Walls of Separation, Physical and Mental

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But I didn’t.

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

But I didn’t

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

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

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

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

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

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!

Mahmoud Darwish

Mahmoud Darwish

10 Aug. 08: Zhang Darwish

The sight was familiar: a busy nook across from the train station in a Chinese city with milling crowds. But the faces all had familiar Palestinian features which didn’t change their Chinese likenesses. And as we sipped our delicious noodle soup THE MAN came in and greeted us warmly. He was at once Mahmoud Darwish and Zhang Yimou. And I was comforted by his presence and warm embrace.

Gazpacho is one of my favorite summer dishes and Didi outdoes herself with embellishing it with local greens and spicy flavors. I can’t resist it though I am a doctor and I know the consequences. I have a serious problem with stomach acid and I normally avoid spicy foods late in the day. But gazpacho is too delicious. Toufiq, my best friend, came over in the late afternoon and for a couple of hours we trimmed hedges in the garden while exchanging expressions of awe at the Olympic opening ceremony we had watched together the night before. We marveled going over the details: the costumes, the spacewalk, the magic globe, the fireworks, the magic stamps, the new meaning imparted to body painting, and the scale of it all. And I related to Toufiq the privilege of having eaten noodle soup at Zhang Yimou’s favorite noodle bar. As we sat down to a bowl of gazpacho Didi helped me bring to life for Toufiq the production by the same magician we had seen in Guilin two years back, thanks to our hosts there, Michael and Limei. Then we raided the fig trees in the garden.

Shortly after sundown Didi and I made a courtesy call at my sister’s. We had missed the wedding party of her first grandson and we had to congratulate the newlyweds. Much as I resisted, I had to accept some of the sweets and fresh fruits offered. It would be too rude not to. They had gone out of their way preparing for our visit. They had set up an outdoor TV screen and a DVD player especially for us so we could enjoy the cool westerly evening breeze while watching a rerun of t the ceremony, the dancing, and the feasting that we had missed.

I had unreasonably overstuffed myself. Just as I was falling asleep the telephone rang. It was my nephew Abed. He wanted to share with me the sad news of the passing away of Mahmoud Darwish, the poet of the Palestinian cause, resistance and conscience. “Is that the closing note in the rhapsody of hope we all had dreamed of and nurtured in our hearts?” he wondered. Abed is another Kanaaneh with dormant literary aspirations. He worships Mahmoud Darwish and has memorized many of his magic lyrics. He wanted to come over to cry on my shoulder. I sought to console him on the phone with a list of the promising young Palestinian poets, not least among them Abed’s own up-and-coming poet nephew, Bashir Shalash. At the mention of Bashir’s name he sounded like he stopped moping and sniffling. And I managed to hold back my own tears and to doze off into fitful sleep.

Twice I got up to swallow some antacids. But the crazy dream would come back as soon as I closed my eyes: Zhang Darwish would come back too, all smiles and slurping his noodle soup with hearty appreciative little noises. But there were three little girls in the shop and they spoke of having a hidden atomic bomb. “We are refugees. Benny Morris invited us,” they kept saying. Mahoud Yimou tried to dissuade them from using their bomb at the demonstration they were heading to in his ruined village of al-Birweh. “Some one will belittle me for this. Israelis are clearing the cemetery in al-Birweh to put up cowsheds. They are disturbing the peace of our dead ancestors, fathers and mothers. And here I am telling the girls not to use violence in resisting the criminal acts. But atomic war is a crime too and you don’t resist one crime with another. There are a lot of flowers in the Galilee. Why do these girls not use wild Galilee flowers? Flowers are as powerful and more becoming for girls. Here in our Olympics opening ceremony we are using songs and flowers to soften the hardened criminals in attendance.”

In the dream when he said those words they sounded so much deeper and more eloquent. They were pure magic. “You must stop those girls from doing it. Have Abed and Bashir help you,” he concluded.

But the girls seemed unconvinced. Laughing coquettishly they ran out of the shop. As I got up to run after them I headed to the medicine cabinet for more antacid. But this time I didn’t go back to bed. I stayed up and wrote.

12 Aug. 08: Punishing the Cactus:

Gardening has come to be a part of my life at a level that I rarely comprehend. Earlier today, as I sat at my computer for my usual morning session of correspondence and of putting down in words some of my free floating anxieties, my mind kept straying away from the task at hand. I simply lacked the needed concentration and the will to perform in routine mode. Frustrated and distracted I abandoned my study and headed out to my garden still in my pajamas. On the way out I unthinkingly grabbed the Brazilian machete I brought home as a souvenir on one of my trips, not fully aware exactly for what purpose. I turned the hose on to drench the earth around my ancient olive tree, the second time I water it this year. It is well rooted in its new location already and over the period of two years I have weaned it from the initial twice a week watering schedule aiming to reach to its natural state of total dependence on rainfall only. I fed the cats and topped the water dish for the free roaming chickens I had let loose in the garden earlier this year as an added attraction in anticipation of the summer visit of my grandchildren. Didi has been bending my ear every day about the social life of the brood and the masterly performance of the rooster. I sprinkled a handful of wheat for it just to see again its mastery of the art of chivalry in calling all the lady chickens to come eat first.

Then I had my morning quota of figs from the tree and approached the long row of cactus. It has overgrown its desired double function of serving as hedge and source of delicious fruit. It stands nearly three meters high. I usually hack down a few high cactus leaves, enough for my daily supply of prickly pears. But today I seemed to savor the act of hacking down the hardy cactus fronds. As I proceeded with the vengeful act I found myself thinking the unthinkable: I should finish the whole hedge off. Its roots have extended far into the field and seem to be affecting the health and productivity of the neighboring figs. I should get rid of the whole thing and start anew in a different location and keep it constantly trimmed to size. Just by replanting one or two leaves and by next season they will bear enough fruit for us. I am having difficulty distributing the plentiful yield this year. Friends and relatives have stopped showing up to pick their share expecting me instead to pick it, clean it and deliver it to them myself. The hell with them all! I am going to cut it all down and free myself of the thankless task next summer.

It took nearly two hours before I stopped hacking at it. By the time I tired out I had a heap of mangled cactus about my own height and several square meters wide at the base. I was totally exhausted and dripping wet with sweat. I had cleared nearly half of the hedge. Only then did it dawn on me what exactly had I been doing. Many a time in the past, when particularly frustrated, I would take an ax to an old dead tree and strike at it till I could hardly move anymore. Once when my late brother and father figure, Ahmad, had a stroke and I, as his trusted doctor, couldn’t find a way of offering him meaningful help, I took out my electric saw and cut down some two dozen cypress trees with the excuse that they were blocking the westerly breeze from brother Sharif, my next-door neighbor. By the time I was done I had perfected the art of determining exactly in which direction a tree would fall and hence acquired the formal position of the neighborhood’s woodchuck. Ever since, my services are sought after by relatives and neighbors to take down this old neem tree without harming the house it shades or to cut that mulberry tree without ruining the chicken coop next to it.

But cactus is different. It, the olive and the fig are so hardily adapted to the Palestinian terrain that they have become landmarks identifying the sites of the hundreds of Palestinian villages razed off the face of the earth by Israel . It never occurred to me before, but it seems that faced with its failure to submerge this living evidence of its ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, Israel has turned around and decided to adopt it as its own in the image it cultivates of its native born sons and daughters as ‘Sabras’, Hebrew for the hardy and thorny cactus. It is as flagrant an assault on Palestinian culture as is its assimilation of our original fast food, the Falafel, as an Israeli innovation. Israel even tried to appropriate the colorful Palestinian hand–embroidered dresses as uniforms for its airline till some alert Palestinian raised objections through UNESCO, not to mention the ‘Hura’ imitation of the Palestinian Dabkeh.

Today it is Mahmoud Darwish I am taking revenge for. All day yesterday I struggled to take my mind off him and his passing away, off what a loss to the Palestinians, to all Arabic speakers and to humanity it was, and off what I could do to quell my anger about it. I had planned to travel to Ramallah to attend the State funeral planned by the Palestinian National Authority, the first since Yasser Arafat’s. I could join members of the Arab Human Rights Association who were travelling in a chartered bus from Nazareth . But would I be able to keep out of trouble should the Israeli armed forces stop us on the way and start questioning and searching us? Perhaps I should travel there the night before and stay overnight. But what would my presence mean beyond paying respect personally to the dead man. At least with the HRA, an organization to which I belong, we will make a formal collective statement conveying the message of our co-ownership of the man, a message of belonging with the rest of the Palestinian people.

I called Moslih, my nephew who teaches at Bir Zeit University, to see if he is travelling to Ramallah. He said he was not and that he had just written an explanation of that on his website. I visited Jalili48.com and was absolutely dumbfounded by the eloquent piece he had written in Arabic decrying the loss of Darwish in a very personal yet representative way of the revered image the man has in the average Palestinian’s heart. He ended with promising Mahmoud that, while his body would be laid to rest in Ramallah, he, Moslih, would be searching for the ruins of his home in al-Birweh.

I felt annoyed and frustrated at my inability to give expression to my own feelings towards the late poet, in the language he loved and lived wherever his exile took him. I speak and read Arabic fluently. But I never learned to type it. And I have lost the creative command I once had of literary Arabic. Linguistically I clearly resemble the axiomatic case of the crow that is presumed to have had its own satisfactory unique gait till it tried to imitate the enviable gait of the pigeon. By the time it accepted its failure it had already forgotten its own way and thus was stuck with the permanent wobble it uses for perambulating. The last time I wrote anything halfway intelligible in Arabic was in my last year in high school as a member of a circle of aspiring poets at the time. Two years later, lonely and disenchanted as a foreign student in Yankton College in South Dakota, I attempted to write in my mother tongue again. My poems were stillborn and I keep them till today as a memento of the loss of creativity I once had.

Now I don’t even have Arabic letters on my keyboard. Makbula Nassar, a fellow Arrabeh villager who made it into media circles in Israel through her twice-weekly radio program and her photos of the ruins of Palestinian villages on the back page of al-Ittihad, the only Arabic news daily in Israel, wrote informing me of the planned symbolic funeral to be held tomorrow in the cemetery of the poets ruined native village of al-Birweh. In passing it on to other locals on my list I felt the need to apologize for writing in English.

What a shame at a time when others are brandishing their literary Arabic skills in memory of its last great icon! To Arabs their language holds a magic power beyond comprehension. God himself offered them no proof of the authenticity of his prophet and of the truth of his message save for the miracle of the Koran’s Arabic eloquence, held by all believers to be beyond the ability of all earthly composers. I still recall to this day the greatest compliment that I ever received from a teacher on my own literary attempts which amounted to an admonition to stop imitating the Koran and develop my own ‘competing style’. Native Arabic speakers can be easily held spellbound by word crafters regardless of subject matter or content, a fact that gives a clear edge to poets and demagogues. But Mahmoud Darwish was an authentic literary innovator building on his early command of the language to promote shared Palestinian sentiments and aspirations to a global audience. With his wellspring of creative energy and provocative thought and with finely sculpted solid images of Palestinian suffering and incessant resistance he confronted humanity with the reality of its abandonment of its essence in our case. If Arafat embodied Palestinian resistance to the world’s revolutionaries, Darwish challenged the world’s collective conscience to acknowledge it. And his living images lost little in translation, evidence of their deeper human appeal in substance and not in style only.

I lasted for two hours of the hard physical work of hacking down the cactus hedge I had worked as hard to establish years ago and of carrying the loads at the end of a fork to a clearing in the orchard to be left there to dry out thoroughly in the heat of the summer sun before I can return the remnants to the soil. As usual for the whole period I had donned my radio receiver in the shape of a headset to stay abreast of world political and cultural events thanks to the BBC and to Monte Carlo. Suddenly I heard a news item that I comprehended. For two hours my thoughts had revolved around Mahmoud Darwish and what his death meant to all of us Palestinians and to our cause. I had not comprehended anything that I heard on the radio for the entire two hours. And now I did: Hugo Morales of Bolivia won a plebiscite about public approval of his presidency. Whoopee! I am happy for him. He is native like me. Fuck the conquistadores!

14 Aug. 08: A Galilee Funeral

Makbula’s idea had caught on. At four in the afternoon Didi and I arrived at the entrance of the industrial zone just to the east of the hill that once was el-Birweh. We joined the funeral procession by several hundred Galilee youth, in black and with Palestinian flags, that proceeded up the dirt road to the ruins of Darwish’s native village’s cemetery. I sought the company of Hanna abu-Hanna, himself a revered Arabic literary figure and a friend of the late poet. Hanna has aged into a shadow of his old vigorous self, now struggling to keep his balance as we wound our way between the strewn cemetery stones and the single barbed wire coiled randomly at its edge. Someone must have attempted to protect the venerable site at one point. Traditional Moslem village cemeteries lack the pretentious raised platforms and showy headstones inscribed with names, dates and prayers. The villagers seem to abide literally by the spirit of ‘dust unto dust’. Each grave is simply outlined by an elliptical row of fist-size local stones. No indication of identity or rank with the exception of a dozen pointed larger bare headstones, possibly attesting to a special status once had. The whole area of the cemetery is overgrown with dried and thorny wild grasses that made it that much more difficult for Hanna to negotiate. A few times some young person would offer his or her help. But Hanna insisted on struggling unaided, perhaps energized by the thought of making a last gesture to his dead friend.

To the south of the forsaken cemetery the skeletal frame of a new industrial-size cowshed juts out encroaching on the serenity and abandonment of the scene. At the far edge to the west are the stone piles and rock foundations of what once were the homes of Mahmoud Darwish and his fellow Birweh villagers. And further to the west are the modern homes and green yards of Ahihud, the thriving settlement that now claims el-Birweh’s very same space and attempts to erase it from living memory with telephone poles, electricity grid, a modern paved access road and a gated entrance from the main road further west. And further west yet is the blinding sheen of the sea, ‘Bahr Akka’- Acre’s Sea as we all once knew it, at the far end of the extensive Sahl el-Birweh, the village’s share of Palestine's coastal plane. The setting sun insists on making a point we almost forgot: This is a choice Mediterranean setting for romance, for a poet to be born, to live, to love, to procreate, to struggle, to die, and to be buried in an unmarked grave and missed by family and fiends. Where did Mahmoud go wrong? Where did we all go wrong? Damn the Zionists!

The empty coffin, draped with the Palestinian flag, was placed in a suitable clearing at the top of the hill in the midst of a multiplicity of unmarked graves, one stone-edged ellipse next to the other. The clearing is suitably demarcated on two sides by a hedge of thorny wild cactus still loaded with overripe fruit and a few hardy pomegranate shrubs with their still unripe fruit. A woman, shrouded in black, sat, cross-legged and leaning her head on one arm, across the clearing from where I stood and picked at the ground with a tiny stick, totally absorbed in her repetitive movement. Someone broke a small green twig with a shiny emerald pomegranate and placed it on the coffin. Others followed suit with lemon, fig and olive branches. Didi had brought a bunch of dried wheat stalks from a vase in our living room and we laid it on the coffin. The only flower he had ask for, were it available, was a Galilee red poppy and it is not the season now. So wheat, the second item he asked for, was right, though he wanted it green and we had none. He died unseasonably.

A child of seven or eight and several young men and women recited from Mahmoud’s poetry, a flutist played some sad tunes, Hanna delivered a moving eulogy and a young woman accompanied on oud sang his “Ahinnu ela khubzi ummi – I long for my mother’s bread” set to music by the Lebanese revolutionary singer/musician Marcel Khalife. Then she sang a Palestinian classic dirge about the horse returning home without its knight. That brought tears to my eyes as it does right now.

In hearing the young woman’s beautiful voice leading the many other young people who sang along I suddenly realized that this was my dream encounter with Mahmoud from a few days ago come true: No violence; just flowers and songs.

Benny Morris to the Rescue

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/18/opinion/18morris.html?th&emc=th

It is one thing to have the renegade father of Israel’s new historians spouting off standard war-mongering rhetoric; It is another thing to read his delirious thoughts on the op-ed page of the New York Times. And I have a theory about that, one nurtured by my own firmly established paranoia and conspiracy-based frame of analysis.

Benny Morris made his name on the strength of daring to expose the falsity of Israel’s previously internationally accepted claims of innocence in the 1948 creation of the Palestinian refugee problem. From the very beginning he faltered a bit and fell short on the honesty component of interpreting his fresh historical account, still allowing an escape route for Ben-Gurion et. al. by devolving responsibility for the war atrocities that drove the Palestinians out of their homes to the field commanders’ level. In recent years, as he saw the fanatical rightists’ light, he started to blame Ben-Gurion for not doing a thorough job. He ought to have completed the ethnic cleansing job, Benny now thinks, and driven out all Palestinians between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. That includes the disorganized group of near 150,000 mainly rural Palestinians who in 1948 became Israeli citizens. True, one quarter to one third of this minority was internal refugees who lost their homes, land and other property. And true the remaining two thirds have lost over 80% of their land to the holy mission of the ingathering of the Jews. Still their demographics are disturbing; they have managed to maintain their relative proportion of the total population of the ‘Jewish and democratic state’ and have even increased some. It is not too late, Benny and his elk now think; ways can be found to fix up the fateful mistake by population exchange, border adjustments and forceful persuasion. When the opportunity presents itself, the entire Palestinian population west of the Jordan River should be transferred out of what Benny thinks should be the minimal natural area of Israel.

Still the man is a recognized authority who has worldwide name recognition. So why not use him now to address the troublesome issue of Iran’s refusal to accept the American-Israeli hegemony in its neighborhood. A message has to be conveyed to the world, whither for short term tactical bluffing or as an actual warning of things to come. Iran has to believe that Israel will attack it and destroy its nuclear facilities even if that means unleashing a nuclear catastrophe on the world. That kind of message is too hard to swallow. So how does one go about getting it across with its full ferocity but without the expected world opinion backlash?

There is a well-tried method. It even has a physiological basis in nature. The good lord, evolution, or whoever designed the cow, has given it the ability to deal with the indigestible-on-the-first-round foods by regurgitation and chewing the cod over and over again till it becomes truly digestible. And that is exactly the way Israeli liberal intellectuals and media stars have dealt with another difficult-to-swallow agenda item that its policy makers decided on: transfer. It is a precedent in which Benny himself has taken a part, though it has been mainly a national level debate with limited international concern or participation. Yet it sets the style of how to go about making the unconscionable sound familiar and less resistible if not less repulsive. In my book of memoirs, A Doctor in Galilee, there is a brief account of this:

“September 5, 2005:

Things do change in this country, but not always for the better. By now, ‘transfer’ in its various forms – whether ‘population exchange’, ‘demographic security’, or even ‘development of the Galilee and the Negev’ – is an accepted part of the political discourse of all the Zionist parties and their leaders. It is part of the current political consensus, neither denounced by civilized people nor denied a central place in ‘normal’ news by the Israeli media. Recently a Palestinian child was shot dead by the occupying Israeli forces. His parents donated his organs to five different patients, including a religious Israeli Jew who declared that, had he known in advance, he would not have accepted an Arab heart in his body. The media presented the item as mildly humorous news, with barely a word of condemnation. A country that has elected Sharon, a veritable war criminal, as its leader and promoted him to the point where the most powerful man on earth, George W Bush, pronounces him ‘a man of peace’, does not have to shy away from policies that are crimes against human rights. Spin-doctoring – known locally as hasbara – is a highly developed art in this country, especially when dealing with Palestinians or when reporting to ‘our American allies’.

Let me explain again: Not long ago transfer was a highly negative term imbued with connotations of war crimes and gross human rights violations. It ranked in most people’s minds with such indecencies as ethnic cleansing and genocide. Till some of Israel’s leaders decided to agitate for removing the major impurity that had sullied the Jewishness of the ‘Jewish and democratic state’ since its establishment, the Palestinian Arab minority that has climbed to near the 20% limit that those leaders and their predecessors, including Yitzhak Rabin, have set for it. Suddenly ‘transfer’ appeared on election platforms of right-of-center Zionist parties. The left was outraged and the media, both private and state owned, made noises of objection. But they all engaged those ‘outrageous transfer-minded rightists’ in active civilized dialogue. They were invited to none-stop academic symposia and to open-ended debate forums on and off the air. Transfer proponent’s views were patiently listened to, analyzed and duly refuted by opponents. Soon you started to hear less convinced middle-of-the-road politicians, and even some of those counted as leftists, declare their objections in more understanding tones. Refutations were prefaced by such half-accepting phrases as ‘granted … but …’ or ‘assuming you are right, still …’. And soon the transfer parties were gaining high approval rates in public polls and doing well in local and national elections. The most outspoken ‘transfer’ party leader, Avigdor Lieberman, was invited into the coalition government and became a minister then a deputy prime minster. And the same transfer objectors continued to participate in the same government.

To fully appreciate the racist flavor of the Israeli mainstream’s cooptation by transfer politicians one has only to remember the loud cries of foul play and the louder denials of the taint flung at liberal leaders accused of consulting with Arab parties about the latter’s possible support of a coalition; not inclusion in it mind you! Just support from the outside. And every last one of them had to come clean on this one and show how distant he or she is from all local Arab politicians.

In no time we found the term ‘transfer’ entering the Israeli parlance as part of the daily verbiage of reporters, newscasters and commentators. It started to be window-dressed into something innocuous and acceptable such as ‘population exchange’, ‘border adjustments’, ‘assisted outmigration’, ‘the socio-economic push and pull factors of population dynamics’, ‘demographic balance’, … etc. etc. Hardly a decade after it all started, the storm was over and ‘transfer’ in Israeli media became a casual innocent term that raises no eyebrows. It is discussed in most circles only as a question of when and how, never if.

The well-tried method is a combination of two basic components: smooth spin-doctoring to camouflage the evil core of what is being said in such a way that it sounds vaguely desirable, and repetitively impinging the senses with it till it becomes familiar and you stop thinking about it when you hear it.

The current topic for obfuscation has added advantages in that the concerned audience is the general American public, the automatic guarantor of Israel’s superior moral rectitude. How many members of the masses in the west and especially in the USA, have the time for the luxury of giving Iran the benefit of the doubt or of engaging in some deep thinking about its affairs! The average middleclass folks can’t be bothered. They will not be easily sidetracked from the daily barrage of mind-gripping minutia from the sex scandals and financial embezzlements in Washington to the little infidelities or wardrobe secrets of superstars in Hollywood. And many are too busy making a living. So it is much more practical to leave worrying about the world to the better informed leaders who are elected and paid to do the job and to those suave experts at all the think tanks and their media conduits that never tire of picking their brains. All in all deep thinking about strange happenings in faraway places is best left for politicians and the media. The fact that groups with money and well-formulated political agendas can buy both genres and turn them into propaganda mouthpieces is too much of an insult for most to consider seriously. A vicious circle ensues whereby the bigger the lie the deeper the ignorance and the insult of facing up to it and the stronger the denial.

That is where Benny Morris’s services come handy. He is an automatic shoo-in, an already well-established credible member of the inner circle of Academia and Middle East expertise; he has name Recognition; like the great majority of Israeli academicians he must have done few stints in service to the Israeli defense forces; And he has what it takes in terms of deep mistrust, if not total contempt of Islam and Muslims. So why not have him pave the road in mainstreaming the idea of a nuclear attack against Iran? It has already been bandied around by Israeli top generals and politicians. It is time to air it out as part of the common secondhand ware on the media market; let people handle it, smell it, fumble it, and get familiar with it even if they were not to buy into it right away.

You would think that the editors of the New York Times would have the common sense to spot such foul intrigue and the decency to nip it in the bud. Here is a well-respected historian who dared to expose the lies expounded by his own national heroes. So committed he is to airing and documented the facts that he didn’t back down on consolidating impressive new evidence confirming the Palestinian narrative regarding their Nakba or catastrophe. Yet he espouses an immoral stand in full contradiction of the lessons his expose teaches. To any one with a minimum of logic this should have raised a red flag. It should have signaled either schizophrenia or the onset of senile dementia.

Yet neither is likely judging by the man’s cold logic; he is not totally off his rocker. Accepting his premises, which the New York Times seems to allow for if not to subscribe to, the conclusions he reaches are not ‘crazy’. Building on patently false premises he proceeds to speak approvingly of a nuclear strike against Iran as a preemptive option. Among other concepts, he mentions quite casually the prospect of “a ratcheting up of the Iranian-Israeli conflict to a nuclear level”, “an Iran turned into a nuclear wasteland” and “a Middle Eastern nuclear holocaust” with “radioactive pollution of the earth's atmosphere and water” being “in the cards”.

If the man is not ‘crazy’, then what explanation can there be for his delirium-like spouting off? That is where I revert to my well-entrenched intrigue and subversion theory: The man has been obviously put up to the job; someone is setting him up as an academician to chew the nuclear cod. People may object to what he says and will sound off their objections. But in doing so, they will be repeating his nuclear mantras, just as I have been forced to do here. Slowly but surely, the terms loose their abhorrent first-encounter effect; a disconnect sets in between the sound of the words and their deeper meaning. People all over the world, but especially in the West, get hypnotized by the repetitive sound-bites, especially as the concepts get sanitized into less offensive sounding terms, though that may come only after the fact. Whoever invented ‘collateral damage’ and ‘targeted elimination’ is capable of whitewashing nuclear terminology into innocent sounding alternative phrases.

It remains to be asked: Who may have put Benny up to this task? My guess is whoever put Bush up to invading Iraq.

So get ready for ‘Operation Maximum Middle East Peace’.

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