A Friend's Reading of My Thoughts

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

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

Khalil Nakhleh

Ramallah, 5 Nov. 2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some concluding remarks

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

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

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

Ishkharlo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ishkharlo ya walad!

Lucky You Come Hawaii

Lucky You Come Hawaii

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

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

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

June 14, 20081,

Sponsored by the Friends of Sabeel

Good evening, Salam and Aloha,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Land, Population and Housing:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Indicators of Discrimination:

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

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

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

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

What can we do?

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

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

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

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

Spreading the Word in Hawaii

The following appeared on the opinion page of the Sunday June 22 issue of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin:

http://starbulletin.com/2008/06/22/editorial/commentary2.html

Palestinian Perspective Hatim Kanaaneh A neglected bridge for peace in the Middle East Editor's note: Hatim Kanaaneh, a Palestinian physician and author, has had several speaking engagements in Honolulu this month. He wrote this commentary for the Star-Bulletin. Few doubt the centrality of justice for the Palestinians in any peaceful resolution of all Middle East conflicts. It has been said that nowadays a person's stand on the rights of the Palestinians is the test of his or her humanity. The underlying cause of their plight is best summed up by the Palestinian lawyer and author Raja Shehadeh in his book "Palestinian Walks" as follows: "Perhaps the curse of Palestine is its centrality to the West's historical and biblical imagination." For four decades I have attempted to call to the attention of concerned parties the potential contribution of my little-known and often misunderstood community that is nonetheless key to understanding the Arab-Israeli conflict, the near one and a half million Palestinian citizens of Israel since its establishment. For obvious reasons we have a strong vested interest in peace. Yet, the Zionist state system has methodically denied us any potential role as a bridge for peace. On the contrary, we have been relegated to second-class citizenship in Israel's apartheid system. In my book of memoirs, "A Doctor in Galilee: The Story and Struggle of a Palestinian in Israel," I attempt to give a taste of how it feels to live this experience. The memoir arises from my struggle as a physician to bring the benefits of public health and community development to my people. I was born in 1937 in rural Galilee at the height of the Palestinian peasant uprising against the British Mandate for its sympathy with and accommodation of the designs of the Zionist movement on their land. On my 11th birthday, Israel officially declared its independence, marking the Palestinian Nakba, Arabic for catastrophe. The vast majority of Palestinians from the area of the new state became refugees in neighboring Arab countries. Their towns and villages were systematically razed or their homes occupied by Jewish immigrants. We, the few Palestinians who remained on their land, found ourselves on the wrong side of the border, a leaderless and alienated minority in an enemy state. For 18 years we were placed under oppressive military rule that sapped our community of any remaining vigor or resources. As subsistence olive farmers, my family sacrificed much to put me through high school in Nazareth. Two years later, in 1960, I struck out to study medicine in the United States. In 1970, having obtained Harvard degrees in medicine and public health and turning down several lucrative offers in America, I returned with my Hawaiian wife, a teacher, to the Galilee and found employment with the Ministry of Health in my field of specialty. The dearth of physicians in my region forced me to double as solo village general practitioner. I found my public health work unproductive in light of state systems openly hostile to Palestinian citizens. I started searching for a way around the discriminatory and antagonistic governmental system in which I worked. After a decade of lost effort, I and three other disgruntled local physicians established a nongovernmental organization, the Galilee Society, dedicated to improving the health and welfare of the Palestinian minority within Israel. This NGO became the conduit for my professional endeavors actively challenging the system of which I was formally a part. We used the NGO service sector as a means of consciousness-raising and community mobilization; we reached out to international circles and built alliances with like-minded minority rights activists abroad; and we confronted the Israeli military-industrial complex, demanding environmental protection of the Galilee. Eventually, the health ministry, under Ehud Olmert, ejected me and I became persona non grata in my former professional home. Later I found myself out of a job at the Galilee Society as well, the institution I created and led for a decade and a half. On my way to retirement I then served briefly as a consultant to UNICEF's mission to the Palestinian National Authority before returning to my home village to establish a center for child rehabilitation, which I successfully transferred to others. Still, I find that my efforts and those of other committed citizens, both Palestinian and Jewish non-Zionists, have had little effect in terms of attaining equality. And public opinion surveys show the clear majority of our Jewish co-citizens approving of our banishment out of the country. The persistent confiscation of our land for the benefit of the majority Jewish population, justified by some three dozen specifically formulated laws, has been "our" state's major means of impoverishing our community, economically, politically and culturally. Official statistics show us at a great disadvantage compared with recently arrived Jewish immigrant groups, even those from Third World backgrounds. It is worth repeating that we are not talking here of the Palestinians under the harsh military occupation in the West Bank or in the mass prison of Gaza. Rather we are the indigenous population of the land who survived the Nakba, and stayed in their homes to be incorporated among the first citizens of Israel. © Honolulu Star-Bulletin -- http://starbulletin.com