Apartheid is too mild a concept

Apartheid is too mild a concept for the way Israel deals with Palestinians under its control when they show any level of resistance. Three days ago, The Guardian published a daring admission by the director of B’Tselem, the largest human rights organization in Israel, of the Apartheid reality that runs throughout Israel and all of the Palestinian Territories that it occupies. It is the standard way Israel deals with Palestinians whether they are its citizens, its permanent residents as in the case of the East Jerusalem population, or subjects of its military occupation in Gaza and the West Bank. The next day, as if in direct response, an Israeli court slammed the actor and movie director, Mohammad Bakri, with a ban on the showing in Israel of his 2002 film “Jenin, Jenin” and a heavy monetary compensation to a former soldier whose face appears very briefly in the film. Gideon Levy opines that the court does Bakri and the Palestinians a great service. The film and the massacre of Palestinians in the Jenin refugee camp that it documents are too important to be relegated to film archives. Now the film has come alive again and you can see it here. That brought back to me the visit I made to the freshly flattened camp in 2002. In April that year, Israel mounted an alleged reprisal attack against the Palestinian Jenin Refugee Camp resulting in the death of scores of fighters and civilians and the razing of a large area of the camp. Despite much debate, mostly academic in the extreme, both the UN and Human Rights Watch deemed Israel’s actions to be war crimes. Mohammad Bakri’s documentary film, Jenin Jenin, gives a Palestinian perspective on the massacre. It is ironic that the architects who later planned the razed section’s renovation reportedly designed its alleys to accommodate Israeli tanks. Here is an entry I recorded in my book of memoirs, “A Doctor In Galilee” [Pluto Press, London, 2015]: June 7, 2002: How does one relate an incident so it feels in writing as it was in reality? What happened last week on a visit to Jenin Refugee Camp was out of character for me. I exposed my feelings so openly that Zainab, my first nurse and the wife of my closest friend, thought I had lost it. She had not seen me weep before in the 32 years of our professional camaraderie. We visited the [Jenin Camp] as part of a medical aid mission from the Palestinian community in Israel, to offer help to the inhabitants after the horrifying rampage by the Israeli army in April. We worked in the dilapidated UNRWA facility for four hours, during which time I cared for over twenty sick children. As we were leaving, we decided to walk through the rubble of the section of the camp flattened by the Israeli war machine more than a month earlier. I have walked through ruins before and sensed the air of total loss that engulfs the whole space. This time I looked at details: the remnants of a family living room with some of the furniture still in place under the caved-in walls; a plastic flower basket hanging between the iron bars protruding from the half- ceiling; a wheelchair hanging from a fallen balcony (we were told the paraplegic survived his fall); pieces of broken toys, the remnants of a musical string instrument, flattened pots and pans. Here and there a few families sheltered under a blanket strung across four sticks over what used to be their camp home, their supposed refuge away from their original home within Israel. Halfway through our walk I noticed a middle-aged man, thin, unshaven and covered with dust, kneeling inside a shallow ditch he had cleared in the middle of the rubble. The ditch was about two meters long by one wide, and about one meter deep, about the size of a freshly dug grave. The bottom was well-packed solid ground, obviously a part of the original camp ground, and the two sides were the base of concrete walls, one with faded blue paint. I walked closer to him, but he did not notice me. Instead he continued clearing the rubble with his bare hands, totally absorbed by his work and with a very determined look on his face. I greeted him with the traditional “May God give you health,” to which he responded absentmindedly, almost mechanically. He continued shoveling out the dirt, only this time throwing the handfuls in the other direction. He was obviously preoccupied but not distraught. I persisted and inquired about what he was looking for. He turned to me and said sarcastically, “Gold, what else?” Again, I persisted with my question. Then he sighed and looked away with a certain sense of shame. “This is the alley on which my house opened. You are standing where it used to be. This is my neighbor’s home. I just wanted to clean in front of my house.” That did it. I could not hold the grief and sadness anymore. It hit like a bolt and I started sobbing. I crouched down, took my glasses off and tried to dry my eyes. But it would not stop. I kept sobbing and my silent gulping for air became louder. Then I just let go and sobbed loudly, momentarily lapsing into the dark abysmal loneliness I felt when as a teenager I came home to find my mother dead and already buried. I regained control only when two men held me around the shoulders and tried to comfort me. One was the same man digging for gold; the second man, I found out later, was a young man nicknamed Michael Jackson, the now-unemployed leader of the camp’s renowned folkdance troop. They both kept repeating to me one reassuring statement: “We are strong. We will outlive this and overcome the destruction.” As I walked away, I was ashamed of the scene I had made. I noticed a group of foreigners being shown around, a group I discovered that were from Iceland and being guided around by Peter Hansen, the director-general of UNRWA. I introduced myself to him and demanded that the capabilities and unique position of the Arab community inside Israel be factored into any plans for the rehabilitation of this and other camps. He acquiesced, agreeing to focus on the psychological health of the camp’s children, and we set a time for a meeting. On my way home, my newly found unabashedness continued. As I got in my car, which I had left safely in a village outside of Jenin, I saw a housewife baking wheat bread in an outside oven in front of her house. I was hungry and the smell of fresh bread was irresistible. I remembered my mother’s freshly baked bread. A child came out of the house. I offered to give him five shekels for a loaf. He ran to his mother and brought two. As he brought the bread the father showed up and told the child not to accept the money. When I insisted that I had to honor the deal I made with the boy the father got a little upset and half-jokingly threatened to break up my car if I insult him and his child any further. He wanted me to come into the house. I apologized for being in a hurry. I was on my way to my nephew’s engagement party. He went in and brought back a plastic bag with a special homemade delicacy—freshly baked paper-thin bread rolled in ghee and sugar. It was delicious. I ate it as I sped off to the party, getting it all over the white clothes I always wear when on a medical relief mission. People at the engagement party had to excuse my looks. They realized I’d had a rough day at the Jenin Refugee Camp. *** In parallel to its director’s article in The Guardian, B’Tselem has updated its website to include a thorough definition of Apartheid in Hebrew, Arabic and English. Its daring and unflinching assertion has caught the world’s attention and has been widely quoted. It is worth recalling that former USA President, Jimmy Carter, had made the same diagnosis years ago in his 2006 book “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid”, though he limited his criticism to Israel’s behavior in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. For that, the main stream pro-Israel USA media nearly tarred and feathered him. Last but not least, South Africa, the original home of Apartheid, has long recognized Israel’s policy and practice towards Palestinians as befitting its illegitimate and disowned scion, as the former diplomat and human rights activist Ronnie Kasrils articulated not long ago.

News to Write Home About

"Egypt Asks Israel to Keep Turkey Away From Gaza,” the headline in Haaretz announced. http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/1.696080 When I first read it my wife and I were still in Hawaii. I broke out laughing. It sounded like a parody straight out of ‘The Onion.’ I labored to put the headline in perspective for people who had no inkling about Gaza’s tragedy. Or about Egypt’s, Turkey’s or Israel’s fixes for that matter, each tragic in its own asinine way.

Every morning, as we walked to the Ala Moana Beach Park from our modest hotel at the edge of Waikiki for an hour’s swim and on our way back, we passed by half a dozen homeless nests, collections of rags, cardboard and plastic in which humans huddled on the sidewalk of the Ala Wai Promenade. Misshapen tarpaulin and plastic sheets strung from the side rails of the bridge to a parked shopping cart or a beat-up bicycle provided a semblance of protection from the rain and sun. The carts were full of more nest-building materials and of bags of edible or wearable goods salvaged from waste bins.

Many of the homeless were young, a surprise to me. One husky Chinese-Hawaiian old man would hold a hand sprinkler and carefully water the flowerbed he had planted along the sidewalk. He was safe enough for me to establish eye contact with him. And one emaciated elderly haole (a derogatory Hawaiian term for white person) in particular attracted my attention. But I didn’t dare look him straight in the eye. Many years ago, in Delhi, I perfected the skill of avoiding the hungry children’s gaze. I could sleep better that way. They were there but weren’t individually registered in my conscience. This ‘present absentee’ old man usually sat in his rags by the telephone pole on our side of the stoplight just before the entrance to the Ala Moana Shopping Center, once boasting to be the biggest such complex in the whole world. Almost always he held a lit cigar in his hand. In the faintest of voices he asked for change while motioning with his other hand to his mouth. An old woman with well-combed shoulder-length blond hair sat on a wheelchair or lay on the ground next to him and listened to classic music on a radio-tape gadget held close to her thin chest. More than all the other homeless on the sidewalk, these two disturbed my peace of mind.

But another seemingly unrelated matter bothered me in Hawaii: ISIS. It is the favorite theme of a good Indian friend of mine there, a brother from college days. He seems to deny me my right of understanding Islam as I know it. He assumes that ISIS is all that Islam is or ever was. The only thing I detest more than accepting such analysis is to defend ISIS. And India did suffer centuries of colonization by Moslems. Now it occurs to me that my daily double encounter with the homeless crowd at the edge of Waikiki can serve the purpose of illustrating my friend’s misconception: What if I were to report to those who know nothing about Hawaii that homelessness is the cardinal feature of Hawaii and the only thing in it worth writing home about? Both Islam and the Hawaiian Islands have more beauty and serenity than needs defending, especially by someone like me who has resisted full emersion in their magic and richness. But, believe me, the homeless phenomenon is the one thing that struck me most on this trip and violated my lasting impression of my second home’s godly beauty.

Twice we witnessed the police clearing the illicit encampments, packing everything haphazardly in cartons and make-believe luggage pieces to be carted away for storage. Those were labeled with location, date and destination in duplicates with copy sheets hung on the rails for the owners to locate their abandoned property should they so desire or dare. Both times I saw none of the regular occupants that I had come to recognize. Neither the Chinese-Hawaiian nor the hungry old white fellow and his girlfriend were to be seen on either of the two occasions. They must have their own early warning system and didn’t care for whatever alternative shelter the Honolulu Police and Social Welfare Department offered them.

I wanted to incorporate some of this in my simile of the comic Gaza news item I had read. It pre-occupied me especially since I was scheduled to speak at a book event later that day. And there was the local couple, our friends and hosts who always try to comprehend the Middle East regional issues. I knew they would ask me about the strange headline. I needed a local simile to illustrate how ridiculous it was. Right away I could see that the destitute white couple was Gaza. The figurative owner of the shopping center has to be Israel, the worst baddy of them all in every Palestinian nightmare. And I will stand for Turkey: I am a dictatorial Moslem and can afford to help but keep my distance and am satisfied with expressing my sympathy especially in my benevolent dreams. We need only an Egypt to complete the silly allegory. We need to incorporate the beach in this charade, of course. So let us say the lifeguard is Egypt. He is physically powerful but choses to serve his mightier neighbor for payment through a third party. Don’t ask me who will stand for the USA; this is getting out of hand in complexity and we haven’t even gotten to ISIS. So now that we have this much of our insane shadow-play comedy in place, let us stop right here: The lifeguard asks the owner of the shopping center to stop me from helping the homeless old couple. It almost makes sense; it certainly makes more sense than the original headline: “Egypt Asks Israel to Keep Turkey Away From Gaza.” Ha ha ha!

I nearly drowned. I finished formulating my analogy while swimming on my back. As I broke out in uncontrollable laughter I swallowed enough seawater to nearly drown. The lifeguard whistled and I lifted my hand and signaled ‘OK’ to him. No need to interfere. Let each stew in his own juice. Or, as we say in Palestine, let each pull out his thorns from his feet with his own hands.

The Adventures of Andy in Disappeared Palestine

This sounds like a lovely title for a children’s book or even a fairytale. Indeed the tale told here is fantastic and hard for the sane mature to believe, fit only for the imagination of a child. It is about the surreal happenings in few days in the life of Andy, a real person who showed up at the Acre train station one evening with an assortment of video-recording equipment.

Andy hails from America. He belongs to the rare breed of self-assigned truth and justice seekers who dedicate themselves to the task of saving the human race at this late hour of its incessant march, lemming-like, to its demise. He has no plausible connection to Palestine or the Palestinians except that he, like Jimmy Carter, finds them awfully wronged and their suffering worthy of recognition. He wants to set the record straight. Together with another fighter for Palestine, Dr. Ahlam (Arabic for ‘dreams’) Muhtaseb, he sets out to document the wrongs done the Palestinians in 1948 through visits to their destroyed former homes and the recording of interviews with members of separated families in Galilee and the refugee camps in Lebanon.


November 05, 2008
I. Andy Visits the Living Ruins

Mia’ar
Andy had a list of Palestinian localities in Galilee that he had to visit. He needed to take a good photo of Sha’ab. For that purpose I drove him to the outskirts of Ya’ad, the posh settlement established in the 1970s atop the hill overlooking Sha’ab that was once the thriving and proud village of Mia’ar. Ya’ad’s first residents were specialist engineers attracted from their original homes in South Africa to work in the nearby military industrial park, reputed to manufacture the electronic trigger mechanisms for Israel’s super-bombs including nuclear ones.

As we walked to our sought-after lookout, I stumbled across a derelict memorial structure overgrown by weeds and hardy local bushes surviving in the shade of the superimposed European pine forest. A marble slab had some writing on it and I stopped to read it. It was in Italian and Hebrew and sang the praises of some Italian Jewish hero, I presumed. I read the specifics: He is commemorated as an educator, a community organizer, and a fighter who lead the liberation of Torino “from a cruel and merciless occupier.” I looked around and felt as if someone hit me hard in the pit of the stomach. The monument is surrounded on all sides by the rubble of old Mia’ar, razed off the face of the earth not long after our hero finished liberating Torino from its usurpers. Rectangular rows of stone still outline the bases of destroyed homes. The profanity of the statement itched in stone in the midst of the ruins nauseated me; I bent over retching. When I recovered I called Andy over and he took pictures.

Ghabsiyeh
Next we visited the ruins of Ghabsiyeh, the destroyed village of Daud Bader, our guide for the day. He is a well-informed and hardened refugee whose family had been settled in the village of Sheikh Dannoun together with a humdrum collection of refugees from other coastal villages who didn’t cross the borders of the then forming state of Israel, borders still undetermined to this very day. Even families from Dannoun itself who returned to their own homes days or weeks after they were driven out of them lost all claims to their property and were forced to rent their former residences from the Custodian of Abandoned Property. I am familiar with this phenomenon from Sha’ab, the similarly aggregated village of ‘internal refugees’ where I have relatives among its original residents who stayed put. Also Dannoun was the home of my aunt’s family, but they all ran away to the other side.

Daud is a well educated man that dedicates his time to informing others about destroyed Palestinian towns and villages. Early on he had a run-in with the Shin Bet (Israel’s Stassi) and lost any chance of holding a job in the system such as teaching in Dannoun’s schools. Now he holds the position of Field Director of the Association for the Defense of Refugee Rights, an officially registered NGO that deals with issues of internally displaced Palestinians like himself, making up nearly a third of the Palestinian minority in Israel. He has an amazingly rich and detailed range of information with exact facts and figures about the geography, social life, land holdings, historical events and specific dates for every destroyed Palestinian locale. His audience ranges from curious locals and daring teachers with their inquisitive students to visiting pilgrims opting for alternative tours, to the adventurous Diaspora Palestinian interested in locating his not so distant roots, to the graduate student on a research assignment, to journalists with a sense of the obscure, to filmmakers documenting past events like Andy, the guest I was driving around the Galilee on this occasion.

In Ghabsiyeh Daud proceeded to beguile us with memories from his own past when his family ran away to neighboring areas then returned with other residents of the village to live undisturbed for some six months before they were forced to move out to Dannoun. On location he expounded details of the historical village mosque that once served the entire region, now sealed and encased by a high metal sheet barrier. For decades it stood neglected, used mostly to house cattle from the neighboring communal agricultural settlement. Then Daud and other agitators cleaned the place up, painted its walls and started to hold Friday prayers in it. The ever-alert Israel Lands Authority, having assumed ownership, very early on, of all refugee lands from the good Custodian, sprang to action and boarded up the place.

Daud pointed out to us some of the village distinctive remains: the surviving palm tree next to the balcony of the effendi’s home, now razed to the ground like all the other Ghabsiyeh homes. The four concrete steps to the entrance to the home of another prominent Ghabsiyan still maintain their upright position abutting a passageway, the village’s agricultural road leading west to its extensive land holdings in the coastal plane. Andy, our documentarian guest, next hoisted his field equipment to the cemetery to capture the neglect and abandonment on film.

On the way out we halted again to hear a rich stream of Daud’s memories about another village landmark, es-sidri, the imposing ancient native tree that stands in a clearing by the village’s paved road entrance. It features the combined status of a banquet hall and a shrine. In the days before 1948 it was the sight for zaffet el-a’rees, the showy and jubilant procession for every wedding in Ghabsiyeh. The groom would be brought on horseback to sit on a chair in the shade of es-sidri. An impromptu horse race would be held for the occasion in the open fields to the west. Guests, friends and next of kin would surround and regale him with song and dabkeh dancing till the sun tilted to dip in the shining sea. The happy groom could almost hold it in his henna-adorned right hand, the sea is so close! Then the men, guests and locals alike, would form a line, their torsos pressed together shoulder-to-shoulder, and proceed to move in unison in a swaying sideways movement to the staccato rhythm of folksingers toward the groom’s home, repeating their sing-songy refrain of “Ya halali ya mali,” a near mystic pronouncement the best translation for which would be “You are rightfully mine and all I own.” The to-and-fro movement of the well-dressed village men reminded the observer of the wavy motion of a breeze-swept green field of el-Ghabsiyeh wheat. The groom would follow mounted on his horse and accompanied by the singing and ululating women celebrants. A throng of young men with few village elders would have preceded the groom’s party to bring the bride from her home, also on horseback and edged on by song and street dancing, to the couples new abode to await the groom’s happy arrival and the conjugal union –ed-dakhli- preceded by the traditional dinner-for-two known as “ luqmit es-sa’adi - the bite of happiness,” and the receiving of modest monitory gifts acknowledged with the standard calling out of the name of each well wisher at the top of the professional village crier’s voice: “May God compensate so and so for his donation to the groom of x number of liras, for the love of his father and of the prophet and of all who bless him.”

The sidri was the sight for all happy Ghabsiyeh communal occasions. In many village cemeteries in Galilee the same kind of tree provides permanent shade without the need to be tended in any way. And its fruit, though small and flat tasting (Daud insisted we taste it), provides a healthy source of energy for children playing in its shade. Over time this tree acquired a mystique bordering on holiness and became the object of veneration. Indeed, there was a sheet of green satin shimmering in the midday sun as we arrived, a decorative present made by some Ghabsiyeh refugee in distress asking for God’s favors or thanking him for them.

El-Kabri
Kabri sat on a rich treasure, its springs the major release valve for the building pressure accumulated in the vast water table under the seaward slant of the Western Galilee mountains. It bottled water long before Israel was established and put its name to the brand. Ahmad Basha ‘Aljazzar’, Acre’s notorious ‘butcher’ of men not cattle, and the Romans before him, brought the cleansing elixir to the coastal metropolis of Acre in specially constructed aqueducts. A length of remains of the multi-arched archeological gem has survived the destructive hand of history and its looting generals as well as the repeated tremors of earthquakes over the centuries. It stretches parallel to the road between al-Mazra’a, another focal collection of Palestinian refugees, and the neighboring Kibbutz of Lohame Hageteot, the sight of the museum honoring Jewish heroes who rebelled against and were executed by their savage oppressors in European Ghettos. The aqueduct provides a bold visual reminder connecting and juxtaposing the two realities, the Jewish historical and the Arab current ones, another evocative yet depressing reminder of whose reality takes precedence around this place. My visceral response was not as acute.

Andy, the documenter par-excellence, and Daud, our well practiced guide-cum-witness, stopped at one of Kabri’s springs, now fully metal-encased and mechanized. Not far from it, in the midst of a lush park that advertized itself with signs all around proclaiming its mind and body-relaxing magic (it did neither to me!), was an old water-operated wheat mill, the flow of its driving force of a stream now another historical relic, tapped dry at source. A Parks Authority sign explained the mechanics of the contraption; not a word about the miller or his wheat-consuming customers. Andy and his project partner, Dr. Ahlam Muhtaseb, hope to connect between the mill here and the miller in his refugee camp a few miles away in South Lebanon.

A convoy of local tourists on their beach buggies, mostly Ashkenazi couples, drove by, the passenger seat spouses clicking their cameras. They and their ilk can’t afford to contemplate, even in the abstract, the logical conclusion to Ahlam and Andy’s tender undertaking: permitting the miller to tend to his mill at el-Kabri.

Al-Bassa
Two churches, two cemeteries, a boarded mosque, a nuns former residence, the two story elegant home of the Greek Catholic priest, and a shrine dedicated to the prophet Elijah (el-Khader, the Green, to Arabs) is all that remains of el-Bassah’s old days of glory. Before the Nakbah el-Bassah was a thriving little town of near three thousand people; it boasted a high school, a hotel, a café, and even a bar; it was that modern. Its location atop a hillock looking out at the Mediterranean sea less than five miles away is truly magnificent.

Another thriving community has now replaced el-Bassa, that of Shlomi, a name derived from ‘shalom’, Hebrew for peace. But the peace of the sacred remnants of old el-Bassa in the midst of shoulder-high dry weeds and wild thistles and bushes is disturbed by the noise emanating from factories around them. It is Shlomi’s industrial zone. And by a more wicked noise.

Andy hoisted his gear and disappeared in the brush. I worried about him, what with his jetlag, exhausting schedule and limited food intake. Eventually he emerged, camera and tripod on shoulder, ready to move to the next location. But I had spotted two items worthy of his documenting attention: Daud and I had climbed over the missing stairs of a church and pried its door open to access its haunting vast interior with its high vaulted, cracked ceiling. It is totally empty except for a wooden altar with few dust covered icons, including a couple of St George slaying the Dragon. A dusty leather-bound half-gnawed copy of the New Testament lay on the corner of the altar. Daud informed us that the Wakims, a fightsy Bassan internal refugee family, still baptize their children here.

Emerging from the church I directed Andy’s attention to another recordable scene, the source of that wicked noise: At the far end of the collection of dilapidated holy sites a Caterpillar was loading rubble onto trucks. The adjacent area of destroyed el-Bassa was being cleared for the construction of a new bus station. Andy recorded the scene, a beast munching at the boney remnants of a once beautiful body, another eerie reminder of the underpinnings of Israel’s modern development: American cash and equipment deployed to replace Palestine in every possible way: people, homes, culture, and memory.

Would the mosque and churches succumb too? Cemeteries are regularly desecrated and pillaged in the name of Israel’s progress and cultural superiority. In Jerusalem the Supreme Court, the final arbiter of the law of the land, has just ruled that an ancient cemetery just outside the old city walls, dating back to the days of the Khalif Omar, can be cleansed of the bones of Moslems to make room for the greater good embodied in the Gehry designed Museum of Tolerance. And what a great example of tolerance it is!

On the way out, using a short cut to the sea coast, we stopped at one of el-Bassa’s derelict cemeteries. Most of the graves are in the form of family mausoleums. Daud found a broken headstone with beautiful Arabic calligraphy. Between the two of us we could make out most of the remaining two thirds of a memorial poem whose letters when added give the date of burial. Daud made sure the slab was turned to lay face down among other unmarked stones to protect it from archeology buffs.

At the edge of the cemetery, just where I parked my car on the street, Daud pointed out another curiosity: a well preserved several feet-wide piece of Byzantine mosaic overgrown and hidden by weeds, edges lost in the surrounding rubble. He figured it must be Byzantine because of the neglect. Had it been Jewish the road cutting through it would have been redirected.

Ez-zeeb
Our visit to Ez-Zeeb was curtailed by nightfall. We hurried to the hill at the northern edge of the national park that the Palestinian fishing village has become, its ruins shared to the south by Club Med and to the north by an anarchist declaring his squatter’s rights in bold signs of ‘No entry’ and ‘The independent State of Achzeevland.’ Andy had just enough light to record the picturesque scene before we rushed to the gate of the park to search for a sign that my wife remembered seeing. Using my car lights to decipher and photograph it, Andy reported its contents: There was a lengthy and detailed account of the place’s history over the centuries. Except that when it came to the over-thirteen centuries of Arab life and culture in the place, it was covered in one brief sentence: “Then it declined into a fishing village.”

Andy’s second night at our home was a little better for him; his jetlag had abated some and he was exhausted. Perhaps also he was satisfied with having witnessed in person the evidence of the trampling of Palestinian rights that he had heard so often from ‘opinionated informants.’ For my part I slept little despite seeking comfort in Melatonin. The evoked memories had coalesced into a nightmarish wakeful dream. I stayed up and wrote.

Dream on Ahlam!


November 15, 2008
II. Andy Meets the Present Absentees

The Musas
On our way back from the Palestinian Neverland of Western Galilee guided by one of its true sons, an actual ‘present absentee’ in the flesh, I called a phone number provided to us by Ms. Dreams. On the other end was a surprised young man who immediately figured out the source of my mix-up: The phone number was his but the name I asked for was that of his old uncle, so it had to be from some confused relative and such exist in refugee camps in Lebanon. I introduced myself and asked if we could meet within the hour.
“Drive up the main road of Deir el-Asad and ask anyone you meet. You and your guest are welcome. Consider it your home.” I reminded Didi of the old couple we met sightseeing on the outskirts of a village in Andalucía who kept repeating to us: “Mi casa su casa!”

When we arrived the young man was waiting. We shook hands and he welcomed us into his uncle’s guestroom. Coffee and fruits were offered and a dozen curious immediate relatives gawked as Andy set up his equipment and I explained the purpose of the interview to the octogenarian Mr. Musa: stocky, fair skinned, well shaven with a sporty white moustache, coarse earth-roughened strong hands and a screaming quarter-size basal cell carcinoma in the middle of his forehead. I made the latter the focal point of my conversation with him. That gave me, a physician, the upper hand in the forming relationship between us. Tangentially, I alluded to the purpose of our visit, the taping of an interview with him regarding his refugee niece in Lebanon. He assumed a heroic, devil-may-care air and expressed his readiness to speak to us of his personal experience of the 1948 tragic events in his village and of his feelings regarding the Nakbah and his changed life ever since.

His diminutive old wife, face deeply wrinkled and framed by a white scarf, sat at his side with her arms respectfully folded across her age- and reproduction-flattened chest (a dozen living children!). Intermittently she muttered her disapproval:
“Let bygones be! Of what use is it to talk of long forgotten events?”
“Osss! Hush-up! I will talk. What is there to hide? The good doctor here is no informant.”
“Of what use is it!” she stood her ground.
The couple’s assembled children and two generations of grandchildren laughed at their progenitors arguing and playing their expected roles, he the assertive, courageous and self-sacrificing head of the household and she the cautious and protective mother hen.

The stage and lighting was readied and I translated Andy’s questions. Despite his rebellious air off camera, Mr. Musa’s answers were brief and evasive and his memories clouded and generalized. His niece in Shatila camp was not exactly a blood relative, only the wife of one. And life in Deir-el-Asad is peaceful and comfortable, thanks in great part to Israel’s National Security Fund old-age payments. What little factual information about the events of 1948 he related, ones that are common knowledge to all adults in the room, had to be pried out of the intimidated old man by force. From the start of the session his wife could be seen to the side shaking her head and making tsuk-tsuk noises in disapproval.

As the camera was turned off, the adult children and grandchildren offered their apologetic explanations blaming it all on old age and psychological aversion to traumatic memories. The young man, my original contact, angrily shouted at the older couple with less than filial veneration. He offered to speak on record himself and Andy accepted the offer. He was open and fiery in decrying ‘our poverty, our loss of our land and dignity, our imprisonment within our communities and our separation from our next of kin across the border’ and more. At this the grand old lady shook her head in disbelief: “Who knows who will hear all of this and what they will do!”

The Krayims
The roles were reversed when we visited the Krayim family in Majd-el-Kroum, the visit arranged on the spot thanks to the fast detective work of my nephew there: The husband, a successful baker who supplies his bread to many a Jewish customer and hence, I suspect, may fear their boycott, was reluctant to speak up, while his wife took the plunge. She, a well preserved woman of short stature, ample girth, and a smiley full and youthful face with large dark eyes, opened up immediately to Andy’s questions in his halting college-learned Arabic. Yes, she allowed, she was a refugee of Al-Yajour, the none-existent suburb of British Mandate Haifa. She was the only refugee from her community to settle, through matrimony, in Majd-el-Kroum. In 1948 her father took the family and fled the onslaught of the fast-advancing murderous Haganah forces to the neighboring village of Usifya up the Carmel mountain, rumored then to be safe, perhaps because of its dominantly Druze inhabitants and the latter’s suspected connection to the enemy, later to be exposed and exalted into blood brotherhood. Eventually, with the wiping of their entire town off the fast shrinking map of Palestine, the family slipped into full refugee status, one part moved down to Haifa as internal refugees and the other chased across the border into Lebanon.

A scene from Haifa’s struggle to defend its Palestinian identity still singes her visual cortex to this day: the sight of dozens of bodies piled up at the edge of the Islamic cemetery, too many to be buried individually in the perilous circumstances, still scares the little girl in her many wakeful nights even today. And yes, she knows through the grapevine of her brother in Shatila camp (of Sabra and Shatila Massacre fame) and would give her dearest to talk to him after sixty years of painful separation, alleviated only once by a single phone call eight years ago when she and her sister visited a niece in Sweden. As she proceeded to search her aging memory for the family’s phone number that Andy had requested, the heavily mustachioed husband interrupted with his second ‘sho bidna bhatha kullo - what is that all for!’ of the evening. Eventually he gave his own mobile number instead of that of the home’s landline.

As we drove home I felt personally betrayed. I had to apologize to Andy for the disappointing responses we managed to elicit in Deir-el-Asad and the mistrust shown us by some of our hosts in both localities. Two factors colluded to undermine the confidence of these people: They had experienced life under a vile military rule with the intrusive, omnipresent and all-knowing Shin-Bet dominating their lives for the near two decades of its existence and for years afterwards, perhaps till the present day. They may have heard my name before but they don’t know me enough for my involvement to allay their fear and suspicion of an American carrying video equipment and asking strange questions about their most intimate feelings. The only members of the generation we were searching for who would dare speak out their minds with uncensored temerity are old communists, I told Andy. All others, barring the few who are close contacts of mine, will practice their learned timidity on us as untrustworthy outsiders.

The Zreiks
Before going to sleep I called and made an appointment for early the next day at the Senior Citizens Club in Eilaboun. The person to whom I was referred turned out to be Asa’ad Zreik, my older brother Sharif’s high school classmate. I joked with him about his senior position with the senior citizens of his village and he informed me that his younger brother Fayez, my own classmate, was a longstanding member of the club. I felt old, perhaps another reason I slept little that night.

In the morning, after a breakfast of cereal and a mix of organic fruits freshly picked from our garden, we headed to our appointment. Warm embraces and fond memories loosened the formal atmosphere of Asa’ad’s modern office. The two old resource persons that awaited our arrival were also a pair of brothers. Thing in Eilaboun, it turns out, show a peculiar tendency for twinning. The senior half, abu-Zreik, ninety four years old, showed his age by the use of a cane and a hearing aid, but otherwise was in full command of his faculties. He spoke first, as is only proper for an elder brother, and was clear-minded in relating his memories in his slightly halting speech pattern. He spoke good English thanks to his education under the British Mandate system and his service in the police force on the eve of al-Nakba. Still he preferred that I translate so as not to err in providing the right answers to Andy’s welcome questions.

Abu-Zreik and his junior brother, eighty six, were among the young men of Eilaboun selected by the conquering Haganah commander for execution. The two were spared the fate of the other fourteen, including a father and son pair, due to abu-Zreik’s driving skill. The commander asked for a driver to get in an army jeep and lead a column of army vehicles on the road north in case it was land-mined. “They didn’t invent human shields in Gaza and the West Bank. The British taught it to them back then before 1948,” he declared.

Abu-Zreik then took us in his account from memory on a zigzag trip north to Maghar, then west to Deir-el-Asad, east to Farradhyeh then north again to Kufr-I’inan, accompanied all along by his younger brother, who now sat there and nodded in respectful agreement, and by the people of Eilaboun who were forced out of their homes at gunpoint after the execution of fourteen victims in the four corners of the village. The firing squads were dispersed this way apparently to make the murders appear as combat fatalities, though the UN inspectors who arrived shortly thereafter on the scene realized what had happened from the nature of the wounds; all the victims were shot pointblank in the back of the head. The same was true of the additional fifteen Moslem men from the neighboring Bedouin tribes, including a father and his two sons, executed separately at the outskirts of Eilaboun.

From the start Israel had a way of segregating along confessional lines: Christians, Druze and Moslems, abu-Zreik explains; it maintains the tradition to this day. As a born (sans the ‘again’ so I don’t have to share even one adjective with George W Bush) Moslem, my own marriage to my Christian wife would have not been allowed had it not taken place in far-away Waikiki, I concur.

Abu-Zreik, with his kid brother in tow, made it alive all the way to Lebanon and back thanks also to another survival skill, his mastery of Hebrew. When he enlisted in the police force in Jerusalem the standard British Mandatory regulations decreed that those who passed their exam in Hebrew were paid a whole lira more per month. So he learned the enemy’s language. On his via dolorosa to Lebanon and Back, Haganah officers kept unwittingly leaking their plans to him and he kept a step ahead of their game. One reprimand from a commanding officer to an unruly Hagana fighter, who was terrorizing the gathered refugees at the Farradhyeh junction with his random shooting of his automatic weapon, still makes abu-Zreik cringe now as he relates it to us. In Hebrew the commander told his underling: “Stop your random shooting. You want to kill? Take four or five men to the fields and shoot them. But don’t do this”

The interview of the senior brother was over and it was his junior brother’s turn. Abu-Ziad’s silence so far was not out of any lack of memories to share or any reluctance to share them. He simply and respectfully awaited his turn. He needed no prompting for he had heard the questions asked of his brother and decided to relate to all of them sequentially avoiding any repetition. Instead of relating the chronology of events as his senior brother had done, he delved into a commentary and political analysis of them. He was sharp, concise, profound, orderly, and meticulous and spoke clearly at a rapid fire clip.

He quickly debunked all the rumors still circulating about the Eilaboun Massacre having been committed in vengeful retributions for the mutilation of two enemy corpses that a stranger had committed. The village’s wise priest, el-khuri Murqus, asked him to leave the village for the sake of its peace and for that of humanity and God. The man left to bury the two heads he had brought with him from a battle in another location never to be seen again. What happened in Eilaboun, he later explained to me by the monument commemorating the two groups of executed civilians, was part of a well-established pattern, a step aimed at the survivors who witnessed it so as to scare them into flight. If we are to blame this one on revenge, how do we explain the scores of others from Deir Yasin to Ramleh, to es-Sufsaf, to… and the list is too long.

Later, at an unrelated public forum, another Zreik, this time Raef, the young Harvard educated expert on legal theory, explained: It all is part of a well thought-out plan of ethnic cleansing. Ethnic cleansing was there all along in the Zionist discourse, written all over the place between the lines. It takes no special gift of intelligence to decipher it. Ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians was and still is an essential foundational element of the Zionist scheme. It has been the default option all along. If it was not, then why would Ben-Gurion instruct the commander that overran Nazareth that there should be no ethnic cleansing in the holy city, the center of attention of European observers? The case of Nazareth was clearly the exception to a rule.

And how do they justify their violent expulsion of the Palestinian native population? You may well be excused, though your act would not be legal, if your house is on fire and you break the door of a neighbor to get water to put the fire out. If your ship out on the open seas is sinking, you may well be excused for climbing on someone else’s ship, though you cannot claim its ownership on grounds of need. The Holocaust is a powerful and repugnant excuse for the Jewish people’s outmigration from Europe. But it doesn’t give them the right to expel others and live in their homes and on their land.

As to the theories crediting the return of Eilaboun’s residents from their exile to intervention by the Vatican, abu-Ziad dismissed that as well. He credits that exceptional move to the village residents’ determination and unity even in exile. They never gave up and they had good community leaders. He himself was directly involved in all of this. He recalls distributing leaflets, under fire, calling on people not to give up and to accept the 1947 UN division plan. He was a communist and that was the party line.

By midday the two sets of brothers took us to the village square, for an enactment of the events of 1948, a faint shadow of the real thing. We then proceeded to visit the nearby cemetery and memorial monument before we said our emotional goodbyes. By the time I left I felt connected.

The Shehadehs
A week later I picked Andy up at the traffic circle on the east side of Majd-el-Kroum. He was relieved to see me. He had to film the Galilee side of the conference call that Ahlam had arranged between Na’ameh Shehadeh, the same Mrs. Krayim we had interviewed before, and her brother Ahmad Shehadeh in Shatila camp in Lebanon. He came by taxi from Nazareth where he had been busy documenting the Seventh Sabeel Conference on video. While waiting for me he decided to shoot some footage of life at the edge of the village. He soon realized he was getting dirty looks from people passing by. He understood why and got worried because it had happened to him on another occasion while filming on the edge of the fertile Jerezeel valley and his hosts there had to interfere and explain. To Palestinian villagers in Israel someone standing behind equipment on a tripod is a surveyor and that means the first step in the process of confiscating their land. Andy’s Ashkenazi looks further confirmed their suspicions.

Soon we arrived at im-Bassam’s and found her at home all alone. I theorized that the other family members simply didn’t appreciate the true significance of the occasion and each must have gone to his usual work. Then it dawned on me that it was Saturday, the day of rest for us in this country. A better explanation is that indeed they realized the true nature of this orchestrated encounter and decided to split.

Elhajji im-Bassam welcomed us with Arabic coffee and fruits and awaited the call with an eager expression on her smiley fresh morning face. When the call came she handled it calmly and confidently, speaking in a loud and clear voice; no hysterics and no crying. Contrary to my preconceived ideas this was a very happy occasion sprinkled with bouts of laughter. Her full face and large black eyes radiated with pleasant emotions. She inquired from her brother, abu-Ali, about his health and about the health and marital status of her nephews and nieces and of other relatives there while in exchange sharing the news of her single sister in Haifa, of her children and of her retired husband who was now on ‘pensia’ –Hebrew for pension. The names Mahmoud, Hassan and Ali were mentioned often while the localities of Canada, America, Sweden, Lebanon and ‘Falasteen,’ –to balance off ‘pensia’ I presume- featured repeatedly on this side of the conversation. She wished her brother long life and hoped to see him some day “inshallah, God willing and with the benefit of his unbound generosity.” Then her voice went up another pleasant notch as she spoke to her nephew, Ali, the oldest in his family and the one who was born under fire on the family’s way to Lebanon. Now, I presume she was seeking reassurance about her brother and a sudden note of sadness crept in: “All alone, ya Haram! And bed-ridden! Who cares for him? What can we do! That is our destiny; we have been scattered as by a wild wind.” Then came another relative and another. And then the conversation ended as it was started with smiles, pleasantries and well-wishes and we were offered another round of coffee and fruit.

Andy was satisfied with his achievement. Alas, he still felt sad.

The Democratic and 80%-Jewish State

This is a long overdue entry. It was delayed for consultation with lawyer friends who suggested the original could be construed to be libelous. The following is the toned down version:

August 28, 2008
Upper(ty) Nazareth
“I am all for a democratic Upper Nazareth, but first of all a Jewish one" declares Gapso, a Tunisian immigrant vying for the town’s mayorship in the coming elections. With that he dismisses the appeal of a delegation of Arab residents to take their concerns into consideration. He is not the only contender for the post who is dismissive of Arab demands. All candidates quoted in Lily Galili’s report in Haaretz (http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1009568.html) express similar opinions, usually in more openly racist language. It should be pointed out that those Arab intruders are likely to be descendents of the area’s native population whose land the Israeli government under Ben Gurion’s leadership expropriated for the benefit of Jewish immigrants some fifty years ago.

An incident I still recall vividly from over twenty five years ago illustrates the maladjustment of the residents of Upper Nazareth to their Arab surroundings. A complaint from the mayor of the Arab village of Reineh was received at the District Health office that I headed temporarily. The city of Upper Nazareth had released its untreated sewage down the valley at the edge of his village, the plaintiff claimed. I immediately called in the Nazareth Sub-district Physician who was in charge of both concerned localities. She happened to be a Russian immigrant residing in Upper Nazareth and her husband happened to be the physician heading the sanitary department in Upper Nazareth’s city administration. When she read the complaint from the neighboring village she assured me that she knew about this and that it is unlikely that the situation will be corrected soon. As an explanation she offered the fact that the village of Reineh has been transgressing against Upper Nazareth since day one of its establishment. The calls for prayer from the village mosque so early in the morning disturbed the sleep of the city residents and the village’s mayor had refused to do anything about it. She didn’t spell it out but I sensed the clear message that she approved the tit-for-tat. Were it not for my own impotence in the system, she would have lost her job.

Over time and with the expansion of Upper Nazareth, the residential area of the native town of Nazareth became more restricted. The creeping encroachment of the favored new twin with its expansive luxurious neighborhoods, parks, industrial zones, and shopping malls, progressively deprived old Nazareth of any land reserves for its natural growth. Some of Nazareth’s younger well-educated residents are lured by the promise of freedom and better opportunity in foreign lands, especially in North America. Paradoxically, as the capital of the Palestinian minority in Israel, it attracts some of the young professionals from the surrounding Arab villages. To my generation the ultimate success story of a young Galilee villager was to attain professional status and sufficient income to qualify for a Nazarene beauty, preferably the daughter of one of the city’s established families. On balance, Nazareth’s population continued to grow to the point that the city no longer could accommodate it within its restricted borders.

Thus, deprived of its natural expansion zone, very early on, Nazareth’s population started spilling over into the new neighboring town that was originally conceived of as a counterbalance to it. The better-off nascent middle class of Nazareth, doctors, lawyers, engineers and the like, started making lucrative offers to home owners in the tidier upper Nazareth with its better infrastructure and services. Many Jewish owners of government-subsidized homes and apartments in Upper Nazareth were less than pleased with its limited urbanity and westernization compared with such central locales as Netanya and Tel-Aviv. Its close proximity to several Arab villages and to old Nazareth, from which it is separated only by a two-lane highway, added to its unattractiveness to Ashkenazi immigrants. They must have sensed that they were ‘exiled’ to this failed experiment in Europeanization of the Palestinian space. After all, the very same agencies, governmental or international para-statal Jewish ones, involved in enticing them to immigrate to Israel, make a regular habit of brain washing such clients into absolute enmity to Arabs and to all things Arabic. In this case this practice proved to be a two-edged sword. Many such immigrants were alienated from Arabs not only to the degree that they had no qualms about taking over their land but also wanted to get away from them altogether.

That is when another Arab strange characteristic came into play: On the whole, Palestinians in Israel have limited economic horizons. They have little incentive for investment and very few business opportunities beyond small family enterprises. What they earn is saved for family-centered occasions: a son’s wedding (and more recently splurging on a daughter’s wedding has become fashionable as well), building a house and buying a good car, all handled on cash-down basis. Many manage to accumulate hefty saving bank accounts toward such major life events.

Now let us step back into the shoes of the disgruntled Ashkenazi immigrant in Upper Nazareth. Sooner or later you manage to meet the heavily subsidized payments on the public housing unit or the fancy home you occupied upon arrival in this God-forsaken locale surrounded on all sides by antagonistic, unclean, ignorant natives. Now you are free of the restrictions placed on you by the contractor who developed the subdivision, by the housing and the absorption ministries, and by the Jewish Agency barring you from selling your house to non-Jews. And now at the door appears a young couple with checkbook in hand willing to pay for it on the spot. You may dislike and suspect them but they speak fluent Russian, your mother tongue, and their Hebrew is even better than yours. And they seem to be rather polite and offer to meet your lawyer to close the deal. And your cousin or aunt or the brother-in-law of your sister’s mother-in-law has located an apartment in a good neighborhood in Tel-Aviv, a walking distance from the beach and hardly any Arabs in sight at all. And you can deposit your cash money in the bank and pay for the new apartment on installments. And if you get proof for your wife’s disability you may qualify for an interest-free housing bank loan. And they think you can get a cashier’s job at the neighborhood’s superette. The hell with the objections of next-door neighbors, with the speeches of the mayor, and with the warnings of the Committee to Keep Upper Nazareth Pure! Let us go see the lawyer.

There is a thin wedge, a panhandle of upper Nazareth that juts out in a westerly direction along the ridge separating the north edge of the misshapen grabben that makes up old Nazareth from neighboring Reineh village. On both sides of this wedge you find the fancy homes of well-to-do Nazarenes, a mix of some of the well-established old landed aristocracy of Nazareth, still with their aristocratic pretentions but without the land, and of a few noveau-riche arrivals from Galilee villages including some of my physician colleagues. The neighborhood is so prestigious that it was the site a decade ago of the first of the two traffic lights in Nazareth, right in front of the falafel joint that attracted diners from all over Israel before its master falafel-maker was killed in a family feud. Arrabeh, my own home village, has since replaced Nazareth as the falafel Mecca of Galilee.

One of the first public housing projects in Upper Nazareth was located in this confiscated land strip and was specifically planned for housing families of army personnel, hence its name, Shkhonat Tzahal – Army Neighborhood. Of course, the Jewish-only clause must have applied. But soon enough, something like the above scenario took place and the first Arab family moved in, possibly feeling some security in the area’s proximity to Arab homes on both sides of the ridge. In retrospect, no one should have been surprised by the ensuing events: The downward spiral in the prices of apartments and homes and the flight of Jewish owners out of Shkhonat Tzahal. It is a familiar phenomenon to American residents of formerly white-only suburbs. By now the residents of the Army Neighborhood of upper Nazareth are nearly all Arabs, though it has kept its name. Despite the local vigilantes and the continued friction, including the threats and actual attacks against Upper Nazareth’s most outspoken Arab resident, former Knesset Member Azmi Bshara, the infiltration of other parts of upper Nazareth by Arab young couples continues by force of necessity. It has reached such proportions that Upper Nazareth has been officially listed as a mixed city, there is an Arab member in the city council, and Arabs dare to make demands on candidates for mayor. You would think it is enough to make the intruders, and who is an intruder depends on which side of that two-lane highway you stand, pick up and leave.

September 09, 2008
Whoring in Karmiel
The municipal election mania is heating up in Galilee ‘mixed cities’. It is a rare occasion nowadays that I see the news broadcast on Israel’s state TV Channel 1; my disconnect from ‘my country’ is that complete. I just can’t focus on what is being reported after the first news item about anything to do with Palestine and the Palestinians. I just sit there glaring at those well-dressed respectable-looking news announcers and their learned political analysts and expert guests. I wonder if they really think about what they say and how they do really feel inside when they casually and regularly dehumanize the other. But an item of this genera caught my attention enough for me to follow it through as I sat waiting for our regular visitors, our friends Toufiq and Zainab. It was about the municipal elections in neighboring Karmiel where several parties catering to Russian and other new immigrants campaign on the strength of their stand against Arabs moving into the Jewish city envisioned by its Zionist planners as the future big beating-heart of central Galilee.

Imagined maps of the Judaized future Galilee feature Karmiel metamorphosing into a massive urban expanse that extends from Maa’lot close to the Lebanese border all the way to and including Upper Nazareth. How do these planners reconcile their standard exclusionary policies with their demographic worries? The Galilee continues to be Israel’s demographic Achilles’ heel, its Arabs maintaining their lead with a fraction of a percentile point ahead of its Jews. A decade or so ago when the tide turned momentarily in favor of the Jews the National Demographic Center, government ministers and the press all celebrated the occasion with much aplomb. What do they plan to do with me and my extended family, I wonder? And shouldn’t I worry?

So far the actual Karmiel octopus of a settlement has engulfed only much of the private fertile fields and olive groves and of the traditional collective grazing lands of the surrounding Arab villages of Rama, Sajour, Nahif, Bii’neh, Dier-el-Asad, Majd-el-Kroum, and the ancient Bedouin localities of Kammaneh West, Kammaneh East, El-Hussainyieh, el-Nai’m and Ramyeh.

The last locality, Ramyeh, was simply imagined out of existence by the planners and mapped as another neighborhood of the new Jewish city. Its original residents however didn’t accept their total absence from the inspirational drama of Judaizing the Galilee and dug their heels in, further infuriating the progressive city fathers with their antics of alerting leftist and activists across Israel and the world. Those raging maniacs, the Bedouin residents of Ramyeh, dared ask the city to take them in as residents and to incorporate their existing modest homes as part of the new development. But, of course, plans are plans and they didn’t show Bedouin shacks as part of the modern subdivision that was being constructed. Besides, the city is a Jewish one and Bedouins can never hide their Arabness even if their boys often volunteer their services to the Israel Defense Forces, not even when they are deployed to drive other Bedouins in the Occupied Palestinian Territories of Gaza and the West Bank out of their homes.

More than two decades have passed since the last time I participated in a demonstration in support of Ramyeh. I am ashamed to say that over the years I grew tired of the daily tug of war between the dozen families in Ramyeh with their leftist and human rights activist sympathizers and the city’s adamant administration set on expelling them from their homes. All I know is that as I drive by I still can see the few simple stone homes overshadowed and rimmed on three sides by multistory modern apartment buildings. I promise I will find out more soon!

All of that is not in the news report, of course. And another major Arab-Jewish flash point is no longer in the headlines: For years Zionist party leaders in Karmiel and their visiting backers from national headquarters waved their anti-Arab banners high while simultaneously claiming the moral high ground: They would loudly declare their objection to the infiltration of Arabs into Karmiel. Arab pioneering youth, daring to challenge the status quo and to cross the ethnic divide, come there mainly in search of vice and debauchery, they claim. Their influx, even as nonresident business customers, further encouraged the booming sex industry that had continued to flourish in the 1990s with each wave of Russian immigrants.

I know what you are thinking: ‘this is slanderous’, no? Let me explain and provide some contextuality for my outrageous statement. Eons ago I attended college at the University of Hawaii and wound up marrying a local fellow student and have been returning there frequently ever since. My brother Sharif also attended the UH but he had already hooked up a South Dakotan. Around the turn of the millennium Didi and I hosted Pat and Sharif in Hawaii after their absence from the island scene of over two decades. They were on their way back from a conference in Australia. At the end of our compulsory stroll along Kalakaua Avenue, the touristy strip parallel to the world-famous Waikiki Beach, as we approached the less refined bar and gaming end of the street I asked my brother if he noticed any change in the ever vibrant Waikiki nightlife. He responded with a one-liner: “The Korean hookers on the street have been replaced by Russian ones.”

Now, if they have conquered Honolulu, could they not takeover Karmiel? Poverty, the dissolution of the political and societal framework of the former Soviet Union, and the advent of globalization have lead to the rapid spread of the business networks of the Russian underworld, including the sex industry and the trade in women slaves. Israel was and still is much affected by this development, the crime bosses taking advantage of its insatiable appetite for Russian immigrants. Much as it uncritically supported the state’s immigration policy, the Israeli media has frequently featured major business and crime scandals of specific Russian immigrants.

In Karmiel the city bosses assume that the sex industry thrives on the pull factor of the ample supply of male customers, the sexually-deprived young men from the surrounding Arab villages. Ergo, Arabs are to blame for the flourishing sex industry in the town and the way to stem it is to prevent their taking residence in it. Still, by now Arab families make up 10-15% of Karmiel’s residents. They have put up their own party for the municipal elections. On TV they even interviewed its lead candidate, Rabea’ Jahshan, a young lawyer who was a good friend of my daughter in high school.

The argument against Arabs, I hear, was recently revived again by no other than Avigdor Lieberman, the biggest Russian political entrepreneur In Israel. He doesn’t restrict his campaign to targeting Arabs in mixed cities. He wants all Palestinians out of Israel. He openly calls for my expulsion from my home. And the Israeli news media brings that as another neutral news item.

Now how can I deal with that without cussing? The Palestinian Arabic vernacular is rich in cusswords and vulgar descriptive phrases that relate to the cussee’s female relatives’ private anatomy and sexual habits. I am told that the Russian language shares that special richness. So, if the two of us ever meet in person, we will have a lively conversation, I am sure.

For now suffice it to say: ”Damn!”

Faulty Design

Faulty Design

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Obama the Bedouin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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