, if not majority, of deeply opinionated pro-Israelis. Not only was I able to express my particular point of view on the subject uninterrupted but also to elicit valid comments and relevant questions regarding needed additional factual information. I have since used this inadvertent advantage to rework my presentation and to incorporate the various points raised in the Q&A period of the different presentations to live Hawaiian audiences. I decided to retain my original heading in recognition of the group that was the first to invite me to speak. Here is the outcome:

Talk at the Church of the Crossroads, Honolulu, Hawaii,

June 14, 20081,

Sponsored by the Friends of Sabeel

Good evening, Salam and Aloha,

Let me start by thanking my hosts, the Friends of Sabeel, and specifically Mr. Ramsis Lutfy and Ms. Margaret Brown, who have been kind enough to arrange for this wonderful occasion. Before leaving home I spoke to the Rev. Naim Atik, the Palestinian founder of Sabeel in the best tradition of proactive liberation theology. He asked me to convey his regards and blessings to you. Some of my friends here tonight, including my protestant wife Didi and my two brothers, the Catholic Indonesian Djon and the Hindu Jagy, will recall the good old days of the early 1960s when, as foreign students at the University of Hawaii, we used to seek warmth at the Church of the Crossroads thanks to the hospitality and humanity of our friend and host at the time, the late Rev. Del Rayson.

I am touched by the interest of so many people in this island paradise in a subject relevant to the hell burning half way across the globe, though the hell is perpetrated with the full support of the USA and its fire kept is burning with your tax money. It has been asserted that nowadays a person’s stand on the suffering of the Palestinians is the test of his or her humanity. Tonight I salute your humanity.

In his book Palestinian Walks, the Palestinian lawyer and author Raja Shehadeh states: “Perhaps the curse of Palestine is its centrality to the West’s historical and biblical imagination.” He then goes on to declare: “There is no place like the Holy Land to make one cynical about religion.” It is not comfortable being on the receiving end of fabrications issuing from the West’s fertile imagination especially when these are further augmented by clever spin-doctoring targeting the native population of the Holy Land. Cleverly twisted, facts have yielded to fiction rendering our history one long series of blood feuds, our land empty –a country without people-, our civilization pure savagery, and all of us terrorists by definition. According to this creative narrative, in 1948 we collectively left our homes on an extended vacation to allow the establishment of the ‘only democracy in the ME’, the ‘Jewish and democratic’ state of Israel. Except that, as reality would have it, in the Jewish and democratic state there is a near 20% minority of Palestinians, a fact rendering it an oxymoron by definition. Israel is a democracy for Jews only; it lacks a constitution that guarantees us, the minority Palestinians, protection from the draconian laws supported by the majority.

It is with this in mind that I want to declare my full secularism and my support for a single secular and democratic state in all of historical Palestine. The two state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been rendered totally impractical by the facts on the ground that Israel has created with the full backing of the US. Any such fiction has been relegated to the realm of posturing of puppets in a children’s comic show. The reality of the two independent states is not unlike the USA on one side and the Native American reservation residents on the other, except that the Native Americans in this case are not permitted to leave their reservations, are not allowed to use Federal and State highways and General Custer and his troops have free range. And the two ‘states’ are left to settle their differences through direct ‘negotiations’. The two-state solution and its ‘rejection by the Palestinians’ is well on its way to becoming another in the series of myths the West is willing to buy into so as to soothe its conscience about the historic evil it had committed against the Jews. Making up for the holocaust by forfeiting the rights of another Semitic people is hardly a lasting cure.

My goal today is to introduce to you the little known community in the Middle East that has had a vested interest in peace and which has been ignored by all parties to the ongoing conflict, my community, the Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel [This is the equivalent of saying ‘the Hawaiian Polynesian citizens of the US’. It is the term we prefer in contradistinction to the Israeli term of ‘Israel’s Arabs’.]

Here I want to distinguish clearly between this little known group and other parts of the Palestinian people: those under occupation in the West Bank and Gaza, those in Refugee camps in ME countries, and those in the Diaspora across the globe. In the process of violent dispersion of the Palestinian nation in 1948 we were the lucky ones who inadvertently stayed in our homes in the part of Palestine that became Israel and thus we became citizens of Israel since its establishment.

This small group of less than 150,000 in 1948, or some 15% of the population of Israel at the start, has multiplied tenfold since, through natural increase. It has proportionately outstripped the majority Jewish population increase to become nearly 20% of the total population. This, despite Israel’s massive international recruitment efforts of Jewish immigrants with special laws, attractive economic enticements, and underhanded contrivance.

Land, Population and Housing:

Our natural population development has brought upon us the wrath of Zionist policymakers who invented the term ‘demographic time bomb’ for it. This offensive term, the related discriminatory Law of Return, and the three dozen land confiscation laws especially formulated to usurp our land, all presented to the world as part of Israel’s enlightened democracy, are some of the most insulting tactics used against an indigenous population anywhere on earth.

The rapid population increase, together with land confiscation, has led to excessive overcrowding in our towns and villages. I should explain here that in Israel the two population groups live in segregated communities with the exception of a few ‘mixed cities’ where Jews and Arabs live in segregated neighborhoods, oftentimes separated by high concrete walls and barbwire.

Subsidized housing exists exclusively for members of the Jewish majority. In Nazareth Elite or Upper Nazareth, established in the 1950’s to offset the historical native city of Nazareth on land confiscated from its residents and those of surrounding Arab villages, young Arab couples have been buying homes from disgruntled immigrants who prefer the central Jewish cities, this prompting a Movement to Keep Nazareth Elite pure.

Two further related phenomena are house demolitions, exclusively practiced against Israel’s Palestinian minority, and the over one hundred Unrecognized Villages, Arabic communities that often predated the establishment of the state but that were made retroactively illegal and denied government services and public utilities, including drinking water.

Who are the Palestinians and where do I fit among them?

M My best guess at our historical background is described in the last page in my book of memoirs, A Doctor in Galilee. I will read a couple of paragraphs from the entry in my memoirs describing my successful transplanting of a millennia-old olive tree from a neighboring valley to my front yard:

The horrific sense of history inspired by this continuous biological link between me and my land is simply awesome. Are the Palestinians not the historical descendants of the Minoans of Crete? Were the Minoans not the first olive farmers in recorded history? Did Minoan culture not revolve around the trade in olive oil? Was the trade by way of Phoenicia? Could the Phoenicians, Canaanites, Israelites, Egyptians, Hyxos, Romans, Greeks, Persians, Arabs, Moguls, Crusaders and Turks have played a role in influencing the life and physique of my own tree? Yes, indeed, they may have. Any or all of them may have enjoyed the afternoon Mediterranean breeze in its cool shade. Any or all of them may have tied their trusted mounts to its sturdy trunk and cut a fresh shoot from its base to hurry the steed along -- the reason, most likely, for all the beautiful, football-size knots on its trunk. Any or all of them may have seduced, or raped, one of my maiden progenitors, leaving his telltale imprint on my amalgam of genes. And any or all of them may have dictated their rules and regulations to my ancestors, who submissively incorporated them as “ours”.

But at bottom, it was those Minoan olive oil traders and their Palestinian descendants, clinging to their land and subsisting in the shadow of their olive groves, that morphed into an ambitious nation laying claim to Arab culture, the last dominant culture of significant impact. My tree knows and attests to all of that; that is how it all started. This horrendous behemoth, with its two-meter wide, beautifully sculpted trunk and over ten square meters of beautifully sculpted exposed root system saw it all. I can prove my belonging to this piece of the earth’s crust through it; its roots are my surrogate roots. And they are taking hold in my land that I inherited from my father, who inherited it from his father,… and so on ad- infinitum.

Now I will attempt briefly to introduce to you my own narrative in the context of the ME conflict, in the hope that I will leave you with some appreciation of the degree of injustice that Israel and the US continue to wreak upon my people, the Palestinians, all of course, as seen from my perspective as an involved witness to the process. Again I will read from my book of memoirs, now from my foreword to it:

'A Doctor in Galilee: The Story and Struggle of a Palestinian in Israel' is a memoir arising from my struggle as a physician to bring the benefits of Public Health and community development to my people, the Palestinian Arab minority citizens of Israel. The intimate personal narrative introduces readers to this little known and often misunderstood population that is nonetheless key to understanding the Arab-Israeli conflict.

I was born in 1937 In Arrabeh Village in the Galilee at the height of the Palestinian peasant uprising against the British Mandate for its sympathy with and accommodation of the designs of the Zionist Movement on their land. On my eleventh birthday, Israel was officially declared an independent state, marking the Palestinian Nakba or catastrophe. The vast majority of Palestinians from the area of the new state became refugees in neighboring Arab countries. Their towns and villages were systematically razed or their homes occupied by Jewish immigrants. We, the few Palestinians who remained on their land, found ourselves on the wrong side of the border, a leaderless and alienated minority in an enemy state. For 18 years we were placed under oppressive military rule.

As subsistence olive farmers my family sacrificed much to put me through the Nazareth Municipal High School. Two years later, in 1960, I struck out to study medicine in the USA. In 1970, having obtained Harvard degrees in Medicine and Public Health and turning down several lucrative offers in America, I returned with my Hawaiian wife, a teacher, to Arrabeh and found employment with the Ministry of Health in my field of specialty. The dearth of physicians in my region forced me to double as solo village GP. I lasted for six years before I could take it no more. I found my Public Health work unproductive in light of state systems openly hostile to Arab citizens. This included policies of massive land confiscation that led to a mini uprising by my people, known thereafter as Land Day. Frustrated and angry, in 1976 I moved with my wife and two children to Hawaii.

After two years of vacillating we returned home to the Galilee and to the same setting we had left. I started looking for a way around the discriminatory and antagonistic governmental system in which I worked. Within three years I and three other disgruntled local physicians established a non-governmental organization, the Galilee Society, dedicated to improving the health and welfare of the Palestinian minority within Israel. This NGO became the conduit for my professional endeavors actively challenging the system of which I was formally a part and to which, for pragmatic considerations, I continued to hold for another ten years. The MOH, under Ehud Olmert, eventually ejected me and I became persona non grata in my former professional home. For four additional years I continued to use the NGO service sector as a means of consciousness raising and community mobilization. I reached out to international circles and built alliances with like-minded minority rights activists abroad. This, together with a confrontation with the Israeli military-industrial complex over environmental protection of the Galilee, apparently was beyond the tolerance of all concerned. In 1995 I found myself out of a job at The Galilee Society, the institution I created and led for a decade and a half. On my way to retirement I then served briefly as a consultant to UNICEF’s mission to The Palestinian National Authority before returning to my home village to establish a center for child rehabilitation.

The narrative follows a simple chronological pattern, but is replete with contemplative pauses, flashbacks, village scenes and foibles from rural Palestine and from my childhood days. In terms of its subject matter, the major theme of the book revolves around the politics of dispossession and the nature of Israel’s majority-minority ‘coexistence’ as it plays out in the life of Arrabeh and similar communities and as experienced and recorded by me in real time. Straddling the socioeconomic and political divide between this disadvantaged minority amongst whom I lived and the dominant Jewish majority amongst whom I worked, my daily experience bordered on the schizophrenic. The book delves particularly deep into the struggle over land, which underlies all aspects of the conflict between the two groups that people my two realities.

An introduction by journalist and author Jonathan Cook sets the memoirs in proper historical and political perspective. It also serves as an excellent primer on the Palestinian community in Israel and on its standing in its country of citizenship.

Indicators of Discrimination:

Let me now share with you some facts and figures taken from the most recently available Israeli Yearbook of Statistics. The figures are for the year 2006. Unfortunately, these prove that I have failed miserably to improve the status of my community vis-à-vis that of the Jewish majority in Israel. I will mention only a few indicators for comparison. My emphasis is not on the absolute figures but on the comparison between us, the Palestinian citizens of Israel, and the Jewish majority, and on the trends of the relative ratios over time.

Let me first speak of the one statistic that I have the authority to speak on as a Public Health expert, that of Infant Mortality Rate (IMR). It is the number out of a thousand live births in a specific year that die before their first birthday. IMR has been shown to be the best indicator of a community’s general wellbeing. It is affected most by such independent variables as the community’s environmental health (as reflected in the cleanliness of its water supply), by the level of income of the heads of families, and by the level of education of the mothers. Our IMRs have run double those of the Jewish majority since the establishment of Israel. Immigrant groups from third world countries with initial IMRs higher than ours have improved to where they fit now within the Jewish majority rates, thanks to intensive targeted state intervention and support programs. No similar program has ever been attempted for us. I recall the program that was once mounted in the Ministry of Health to reduce infant mortality in towns and villages where it was particularly high. Two cut-off lines were selected, the one for Arab towns twice as high as that for Jewish ones. Finally, over the past decade the relative IMR gap has widened to where our infants now die at two and a half times the rate at which Jewish infants die.

And Arab families are three times as likely to be under the poverty line. Such statistics are more damning if one looks at them more analytically. Over time this statistic has worsened as well. Of special meaning is that the intervention of the state in terms of subsidies and support payments elevates relatively three times as many Jewish families to above the poverty line as it does Arab ones, a clear indication of the state’s discriminatory practices.

And the future doesn’t bode well for us. Our young adults (age 20-35 years) are one third as likely to be at an institute of higher education as do their Jewish co-citizens.

What can we do?

This all begs the question of what can we do? I have no easy answer. Your presence here tonight is an indication of your awareness and commitment. More of the same is all I can ask from you: Use your influence, moral, political and social, to make it possible for Palestinians to air their narrative and to debunk the standard myths and spin-doctoring that your media continues to force-feed you. Help free your political representatives from the yoke of financial dependence on dominant lobby groups and agents of vested interest. Use your democratic system to act on your convictions.

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.

It is that worldview that I ask you to take a stand on through political pressure and civil society activism, every day and everywhere. As a secular pacifist I put my trust in the common sense and common decency of humanity at large. At the end these ample human resources will triumph.

In the sixties in this very place we all sang: “We shall overcome, someday!”

On enlightened self-interest

On enlightened self-interest

Dear Mazin:

Thank you for the thought provoking philosophical piece [below]. In responding to it I shall first analyze my own act of responding and try to understand myself and explain to others what is it that motivates me to do so and through that to formulate my own concept regarding the phenomenon of enlightened self interest (ESI). I am aware of the danger of the circuitous logic inherent in such an attempt . Still I am willing to try at the risk of perhaps sounding less than convincing.

Though I never met you, I am an admirer and have been reading your various postings. So, by responding to your call for comments on what you wrote I am paying myself a certain complement by putting myself in the same class of committed Palestinian activists and involved intellectuals. Perhaps I am also attracted by the promise you made of posting responses to your piece. After all, such posting serves as a form of self promotion to circles of better-informed academicians involved in seeking peace and justice for Palestinians, a group that I would probably have joined myself had I not gotten preoccupied by my medical career. In both of these aspects there is a certain gain for me, which I will try to discount from the balance of my account as I tally up credit to myself against debt I owe to humanity at large as exemplified by all the ‘selfless’ figures you mention and as embodied by you in your ‘selfless’ acts.

This brings me to my statement of principle: There is no such thing as a selfless act. That is why it is better to stay with your term of ‘enlightened self interest’. I assume my statement is not news to anyone steeped in philosophy, which I am not. I am making this statement based on my analysis of my own actions throughout my over half a century of adult life. I wish at this early point in my rambling-on to make the cautionary disclaimer that I speak of my own career and experience and mean what I say to reflect on no one else.

So first let me say a few words about myself: I was born in 1937 In Arrabeh Village in the Galilee at the height of the Palestinian peasant uprising against the British Mandate for its sympathy with and accommodation of the designs of the Zionist Movement on our land. On my eleventh birthday, Israel was officially declared an independent state, marking our Nakba. We, the few Palestinians who remained on their land, found ourselves on the wrong side of the border, a leaderless and alienated minority in an enemy state. For 18 years we were placed under oppressive military rule and ‘our state’ has proven to be most inventive in its persistent grab for our land.

As subsistence olive farmers my family sacrificed much to put me through the Nazareth Municipal High School . Two years later, in 1960, I struck out with a total of $500 to study medicine in the USA . In 1970, having obtained Harvard degrees in Medicine and Public Health and turning down several lucrative offers in America, I returned with my Hawaiian wife, a teacher, to Arrabeh and found employment with the Ministry of Health (MOH) in my field of specialty. The dearth of physicians in my region forced me to double as solo village general practitioner (GP). I lasted for six years before I could take it no more. I found my Public Health work unproductive in light of state systems openly hostile to Arab citizens. This included policies of massive land confiscation that led to a mini uprising by my people, known thereafter as Land Day. Frustrated and angry, in 1976 I moved with my wife and two children to Hawaii . After two years of vacillating we returned home to the Galilee and to the same setting and jobs we had left. I started looking for a way around the discriminatory and antagonistic governmental system in which I worked. Within three years I and three other disgruntled local physicians established a non-governmental organization, the Galilee Society, dedicated to improving the health and welfare of the Palestinian minority in Israel . This NGO became the conduit for my professional endeavors actively challenging the system of which I was formally a part and to which, for pragmatic considerations, I continued to hold for another ten years. The MOH, under Ehud Olmert as a minister, eventually ejected me and I became persona non grata in my former professional home. For four additional years I continued to use the NGO service sector as a means of consciousness raising and community mobilization. I reached out to international circles and built alliances with like-minded minority rights activists abroad. This, together with a confrontation with the Israeli military-industrial complex over environmental protection of the Galilee , apparently was beyond the tolerance of all concerned. In 1995 I found myself out of a job at The Galilee Society, the institution I created and led for a decade and a half. On my way to retirement I then served briefly as a consultant to UNICEF’s mission to The Palestinian National Authority before returning to my home village to establish Elrazi Center for Child Rehabilitation, the first facility of its kind in an Arab rural community in Israel .

I have always enjoyed penning down my thoughts. But, alas, I became a physician. With the mounting demands on my time, I found an easy-out; I shifted to recording my ‘compositions’, my soul-searching diatribes, and my confessions, on audiotapes that I stored away never to hear again. The act of facing myself across the page or vocally, not the content, had the therapeutic effect I sought in my many hours of need. The above brief biography encapsulates what I have selected out of the massive amount of my written and audio-memoirs for publication by Pluto Press of London under the title “A Doctor in Galilee, the Story and Struggle of a Palestinian in Israel” due out on the market this June. As I sat down to sift through the accumulated records of my life I found it a daunting exercisein self-reinterpretation. Some of the sensitive recorded episodes of soul searching and self-questioning were emotionally devastating to listen to. Especially the audiotapes captured not only the words spoken, but also my mood and emotions. In retrospect, it is clear that much of the material would be highly charged, for it was when I sought to relieve myself of mental anguish that I turned to this escape rout. On occasion, the narrator on those tapes sounded so downcast, defeated and tormented that he would mumble under his breath; he would recoil, dim-out and hide behind his inaudible speech. I could hardly make out the words or guess at the content. Had it been on videotape, the body language would have been something to behold.

Now I shall return to our point, the meaning of ESI and why do we do what we do taking your own cue of “looking inward to our own motivation”. As I have stated already, to me there is no such thing as self-sacrifice but only self-interest with the endless range of qualifications from 'evil' to various degrees of 'enlightenment'. I happen to know personally a few of the names you list in your “hesitant meditations” as those “I think of” in connection with selfless acts and exemplary lives of sacrifice for others. I find it hard to exempt any of them from the applicability of my relativist scale of self-interest, with the exception perhaps of Jesus and Rachel Corrie whose premeditated crucifixion sanctifies their memory beyond my iconoclastic thoughts.

Leaving others alone for the moment I shall return to my own experience and convictions as displayed in the above described book of memoirs. In listening for the first time to my own audio-memoirs that I had kept over some thirty five years of professional life as a rural solo GP and a public health practitioner, I kept asking myself repeatedly why did I do what I did when I had lucrative alternative options at Harvard and in Hawaii. It turned out that throughout those years I kept debating that question and repeatedly addressing it to myself on tape. It had kept my life in focus for me as I repeatedly reminded myself of what was in it for me. Very early on, in 1978, during a period when I took my family to live and practice in Hawaii , a venture that lasted only two years, I realized that my life would be meaningless there. Here is the relevant and revealing entry from that period from my book of memoirs:

“It was difficult not to wonder at the wisdom of turning our backs on my promising medical career in the US, and on the paradise of Didi’s native state of Hawaii, where we had for a time considered settling. But head back to the Galilee and Arrabeh we did nonetheless. After all, that was why I studied medicine; any other decision would have robbed me of the rationale for accepting a profession I would never have chosen on my own. People in Arrabeh tell of the village simpleton who bought a donkey. When asked why he needed a donkey, he answered:

‘To carry loads of grass from the fields.’

‘But you own no cattle! What do you need the grass for?’

‘To feed my donkey, of course!’

That is how it would have been for me to have settled and practiced medicine in America .”

This is a clear case of self-interest. I needed to keep my psychological balance, to keep a grip on my sanity. I would have gone crazy practicing a profession that my family and community had drummed into my head in the first place outside of that same community. And I was lucky to have realized that before I got entrapped in the quagmire of Arrabeh’s simpleton's analogy.

On another occasion I face up to the same quandary on tape by admitting that I wanted to be “a big fish in a small pond,” that it would have been too strenuous a struggle to gain prominence through the Harvard public health/nutrition research team where I was offered a position. In Arrabeh I was prominent by definition, without even trying. Again and again I find myself admitting to myself on tape that I had returned to Arrabeh because of my vanity:

“During that decade [1960-70] I had obtained degrees in medicine and public health from Harvard University and completed an internship at the Queen’s Medical Center in Honolulu , Hawaii . I was Arrabeh’s first son ever to leave to study abroad, a historic moment made possible by my father’s agreement to sell some of his farming land to pay my way and by the charity of a childless American couple, Byrd and Amie Davis of Clarion, Pennsylvania, who had become my pen pals after meeting me during a visit to Nazareth. They sponsored me through college and, at the end of my studies, offered to adopt me and leave me their considerable fortune as an inheritance should I agree to carry on the family banking business in their hometown. Tempting though the offer was, rejecting it did not delay me long. As soon as I had reached the point in my medical training where I mustered the skill and fortitude to stand before another human and tell him or her what to do with their body, I rushed home to play God to my friends and next of kin. I had studied medicine so that one day I could return to repay the debt to my community. I was committed to the professional life of a physician, to a life dedicated to healing bodies, to guiding and uplifting spirits, and to improving the living conditions of my village -- a life, in short, dedicated to saving humanity through serving my people. More than a little optimistically, I thought I was going to change the world."

True, the decision meant spending many sleepless nights and fighting an uphill struggle against an airtight system of neglect and discrimination by ‘my’ government and the Zionist majority in Israel . To anyone looking from the outside, it would seem a reasonable example of altruistic community service and self sacrifice. But I know better. At the bottom of it were my own, perhaps unexplainable, personal psychological needs.

When I reached the clear conclusion that there is little to be gained by working from within the system, I devised a scheme that brought me quickly to the forefront of the nascent civil society movement in the Palestinian community in Israel . I established the Galilee Society and spearheaded its mission of campaigning for better health and development for my community for some fifteen years. Suffice it to say that the Galilee Society http://www.gal-soc.org/en/ survived my departure and that it and two of its daughter organizations, Adalah http://adalah.org and Ittijah http://ittijah.org still count for much in the current civil society movement in our community. To me that is the main professional contribution I have made in my career as a public health specialist. Of course it was a steep uphill struggle all the way through. Yet I drew satisfaction not only from fighting an unfair system and from alerting the world community to our existence and existential struggle but also from knocking at so many doors and meeting so many significant figures internationally. That and the many gains I reaped for my people, I realize now in retrospect, are difficult to separate from the self aggrandizement and pleasure that I derived from the process itself. Not only did it bring me name recognition throughout my community but even a citation of merit from the late President Mitterrand of France . I have always enjoyed meeting new people and going to new places. And that I did secure for myself through the establishment and nurturing of the Galilee Society. Obviously, as seen from this critical angle, it was a self-serving endeavor.

Again and again the theme of self-aggrandizement pops up on those tapes: In the summer of 1990, as the first gulf war was brewing, my family and I were vacationing in Hawaii and pressure was brought on us by relatives and friends to extend our vacation and perhaps stay there for good. Here is the rationale I found for returning to the Galilee , as recorded on tape in real time:

“We mull over our decision to return to our home in Israel against the advice of friends and exhortation of relatives. We try to dismiss doom’s-day predictions of Saddam targeting Israel with his missiles with their expected payload of poison gas or deadly germs.

‘Still, why should sane people like us, sitting in their swimming shorts here at water’s edge in Hawaii, turn away from the easy choice of continuing their vacation in paradise a while longer? Why go back to the eye of the storm?’ Didi wonders.

‘I try to tell myself that it is not sheer obstinacy or romantic attachment that is at the base of my insistence to go back home to Israel . There is a consideration that transcends my obligation to be there to offer my professional services should disaster strike my community. It is beyond our physical survival. It is the hope, conceited as it may sound, that my voice, and not only my profession, will count for something in such hour of need. My worst-case scenario is ethnic cleansing of Palestinians again. War breaks out and Israel takes the opportunity to throw us out of its still-undetermined borders as refugees. Regardless of who strikes first, a general war in the area directly involving Israel will provide its transfer strategists with the perfect cover to drive all Palestinians -- including us, the near-million minority of its citizens -- out of our homes and to deposit the survivors in the lap of UNRWA, as yet another batch of Palestinian refugees to deal with. Under the guise of war-time measures a news blackout can be imposed and the go-ahead given for the generals to activate their readymade contingency plans, or what Israelis call their ‘drawer plans’, for driving us out. This is the crux of my argument in favor of returning immediately home and staying put in Arrabeh regardless of everything. In such a development my voice and international connections may count for something in informing the world.’”

Clearly this is a case of self-aggrandizement. But despite my recognizing it as such in due time, we still did go back to Galilee before war broke out and we had to suffer the tense nerve-racking days sitting in our sealed rooms awaiting the scud missiles. To the outside world it may sound like self-sacrifice in the spirit of service to my community. But I know otherwise; I can read it, at least for the sake of my current argument, as an ego trip at the expense of my wife and children.

To close off this rambling bit of self flagellation, I will state for the last time that for me, on balance, there is no such thing as self-sacrifice and that we all are the beneficiaries of the self-interest component of our ‘acts of valor’ made more palatable by the self-serving qualifier ‘enlightened’. I even can sense the derivation of some pleasure from this admission itself, and from stating what I have just stated, and so on ad-infinitum.

Circuitous and self-serving, you say? Yes, I agree!

Hatim Kanaaneh , MD , MPH

******

Mazin Qumsiyeh’s piece to which the above is a response:

On enlightened self-interest

Waking up into a communal and peace farm in Luck, Wisconsin gives a new meaning to "sunrise of a new day". The families and activists gathered there provided inspiration to us beyond measure. They had built their own houses, they used solar energy for electricity and heat, grew their own foods, used composting toilets, and collected rainwater for their very minimal water needs. They were also all active in the peace movement. Their activities ranged from civil disobedience at Fort Benning, Georgia to playing key roles in the Wheels of Justice bus tour. See the website http://www.anathothcommunityfarm.org/ Our bus retreat brought members from the farm and volunteers from many part of the country. This experience at the farm and in talking to such people (e.g. Kathy Kelly, Abbie Coburn, Ceylon Mooney, Lama Nassar, Bill Hill, Bob Abplanalp, Mike Miles, Cecilia Lucas, Dan Pearson, Jessie Chang, etc.). We had a great time with these inspiring people and then the nearly 200 people in the Chicago Peace Walk Sunday (see http://www.cjpip.org/ ). In Greenwich, CT, three good people who happen to be Jewish spoke from the heart about how they came to view Israel and Zionism. I could not help but think that life is really good and these are people I truly love. It is a humbling experience to jot down some thoughts about the meaning of activism, self-sacrifice, love, and enlightened self-interest. I hope you will find those hesitant meditations/observations useful.

We ask ourselves many questions as we struggle through this short life of ours. What is the nature of activism? Why do we do what we do? How much self-sacrifice are we really willing to take? What do those of us feel after lost jobs, after time in jail, after being beaten and gassed by Israeli soldiers, or after all of the above? How does one distinguish between selfishness and enlightened self-interest? Is activism for peace and justice the ultimate love of humanity or the triumph of optimism over experience? Is activism and living live simply the ultimate love of mother nature or of God? The following rambling thoughts do not intend to give answers but hopefully give us time to reflect and think (please send my your comments and I will post and share them).

Several years ago a prominent person in the Palestinian right to return movement repeatedly criticized Prof. Edward Said (then at Columbia University) for "self-interest". While some are tempted to dismiss such comments by attributing other reasons for making them (jealousy, inability to get Said to help in key areas thought important etc), the subjects of self-interest, self-sacrifice, collective work are worthy of examination when we look at what makes activists "tick", what gets us to do the things we do, and this could help us get more people involved in the movement for peace and justice and remain active even after setbacks and challenges. Edward Said was a brilliant Professor of Literature, a prominent music critic, and a noted commentator on human conditions. What motivated him and millions like him is worthy of examination but perhaps looking inward to our own motivations is a more fruitful endeavor. Perhaps we can make some comments on issues of love and enlightened self-interest that could initiate a dialogue at least with ourselves.

My background is in evolutionary biology including genetic and behavioral biology. It would not be necessary for the sake of this discussion to review the exhaustive literature on evolution of human behaviors that relates to group and individual behavior. Scientific explanations can certainly give us certain insights but they are limited. We do know that each individual human being has certain basic needs that are easily recognized: water, food, shelter, safety, social interactions, and sex. In many parts of the world with limited technological development, people still have to focus on their day to day survival: scavenging for food, finding a shelter etc. In technologically advanced societies, we still find such people represented among our ranks as the homeless in cities around Europe and North America. Such a life is described as closest to the state of affairs for much of humanity throughout much of our history. But when basic survival issues are met, we do recognize that it is very hard to live without social interactions; hence solitary confinement is the most dreaded punishment for inmates. Lack of social interactions is known to depress the immune system, cause extreme behavior changes and even lead to premature death.

Humans unlike other mammals also have concepts of self-sacrifice, collective work, and work for the common good that emanate directly from a social society. Other social animal societies (ants, bees, elephants) do show many of the features we recognize in such groupings. But humans have complex communication systems and as far as we know the only species that ponders its existence, thinks of life after death and has other concepts that we cannot observe in other life forms. We do find many animals that exhibit self-sacrificial behaviors from losing their life to feed and protect their young to domesticated dogs that jump into dangerous situations to save their human companions. But why has human societies developed such highly amazing forms of complex behaviors that involve things like standing in front of a bulldozer that aims to demolish a house of someone totally unrelated to you (Rachel Corrie)? Such behaviors call for deeper explanations (most personal) that are very hard to analyze by objective and rational thought processes.

Could one argue that Mother Teresa or Mahatma Gandhi were driven by a pure form of self-sacrifice and altruism or by what we may term as enlightened self-interest? Are these two things distinguishable? The diaries of Mother Teresa which she did not want published disturbed many of her supporters who were shocked to learn that throughout a life time of doing good for others, she had doubts about so many things (even the existence of God). Yet, this simple women I think epitomizes the love of the poor more than we can imagine. That love is the issue that we should start with when discussing sacrifice and enlightened self-interest.

Love between a child and a parent involve significant sacrifices and maybe the easiest to understand in linking biology (genetic relationship), learned behaviors, and perhaps much more. In ancient China, children sometimes cut off pieces of their own flesh to feed an ailing or starving parent. Caring for immediate family members is biologically ingrained for the obvious reason that they share some of our genes. But the human intellectual and social development produced other traits that sometimes overcome the biological wiring. Think of the love and sacrifice for adopted children for example. Think of people who donate to the point of impoverishing themselves to help children in far away places. These are not so easily explained by biology. The love of couples to each other also cannot be reduced to biological needs or even social needs. The caring of the people living at a communal farm for each other is obviously much more than their needs or desires. It is something much more profound and much less analyzable than mere language or analytic logic can describe.

The role of religion and morality cannot be underestimated. I think of how people like Clarence Jordan was raised as a privileged white man in the segregated south of the 1940s and 1950s and opposed wars (all wars including WWII and Vietnam). Learning ancient languages and learning what Jesus really taught transformed him. His faith led him to challenge the comfortable clergy in the south and then move on to establish Koinonia farms in Georgia where blacks and whites lived and worked together. They got firebombed and attacked frequently but never gave up. As I listened to his tapes, I am always impressed by the sense of optimism and the general goodness. His vision was validated while he lived and validated after he died (Habitats for Humanity was founded at Koinonia farms). I think of Dorothy Day ("my job is to comfort the afflicted and make the comfortable less comfortable"), Martin Luther King Jr (his vehement rejection of wars is forgotten by a government that names streets after him), Desmond Tutu, Mahatma Gandhi, Sheikh Mohammad Hussain, Father Naeem Atik, Abouna Hanna Atallah, Father Elias Chakour and countless others. A while back I started compiling names of people we honor at my website (http://www.qumsiyeh.org/honorlist/) but that task would be endless since there are literally millions of people, most of them we have never met. But even that task would be rather simple compared to the task of understanding what made one of these activists do what they do or did.

We can safely state as Anthropologist Margaret Mead observed: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has." But Mead cannot tell us why these people became committee or thoughtful. What makes a Kathy Kelly or a Clarence Jordan?

We can safely say indeed that human societies evolved in spite of sometimes incredible odds precisely because of such thoughtful committed (I would add loving) people. A good example of such a historical study is Howard Zinn's "A people history of the United states"). US historical development has shown that pure individual altruism is hard to come by but that enlightened self-interest was critical in key developments in the US going back hundreds of years. Advocates for native American rights helped save thousands of natives from the European colonial onslaught. These were examples of Enlightened Self-Interest (ESI). ESI drove abolitionists (white and black) to save thousands of slaves before the civil war. Reconciliation after the Civil War was also an example of ESI. ESI also got us the women's right to vote in the US elections (happened only in the 1920s). ESI got us the 40-hour workweek and other workers rights. ESI is what ended the war on Vietnam. It is what ended 30 years of US support to Apartheid South Africa (the State Department had designated Nelson Mandela and African National Congress as terrorist organizations). None of these actions were done by people who thought their actions were 100% altruistic. All thought they were doing what we now understand as enlightened self-interest. Many of them thought (many of us think) in fact that it is the only meaningful way to live.

Ofcourse many individuals may think they are engaged in ESI when they are not (or even when they are even racist or bigots). Members of many artificial grouping (including extended family, co-religionists, nation, people who think alike) have taken up arms against "others" that by definition did not belong to the self-defined grouping. These are actually the primary cause of wars and conflicts around the world. And as any independent and rational observer knows, there are no winners in wars only losers.

We can explain ESI in terms of nagging conscience, morality, religion, logic, psychological hedonism, or any combination thereof but we cannot deny its existence and widespread impact on human history. For example, I talked to people who think of Jesus as a Son of God, those who think of him as a prophet of God, and those who don't believe in God and all have agreed that Jesus lived on earth and did give of himself for humanity even as they differ on what his message was (would it not be good to acknowledge the example he provided?) or that it had a huge impact on human history.

We can cite genetic and behavioral studies to show that self-sacrifice for the group is a trait that does exist and evolve in mammalian societies. My son actually did a simulation via computer programming with random mutations and noted that group behaviors evolved that included altruism; It evolved without being programmed or encouraged so clearly groups that show these behaviors benefit. We can cite religious reasons for doing good to others even at the expense of our material well being (this is also enlightened self-interest as we think of ourselves as vessels and tools of God). We can cite moral or other reasons for helping others even if we are not religious (agnostic or atheist) such as a livable human and humane society. We can each come up with many ways of looking at these issues but again I think it is something deeply personal and that is where it must come from.

But we need not look beyond our own personal experiences to find who the people we admire are. If you take a moment to think of the person you personally knew/met that you most admire (whether they are still alive or dead). If you think what qualities made you admire this person. If you then think of what motivates that person. I think these are things that provide the best and most meaningful personal lessons for each of us. For me it was an uncle who was the first Zoologist in Palestine and who was killed in 1970 right after he finished his PHD (and after he had already made significant scientific and other contributions to humanity). His letters and motivation to help not just his relatives but humanity as a whole made a difference in my own life. Reading his letters and notes years later and speaking to his close friends showed me that he had truly epitomized the Buddhist statement of "having joyful participation in the sorrows of this world." I am sure each of us knows someone like that (either dead or alive).

The English language has limitations in describing the source of these desires that add to positive energy in the world. They are described differently by different people or even by the same person in different stages of understanding. They are deeply personal. Perhaps those who have the best skill to describe these emotions and desires are poets and we should read them more. My own favorite poet is Kahlil Gibran. For me his meditation on love speak directly to the issues at hand.

On Love, from The PROPHET, by Kahlil Gibran

When love beckons to you follow him,
Though his ways are hard and steep.
And when his wings enfold you yield to him,
Though the sword hidden among his pinions may wound you.
And when he speaks to you believe in him,
Though his voice may shatter your dreams as the north wind lays waste the garden.
For even as love crowns you so shall he crucify you. Even as he is for your growth so is he for your pruning.
Even as he ascends to your height and caresses your tenderest branches that quiver in the sun,
So shall he descend to your roots and shake them in their clinging to the earth.
Like sheaves of corn he gathers you unto himself.
He threshes you to make you naked.
He sifts you to free you from your husks.
He grinds you to whiteness.
He kneads you until you are pliant;
And then he assigns you to his sacred fire, that you may become sacred bread for God's sacred feast.
All these things shall love do unto you that you may know the secrets of your heart, and in that knowledge become a fragment of Life's heart.
But if in your fear you would seek only love's peace and love's pleasure,
Then it is better for you that you cover your nakedness and pass out of love's threshing-floor,
Into the seasonless world where you shall laugh, but not all of your laughter, and weep, but not all of your tears.
Love gives naught but itself and takes naught but from itself.
Love possesses not nor would it be possessed;
For love is sufficient unto love.
When you love you should not say, "God is in my heart," but rather,
"I am in the heart of God."
And think not you can direct the course of love, for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.
Love has no other desire but to fulfill itself.
But if you love and must needs have desires, let these be your desires:
To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night.
To know the pain of too much tenderness.
To be wounded by your own understanding of love;
And to bleed willingly and joyfully.
To wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving;
To rest at the noon hour and meditate love's ecstasy;
To return home at eventide with gratitude;
And then to sleep with a prayer for the beloved in your heart and a song of praise upon your lips.

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