Wednesday, September 2, 2020

Salman Abu Sitta's "Mapping My Return"-A Review

 NOTE: This review appeared firs in Mondoweiss where one can view the images and possible comments.


Salman Abu Sitta. (Photo: Stephen Bradley/Bout Yeh)SALMAN ABU SITTA. (PHOTO: STEPHEN BRADLEY/BOUT YEH)

MAPPING MY RETURN
A Palestinian Memoir 
by Salman Abu Sitta
352 pp. The American University in Cairo Press. $36.05

 

To judge by his fellow Palestinian activist associates, the likes of Edward Said and Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, Dr. Salman Abu Sitta is among our living lead intellectuals. He is a low-key but persistent native contributor to documenting the life, and especially the “living geography,” of Palestine across the ages, a task to which he has dedicated his professional knowhow and time.  

In the preface to his 2016 book, “Mapping My Return: A Palestinian Memoir,” Dr. Abu Sitta, an engineer by training who was exiled from his prosperous childhood home in southern Palestine at the age of ten years, advises his reader:

“[The book] tells the story of the long journey of a refugee trying to return home. There were no guns or tanks. There were no secret missions. It was simply a quest for a right to be restored, a truth to be unveiled, and a patrimony, lost in a moment of historical aberration, to be regained. That is the fuel which sustains all Palestinians in their long struggle.”

Amen! I hereby admit that, though not a refugee, I fully subscribe to this form of resistance.

Abu Sitta’s “regular” professional life seems to have been rich and challenging enough: It involves the standard technical engineering office and field work and independent business ventures with the attendant achievements and reversals, especially in Kuwait with Saddam’s megalomaniacal invasion and defeat. He participates as well in the standard Palestinian intellectual and organizational activism worldwide. Such a career seems typical of many diasporic Palestinians, the genre known for its high educational and professional achievement. And for its reliability: “They would go anywhere, any time, and do a terrific job,” the author tells us.

Yet the loss of home, property and lead position of his family as well as all the familiar physical and sociocultural surroundings must have been overwhelming to Salman as a ten-year-old. It stayed with him for life. Then, half a century later, approaching retirement, the author is seized by his lifelong urge to discover what lay behind his dispossession: 

Cover of "Mapping My Return: A Palestinian Memoir" by Salman Abu Sitta, The American University in Cairo Press.COVER OF “MAPPING MY RETURN: A PALESTINIAN MEMOIR” BY SALMAN ABU SITTA, THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY IN CAIRO PRESS.

 

“I was a tenured professor; I had a nice house and a lovely growing family. One night, after pacing around our sitting room hundreds of times until after midnight, I decided to go.” 

And that apparently was how his “crusade” to map his return finally started.

Thus, Abu Sitta’s professional career was bracketed by the childhood obsession around which his book of memoirs revolves. This obsession seems to turn him, the studious civil engineer, into an expert cartographer and historical researcher focusing his gained expertise on Palestine as is clear from repeated declarations regarding the burning fire of his desire to end his long exile: 

“My life’s mission became to try to put a face to this invisible enemy, in particular, the Zionist soldiers who attacked and burned down my home.”

The intense account in this book of memoirs draws on a life rich in successes and adventure but never without the dark hue of the author’s childhood Nakba experience and its traumatic and violent events. And yet, the author manages to sprinkle his writing with a homely sense of humor and snippets of human frailty. Take for example his trip from Gaza to Cairo with his older brothers after the Nakba where they are allowed on train carriages transporting prisoners. They all are placed in adult-size shackles as part of the trip’s standard procedure. As soon as the guards leave, Salman slips his slim arms free. And in Cairo, while attending school, he is entrusted to the care of friends of his family. The couple permit him to share their bed, sleeping between their physically mismatched torsos with all the fondly-remembered comic events on which only a child can embellish.

To gain some appreciation of the author’s perspective as a refugee and on the great loss of status and means that came with his family’s exile, we have to be reminded of the firm traditional leadership his extended tribe, the Tarabeen, and especially his father, Hussain Abu Sitta, had held among Bedouin tribes and farmers in the Beer Sheba district of South Palestine.

https://mondoweiss.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/20200830_164759-768x1024.jpgA PORTRAIT OF HUSSEIN ABU SITTA, THE AUTHOR SALMAN’S FATHER, A CENTRAL FIGURE IN THE HISTORY OF HIS TRIBE AT THE TIME OF THE NAKBA AND ONE WHO FIGURES CENTRALLY IN HIS SON’S MEMOIR. IT IS BY THE FAMED PALESTINIAN ARTIST ISMAEL SHAMMMOUT IN 1950.

 

“After the [First World] war, the British, with their usual diplomacy, confirmed my father as sheikh although he had never cooperated with them during the war. He assumed his duties with vigor. My father had a pleasant appearance and a commanding presence; he was well-spoken and persuasive. He chose the pursuit of justice without belligerence, an approach befitting his role as a judge. In the years to come, he would play an important part in the Palestinian national movement.”

Judge Hussain Abu Sitta was an autodidact chief of towering status whose tribe owned generous tracts of agricultural land in its native Beer Sheba district of south Palestine as well as fertile lands in Egypt. He could afford to send four of his sons to study at Cairo University as well as others to study in Jerusalem. He was in regular personal touch with other Palestinian national leaders as well as international bigshots, from Winston Churchill to Che Guevara. Yet the death of heroic members of the family in the midst of all the terrible Nakba events and what followed in the Tripartite aggression against Gamal Abdul Nasser’s Egypt, is announced by the author in a simple sentence: “On one of his trips, Hassan [Not to be confused with Hussain] stepped on a mine and died. We lost fifteen martyrs from my family alone in the early 1950s.”  The author seems simply too overwhelmed to go into detail.

Then we are given a quick run of the massive destruction from the air and ground that the Zionist forces inflicted on Salman’s childhood home, the school that his father had built for the village’s children, the family’s flourmill and the other landmarks of the area. There are the elders and the feeble and the rest of the distraught and fleeing crowd. 

The vivid picture of the overwhelming disaster is given full force in the author’s childhood memories with the site of a ravine that had formerly served as his agemates’ playground, now used as hideaway by the village’s women, children and the elderly. “[The] women splashed dirt on their faces to discourage rape.” The scene seems to have never left Salman’s active memory. That and viewing his family’s unharvested wheat fields.

“I had wanted to know, since the moment I had been hiding in the wadi with the women and children, who had done this to me, to all of us.” 

Fast forward for over five decades and Abu Sitta, the itinerant Palestinian refugee, having escaped his academic life, is a regular at British libraries in search of historical maps of Palestine from past Western missions starting with Napoleon’s invasion with all its experts and cartographers. It is the start of his self-assigned, self-propelled and unending mapping and documenting of Palestine, the rich field he continues to lead with academic vigor and which provides the arch that sustains the book’s narrative.

Unfortunately, the rape the Abu Sitta womenfolk dreaded did take place; all those rumors were not the figment of someone’s imagination. At this later stage we are presented with one account that the author discovers retroactively with all its inhumane and shameful details. He has entrusted the Palestinian Jewish anthropologist, Uri Davis, with the task of tracking down his father’s heirloom silver sword. The attempt fails. Apparently, the sword had been pilfered, along with photos, books and other valuables, from the family’s residence, the prosperous Ma’in village’s headman’s home. The investigation leads to a more damning side issue: A year after the Nakba, a gang rape was committed by a whole platoon, 17 men soldiers in total, with the victim, a 10 to 15-year-old Palestinian girl, given a bath and a haircut in full view of the platoon’s members before they serially raped her, (which, it must be admitted, was decided democratically by a vote at the mess hall during that Saturday eve gathering in Kibbutz Nirim, newly established on Abu Sitta’s private land). Later, they execute the girl and bury her body in a shallow grave. All of the details are exposed at this later stage by several of the Participants in an investigative report published in Haaretz. 

https://mondoweiss.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Salman-Abu-Sitta-580x435.pngSALMAN ABU SITTA

 

Recounting the childhood memory of the Hagana forces destroying his village, the author formulates the moving conception of his life-long commitment to the idea of “Mapping My Return,” the title and theme of his book:

I looked back at the smoldering ruins, at the meadows of my childhood, golden with the still-unharvested wheat. I was engulfed by a feeling of both anxiety and serenity: serenity because we were still alive and an anxiety that was never to leave me. I wanted to know who this faceless enemy was. What did they look like, why did they hate us, why did they destroy us, why had they had literally burned our lives to the ground? 

What had we done to them? Who were these Jews anyway? I thought to myself that I must find out who they were: their names, their faces, where they came from. I must know their army formations, their officers, what exactly they had done that day, and where they lived later. I scanned the horizon behind me, recalling the places where I was born, played, went to school, as they slowly disappeared from view. My unexpected departure did not feel that it would be such a long separation—it was simply a sojourn in another place for a while. 

If the future was vague for me at that moment, the past that I had just left behind became frozen in my mind and became my present forever. I never imagined that I would not see these places again, that I would never be able to return to my birthplace. The events of those two days catapulted us into the unknown. 

I spent the rest of my life on a long, winding journey of return, a journey that has taken me to dozens of countries over decades of travel, and turned my black hair to silver. But like a boomerang, I knew the end destination, and that the only way to it was the road of return I had decided to take.

As for those refugees gathered nightly at his father’s rented home in Khan Yunis:

“No one ever questioned the idea of returning home. The refugees discussed only ‘when.’”

And that is still the burning fire in Salman’s and other Palestinian refugees’ hearts. Here Salman shows a detailed map of his home village, Ma’in Abu Sitta, and the four Israeli Kibbutzim totaling close to one thousand settlers, established on the village’s land, mainly soldiers who are later ceremoniously declared civilians. In the meantime, the same four settlements became the launching grounds for the multiple massacres of Palestinian refugees in Gaza. 

“This river of blood that engulfed the Gaza Strip in 1956 was not deemed sufficient to earn even a page of coverage in a dozen or so of the western books on the so-called Suez Campaign.” 

 

Here Abu Sitta shares at length two sets of correspondence from two fellow Palestinian friends, one killed in one such massacre and the other, a vagabond, essentially walks his way from Palestine to Kuwait. Just two intimate examples of what the Palestinian diaspora feels like.

 

Saturday, August 29, 2020

Disinherited

 Share on Facebook Sha/var/folders/3w/fsbwk3t51vx4dzqdcy1sv2x00000gn/T/com.microsoft.Word/WebArchiveCopyPasteTempFiles/image-1.pngre on Twitter

THIS IS A PHOTO OF THE RUINS OF THE AMKA (AMQA) MOSQUE BY MAQBULEH NASSAR, A FELLOW RESIDENT OF ARRABEH. IT IS ONE OF TWO STRUCTURES THAT ARE STILL STANDING AT THE SITE OF PALESTINIAN AMQA. THE SECOND IS THE OLD SCHOOL WHICH IS NOW USED AS A STORAGE SPACE. BEFORE THE NAKBA, AMQA HAD ABOUT THE SAME POPULATION AS ARRABEH WHICH NOW COUNTS ABOUT 24 THOUSAND RESIDENTS.

 

For years now, I have scanned Haaretz every morning to assess the public opinion in Israel. The selective English version is delivered daily to my door with the international New York Times.

This morning [last week], a photo of a dozen masked (as in COVID-19) Jewish Orthodox male students in a classroom occupies the center of the paper’s first page. A portrait of Golda Meir hangs above the group and next to the portrait in the photo is the highlighted Hebrew quote: 

“If it were not for the study of Judaism, we would have been like all goys who were once but no more …” 

That puts me in my right place. As if to reconfirm my irrelevance in the Middle East arena, the main headline of the day announces: 

“Kushner: Israel won’t annex without our okay, and that won’t be for ‘some time’” 

Nobody seems to take my Palestinian presence into consideration. I guess I am included under the genre of ‘all goys who were once but no more.’ 

My throat feels parched. I walk to the kitchen for fresh water. For reassurance, I glance at the top of the buffet table with the photo display of various combinations of my five grandchildren. What impurity! Arab, Chinese, Japanese, Caucasian, Jewish and who-knows-what-more. Just my own amalgam of all the historical invaders of Palestine over the millennia depositing their odd genes in my family tree should suffice. They have left some of my siblings with the occasional honey-colored eyes, or light hair to embellish the dominant olive skin and prominent or hooked nose that may belie the goy accusation flung against us Palestinians. 

Or was that just a religious insult? I am even further away from being religious than race conscious. Could that be because of my telltale last name, the Arabic form of Canaanite. Go figure!

Two other first-page headlines are about the main current Israeli headaches, COVID-19 and the diplomatic breakthrough with the United Arab Emirates. A third headline seems less familiar and I read on: 

“IDF has big plans …” 

To me it sounds futuristic, a science fiction exploration of what the Israeli army will be marketing next based on its field tests of weapons in Gaza: drones with the next level of AI to maim and kill disposable human irritants. A quick glance confirms my suspicion with the added mention of Beirut and Hezbollah as additional possible targets.

That is it for the day, I think. Till I stop for coffee at a friend’s home. Not to worry! We both practice social distancing, wear masks and sip our coffee in the breeze of an open veranda. 

He happens to be scanning Haaretz as well. Except that he subscribes to the original Hebrew version. This extends over 12 pages whereas my English copy has only eight. I am fluent in Arabic, Hebrew and English. A quick glance reveals the fact that the English version skips several items that the publisher must deem of little interest to non-Hebrew speakers. I persist in my exploration and find a most interesting article on page 8 with the heading (my translation):

“Without coordination the IDF turned an ancient olive grove in Upper Galilee into a firing range.” 

Olives in Galilee! They obviously are talking about me. I take my time and read on. The report starts with the romantic description of the “vandalized” olive grove as “a pastoral dream of ancient olives that have grown on the steep incline next to almond trees and pomegranates [with a stream] from a spring that refuses to dry up.”

/var/folders/3w/fsbwk3t51vx4dzqdcy1sv2x00000gn/T/com.microsoft.Word/WebArchiveCopyPasteTempFiles/unnamed-1.jpgIMAGE OF ISRAELI VILLAGE OF AMUKA IN GALILEE

My sources date the establishment of the Jewish-only settlement of Amuka to 1949 on the lands of the Palestinian village of A’mka (see remains of mosque above), apparently from the Hebrew or Aramaic for ‘valley’, obviously from the same root as the Arabic word for ‘deep’. The locale is mentioned by historians for centuries and even rated a school built by the Ottoman system in 1887. 

But the Haaretz article for Israeli consumption dates the settlement of seven families in the Jewish village to around 1980.

Despite this shallow historical perspective, the concerned Jewish family in the article displays ‘deep’ attachment to the field the Israel Land Authority had assigned to it on renewable annual lease basis: “This is a livelihood but also a lifestyle,” says the wife, “a lifestyle that they are about to cut off.” The husband adds: “There are wild pigs and porcupines and bible students run around here … I have worked here 38 years. I am connected to the place with my legs and all my body. I am in love with this place. This is action therapy. We know every stone here …”

As a Palestinian, reading the article leaves me with a sense of surrealism. I want to shout at the guy: “You may ‘know every stone here’. Question is, do the stones know you? Go ahead! Throw some of them at me. I bet you stones will veer away from my body! We know each other much better than you think! Just don’t blame me if they mysteriously turn around and smack you in the head.” 

I was born and grew up with olives and stones all around me. Within shouting distance from where this argument is taking place are others, no less human, believe me, who are the current link in the broken long chain of inheritance of those olive fields for only-God-knows-how-long and who now survive on donations as refugees across the border or on pay for menial labor in Jewish settlements like Amuka. They were disinherited as internally displaced ‘present absentees’ at the hands of the same IDF that now awards their olives at will to its Israeli veterans. 

I have cousins in Refugee camps in South Lebanon from this very same area. They still entertain a vivid “pastoral dream of ancient olives” and streams that refuse to dry up.

  

Sunday, August 16, 2020

The extremes of human behavior

 

Note: This post appeared firs on Mondoweiss.

Of late I keep being reminded of my age. Fortunately, the impinging frailties are emotional, not physical. Emotional lability is common among octogenarians. I shudder to think of other more psychopathological explanations for the infirmity. Whatever the cause, in my rural Palestinian culture crying is not for strong men. But nowadays reading the news seems always to bring tears to my eyes.

The cases of near random brutalizing of civilians in the occupied Palestinian territories, often multiple and often to death, is a near daily occurrence. Last week’s episode in Haaretz apparently is a case of mistaken identity, a border cop shooting a man from Jenin in the back seat of a car on sight. The Israeli heroic soldier’s quick finger on the trigger is in line with the a priori Talmudic license of “If someone comes to kill you, rise up and kill him first.” I cried for the injured man’s father visiting him in the hospital. Not only that one of his sons is in critical condition with a pointblank shot to the head but also that there is a death sentence for the other son, the intended subject of the attack. And the same newsfeed has this item as well as this, one of a mother and the other of a child, “the second such incident in three months.” A weekly inclusive summary of such abuses, deadly and otherwise, is the JVP Health Advisory Committee weekly report.

Then Haaretz (English print version) carried a report about the rush of so many Palestinian families including parents, children and some elderly to the shore of the Mediterranean, mostly at Jaffa’s beach, many of them for the first time in their lives. Not only that they had no permits but also that most of them crossed the so called ‘Security Barrier’ through illegal passages and breaks in the fence with the Israeli security officials looking the other way. This surprising event and the pleasure the Palestinian children derived from wading into the sea for the first time, as is shown in one of the pictures in the report, nearly made me cry with pleasure. But what really made me cry to where I was gulping for breath is a video that a search about the topic of Israel’s borders eventually led me to. It shows a football game between two teams of Palestinian amputees in Gaza. Those young men didn’t even touch the fence of their open-air prison, much less crossed it. Just as the unwritten permit to cross the Apartheid wall to reach the sea, shooting with intent to mutilate demonstrating youth in Gaza must have been a well-considered decision of security and political higher-ups. War crimes usually start at the top.

My home in Galilee is nearly equidistant from Jenin and Beirut. For the last five days the scenes of death, destruction and wide spread misery in the Lebanese capital’s port area is shocking. For many of us, natives of the region, the shock is in proportion to Beirut’s romantic place in our hearts as Paris of the Levant. The tragic scenes in the media, especially on Lebanese TV stations, are sufficient to shock the most stoic amongst us. The account of one touching human tragedy that I have seen on TV is also reported in the New York Times international edition. It is of a heroic young woman from a village in north Lebanon, a medic who had joined Beirut’s fire department and died while talking to her fiancé. She was buried in a typical village wedding procession with the standard wedding music and singing and with her coffin draped in white and her fiancé’ dressed in a wedding suit and carried on his friends’ shoulders as befits a groom.

But the one report that brought tears to my eyes the most was a two-line sketch in Arabic on a dear friend’s Facebook account which went as follows (My translation):

“You should be Careful. I have Corona!” an injured woman in Beirut told the man trying to rescue her.

“I am not letting you die,” the man answered as he carried her in his arms.

The humanity of both! I just can’t stop crying. I can’t breathe.


Wednesday, August 5, 2020

In support of a straight shooter: Susan Abulhawa is right about ‘Apeirogon’

CULTURE

Note: This post appeared first on Mondoweiss where. one can see the deleted images.


Susan Abulhawa is right about ‘Apeirogon’

BY HATIM KANAANEH  AUGUST 5, 2020

 Share on Facebook Share on Twitter

Colum McCann. (Photo: Random House)COLUM MCCANN. (PHOTO: RANDOM HOUSE) 

I hadn’t intended to read Colum McCann’s “Apeirogon: A Novel,” (Random House, 2020) at this time. Till I read Raja Shehadeh’s article in Mondoweiss. My admiration and trust in the judgement of the human rights lawyer and prize-winning Palestinian writer compelled me to read the book. But first I read Susan Abulhawa’s critical assessment of the same book in her Al Jazeera article. That made my self-assigned task doubly difficult: I equally admire the lead living Palestinian novelist and poet and have read and reviewed all of her published books except for her forthcoming “Against the Loveless World,” which is high on my current reading list.

In his novel, McCann does a great artistic and creative job of reaching far and wide across time and space, constantly borrowing from world literature, history, folklore and sacred texts to impact his reader with the depth of the personal tragedies that two families, one Palestinian and the other Israeli, had suffered with the loss of one lovely young daughter each in the ongoing violence of Israel’s occupation of Palestine. Both of the fathers have committed to pursuing peace through joining the activist circle of bereaved families on both sides of the ‘conflict.’ And McCann’s tersely poetic writing style is a cross between dwelling at length on the suffering and inner struggles of the two sets of parents of the assassinated promising young girls, and straying far afield in unpredictable directions in literary and popular cultural accounts on both sides of ‘the conflict’.

“Apeirogon” is an appropriate name for a novel that seems to aspire to transcend definition in space and time, a tense poetic tangle with a stylistic mix of William Faulkner’s stream of consciousness and the repeatedly mentioned Thousand and One Nights. Yet, as I read it with the intent to judge its author’s partiality to one side or the other in the assumed Israel-Palestine “conflict,” or his lack thereof, I kept stumbling across reminders that Bassam Aramin, the bereaved Palestinian father (with the repeated but never substantiated Israeli accusations of terrorism and his time in jail under a military court system with a record of 99.8% of all accused being found guilty as charged, as mentioned by the author), his wife, Salwa, and I are all operating at a disadvantage vis-à-vis Rami Elhanan, Bassam’s Israeli counterpart, with his Israeli fighter’s heroic image  which the author visits repeatedly, and his wife, Nurit Peled-Elhanan, the daughter of a famed Israeli general turned peace activist in retirement. And Rami’s sympathetic image is further fortified with details of his Jewish underdog status as a “Holocaust graduate,” the European Nazi crime against humanity which the countrymen of its own perpetrators use as a curse to smear Palestinians. Witness, if you will, Germany’s (and other Western countries’) current criminalization of Palestinian peaceful civil activism against Israel.

/var/folders/3w/fsbwk3t51vx4dzqdcy1sv2x00000gn/T/com.microsoft.Word/WebArchiveCopyPasteTempFiles/bassam-rami-parentscircle.jpgBASSAM ARAMIN AND RAMI ELHANAN WITH COPIES OF COLUM MCCANN’S BOOK “APEIROGON: A NOVEL.” (PHOTO: PARENTS CIRCLE FORUM)

Think about it: To start with, the capable Irish author is European aesthetically and in terms of his natural milieu, his elementary frame of reference and his acculturation. That automatically makes us oriental creatures, and especially the long-derided Palestinians whose main role in the successful Zionist portrayal across most Western media, going back to the earliest church Zionist teachings, has been their absence from the imagined Holy Land till after the unleashing of the Zionists’ settler colonial project when the Palestinians were needed to show up as terrorists. Then comes the novel, “Exodus,” and the most successful film based on it confirming our non-existence except as terrorists. No wonder I still remember demonstrating against it along with my fellow high school mates in Nazareth as it was being filmed. Now, the film rights to “Apeirogon” have been bought by Steven Spielberg before the book was published. The famed film director, even when some of his critics deride him as “no friend of Israel,” is sure to visualize and present the whole mystic blur of “Apeirogon” through Zionist-glinted 3-D glasses. He has famously expressed his willingness to die for Israel but is sure to land alive on the Israeli side of the equalized “conflict.” 

Does no one but the Palestinian writer, Susan Abulhawa, find that alarming? On account of that film’s threat alone, I am compelled to join her in sounding the alarm. The most I can credit McCann with is to give him the benefit of the doubt as a misguided and honest bystander who is practicing his artistic gifts based on his lifelong inherent partiality. 

Author Susan Abulhawa. (Photo: Goodreads)AUTHOR SUSAN ABULHAWA. (PHOTO: GOODREADS)

Pointing this is the minimum I, as a Palestinian, can do. After all, most Westerners are just waking up to the suspicion that they may have been duped by the Zionists’ clever alignment of their own settler-colonial scheme with the God-ordained white man’s burden as colonialists. Given the success of the ploy, it is left up to the Palestinians to sound the alarm and call on their fellow-colonized dark skins to stand up socio-culturally if not politically to their further debasement through the guise of sharing the blame with their oppressors, their settler colonialists, as “equal partners” in a “conflict.” It is the acuity of their ongoing plight that lends urgency to the Palestinians’ ongoing Nakba and obligates their vocal objection to the continued blame as equal partners to a ‘historical conflict’ whether such blame is intentional or out of inbuilt sociocultural partisanship as is the case with McCann in “Apeirogon.” In her piece in Al Jazeera, Abulhawa shines the light on such standard equating of settler and colonized as follows:

“Imagine this (to borrow from McCann’s writing style): Somewhere on the Pine Ridge Reservation, a little girl from the Oglala Lakota Nation, whose head was shattered by a white settler’s petulant son, bleeds to death in her father’s helpless arms. Another white settler befriends the Native girl’s father (it has to be at the white man’s behest because the father can’t leave the reservation), and a friendship between the two men flourishes from their common anguish of having lost a child. The white man’s daughter had been killed by a group of young Braves who attacked an encroaching settlement. The friendship between the two men is real. The loss that haunts them for all their days is the same.”

There is much to quote in support of my contention of the inborn and life-long cultivated partiality to Western values and folkways of McCann, perhaps through no intended bias on his part. He simply is comfortable in his own Western skin. Such bias is nearly worldwide. But that is exactly the problem. Let me quote from a field with which I am more familiar: In his introduction to the current special issue of the International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies focused on Settler Colonialism: The Palestinian/Israeli CaseMartin Kemp concludes at one point:

Silence, going with the flow, avoiding controversy above all else—taking the role of the bystander—does not absolve us of responsibility. It is a choice in itself that can lead us into collusion with injustice and harm of a kind that could never be openly acknowledged. … Like viruses, the political threats to life and liberty have no respect of national boundaries. In a period in which the specters of fascism and militarism once again haunt the world, this places the Palestinian struggle in its proper context. To join with Palestinians on their path to self‐liberation might then be considered to take one’s place in the unending struggle for universal emancipation.”

The obligatory outcome of McCann’s “neutrality” is that the highly artistic product that he puts in our hands is more empathetic with the characters with European values and behavior, i.e. the Israelis, than otherwise. Let me illustrate by quoting from two engaging moments from the lives of the two bereaved mothers. Here is Salwa, the Palestinian mother:

“Once she was filmed carrying her youngest, Hiba, through the apartment. She had stopped to look at a photograph of [the murdered] Abir and the cameraman caught her crying. If they could have understood her anger, if they could somehow have captured it without making a spectacle of it, she would have talked with them, but she knew, she just knew: a Muslim woman, a Palestinian, the crime of her geography. She supported what Bassam did, Rami too, Nurit as well, but she wanted only to pursue the ordinary. She would find blessing there.”

Compare this, if you will, with the Jewish mother’s less inward directed demeanor: She, Nurit, is loud and clear in her crying out to the world, accusing Israel of killing her daughter by maintaining the occupation of Palestinian Territories, a laudatory and just outcry. Nurit’s scream reverberates across the international media to all regions of the world and over one full month of articles and quotes in the media in various world capitals, as the author documents. That is the manner in which the West understands a mother’s outcry and not in the classic pained reticence of the Palestinian mother. Nurit and Israelis generally are not satisfied “to pursue the ordinary.”

A similar conclusion can be reached even in studying the school report cards of the two lost bright girls, Abir’s abstract grades of A, B and C, compared with Smadar’s more “modern” discourse regarding her performance and interactions with classmates and teachers in each subject. Modern Westerners are automatically drawn to the latter’s lively depictions than to dry grades. And the text is rich with similar contrasts playing in favor of Israel’s more familiar patterns of Western acculturation.

When the author comes to negative portrayal of killers on the two sides, the prominence is in reverse proportions, the Palestinians given the lion’s share. We are presented with the cruel portraits of the three Palestinian suicide bombers, Abulhawa’s “braves,” with considerable details of their horrid refugee camp lives and environment. The author goes on to explain the details of the explosive belts that they wore and the angle at which the explosives must have torn their bodies. He even details how the eye of one of them was found later hanging by its nerve over the edge of a shop’s awning in Jerusalem; utter disgust! When the author comes to the soldier who murdered the Palestinian girl with a rubber bullet to the back of her head just outside her school gate, the murderer’s identity is not known and he never really materializes in the account; the reader never meets or him or her. Little cruelty or gore is flung at the reader in association with the Israeli killer. In fact, the one character who shines most in that account is the Israeli woman judge who insists on visiting the site and ends up ruling in favor of a monetary compensation to the Palestinian family for the loss of their little daughter, a rare outcome for Palestinians in Israeli courts.

To be fair, a surprising exception has to be mentioned here: few people, whether Palestinian or Israeli, are featured in the book with recognizable presence outside of the members of the two victims’ immediate families. 

Yet, two Palestinian young women gain entry into the poetic milieu of the book, both unrelated by blood or circumstance to the victims at the center of the book. One is the well-known Palestinian artist, Emily Jacir, who is featured pursuing a project with a connection to Thousand and One Nights. The other is Dalia el-Fahum who, presumably, dies while pursuing her musical ambition of recording bird songs in nature. Yet those most sympathetic sketches of young Palestinian artists fail to balance the account, especially since they both are only tangentially-related to the book’s central theme.

To be honest, reading “Apeirogon,” I could sense Orwell’s presence at the edges tampering with its central premise and carefully balancing its weight and impact. “A swan can be as fatal to the pilot as a rocket-propelled grenade,” is an illustrative casual assertion in the book. It stands alone as one of its thousand chapters of varying length. The author has a fascination with migratory birds that fill many pages all through the novel. This brief statement, I feel, sums up the essence of his “balanced” political stand. Might he, for example, be equating the impact of the peaceful Great March of Return in Gaza with Israel’s frequently fatal and disabling reaction to it? At the end, I find myself in full sympathy with Susan Abulhawa’s stand especially because of the novel’s artistic refinement and inventiveness and the expected worldwide impact of the film based on it, quietly concealing the Palestinians’ ongoing Nakba and denied rights, collective as well as individual ones, witness, for example, Israel’s recently passed apartheid constitutional Nation-State Law.

To use a local Palestinian expression, Susan Abulhawa’s pronouncements “never hit the ground”; her aim is perfect and her fire power is deadly. I find her powerful discourse, centering on refuting the standard Western-style equivalency between the Zionist settler colonialists and their native Palestinian victims, flawless. Confirming and celebrating such unfair equivalency between victim and perpetrator must be decried, challenged and corrected by whoever has the conscience to fathom the depth of its disservice and the media outreach to attempt correcting it. Seeing the current success of the Netflix travesty, Fauda, for example, it is clear that Israel and its hired contractors, especially in the film industry, are retooling their old attack fleets. Raising the alarm, at the earliest possible time and with the loudest possible means at our disposal is the least that all of us, Palestinians and colonized and ethnically-cleansed natives everywhere, must do. Susan Abulhawa did that in her most eloquent style and I humbly second her opinion.

BASSAM ARAMINCOLUM MCCANNPARENTS CIRCLE-FAMILIES FORUMRAMI ELHANAN


Tuesday, June 2, 2020

المهنيون الصحيون الفلسطينيون مواطنو إسرائيل: إلى أين؟

  ملاحظه: هذا المقال مقتبس من مدونة مركز الدراسات الفلسطينيه 


الدكتور رياض مجادلة وفريقه الطبي
المهنيون الصحيون الفلسطينيون مواطنو إسرائيل: إلى أين؟ 
التاريخ
01/06/2020
المؤلف
سلسلة خاصة
نشرت صحيفة "هآرتس" الإسرائيلية مؤخراً مقالاً حول عطاء الدكتور رياض مجادله وخمسة من أنجاله الأطباء في كفاحهم ضد وباء فيروس الكورونا. بالإضافة إلى الإشادة بالدور المركزي لهؤلاء الأطباء وتضحيتهم في هذا السياق لإنقاذ جمهورهم من خطر الإصابة بهذا المرض ولعلاج من أصيب به، بغض النظر عن هوية المصابين القومية، أكانوا عرباً أم يهوداً، تتعرض الصحافية كاتبة المقال أيضاً لموضوع ثانوي أكثر حساسية إذ تقول: "السعي وراء مهنة الطب يظهر كسبيل للاستقلال المادي والتميز الاجتماعي في بلد فيها العديد من المجالات الأُخرى، بما فيها 'الهايتك'، أكثر صعوبة للاختراق بالنسبة إلى المواطنين العرب"—(ترجمتي من الإنكليزية).
وتضيف الصحافية بعداً آخر إذ تتساءل: "هل ستبرهن هذه الأزمة أنها نقطة تحوّل في السعي وراء تغيير أساسي قد يؤدي إلى المساواة الاجتماعية والاقتصادية والاحترام تجاه المجتمع العربي (في إسرائيل). وهل سيصل وقع التضحية المتمثلة بما يجري في مثل هذه اللحظات الدراماتيكية في مستشفيات البلد، عندما تكون، في بعض الحالات، أغلبية الطواقم الطبية من العرب، إلى خارج جدران المستشفى؟"
هذه الملاحظات، وفيها كثير من العمق والصدق، تستدعي منا التمعن والتعليق، إذ إنها ظاهرة جديدة نسبياً في الصحافة العبرية. وقد يطرأ على مثل هذه المعطيات تغيير وتراجع، إذ لم تكن يوماً نتيجة تخطيط مبرمج من المسؤولين. وأشير هنا إلى مقال آخر نشرته الصحيفة نفسها سابقاً وفيه تطرح كاتبة أُخرى المشكلة بشكل حاد في مقال عنوانه: "الإسرائيليون العرب يحاربون الكورونا فيروس كأطباء من الدرجة الأولى لكن كمواطنين من الدرجة الثانية". وهنا تورد المراسلة المعلومات الرسمية التالية: "علماً بأننا نشكل٢٠% من مجموع السكان، فإن ١٧% من الأطباء و٢٤% من الممرضات و٤٦% من الصيادلة في إسرائيل هم من أبنائنا وبناتنا. أضف إلى ذلك دور القوى المهنية في المجالات المساعدة والعاملين غير المهنيين."
من المثير للتمعن، حتى وإن كان الأمر من الحساسية بمكان، مسيرة التقدم والارتقاء مهنياً وإدارياً لمثل هذه الكوادر ومدى علو 'سقفها الزجاجي'. أنا أذكر حين كنت صاحب أعلى درجه مهنية في وزارة الصحة الإسرائيلية بيد أني كنت في الدرك الأدنى من الأوسط بين الأطباء العاملين فيها، كما وأذكر جلياً أول طبيب عربي تبوأ مرتبة مدير قسم في مستشفى إسرائيلي. اليوم، وقد تغير الأمر، يتوجب أن نلقي نظرة فاحصة على مدى تغلغل المهنيين الصحيين العرب في الجهاز، وربما يرى المتنورون من القيمين على الجهاز المنفعة الجمة لمثل هذه الدراسة، إذ من الصعب إجراء مسح كهذا من خارج جدران المؤسسة.
ونشير هنا إلى البعد الاقتصادي للوضع القائم: الأغلبية العظمى من الأطباء الفلسطينيين مواطني إسرائيل، مثلاً، قد انهوا دراستهم خارج إسرائيل. كان السبق في هذا الأمر للإرساليات الدراسية التي رتبها الحزب الشيوعي لأبناء كوادره في شتى المجالات الأكاديمية، ولا سيما الطب والهندسة والمحاماة. لاحقاً تلى ذلك اعتماد الطلاب الجامعيين على دخل أهلهم الخاص. وعلى الرغم من محدودية مثل هذا الدخل، فإنه من المتعارف عليه بين أهلينا أن يتكاتف عدد من البالغين من الأهل لدعم ابنهم، ومؤخراً ابنتهم أيضاً، لاستكمال الدراسة الجامعية، بما في ذلك الطبية منها، وغالباً خارج البلد. وفي العقد الأخير ازداد عدد الطلاب من 'عرب الداخل' الذين يأمون الجامعات الأردنية والفلسطينية في القدس والضفة الغربية. وبحسب تقدير محافظ في مرجع موثوق ، يوفر مثل هؤلاء الأهل على الدولة ما مقداره بين نصف مليون إلى ١،٨مليون دولار لتأهيل الطبيب الواحد، وعلى هذا يتوجب القياس في المهن الأُخرى. لنذكر هنا أيضاً أن هذه الطفرة غير المبرمجة هي حديثة العهد. فأنا، على سبيل المثال، كنت أول طبيب عصري في بلدي، عرابة البطوف، من مثلث يوم الأرض في الجليل الأوسط. مدينة عرابة البطوف تتبوأ حالياً المرتبة الأولى بين جميع البلدات العربية واليهودية في إسرائيل على حد سواء، من حيث نسبة عدد الأطباء من سكانها لمجموع السكان. وقد ينطبق الأمر على عدد الأكاديميين وطلاب الجامعات أيضاً، ودراسة هذا الأمر في قيد البحث في المجلس البلدي.
بيد أن مثل هذه الظاهرة ليست بالغريبة، إذ إنه من المعروف في الولايات المتحدة مثلاً، أن المهاجرين الجدد والجيل اللاحق من نسلهم هم أكثر المجموعات السكانية اهتماماً بضمان التعليم العالي لأبناء عائلاتهم. كما ومن المعروف أن الجالية اليهودية في أميركا تعتمد التقدم اقتصادياً واجتماعياً من خلال التعليم العالي أيضاً. ونحن قد غدونا مؤخراً في مقام "اليهود المتجولين" في وطننا.  
المقلق في الأمر هو التضارب القائم والمشار إليه أعلاه بين الواقع الذي نعيشه، نحن المهنيين الصحيين من أبناء وبنات الأقلية الفلسطينية من عرب إسرائيل، وبين قناعات أصحاب القرار من القيّمين على الدولة، وهم جميعهم حالياً من التيار الصهيوني اليميني المتزمت. وتشير ريم خميس-دكور، دكتورة العلاج بالنطق، في تحليل لها إلى التفرقة البنيوية القائمة في الكيان الإسرائيلي. وتكثر الإشارة عادة إلى الجهاز الصحي في إسرائيل على أنه المجال العام النقي من التفرقة العنصرية. وعلى الرغم عن ذلك، مثلاً، لم تبن الدولة مستشفى حكومياً واحداً في أي بلد عربي في إسرائيل منذ قيامها. لنذكر هنا أن الرؤية الصهيونية تاريخياً كانت وما زالت ترتكز أساساً على نظرة مبدأية وممارسة واقعية استعمارية-استيطانية لا دور فيها للأغيار، بمن فيهم الفلسطينيون المواطنون في إسرائيل، إلاّ الدعم كخدم للسادة اليهود الصهيونيين، "كحطابين وسقائي ماء" لا غير. بالطبع، هذه الرؤية مرفوضة من غير اليهود، منا نحن مواطني إسرائيل. من هنا يظهر جلياً أن التضارب في وضعنا الحالي سيستمر وسيزداد وضوحاً وحدة مع مرور الزمن. هذا الأمر يعيد إلى الذهن ما جرى تاريخياً لنا في مجالات عمل أُخرى، ألا وهي مجالات أعمال البناء والزراعة. وبعد الانتفاضة الثانية، وحين ارتأى القيّمون على شؤون الدولة الصهيونية أن مستقبل مشروعهم الاستيطاني يتطلب استبدال العمال الفلسطينيين، فتحت أبواب الاستيراد لمثل هؤلاء العمال من شرق آسيا وتركيا وأوروبا الشرقية وسواها، وهكذا فكت تلك الأزمة وما زال الحل جارياً إلى يومنا.
وفي عودة إلى المقال الذي افتتحت به حديثي هنا: تتطرق الصحافية في طرحها إلى مطالبة الأطباء من "عرب إسرائيل" الذين تحدثت إليهم بتغيير النظرة الإقصائية من جانب السياسيين الإسرائيليين تجاه القيادة المنتخبة من أبناء مجتمعهم الفلسطيني في إسرائيل، لكن حالياً ما من مجيب. لنذكر هنا أنه بات من المؤكد أن لدى الجيش الإسرائيلي خطط طوارئ مبيتة لطردنا نحن الباقون من سكان البلد الأصليين، من قرانا ومدننا تحت غطاء حرب مع دولة عربية مجاورة. هل يا ترى سيصل الأمر بالقيادة الصهيونية اليمينية المتطرفة إلى مثل هذا الخيار التدميري اعتماداً على مصادر بديلة للقوى الطبية الفلسطينية المحلية المتوفرة؟ أم هل سيعي بعض المتنورين من المواطنين الإسرائيليين اليهود والعرب لحكمة الحل الدائم من خلال الدولة الديمقراطية العلمانية الواحدة بين النهر والبحر؟