Rumman – Arabic for pomegranate, originally the Pharonic name for the Iranian native fruit - has a special romantic ring to it in my heart. Rummaneh – pomegranate tree - is a pretty sounding girl’s name locally. One of the first tunes I whistled as a teenager was from a song that spoke of the girl whose ‘breasts are like two pomegranates crackling in my hands’. And romance is what comes to my mind when I think of Granada, a name derived directly from the fruit that became the symbol for the city and is still to be seen engraved in relief on the arch over the entryway to the walled historical fortress of Alhambra Palace. Granada is where Arab culture reached its very zenith and Alhambra is where one can still get a glimpse of the architectural and artistic sophistication and the heavenly sweetness that once was Andalusia. Rumman encapsulates all of that for me.
In Jewish tradition, the pomegranate features so highly that claims were made by ancient scholars of the religion that the number of the seeds of the fruit matches the number of its commandments, 613. Unfortunately the number of seeds varies between different fruits. A more disturbing recent development is the usage of the Hebrew word from the same ancient Egyptian root, rimon, for a weapon, ‘grenade’. Come to think of it, the Latin usage is equally corrupting of my romantic image of the fruit.
In my childhood I spent many hours in the shade of the row of pomegranate trees that my father had planted just inside the wall enclosing the courtyard of our traditional Arab-style home, a more spacious mud-plastered version of your standard Andalusian pension. In early summer we would gather the fallen dumbbell-shaped forming fruit buds, still decorated with red petals, assign them names and pretend they were human, children that we sat in imagined schoolrooms drawn with a stick in the dirt, or soldiers we stood in rows performing military drills or packed in trucks we constructed out of cactus leaves. There were also one apple tree and one lemon. Dropped fruits from these were less common and assumed higher ranks in our magic play world.
Just recently a visit to a Palestinian friend’s home in Ramallah awakened in me all of the romance and childhood memories I associate with the fruit. Our friend’s hobby is botanical painting. She spends long hours copying exact details from actual plant specimens placed under a special microscope. Of the dozens of beautiful paintings strewn around her workshop, the most beautiful was of rumman. It had various views of the fruit: whole, split open, or in the bud.
In the old days our pomegranates gave three varieties of fruit, one large with glistening red cover and extra sweet kernels when ripe, the second with golden yellow-green cover and sweet-and-sour taste and the last smallish in size with green-colored, celadon-like peelings and strong lemony sour flavor. The last was the most valued by my mother who incorporated it in her cooking at well. In season, no degree of pre-warning and repeated castigation was enough to stop us children from raiding the trees when my father took his daily siesta. The telltale permanent stains on our clothes and black fingertips from scraping the skin off the delicious fruit left us with little option but to fall back on our feigned honesty and admit our crime day in and day out till the end of the season.
Those pomegranate trees were older than I was. My father used to relate the story from the first year they bore fruit, when they were the envy of everyone in the village including a mentally handicapped cousin and age mate of his. This cousin could perform the miraculous feat of climbing over the high wall of the courtyard and steal the fruits. One night my father caught him in the act. As he tried to deliver a punishing spanking with his open hand to the cousin’s rear the latter protected his buttock with his bony elbow causing my fathers arm to fracture at the wrest. For the rest of his life my father accepted that as well-deserved punishment for his intended cruelty to a mentally handicapped person. Never again in all of his life did he commit a cruel act or say no to requests from simpletons.
Obviously, my father’s hard learned lesson was not the cause of the special regard in which villagers, even today, hold those with a mental handicap. They credit them with special powers, almost magical, mystic and holy in nature. Especially pregnant women trust the predictions of Mahel, another village ‘saint’ with divining powers and reward him generously especially when his prediction is of a male outcome of a pregnancy.
Those trees lived to see the establishment of the state of Israel as did my father. Two days after our area succumbed to the invading army the trees succumbed to the dozens of work animals pillaged from their owners by the Israeli army and herded in our court yard because of its wall, gate and location fronting the central square in the village. Having nothing else to eat for the period of their incarceration the animals stripped the bark off of the trees before they were trucked away to the army’s slaughterhouse. My father lived for a dozen more unhappy years without ever replanting the pomegranate row.
So, long before its antioxidant healing properties made the pomegranate the culinary rage of the rich, my family had a year-round supply of home-made grenadine concentrate. Now-a-days, each summer, pests, family and friends literally eat into our ample pomegranate crop. And we join in the effort with our daily breakfast cereal supplement and my after-siesta snacks direct from the tree. Just this year I discovered a new combination: fresh pomegranate and passion fruit; heavenly! And each autumn we salvage what is left after all such parties have claimed their share; we squeeze the peeled fruit and boil down the juice into a constant supply of concentrate for our use and for guest receiving at our home.
My first attempt at establishing my own orchard, while the home it now surrounds was still but a fuzzy dream, was to plant a row of pomegranates. I recall forcing myself to make time for the chore in late winter one year and suffering a major disappointment a few weeks later when all of the cuttings I had stuck in the ground failed to sprout. For years I envied my good friend, Abu-Ayman, who had pursued a successful professional career as a medical technician, rising in the ranks to head the lab in our regional hospital, while at the same time keeping an active lifestyle as a successful farmer who managed to accrue, by sheer persistence and hard work, more land in the village’s fertile Battouf Valley than the generous share he had inherited from his father. Since ever I started practicing medicine in Arrabeh I had dreamt of matching his work ethic. He married a traditional villager from a conservative family, a distant cousin whose fair skin, blue eyes and reputation as an adroit fine Palestinian needlework artist had made her the subject of fierce competition between eligible cousins before my friend successfully gained her hand in marriage thus outdoing all others thanks to his college degree and offers of gold jewelry by the kilogram. All through the year, day in and day out, come hell or high water, he rises at dawn and puts in few hours of physical labor in his land before he drives to work. And in the evening, especially in summer, he drives back from work directly to join his family in the fields where they eat what his equally diligent wife had prepared for them and spends the remaining hours of light enjoying the late afternoon cool breeze and the lovely audiovisual show of sunset and twilight augmented by nature’s own daily songfest.
To see Abu-Ayman and his ever-doting wife at work is to know the meaning of a healthy lifestyle. Here is this brown-skinned thin man in baggy pants who had just downed a meal fit for a camel, a baseball hat covering his balding head in the old visor-forward style, wielding a hoe and zigzagging at the speed of light between the vegetables he had planted individually with his own hands, whacking a weed here or straightening the direction of a watermelon vine there. And he is constantly mindful of the needs of the two goats at home saving greens for them and assigning the task of milking to one child or the other.
One spring day I had it with my siblings’ envy; I imposed on my cousin and brother-in-law at whose house we were staying to allow me to prepare a dozen pomegranate cuttings from his trees for planting. The next morning I was up at dawn and had a cup of coffee with my early-rising sister and her first-cousin husband. I grabbed my prepared cuttings and a hoe and walked energetically to my own field inherited from my farmer father. I prepared the holes with the prescribed distances between them, stuck the cuttings in, inserting them in what I judged to be the upright direction, packed the ground well around them and left directly to work in copy-cat imitation of Abu-Ayman. That day it rained and I felt happy for the prospect of life for my pomegranates.
For a few days I did rise early and make it to my land to putter around my first independent farming experiment and to make measurements of the land at the eastern edge of the village shared with my four brothers and to imagine putting a house in a corner of that inherited land. (It never occurred to me that any of my four sisters might demand her rightful share of the land, and indeed when the time came all four sisters happily signed the customary release papers relinquishing their rights to it.) By mid-spring it was obvious that all my efforts had been in vain. Apparently I had misjudged the direction of growth of the cuttings I had made and planted them upside down. Since then I have learned the way knowledgeable farmers make cuttings: you snip the twig straight at the bottom and at a bevel at the top so the direction of growth is obvious.
Or perhaps it was the fact that the cuttings sat for a whole day in the open causing the tips to dry up and fail to take root. I had learned a thing or two about that as well: locally everyone knows that you should wrap the cuttings in a newspaper, drench the paper with water and wrap the bundle in a plastic bag. A while back I discovered a more primitive, yet a cleverer way of achieving the same end using natural products only.
Dr. Ali Badarneh, my friend from a much younger generation and co-founder of Elrazi, the Center for Child Rehabilitation, is married to Maria, a fellow student of psychology he met at the Russian institute of neuropsychology famous for its founder the world-renowned Luria. They reside in Arrabeh but spend their vacations in Crete, her island of origin. Both consider it highly damaging for the psyche of their three young children to spend one whole uninterrupted year in violent Israel especially when a child is a member of the trauma-ridden Palestinian minority. On more than one occasion we have joined them for part of their summer vacation in Crete and befriended Maria’s family and especially her grandparents who, in their eighties, still lead an active farming life. When the old man came to visit his granddaughter in Arrabeh Maria and Ali brought him to see my garden. They acted as translators as I showed him around and bragged about the variety of trees I have. It was spring and when I described the special properties of one variety of pest-resistant and late ripening pomegranates, he got interested. He asked for a potato, pulled out his pocketknife, cut a length from a spry twig and stuck it in the potato to keep its base moist.
The following spring Didi and I visited Crete on our own. We wanted to hike the Samaria Gorge, reputed to be the home of the greatest number of native flowers in all of Europe, and Ali and Maria had no vacation. On one of our drives we came to a familiar spot where the previous summer I had made a scene by pulling off the road and climbing over a fence to eat some particularly luscious figs to the objection and consternation of my wife. I figured that rural Cretans would be as generous as Palestinians and would be certain to welcome a stranger quenching his lust for their delicious fruits. It is not only a custom but also a commandment to feed a wayward stranger. The prophet, we are told, would eat a fruit from the side of the road without asking permission from the owners. No hording though; just enough to reflect the evil eye from damaging the envied tree.
Now I recognized the same tree and broke off three small twigs from it, one each for me, for Ali and for my fellow village gardener, Toufiq. Then we drove over to Grandpa’s house in Arvi on the southern coast, stopping on the way at a store to pick a kilogram of potatoes. As we arrived we found Grandma down with the flu. Grandpa however was well and received us with smiles, hugs and all sorts of physical gestures of welcome. There was no one around to translate. I handed him the bag with the potatoes and the twigs and explained in detailed hand gestures what I wanted done with the contents expecting that, as the source of the wise farming trick, he would understand my purpose. A peculiar faint smile spread across his weathered Mediterranean face as he stowed the loot away. Soon an English-speaking young woman arrived and I asked her to explain to her grandfather that I needed my bag back together with a kitchen knife to shape the cuttings the right way. As she did he broke out roaring with laughter and reached out for a jug of raki and a set of glasses. He had thought the bag was a present we brought on the occasion of visiting his sick wife.
He took us to his field to show me how well the pomegranate seedlings started from my tree were doing. The source was one of many exotic fruit varieties that Kamel, my fruit tree advisor and source, had supplied me with. It was part of a deal in the best of our subsistence farming bartering traditions that came about spontaneously without it ever being openly formulated into a binding agreement: I took care of his children and he of my trees. He is much younger than I am, one of Toufiq’s few dozen nephews. When I came back from the States he was still in agricultural high school, a middling student with limited promise beyond the prospect of turning into the standard semi-skilled construction worker that most of our boys become after high school. But he landed a job at an experimental agricultural station and climbed through the ranks from weeding and ditch-digging to the head of the fruit tree section. He dabbles with developing new fruit varieties by bombarding seeds with ionizing radiation and has one variety of pomegranate named after him, ‘Kamel’. It has huge fruits with pinkish skin but tastes less satisfying than it looks promise. And that is Kamel for you; the year his youngest child grew to where he needed less care Kamel stopped visiting my orchard regularly.
A memorable story from Kamel is instructive in explaining his adaptive skills at work: In October 2000, at the start of the Second Intifada and at the height of the demonstrations that frequently exploded into riots and confrontations with the police, Kamel did a favor to a soldier. As he drove his car back from work he saw her standing at the bus station at the entrance to Arrabeh, obviously panicked and uncomfortable with where she had found herself. Israeli media had pictured our communities as the aggressors and a danger to neighboring settlements. Kamel picked the young woman up, reassured her, turned around and drove her to her home in the nearby settlement of Tzivia. She asked for his address. Two weeks later Kamel offered me two entrance tickets to the famous Country Club outside of Tel Aviv where the soldier’s father worked. He had received them by mail with a card thanking him for “saving our daughters’ life.” Kamel felt uncomfortable with the prospect of going to the country club for a weekend and thought that I may jump on the opportunity. He related to me that he had shared his story with his boss at work emphasizing his different attitude with a literal translation of a local expression: “You think all Arabs are Arabs. In fact there are Arabs and there are Arabs!”
With the exception of the dark-skinned variety that I exported to Crete, pomegranates are often subject to damage by pests. Last year I introduced a new fruit-farming trick I learned in China and it worked well. In October of 2007 when we visited China, while climbing up the side of the massive mound over the undisturbed mausoleum of China’s first emperor, not far from the site where China’s most famous relics, the Terracotta Soldiers, were discovered, I stopped to pick a couple of ripe pomegranates from a farmer’s stall at the edge of his field. Through a translator I learned the details of how and when to wrap each individual fruit in the bud with a thin translucent plastic bag. Later we were to see thousands of acres of apple orchards loaded with luscious red apples all individually wrapped in plastic bags. What remained was for me to figure out which was more damaging to the environment, chemical spray or plastic.
In my garden I used this labor-intensive preventive treatment on my pomegranates, apricots, apples, pears and persimmons. With the exception of the pomegranates, fruits benefiting from this modality of Chinese wisdom seem to ripen earlier but to be slightly more watery and less flavorful. But for my rumman it was perfect.
Monday, March 16, 2009
Sunday, March 1, 2009
A Palestinian Rendevous
Jordan is a less exciting country than many we have visited. Take away Petra, and Wadi Rum and you are left with very little to see. At least that is how it seems to me.
There are a couple of biblical sites, of course: There is Madaba with its famed mosaic map of the Holy Land on the floor of a Byzantine church; there is Mount Nebo, where Moses is reported to have seen the Promised Land for the first time after forty years of going round in circles in the desert, blinded, no doubt, by sandstorms; and there is Bethabara, the site on the Jordan River where John the Baptist immersed Jesus. But none of that is particularly exciting for a secular person like me, especially when in my case Islam is the alternative to secularism.
The whole idea of the Promised Land is a fairly unjust deal from my perspective. After all, the piece of real estate that Abraham’s God promised him and his descendents was the land of the Canaanites, my own ancestors’ property, myself being a Kanaaneh, Arabic for Canaanite. Mind you, history in general, and that of these parts in particular, is fairly flexible. When it suits me I can fall back on my equally valid claim to Arab ancestry. Arabs are the descendents of Abraham, albeit from the less favored second wife, Hagar the slave women. Her status as Sarah’s servant has been fixed in perpetuity in the West’s mind by the Greek-derived term ‘Saracens’ or ‘Sarah’s servants’ for Arabs. Still, as we Saracens say, “elli khalafu abouk ilak ow-la-akhouk – what your father bequeathed is for you and your brother.” So the Promised Land is equally mine by any fair judgment. Some smart aleck is going to come up with a legalistic counterargument about the inheritance rights of half siblings from one’s fathers’ slave women, or the lack thereof. You just wait till we, the slave descendents, get to Durban II; we are going to ask again not only for our share of inheritance but also for reparations for all the unpaid labors of our slave ancestors and for all of their suffering too. Though he does not come from a line of slaves, we have the ear of the USA president this time around, we hope.
As to the baptismal site in Jordan, you may forget about that as well; Israel contests that and offers an alternative location right at the exit of the Jordan River from The Sea of Galilee, less than an hour’s drive from my home. Considering the fact that the Jordanian site is down river from the Israeli one, it is more likely to be polluted. Sorry to disappoint all of you potential fervent pilgrims, but the Jordan River is but a thin stream and the Sea of Galilee is polluted enough to warrant a cautionary note from our health authorities to all picnickers on its shores. Agricultural settlements around it, including those in the Golan Heights, dump their sewage into it and we keep drawing water from it for irrigation and drinking (not to worry, we have chlorine!), so much so that it has gone way below the designated danger line. At the way things are going, desertification of both the Sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea is creeping at an ever faster pace, all in the good cause of ‘making the desert bloom’. Development is an oxymoronic two-way street. You can’t compete with Egyptian cotton if you don’t have a Nile of your own. Or, to put it in the crude village idiom, ‘you don’t fry eggs with farts’; you need a more substantive source of heat.
And the ancient schematic map in Madaba is less than accurate. Also Arrabeh is full of Byzantine mosaic floors. I probably am sitting on top of one right now. My next-door neighbor once found a well preserved mosaic floor in his front yard. It was appropriated by the Israeli Archeological Authority and moved to a museum. Byzantine archeological wonders are plentiful right here. They are worth no more than one visit to Madaba and we have already done that twice.
Petra is something else; it is a site worth a special visit in and of itself even if you have to travel from Patagonia, Inner Mongolia or outer space. We have made the pilgrimage to Petra twice before. As to Wadi Rum, famed for its sand dunes where Laurence of Arabia footage was shot and one of the reasons we acquired our four-wheel drive Subaru Outback, it is still on our schedule. But winter is the wrong season for it; desert flash floods are too much of a challenge for me. There is also the well preserved Ajloun Crusader Citadel. We have visited that one a few times before and we have Crusader Citadels on this side of the Jordan River as well. And there is the famous Roman ruins of Jerash in whose amphitheater an annual songfest is held featuring on more than one occasion my and many Arabs’ idol, Fairouz. But again this is the off season for the Jerash Festival.
So, if we go to Jordan, there has to be a better excuse for it than archeology or ecotourism. And we limited our visit this time around to the capital city of Amman, a place Palestinians give themselves credit for elevating to the status of a city in the first place. But both Armenians and Circassians make similar claims with equally valid historical reasons though you wouldn’t know it by their small numbers nowadays. Amman’s residents are over 80% Palestinians who arrived there as refugees in two waves, in 1948 and again in 1967. Palestinians are the clear majority in the whole of Jordan, a country reputed to have been created for the first time by Winston Churchill when, between two puffs on his cigar, he drew a line on a map, called it Jordan and put his Hashemite interlocutor in charge of it. Despite Amman’s vibrant marketplaces and some modern and new neighborhoods, many still doubt the validity of Jordan’s claims to proper countryhood. As a friend of mine explains, ‘it is little more than a bunch of people with a king’.
In fact we were struck by the absolute number of cars on the roads of Amman, as well as by the good condition of some of the roads and of the cars crowding them. We were informed that two factors could explain this change: the recent drop in vehicle sales tax and the wealth infused into the city’s coffers by better-off Iraqi refugees and returning Palestinians from Kuwait and the Gulf States.
What brought us to Amman is the recent discovery of a fellow public health physician who is a third generation descendent of my late Aunt Samiyeh who was driven out of Dannoun, her coastal village, in 1948 to become a refugee in Lebanon. Suha is employed by UNRWA and is rising in the ranks fast, considering her young age. She came to Amman for an in-service training course. Didi and I, with my sister and her cousin-husband in tow, crossed the border, a simple and well facilitated process at this stage of normalization of Israel-Jordan relations, to meet her. I had also to tend to some other business related to promoting my book of memoirs, ‘A Doctor in Galilee’.
Suha’s entry to Jordan is not as casual a matter as ours is. She travels on as a UN staffer and has to have a good excuse to gain clearance from the responsible authorities in three sets of bureaucracy: Lebanese, Jordanian and UN. She tells us that one outlet Palestinian refugees like her had from the near total incarceration as a stateless people in Lebanon was to travel to Cyprus. Alas, that has recently ceased to be available with the Cyprus’ association with the European Union.
Suha had studied medicine in Baghdad on an Iraqi state scholarship. She admits to a sense of personal indebtedness to Saddam Hussein which she attempts to repay with prayers for Allah’s forgiveness of his many sins. She thinks of him more as a cruel and super-strict father than a political dictator; red was out because it betrayed allegiance to communism and so no red was acceptable in anything you put on, not even as a stripe on a pair of pajamas. That must have been why he was the darling of the Americans early in his career when the Cold War was at its zenith.
Born and raised in Lebanon, Suha also owns up to having had a degree of abstract romanticism when it came to imagining Palestine. Till, as a teenager, she took a trip that brought her to a mountain top close to the western end of the border with Israel. Suddenly she realized that Palestine was right there under her nose; Acre, the regional center city of which her parents and uncles spoke so often was right there at the distance just before Haifa at the horizon. Closer yet was the coastal plane, lands that once fed her mother’s family, the Rustoms of Dannoun, and her father’s family, the Khalils of El-Bassah. After that trip, she says, her infatuation with her nearby homeland grew even stronger and her sense of belonging to the soil her feet never walked redoubled.
Again and again Suha repeated her special appeal to the four of us, her relatives from Paradise Lost: “Ihna akalnaha!- We have suffered the worst possible loss! The only hope we still have is the connection through you. Khalliku mahalku-Stay put, please!”
Suha relates an incident during a UN function in a European capital. “A fellow UN worker from Slovenia sat next to me on the bus. She asked where I was from and I told her in detail. All of a sudden she started sobbing. During the whole period we were there her eyes would fill with tears every time she saw me. I never found out if she had suffered some family separation of her own or what was behind that. Perhaps she just was a sensitive human being.”
On our trip back our luggage was lighter. We had parted with a load of home-made Palestinian olive oil soap that cousin Amineh, Suha’s mother, had asked for from another cousin here in Arrabeh. And I had taken with me a 1.5 liter coke bottle refilled with Rubb, my own homemade carob molasses, as a special present. She promised to share it not only with her mother but also with her uncle Faisal, my own playmate from the Nakba days who has retired from a career of medical practice in Libya. Suha’s sister, married to an Iraqi engineer and living in Canada will miss out. And so will relatives in the Gulf and in Syria. "We have scattered across the face of the earth; globalization at its best!", Suha adds with bitter sarcasm.
As the taxicab drove down the barren hills of Jordan I was tired enough to fall asleep. I had a restless and nightmare-interrupted sleep the night before. I kept dreaming of being forced out of my home and becoming a refugee myself. I woke up in the midst of the Jordan Valley fields brimming with fresh vegetable produce. Were we in a ‘normal situation’ these farmers could sell their vegetables in Arrabeh’s bustling framers’ market every Tuesday and Saturday.
There are a couple of biblical sites, of course: There is Madaba with its famed mosaic map of the Holy Land on the floor of a Byzantine church; there is Mount Nebo, where Moses is reported to have seen the Promised Land for the first time after forty years of going round in circles in the desert, blinded, no doubt, by sandstorms; and there is Bethabara, the site on the Jordan River where John the Baptist immersed Jesus. But none of that is particularly exciting for a secular person like me, especially when in my case Islam is the alternative to secularism.
The whole idea of the Promised Land is a fairly unjust deal from my perspective. After all, the piece of real estate that Abraham’s God promised him and his descendents was the land of the Canaanites, my own ancestors’ property, myself being a Kanaaneh, Arabic for Canaanite. Mind you, history in general, and that of these parts in particular, is fairly flexible. When it suits me I can fall back on my equally valid claim to Arab ancestry. Arabs are the descendents of Abraham, albeit from the less favored second wife, Hagar the slave women. Her status as Sarah’s servant has been fixed in perpetuity in the West’s mind by the Greek-derived term ‘Saracens’ or ‘Sarah’s servants’ for Arabs. Still, as we Saracens say, “elli khalafu abouk ilak ow-la-akhouk – what your father bequeathed is for you and your brother.” So the Promised Land is equally mine by any fair judgment. Some smart aleck is going to come up with a legalistic counterargument about the inheritance rights of half siblings from one’s fathers’ slave women, or the lack thereof. You just wait till we, the slave descendents, get to Durban II; we are going to ask again not only for our share of inheritance but also for reparations for all the unpaid labors of our slave ancestors and for all of their suffering too. Though he does not come from a line of slaves, we have the ear of the USA president this time around, we hope.
As to the baptismal site in Jordan, you may forget about that as well; Israel contests that and offers an alternative location right at the exit of the Jordan River from The Sea of Galilee, less than an hour’s drive from my home. Considering the fact that the Jordanian site is down river from the Israeli one, it is more likely to be polluted. Sorry to disappoint all of you potential fervent pilgrims, but the Jordan River is but a thin stream and the Sea of Galilee is polluted enough to warrant a cautionary note from our health authorities to all picnickers on its shores. Agricultural settlements around it, including those in the Golan Heights, dump their sewage into it and we keep drawing water from it for irrigation and drinking (not to worry, we have chlorine!), so much so that it has gone way below the designated danger line. At the way things are going, desertification of both the Sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea is creeping at an ever faster pace, all in the good cause of ‘making the desert bloom’. Development is an oxymoronic two-way street. You can’t compete with Egyptian cotton if you don’t have a Nile of your own. Or, to put it in the crude village idiom, ‘you don’t fry eggs with farts’; you need a more substantive source of heat.
And the ancient schematic map in Madaba is less than accurate. Also Arrabeh is full of Byzantine mosaic floors. I probably am sitting on top of one right now. My next-door neighbor once found a well preserved mosaic floor in his front yard. It was appropriated by the Israeli Archeological Authority and moved to a museum. Byzantine archeological wonders are plentiful right here. They are worth no more than one visit to Madaba and we have already done that twice.
Petra is something else; it is a site worth a special visit in and of itself even if you have to travel from Patagonia, Inner Mongolia or outer space. We have made the pilgrimage to Petra twice before. As to Wadi Rum, famed for its sand dunes where Laurence of Arabia footage was shot and one of the reasons we acquired our four-wheel drive Subaru Outback, it is still on our schedule. But winter is the wrong season for it; desert flash floods are too much of a challenge for me. There is also the well preserved Ajloun Crusader Citadel. We have visited that one a few times before and we have Crusader Citadels on this side of the Jordan River as well. And there is the famous Roman ruins of Jerash in whose amphitheater an annual songfest is held featuring on more than one occasion my and many Arabs’ idol, Fairouz. But again this is the off season for the Jerash Festival.
So, if we go to Jordan, there has to be a better excuse for it than archeology or ecotourism. And we limited our visit this time around to the capital city of Amman, a place Palestinians give themselves credit for elevating to the status of a city in the first place. But both Armenians and Circassians make similar claims with equally valid historical reasons though you wouldn’t know it by their small numbers nowadays. Amman’s residents are over 80% Palestinians who arrived there as refugees in two waves, in 1948 and again in 1967. Palestinians are the clear majority in the whole of Jordan, a country reputed to have been created for the first time by Winston Churchill when, between two puffs on his cigar, he drew a line on a map, called it Jordan and put his Hashemite interlocutor in charge of it. Despite Amman’s vibrant marketplaces and some modern and new neighborhoods, many still doubt the validity of Jordan’s claims to proper countryhood. As a friend of mine explains, ‘it is little more than a bunch of people with a king’.
In fact we were struck by the absolute number of cars on the roads of Amman, as well as by the good condition of some of the roads and of the cars crowding them. We were informed that two factors could explain this change: the recent drop in vehicle sales tax and the wealth infused into the city’s coffers by better-off Iraqi refugees and returning Palestinians from Kuwait and the Gulf States.
What brought us to Amman is the recent discovery of a fellow public health physician who is a third generation descendent of my late Aunt Samiyeh who was driven out of Dannoun, her coastal village, in 1948 to become a refugee in Lebanon. Suha is employed by UNRWA and is rising in the ranks fast, considering her young age. She came to Amman for an in-service training course. Didi and I, with my sister and her cousin-husband in tow, crossed the border, a simple and well facilitated process at this stage of normalization of Israel-Jordan relations, to meet her. I had also to tend to some other business related to promoting my book of memoirs, ‘A Doctor in Galilee’.
Suha’s entry to Jordan is not as casual a matter as ours is. She travels on as a UN staffer and has to have a good excuse to gain clearance from the responsible authorities in three sets of bureaucracy: Lebanese, Jordanian and UN. She tells us that one outlet Palestinian refugees like her had from the near total incarceration as a stateless people in Lebanon was to travel to Cyprus. Alas, that has recently ceased to be available with the Cyprus’ association with the European Union.
Suha had studied medicine in Baghdad on an Iraqi state scholarship. She admits to a sense of personal indebtedness to Saddam Hussein which she attempts to repay with prayers for Allah’s forgiveness of his many sins. She thinks of him more as a cruel and super-strict father than a political dictator; red was out because it betrayed allegiance to communism and so no red was acceptable in anything you put on, not even as a stripe on a pair of pajamas. That must have been why he was the darling of the Americans early in his career when the Cold War was at its zenith.
Born and raised in Lebanon, Suha also owns up to having had a degree of abstract romanticism when it came to imagining Palestine. Till, as a teenager, she took a trip that brought her to a mountain top close to the western end of the border with Israel. Suddenly she realized that Palestine was right there under her nose; Acre, the regional center city of which her parents and uncles spoke so often was right there at the distance just before Haifa at the horizon. Closer yet was the coastal plane, lands that once fed her mother’s family, the Rustoms of Dannoun, and her father’s family, the Khalils of El-Bassah. After that trip, she says, her infatuation with her nearby homeland grew even stronger and her sense of belonging to the soil her feet never walked redoubled.
Again and again Suha repeated her special appeal to the four of us, her relatives from Paradise Lost: “Ihna akalnaha!- We have suffered the worst possible loss! The only hope we still have is the connection through you. Khalliku mahalku-Stay put, please!”
Suha relates an incident during a UN function in a European capital. “A fellow UN worker from Slovenia sat next to me on the bus. She asked where I was from and I told her in detail. All of a sudden she started sobbing. During the whole period we were there her eyes would fill with tears every time she saw me. I never found out if she had suffered some family separation of her own or what was behind that. Perhaps she just was a sensitive human being.”
On our trip back our luggage was lighter. We had parted with a load of home-made Palestinian olive oil soap that cousin Amineh, Suha’s mother, had asked for from another cousin here in Arrabeh. And I had taken with me a 1.5 liter coke bottle refilled with Rubb, my own homemade carob molasses, as a special present. She promised to share it not only with her mother but also with her uncle Faisal, my own playmate from the Nakba days who has retired from a career of medical practice in Libya. Suha’s sister, married to an Iraqi engineer and living in Canada will miss out. And so will relatives in the Gulf and in Syria. "We have scattered across the face of the earth; globalization at its best!", Suha adds with bitter sarcasm.
As the taxicab drove down the barren hills of Jordan I was tired enough to fall asleep. I had a restless and nightmare-interrupted sleep the night before. I kept dreaming of being forced out of my home and becoming a refugee myself. I woke up in the midst of the Jordan Valley fields brimming with fresh vegetable produce. Were we in a ‘normal situation’ these farmers could sell their vegetables in Arrabeh’s bustling framers’ market every Tuesday and Saturday.
Saturday, February 14, 2009
Coach Youngworth Referees the Elections in Israel
February 10, 2009
It is rainy, the best excuse to procrastinate. I am sure partisan friends and neighbors in my village will comb their computerized voter registry and come to take me to the ballot box before it closes. They probably will accept my excuse of avoiding exposure to the elements on a wet and cold day better than any political analysis I can offer. I don’t have the patience to argue and try to refute their claims of the value of every last vote in proving our collective steadfastness in the face of the racist Zionist mob bent on driving us out of our homes. But I need to clarify to my self my deeply-felt revulsion at participating in this symbolic act of Israeli democracy in its current form.
[A daydream keeps blurring my conscious attempt at focusing: Some folks from Yankton College in South Dakota, my first steppingstone towards a medical degree, have just re-contacted me after some forty years. Now Mr. Youngworth, my Yankton College PE coach, keeps urging me to take Lieberman on in a round of Sumo Wrestling, something that we never did at Yankton.]
Dov, a Jewish family friend, was visiting the other day and raised a relevant point. He lives in the center of the country where the Jewishness of his residential space is less likely to be disturbed by the presence of Arabs. He wondered about the interracial relations in our half-and-half Galilee in light of the violence visited by Israel on Gaza. He felt uncomfortable raising the issue and prefaced his inquiry with the statement that what happened in Gaza left him with the feeling of having received a punch in the face. I commiserated with him by admitting to a persistent feeling of having received a kick in the stomach. I then informed him of the near total absence of current contacts between the two demographic halves of Galilee. I didn’t need to go into the lopsided distribution of rights and resources between the two groups, for that is always a given, and we both know it.
Dov then asked a personal question: “Aren’t you still in touch with so-and-so in the next-door settlement whom you mentioned to me before?”
“No! We parted ways after he became the head of the board of a University of Haifa public forum with academic pretensions and highfalutin coexistence claims.”
“Why? Didn’t he invite you to join?”
“Well, that was exactly the problem. He invited me to join the board and I accepted. Till I found out that Prof. Arnon Sofer sits on the same board. I wrote him asking formally for my name, or that of the professor, to be dropped from the roster. He dragged his feet forcing me to circulate my letter of resignation and the explanation for it to all the other board members. A few tried to dissuade me from this step sighting the presumed pluralistic and democratic nature of Israel and its academic institutions. But I kept to my decision not to sit on the same board with an avowed racist, a long-standing military adviser, and the father of the Palestinian demographic ticking bomb theory.”
“I am surprised at you, Hatim! What is wrong with debating the issues with opponents?”
“Nothing, believe me! But that misses the point. In fact one time I saw the man in a cafe and I walked over to him, introduced myself and initiated a brief discussion with him. I have no problem with debating an opponent. What I will not accept is any form of partnership with him. Partnership means sharing responsibility. Being on the same board with him means we share responsibility for each other’s views and acts. And that I will not permit.”
[“Size is not the only factor in Sumo Wrestling,” Mr. Youngworth urges. “Brains and agility are more important than sheer size and muscle mass. Go down and challenge him. You will beat him, I know. And if you don’t at least no one can blame you for not trying.”
“But I am an itinerant coward; I never rely on physical force; I am a pacifist, you know! And the lack of circulation here is suffocating. It is stifling hot here in the gym!”]
Last night, and for no apparent reason, I made a call to a physician in Lebanon, the granddaughter of my late aunt whose family was driven out of their coastal village of Dannoun north of Acre in 1948. I had never seen or spoken to her before. Still she knew I was from Arrabeh from the way I said ‘hello’ on the phone and proceeded to guess who I was, getting it right on the second try. I praised her intelligence in figuring out who I was after hearing only my greeting and she returned the complement: “Thiltheen elwalad lakhalou—two thirds of the child belong to the maternal uncle! And you are my maternal uncle.”
We proceeded to exchange information, emails, and reassurances about our families and situations and we promised to meet somewhere sometime. Suha’s last request was a passionate “Please stay in Galilee, in Palestine, uncle!”
[Mr. Youngworth is still pushing: “Take him on!” I respect the coach but this is too much. I step outdoor into the central court yard. The rain has stopped. There is a refreshing cool breeze.
“It is against my principle to engage in a physical fight. And this guy is a brute. Let him claim victory, but it won’t be my defeat.”]
Now to going out in the cold to elect Bibi Natanyahu for prime minister and Avigdor Lieberman for his deputy: Voting means accepting the premises of Israel’s democracy, one that allows a party to run on slogans of transferring me out of my home and to hold rallies at which calls of “Death to Arabs!” are standard. I am not afraid of such people’s intellectual clout and would welcome the opportunity to debate them before any audience. But my casual participation in the process of voting means I share in the responsibility for the inevitable outcome of fascist rule in Israel.
[“What about your home?” Mr. Youngworth now steps into my present. “What about your yard, your garden, your trees? Don’t you want to defend them?”
I survey my garden: my citrus orchard with all the luscious ready-for-the-pick fruits at one end, my half dozen bare fig trees with the promise of summer fruits at the other, and, in between, my almonds in full bloom interspersed amongst the apples, the peaches, the pears, the guavas, the pomegranates, the grapevines, the carob, the hawthorn, the quince the passiflora, and more. I walk to my millennia-old olive tree and caress its renewed canopy.
“Coach, I will take the SOB on. He will have to kill me before he can push me out of that circle!”]
It is rainy, the best excuse to procrastinate. I am sure partisan friends and neighbors in my village will comb their computerized voter registry and come to take me to the ballot box before it closes. They probably will accept my excuse of avoiding exposure to the elements on a wet and cold day better than any political analysis I can offer. I don’t have the patience to argue and try to refute their claims of the value of every last vote in proving our collective steadfastness in the face of the racist Zionist mob bent on driving us out of our homes. But I need to clarify to my self my deeply-felt revulsion at participating in this symbolic act of Israeli democracy in its current form.
[A daydream keeps blurring my conscious attempt at focusing: Some folks from Yankton College in South Dakota, my first steppingstone towards a medical degree, have just re-contacted me after some forty years. Now Mr. Youngworth, my Yankton College PE coach, keeps urging me to take Lieberman on in a round of Sumo Wrestling, something that we never did at Yankton.]
Dov, a Jewish family friend, was visiting the other day and raised a relevant point. He lives in the center of the country where the Jewishness of his residential space is less likely to be disturbed by the presence of Arabs. He wondered about the interracial relations in our half-and-half Galilee in light of the violence visited by Israel on Gaza. He felt uncomfortable raising the issue and prefaced his inquiry with the statement that what happened in Gaza left him with the feeling of having received a punch in the face. I commiserated with him by admitting to a persistent feeling of having received a kick in the stomach. I then informed him of the near total absence of current contacts between the two demographic halves of Galilee. I didn’t need to go into the lopsided distribution of rights and resources between the two groups, for that is always a given, and we both know it.
Dov then asked a personal question: “Aren’t you still in touch with so-and-so in the next-door settlement whom you mentioned to me before?”
“No! We parted ways after he became the head of the board of a University of Haifa public forum with academic pretensions and highfalutin coexistence claims.”
“Why? Didn’t he invite you to join?”
“Well, that was exactly the problem. He invited me to join the board and I accepted. Till I found out that Prof. Arnon Sofer sits on the same board. I wrote him asking formally for my name, or that of the professor, to be dropped from the roster. He dragged his feet forcing me to circulate my letter of resignation and the explanation for it to all the other board members. A few tried to dissuade me from this step sighting the presumed pluralistic and democratic nature of Israel and its academic institutions. But I kept to my decision not to sit on the same board with an avowed racist, a long-standing military adviser, and the father of the Palestinian demographic ticking bomb theory.”
“I am surprised at you, Hatim! What is wrong with debating the issues with opponents?”
“Nothing, believe me! But that misses the point. In fact one time I saw the man in a cafe and I walked over to him, introduced myself and initiated a brief discussion with him. I have no problem with debating an opponent. What I will not accept is any form of partnership with him. Partnership means sharing responsibility. Being on the same board with him means we share responsibility for each other’s views and acts. And that I will not permit.”
[“Size is not the only factor in Sumo Wrestling,” Mr. Youngworth urges. “Brains and agility are more important than sheer size and muscle mass. Go down and challenge him. You will beat him, I know. And if you don’t at least no one can blame you for not trying.”
“But I am an itinerant coward; I never rely on physical force; I am a pacifist, you know! And the lack of circulation here is suffocating. It is stifling hot here in the gym!”]
Last night, and for no apparent reason, I made a call to a physician in Lebanon, the granddaughter of my late aunt whose family was driven out of their coastal village of Dannoun north of Acre in 1948. I had never seen or spoken to her before. Still she knew I was from Arrabeh from the way I said ‘hello’ on the phone and proceeded to guess who I was, getting it right on the second try. I praised her intelligence in figuring out who I was after hearing only my greeting and she returned the complement: “Thiltheen elwalad lakhalou—two thirds of the child belong to the maternal uncle! And you are my maternal uncle.”
We proceeded to exchange information, emails, and reassurances about our families and situations and we promised to meet somewhere sometime. Suha’s last request was a passionate “Please stay in Galilee, in Palestine, uncle!”
[Mr. Youngworth is still pushing: “Take him on!” I respect the coach but this is too much. I step outdoor into the central court yard. The rain has stopped. There is a refreshing cool breeze.
“It is against my principle to engage in a physical fight. And this guy is a brute. Let him claim victory, but it won’t be my defeat.”]
Now to going out in the cold to elect Bibi Natanyahu for prime minister and Avigdor Lieberman for his deputy: Voting means accepting the premises of Israel’s democracy, one that allows a party to run on slogans of transferring me out of my home and to hold rallies at which calls of “Death to Arabs!” are standard. I am not afraid of such people’s intellectual clout and would welcome the opportunity to debate them before any audience. But my casual participation in the process of voting means I share in the responsibility for the inevitable outcome of fascist rule in Israel.
[“What about your home?” Mr. Youngworth now steps into my present. “What about your yard, your garden, your trees? Don’t you want to defend them?”
I survey my garden: my citrus orchard with all the luscious ready-for-the-pick fruits at one end, my half dozen bare fig trees with the promise of summer fruits at the other, and, in between, my almonds in full bloom interspersed amongst the apples, the peaches, the pears, the guavas, the pomegranates, the grapevines, the carob, the hawthorn, the quince the passiflora, and more. I walk to my millennia-old olive tree and caress its renewed canopy.
“Coach, I will take the SOB on. He will have to kill me before he can push me out of that circle!”]
Saturday, February 7, 2009
Novelty: Settler Violence in Hebron
In early December 2008, before Gaza monopolized all our thoughts here in Israel, our media bandied a big story about the settlers in Hebron ‘turning’ violent. The following were my thoughts on the subject when I first read the headlines:
“La-di-frickin’-da!” to quote from Saturday Night Live! What news we have here? Settlers riot in Hebron! Settlers suddenly turn violent!
As if the settlement enterprise ever meant anything other than violence.
As if unmitigated crude violence wasn’t a foundational element of the settler movement in the Palestinian Occupied Territories since its establishment in the nineteen-seventies with the full theological, political, and emotional blessing of every Israeli politician who participated in government ever since. And as if crude violence by settlers wasn’t actively promoted and aided with free access to arms by the Israeli state system and bankrolled by its Zionist sponsors and their ever-ready American taxpayer base.
As if raping the pristine hills around my village was anything but violence by the settlers in Galilee.
As if the Israeli ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948 was anything other than violence.
As if military rule under which we lived for eighteen years was something other than violence.
As if the daily discrimination against me and my people is not violent.
As if the starving of 1.5 million Palestinians imprisoned in Gaza is not violent.
As if the carpet bombing, from the air, sea and land of entire neighborhoods for housing those who think otherwise, whether in Beirut or Gaza, could have any name other than willful violence.
Believe you me, the only new element that makes this newsworthy is the fact that the settlers’ violence was directed this time, in part, against the Israeli armed forces that are there in the first place to protect, aid and abet them. Much harsher and unprovoked settler violence often amounting to veritable pogroms against the local Palestinians in Hebron, al-Khalil to us Palestinians, is part of their daily life, as any independent observer, such as any member of Christian Peacemakers Teams (CPT) will testify.
I often marvel at the power of words and how their use is so pregnant with preconceived ideas and internalized value systems. Take my use of the term ’pogrom’ as a case in point. It is a concept that has been historically associated with racist violence against Jewish communities in ghettos in Eastern Europe. The mere mention of the word evokes sympathy for the classic Jewish underdog in the minds and hearts of Western audiences. Even I, a Western educated Palestinian, find it difficult to cleanse the term of a twinge of guilt and a measure of sympathy for the poor Ashkenazi Jews unjustly attacked, abused or killed in their Shtetles. So, even when I am trying to showcase the plight of the Palestinians in al-Khalil and the savagery and violence of their Jewish tormentors, I end up promoting sympathy for the Zionist cause. There is always that subconscious dividend for Zionism when one uses their standard terminology, the brainwashing, including mine, is so thorough.
And here is another case in point: the name ‘Hebron’. I don’t even know its exact derivation. But it is a biblical name and in the Christian West one automatically associates it with the Old Testament and the history and heritage of the Jewish people in ‘their rightful homeland’. Very few in the West know the Arabic name for the city or appreciate its less conflict-imbued meaning. Al-Khalil refers to Abraham, the common ancestor of Arabs and Jews who is buried in the city. The name derives from his very revered position in Islamic tradition as Khalil-u-Allah, the friend of God. With the one democratic state for Jews and Arabs in all of historic Palestine becoming the default option, we have to look for such quaint nuggets to promote real coexistence.
Yet, falling back on three-millennium old myths, fanatic Jewish fundamentalists picked and chose from the constituent elements of their tribal legends to dehumanize ‘the other’, native Palestinians who arguably have a much more convincing claim to Jewish origins than all the kippa-wearing gun-toting young immigrants from Brooklyn. Their narrowly focused theological scholars dug deep and came up with ‘Amalik’ the best identity to frame this other in, expressing in the process their own vilest and most revolting inhumane sentiments and transferring them to the other as the deserving victim who brings Jehovah’s wrath upon himself to such a degree that the lord demands not only the destruction of his home, his orchards and the crops in his fields and the killing of his cattle, but also the bashing of his children’s heads on rocks. Fanatic Rabbis that publicly preach this wild menu of violence against me and my people and politicians that build their popularity on calls for our expulsion from our homes go unchallenged by Israel’s guardians of ‘the only democracy in the Middle East’. At the same time, those who advocate equality under the law of a state for all its citizens are hounded out of the country, witness the case of ex-parliament member Azmi Bshara.
True, the settlers can be looked at as, and often are made out to be, the extremist fringe of the long-oppressed Jewish minority in the West, and hence Western society owes it a level of understanding and forgiveness when it turns to the use of its own standard genocidal tactics, no worse, let us admit, than the violence committed by ‘pilgrims’ against native Americans for example. And there too, God’s inspirational favors were sought and apparently granted in pursuit of the liberation and settling of the ‘Promised Land’, the lives and property of the ‘heathen natives’ trampled and pillaged at well in the process.
It was only last week that this phenomenal jumble-mumble of myth, tradition and fertile imagination pricked at my innermost sense of self-worth and humanity to a degree that I felt uncomfortable in the midst of a crowd of presumed supporters of my cause. I attended a well-organized and well publicized benefit for Adalah NY, an organization that seeks justice for the Palestinians. The evening of music by Simon Shaheen, a fellow Galilee native who has made the impossible climb to international prominence without abandoning the Palestinian flavor of his music, was held at a church belonging to a well-intended liberal activist Protestant congregation in New York. In the intermission the middle-aged woman next to me occupied herself with leafing through the hymnal book in front of her. Out of curiosity I did the same. My conscience was jarred to discomfort by the title of the first hymn I glanced at; Its name was ‘Marching to Zion.’
Back in 1960, when I first arrived in the USA, at Yankton College in South Dakota I had to listen to those hymns every Sunday. Much as I lacked a full understanding of their meaning, given my new familiarity with the English language, I still sensed a certain alienation from the general flavor of quite a few of them. Back then I roomed with two newly-acquired friends, Djon Lim, now a respected cardiologist by the same name on the Island of Hawaii, and Gabor Zappanos, now Gabor Boritt, a well-respected Abraham Lincoln historian at Gettysburg University. Both were exempted from Sunday chapel hour. When I sought the same privileged treatment as my two fellow foreign students, I was told by our foreign student advisor that the regulations acknowledged the prerogative for both Catholics and Jews but made no mention of Moslems. So I had to suffer on instead of sleeping late each Sunday morning.
At the time I didn’t fully appreciate this clue to America’s general lack of familiarity with, if not rejection of, Islam and Muslims. Then I was still in my seeking mode; I hadn’t shut my mind to all religions, except perhaps for Gandhi’s passive resistance, if one can call that a religion. Don’t be quick to judge me, please! I am a non-practicing Muslim who has shared long and happy years of marriage to a non-practicing Christian and raised two beautiful children, both now married and raising families in the same non-denominational secular, if not agnostic or atheistic, tradition. But we all are proud to be the heirs, to varying degrees and admixed with Christian, Jewish and Buddhist influences, of the rich and humane tradition of Islam that reached its peak of intellectual and artistic expression in Andalusia.
And there, perhaps, is another seed of my and the West’s discomfort with each other’s heritage. After all, Andalusia was a colonial and settler project of the Moslem Moors. The flip side of this long and bloody history of conflict goes back to ‘our’ repealing by the sword ‘your’ Byzantine hegemony over the Middle East, followed centuries later by four consecutive Crusades, still axiomatically sacred to you, witness George W Bush’s recent usage of the term in justifying his invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan. Then came the Napoleonic campaigns and, in modern times, ‘your’ colonization of ‘our’ Middle East, and your casting away of your deeply seated guilt for visiting the Holocaust upon the Jews by rewarding them with ‘my’ piece of land, etc. etc. … ad infinitum.
Yet all of this is a tangential issue, believe me! What I had in mind when I started writing was to focus my and your attention on the commonality of violence, physical, mental and moral, in the daily lives of those settlers that the Israeli media has suddenly shone its lights upon for the obvious reason that they have openly threatened the Israeli armed forces who still are their protectors and mentors. Yet nothing that the vile and violent settlers do and preach is unique to them. Again, they are there in the first place due to formal decisions of Israel’s successive governments with specific generous budgets. Their outrageous incursions on Palestinian private lands are done with open support and knowing collusion of government officials, IDF heads of staff and Israeli heads of state. As if this were not enough, the apartheid wall was constructed with the famous philosophy of “we are here and they are there” leading in the process to the loss of massive tracts of Palestinian farmland.
Even when not openly approving or financing the Settlers’ violence, one Israeli leader after the other have consistently shown their less than hidden violent thoughts towards us, the Palestinians. The famous statement of Golda Meir, repeated more recently by Elyakim Rubenstein in his capacity as the head negotiator with the Palestinians comes to mind: “We will never forgive the Palestinians for forcing us to kill their children.”
What clearer message of the mental and moral messianic zeal of such leaders can one come up with to justify the Settlers’ violence? How much cleaner can one wipe his or her hands of the blood of a victim? How better can one free his or her mind of guilt for killing children? What convoluted logic!
“La-di-frickin’-da!” to quote from Saturday Night Live! What news we have here? Settlers riot in Hebron! Settlers suddenly turn violent!
As if the settlement enterprise ever meant anything other than violence.
As if unmitigated crude violence wasn’t a foundational element of the settler movement in the Palestinian Occupied Territories since its establishment in the nineteen-seventies with the full theological, political, and emotional blessing of every Israeli politician who participated in government ever since. And as if crude violence by settlers wasn’t actively promoted and aided with free access to arms by the Israeli state system and bankrolled by its Zionist sponsors and their ever-ready American taxpayer base.
As if raping the pristine hills around my village was anything but violence by the settlers in Galilee.
As if the Israeli ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948 was anything other than violence.
As if military rule under which we lived for eighteen years was something other than violence.
As if the daily discrimination against me and my people is not violent.
As if the starving of 1.5 million Palestinians imprisoned in Gaza is not violent.
As if the carpet bombing, from the air, sea and land of entire neighborhoods for housing those who think otherwise, whether in Beirut or Gaza, could have any name other than willful violence.
Believe you me, the only new element that makes this newsworthy is the fact that the settlers’ violence was directed this time, in part, against the Israeli armed forces that are there in the first place to protect, aid and abet them. Much harsher and unprovoked settler violence often amounting to veritable pogroms against the local Palestinians in Hebron, al-Khalil to us Palestinians, is part of their daily life, as any independent observer, such as any member of Christian Peacemakers Teams (CPT) will testify.
I often marvel at the power of words and how their use is so pregnant with preconceived ideas and internalized value systems. Take my use of the term ’pogrom’ as a case in point. It is a concept that has been historically associated with racist violence against Jewish communities in ghettos in Eastern Europe. The mere mention of the word evokes sympathy for the classic Jewish underdog in the minds and hearts of Western audiences. Even I, a Western educated Palestinian, find it difficult to cleanse the term of a twinge of guilt and a measure of sympathy for the poor Ashkenazi Jews unjustly attacked, abused or killed in their Shtetles. So, even when I am trying to showcase the plight of the Palestinians in al-Khalil and the savagery and violence of their Jewish tormentors, I end up promoting sympathy for the Zionist cause. There is always that subconscious dividend for Zionism when one uses their standard terminology, the brainwashing, including mine, is so thorough.
And here is another case in point: the name ‘Hebron’. I don’t even know its exact derivation. But it is a biblical name and in the Christian West one automatically associates it with the Old Testament and the history and heritage of the Jewish people in ‘their rightful homeland’. Very few in the West know the Arabic name for the city or appreciate its less conflict-imbued meaning. Al-Khalil refers to Abraham, the common ancestor of Arabs and Jews who is buried in the city. The name derives from his very revered position in Islamic tradition as Khalil-u-Allah, the friend of God. With the one democratic state for Jews and Arabs in all of historic Palestine becoming the default option, we have to look for such quaint nuggets to promote real coexistence.
Yet, falling back on three-millennium old myths, fanatic Jewish fundamentalists picked and chose from the constituent elements of their tribal legends to dehumanize ‘the other’, native Palestinians who arguably have a much more convincing claim to Jewish origins than all the kippa-wearing gun-toting young immigrants from Brooklyn. Their narrowly focused theological scholars dug deep and came up with ‘Amalik’ the best identity to frame this other in, expressing in the process their own vilest and most revolting inhumane sentiments and transferring them to the other as the deserving victim who brings Jehovah’s wrath upon himself to such a degree that the lord demands not only the destruction of his home, his orchards and the crops in his fields and the killing of his cattle, but also the bashing of his children’s heads on rocks. Fanatic Rabbis that publicly preach this wild menu of violence against me and my people and politicians that build their popularity on calls for our expulsion from our homes go unchallenged by Israel’s guardians of ‘the only democracy in the Middle East’. At the same time, those who advocate equality under the law of a state for all its citizens are hounded out of the country, witness the case of ex-parliament member Azmi Bshara.
True, the settlers can be looked at as, and often are made out to be, the extremist fringe of the long-oppressed Jewish minority in the West, and hence Western society owes it a level of understanding and forgiveness when it turns to the use of its own standard genocidal tactics, no worse, let us admit, than the violence committed by ‘pilgrims’ against native Americans for example. And there too, God’s inspirational favors were sought and apparently granted in pursuit of the liberation and settling of the ‘Promised Land’, the lives and property of the ‘heathen natives’ trampled and pillaged at well in the process.
It was only last week that this phenomenal jumble-mumble of myth, tradition and fertile imagination pricked at my innermost sense of self-worth and humanity to a degree that I felt uncomfortable in the midst of a crowd of presumed supporters of my cause. I attended a well-organized and well publicized benefit for Adalah NY, an organization that seeks justice for the Palestinians. The evening of music by Simon Shaheen, a fellow Galilee native who has made the impossible climb to international prominence without abandoning the Palestinian flavor of his music, was held at a church belonging to a well-intended liberal activist Protestant congregation in New York. In the intermission the middle-aged woman next to me occupied herself with leafing through the hymnal book in front of her. Out of curiosity I did the same. My conscience was jarred to discomfort by the title of the first hymn I glanced at; Its name was ‘Marching to Zion.’
Back in 1960, when I first arrived in the USA, at Yankton College in South Dakota I had to listen to those hymns every Sunday. Much as I lacked a full understanding of their meaning, given my new familiarity with the English language, I still sensed a certain alienation from the general flavor of quite a few of them. Back then I roomed with two newly-acquired friends, Djon Lim, now a respected cardiologist by the same name on the Island of Hawaii, and Gabor Zappanos, now Gabor Boritt, a well-respected Abraham Lincoln historian at Gettysburg University. Both were exempted from Sunday chapel hour. When I sought the same privileged treatment as my two fellow foreign students, I was told by our foreign student advisor that the regulations acknowledged the prerogative for both Catholics and Jews but made no mention of Moslems. So I had to suffer on instead of sleeping late each Sunday morning.
At the time I didn’t fully appreciate this clue to America’s general lack of familiarity with, if not rejection of, Islam and Muslims. Then I was still in my seeking mode; I hadn’t shut my mind to all religions, except perhaps for Gandhi’s passive resistance, if one can call that a religion. Don’t be quick to judge me, please! I am a non-practicing Muslim who has shared long and happy years of marriage to a non-practicing Christian and raised two beautiful children, both now married and raising families in the same non-denominational secular, if not agnostic or atheistic, tradition. But we all are proud to be the heirs, to varying degrees and admixed with Christian, Jewish and Buddhist influences, of the rich and humane tradition of Islam that reached its peak of intellectual and artistic expression in Andalusia.
And there, perhaps, is another seed of my and the West’s discomfort with each other’s heritage. After all, Andalusia was a colonial and settler project of the Moslem Moors. The flip side of this long and bloody history of conflict goes back to ‘our’ repealing by the sword ‘your’ Byzantine hegemony over the Middle East, followed centuries later by four consecutive Crusades, still axiomatically sacred to you, witness George W Bush’s recent usage of the term in justifying his invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan. Then came the Napoleonic campaigns and, in modern times, ‘your’ colonization of ‘our’ Middle East, and your casting away of your deeply seated guilt for visiting the Holocaust upon the Jews by rewarding them with ‘my’ piece of land, etc. etc. … ad infinitum.
Yet all of this is a tangential issue, believe me! What I had in mind when I started writing was to focus my and your attention on the commonality of violence, physical, mental and moral, in the daily lives of those settlers that the Israeli media has suddenly shone its lights upon for the obvious reason that they have openly threatened the Israeli armed forces who still are their protectors and mentors. Yet nothing that the vile and violent settlers do and preach is unique to them. Again, they are there in the first place due to formal decisions of Israel’s successive governments with specific generous budgets. Their outrageous incursions on Palestinian private lands are done with open support and knowing collusion of government officials, IDF heads of staff and Israeli heads of state. As if this were not enough, the apartheid wall was constructed with the famous philosophy of “we are here and they are there” leading in the process to the loss of massive tracts of Palestinian farmland.
Even when not openly approving or financing the Settlers’ violence, one Israeli leader after the other have consistently shown their less than hidden violent thoughts towards us, the Palestinians. The famous statement of Golda Meir, repeated more recently by Elyakim Rubenstein in his capacity as the head negotiator with the Palestinians comes to mind: “We will never forgive the Palestinians for forcing us to kill their children.”
What clearer message of the mental and moral messianic zeal of such leaders can one come up with to justify the Settlers’ violence? How much cleaner can one wipe his or her hands of the blood of a victim? How better can one free his or her mind of guilt for killing children? What convoluted logic!
Gaza Obsession
Friends and close associates, whether relatives or DNA-aliens, are an extension of one’s own being. At least that is how I seem to relate to the segment of humanity that I mingle with by choice. With that in mind and with my humanity severely tested by the atrocities committed in part in my name as a citizen of Israel and with my tax money , my mind and my senses have been acutely attuned to relevant signals coming from members of my immediate human circle of contacts.
At the airport, Ali, my nephew who drove my car over to meet us, couldn’t start it on the first try and cussed Israel’s leaders loudly; he needed to get a certain part from Karmiel but didn’t feel like venturing there. No specific incident or source of fear; just a general feeling of discomfort when in the midst of the inimical environment of a Jewish town. He, his son and his brother have not put a single day’s work since the Gaza invasion started. Mahmoud, his construction contractor friend, has stripped down his crew from a daily fleet of thre e car-fulls to just one with five workers. It is a combination, he thinks, of the war and the world economic slump.
Back in Arrabeh, my home town in Galilee, in shops while picking up milk and eggs, at the homes of relatives over meals, and in the yards of friends over coffee in the warm winter sun, people ask politely about my trip abroad and about the health and wellbeing of my children and grandchildren there. As I try to respond with specific information about my kin in America and our three-week trip to exotic Morocco, the conversation keeps reverting back to Gaza . Every statement leads directly to the one and only topic worthy of discussing: “Yes, nice to know they are doing well! But how do Americans feel about the massacres? Do they watch Al-Jazeera there or does their media censor what they see like Israel ’s media does?” Or: “Morocco ! Oh yes; they had the largest demonstration anywhere in the whole world. It is a shame their government doesn’t lift a finger. I wonder how long they and Mubarak’s band of criminals can hold on to their chairs.”
I shift gears: “My Dutch colleague, a big-time psychiatrist specializing in mental trauma came especially to New York to spend the weekend with us. You may remember him; he came to Arrabeh to visit me a couple of times. He tells me that one third to one half of the soldiers who take part in such awful wars, even when they are the victors in the specific battle, wind up with severe mental disturbances needing psychiatric intervention,” I inform my circle of friends. An astute housewife opines: “That is true in America ; they have a conscience there, even if Bush is the biggest criminal of all.”
I spin her pronouncement a little and give it scientific veneer: “My Dutch colleague shares your opinion. He says that in Israel , because of the solid stand of the Jewish population with war and the near total support it gives its armed forces, the fighters are likely to suffer less; only about a third of them may wind up going crazy.”
“How about the victims? What happened to the Vietnamese civilians who survived the
massacre in that village? You know the one!” She meant My Lai of course.
I didn’t know the answer, so I changed the subject: “In Morocco we were in the desert near the Algerian borders. You know I am always looking for fossils and the place is full of them. You pick any rock and look closely at it and there are fossils in it. I brought a few large ones with me.”
“What is important is how heavy are the rocks and how sharp are the edges; are they good for throwing at soldiers?” a friend with a sense of humor responds.
“Those were the good old days of the first Intifada. Now Mahmoud Abbas and his boys are in charge and they are totally pacified. They didn’t even permit a peaceful demonstration in Ramallah to go on. Their day will come, that is for sure!” that is from another woman.
For some reason the women seem to be at greater liberty to speak out. The men only
nod. Except for one young man who surprises everyone with his assertions: "The days of throwing stones are gone. Don't you guys hear the shooting between gangs in the village at night? Youth have free access to all sorts of weapons on the black market, from handguns to hand grenades to automatic weapons. And the police know all about it."
"Not only do they know about it but they seem to encourage it. It is their boys that trade in it and in drugs. They intentionally corrupt our youth," the young man's mother, a woman who never finished her studies in criminology, adds.
"It is worse than you think. The police keep a blind eye as long as it is within our communities. What is scary is what will happen if violence breaks out between Arabs and Jews in our area and young people use firearms. That is when we will learn the real plan behind all of this. What happened in Gaza is child's play compared to what they will do to us. It will be our final solution," a female educator responds.
A nursing student from the neighborhood, home for the weekend from her studies in Tel-Aviv, drops in for a chat. She usually comes to seek my advice when something is troubling her. I ask her about her studies.
“The usual” she says, “a little disturbing in the last few weeks, what with Gaza and all.”
“What exactly is disturbing you now?”
“Nothing at the personal level; it is the general atmosphere. The racial slurs are more open and more often. I am now in the obstetrics department. I am in the delivery room for Arab women.”
“What! They have separate delivery rooms for Arab women?”
“Yes, of course! You didn’t know that? The administration explains it with a worse case scenario of two multi-para (medical term for many deliveries) women, one a religious Jewish settler from the West Bank and the other a religious Moslem woman from the Triangle, being in labor at the same time and having their dozens of relatives drop in to visit. A clash would be unavoidable.”
“To me it sounds like they should get along well; both are religious!” I feign ignorance of the violence underpinnings of all fundamentalists.
“You know they would clash in no time; or at least that is what the administration expects. And one side is always with loaded automatic weapons on the ready.”
“Settlers are allowed into hospitals with their weapons?”
“You have forgotten uncle! You yourself told us that your Jewish nurses went out to immunize Arab children with handguns in their handbags.”
“Yes, but that was a long time ago.”
“What do you expect now with the national war mood? The venom boils over. When a new woman arrived in the department for delivery, the standard question whispered by the receiving staff used to be: ‘is she Arabic speaker?’ Now the head nurse barks out loudly with a pained grimace on her face: ‘Another Arab?’ usually with an expletive that sounds like it is aimed at me. And since the blitz on Gaza started I feel isolated by classmates; I get reprimanded by teachers for the slightest error.”
“Take a sick leave” was the only inane advice I could offer.
Two days later, over dinner with mixed company including a Jewish professor and two
expatriate Americans, the same Gaza-centered discourse persists, albeit in Ramallah and with intellectual overtones. “The soldier at the checkpoint took one look at me and waved me on despite the big sign banning Israeli citizens from entering the West Bank . He must have figured I was an Arab and hence not likely to be in danger of being attacked. Or perhaps he thinks Arabs are dispensable.”
“Well, where do we go otherwise? The sense of estrangement among members of the Palestinian minority in Israel is quite pervasive. Even in the best of times the Jewish majority rejects us and we have little access to other Arab societies in the Middle East ,” says a social scientist in the group.
“That is a recipe for disaster. It is even worse among the Jewish majority; we have ghettoized ourselves by choice. With one aggression after another against our neighbors we are actualizing the self-fulfilling prophecy of us against the whole world.”
These are dangerous grounds for non-Jews to tread. To break the silence the Jewish professor continues: “We have shifted far to the right in recent years. The massacre in Gaza is greater than that of Sabra and Shatilla. And this one is solely ours; no Maronite alibis. But where are the protesting crowds in Tel Aviv?”
“What next then?”
“More of the same, I am afraid! There will be international warrants of arrest for Israeli leaders, another confirmation that the whole world is against us. We will withdraw into our shell. Our intellectuals and their liberal supporters abroad will keep chewing and regurgitating the cud of the lack of precision and the inapplicability of human rights instruments to the heirs of the holocaust till the whole issue gets vulgarized and enveloped in a haze of a delegitimizing discourse and accusations of anti-Semitism. In the meanwhile Gaza and the West Bank would be fully pacified and colonized.”
“That is when our own turn comes,” I find the courage to opine. “We continue to sully
the rightists’ dream of a pure Jewish state. Logically, if one accepts their premises we have to be transferred out. Israel ’s leaders seem to agree. A small war with Syria or Lebanon and we can be massacred and driven across the border and the dream becomes
reality.”
“And I thought only us, the Jews, have a persecution complex!”
At the airport, Ali, my nephew who drove my car over to meet us, couldn’t start it on the first try and cussed Israel’s leaders loudly; he needed to get a certain part from Karmiel but didn’t feel like venturing there. No specific incident or source of fear; just a general feeling of discomfort when in the midst of the inimical environment of a Jewish town. He, his son and his brother have not put a single day’s work since the Gaza invasion started. Mahmoud, his construction contractor friend, has stripped down his crew from a daily fleet of thre e car-fulls to just one with five workers. It is a combination, he thinks, of the war and the world economic slump.
Back in Arrabeh, my home town in Galilee, in shops while picking up milk and eggs, at the homes of relatives over meals, and in the yards of friends over coffee in the warm winter sun, people ask politely about my trip abroad and about the health and wellbeing of my children and grandchildren there. As I try to respond with specific information about my kin in America and our three-week trip to exotic Morocco, the conversation keeps reverting back to Gaza . Every statement leads directly to the one and only topic worthy of discussing: “Yes, nice to know they are doing well! But how do Americans feel about the massacres? Do they watch Al-Jazeera there or does their media censor what they see like Israel ’s media does?” Or: “Morocco ! Oh yes; they had the largest demonstration anywhere in the whole world. It is a shame their government doesn’t lift a finger. I wonder how long they and Mubarak’s band of criminals can hold on to their chairs.”
I shift gears: “My Dutch colleague, a big-time psychiatrist specializing in mental trauma came especially to New York to spend the weekend with us. You may remember him; he came to Arrabeh to visit me a couple of times. He tells me that one third to one half of the soldiers who take part in such awful wars, even when they are the victors in the specific battle, wind up with severe mental disturbances needing psychiatric intervention,” I inform my circle of friends. An astute housewife opines: “That is true in America ; they have a conscience there, even if Bush is the biggest criminal of all.”
I spin her pronouncement a little and give it scientific veneer: “My Dutch colleague shares your opinion. He says that in Israel , because of the solid stand of the Jewish population with war and the near total support it gives its armed forces, the fighters are likely to suffer less; only about a third of them may wind up going crazy.”
“How about the victims? What happened to the Vietnamese civilians who survived the
massacre in that village? You know the one!” She meant My Lai of course.
I didn’t know the answer, so I changed the subject: “In Morocco we were in the desert near the Algerian borders. You know I am always looking for fossils and the place is full of them. You pick any rock and look closely at it and there are fossils in it. I brought a few large ones with me.”
“What is important is how heavy are the rocks and how sharp are the edges; are they good for throwing at soldiers?” a friend with a sense of humor responds.
“Those were the good old days of the first Intifada. Now Mahmoud Abbas and his boys are in charge and they are totally pacified. They didn’t even permit a peaceful demonstration in Ramallah to go on. Their day will come, that is for sure!” that is from another woman.
For some reason the women seem to be at greater liberty to speak out. The men only
nod. Except for one young man who surprises everyone with his assertions: "The days of throwing stones are gone. Don't you guys hear the shooting between gangs in the village at night? Youth have free access to all sorts of weapons on the black market, from handguns to hand grenades to automatic weapons. And the police know all about it."
"Not only do they know about it but they seem to encourage it. It is their boys that trade in it and in drugs. They intentionally corrupt our youth," the young man's mother, a woman who never finished her studies in criminology, adds.
"It is worse than you think. The police keep a blind eye as long as it is within our communities. What is scary is what will happen if violence breaks out between Arabs and Jews in our area and young people use firearms. That is when we will learn the real plan behind all of this. What happened in Gaza is child's play compared to what they will do to us. It will be our final solution," a female educator responds.
A nursing student from the neighborhood, home for the weekend from her studies in Tel-Aviv, drops in for a chat. She usually comes to seek my advice when something is troubling her. I ask her about her studies.
“The usual” she says, “a little disturbing in the last few weeks, what with Gaza and all.”
“What exactly is disturbing you now?”
“Nothing at the personal level; it is the general atmosphere. The racial slurs are more open and more often. I am now in the obstetrics department. I am in the delivery room for Arab women.”
“What! They have separate delivery rooms for Arab women?”
“Yes, of course! You didn’t know that? The administration explains it with a worse case scenario of two multi-para (medical term for many deliveries) women, one a religious Jewish settler from the West Bank and the other a religious Moslem woman from the Triangle, being in labor at the same time and having their dozens of relatives drop in to visit. A clash would be unavoidable.”
“To me it sounds like they should get along well; both are religious!” I feign ignorance of the violence underpinnings of all fundamentalists.
“You know they would clash in no time; or at least that is what the administration expects. And one side is always with loaded automatic weapons on the ready.”
“Settlers are allowed into hospitals with their weapons?”
“You have forgotten uncle! You yourself told us that your Jewish nurses went out to immunize Arab children with handguns in their handbags.”
“Yes, but that was a long time ago.”
“What do you expect now with the national war mood? The venom boils over. When a new woman arrived in the department for delivery, the standard question whispered by the receiving staff used to be: ‘is she Arabic speaker?’ Now the head nurse barks out loudly with a pained grimace on her face: ‘Another Arab?’ usually with an expletive that sounds like it is aimed at me. And since the blitz on Gaza started I feel isolated by classmates; I get reprimanded by teachers for the slightest error.”
“Take a sick leave” was the only inane advice I could offer.
Two days later, over dinner with mixed company including a Jewish professor and two
expatriate Americans, the same Gaza-centered discourse persists, albeit in Ramallah and with intellectual overtones. “The soldier at the checkpoint took one look at me and waved me on despite the big sign banning Israeli citizens from entering the West Bank . He must have figured I was an Arab and hence not likely to be in danger of being attacked. Or perhaps he thinks Arabs are dispensable.”
“Well, where do we go otherwise? The sense of estrangement among members of the Palestinian minority in Israel is quite pervasive. Even in the best of times the Jewish majority rejects us and we have little access to other Arab societies in the Middle East ,” says a social scientist in the group.
“That is a recipe for disaster. It is even worse among the Jewish majority; we have ghettoized ourselves by choice. With one aggression after another against our neighbors we are actualizing the self-fulfilling prophecy of us against the whole world.”
These are dangerous grounds for non-Jews to tread. To break the silence the Jewish professor continues: “We have shifted far to the right in recent years. The massacre in Gaza is greater than that of Sabra and Shatilla. And this one is solely ours; no Maronite alibis. But where are the protesting crowds in Tel Aviv?”
“What next then?”
“More of the same, I am afraid! There will be international warrants of arrest for Israeli leaders, another confirmation that the whole world is against us. We will withdraw into our shell. Our intellectuals and their liberal supporters abroad will keep chewing and regurgitating the cud of the lack of precision and the inapplicability of human rights instruments to the heirs of the holocaust till the whole issue gets vulgarized and enveloped in a haze of a delegitimizing discourse and accusations of anti-Semitism. In the meanwhile Gaza and the West Bank would be fully pacified and colonized.”
“That is when our own turn comes,” I find the courage to opine. “We continue to sully
the rightists’ dream of a pure Jewish state. Logically, if one accepts their premises we have to be transferred out. Israel ’s leaders seem to agree. A small war with Syria or Lebanon and we can be massacred and driven across the border and the dream becomes
reality.”
“And I thought only us, the Jews, have a persecution complex!”
Friday, February 6, 2009
War Crimes in Gaza: My Correspondence with the Head of the Israel Medical Association on the Matter
Here is my unrewarding experience in attempting to get the head of the IMA to distance the organization from War crimes during the Israeli 22 day-long massive violence against the Palestinians in Gaza:
MY INITIAL EMAIL:
From: Hatim Kanaaneh
To: Dr. Yoram Blachar
Cc: ""Dunchin Milca" please circulate to my Public health colleagues"; Physicians for Human Rights
Sent: Tuesday, January 13, 2009 1:13:46 PM
Subject: A Call to Distance IMA from War Crimes
Dear Dr Blachar,
I am writing as a member of IMA, to clear my conscience and do my moral duty as a human being and a caring professional.
If you happen to have read my book of memoirs, (A Doctor in Galilee, Pluto Press, 2008) you would know by now that I object to many practices of the health care system in Israel and have attempted to change them for the better by all legal means available.
I am now writing to call on you and on all conscientious members of the IMA to take a step, collectively and individually, that would improve the image of the organization to which I still formally belong. I am sure many of my colleagues, both Jewish and Arab citizens of Israel, sympathize with my point of view and would welcome such a step.
As calls from the international and Human Rights community objecting to the bloodshed in Gaza and calling for an investigation of actions by the IDF that so many neutral parties consider war crimes under international law, including the targeting of civilians and of medical staff and the preventing of emergency aid workers from reaching the injured, It behooves the IMA to take a public stand against such illegal practices, to call for halting the war, and to call for an international investigation of such practices by the IDF.
Therefore, I hereby formally call on you as the head of the IMA to take this courageous step immediately and to rid the organization of the image it is fast acquiring of condoning and collaborating in war crimes.
With utmost concern,
Hatim Kanaaneh, MD, MPH
Author of 'A Doctor in Galilee: the Life and Struggle of a Palestinian in Israel', Pluto Press, 2008
Active Blog: http://a-doctor-in-galilee.blogspot.com/
PS: Please acknowledge the receipt of this message. HK
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
MY REMINDER:
From: Hatim Kanaaneh
To: Dr. Yoram Blachar
Cc: milka@hadassah.org.il
Sent: Saturday, January 24, 2009 6:18:27 AM
Subject: A Call to Distance IMA from War Crimes
Sir,
You have not responded to my message below. Since I wrote it to you the number of civilian dead and injured in Gaza has nearly doubled. Furthermore suspicions that the IDF has committed war crimes in this war have gained wider acceptance within Israel and abroad. Groups of technical experts, human rights activists and practitioners of ethics including groups of Rabbinical students and of physicians and other caring professions have called for investigating the conduct of the IDF in Gaza.
In light of the above, I call on you again as my representative to comply with my request in my letter below and to bring it to the attention of my colleagues, members of IMA. In three days it will be the Holocaust Memorial Day, an appropriate deadline to respond to my request from you by return email, whether positively or in the negative. If I do not receive your answer by then I will feel at liberty to publicize this call as an open letter in local and international circles.
With concern,
Hatim Kanaaneh, MD, MPH
Author of 'A Doctor in Galilee: the Life and Struggle of a Palestinian in Israel', Pluto Press, 2008
Active Blog: http://a-doctor-in-galilee.blogspot.com/
PS: The correspondence is shared with Dr. Milka Dunchin with my kind request to share it with my Public Health colleagues.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
RESPONSE FROM THE HEAD OF IMA(Translated from Hebrew):
Israel Medical Association
January 26, 2009
To: Dr. Kanaaneh, Esq.
In accordance with your book ‘A Doctor in Galilee’ that you mention, I presume that, having worked in the Galilee, you know Hebrew well and I will answer you in Hebrew.
The IMA, in which according to your statement you are still a member, is not a political body.
The members of IMA, almost certainly, represent the entire range of the political spectrum in Israel and hence we are not involved in politics.
True, the IMA is responsible for the ethical stand of its members; the IMA is a signatory of the international conventions regarding the ethical standards that obligates doctors everywhere.
The humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strep is an extremely severe reality and the fact that Hamas itself is the cause for this reality doesn’t help the Palestinian suffering.
As a result of an idea that we initiated and brought to the Ministry of Health, the clinic for Palestinians was established at the Erez crossing. In addition we called several times on the military authorities, and our calls were even answered, regarding the need to allow the passage of the sick and injured to Israel and to refrain from targeting medical staff.
There are two sides to each coin, Dr. Hatim Kanaaneh.
Your voice was not heard when hundreds of Israeli citizens, sometimes including Arabs, innocent of any crime, were torn to shreds when suicidal terrorists blew themselves on buses, in banquets and in shopping malls with the intent of injuring the highest possible number of citizens. Your voice was not heard against the phenomenon of Palestinian mothers sending their sons and daughters to be martyrs – in itself a sick phenomenon that has no match in other cultures.
You did not scream out while for eight years over 12000 missiles, Kassams and projectiles, with the sole purpose of sow fear and panic, destruction and killing of citizens, children, women and elders. Eight full years Dr. Hatim!!! And you kept quiet.
We did not hear your voice in objection to the cynical and terrible use of Hamas terrorists of the Palestinian population, their own flesh, their brothers an sisters and the children that elected them to office.
Your voice was not heard when Hamas terrorists intentionally launched missiles from inside civilian population, from schools, from mosques, and from within innocent population concentrations. Your criticism was not heard against the fact that Hamas itself was the one that prevented the movement of Palestinian sick and wounded from the strep to border passages till few days ago.
The unbearable unilateralism of your calls undercuts their moral and value basis!! Your being Arab, Israeli or Palestinian, whatever you define yourself, does not add or detract in this connection; independent of this, as I said at the start of my letter, in light of the difficult humanitarian condition, we did and will do all we can for aiding. You can get an update on few of our activities on the IMA website www.ima.org.il
I answer your words since you are an IMA member.
You can do whatever you wish with the correspondence between us.
With Regards,
(signature)
Dr. Yoram Blacher ,
Head of IMA
Cc: Dr. Milka Dunchin
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
MY REPLY:
To: Dr. Yoram Blacher, Head of IMA,
January 30, 2009
Sir:
1. Thank you for responding to my email, though it was only after a reminder in which I threatened to go public with my request.
2. Of course, I do speak Hebrew fluently. I communicate on the internet in English for technical reasons.
3. Below is my English translation of your response. Unless you send me your corrected version, I shall use this translation as the official response from you in your capacity as the head of the IMA should I find myself in a position where I have to explain my membership in the organization to an international audience.
4. The first part of your response, up to the statement “There are two sides to each coin,….” would have sufficed for the purpose stated in the above paragraph, regardless whether I agree or disagree with it. It clarifies the official stand of the IMA and provides me with the fig leaf that I needed.
5. In the rest of your letter, the larger part of it in fact, and after you have stated that the IMA “is not a political body” and explained why that is so, you proceed to attack me personally with language and allegations drawn from Israeli street politics. You seem to forget that you are speaking for a nonpolitical body.
6. I consider it less than dignified for presumed professional colleagues to engage in this level of discourse and hence I will not reply to your specific statements, or to the accusatory ones I have received from 7 other IMA members so far, except to clarify two points:
a) As you well know, I called on you to take a stand regarding accusations of war crimes because of your official position. As the head of IMA you owe a member in the organization a clear answer on a relevant issue that he raises. At least that was my understanding. I am at a loss as to my capacity under which you consider yourself entitled to hear my voice regarding violence visited by one party in a conflict against the other, regardless of where my sympathies may lie. I don’t recall ever meeting you in person and there has never been a discussion between us on this matter before. Explain to me, please, who are you to me to make such personal demands on me?
b) Those who know me, whether through working with me or through reading my book of memoirs, realize that I am a committed pacifist, though not the activist type that preaches it to others. I reject violence wherever and whenever it is committed, by NATO, the IDF, Taliban, Hamas, or whoever.
On this peaceful note I wish you well and a clear conscience,
With much concern,
Hatim Kanaaneh, MD, MPH
Author of 'A Doctor in Galilee: the Life and Struggle of a Palestinian in Israel', Pluto Press, 2008
Active Blog: http://a-doctor-in-galilee.blogspot.com/
MY INITIAL EMAIL:
From: Hatim Kanaaneh
To: Dr. Yoram Blachar
Cc: ""Dunchin Milca" please circulate to my Public health colleagues"
Sent: Tuesday, January 13, 2009 1:13:46 PM
Subject: A Call to Distance IMA from War Crimes
Dear Dr Blachar,
I am writing as a member of IMA, to clear my conscience and do my moral duty as a human being and a caring professional.
If you happen to have read my book of memoirs, (A Doctor in Galilee, Pluto Press, 2008) you would know by now that I object to many practices of the health care system in Israel and have attempted to change them for the better by all legal means available.
I am now writing to call on you and on all conscientious members of the IMA to take a step, collectively and individually, that would improve the image of the organization to which I still formally belong. I am sure many of my colleagues, both Jewish and Arab citizens of Israel, sympathize with my point of view and would welcome such a step.
As calls from the international and Human Rights community objecting to the bloodshed in Gaza and calling for an investigation of actions by the IDF that so many neutral parties consider war crimes under international law, including the targeting of civilians and of medical staff and the preventing of emergency aid workers from reaching the injured, It behooves the IMA to take a public stand against such illegal practices, to call for halting the war, and to call for an international investigation of such practices by the IDF.
Therefore, I hereby formally call on you as the head of the IMA to take this courageous step immediately and to rid the organization of the image it is fast acquiring of condoning and collaborating in war crimes.
With utmost concern,
Hatim Kanaaneh, MD, MPH
Author of 'A Doctor in Galilee: the Life and Struggle of a Palestinian in Israel', Pluto Press, 2008
Active Blog: http://a-doctor-in-galilee.blogspot.com/
PS: Please acknowledge the receipt of this message. HK
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
MY REMINDER:
From: Hatim Kanaaneh
To: Dr. Yoram Blachar
Cc: milka@hadassah.org.il
Sent: Saturday, January 24, 2009 6:18:27 AM
Subject: A Call to Distance IMA from War Crimes
Sir,
You have not responded to my message below. Since I wrote it to you the number of civilian dead and injured in Gaza has nearly doubled. Furthermore suspicions that the IDF has committed war crimes in this war have gained wider acceptance within Israel and abroad. Groups of technical experts, human rights activists and practitioners of ethics including groups of Rabbinical students and of physicians and other caring professions have called for investigating the conduct of the IDF in Gaza.
In light of the above, I call on you again as my representative to comply with my request in my letter below and to bring it to the attention of my colleagues, members of IMA. In three days it will be the Holocaust Memorial Day, an appropriate deadline to respond to my request from you by return email, whether positively or in the negative. If I do not receive your answer by then I will feel at liberty to publicize this call as an open letter in local and international circles.
With concern,
Hatim Kanaaneh, MD, MPH
Author of 'A Doctor in Galilee: the Life and Struggle of a Palestinian in Israel', Pluto Press, 2008
Active Blog: http://a-doctor-in-galilee.blogspot.com/
PS: The correspondence is shared with Dr. Milka Dunchin with my kind request to share it with my Public Health colleagues.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
RESPONSE FROM THE HEAD OF IMA(Translated from Hebrew):
Israel Medical Association
January 26, 2009
To: Dr. Kanaaneh, Esq.
In accordance with your book ‘A Doctor in Galilee’ that you mention, I presume that, having worked in the Galilee, you know Hebrew well and I will answer you in Hebrew.
The IMA, in which according to your statement you are still a member, is not a political body.
The members of IMA, almost certainly, represent the entire range of the political spectrum in Israel and hence we are not involved in politics.
True, the IMA is responsible for the ethical stand of its members; the IMA is a signatory of the international conventions regarding the ethical standards that obligates doctors everywhere.
The humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strep is an extremely severe reality and the fact that Hamas itself is the cause for this reality doesn’t help the Palestinian suffering.
As a result of an idea that we initiated and brought to the Ministry of Health, the clinic for Palestinians was established at the Erez crossing. In addition we called several times on the military authorities, and our calls were even answered, regarding the need to allow the passage of the sick and injured to Israel and to refrain from targeting medical staff.
There are two sides to each coin, Dr. Hatim Kanaaneh.
Your voice was not heard when hundreds of Israeli citizens, sometimes including Arabs, innocent of any crime, were torn to shreds when suicidal terrorists blew themselves on buses, in banquets and in shopping malls with the intent of injuring the highest possible number of citizens. Your voice was not heard against the phenomenon of Palestinian mothers sending their sons and daughters to be martyrs – in itself a sick phenomenon that has no match in other cultures.
You did not scream out while for eight years over 12000 missiles, Kassams and projectiles, with the sole purpose of sow fear and panic, destruction and killing of citizens, children, women and elders. Eight full years Dr. Hatim!!! And you kept quiet.
We did not hear your voice in objection to the cynical and terrible use of Hamas terrorists of the Palestinian population, their own flesh, their brothers an sisters and the children that elected them to office.
Your voice was not heard when Hamas terrorists intentionally launched missiles from inside civilian population, from schools, from mosques, and from within innocent population concentrations. Your criticism was not heard against the fact that Hamas itself was the one that prevented the movement of Palestinian sick and wounded from the strep to border passages till few days ago.
The unbearable unilateralism of your calls undercuts their moral and value basis!! Your being Arab, Israeli or Palestinian, whatever you define yourself, does not add or detract in this connection; independent of this, as I said at the start of my letter, in light of the difficult humanitarian condition, we did and will do all we can for aiding. You can get an update on few of our activities on the IMA website www.ima.org.il
I answer your words since you are an IMA member.
You can do whatever you wish with the correspondence between us.
With Regards,
(signature)
Dr. Yoram Blacher ,
Head of IMA
Cc: Dr. Milka Dunchin
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MY REPLY:
To: Dr. Yoram Blacher, Head of IMA,
January 30, 2009
Sir:
1. Thank you for responding to my email, though it was only after a reminder in which I threatened to go public with my request.
2. Of course, I do speak Hebrew fluently. I communicate on the internet in English for technical reasons.
3. Below is my English translation of your response. Unless you send me your corrected version, I shall use this translation as the official response from you in your capacity as the head of the IMA should I find myself in a position where I have to explain my membership in the organization to an international audience.
4. The first part of your response, up to the statement “There are two sides to each coin,….” would have sufficed for the purpose stated in the above paragraph, regardless whether I agree or disagree with it. It clarifies the official stand of the IMA and provides me with the fig leaf that I needed.
5. In the rest of your letter, the larger part of it in fact, and after you have stated that the IMA “is not a political body” and explained why that is so, you proceed to attack me personally with language and allegations drawn from Israeli street politics. You seem to forget that you are speaking for a nonpolitical body.
6. I consider it less than dignified for presumed professional colleagues to engage in this level of discourse and hence I will not reply to your specific statements, or to the accusatory ones I have received from 7 other IMA members so far, except to clarify two points:
a) As you well know, I called on you to take a stand regarding accusations of war crimes because of your official position. As the head of IMA you owe a member in the organization a clear answer on a relevant issue that he raises. At least that was my understanding. I am at a loss as to my capacity under which you consider yourself entitled to hear my voice regarding violence visited by one party in a conflict against the other, regardless of where my sympathies may lie. I don’t recall ever meeting you in person and there has never been a discussion between us on this matter before. Explain to me, please, who are you to me to make such personal demands on me?
b) Those who know me, whether through working with me or through reading my book of memoirs, realize that I am a committed pacifist, though not the activist type that preaches it to others. I reject violence wherever and whenever it is committed, by NATO, the IDF, Taliban, Hamas, or whoever.
On this peaceful note I wish you well and a clear conscience,
With much concern,
Hatim Kanaaneh, MD, MPH
Author of 'A Doctor in Galilee: the Life and Struggle of a Palestinian in Israel', Pluto Press, 2008
Active Blog: http://a-doctor-in-galilee.blogspot.com/
Friday, January 23, 2009
Touring Morocco with Gaza on my Mind
Gaza on my Mind
Like Obama in Hawaii I was vacationing and didn’t want my peace disturbed by bad news from a faraway dead-end place. I should have picked up the ample clues and listened to radio or sought a place with a TV and seen Al-Jazeera. But I chose not to and kept in full ignorance of what was happening in Gaza.
When Israel first unleashed its abhorrent violence against Gaza’s imprisoned and starved Palestinians, we were already in Morocco’s desert close to the Algerian border. In part, this wild trip was decided on my prodding; fossil hunting is a hobby of mine and the wild environs of Erfoud are full of black marble inundated with fossils. And Malaika, my third-grader granddaughter, was excited about the prospect of viewing the star constellations in the clear desert sky. So we all headed there and had a fantastic experience.
But every time the locals, Berber tribesmen or citified tourist guides, knew I was a Palestinian they would spill out their hearts in welcome and sympathy and prayers for Palestine. I took it to be the standard expression of solidarity with Palestinian people in their historic suffering and maltreatment. Truly, in all my years, I cannot recall ever meeting an Arab man or women who didn’t express solidarity with my people, discontent with his or her rulers for their cooptation by the West and for their abandonment of Palestine, and anger at American and European governments for their blind support of Israel. Such expressions of sympathy are not new to me. But this time in Morocco there was a touch of sadness mixed with admiration, almost adulation, in the eyes of my interlocutors, all despite the language barrier that we sought to transcend by reverting to high literary Arabic. Still I credited it all to a special infatuation of Moroccans with Palestine and the Palestinians.
On the second day of the New Year, emerging from our dream desert experience, we drove through the Middle Atlas toward Fez, our next destination. In a small Berber town the road was blocked by a crowd of high school students demonstrating rowdily with Palestinian flags and slogans. At the outskirts of Fez we stopped to ask directions from a group of young people on the walkway. One immediately identified me as a Palestinian and the group burst out into a mini demonstration jumping, thrusting their arms high in the air and shouting pro-Gaza, anti-Israeli and anti-American slogans. At the hotel I reconnected with the real world and saw the flood of emails condemning the continuing slaughter. Several friends had written to check on us and hear our thoughts.
For the remaining week of vacation I had to suffer the images of death and destruction. Gaza was constantly on my mind. Nothing I did or saw but reminded me of the children and mothers of Gaza. I had a deep sense of personal guilt tinged with shame for having enjoyed myself as they suffered. A few weeks before I had undergone a medical procedure and was still on painkillers especially during the night. I stopped taking my meds. Every little discomfort my body felt triggered a sense of guilt for having access to medications when the children of Gaza with their mangled limbs didn’t. Gaza, whose name was immortalized by an invention of its weavers of ancient times, has now run out of gauze to dress the wounds of its children.
In the butchers market in Fez the sight of lambs’ heads strung overhead made me cringe, not for pitying the lambs; somehow the sight evoked that of dismembered bodies and severed parts of children in Gaza. I stopped eating meat and missed out on all the lamb tagine, the lead dish of Moroccan cuisine. At night I slept little; every motion of my granddaughter who shared my queen-size bed made me jump. In daytime I guarded her like a hawk; every time she went up or down the steep stairs of the hotel I would follow her and every time we walked in the market I held her hand tight. All I could think of was the danger of her falling down the stairs or tripping on something and suffering a massive injury to her pretty face or loosing a limb.
As we viewed the ancient leather dyeing vats in the old city, a bastion of grime and foul smell, I pitied the leather dyeing workers climbing in and out of the vats: What despair and loss of dignity brings a human being to tolerate such degradation and suffering? But what do I know about the pleasures those men enjoy in bringing home bread for their children. But what if one goes home from work to find it destroyed and wife and children all dead! That had just happened in Gaza. Does such despair make people face the prospect of death calmly? Gazans say they do. The images of the children with bloodied heads and mangled limbs with that absolute blank look in their empty eyes, both hope and fear having been wiped out of them by shock, mesmerized me; I screamed because they didn’t.
On our last night we stayed in Casablanca at a hotel operated by a Spanish firm. They had a varied and fancy variety of breakfast foods including five differently flavored olive oils that I savored with freshly baked bread. Till I read the paper: Israel had targeted the Zeitoun (Arabic for ‘olive’) neighborhood of Gaza City killing 15 civilians including an old man and his grandchild. Nausea attacked and I ran to the bathroom.
On arriving back in New York I went to bed and slept for three hours. It must be jetlag. At 2 AM I tried to catch up with my email. One report after another by Human Rights organizations, peace activists, independent journalists, UN officials, etc. expressed objection and outrage at what Israel had done. A deep discomfort nagged at my conscience; something was missing; I need to explain to all the people in the world that we all are missing several core facts. We are speaking, as if, of two equal parties and making many false assumptions, even when well-intentioned. I need to alert everyone to the danger of such misconceptions.
Deep in my heart I know all the pieces of the puzzle: Stripped of all the political propaganda and American Zionist-inspired spin-doctoring and Christian born-again zeal and prejudices, it all starts with conflicting claims by two peoples to the same piece of land, the weaker party having been on it for centuries and the stronger one intent on dislodging them off it even if that required eliminating them off the face of the earth. The latter bases its claim on a special deal with its own deity several millennia ago. Both parties have fallen back on stupidity and stubbornness and on their not unrelated dependence on their faiths. But I needed to elucidate my narrative and support it with factual information and historical accounts. Putting it at this level of simplistic analysis equates between aggressor and victim, the very thing I am upset about when I read the calls for both sides to refrain from targeting civilians.
By morning when the family awoke I had accomplished nothing. I was still angry and full of outrage at the hypocrisy of so many ‘neutral’ authorities and observers. I took my granddaughter to her school and spent the rest of the day in a daze.
I kept at it for a second night. This time I read in depth several analyses. There is very little I want to say that has not been said by better qualified people: my friend Jonathan Cook looks at Israel’s hidden agenda http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10132.shtml; The Israeli historian Avi Shlaim gives a good insight into the background to the current situation http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/07/gaza-israel-palestine; Another friend, Ilan Pappe, delves into the peculiar self-righteousness of Zionist Israel http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10100.shtml; Robert Fisk sheds some light on the Israeli standard lies in times of war, on who the Hamas rabble in Gaza are and on Israel’s role in pushing them to the corner from which they have no option but to act in the way they do http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-why-bombing-ashkelon-is-the-most-tragic-irony-1216228.html; and Omar Barghouthi gives but one example of the complicity and preconceived prejudices of so many international officials and reporters http:/www./counterpunch.org/barghouti01022009.html. But then what policy maker in the world heeds the opinion of contributors to the Electronic Intifada. At least a third friend, Prof. Rashid Khalidi, got some unpopular ideas published as an op-ed in the New York Times http://www.nytimes. com/2009/ 01/08/opinion/ 08khalidi. html.
One statement I have not seen yet: Israel is out to diminish the number of Palestinians in any and every way it can, so as to eliminate as many claimants in the ongoing land dispute as possible. And one stream of analysis I have not seen, though bits and pieces of it are on every one’s mind: By its bloody trampling on the human rights, institutions, infrastructure, property, and lives of Palestinians Israel hopes to draw Hezbollah into the fray, to take revenge on it for having withstood its aggression in 2006, and simultaneously to strike at Iran, possibly with nuclear arsenal. And this has all been cleared and coordinated with the American lame duck president and administration. The one remaining hope is that Hezbollah will resist taking the bait till Obama takes over.
Finally I proceeded to empty my bags and enjoy the beauty of all the exotic souvenirs we acquired on our trip. My wife had picked up several ceramic dishes from Fes. I shuddered; I had just read the news: Israel had hit the UN school in Al-Fakhora (Arabic for ‘ceramic factory’) neighborhood of Jabalia Refugee Camp killing 43 civilians, mostly children. I spread out the traditional Berber rug I had purchased: My God! It is blood red!
I sought comfort in reading personal emails from friends. The Rev. Barbara Grace Ripple ends her message of sympathy and wishes for peace and justice from Hawaii with the simple statement that she had spent the day in fasting and prayer. I am not a religious person. But that statement touched me to the core; that is what my late mother, an illiterate Palestinian villager, would do every time she lost a child.
Mixing with the locals in Marrakesh
In winter both storks and the French flock to Morocco. It is a short cross-Mediterranean hop and offseason charter flights are $100 roundtrip. In the city the storks nest in pairs on the high minarets while French couples go for romantic riads, the traditional enclosed former residences of the better-off families in the old quarters, each built in a multilevel quadrangle surrounding a garden or a central court with a fountain and with its walls and floor covered with colorful arabesque designs in ceramic. The roof of a riad is often furnished with beach chairs and a mini-bar, the perfect spot for relaxing and sunning oneself. Didi and I have stayed more than once in such intimate luxury before in Andalusia, historically the extension of the Arab-Berber culture, better known as Moorish culture, of North Africa that flourished to outdo and dominate its progenitor. Except that in Spain riads are known as pensions.
In Marrakesh we were guests at Riad Saba, a guest house operated by Jubran, an entrepreneurial friendly young Moroccan and his Swedish wife who, unfortunately for us, had taken her daughter home for Christmas. Still we greatly enjoyed the hospitality and personal attention of the local staff of three. Their freshly prepared breakfasts were greatly satisfying. At Riad Saba we were introduced for the first time to msemmani, the multilayered thin pastry dough deep fried in ghee. Malaika has demanded it at every breakfast thereafter and even back in New York still agitates for her grandmother to experiment with concocting the exotic food.
For the one week we stayed in Marrakesh we dined at several of its famous restaurants. [In editing this piece I had to change the original verb, ‘targeted’, I had used; its military connotation made my stomach turn.] Yet my most enjoyable meal was at the humble home of a family we befriended by chance. Seth, my son-in-law, and I were looking for the neighborhood’s hammam (local bathhouse, not unlike the classic Turkish bath) for men. We all had been to a fancy one operated by a French firm which was more of a spa than a hammam. This time we were after the authentic experience; we wanted to bathe with the locals. As we reached the spot there was a smell of cooked lamb wafting out of an open door with sawdust piled up waste-high and spilling down into a dungeon-like basement where a lanky man was shoveling it into a furnace. We waved at him and he cleared the stairs enough for us to negotiate our way down. The furnace is for heating water for the hammam on the other side of the wall. The hot air goes through a longish passage in the wall and a recessed space in the wall serves for cooking a specialty dish, tangia, meat and vegetables with the proper condiments placed in a ceramic jar which is closed and left on low heat for hours. There were a dozen or so crocks cooking and I had my picture taken holding one with the furnace operator.
The next day Seth and I decided to try to do our own tangia: We would buy the ceramic pot, the mutton, the vegetables and the spices, arrange the ingredients in the pot and take it to our friend, the furnace man. Malaika decided to accompany us on the venture. Our wives sarcastically wished us success. As we approached the bathhouse we heard drums beating. We looked down a side alley to find a group of children clapping their hands and beating tambourines. Malaika decided to join the fun and we followed her. A housewife approached us and explained that the kids where her own children and their friends practicing for the procession their school is having in celebration of the Islamic new year in ten days. She invited us into her house for tea and we accepted. As we savored the heavenly Moroccan very sweet mint and absinth tea we enquired about the family: She was a housewife; her husband worked long hours as a taxi driver; they have six children, the oldest in high school; they own their house, another classic though a humbler riad with chipped old ceramic tiles and with clotheslines strung across from the second story inward-facing balconies; and they share the riad through inheritance with her brother’s family and with that of her widowed sister. I climbed up with an older child and took pictures. I was intrigued by the thin strips, obviously not of fabric, that hung in the sun from one clothesline. These turned out to be fresh lamb innards being sundried for later use.
Before leaving we asked for directions to a good butcher and the hostess offered to guide us to one. When she learned our plan she offered to help with preparing the dish for us. After all, the butcher, the vegetable stall owner, the baker, and the furnace operator were all personal friends of hers and she knows the art of cooking tangia and will take care of everything for us. It wasn’t every day that she met good people from beloved Palestine and she wanted to prove her sincere sentiments to us. We accepted on the condition that we will share the tangia dinner with all the members of her family. Since it was the time for the Friday noon prayer all shops were closed. She proposed a plan: She would consult the butcher as to the amount of mutton needed to feed fourteen people and purchase a good cut from him; he will rent the pot from the baker for us; she will buy the vegetables and cook them separately since tangia was best done with mutton alone; and she will bring back the pot before eight o’clock. We left enough cash for all the expected expenses and headed home. We had to forcefully extract Malaika from her new-found band of friends and could do that only after taking multiple pictures of her and them kissing and hugging, individually and in groups. That is how fast children bond. How painful it must be for the surviving children of Gaza to take leave from dead siblings and friends!
When we returned in the evening our hostess’s demeanor had changed; she had become a little cagey. She hadn’t brought the pot back from the furnace. When we accompanied her to bring it our friend there demanded an added fee. We consulted and decided to play along and let it slide off our backs. After all she needed the money; they all needed the money more than the proprietor of an expensive restaurant that we would have gone to. We had to double the amount to the butcher and pay extra Dirhams for the fresh vegetables, for the bread, and for a load of sweets, though we had already brought a good amount of that as a present to the family. It all added to near hundred dollars. [“Ah! The almighty American dollar!” sighed one riad owner when I paid him in hundred-dollar bills. And that is what is padding the Israeli war machine.]
When we returned to the house with all the food the open smiles returned to our hostess’s face. Joined by her brother and her French-speaking mobile phone-obsessed teenage daughter, a specimen right out of a Paris salon, the three kept repeating welcoming remarks. She labored hard at waiting on us and on the members of her family and those of her brother and sister: dishing out the meat from the steaming pot, preparing and serving the vegetables the fruits, and the tea, and topping our dishes again and again while urging us to eat more. By the time the fantastic feast ended, the lady had certainly earned her cut. But I would rather have given it to her directly as we had originally planned.
Another occasion for rubbing shoulders with Moroccan brothers and sisters had come that same afternoon. As I often do when traveling, I had asked Jubran if he could arrange for us to be invited to a local wedding celebration, a real one and not the show put on for tourists. There weren’t that many weddings this time of year but he would try, he promised. That morning we noticed a decorated new Mercedes parked at the entrance to our ally. We were told there must be a wedding or, more likely, a celebration for someone who has just returned from pilgrimage to Mecca. Then we heard music in the street. I went down to discover a traditional Sufi-style religious band with some twenty men dressed in white jellabas and colorful red kaftans, singing and playing their drums, cymbals, and reed pipes. I ran back to alert the family and found them already in the alley that was now packed with children and women singing and ululating. Jubran was talking to a woman who had just reprimanded me for aiming my camera in her direction. [Only a camera! I am a pacifist; I don’t aim deadly weapons at people.] She turned out to be the daughter of the celebrant pilgrims and he had asked her to invite us. She did so very graciously with repeated welcomes and joyous songs in our praise and in praise of Palestine. We accompanied the noisy procession to the house at the end of the alley where we were invited in and separated by gender, the men upstairs where I hugged the father freshly arrived from Mecca and glowing with pride and holy content. I congratulated him on performing his religious duty and wished him long life, politely declined his invitation to join the feast being served, and returned to the inner balcony for more pictures of the band and womenfolk downstairs. [Wouldn’t all that money be better spent had it been donated for a charity in Gaza! And how about the money we spent on this whole trip? And the price of our incessant overeating and the money we will spend on taking the extra weight off? How many starving children in Gaza would that feed? If only they would live to see the day I turn philanthropist!]
Our riad was only a short walking distance from Jama’a El Fnaa’, deservingly promoted to tourists as the world’s most lively city plaza. We have experienced its exotic excitement before but this time we had the added pleasure of sharing the venture with our two grand daughters, two and eight-years old. On repeated visits over one week we managed to eat at its not-so-hygienic food stalls, to use the services of one henna artist, and to see the varied and unusual entertainment it had on offer: snake charmers and performing monkeys, colorful water-sellers and gnouai type singers jingling their cymbals and twirling their fez tassels enough to make you dizzy, musicians playing their tambourines and single string instruments, single or group gymnasts, local tooth extractors standing with a pair of pliers next to a low chair and a dish containing several hundred actual human teeth, and glib charlatans hawking their magic cures to local customers who formed a mesmerized tight circle around them. And we rode around the square in horse-drawn open carriages. What I found most intriguing was the fact that the place was frequented by more local customers than by tourists who flock to it from all corners of the earth. Jama’a El Fnaa is truly an authentic display of the local culture reflecting the interface of Morocco’s Arab, Berber and African roots.
Yet our level of excitement never reached that of the French family we met at Riad Saba. The wife, a pediatrician, was so involved with the happenings at Jama’a El Fnaa that she achieved the unique distinction of being bitten by a monkey there and needing to go for anti-rabies shots.
We also hit some of the cultural highlights of the city including a few historical sights memorable amongst which was a guided tour of the majestic graves of the Saa’dis, the royal dynasty that preceded the current Alaouis, historically both having burst on the scene from their desert tribal enclaves claiming descent from the prophet Mohammad, to fill the political power vacuum in the capital, each in its own time. The fine Arabic calligraphy and the fancy decorative artistry in ceramic and plaster that covers the walls, floors, and ceilings of the mausoleums is reminiscent of the not unrelated artwork and craftsmanship seen at Alhambra Palace in Granada, the last Arab capital in Andalucía.
Other than the visual pleasure and the sense of elation at seeing the highlights of one’s own culture, this place held a second enticement for me. When the first Alaoui sultan defeated the Saa’dis, he posted the heads of their fighters atop the city wall, and there were enough heads to go around the entire wall. Surviving Saa’dis dispersed to all corners of the Arab world, including to Palestine. Back in Arrabeh, my village in Galilee, there is a contingent of Saa’di’s and Othman Saa’di, an electronic engineer with a successful business enterprise in Germany, is a very good friend of mine. [In Gaza there must be Saa’dis too. And their fate under Israel’s sword is no less gory than under that of the first Alaoui Sultan. Except that it is done with more efficient and less personal means of revenge.]
Across the Arab Middle East, Saa’dis still enjoy a certain regard and have an aura of holiness about them, apparently maintained from their better days in al-Maghreb. In recent history in Palestine this was augmented by the heroic performances of two scions of this ancient clan, Farhan and Nimr el-Saadi, who achieved martyrdom together with Izz-eddin el-Qassam, the inspirational leader of the 1936 peasant uprising against the British Mandate and its Zionist allies. The latter’s name is now familiar the world over as the brand name of the crude homemade missiles of Hamas in Gaza. And in Arrabeh I have a colleague, neighbor, and distant relative named Farhan Saa’di who sought his olden roots and married a Moroccan beauty.
Othman’s uncle, Sheikh Ibrahim el-Saa’di, who dabbled in writing amulets for the sick and disturbed, was the husband of my late aunt Nijmi. He was especially famous for treating one particular ailment, the locking of the jaw because of the displacement of its joint, what we physicians call temporo-mandibular joint displacement. Sufferers of this painful affliction flocked to his humble home from all parts of Galilee, if not all of Palestine. In modern day medical practice the usual nonsurgical treatment is for the doctor to grab the lower jawbone with both hands, thumbs inside the patient’s mouth and firmly pressed over the lower molars, and to yank down the jawbone into position. Sheikh Ibrahim used his Moroccan-style soft leather show, having read a healing prayer over it, to whack the jaw back into position. It was reported never to fail.
At Home with Berbers
In rural areas storks settle in high trees though they often invade with their oversized nests the towers of the same kasbahs frequented by the French vacationers. Kasbahs were the mini-castles of the rural Maghreb, inhabited by local tribal bosses. They were constructed out of mud bricks with mud thatched roofs, all molded out of local earth. This still is the construction material for most of the humble abodes of the Berber who populate the Atlas Mountains and their valleys and foothills as these descend towards the arid desert. That is why Berber towns and villages merge so well with their surroundings, so much so that they give the impression of total wilderness and desolation and nearly escape notice were it not for their well-tended green fields and the occasional foot traveler, local farmer on his donkey or mule, or woman with a load of firewood or the picturesque huge hay bundle on her back.
On our way from Marrakesh to our desert destination, we passed many Berber towns and villages and stayed for a total of three nights in their kasbahs and other tourist havens. As the color of the rock formations changed from the tedious gray into the charming pink and the intriguing multicolored red-streaked painted desert-like sandstone hills, so did the color of the Berber towns and villages and their old kasbahs.
Despite their lowly building materials kasbahs can be architecturally quite elaborate. In Skoura we stayed at such a kasbah and had lunch at another. At the latter we found the owner’s family, descendents of an influential Berber chieftain who built the highest kasbah in all of Morocco, busy collecting their olive crop. We pitched in and helped, thus earning our hors d’ouevres of freshly baked local bread with same-day freshly pressed olive oil savored right under the trees from which it came. I have a real infatuation with the magic stuff and never fail to register its taste in comparison to my own home produced oil. This was more akin to the taste of the raw olive itself and I interrogated my host, a young college grad with a degree in physics, about the reason.
In the same environs we befriended three children, siblings on their way to the fields, and had Laiali ride their donkey while Malaika joined them in the donkey cart. I took pictures and showed them to the giggling children. [Al-Jazeera TV in English has just become available on line in the USA for the first time. Today it showed the ICRC representative in Jerusalem describing how her staff in Gaza evacuated injured and starved children, surviving for four days next to the corpses of their dead mothers, by donkey cart because the Israeli army wouldn’t allow ambulances in. Look out! ‘F-16s and Donkey Carts’ will be the title of my next movie.]
Our other stop was at the famous Glaoui Kasbah, a veritable palace in the desert. The late Thami Glaoui acquired a great fortune, much influence and national notoriety for his support of the French during Morocco’s struggle for independence in the 1940s and 50s. Often hosted by the French masters in Paris with much aplomb and fanfare, for he also was a handsome devil, he had a solid base of followers among his Berber tribesmen and held sway over large swathes of the desert with its mineral riches, the income from which filled his coffers. Though he repented and begged forgiveness from the exiled Sultan, at whose feet he literally threw himself on the eve of independence, his image as a collaborator and a playboy apparently was never repaired. This I assume from the reluctance of the local Berber guide that accompanied us on the visit, himself a Glaoui, to enter into any detail about the life of the man beyond the information about his famous kasbah. Others I attempted to draw into a discussion of Thami’s role in the struggle for independence were equally evasive. [Will Palestinians ever achieve independence? And at what price? And if they do, which I doubt, can they ever rehabilitate all the turncoats and traitors to the cause that Israel’s secret services have corrupted?]
When we took the detour to the Glaoui Kasbah, the road was narrow but looked like a reasonable short cut. After the kasbah we sought the advice of our guide if we should return the way we came or continue on the shorter road. He questioned us about what car we drove and was assured it can make it. Still he cautioned that we should drive on right away so as to make it to the asphalted road before dark. “You have to descend down some steep stairs,” he informed us casually. At least two of us appreciated the ride: Seth who loves off-road driving, and I who took the front passenger seat and enjoyed the view. Malaika sat between us and spent a good part of the time face down in my lap with her hands over her eyes; Didi developed a serious heartburn; and Rhoda fell back on the classic excuse of all mothers: “Slow down! The baby is asleep.”
The road was impossibly narrow, rough, jagged, and curvy and it crawled down the very edge of a ravine. And it did have several stairways to traverse, some of the circular type, it seemed. Quite early on, we came to a fork that Michelin doesn’t show on its map. They can be sued for criminal intent for showing the road on their map in the first place. Soon we were joined by a group of young Russians who were on a more challenging mission: to travel the same road with regular cars including a small Fiat. Mercifully, three women on foot showed up from different directions and the puzzle was solved with sign language. Instantly another source of help materialized, a local tour guide driving a carload of tourists to the same destination, Ait Benhaddou. We followed him. This was a mixed blessing: he had driven this road before and knew were he was going; but also he drove fast. One added advantage was that should we meet an oncoming vehicle we would have advance notice. The one time this happened we were lucky to be in a small village where we could pull to the side and wait the half hour it took one of the two cars to drive in reverse to where there was enough space for the other to pass.
We covered the 40 Km in three hours flat. But the four times that we found someone to ask about the remaining distance we received the same estimate we were given at the start, fifteen Km. Excepting a few tension-filled moments where I mentally reviewed major events in my life, I enjoyed the adventure greatly. The light of the setting sun brought out the special hues of pink, red and orange of the cliffs across the ravine and magnified the shadows of the rocks and the charm of the farmland below. The quilt-like patchwork of multicolored geometrically varied pieces of land, red freshly tilled, green already-planted, and yellow or pink wild flower covered, all tightly packed at the base of the ravine for its entire length were magical. It brought vivid memories of my childhood in Galilee: not as wild, but no less pretty. This is how our farmland looked in early spring in the years before we lost it to Israeli settlers who turned it to commercial farming: one clean swipe, one boring color at a time.
One of the several locals we passed looked peculiarly out of place in this wilderness: a young woman with local features dressed in western attire, hair cut at shoulder level and with a purse and a backpack, deftly squeezed against the rock wall as we passed her. We couldn’t possibly make the space in the car to offer her a ride. I felt bad about her. Was she a university student home for a vacation? Or could she be a conscientious civil servant, a teacher, a social worker, a nurse or a health educator on her way to visit a client. I had made similar forays into some wild Bedouin localities in Galilee. But this was a tougher setting. And she certainly proved to be a tougher loner than I ever was: By the time we reached our destination she was already there. She must have taken shortcuts across the wild terrain.
As a villager myself, I found the rural area of great interest. The narrow asphalted road down the Dades valley goes through one Berber town after another with little distinctive features for the casual stranger, except perhaps for the hue of the soil that colors each town, as if the same can of paint had been splashed across the whole area. The farmers with their donkey carts and mules, or on foot with farm implements balanced on their shoulders, had me reminiscing. And the rock formations and strange shapes of the mountains, of course, were magical. At Ait-Ali we hired a local guide, took a local picnic lunch and went for a local hike across the river and into a canyon between the strange-looking wind and floods-sculpted rocks that the French call ‘Monkey’s Fingers’. Even Didi, with her pronounced acrophobia, enjoyed the experience. Many of the peculiarly-shaped rocks evoked visions of human images, a veritable three-dimensional Rorschach experience. Now, as I review the pictures on my camera, I can see clearly a Madonna with Child, a family seated in a circle, and corpses, many corpses piled one on top of the other, a whole mess of corpses. Is that an Israeli soldier peering out of his tank in the distance?
The King and we
The evident lack of any attempt at renovating the impressive Glaoui desert fortress cum palace fits well with my impression of the intentional neglect of the authorities of Thami’s legacy despite the successful national reconciliation so far. Later, as we reached sunny Tinerhir, the town was bedecked with so many Moroccan flags that from a distance it had a red sheen. At a local café a ferocious-looking Berber sat at the next table, his stern face, with its thick features and handlebar moustache framed by the hood of his gray thick woolen jellaba, foretold of foreboding news. We repeatedly exchanged glances and I finally asked him in high Arabic what was the reason for all the flags. He said that the King had been expected to visit the town today but this morning he cancelled the visit. I sarcastically said: “fortunately, ha!” The man glowered at me from under his hood and snapped an angry “What did you say?” I immediately corrected my remark to “unfortunately!” and withdrew apologetically from his zone. It turned out that the royal visit was only postponed, not cancelled. I didn’t go back to see if my friend could now smile.
Not only here but all along our desert route flags were posted every so many meters single or in clumps. At the entrance to small villages long stretches of camelhair tents were erected surrounded with flags and big banners with welcoming slogans in beautiful Arabic calligraphy, the distinctive Moroccan script adapted from the famous Kufi script of Iraq. [Not to worry; I will stop here; I won’t go on a tangent to speak of America’s war crimes in Iraq.] Even at little Merzouga the flags and the welcome banners were there. As we took off for a two-hour ATV ride across its famous sand dunes, we were informed that his Majesty, King Mohammad VI, is expected to come for a similar ride. After the exciting experience I wondered if a king also gets the same adrenaline surge as we did from the ride, or does he get used to excitement? Perhaps royalty get addicted to adrenaline highs and that is why the number of flags and slogans has to increase progressively.
It seemed the king’s planned trip, had he not decided to avoid us, would have taken him to all the same places where we ventured in southeast Morocco. Emerging out of the desert we caught up with him in the High Atlas town and ski-resort of Ifrane, Morocco’s answer to the Swiss Alps. The number of policemen and members of the Royal Guard on the road was impressive. And on the freeway from Fez to Casablanca, part of the king’s expected route, policemen were posted within sight of one another on both sides of the entire road. At a rest stop we found a score of shiny motorcycles in the parking lot with their Royal Guard riders sipping tea inside and awaiting orders. As a closet pacifist I never feel comfortable in the same room with an armed security person. I broke in a cold sweat.
The national slogan that we saw everywhere we went was “God, The Homeland, and The King”. This declaration of allegiance, Morocco’s own holy trinity, was there on banners and city signs and spelled out in stone on hills and mountainsides all across the country. Yet all of this did not measure up to the number of pictures and slogans that I remember seeing ten years ago when I visited the exotic country for the first time. King Mohammad VI image doesn’t overwhelm the commercial ads and business venues as his father’s did. Even now many shops still have King Hassan II gazing at the customers as they enter the door.
We were pleasantly surprised by the noticeable degree of improvement that has taken place in the general sanitation especially in Fes and Marrakesh, the two cities where we stayed in the old walled quarters. Major repairs, restoration and maintenance efforts were in evidence. Mosques, baths, and sabeels were in good functioning order. A sabeel is a drinking fountain set in the center of a decorative mural, a wide, recessed and tiled wall with a typical serrated overhanging arch. These are a typical feature of Islamic old cities, a source of clean drinking water for the benefit of passersby, dedicated by historical venerable figures or rich merchants. They break the monotony of the repetitive displays of the same type of goods in one shop after the other in the traditional market streets. I remembered the sabeels in Akka from my early childhood. Akka, Haifa, Jaffa, Lidda, Jerusalem and all other old cities in Palestine once had sabeels. With the absence of both the beneficiaries and the benefactors they have turned to nonfunctioning and broken down relics of past days. How did the sabeels in Gaza fair this time, I wondered.
In Fez we lucked out with our choice of accommodation, La Maison Bleue, a superbly restored riad abutting the historic site where the original independence proclamation document was drafted and signed in 1943, hence the name of the plaza it fronts, ‘Istiqlal Plaza.’ The riad’s center courtyard walls and their arcaded recesses that serve as private dining rooms while still in open continuity with the central space, allowing the full enjoyment of performing musicians, has been done with such refined ceramic handicraft artistry that it matches anything we have ever seen anywhere in palatial grandeur. And the service was equally hospitable while the rooms combined all modern conveniences with the imagined excesses of an oriental guesthouse of old, from heated beds to bathtubs enveloped by clouds of warm amber oil vapor. By now I have learned of the ongoing massacre in Gaza. The sense of guilt tore at my heart and I hated the excess luxury.
We walked the markets and visited the famous Buananieh school, the home of such world-renowned Arab thought luminaries as Ibn Khaldoun and Ibn Battuta, both having penned their volumes while on full pension from the sultan abu-Anan, the founder and mentor of the school, hence the name. The shopkeepers were not too aggressive with plying their reasonably priced and truly authentic carpets, ceramics, leather goods, and other locally produced souvenirs. But you had to know the essentials of bargaining. That I certainly do. When bored I practice my skill at bargaining as a sport. I choose a small item and drive the price down to the absolute minimum that the shopkeeper will accept and then pay him his original asking price. It always elicits a big smile or even a hug and an invitation to tea.
The one aspect of the marketplace that we found irksome was that everyone we asked for directions mutated right under our sights into a paid tourist guide insisting to show us the best place in town which was, of course, not the one we had asked directions for, and then demanded remuneration for his services.
Zoo
Laqlaq, Arabic for stork, is a more interesting sounding word. It imitates the sound made by the bird and is pronounced with the guttural ‘q’ that few other than Arabs and storks can make. Laiali, my granddaughter, couldn’t stop repeating the word. As behooves a toddler, she appreciates repetitive sounds. She says her name is Lulu and her sister is Lala and Morocco was full of laqlaqs, and of camels, of course.
Lulu has never seen a warwar, bee-eater, another more colorful migratory bird that is called by the sound it makes. It used to cross the skies of my childhood in Galilee in flocks that would cover the whole sky with bright green. My uncle who was influential enough, or co-opted enough if you wish, to rate a hunting-gun permit from the British administration, would stand on the roof of his house and shoot a few warwars for dinner and we children would compete with his Seljuk dog in retrieving them. We would specially delight in the great flocks of storks that would frequently choose the skies of our village to circle endlessly round and round. Apparently the stream of warm air that rose from a our village provided the uplift the storks needed to take a rest, a brief R&R on their arduous flight from Russia to East Africa or back. The storks were holding a wedding dance, we, the children, believed. And we would join them in our own joyous group dance, the Dabkeh. Alas, it seems a rare occasion that I have seen a stork wedding party over Arrabeh or a flock of warwar in the over fifty years since I reached adulthood. Is it the loss of innocence, I wonder, or the modernizing influence of Israel that has caused our ‘desert to bloom’ and migrating birds to change their course and avoid us?
The French also seek warmer environs and sing, dance, circle and sway when they hit a warm spot. Indeed a veritable noisy flock of them crowded the dance floor at the desert retreat where we stayed and celebrated the New Year. We dined, Rhoda and Seth danced, Malaika danced with her parents and played with her French age-mates, and little Lulu befriended an older French boy and spent the evening dancing, running and shouting with him, both using their toddler babble and sheer energy as a common language. We didn’t know then that the New Year had started that differently for people in Gaza.
All through the trip our grandchildren experienced Morocco as a super petting zoo: camels, horses, mules, donkeys, sheep, goats, monkeys, cats, guinea pigs, parrots, snakes, turtles and even porcupines. And I have pictures to prove it.
No pet pigs or dogs though. Both are considered filthy in Arab and Islamic culture. Dogs are kept mainly outdoors on guard duty or to shepherd the flocks. They don’t reach the level of respectability to associate closely with humans and be petted. Especially in Gaza dogs are currently getting some particularly bad press. They are reported to be eating the corpses of dead children left out to rot. I wonder who is to blame! Soon we will read and hear, I am sure, about the awful parenting practices of Palestinians who leave their dead children for dogs to eat. And Israeli, American, and European experts will delve into analytical discourses and offer socio-cultural and psychological explanations.
Exaggeration! Blood libel! You say.
Wrong! I say. You, your intellectuals, politicians and media moguls, and, dare I say, your born-again fundamentalist Christians, in and out of the White House, have maligned us before, twisting facts to suite your malicious intent. You have dehumanized me and my people to the point that you are unable to pity our dying children. You have demonized me and my people and pictured us as mindless savages without conscience, sub-humans unworthy of your attention. You have made it a virtue, nay, a commandment to kill me.
Enough is enough! It is time you opened your mind and heart and looked me straight in the eye as your equal in humanity and compassion. It is time you knew me for what I am: another human being, pure and simple, one capable of all the hate and malice that you can muster against your enemies, but also of all the love and compassion that you have for your friends. It behooves us both to consider the alternatives. Just don’t look at me through your gun sight; drop the gun from your hand and take your heavy boot off my neck so I can breathe some fresh air and be your friend again. Stop bludgeoning me and pay attention to my own narrative; Say what is on your mind but hear me out too.
Like Obama in Hawaii I was vacationing and didn’t want my peace disturbed by bad news from a faraway dead-end place. I should have picked up the ample clues and listened to radio or sought a place with a TV and seen Al-Jazeera. But I chose not to and kept in full ignorance of what was happening in Gaza.
When Israel first unleashed its abhorrent violence against Gaza’s imprisoned and starved Palestinians, we were already in Morocco’s desert close to the Algerian border. In part, this wild trip was decided on my prodding; fossil hunting is a hobby of mine and the wild environs of Erfoud are full of black marble inundated with fossils. And Malaika, my third-grader granddaughter, was excited about the prospect of viewing the star constellations in the clear desert sky. So we all headed there and had a fantastic experience.
But every time the locals, Berber tribesmen or citified tourist guides, knew I was a Palestinian they would spill out their hearts in welcome and sympathy and prayers for Palestine. I took it to be the standard expression of solidarity with Palestinian people in their historic suffering and maltreatment. Truly, in all my years, I cannot recall ever meeting an Arab man or women who didn’t express solidarity with my people, discontent with his or her rulers for their cooptation by the West and for their abandonment of Palestine, and anger at American and European governments for their blind support of Israel. Such expressions of sympathy are not new to me. But this time in Morocco there was a touch of sadness mixed with admiration, almost adulation, in the eyes of my interlocutors, all despite the language barrier that we sought to transcend by reverting to high literary Arabic. Still I credited it all to a special infatuation of Moroccans with Palestine and the Palestinians.
On the second day of the New Year, emerging from our dream desert experience, we drove through the Middle Atlas toward Fez, our next destination. In a small Berber town the road was blocked by a crowd of high school students demonstrating rowdily with Palestinian flags and slogans. At the outskirts of Fez we stopped to ask directions from a group of young people on the walkway. One immediately identified me as a Palestinian and the group burst out into a mini demonstration jumping, thrusting their arms high in the air and shouting pro-Gaza, anti-Israeli and anti-American slogans. At the hotel I reconnected with the real world and saw the flood of emails condemning the continuing slaughter. Several friends had written to check on us and hear our thoughts.
For the remaining week of vacation I had to suffer the images of death and destruction. Gaza was constantly on my mind. Nothing I did or saw but reminded me of the children and mothers of Gaza. I had a deep sense of personal guilt tinged with shame for having enjoyed myself as they suffered. A few weeks before I had undergone a medical procedure and was still on painkillers especially during the night. I stopped taking my meds. Every little discomfort my body felt triggered a sense of guilt for having access to medications when the children of Gaza with their mangled limbs didn’t. Gaza, whose name was immortalized by an invention of its weavers of ancient times, has now run out of gauze to dress the wounds of its children.
In the butchers market in Fez the sight of lambs’ heads strung overhead made me cringe, not for pitying the lambs; somehow the sight evoked that of dismembered bodies and severed parts of children in Gaza. I stopped eating meat and missed out on all the lamb tagine, the lead dish of Moroccan cuisine. At night I slept little; every motion of my granddaughter who shared my queen-size bed made me jump. In daytime I guarded her like a hawk; every time she went up or down the steep stairs of the hotel I would follow her and every time we walked in the market I held her hand tight. All I could think of was the danger of her falling down the stairs or tripping on something and suffering a massive injury to her pretty face or loosing a limb.
As we viewed the ancient leather dyeing vats in the old city, a bastion of grime and foul smell, I pitied the leather dyeing workers climbing in and out of the vats: What despair and loss of dignity brings a human being to tolerate such degradation and suffering? But what do I know about the pleasures those men enjoy in bringing home bread for their children. But what if one goes home from work to find it destroyed and wife and children all dead! That had just happened in Gaza. Does such despair make people face the prospect of death calmly? Gazans say they do. The images of the children with bloodied heads and mangled limbs with that absolute blank look in their empty eyes, both hope and fear having been wiped out of them by shock, mesmerized me; I screamed because they didn’t.
On our last night we stayed in Casablanca at a hotel operated by a Spanish firm. They had a varied and fancy variety of breakfast foods including five differently flavored olive oils that I savored with freshly baked bread. Till I read the paper: Israel had targeted the Zeitoun (Arabic for ‘olive’) neighborhood of Gaza City killing 15 civilians including an old man and his grandchild. Nausea attacked and I ran to the bathroom.
On arriving back in New York I went to bed and slept for three hours. It must be jetlag. At 2 AM I tried to catch up with my email. One report after another by Human Rights organizations, peace activists, independent journalists, UN officials, etc. expressed objection and outrage at what Israel had done. A deep discomfort nagged at my conscience; something was missing; I need to explain to all the people in the world that we all are missing several core facts. We are speaking, as if, of two equal parties and making many false assumptions, even when well-intentioned. I need to alert everyone to the danger of such misconceptions.
Deep in my heart I know all the pieces of the puzzle: Stripped of all the political propaganda and American Zionist-inspired spin-doctoring and Christian born-again zeal and prejudices, it all starts with conflicting claims by two peoples to the same piece of land, the weaker party having been on it for centuries and the stronger one intent on dislodging them off it even if that required eliminating them off the face of the earth. The latter bases its claim on a special deal with its own deity several millennia ago. Both parties have fallen back on stupidity and stubbornness and on their not unrelated dependence on their faiths. But I needed to elucidate my narrative and support it with factual information and historical accounts. Putting it at this level of simplistic analysis equates between aggressor and victim, the very thing I am upset about when I read the calls for both sides to refrain from targeting civilians.
By morning when the family awoke I had accomplished nothing. I was still angry and full of outrage at the hypocrisy of so many ‘neutral’ authorities and observers. I took my granddaughter to her school and spent the rest of the day in a daze.
I kept at it for a second night. This time I read in depth several analyses. There is very little I want to say that has not been said by better qualified people: my friend Jonathan Cook looks at Israel’s hidden agenda http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10132.shtml; The Israeli historian Avi Shlaim gives a good insight into the background to the current situation http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/07/gaza-israel-palestine; Another friend, Ilan Pappe, delves into the peculiar self-righteousness of Zionist Israel http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10100.shtml; Robert Fisk sheds some light on the Israeli standard lies in times of war, on who the Hamas rabble in Gaza are and on Israel’s role in pushing them to the corner from which they have no option but to act in the way they do http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-why-bombing-ashkelon-is-the-most-tragic-irony-1216228.html; and Omar Barghouthi gives but one example of the complicity and preconceived prejudices of so many international officials and reporters http:/www./counterpunch.org/barghouti01022009.html. But then what policy maker in the world heeds the opinion of contributors to the Electronic Intifada. At least a third friend, Prof. Rashid Khalidi, got some unpopular ideas published as an op-ed in the New York Times http://www.nytimes. com/2009/ 01/08/opinion/ 08khalidi. html.
One statement I have not seen yet: Israel is out to diminish the number of Palestinians in any and every way it can, so as to eliminate as many claimants in the ongoing land dispute as possible. And one stream of analysis I have not seen, though bits and pieces of it are on every one’s mind: By its bloody trampling on the human rights, institutions, infrastructure, property, and lives of Palestinians Israel hopes to draw Hezbollah into the fray, to take revenge on it for having withstood its aggression in 2006, and simultaneously to strike at Iran, possibly with nuclear arsenal. And this has all been cleared and coordinated with the American lame duck president and administration. The one remaining hope is that Hezbollah will resist taking the bait till Obama takes over.
Finally I proceeded to empty my bags and enjoy the beauty of all the exotic souvenirs we acquired on our trip. My wife had picked up several ceramic dishes from Fes. I shuddered; I had just read the news: Israel had hit the UN school in Al-Fakhora (Arabic for ‘ceramic factory’) neighborhood of Jabalia Refugee Camp killing 43 civilians, mostly children. I spread out the traditional Berber rug I had purchased: My God! It is blood red!
I sought comfort in reading personal emails from friends. The Rev. Barbara Grace Ripple ends her message of sympathy and wishes for peace and justice from Hawaii with the simple statement that she had spent the day in fasting and prayer. I am not a religious person. But that statement touched me to the core; that is what my late mother, an illiterate Palestinian villager, would do every time she lost a child.
Mixing with the locals in Marrakesh
In winter both storks and the French flock to Morocco. It is a short cross-Mediterranean hop and offseason charter flights are $100 roundtrip. In the city the storks nest in pairs on the high minarets while French couples go for romantic riads, the traditional enclosed former residences of the better-off families in the old quarters, each built in a multilevel quadrangle surrounding a garden or a central court with a fountain and with its walls and floor covered with colorful arabesque designs in ceramic. The roof of a riad is often furnished with beach chairs and a mini-bar, the perfect spot for relaxing and sunning oneself. Didi and I have stayed more than once in such intimate luxury before in Andalusia, historically the extension of the Arab-Berber culture, better known as Moorish culture, of North Africa that flourished to outdo and dominate its progenitor. Except that in Spain riads are known as pensions.
In Marrakesh we were guests at Riad Saba, a guest house operated by Jubran, an entrepreneurial friendly young Moroccan and his Swedish wife who, unfortunately for us, had taken her daughter home for Christmas. Still we greatly enjoyed the hospitality and personal attention of the local staff of three. Their freshly prepared breakfasts were greatly satisfying. At Riad Saba we were introduced for the first time to msemmani, the multilayered thin pastry dough deep fried in ghee. Malaika has demanded it at every breakfast thereafter and even back in New York still agitates for her grandmother to experiment with concocting the exotic food.
For the one week we stayed in Marrakesh we dined at several of its famous restaurants. [In editing this piece I had to change the original verb, ‘targeted’, I had used; its military connotation made my stomach turn.] Yet my most enjoyable meal was at the humble home of a family we befriended by chance. Seth, my son-in-law, and I were looking for the neighborhood’s hammam (local bathhouse, not unlike the classic Turkish bath) for men. We all had been to a fancy one operated by a French firm which was more of a spa than a hammam. This time we were after the authentic experience; we wanted to bathe with the locals. As we reached the spot there was a smell of cooked lamb wafting out of an open door with sawdust piled up waste-high and spilling down into a dungeon-like basement where a lanky man was shoveling it into a furnace. We waved at him and he cleared the stairs enough for us to negotiate our way down. The furnace is for heating water for the hammam on the other side of the wall. The hot air goes through a longish passage in the wall and a recessed space in the wall serves for cooking a specialty dish, tangia, meat and vegetables with the proper condiments placed in a ceramic jar which is closed and left on low heat for hours. There were a dozen or so crocks cooking and I had my picture taken holding one with the furnace operator.
The next day Seth and I decided to try to do our own tangia: We would buy the ceramic pot, the mutton, the vegetables and the spices, arrange the ingredients in the pot and take it to our friend, the furnace man. Malaika decided to accompany us on the venture. Our wives sarcastically wished us success. As we approached the bathhouse we heard drums beating. We looked down a side alley to find a group of children clapping their hands and beating tambourines. Malaika decided to join the fun and we followed her. A housewife approached us and explained that the kids where her own children and their friends practicing for the procession their school is having in celebration of the Islamic new year in ten days. She invited us into her house for tea and we accepted. As we savored the heavenly Moroccan very sweet mint and absinth tea we enquired about the family: She was a housewife; her husband worked long hours as a taxi driver; they have six children, the oldest in high school; they own their house, another classic though a humbler riad with chipped old ceramic tiles and with clotheslines strung across from the second story inward-facing balconies; and they share the riad through inheritance with her brother’s family and with that of her widowed sister. I climbed up with an older child and took pictures. I was intrigued by the thin strips, obviously not of fabric, that hung in the sun from one clothesline. These turned out to be fresh lamb innards being sundried for later use.
Before leaving we asked for directions to a good butcher and the hostess offered to guide us to one. When she learned our plan she offered to help with preparing the dish for us. After all, the butcher, the vegetable stall owner, the baker, and the furnace operator were all personal friends of hers and she knows the art of cooking tangia and will take care of everything for us. It wasn’t every day that she met good people from beloved Palestine and she wanted to prove her sincere sentiments to us. We accepted on the condition that we will share the tangia dinner with all the members of her family. Since it was the time for the Friday noon prayer all shops were closed. She proposed a plan: She would consult the butcher as to the amount of mutton needed to feed fourteen people and purchase a good cut from him; he will rent the pot from the baker for us; she will buy the vegetables and cook them separately since tangia was best done with mutton alone; and she will bring back the pot before eight o’clock. We left enough cash for all the expected expenses and headed home. We had to forcefully extract Malaika from her new-found band of friends and could do that only after taking multiple pictures of her and them kissing and hugging, individually and in groups. That is how fast children bond. How painful it must be for the surviving children of Gaza to take leave from dead siblings and friends!
When we returned in the evening our hostess’s demeanor had changed; she had become a little cagey. She hadn’t brought the pot back from the furnace. When we accompanied her to bring it our friend there demanded an added fee. We consulted and decided to play along and let it slide off our backs. After all she needed the money; they all needed the money more than the proprietor of an expensive restaurant that we would have gone to. We had to double the amount to the butcher and pay extra Dirhams for the fresh vegetables, for the bread, and for a load of sweets, though we had already brought a good amount of that as a present to the family. It all added to near hundred dollars. [“Ah! The almighty American dollar!” sighed one riad owner when I paid him in hundred-dollar bills. And that is what is padding the Israeli war machine.]
When we returned to the house with all the food the open smiles returned to our hostess’s face. Joined by her brother and her French-speaking mobile phone-obsessed teenage daughter, a specimen right out of a Paris salon, the three kept repeating welcoming remarks. She labored hard at waiting on us and on the members of her family and those of her brother and sister: dishing out the meat from the steaming pot, preparing and serving the vegetables the fruits, and the tea, and topping our dishes again and again while urging us to eat more. By the time the fantastic feast ended, the lady had certainly earned her cut. But I would rather have given it to her directly as we had originally planned.
Another occasion for rubbing shoulders with Moroccan brothers and sisters had come that same afternoon. As I often do when traveling, I had asked Jubran if he could arrange for us to be invited to a local wedding celebration, a real one and not the show put on for tourists. There weren’t that many weddings this time of year but he would try, he promised. That morning we noticed a decorated new Mercedes parked at the entrance to our ally. We were told there must be a wedding or, more likely, a celebration for someone who has just returned from pilgrimage to Mecca. Then we heard music in the street. I went down to discover a traditional Sufi-style religious band with some twenty men dressed in white jellabas and colorful red kaftans, singing and playing their drums, cymbals, and reed pipes. I ran back to alert the family and found them already in the alley that was now packed with children and women singing and ululating. Jubran was talking to a woman who had just reprimanded me for aiming my camera in her direction. [Only a camera! I am a pacifist; I don’t aim deadly weapons at people.] She turned out to be the daughter of the celebrant pilgrims and he had asked her to invite us. She did so very graciously with repeated welcomes and joyous songs in our praise and in praise of Palestine. We accompanied the noisy procession to the house at the end of the alley where we were invited in and separated by gender, the men upstairs where I hugged the father freshly arrived from Mecca and glowing with pride and holy content. I congratulated him on performing his religious duty and wished him long life, politely declined his invitation to join the feast being served, and returned to the inner balcony for more pictures of the band and womenfolk downstairs. [Wouldn’t all that money be better spent had it been donated for a charity in Gaza! And how about the money we spent on this whole trip? And the price of our incessant overeating and the money we will spend on taking the extra weight off? How many starving children in Gaza would that feed? If only they would live to see the day I turn philanthropist!]
Our riad was only a short walking distance from Jama’a El Fnaa’, deservingly promoted to tourists as the world’s most lively city plaza. We have experienced its exotic excitement before but this time we had the added pleasure of sharing the venture with our two grand daughters, two and eight-years old. On repeated visits over one week we managed to eat at its not-so-hygienic food stalls, to use the services of one henna artist, and to see the varied and unusual entertainment it had on offer: snake charmers and performing monkeys, colorful water-sellers and gnouai type singers jingling their cymbals and twirling their fez tassels enough to make you dizzy, musicians playing their tambourines and single string instruments, single or group gymnasts, local tooth extractors standing with a pair of pliers next to a low chair and a dish containing several hundred actual human teeth, and glib charlatans hawking their magic cures to local customers who formed a mesmerized tight circle around them. And we rode around the square in horse-drawn open carriages. What I found most intriguing was the fact that the place was frequented by more local customers than by tourists who flock to it from all corners of the earth. Jama’a El Fnaa is truly an authentic display of the local culture reflecting the interface of Morocco’s Arab, Berber and African roots.
Yet our level of excitement never reached that of the French family we met at Riad Saba. The wife, a pediatrician, was so involved with the happenings at Jama’a El Fnaa that she achieved the unique distinction of being bitten by a monkey there and needing to go for anti-rabies shots.
We also hit some of the cultural highlights of the city including a few historical sights memorable amongst which was a guided tour of the majestic graves of the Saa’dis, the royal dynasty that preceded the current Alaouis, historically both having burst on the scene from their desert tribal enclaves claiming descent from the prophet Mohammad, to fill the political power vacuum in the capital, each in its own time. The fine Arabic calligraphy and the fancy decorative artistry in ceramic and plaster that covers the walls, floors, and ceilings of the mausoleums is reminiscent of the not unrelated artwork and craftsmanship seen at Alhambra Palace in Granada, the last Arab capital in Andalucía.
Other than the visual pleasure and the sense of elation at seeing the highlights of one’s own culture, this place held a second enticement for me. When the first Alaoui sultan defeated the Saa’dis, he posted the heads of their fighters atop the city wall, and there were enough heads to go around the entire wall. Surviving Saa’dis dispersed to all corners of the Arab world, including to Palestine. Back in Arrabeh, my village in Galilee, there is a contingent of Saa’di’s and Othman Saa’di, an electronic engineer with a successful business enterprise in Germany, is a very good friend of mine. [In Gaza there must be Saa’dis too. And their fate under Israel’s sword is no less gory than under that of the first Alaoui Sultan. Except that it is done with more efficient and less personal means of revenge.]
Across the Arab Middle East, Saa’dis still enjoy a certain regard and have an aura of holiness about them, apparently maintained from their better days in al-Maghreb. In recent history in Palestine this was augmented by the heroic performances of two scions of this ancient clan, Farhan and Nimr el-Saadi, who achieved martyrdom together with Izz-eddin el-Qassam, the inspirational leader of the 1936 peasant uprising against the British Mandate and its Zionist allies. The latter’s name is now familiar the world over as the brand name of the crude homemade missiles of Hamas in Gaza. And in Arrabeh I have a colleague, neighbor, and distant relative named Farhan Saa’di who sought his olden roots and married a Moroccan beauty.
Othman’s uncle, Sheikh Ibrahim el-Saa’di, who dabbled in writing amulets for the sick and disturbed, was the husband of my late aunt Nijmi. He was especially famous for treating one particular ailment, the locking of the jaw because of the displacement of its joint, what we physicians call temporo-mandibular joint displacement. Sufferers of this painful affliction flocked to his humble home from all parts of Galilee, if not all of Palestine. In modern day medical practice the usual nonsurgical treatment is for the doctor to grab the lower jawbone with both hands, thumbs inside the patient’s mouth and firmly pressed over the lower molars, and to yank down the jawbone into position. Sheikh Ibrahim used his Moroccan-style soft leather show, having read a healing prayer over it, to whack the jaw back into position. It was reported never to fail.
At Home with Berbers
In rural areas storks settle in high trees though they often invade with their oversized nests the towers of the same kasbahs frequented by the French vacationers. Kasbahs were the mini-castles of the rural Maghreb, inhabited by local tribal bosses. They were constructed out of mud bricks with mud thatched roofs, all molded out of local earth. This still is the construction material for most of the humble abodes of the Berber who populate the Atlas Mountains and their valleys and foothills as these descend towards the arid desert. That is why Berber towns and villages merge so well with their surroundings, so much so that they give the impression of total wilderness and desolation and nearly escape notice were it not for their well-tended green fields and the occasional foot traveler, local farmer on his donkey or mule, or woman with a load of firewood or the picturesque huge hay bundle on her back.
On our way from Marrakesh to our desert destination, we passed many Berber towns and villages and stayed for a total of three nights in their kasbahs and other tourist havens. As the color of the rock formations changed from the tedious gray into the charming pink and the intriguing multicolored red-streaked painted desert-like sandstone hills, so did the color of the Berber towns and villages and their old kasbahs.
Despite their lowly building materials kasbahs can be architecturally quite elaborate. In Skoura we stayed at such a kasbah and had lunch at another. At the latter we found the owner’s family, descendents of an influential Berber chieftain who built the highest kasbah in all of Morocco, busy collecting their olive crop. We pitched in and helped, thus earning our hors d’ouevres of freshly baked local bread with same-day freshly pressed olive oil savored right under the trees from which it came. I have a real infatuation with the magic stuff and never fail to register its taste in comparison to my own home produced oil. This was more akin to the taste of the raw olive itself and I interrogated my host, a young college grad with a degree in physics, about the reason.
In the same environs we befriended three children, siblings on their way to the fields, and had Laiali ride their donkey while Malaika joined them in the donkey cart. I took pictures and showed them to the giggling children. [Al-Jazeera TV in English has just become available on line in the USA for the first time. Today it showed the ICRC representative in Jerusalem describing how her staff in Gaza evacuated injured and starved children, surviving for four days next to the corpses of their dead mothers, by donkey cart because the Israeli army wouldn’t allow ambulances in. Look out! ‘F-16s and Donkey Carts’ will be the title of my next movie.]
Our other stop was at the famous Glaoui Kasbah, a veritable palace in the desert. The late Thami Glaoui acquired a great fortune, much influence and national notoriety for his support of the French during Morocco’s struggle for independence in the 1940s and 50s. Often hosted by the French masters in Paris with much aplomb and fanfare, for he also was a handsome devil, he had a solid base of followers among his Berber tribesmen and held sway over large swathes of the desert with its mineral riches, the income from which filled his coffers. Though he repented and begged forgiveness from the exiled Sultan, at whose feet he literally threw himself on the eve of independence, his image as a collaborator and a playboy apparently was never repaired. This I assume from the reluctance of the local Berber guide that accompanied us on the visit, himself a Glaoui, to enter into any detail about the life of the man beyond the information about his famous kasbah. Others I attempted to draw into a discussion of Thami’s role in the struggle for independence were equally evasive. [Will Palestinians ever achieve independence? And at what price? And if they do, which I doubt, can they ever rehabilitate all the turncoats and traitors to the cause that Israel’s secret services have corrupted?]
When we took the detour to the Glaoui Kasbah, the road was narrow but looked like a reasonable short cut. After the kasbah we sought the advice of our guide if we should return the way we came or continue on the shorter road. He questioned us about what car we drove and was assured it can make it. Still he cautioned that we should drive on right away so as to make it to the asphalted road before dark. “You have to descend down some steep stairs,” he informed us casually. At least two of us appreciated the ride: Seth who loves off-road driving, and I who took the front passenger seat and enjoyed the view. Malaika sat between us and spent a good part of the time face down in my lap with her hands over her eyes; Didi developed a serious heartburn; and Rhoda fell back on the classic excuse of all mothers: “Slow down! The baby is asleep.”
The road was impossibly narrow, rough, jagged, and curvy and it crawled down the very edge of a ravine. And it did have several stairways to traverse, some of the circular type, it seemed. Quite early on, we came to a fork that Michelin doesn’t show on its map. They can be sued for criminal intent for showing the road on their map in the first place. Soon we were joined by a group of young Russians who were on a more challenging mission: to travel the same road with regular cars including a small Fiat. Mercifully, three women on foot showed up from different directions and the puzzle was solved with sign language. Instantly another source of help materialized, a local tour guide driving a carload of tourists to the same destination, Ait Benhaddou. We followed him. This was a mixed blessing: he had driven this road before and knew were he was going; but also he drove fast. One added advantage was that should we meet an oncoming vehicle we would have advance notice. The one time this happened we were lucky to be in a small village where we could pull to the side and wait the half hour it took one of the two cars to drive in reverse to where there was enough space for the other to pass.
We covered the 40 Km in three hours flat. But the four times that we found someone to ask about the remaining distance we received the same estimate we were given at the start, fifteen Km. Excepting a few tension-filled moments where I mentally reviewed major events in my life, I enjoyed the adventure greatly. The light of the setting sun brought out the special hues of pink, red and orange of the cliffs across the ravine and magnified the shadows of the rocks and the charm of the farmland below. The quilt-like patchwork of multicolored geometrically varied pieces of land, red freshly tilled, green already-planted, and yellow or pink wild flower covered, all tightly packed at the base of the ravine for its entire length were magical. It brought vivid memories of my childhood in Galilee: not as wild, but no less pretty. This is how our farmland looked in early spring in the years before we lost it to Israeli settlers who turned it to commercial farming: one clean swipe, one boring color at a time.
One of the several locals we passed looked peculiarly out of place in this wilderness: a young woman with local features dressed in western attire, hair cut at shoulder level and with a purse and a backpack, deftly squeezed against the rock wall as we passed her. We couldn’t possibly make the space in the car to offer her a ride. I felt bad about her. Was she a university student home for a vacation? Or could she be a conscientious civil servant, a teacher, a social worker, a nurse or a health educator on her way to visit a client. I had made similar forays into some wild Bedouin localities in Galilee. But this was a tougher setting. And she certainly proved to be a tougher loner than I ever was: By the time we reached our destination she was already there. She must have taken shortcuts across the wild terrain.
As a villager myself, I found the rural area of great interest. The narrow asphalted road down the Dades valley goes through one Berber town after another with little distinctive features for the casual stranger, except perhaps for the hue of the soil that colors each town, as if the same can of paint had been splashed across the whole area. The farmers with their donkey carts and mules, or on foot with farm implements balanced on their shoulders, had me reminiscing. And the rock formations and strange shapes of the mountains, of course, were magical. At Ait-Ali we hired a local guide, took a local picnic lunch and went for a local hike across the river and into a canyon between the strange-looking wind and floods-sculpted rocks that the French call ‘Monkey’s Fingers’. Even Didi, with her pronounced acrophobia, enjoyed the experience. Many of the peculiarly-shaped rocks evoked visions of human images, a veritable three-dimensional Rorschach experience. Now, as I review the pictures on my camera, I can see clearly a Madonna with Child, a family seated in a circle, and corpses, many corpses piled one on top of the other, a whole mess of corpses. Is that an Israeli soldier peering out of his tank in the distance?
The King and we
The evident lack of any attempt at renovating the impressive Glaoui desert fortress cum palace fits well with my impression of the intentional neglect of the authorities of Thami’s legacy despite the successful national reconciliation so far. Later, as we reached sunny Tinerhir, the town was bedecked with so many Moroccan flags that from a distance it had a red sheen. At a local café a ferocious-looking Berber sat at the next table, his stern face, with its thick features and handlebar moustache framed by the hood of his gray thick woolen jellaba, foretold of foreboding news. We repeatedly exchanged glances and I finally asked him in high Arabic what was the reason for all the flags. He said that the King had been expected to visit the town today but this morning he cancelled the visit. I sarcastically said: “fortunately, ha!” The man glowered at me from under his hood and snapped an angry “What did you say?” I immediately corrected my remark to “unfortunately!” and withdrew apologetically from his zone. It turned out that the royal visit was only postponed, not cancelled. I didn’t go back to see if my friend could now smile.
Not only here but all along our desert route flags were posted every so many meters single or in clumps. At the entrance to small villages long stretches of camelhair tents were erected surrounded with flags and big banners with welcoming slogans in beautiful Arabic calligraphy, the distinctive Moroccan script adapted from the famous Kufi script of Iraq. [Not to worry; I will stop here; I won’t go on a tangent to speak of America’s war crimes in Iraq.] Even at little Merzouga the flags and the welcome banners were there. As we took off for a two-hour ATV ride across its famous sand dunes, we were informed that his Majesty, King Mohammad VI, is expected to come for a similar ride. After the exciting experience I wondered if a king also gets the same adrenaline surge as we did from the ride, or does he get used to excitement? Perhaps royalty get addicted to adrenaline highs and that is why the number of flags and slogans has to increase progressively.
It seemed the king’s planned trip, had he not decided to avoid us, would have taken him to all the same places where we ventured in southeast Morocco. Emerging out of the desert we caught up with him in the High Atlas town and ski-resort of Ifrane, Morocco’s answer to the Swiss Alps. The number of policemen and members of the Royal Guard on the road was impressive. And on the freeway from Fez to Casablanca, part of the king’s expected route, policemen were posted within sight of one another on both sides of the entire road. At a rest stop we found a score of shiny motorcycles in the parking lot with their Royal Guard riders sipping tea inside and awaiting orders. As a closet pacifist I never feel comfortable in the same room with an armed security person. I broke in a cold sweat.
The national slogan that we saw everywhere we went was “God, The Homeland, and The King”. This declaration of allegiance, Morocco’s own holy trinity, was there on banners and city signs and spelled out in stone on hills and mountainsides all across the country. Yet all of this did not measure up to the number of pictures and slogans that I remember seeing ten years ago when I visited the exotic country for the first time. King Mohammad VI image doesn’t overwhelm the commercial ads and business venues as his father’s did. Even now many shops still have King Hassan II gazing at the customers as they enter the door.
We were pleasantly surprised by the noticeable degree of improvement that has taken place in the general sanitation especially in Fes and Marrakesh, the two cities where we stayed in the old walled quarters. Major repairs, restoration and maintenance efforts were in evidence. Mosques, baths, and sabeels were in good functioning order. A sabeel is a drinking fountain set in the center of a decorative mural, a wide, recessed and tiled wall with a typical serrated overhanging arch. These are a typical feature of Islamic old cities, a source of clean drinking water for the benefit of passersby, dedicated by historical venerable figures or rich merchants. They break the monotony of the repetitive displays of the same type of goods in one shop after the other in the traditional market streets. I remembered the sabeels in Akka from my early childhood. Akka, Haifa, Jaffa, Lidda, Jerusalem and all other old cities in Palestine once had sabeels. With the absence of both the beneficiaries and the benefactors they have turned to nonfunctioning and broken down relics of past days. How did the sabeels in Gaza fair this time, I wondered.
In Fez we lucked out with our choice of accommodation, La Maison Bleue, a superbly restored riad abutting the historic site where the original independence proclamation document was drafted and signed in 1943, hence the name of the plaza it fronts, ‘Istiqlal Plaza.’ The riad’s center courtyard walls and their arcaded recesses that serve as private dining rooms while still in open continuity with the central space, allowing the full enjoyment of performing musicians, has been done with such refined ceramic handicraft artistry that it matches anything we have ever seen anywhere in palatial grandeur. And the service was equally hospitable while the rooms combined all modern conveniences with the imagined excesses of an oriental guesthouse of old, from heated beds to bathtubs enveloped by clouds of warm amber oil vapor. By now I have learned of the ongoing massacre in Gaza. The sense of guilt tore at my heart and I hated the excess luxury.
We walked the markets and visited the famous Buananieh school, the home of such world-renowned Arab thought luminaries as Ibn Khaldoun and Ibn Battuta, both having penned their volumes while on full pension from the sultan abu-Anan, the founder and mentor of the school, hence the name. The shopkeepers were not too aggressive with plying their reasonably priced and truly authentic carpets, ceramics, leather goods, and other locally produced souvenirs. But you had to know the essentials of bargaining. That I certainly do. When bored I practice my skill at bargaining as a sport. I choose a small item and drive the price down to the absolute minimum that the shopkeeper will accept and then pay him his original asking price. It always elicits a big smile or even a hug and an invitation to tea.
The one aspect of the marketplace that we found irksome was that everyone we asked for directions mutated right under our sights into a paid tourist guide insisting to show us the best place in town which was, of course, not the one we had asked directions for, and then demanded remuneration for his services.
Zoo
Laqlaq, Arabic for stork, is a more interesting sounding word. It imitates the sound made by the bird and is pronounced with the guttural ‘q’ that few other than Arabs and storks can make. Laiali, my granddaughter, couldn’t stop repeating the word. As behooves a toddler, she appreciates repetitive sounds. She says her name is Lulu and her sister is Lala and Morocco was full of laqlaqs, and of camels, of course.
Lulu has never seen a warwar, bee-eater, another more colorful migratory bird that is called by the sound it makes. It used to cross the skies of my childhood in Galilee in flocks that would cover the whole sky with bright green. My uncle who was influential enough, or co-opted enough if you wish, to rate a hunting-gun permit from the British administration, would stand on the roof of his house and shoot a few warwars for dinner and we children would compete with his Seljuk dog in retrieving them. We would specially delight in the great flocks of storks that would frequently choose the skies of our village to circle endlessly round and round. Apparently the stream of warm air that rose from a our village provided the uplift the storks needed to take a rest, a brief R&R on their arduous flight from Russia to East Africa or back. The storks were holding a wedding dance, we, the children, believed. And we would join them in our own joyous group dance, the Dabkeh. Alas, it seems a rare occasion that I have seen a stork wedding party over Arrabeh or a flock of warwar in the over fifty years since I reached adulthood. Is it the loss of innocence, I wonder, or the modernizing influence of Israel that has caused our ‘desert to bloom’ and migrating birds to change their course and avoid us?
The French also seek warmer environs and sing, dance, circle and sway when they hit a warm spot. Indeed a veritable noisy flock of them crowded the dance floor at the desert retreat where we stayed and celebrated the New Year. We dined, Rhoda and Seth danced, Malaika danced with her parents and played with her French age-mates, and little Lulu befriended an older French boy and spent the evening dancing, running and shouting with him, both using their toddler babble and sheer energy as a common language. We didn’t know then that the New Year had started that differently for people in Gaza.
All through the trip our grandchildren experienced Morocco as a super petting zoo: camels, horses, mules, donkeys, sheep, goats, monkeys, cats, guinea pigs, parrots, snakes, turtles and even porcupines. And I have pictures to prove it.
No pet pigs or dogs though. Both are considered filthy in Arab and Islamic culture. Dogs are kept mainly outdoors on guard duty or to shepherd the flocks. They don’t reach the level of respectability to associate closely with humans and be petted. Especially in Gaza dogs are currently getting some particularly bad press. They are reported to be eating the corpses of dead children left out to rot. I wonder who is to blame! Soon we will read and hear, I am sure, about the awful parenting practices of Palestinians who leave their dead children for dogs to eat. And Israeli, American, and European experts will delve into analytical discourses and offer socio-cultural and psychological explanations.
Exaggeration! Blood libel! You say.
Wrong! I say. You, your intellectuals, politicians and media moguls, and, dare I say, your born-again fundamentalist Christians, in and out of the White House, have maligned us before, twisting facts to suite your malicious intent. You have dehumanized me and my people to the point that you are unable to pity our dying children. You have demonized me and my people and pictured us as mindless savages without conscience, sub-humans unworthy of your attention. You have made it a virtue, nay, a commandment to kill me.
Enough is enough! It is time you opened your mind and heart and looked me straight in the eye as your equal in humanity and compassion. It is time you knew me for what I am: another human being, pure and simple, one capable of all the hate and malice that you can muster against your enemies, but also of all the love and compassion that you have for your friends. It behooves us both to consider the alternatives. Just don’t look at me through your gun sight; drop the gun from your hand and take your heavy boot off my neck so I can breathe some fresh air and be your friend again. Stop bludgeoning me and pay attention to my own narrative; Say what is on your mind but hear me out too.
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