Youth, vim and vigor all come handy if you happen to find yourself in the islands of Hawaii with extra time on your hands and enough cash to survive on. Time and cash were always at a premium for us before we turned the corner on the vim and vigor requirement for the full savoring of what is always on offer at Waikiki, the bathing and frolicking Mecca of the rich and famous. Compromise is a magic thing and it kicked-in automatically for us as a built-in mechanism, both physical and intellectual.
Arriving in Hawaii this time with the lame excuse of attending a wedding of a second cousin of Didi’s, both of us felt uncomfortable at encroaching on a friend’s or a relative’s privacy by crashing in for more than a couple of nights. We also wanted our own private space. We checked the hotel prices and found them at about half the usual level and settled for one of medium range a walking distance from Ala Moana , the tamest of beaches, socially a family picnic location and physically over a mile’s stretch of sandy shore protected by a wide reef that guarantees the mildest of swimming conditions, second only to a mile-long swimming pool but without the awful chlorine smell. This ideal floating space is contained on the land side by the huge beach park just across the road from Ala Moana Shopping Center, the largest in the world when it was first opened and when as students we could afford only to window-shop in it with the rare coconut ice-cream cone to mitigate the feeling of total estrangement from this plush hangout of international spendthrifts. The park offers no end of cool shade from palm trees in constant hula performance mode to huge monkey pods sheltering the elderly sailors, the tendons of their tattooed biceps frayed to where they play at competing with their remote-control toy sail-boats on the adjacent pond in imitation of the real thing they once did for a living, and the ever expansive banyan trees with swarms of children swaying from their aerial roots.
I never swam or felt comfortable in water before I came to Hawaii as a college junior. On a date at the beach with an East West Center student whose phone line was always busy and the full details of whose features I now forget except for exceptionally succulent lips I learned to float in still seawater. A different girl, an Indian constantly chewing cardamom seeds to freshen her lovely breath, herself unable to swim, would extend her virginal arms under my back and encourage me to splash backward with my arms enough to create a semblance of motion. By the time I befriended Didi I had developed my own back stroke that would keep me afloat even in the moderate waves of Kaneohe bay where her house was.
By now it is what I call ‘my swimming style’ and Didi calls ‘splashing about in the sea’. Whatever you call it, it allows me to move the length of Ala Moana beach and back in less than an hour. And that is exactly what I did every day of our stay in Honolulu on this trip. I wander a bit in the water unable to maintain a straight line while contemplating the landscape on the horizon with Diamond Head’s profile, half-hidden by the row of coconut palms at Magic Island, merging imperceptibly with the green spaces around Waikiki’s high rise hotels. Then the ostentatious glass facade of downtown Honolulu office buildings comes into view from the left while a sea liner, a tugboat or a departing jet crosses my visual field on the right disturbing the otherwise uniformly blue horizon. I float on immersed in dreams of the imagined reality of what it must be like for Gaza’s fishermen now limited to two miles from their coast or for Gazan children with the salt burning their fresh stumps as they enter the Mediterranean the first time after release from hospital.
Dosing off into happier daydreams of past youthful years doesn’t seem to affect my rhythmic backward splashing: four limbs brought together, then forcefully thrust to full extension, then clumped back together and thrown out open again, in again, out again, the repetitive jellyfish-like motion becoming as effortlessly routine as breathing, till the sudden splash of an oar brings me back to present-day Hawaii again with the sight of another paddle-boarder. I focus and see attached to the oar striking the water at my side a muscular arm tattooed with a shark diagonally crossing my field of vision. I look around, adjust my zigzag direction away from the reef, dose off into imagined half reality again, splash away endlessly, and am called back to Hawaii by another athletic figure upright on her board, oar poised in her forward-extended arms ready to split my head if I don’t watch where I am going “boy!” I imbibe the full image as it slides by me: a beautiful dark-skinned wahine with the Hawaiian island chain tattooed on her torso back-to-front, the island of Lanai over the upper spine, then Kauai and Molokai, then Maui and Oahu on the side of her constricted waist and the Big Island around over her bikinied pubis, a heavenly seen to drive away my Gaza nightmare.
Still, as I say, with my semi-random backward splashing I manage to float to and fro from one end of Ala Moana’s magic pool to the other and back again. Exhausted, I lay on my back on the sand and let the Trade Winds cool my torso. As the sun arches across the late afternoon horizon to drop into the Pacific its rays twinkle through my wet eyelids creating the perception of endless concentric rainbows. At midday the effect is too traumatic for enjoyment; the prism-like dispersion of the vertical sunrays by the saltwater drenching my lashes is blinding, the brightest white shower of glowing meteorites across the noon sky, a veritable white phosphorus explosion over Waikiki and Ala Moana. Enough! It is time to escape the tortured memories my guilty conscience keeps conjuring up to murky my reclaimed pleasures of yesteryears.
The tempo of our daily joyful dash to the beach sadly dampened, we walk back the half mile to our hotel, the Equus, in our bathing outfits: no fancy bikinis, no showy tattoos, and no bulging deltoids, biceps or abs for us. And the pursuing images of Gaza to boot. It all adds up to a the equivalent of my usual daily worried village strolls to the post office, the store, the bakery, or a brother’s, a sister’s or a friend’s home back in Arrabeh. It all keeps me preoccupied and fit enough to occasionally forget that I too have some limitations on my physical capacity and endurance. At least that is how it felt when Djon, my Catholic-Chinese-Indonesian ex-college-roommate from Yankton College and UH days and current cardiologist brother in Hilo, and I made the snap decision to go on a two-day hike.
It all started a couple of years back. The last time the two of us hiked the hour-long steep incline into lush Waipio Valley, we spoke about a more serious hike from there on to Waimano Valley where we would stay overnight in its even more lush and wilder environs and then hike back the next day. The climb up the intervening mountain looked hard enough but not quite prohibitive and we promised ourselves to do it ‘the next time’ we are together again on the Big Island. This time around my host in Hilo, a retired Palestinian Soil Science professor who uses his expertise to entice eggplants to grow on volcanic rock and hence has a ragged truck, drove all of us down Waipio Valley for Djon to capture a view of a taro field at its prime with the mountain range and its full-height beautiful waterfall as a backdrop. We failed to locate the right field despite detailed directions from a local beauty whose solitude and daily bath in the stream we disturbed and who mixed her directions with a barrage of complaints about her hash-smoking ex-boyfriend. We drove to the ocean at the mouth of the green valley to take-in the scene from there, the very spot where two years earlier we promised ourselves the dream hike of our lives. One of us brought the subject up, the other felt we had no time this time around and we should put it off till the next time, then one said: “Brother, what if there is no next time?” and we both agreed on the spot to cancel our scheduled appointments the next two days and stared at each other in the hope of one of us flinching but neither did.
As we drove out of the ravine we stopped for some basic information from the park rangers who gave us a schematic map of the hike that they described as "strenuous but not scary for a couple of young guys like you.” At this stage we informed our wives and started thinking about basics: food, water, cameras and sleeping bags. The next morning we were driven to the bottom of Waipio Valley again and we set a time for the same eggplant magician to collect us at the same spot the next afternoon.
The first heroic act was to cross the river that bisects Waipio Valley at its widest point as it enters the ocean, a feat we had to repeat again in Waimano Valley and then twice more on our way back. I wouldn’t be reporting this had I not tripped and fallen right at the start and ruined my camera for good. But Djon was the photographer of this campaign and I had packed our last but one electronic camera for the trip and felt little guilt at the small fortune my clumsiness had cost me.
Landing in LA few days later we stayed at Didi’s late uncle Willy’s family. There I had the time and means to attempt drying my shoes and the thick support padding in them for my flat feet. Karen, a loyal daughter of her mother’s with all the servile attitudes traditional rural Japanese roots assign to the female of the species, took on the forbidding task with washer, dryer and ample supply of Odor Eater brand powder. The only hint of complaint that I heard from her on the smelly topic was when she inquired if I had been on a whaling boat or had stepped in a pile of dead fish. I got the hint and bought a new pair of shoes and a new leather belt for my scheduled lectures in the area.
The day before our pleasure hike the park ranger had pointed out a clump of coconut palms at the far end of the valley as the start of our hiking trail. After crossing barefoot the mile or so of seashore from the opposite end of the valley to the foot of the steep mountain we thought was the only climb there was for us to negotiate, Djon, as the local in our group of two, led the trek. I followed silently up a trail that seemed totally random scurrying between tree trunks and wild forest growth in a diagonal upward general direction, sliding down every few steps about the same distance I had just climbed. After about an hour of this we came to a cleared path, the one the ranger had pointed out to us the previous day from the top of the opposite mountain where we had stood. From there it had looked like a knife’s zigzag slash in the thickly forested face of the mountain. Now we both realized Djon had followed an imagined trail apparently marked by wild boars in their night foraging. That night we related the experience to a Hawaiian hunter camping in Waimano Valley. He asked us to please be on the lookout for one of his four hunting dogs that hadn’t come back. He thought that as lost hikers we have a good chance of straying into the same endless maze of wild boar tracks in which his dog must have been spinning.
As we reached the top of the mountain we met a couple of young hikers on their way back. They reported they had started from our destination six hours before. Still they reassured us that we had cleared the hardest part and the rest of the way was “rather civil.” Still I worried. By now I had discovered a physiologic feature of my Indonesian brother I had forgotten over the years, one that gave his wild boar ramblings meaning: The man sweats like a pig. Despite all the frequent drinking he looked like a welted weed. I started worrying that I may need to carry him down and I was just contemplating if it wouldn’t be wise to get red of my backpack and forage for food and shelter instead; it felt that heavy. Then I realized that there were four helicopter rescue points along the trail. But we had no means of communication and these were the only people we had met on the trail so far. We rested, drank more water and shared a sandwich. We both felt better and crossed over to the opposite side of the mountain expecting that downward hike to take us to our destination.
Far from it! We crossed a total of twelve gulches, each promising to be the climb into our final destination and turning out to lead us across a stream to start another climb out to the top of the range, then another descent, and so on ad-infinitum, or so it felt to us at the time. Every time we made it to the top we would rest a little and I would size up my reserve stamina and brother Djon’s remaining weight and find he had shrunk proportionately and I could still imagine lugging him instead of my backpack should the need arise. As we rested and while trudging down and up gulches we ‘talked story’ as the Hawaiians would say, covering the range of shared memories: our first exposure to American culture in Yankton, South Dakota; the sweet initial depravity, both emotional and financial, of life as guests on the campus of Yankton Collage and then later at the University of Hawaii; the first bumbling experiments with the new thing they called 'dating'; the rebuffs of first dates and sweet successes later on; the affairs of Indonesia and Palestine/Israel; the welfare of Jagy, our Indian brother who pulled out of the trip to Hawaii the last moment; the revival of Hawaiian culture and the state of affairs of the Hawaiian people; Djon’s medical practice and his far off retirement plans; our lovely wives and children; and no end of medical issues I raised with Djon as the one still actively involved in the practice of its art and science.
But the one item that engaged our attention on this two-day ‘pleasure hike’ was the Hawaiian flora. Since ever we first landed in Hawaii nearly half a century ago Djon took to photographing Hawaiian flowers and he has never stopped. Every time we visit him he combines a dinner party in our honor at his home to which he invites friends and colleagues with a slide show of his latest best shots, the ones his photo journalist advisor on the Mainland rates as worthy of publishing and marks with a red dot for distinction. This time was no exception and the man is still out to capture new species and awesome combinations in the wild despite having spent most of his weekends and vacations island hopping in search of them. He now thinks he has two more years to go before his book on Hawaiian Flowers And Flowering Trees will be published.
The entire trip Djon, dehydrated, welted and incontinent of sweat, never stopped talking about the flowers and trees we saw on the way: native species, indigenous ones, imported ones, aggressive invaders, sturdy bushes, fragrant flowers, showy blooms, etc. etc. He went on spewing no end of details regarding every plant we saw and we did see an endless variety indeed. My main contribution was the discovery of two different species of colorful tree mushrooms with concentric bright rings adorning their glistening upper surface clinging to the rotting tree trunks in the wet entrails of those gulches. Djon thought highly of my discovery though it wouldn’t fit exactly in his target species of flowers and flowering trees. The man had accumulated an encyclopedic range of information about everything that grows on the Islands. If he knows as much about cardiology I would certainly trust him with my heart. He noted the location of those mushrooms and designated half a dozen other floral items for photography on the way back in hope of a more sunny day and an earlier hour when the sunrays would be in the right direction. “Available light is best. No flash light for perfect shots,” he insisted.
Having survived the hike into the valley and roughed it out at the beach campsite, a facility defined only by a series of empty rectangular clearings in the stony ground with assigned numbers and one outhouse, we hiked back out of the valley to the constant drizzle and occasional downpour of a generous semitropical rain. No pictures this time around. But would Djon ever dare to repeat the daunting experience? I volunteered the services of our third brother from college days, Jagy the super hiker who is renowned for carrying twice his weight on his back. He used to brag about the fact that at his Hawaiian hiking club a team member devised a rule that required each hiker to carry enough of the shared provisions to bring the total with his or her bodyweight to the same number of pounds. Fat-Free Jagy, as we used to call him, even survived the Sherpa test of endurance up the Annapurna mountain range in Nepal only two years ago.
“Besides he comes from that part of the world where suffering seems to count for less than ‘our’ own and life is valued less than in ‘our’ Western culture.”
“Hold it a f…ing minute, man! We are Jagy types too.” ‘Jagy type’ is the term Djon has started using of late for Indians in general and now he was extending it to encompass all silent sufferers of the East. “Suffering knows no racial boundaries. Just because you can escape out of the Middle East and not see the daily slaughter of your people you start identifying with the master races! I told you about the Dutch in Indonesia last night as we were falling asleep, you remember? How long did you stay awake anyhow?”
“Till you reached the part about Spaniards and Nutmeg or something like that.” I confessed.
“ What did you do to me, man? That was at the very start of the historical account I thought I was giving you. Don’t tell me I was sharing the story with the wild boars! I heard snoring and I couldn’t tell if it was you or them so I kept on talking. I talked for over an hour and got all the way past the Dutch colonial rule, the two world wars, President Sukarno and Suharto and into the present democratically elected president. And you fell asleep at the start! Damn you! I have to go over it again now.” And he started all over from Spain and Europe’s interest in spices.
On our way in we had noticed the occasional marker specifying the remaining distance to the camp ground. The last was at the top of the range after the last gulch just before the steep descent into Waimano. It showed 0.9 miles remaining. As we swung from one bamboo stalk to the other on the sides of the path to support our dead weight down the steep and sharp zigzags, Djon kept repeating: “This is the longest darn 0.9 miles I ever walked in my life! And I have been to some rough places in my life.” His estimate of “three miles at least” was shared by the only three additional hikers that we saw on the trail, a disappointed fisherman with water and a fishing pole as the only supplies, a woman with a huge dog fitted with a weight-carrying saddle on its back for its own food supply, and a young man who had been camping alone for over a week and who guided us to the water source at the camp, a length of plastic tubing someone stuck at the mid point of the closest waterfall.
Reunited with our wives we both were chided for irresponsible and childish behavior. Djon insisted he has to go back to thosw choice shots he missed this time, especially a combination of three genre of trees, indigenous, pan-pacific and imported, all lined up on the side of the trail near its distant end, just after that 0.9 (= 3) mile sign, with a waterfall the height of the entire 0.9 (=3) mile high mountain cliff at the other side of Waimano Valley for a backdrop. He discussed the matter with Sherry privately and came back all smiles:
“At the right time of year I will rent a canoe from Hilo Harbor, enter Waimanu Valley from the ocean and walk up to that point. It was a short 0.9 miles on the way back, wasn’t it, Brother?”
The sheer pleasure of withstanding the physical challenge is comparable only to another demanding three-day Hawaiian hike I once took into Haleakala, House of the Sun, on the Island of Maui. Permit me please to venture once more into the faint landscape of memories from yesteryears when youth, vim and vigor were such integral part of life that they were taken for granted. Three local boys were drafted into this hiking mission by the fully liberated only Norwegian student on campus. The bold blond woman was the unofficial mascot of every University of Hawaii male-dominated club at the time including the Foreign Student Association of which I was head. Her apparent preference though was for the unofficial circle of Fiji Boys, the group of dark and muscular Polynesian young men who partied nonstop on the grounds of the newly constructed East West Center and who were famed for roasting some of the decorative Koi fish in the pool of the Japanese Garden presented to the center by the emperor of Japan himself. When I found out about the planned hike I enquired if I could join and was encouraged to do so by no other than the representative of Norway on the Foreign Student Association herself. Problem was that my financial means were such that I foraged daily for lunch in the wild guavas forest on Tantalus Heights. A casual survey of the financial situation of other members of the Foreign Student Association yielded an immediate solution to my problem; one had enough cash and offered an interest-free loan. Off we flew to Maui where the family of one of the local participants hosted and provisioned us for the hike.
I do recall that this hike was extremely demanding physically. Yet what surfaces from the depths of my memory regarding the whole thing is the more demanding emotional strain the presence of a tall blond with four single men all vying for her attention must have put on the interpersonal relationship between us. I do not recall contemplating the act of pushing all the other three male companions off the edge of the many cliffs we negotiated on the hike, but I would not be surprised now if such evil thoughts had crossed my mind. Be that as it may, I did wind up being favored with sharing her supply of specialty goat cheese and French wine that she had stashed in her backpack. And yet, that sexuality-laced memory does not outdo the present pleasure of Djon’s welted fraternal company.
Back in Hilo we had three more days to spend with the Tamimis, our Palestinian volcano rock farmers. One afternoon we went and helped with harvesting the eggplants growing on the lava. The magic achievement the man blames on his scientific knowhow is less of a miracle when one contemplates the linguistic derivation of the Arabic name for this vegetable. ‘Bathenjan’, probably the source for the French aubergines, is a slight corruption of ‘beith el-jan’, Arabic for eggs of the genie. In colloquial Arabic it could also mean the balls of the genie. And genies are magical creatures that can grow anywhere. What more appropriate medium for any part of the genie to flourish with great exuberance than in the environs of Madam Pele, the Hawaiian goddess of the volcano.
Speaking of goddesses, Didi and our hostess, Siham Tamimi hit it off from the start. Yusuf, better addressed in the Palestinian common style between friends as Abu-Nimr, is a friend from college days. I knew him more as a mentor who passed his rented University Avenue apartment down to us three misfits in Hawaii back in the days when we all were single and when the code word before turning the key to open the door was: “Are you two decent in there, brother?”
By now Abu- and Um-Nimr are a part of the stable Hilo Kamaaina (old-timer) community. They toured the island with us stopping at sights we have never visited before including ranches and agricultural nooks where Yusuf once offered his expert advise to farmers and ranchers. We also did such compulsory spins as a visit to Mauna Kea observatory and its snow-covered mountainside. We did not bring skis; only the deranged can contemplate a ski vacation in Hawaii.
If the usage of Abu- and Um-Nimr for Yusuf and Siham sounds strange to your ears, then let me explain: ‘Abu’ is ‘father of’ and ‘Um’ is ‘mother of’ and each comes before the name of their first born son, actual or imagined. All Palestinian adult males are Abu- one thing or the other to their friends even when they have no children. I was known as Abu-Ty long before my son was born and even before I was married. Certain combinations of names go together; to Arabic speakers ‘Hatim’ and ‘Ty’ go well together because of a legendary figure in Arabic literature named Hatim Ty. Another ploy for inventing a name for one’s unborn male child is to use one’s father’s name for it. In this manner a set combination of two first names is often used in a repetitive manner such as Ali’s first-born son is Husain and Husain’s first-born son is Ali, and so on ad infinitum. All of this without me delving into the equally confusing custom of using the same ‘Abu’ as a nickname to imply fondness of a certain item, be it food, drink or otherwise. So you may well call your child Abu- or Um-Chocolata. My own grandfather was known throughout Galilee as Abu-Shelfi because of his fondness of his rough-hewn sword, shelfi meaning a length of iron. And Abu-this or that is the nom de guerre that all Palestinian fighters adopt. This Arabic tradition once exasperated Menahem Begin, the Stern Gang head terrorist turned Prime Minister of Israel, to such degree that he was heard cursing all Abus.
As we left Honolulu on to Hilo I mentioned the name of our host there. A friend who follows Palestinian issues had heard the same family name that day as the name of the Sheikh who spoke frankly in a meeting with the Pope in Jerusalem about Gaza and the war crimes of Israeli leaders. She wondered if the two Tamimis were related. When we arrived I asked Yusuf. He was pleased to acquaint another fellow Palestinian with the proud legacy of his blood line. Indeed, he and Sheikh Tayseer Tamimi were scions of the same famed ancestor, Tamim El-Aref of El-Khalil (Hebron), the recognized founder of the line now numbering in the tens of thousands in Palestine. (Yusuf did not elaborate on the number of Tamimis in the Diaspora but Hilo has a good start with a fully cohesive clan of half a dozen.) The line goes back some fourteen centuries to this legendary founder of the clan who was a contemporary of the prophet Mohammad, peace be upon him. Though he lived in El-Khalil he had ample opportunity to gain the honor of personal contact with the prophet himself. El-Khalil is known throughout the region for its excellent grapes and our man was a wine merchant. During the annual Pan-Arab trade and worship celebratory season in Mecca Tamim would arrive to the shores of the Arabian Peninsula with a ship load of his select wines to sell. This went on even in the early years of Islam before its total ban on all alcoholic drinks. Sayyidna Gibril, the angle who transmitted the chapters of the holy Koran piecemeal to the prophet who would recite them to the Muslims by way of a special team of contemporaries who in turn would memorize or record them using the period’s primitive print technology of engraving on bone or palm fronds, must have leaked a hint of what was to come to this wine trader. Tamim up and ripped open every goatskin and cracked open every ceramic jar of wine his ship was carrying before arriving to hear the new Islamic edict banning the precious stuff in any shape or form. And that is how it came to pass that the prophet nicknamed him El-Arif, the knowledgeable.
In Anaheim, California I spoke at Al-Awda (The Palestine Right to Return Coalition) Seventh International Convention. This brought about another throwback to the old days. In high school I often did my home work with Faiz Khouri, a classmate whose parents always doted over us and spoke words of encouragement and praise of our seriousness and future potential. They were refugees from Maa’lul, a Palestinian village outside of Nazareth that was totally erased from the face of the earth with the creation of Israel. It shares the same name with a village in Northern Syria, the only modern-day community that still speaks Aramaic, the Language spoken by Jesus and his disciples. Their nine-member family lived in a small rented house and survived on the very limited income of the mother who did janitorial work at the military governor’s office in the ‘Mascobeyeh’, the old Muscovite compound that became the seat of government com jail and torture quarters in Nazareth, just as the parallel compound still does in East Jerusalem today. But Faiz faired infinitely better than I and my two student brothers did in our single rented room in the same neighborhood, Jabal Dar Farah, known for its mix of rich men and drunks. Obviously I welcomed the attention and pampering that Um- and Abu-Faiz bestowed on me in the hope that my company would help focus their son’s attention on his studies. Some very good-looking girls lived in the neighborhood.
There was a slew of children all around us in the warm home of Abu- and Um-Faiz. The family of Faiz’s paternal uncle who was married to the maternal aunt, Um-Faiz’s sister, and shared the same small house also had a number of children. One of this crowd was Fawwaz. Most of the brood, Faiz ,who has since died, included, eventually emigrated to the USA and settled in California. Fawwas is currently active with al-Awda and recognized my name on the speakers’ list for their seventh convention. He called a friend in Nazareth who called one of the half dozen Hatim Kanaanehs listed in the phone book under Arrabeh. This turned out to be my nephew who gave him my daughter’s phone number in New York. Rhoda gave him my mobile number and he reached me in Hawaii. At every link in this human chain he had to explain who he was and justify his motive for wanting to reach me. At the conference we hung around, reminisced and tried to catch up with exactly half a century’s worth of our two lives.
Fawwas had introduced his wife to us. Didi commented to me that they must be newly weds for they were too lovey-dovey. At the banquet we sat at the same table and Fawwaz explained: This is his second wife. The first was a devout Catholic. When their first-born son converted to Islam, the unexpected event reeked havoc in their marital relations ending in a divorce. Fawwaz then met Diane on the internet. She was a Moslem single woman, the daughter of refugees from Nablus, the home town of Yusuf Tamimi. She grew up in Beirut to where Fawwaz made a pilgrimage a couple of months ago, met her in person, met the family, got married and brought the petit pretty young woman back to California. ‘Tiko’ as we say back home; he has evened the score: one-one.
We then dropped in at Adel’s for two nights. Adel’s story is another tale that evokes a myriad of memories. In high school he was the youngest among my Nazarene friends. I was on good relations with everyone then and circled in two mutually exclusive ‘gangs’, one of village boys and the other of the city. Three out of the four in my circle of village boys have since risen to respectable positions in the Israeli educational system and settled with their families and Mercedes cars in the city while three out of the gang of four Nazareth boys that I called close friends emigrated to North America where they have established themselves and built families. I was the odd man out; I experienced the American dream to abandon it and return to my village.
Adel’s Nazarene city credentials were questionable. His family moved there during his childhood when his father, a Catholic village priest of limited financial means, was assigned to serve the small Malkite community in Nazareth. In fact the church in which he held mass was the one in the old market of Nazareth. It is on the ‘must visit’ list of every tourist and pilgrim that makes it to Nazareth because it is reputed to be the site of the synagogue where Jesus delivered a sermon. On Christmas and Easter I often would attend mass for the company and atmosphere and for the smile of acknowledgement that Abuna Basilius Bawardi would beam at us. Later on after I returned to Galilee as a physician I would occasionally venture with Didi and our two children to the same church on Sunday and now receive full acknowledgment before mass and then accompany Abuna Bawardi home for lunch. On such occasion, and only after the feast that Um-Hanna would have prepared, I would check on their health, hear their physical complaints, review their medications and provide medical advice in exchange for a hefty dose of prayers for my and my family’s good health and long life.
While at the University of Hawaii I became familiar with another smaller campus, that of Chaminade College. When I discovered that it was a Catholic institution a spark flashed across every synapse in my nervous system. It said : “Adel!” I proceeded to enquire and made an appointment. When I mentioned that my friend is not only a Catholic from Nazareth but that his father was a priest, I got some quizzical and even down-right dirty looks. I had to explain to a couple of Catholic monks that to the best of my Islamic upbringing there was nothing wrong with all of this and that in the Eastern rite of the Catholic Church lower-rank priests can be married men.
This awkward first contact must have endeared me to one of the officials at the admissions office, the late brother Honnort who kept in touch and would occasionally report to me the progress of his hobby, boat building. At one point he had to undo a couple of year’s worth of work because the boat he built in the basement was too large for the door. Brother Honnort took it upon himself to facilitate Adel’s application for admission and for financial aid. It actually all worked itself out and Adel arrived in Hawaii on the very day I left to medical school. Two years later, when Didi and I got married, he was my best man. At the reception at Wo Fats in Chinatown, like me, he embarrassed himself by ducking under the table when the traditional Chinese good luck fireworks started.
At Chaminade Adel met a Hawaiian beauty, the real Hawaiian type and not the half-Chinese half-American like my wife. They fell in love, got married, savored the best Hawaii can offer, went horseback riding, sang together at parties, traveled, had a child and divorced. Then Adel hunkered down to the task of single-parenting his beautiful Arab-Hawaiian-Portuguese child. A while later I enticed him to make a trip to California to meet a young woman from back home, the good hostess whose hospitality we have been enjoying every so often ever since. Adel’s two children from this second marriage are grown up and brag a lot about the surfing skills and body build of their Hawaiian brother.
Adel and I reminisced about shared memories, called another expatriate Nazarene ,now in Vancouver, gloated about our achievements and drank to the future of our children. The Louvre and Waikiki might be dazzling spots for the glamorous tourist. But nothing is as glamorous or satisfying as lugging a grandchild on one’s neck and heading to the park, as Didi and I will be dong momentarily.
Sunday, June 14, 2009
The Hawaii-Palestine Connection Revisited
By now you may have correctly surmised that I am already an old hand at enjoying Hawaii and getting some additional side chore achieved while at it, such as getting a college education or starting a family. But whoever heard of five speaking engagements and TV appearances in the space of two weeks while in the Islands for a wedding! And, believe me, the balance was heavily tipped in favor of the pleasure component of our sojourn. In addition to adventures recounted elsewhere we were hosted in the homes of generous island friends in the best of Palestinian and Hawaiian style, we made new friends both young and old, and we dined out with more friends than the number of days in our two-week stay.
After leaving Hawaii the spirit of Aloha continued to accompany us as we stopped to visit the family of Didi's late uncle, then to visit a dear friend from high school who had arrived to California via Hawaii, and lastly the Hawaiian-born son of my friend Jagy.
In Anaheim I spoke at the seventh Al-Awda (Right of Return) international convention twice, once at the plenary session and again at the banquet. The first was attended by a couple of hundred committed members, journalists, inquisitive outsiders and newcomers to Palestiniana. There was ample evidence that even old-timers were not that familiar with the issues of the Palestinian citizens of Israel making up nearly 20% of the its total population. So the Q&A period was very intense and challenging for me. At the banquet it was more of a formal short speech and no chance for interactive dialogue with the much larger audience of members, guests and contributors. Also I was overshadowed by the second speaker, British MP George Galloway, who is campaigning for the Viva Palestina USA Convoy scheduled for July 4th. He is a superb and delightful speaker who is committed and knowledgeable beyond belief. The third speaker, Ramzi Clark, apologized the last minute because of an unexpected family demand on his time.
Altogether, my most demanding speaking engagement was at Cal Tech where, thanks to the efforts of Jai Shanata, Jagy's son who is the chair of the Cal Tech Graduate Student Association, I spoke to a mixed group of over 50 graduate students and some faculty. It was challenging but just short of controversial. Most of the audience were truly neutral in attitude but obviously misinformed as most Americans who draw their knowledge on my subject matter from the mainstream American media usually are. Some were rather hostile but sufficiently collegiate and intellectual in their demeanor to make it all more interesting than frustrating. I came away with the sense that word of mouth is a major channel for accessing the privileged group of college students , the leadership of tomorrow's America, and that Cal Tech is an excellent entry point.
One of my speaking engagements in Hawaii was at Revolution Books where Carolyn, the manager of the bookstore, had arranged a reading and book-signing event for me. As I stopped to thank her I mentioned that the book she had recommended to me last year proved to be a revelation and asked her for an encore. Without hesitation she handed me the revised edition of ‘Nation Within: The History of the American Occupation of Hawaii’ by Tom Coffman. I read it as I made my way east to New York where I write now about my impressions of its contents.
Needless to say, colonialism in modern times the world over was an unjust, racist, and self-serving evil invention of Western civilization. European empire-builders initiated the movement and spread it across the globe. The American Revolution initiated the ebb of its overwhelming flood and for that the USA has never stopped being the inspiration of all the downtrodden and subjugated peoples of the world. Yet, sad to say, by the end of the nineteenth century, the same USA raised the banner of colonialism and commenced to occupy other nations, from Cuba to the Philippines with Hawaii in between as an aside, thanks to the aggressive and warmongering personality of such leaders as President Theodore Roosevelt.
I am not a historian by a long shot and wouldn’t have dared to venture into such uncertain grounds or delve into a one-paragraph summary of the history of modern colonialism were it not for the urge to come to a quick indictment of the USA as the major guilty party, albeit indirectly at first, in the colonial crimes committed against both the Hawaiian and the Palestinian peoples. Yet this last generalization conceals more than a reasonable amount of contradiction and dissimilarity.
Bear with me please and I will try to elucidate the unfathomable depths of this conundrum. I know from experience how frustrating it is to try making sense of this most unlikely simile to neutral outsiders. Yet the unity of the suffering of the Hawaiians and the Palestinians is simpler than it first appears and the principle underlying it has the potential of applicability to all colonized peoples: Land-theft, the dispossession of a native population of its land, is the death blow that all colonial powers deal to their subject nations when the goal is permanent occupation. This is true regardless of how benevolent the occupier, how developed the occupied, or where and when the crime is committed.
I had no problem communicating this to two Hawaiians with whom I shared the podium on Olelo, the Hawaiian public access TV program, while in Honolulu. One was a Hawaiian colleague, a young fellow Public Health Specialist whose insight was clearly more professionally focused as he still practices medicine, and a Hawaiian moderator who turned out to be an elementary school classmate of my wife’s. Didi was surprised that she immediately shouted the wahine’s name, “Lynette Machado!” (she is now Cruz), after some fifty-years’ absence. The moment I mentioned the historic un-justice done my people by a colonial system that dislodged them off the land I was assured that in essence I was talking about the plight of the Hawaiians. Obvious differences are there in terms of the timeframe, the identity of the offenders, and the extent of the offence, the ethnic cleansing, the genocide, and the marginalization of survivors. Yet the experience is highly comparable.
It is striking to compare notes, which we found ourselves doing, regarding the modus operandi of the colonialists in our two examples: A small minority (less than 2% in the case of Hawaii and >5% in Palestine) aggressively claims mastery of the land through violent means and reliance on the support of far-away powerful sympathizers who have vested geopolitical interests in the project; religion is enlisted as the fundamental tool for anchoring the claim to and control of the land and for dismissing the rightful owners as sinful objectors to God’s will as obvious in His “manifest destiny” in the one case and in “the promised land” in the other; military and economic schemes lurk behind the religious façade in the minds of distant powerbrokers, Pearl Harbor and sugarcane in Hawaii and oil in the Middle East; facts are falsified and altered to suit the narrative of the colonialists, witness such declarations as “a land without citizens” for Hawaii and “a land without people” for Palestine: contrary historic accounts are willfully eliminated, facts contorted with ample use of ambiguity, duplicity and doublespeak, the spin-doctoring art of yesteryears, to promulgate a false but jingoistic conventional wisdom; and finally, appropriating the moral high-ground and justifying genocide by benevolent intent credited to the colonization crime as in civilizing the savages for one case and in making the other’s desert bloom, two clear examples of the discredited edict of Social Darwinism.
Let me try here to steer clear of some landmines in this historical terrain: The first missionaries to the Hawaiian people, like missionaries everywhere, can be accused of narrow-minded conceit in their assumption of sole ownership of the truth. But it is unlikely that they had designs on the lands of the natives. A generation later their selfless intentions were turned around by their immediate descendents who became the founders of the biggest five capitalist concerns in the islands, The Big Five. The original religious purity of intent quickly evaporated to the disadvantage of those that were “saved”.
In Palestine too, the motive of the original “missions to the Jews” or the Christian Zionists of old in Europe and of their current heirs, the “born again Evangelists” in the USA, may have started with a fanciful prophecy that bore more ill will towards the Jews than the Palestinians. But with the hypnotic magic of their quest to hasten the return of their awaited Savior to earth, and clearly with the undercurrent of an anti-Semitic wish to cleanse their communities of Jews, they took on the role of promoting the Zionist project of colonizing Palestine, willfully trampling on the rights of the native Palestinians in the process. Despite the difference in the two cases, both in Hawaii and in Palestine the faith of an intruding foreign group played havoc with the fate of the native peoples. (I may have just stepped on a landmine! Had I written this six months ago when an Evangelist still lived in the White House I would know for certain I did. Since I have been already ‘amputated’ from any religious affiliation, not much can be done.)
It is equally instructive to consider the weapons of the weak in the two cases: Across the entire native terrain around the globe, resistance is embodied by the stone-throwing Palestinian child. The image of the Palestinian preteen, arm fully stretched above his head with fist clutching an oversized stone and slight torso emphatically magnified by the towering gun barrel of a monstrous Israeli tank pointing at him, the ultimate parody on the reversal of roles in the biblical ‘David and Goliath’ simile, has come to symbolize the natives’ cry of “we shall overcome!”
An account survives of the very same stone-throwing intifada by Hawaiians with the participation of no less central a personage than the young prince Kalakaua to repulse the first attempted take-over by the British.
More to the heart of the matter in this comparison is the centrality of land to the dispossessed natives: All nationalist Hawaiian declarations spoke of the “life of the land.” The Hawaiian activist groups, that sprung up in resistance to the imposed annexation by the American oligarchy had names connecting them to the land. Each was called a ‘Hui’, Hawaiian for a gathering or a group; one was Hui Kalaiaina, or “gathering of those who shared the land” approximated in English to “Hawaiian Political Association”, and the other Hui Aloha Aina, literally “the group that loves the land” translated into “Hawaiian Patriotic League.” And there was a “Women’s Patriotic League” as well.
In Palestine too, land is at the heart of the experience of dispossession. The iconic image of the old farmer woman holding on for life to the trunk of her olive tree in the face of the menacing armored caterpillar inspires natives and the just the world over. Six decades after their forced departure, third generation refugee children in camps across the Middle East still give their locale as that of the village in Palestine from which their grandparents were driven. Elders or their decedents still hold on to house keys as the emblem of their lost land and home to which they still dream of returning.
And for those Palestinians lucky enough to have remained on their land, mostly by accident, the loss of large swaths of it led in 1976 to a mini-revolt commemorated ever since as “Land Day.” Land loss for them is second only to the threat of losing their identity and dignity as they are subjected to demands on them to swear an oath of loyalty to their oppressors. That was what the Hawaiians were subjected to a little over a century earlier.
After leaving Hawaii the spirit of Aloha continued to accompany us as we stopped to visit the family of Didi's late uncle, then to visit a dear friend from high school who had arrived to California via Hawaii, and lastly the Hawaiian-born son of my friend Jagy.
In Anaheim I spoke at the seventh Al-Awda (Right of Return) international convention twice, once at the plenary session and again at the banquet. The first was attended by a couple of hundred committed members, journalists, inquisitive outsiders and newcomers to Palestiniana. There was ample evidence that even old-timers were not that familiar with the issues of the Palestinian citizens of Israel making up nearly 20% of the its total population. So the Q&A period was very intense and challenging for me. At the banquet it was more of a formal short speech and no chance for interactive dialogue with the much larger audience of members, guests and contributors. Also I was overshadowed by the second speaker, British MP George Galloway, who is campaigning for the Viva Palestina USA Convoy scheduled for July 4th. He is a superb and delightful speaker who is committed and knowledgeable beyond belief. The third speaker, Ramzi Clark, apologized the last minute because of an unexpected family demand on his time.
Altogether, my most demanding speaking engagement was at Cal Tech where, thanks to the efforts of Jai Shanata, Jagy's son who is the chair of the Cal Tech Graduate Student Association, I spoke to a mixed group of over 50 graduate students and some faculty. It was challenging but just short of controversial. Most of the audience were truly neutral in attitude but obviously misinformed as most Americans who draw their knowledge on my subject matter from the mainstream American media usually are. Some were rather hostile but sufficiently collegiate and intellectual in their demeanor to make it all more interesting than frustrating. I came away with the sense that word of mouth is a major channel for accessing the privileged group of college students , the leadership of tomorrow's America, and that Cal Tech is an excellent entry point.
One of my speaking engagements in Hawaii was at Revolution Books where Carolyn, the manager of the bookstore, had arranged a reading and book-signing event for me. As I stopped to thank her I mentioned that the book she had recommended to me last year proved to be a revelation and asked her for an encore. Without hesitation she handed me the revised edition of ‘Nation Within: The History of the American Occupation of Hawaii’ by Tom Coffman. I read it as I made my way east to New York where I write now about my impressions of its contents.
Needless to say, colonialism in modern times the world over was an unjust, racist, and self-serving evil invention of Western civilization. European empire-builders initiated the movement and spread it across the globe. The American Revolution initiated the ebb of its overwhelming flood and for that the USA has never stopped being the inspiration of all the downtrodden and subjugated peoples of the world. Yet, sad to say, by the end of the nineteenth century, the same USA raised the banner of colonialism and commenced to occupy other nations, from Cuba to the Philippines with Hawaii in between as an aside, thanks to the aggressive and warmongering personality of such leaders as President Theodore Roosevelt.
I am not a historian by a long shot and wouldn’t have dared to venture into such uncertain grounds or delve into a one-paragraph summary of the history of modern colonialism were it not for the urge to come to a quick indictment of the USA as the major guilty party, albeit indirectly at first, in the colonial crimes committed against both the Hawaiian and the Palestinian peoples. Yet this last generalization conceals more than a reasonable amount of contradiction and dissimilarity.
Bear with me please and I will try to elucidate the unfathomable depths of this conundrum. I know from experience how frustrating it is to try making sense of this most unlikely simile to neutral outsiders. Yet the unity of the suffering of the Hawaiians and the Palestinians is simpler than it first appears and the principle underlying it has the potential of applicability to all colonized peoples: Land-theft, the dispossession of a native population of its land, is the death blow that all colonial powers deal to their subject nations when the goal is permanent occupation. This is true regardless of how benevolent the occupier, how developed the occupied, or where and when the crime is committed.
I had no problem communicating this to two Hawaiians with whom I shared the podium on Olelo, the Hawaiian public access TV program, while in Honolulu. One was a Hawaiian colleague, a young fellow Public Health Specialist whose insight was clearly more professionally focused as he still practices medicine, and a Hawaiian moderator who turned out to be an elementary school classmate of my wife’s. Didi was surprised that she immediately shouted the wahine’s name, “Lynette Machado!” (she is now Cruz), after some fifty-years’ absence. The moment I mentioned the historic un-justice done my people by a colonial system that dislodged them off the land I was assured that in essence I was talking about the plight of the Hawaiians. Obvious differences are there in terms of the timeframe, the identity of the offenders, and the extent of the offence, the ethnic cleansing, the genocide, and the marginalization of survivors. Yet the experience is highly comparable.
It is striking to compare notes, which we found ourselves doing, regarding the modus operandi of the colonialists in our two examples: A small minority (less than 2% in the case of Hawaii and >5% in Palestine) aggressively claims mastery of the land through violent means and reliance on the support of far-away powerful sympathizers who have vested geopolitical interests in the project; religion is enlisted as the fundamental tool for anchoring the claim to and control of the land and for dismissing the rightful owners as sinful objectors to God’s will as obvious in His “manifest destiny” in the one case and in “the promised land” in the other; military and economic schemes lurk behind the religious façade in the minds of distant powerbrokers, Pearl Harbor and sugarcane in Hawaii and oil in the Middle East; facts are falsified and altered to suit the narrative of the colonialists, witness such declarations as “a land without citizens” for Hawaii and “a land without people” for Palestine: contrary historic accounts are willfully eliminated, facts contorted with ample use of ambiguity, duplicity and doublespeak, the spin-doctoring art of yesteryears, to promulgate a false but jingoistic conventional wisdom; and finally, appropriating the moral high-ground and justifying genocide by benevolent intent credited to the colonization crime as in civilizing the savages for one case and in making the other’s desert bloom, two clear examples of the discredited edict of Social Darwinism.
Let me try here to steer clear of some landmines in this historical terrain: The first missionaries to the Hawaiian people, like missionaries everywhere, can be accused of narrow-minded conceit in their assumption of sole ownership of the truth. But it is unlikely that they had designs on the lands of the natives. A generation later their selfless intentions were turned around by their immediate descendents who became the founders of the biggest five capitalist concerns in the islands, The Big Five. The original religious purity of intent quickly evaporated to the disadvantage of those that were “saved”.
In Palestine too, the motive of the original “missions to the Jews” or the Christian Zionists of old in Europe and of their current heirs, the “born again Evangelists” in the USA, may have started with a fanciful prophecy that bore more ill will towards the Jews than the Palestinians. But with the hypnotic magic of their quest to hasten the return of their awaited Savior to earth, and clearly with the undercurrent of an anti-Semitic wish to cleanse their communities of Jews, they took on the role of promoting the Zionist project of colonizing Palestine, willfully trampling on the rights of the native Palestinians in the process. Despite the difference in the two cases, both in Hawaii and in Palestine the faith of an intruding foreign group played havoc with the fate of the native peoples. (I may have just stepped on a landmine! Had I written this six months ago when an Evangelist still lived in the White House I would know for certain I did. Since I have been already ‘amputated’ from any religious affiliation, not much can be done.)
It is equally instructive to consider the weapons of the weak in the two cases: Across the entire native terrain around the globe, resistance is embodied by the stone-throwing Palestinian child. The image of the Palestinian preteen, arm fully stretched above his head with fist clutching an oversized stone and slight torso emphatically magnified by the towering gun barrel of a monstrous Israeli tank pointing at him, the ultimate parody on the reversal of roles in the biblical ‘David and Goliath’ simile, has come to symbolize the natives’ cry of “we shall overcome!”
An account survives of the very same stone-throwing intifada by Hawaiians with the participation of no less central a personage than the young prince Kalakaua to repulse the first attempted take-over by the British.
More to the heart of the matter in this comparison is the centrality of land to the dispossessed natives: All nationalist Hawaiian declarations spoke of the “life of the land.” The Hawaiian activist groups, that sprung up in resistance to the imposed annexation by the American oligarchy had names connecting them to the land. Each was called a ‘Hui’, Hawaiian for a gathering or a group; one was Hui Kalaiaina, or “gathering of those who shared the land” approximated in English to “Hawaiian Political Association”, and the other Hui Aloha Aina, literally “the group that loves the land” translated into “Hawaiian Patriotic League.” And there was a “Women’s Patriotic League” as well.
In Palestine too, land is at the heart of the experience of dispossession. The iconic image of the old farmer woman holding on for life to the trunk of her olive tree in the face of the menacing armored caterpillar inspires natives and the just the world over. Six decades after their forced departure, third generation refugee children in camps across the Middle East still give their locale as that of the village in Palestine from which their grandparents were driven. Elders or their decedents still hold on to house keys as the emblem of their lost land and home to which they still dream of returning.
And for those Palestinians lucky enough to have remained on their land, mostly by accident, the loss of large swaths of it led in 1976 to a mini-revolt commemorated ever since as “Land Day.” Land loss for them is second only to the threat of losing their identity and dignity as they are subjected to demands on them to swear an oath of loyalty to their oppressors. That was what the Hawaiians were subjected to a little over a century earlier.
Thursday, April 23, 2009
A Comment by a Palestinian Colleague,Dr. Mustafa Bargouthy, About "A Doctor in Galilee"
The following is the transcript of the comments made by my esteemed Palestinian colleague and friend, Dr. Mustafa Bargouthy, on the occasion of the book launch for "A Doctor in Galilee" in Ramallah, November 2008:
It gives me great pleasure to be sharing this evening with Dr. Hatim Kanaaneh, who is a friend, a medical colleague and a comrade in our long common struggle. Before I give my response to many things that I saw in this book I want to express my admiration for it as a work of literature with sensitivity and a great sense of humanity.
One of the most interesting aspects of ‘A Doctor in Galilee’, though it is no where declared in the book itself, is the fete it has achieved. What Hatim has managed to achieve in writing this book is to reflect and preserve the sense of the moment of things that had happened around him by keeping all the tapes he recorded and all the pieces he wrote in real time and then putting them in the book. When you read his book you don’t just read his memory of what has happened but practically you live the same moment as he lived it when he put it on paper and that is something I particularly enjoyed. It shows great sensitivity. It is an interesting documentation not only of the life of a person, a Palestinian human being, but also the life of a village and the life of a community.
Moreover, in the account this person gives of his life in his village and community, there is a representation of the Palestinian narrative as a whole. This is something that we miss a lot and that has to be presented repeatedly in different ways, if no other reason at least to create some balance in the available narrative of what goes on here. So though the book is about Hatim it is also about the Galilee. But by talking about the Galilee Hatim is practically opening a window to the story of Palestine – to the whole of Palestine.
Israel’s policy, and that of the Zionist movement as a whole, has always been to try and divide us. Over time Israeli governments and those who stand behind them, regardless of who they are, have always tried to fragment us. They fragmented us into inside and outside, then diaspora and inside, Jerusalem and West Bank, West Bank and Gaza and now into several parts of the West Bank. But after all these divisions and fragmentations, all the insistence on dividing us, and I do see it very much in the book, amazingly and ironically, they are practically reuniting us. That is because today we all are subjected to the same system of discrimination. The same system of apartheid that exists in Jaffa exists in Ramallah and in every part of Palestine. That racism is practically reuniting Palestinians. That is why when you read what Hatim wrote about the Galilee in the 50s, 60s, and 70s it is no different from what happens today in different parts of the West Bank. It’s the same thing exactly, just a different time –what happened in Jaffa is what is happening today in Jerusalem. And in that sense you read about the Galilee and you see the West Bank. I read about the Galilee Society and I see Medical Relief. It’s the same story and the same process.
And it is not only about Palestine; what attracted me a lot also is something that Hatim describes very well, the amazing contradiction that all of us, health practitioners, encounter. It is that constant struggle between the biomedical and the public health approaches. In a beautiful, direct and humane way, Hatim describes the constant and long struggle between the two tracks. He describes well his own search for the right balance between the preventive approach and the curative approach. He reflects in his book on this and on the irony of the difference between what people really need and what they want. The story about the patient that we find everywhere, who insists on an injection when he or she doesn’t really need it – is an interesting part of that. These all are the same challenges we face also in the work we do here in the West Bank. And the final conclusion one reaches, of course, is that health, as is well known, is not only the absence of disease; good health is a situation where people can have socio-economic, psychological and political conditions that are healthy. That leads him, as it has led us, to the conclusion that you cannot have a healthy society without changing the political reality. And you cannot change the political reality or improve people’s health if you join those who are perpetrating the discrimination. In other words, if you want a change, you don’t join the system of discrimination but you fight against it and you try to create an alternative to it. And that is exactly, I think, what Hatim tried to do.
The third dimension that attracted my attention is the psychological and moral struggle that happens in the life of a person and that Hatim reflected in his book so honestly. Hatim comes from a poor family in a poor community. Yet he became, probably, one of the first public health graduates in Palestine, from one of the best, if not the best, universities in the world. And he comes back “to change the world”, as he says. He then discovers how difficult it is in reality not only to change the world but even to change a little village. In attempting that you encounter the system’s resistance and the traditions, the deeply entrenched history and the old ways and the intransigence of so many people who resist reform and change. And then there is the account of the constant disruption, the constant flight between Arrabeh and Hawaii – going back and forth. It is something the reader is sure to enjoy because it is written in a forthright and honest way reflecting the author’s alternating feelings of hope, optimism, desperation and frustration. Worst of all are the feeling of injustice when harm is done to you not by your enemies but by your closest friends, and that is something that all of us face in life, of course. And I think Hatim tried to explain to us how it is much easier to fight the enemy than to struggle with the people around you who do not understand what you are trying to do. I think there is also an interesting reflection, which I would not go into now, about the relationship of local NGOs and foreign donors and how the latter interfere with the life of the local NGOs in unhelpful and improper ways. Probably this is a subject for others to discuss.
Finally I want to come to another significant point, one of the last points that the author reflects on: the issue of identity crisis and where the person is most effective. Again here we see a lot of going and coming between Hawaii and Arrabeh. And I want to use the words that Hatim wrote which is that in Hawaii you have order, a system of proper medical practice. Still, he says, “when I was there I missed all the empowering confidence and dependency my patients in Arrabeh had on me and I missed my involvement in the life of my community.” He could have stayed in Hawaii and continued to practice medicine but I think his constant coming back to Arrabeh is a reflection of the difference between living to eat or eating to live. I think there is a sense of purpose in the book that Hatim describes very well. And at the end Hatim decisively makes his choices. He suffers but he doesn’t hesitate. He exposes his suffering in a way that does not affect or negate his humanity. But he never goes back. I know that Hatim could have become a big specialist in one of the medical fields and could have collected a lot of money and cars and houses and made a lot of stocks to lose them in the financial crisis today but he preferred to be a Palestinian sticking to that sense of dignity, hard work and commitment. For that I salute him and his wife and companion, Didi Kanaaneh.
It gives me great pleasure to be sharing this evening with Dr. Hatim Kanaaneh, who is a friend, a medical colleague and a comrade in our long common struggle. Before I give my response to many things that I saw in this book I want to express my admiration for it as a work of literature with sensitivity and a great sense of humanity.
One of the most interesting aspects of ‘A Doctor in Galilee’, though it is no where declared in the book itself, is the fete it has achieved. What Hatim has managed to achieve in writing this book is to reflect and preserve the sense of the moment of things that had happened around him by keeping all the tapes he recorded and all the pieces he wrote in real time and then putting them in the book. When you read his book you don’t just read his memory of what has happened but practically you live the same moment as he lived it when he put it on paper and that is something I particularly enjoyed. It shows great sensitivity. It is an interesting documentation not only of the life of a person, a Palestinian human being, but also the life of a village and the life of a community.
Moreover, in the account this person gives of his life in his village and community, there is a representation of the Palestinian narrative as a whole. This is something that we miss a lot and that has to be presented repeatedly in different ways, if no other reason at least to create some balance in the available narrative of what goes on here. So though the book is about Hatim it is also about the Galilee. But by talking about the Galilee Hatim is practically opening a window to the story of Palestine – to the whole of Palestine.
Israel’s policy, and that of the Zionist movement as a whole, has always been to try and divide us. Over time Israeli governments and those who stand behind them, regardless of who they are, have always tried to fragment us. They fragmented us into inside and outside, then diaspora and inside, Jerusalem and West Bank, West Bank and Gaza and now into several parts of the West Bank. But after all these divisions and fragmentations, all the insistence on dividing us, and I do see it very much in the book, amazingly and ironically, they are practically reuniting us. That is because today we all are subjected to the same system of discrimination. The same system of apartheid that exists in Jaffa exists in Ramallah and in every part of Palestine. That racism is practically reuniting Palestinians. That is why when you read what Hatim wrote about the Galilee in the 50s, 60s, and 70s it is no different from what happens today in different parts of the West Bank. It’s the same thing exactly, just a different time –what happened in Jaffa is what is happening today in Jerusalem. And in that sense you read about the Galilee and you see the West Bank. I read about the Galilee Society and I see Medical Relief. It’s the same story and the same process.
And it is not only about Palestine; what attracted me a lot also is something that Hatim describes very well, the amazing contradiction that all of us, health practitioners, encounter. It is that constant struggle between the biomedical and the public health approaches. In a beautiful, direct and humane way, Hatim describes the constant and long struggle between the two tracks. He describes well his own search for the right balance between the preventive approach and the curative approach. He reflects in his book on this and on the irony of the difference between what people really need and what they want. The story about the patient that we find everywhere, who insists on an injection when he or she doesn’t really need it – is an interesting part of that. These all are the same challenges we face also in the work we do here in the West Bank. And the final conclusion one reaches, of course, is that health, as is well known, is not only the absence of disease; good health is a situation where people can have socio-economic, psychological and political conditions that are healthy. That leads him, as it has led us, to the conclusion that you cannot have a healthy society without changing the political reality. And you cannot change the political reality or improve people’s health if you join those who are perpetrating the discrimination. In other words, if you want a change, you don’t join the system of discrimination but you fight against it and you try to create an alternative to it. And that is exactly, I think, what Hatim tried to do.
The third dimension that attracted my attention is the psychological and moral struggle that happens in the life of a person and that Hatim reflected in his book so honestly. Hatim comes from a poor family in a poor community. Yet he became, probably, one of the first public health graduates in Palestine, from one of the best, if not the best, universities in the world. And he comes back “to change the world”, as he says. He then discovers how difficult it is in reality not only to change the world but even to change a little village. In attempting that you encounter the system’s resistance and the traditions, the deeply entrenched history and the old ways and the intransigence of so many people who resist reform and change. And then there is the account of the constant disruption, the constant flight between Arrabeh and Hawaii – going back and forth. It is something the reader is sure to enjoy because it is written in a forthright and honest way reflecting the author’s alternating feelings of hope, optimism, desperation and frustration. Worst of all are the feeling of injustice when harm is done to you not by your enemies but by your closest friends, and that is something that all of us face in life, of course. And I think Hatim tried to explain to us how it is much easier to fight the enemy than to struggle with the people around you who do not understand what you are trying to do. I think there is also an interesting reflection, which I would not go into now, about the relationship of local NGOs and foreign donors and how the latter interfere with the life of the local NGOs in unhelpful and improper ways. Probably this is a subject for others to discuss.
Finally I want to come to another significant point, one of the last points that the author reflects on: the issue of identity crisis and where the person is most effective. Again here we see a lot of going and coming between Hawaii and Arrabeh. And I want to use the words that Hatim wrote which is that in Hawaii you have order, a system of proper medical practice. Still, he says, “when I was there I missed all the empowering confidence and dependency my patients in Arrabeh had on me and I missed my involvement in the life of my community.” He could have stayed in Hawaii and continued to practice medicine but I think his constant coming back to Arrabeh is a reflection of the difference between living to eat or eating to live. I think there is a sense of purpose in the book that Hatim describes very well. And at the end Hatim decisively makes his choices. He suffers but he doesn’t hesitate. He exposes his suffering in a way that does not affect or negate his humanity. But he never goes back. I know that Hatim could have become a big specialist in one of the medical fields and could have collected a lot of money and cars and houses and made a lot of stocks to lose them in the financial crisis today but he preferred to be a Palestinian sticking to that sense of dignity, hard work and commitment. For that I salute him and his wife and companion, Didi Kanaaneh.
An Open Letter to President Barak Obama
April, 6, 2009
Dear President Obama,
In approaching the task of addressing you directly about a personal issue, I feel daunted by the abyss that separates the two of us in status and power. I am a retired public health physician, attempting to maintain a hold on his sanity and physical health by puttering around his garden in a Palestinian village in Galilee. You are the president of the nation most of humanity envies and desires to join, burdened with the task of saving the world from economic and political chaos and now from nuclear war.
Yet I find enough shared experiences between us to embolden me to speak to you as an equal in humanity if in no other regard. Like you, I am a product of Hawaii, where I attended university at the time your late parents did, and of Harvard, where we both received our professional training. I subsequently returned to my village and worked among my people to treat their illnesses and improve their wellbeing physically, mentally and socially with varying degrees of success and frustration. Unlike you, I came up fast against the glass ceiling set very low for Palestinian citizens of Israel like me. I have written a book of memoirs (see last below) that documents my professional struggle over three and a half decades. It would be a great honor for me if you were to read it as part of your education on the issues of my community and of our potential as a bridge for peace in the Middle East.
Now to the subject of my message, Mr. President: The newly-elected prime minister of Israel, Mr. Benjamin Netanyahu, and his foreign minister, Mr. Avigdor Lieberman, plan evict me from my home and to take away my garden. These two persons and their fellow ministers were democratically elected to their positions and will use ‘democratic’ means at their disposal to legitimize my disenfranchisement as have previous Israeli governments done in the past. The difference is that the current leaders are explicit and aggressive about disadvantaging me based on my ethnicity. They have devised a way to blame me for my victimhood. They intend to ask me to sign an oath of allegiance to Israel as a Jewish state, a state that defines itself as exclusive of me and my people.
Democracy, Mr. President, may be the best political system, but, alas, it is no guarantee of justice and equality when it is abused to give unrestricted power to an exclusivist majority. My community, citizens of Israel since its establishment, makes up a fifth of the country’s population but owns a constantly shrinking share of the land that currently stands at 3% of the total. Our towns and villages receive 3-5% of municipal budgetary allocations. Our infants and children die at over twice the level of our Jewish co-citizens -- and the relative ratio is rising of late. Our two communities continue to live in racially segregated residential areas often separated by walls and barbwire. Mr. President, I am not writing of the West Bank or Gaza but of neighborhoods in ‘mixed cities’ within the Green line.
You are the lead protector and promoter of true democracy in the world. As such, I call on you, Mr. President, to stand up to such corrupting practices presented to the world under the guise of sound democratic principles.
And as a fellow human being, I ask you, Mr. President, to put yourself momentarily in my position and consider how I should react to the racially-based transfer designs of these politicians. Here, in the person of Avigdor Lieberman, is another presumably equal co-citizen of Israel who calls openly for my disqualification from our shared citizenship because I want to be equal to him under the laws of our common country. He insists on having me step down from our presumed common stand of equality and kowtow openly to his privileged status as the son of a certain race and religion. Would you do that, Mr. President, were it to be demanded from you by a fellow American citizen, be he Anglo-Saxon, Hispanic or Asian immigrant, or even a Native American?
As an alternative, Mr. Lieberman wants me transferred out of the country though I have lived on land I inherited legally from forefathers who almost surely have better claim to descent from the ancient Hebrews than his. And mind you, Mr. President, my residence in the home he wants me evicted from predates the establishment of the state he wants to appropriate as his, and his alone, while he is a recent immigrant from Moldova. Would you, Mr. President, take a loyalty oath confirming your second-class status?
Mr. Lieberman’s best-case scenario for tolerating my existence in his vicinity is to have the homes of the likes of me re-zoned into one of the Bantustans he envisions, to be created and run by remote control from behind an ethnic separation wall. Would you succumb gracefully, without protest, to such a scheme, Mr. President?
You have to understand, sir, that I speak here of life-and-death issues for me and my family. Mr. Lieberman, Israel’s Foreign Minister, attained his impressive status through an openly racist election campaign that featured mass rallies at which calls of “Death to Arabs” were standard. Would you trust such a man with your future in the international arena, Mr. President? I surely hope not: but the majority of Israeli citizens seem to have done exactly that.
That is where I sense danger, sir; in the assigning of my fellow countrymen of responsibility for our common future to fascist and untrustworthy representatives. Past injustices, and those were many and massive against my people, were never so clearly foretold as the ones the current Israeli government threatens to perpetrate against me, my family, my village and my people. It is with this clearly articulated plan of my transfer in mind that I call on you to use the undeniable prestige of your office to stop such plans from being implemented. I ask you, sir, to reassure me that you will never permit such schemes to be on any agenda discussed in the presence of representatives of the United States of America. I need that in order to be able to sleep, Mr. President.
With my best wishes for a peaceful and happy Easter for you and your family and for all of humanity, I remain,
Sincerely,
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: Because of the limitation on postings n the White House website this letter was abridged by about 20%. HK
Dear President Obama,
In approaching the task of addressing you directly about a personal issue, I feel daunted by the abyss that separates the two of us in status and power. I am a retired public health physician, attempting to maintain a hold on his sanity and physical health by puttering around his garden in a Palestinian village in Galilee. You are the president of the nation most of humanity envies and desires to join, burdened with the task of saving the world from economic and political chaos and now from nuclear war.
Yet I find enough shared experiences between us to embolden me to speak to you as an equal in humanity if in no other regard. Like you, I am a product of Hawaii, where I attended university at the time your late parents did, and of Harvard, where we both received our professional training. I subsequently returned to my village and worked among my people to treat their illnesses and improve their wellbeing physically, mentally and socially with varying degrees of success and frustration. Unlike you, I came up fast against the glass ceiling set very low for Palestinian citizens of Israel like me. I have written a book of memoirs (see last below) that documents my professional struggle over three and a half decades. It would be a great honor for me if you were to read it as part of your education on the issues of my community and of our potential as a bridge for peace in the Middle East.
Now to the subject of my message, Mr. President: The newly-elected prime minister of Israel, Mr. Benjamin Netanyahu, and his foreign minister, Mr. Avigdor Lieberman, plan evict me from my home and to take away my garden. These two persons and their fellow ministers were democratically elected to their positions and will use ‘democratic’ means at their disposal to legitimize my disenfranchisement as have previous Israeli governments done in the past. The difference is that the current leaders are explicit and aggressive about disadvantaging me based on my ethnicity. They have devised a way to blame me for my victimhood. They intend to ask me to sign an oath of allegiance to Israel as a Jewish state, a state that defines itself as exclusive of me and my people.
Democracy, Mr. President, may be the best political system, but, alas, it is no guarantee of justice and equality when it is abused to give unrestricted power to an exclusivist majority. My community, citizens of Israel since its establishment, makes up a fifth of the country’s population but owns a constantly shrinking share of the land that currently stands at 3% of the total. Our towns and villages receive 3-5% of municipal budgetary allocations. Our infants and children die at over twice the level of our Jewish co-citizens -- and the relative ratio is rising of late. Our two communities continue to live in racially segregated residential areas often separated by walls and barbwire. Mr. President, I am not writing of the West Bank or Gaza but of neighborhoods in ‘mixed cities’ within the Green line.
You are the lead protector and promoter of true democracy in the world. As such, I call on you, Mr. President, to stand up to such corrupting practices presented to the world under the guise of sound democratic principles.
And as a fellow human being, I ask you, Mr. President, to put yourself momentarily in my position and consider how I should react to the racially-based transfer designs of these politicians. Here, in the person of Avigdor Lieberman, is another presumably equal co-citizen of Israel who calls openly for my disqualification from our shared citizenship because I want to be equal to him under the laws of our common country. He insists on having me step down from our presumed common stand of equality and kowtow openly to his privileged status as the son of a certain race and religion. Would you do that, Mr. President, were it to be demanded from you by a fellow American citizen, be he Anglo-Saxon, Hispanic or Asian immigrant, or even a Native American?
As an alternative, Mr. Lieberman wants me transferred out of the country though I have lived on land I inherited legally from forefathers who almost surely have better claim to descent from the ancient Hebrews than his. And mind you, Mr. President, my residence in the home he wants me evicted from predates the establishment of the state he wants to appropriate as his, and his alone, while he is a recent immigrant from Moldova. Would you, Mr. President, take a loyalty oath confirming your second-class status?
Mr. Lieberman’s best-case scenario for tolerating my existence in his vicinity is to have the homes of the likes of me re-zoned into one of the Bantustans he envisions, to be created and run by remote control from behind an ethnic separation wall. Would you succumb gracefully, without protest, to such a scheme, Mr. President?
You have to understand, sir, that I speak here of life-and-death issues for me and my family. Mr. Lieberman, Israel’s Foreign Minister, attained his impressive status through an openly racist election campaign that featured mass rallies at which calls of “Death to Arabs” were standard. Would you trust such a man with your future in the international arena, Mr. President? I surely hope not: but the majority of Israeli citizens seem to have done exactly that.
That is where I sense danger, sir; in the assigning of my fellow countrymen of responsibility for our common future to fascist and untrustworthy representatives. Past injustices, and those were many and massive against my people, were never so clearly foretold as the ones the current Israeli government threatens to perpetrate against me, my family, my village and my people. It is with this clearly articulated plan of my transfer in mind that I call on you to use the undeniable prestige of your office to stop such plans from being implemented. I ask you, sir, to reassure me that you will never permit such schemes to be on any agenda discussed in the presence of representatives of the United States of America. I need that in order to be able to sleep, Mr. President.
With my best wishes for a peaceful and happy Easter for you and your family and for all of humanity, I remain,
Sincerely,
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: Because of the limitation on postings n the White House website this letter was abridged by about 20%. HK
Thursday, April 16, 2009
Friends and Relations
A time was when the range of my human contacts was delimited by the physical space within my reach; people I saw, shook hands with, spoke to over a copper wire connection, or at least exchanged letters written on paper with ink. I personally knew everyone in this crowd and could see their faces before me even when separated by the axiomatic ‘seven seas’ of Arab imagery.
Two new developments have changed all of that: I have published a book of memoirs and someone has invented the internet. Now I am in touch with thousands of people I can only imagine the color of their eyes or the shape of their noses. And they are a fascinating bunch to handle and to please as I am always at pains to do with all my human contacts. It is a weakness I can never overcome much as I try: Every human I deal with is automatically my equal in status and rights. That obligates me to deal with him or her not only on the basis of equality but also as a shareholder in my own humanity. Buddhists may recognize this as karma, Sufis as the Divine Unity, and Quakers as the light of God in each and every one of us. But, believe me, it is a burden not always easy to shoulder.
Across the cyberspace I am called on to acknowledge a debt of sorts to four separate individuals, three of whom are fellow Palestinians, I never met except via email exchanges. All four stayed up all night to finish reading my book of memoirs at one sitting. I know they mean this as a compliment and I am duly flattered; but I sense that now they can make demands on me in line with their inflated appraisal of my writing skills. And here I am, sitting at my desk at four in the morning, computer alight and coffee-cup in hand, trying to respond to their implied urging of me to produce more readable memoirs.
Just to balance the picture I will now bring up the opposite end of the range of my newly expanded circle of human contacts. A woman psychotherapist, formerly an Israeli resident of Tel Aviv, writes me from Australia. Having finished her Army service in her country of birth and with the insight of a psychoanalyst she started to see it in a different and disturbing light and had to escape the lies and cheating by fleeing to a new and remote country. Avigail now writes me that she gets ‘psychological hives’, breaks out with itching all over her body, as she reads my book of memoirs. To her also I owe the debt of responding across cyberspace with words to sooth the itch that I have caused.
More close to home, several Israeli Jewish friends, the type I have met physically and not only as email addresses, and I do have a few of those, have expressed praise for my book, A Doctor in Galilee. Yet, without exception, their words of praise have focused on passages in it that relate intimate family anecdotes, cute stories about my children, or folksy tales about village culture. One such friend did state that the book should be published in Hebrew so that “our children would get a glimpse of the reality as experienced by the other side.” This is a true reflection of the kind of relationship I maintain with such friends: our encounters are purely social, devoid of political discourse beyond such clichés as ‘this government is for the dogs’ or ‘the violence is mounting again’ … etc. Both sides struggle to keep the tenuous pretense of superficial normality despite the mutual constant awareness of the strain that the Zionist nature of Israel places on our friendship. Lois Nakhli, a Palestinian friend, has a simile for this; it is the elephant in the room that no one dares mention.
I admit that the number of my Israeli Jewish friends suffered a rapid decline shortly after my departure from the Ministry of Health in 1992.Until then I had a good number of colleagues and co-workers that I took to be my friends. Upon being forced out of my position with the ministry I attempted to stay in touch with many of them through visits to the office or by calling them, though I had little purpose in doing so beyond maintaining the nominal friendship between us. Then one morning I looked the guy in the mirror in the eyes and said; "This is the last time you keep up this hypocrisy. Friendship is mutual; If they are true friends they should reciprocate and take the initiative in contacting you." That day I called about a dozen such colleagues for the last time. No one called back and I stopped my nagging. I still am happy to see some of them on occasion in professional meetings and they act duly cordial to me. But that was before I published my book of memoirs, I am not sure how they will act the next time they see me.
One exception, though: Only two days ago, while visiting with a long-time friend I was properly chided for misbehaving: Biatte Davidson is a retired gynecologist who is now in her mid-nineties. She is a relative of the Peterkowskis, our weekend gracious hosts in Naharya in the days when I had to escape with my family out from our village, Arrabeh, to get one night of good sleep a week. She is still with it and a pleasant company who can carry her end of a meaningful conversation. Every so often we call and take her out from her nursing home for dinner for the sake of the good old days. This time we drove to the Jarhi Brothers by the boat harbor of old Acre. The Jarhis are fishmongers who had fixed up an adjacent old-style room, probably constructed in the Ottoman days, and put some tables and chairs in it. You choose your fish from their catch-of-the-day and they clean it and roast it right there for you to eat, our favorite dining experience.
On the occasion of our last visit with Biatte I had given her a copy of ‘A Doctor in Galilee’ as a present. She now tells me that she couldn’t read more than a few pages in it; it was that disturbing to her that she sent it to Hanna, another Peterkowski gynecologist in her nineties who had passed away only last week. Hanna and her late husband, at the time the head of the Danish Royal Space Research Institute, hosted us for few weeks in their house in Copenhagen in the summer of 1976 when we were struggling with the decision if to emigrate to Hawaii.
Biatte shared with me her true feeling of anger at the negative overall tone of my book and harsh assessment of Israel’s influence on my community’s life. She admitted to having avoided political discussions with us over the many years that we have known her but thought the time had now come for that. She also told me flat out that she had thought that she will never talk to me again, but now that we called on her again she still finds us the best of friends and can’t help but be pleasant. She admitted that many a mistake has been made by the successive Israeli governments in dealing with their Arab citizens but that I should give credit for such positive aspects of our life as the equal rights under the National Health Insurance law. And now that we had discussed politics, she will get her copy of my book back from our common dead friend in Denmark and finish reading it.
The political discussion that we had amounted to her spelling out her memories of all the horrible things that she suffered under the Nazi’s in Germany in the 1930’s, of escaping to Italy and the rough time she had studying medicine there with all the disturbing incidents that befell her as a single woman with no male protector in the Italian chauvinistic and fascist society, of her escape to Palestine and the difficulties of life as an outsider in a mainly Polish Jewish kibbutz, and of the crime of the extermination of her parents at the hands of the Nazis.
I am not one to argue with a grandmotherly pitiful old friend especially when there was nothing really to argue about in what she related to us. I decided to defer any mention of my people’s functioning as surrogate Europeans to be the target of her community’s anger, blame or revenge. I may bring that up at the next visit after she would have finished reading the book.
And yet another friend who decided to drop the book after the first few pages: Nadia is a friend, a daughter of close friends and a close friend of my daughter. Though she grew up in Germany she knew Arrabeh and the Galilee as a child from her annual vacations with her father’s extended family and friends here. She particularly remembers her childhood playmates, the many friends and cousins, who would attend her birthday party each summer. She now finds the reality revealed in my book too harsh and is reluctant to ruin her fond memories by knowing the full truth; she prefers to stay ignorant and to keep her beautiful dreams alive.
That is reminiscent of Seth, my son in law, who has never seen the videos we recorded of the three-night-long village celebration we held in Arrabeh for him and Rhoda two weeks after their Central Park wedding in New York. He knows it can never be as beautiful as the memory he holds in his head and heart. He thinks he may watch those videos with his grandchildren when they arrive.
Memories are a form of malleable reality, thanks to our ability to highlight and expand certain aspects of it and nearly erase others. That dawned on me again the other night as I chatted with an elder neighbor while sitting in the Diwan to receive condolences after the burial of a common distant cousin. He started reminiscing about the good old days and what nice neighbors my parents were to his family. He started by reminding me, in whispers as is appropriate to the occasion, that my sister Jamileh was also his sister; when he was only a few months old, his late mother fell ill and stopped producing milk while my late mother was still breastfeeding her two-year old daughter. After consulting with my late father she decided to wean her own daughter and breastfed her neighbor’s baby till he could take solid foods. “Where can you find that sort of kindness nowadays? I would be dead and buried if it had happen these days.”
I moved closer and prompted Falah for more.
“Your late father was the personification of honesty and neighborliness. Shortly after el-ihtilal -the occupation, the local usage for the 1948 Nakba- one of our cousins accused me of owning a gun that was found in a cave in our land, right there where my son’s house now stands. It turned out actually to belong to the accuser himself; someone else ratted on him and he, may he roast in hellfire, blamed me. The military governor was holding court in the olive fields to the west of the village, in Said el-Khalil’s almond field, to be exact. They dragged me there in the evening and tried to get me to admit to owning the gun that I had never touched or seen before. When I refused to admit to the false accusation an Arabic speaking soldier took me aside and offered me a bargain; he wanted me to be on the look-out for weapons and smugglers in the village and in exchange he would release me. I refused and they set the dogs on me. I kept saying to them ‘I am a farmer and the son of farmers. Ask me about land, about ploughs and whose threshing board is the fittest in the village and I will tell you.’ They wouldn’t listen and their dogs tore my clothes off completely. They then tied me to the trunk of an olive tree naked and bleeding from so many dog bites all over my body. Here you can see the scars on my arm!” and he lifted his shirtsleeve to show me. “Eventually they let me go and someone from the Nassar family saw me and brought me water and a’aba - the traditional woolen tunic men wear over their clothes for warmth and as a symbol of status – and I limbed home in the early hours of the morning to find the gate to our courtyard bolted. Much as I banged no one woke up. I then remembered that the gate to your family’s courtyard had a metal bolt, not the heavy wooden type that was in use in those days. I took a thin stick and managed to dislodge it and open the gate. Your father, Allah yerhamu – may god’s mercy be upon him - was still up reading the Koran. When he saw my condition he started crying and asking God to punish those who tortured me. His tears soaked the pages of his holy book. He swore he will never forgive his own nephew, the informer. Where do you find that sort of neighbor nowadays?”
“It all happened so long ago but I remember it as if it were only yesterday,” Falah continued as another wave of male well-wishers entered the room and conveyed their standard messages of condolence. “You see Hussain there? He is a grandfather no doubt. Yet when el-ihtilal happened he was still in his mother’s womb. His late father was not killed by the Jews; in the mayhem that they created after the English abandoned us to our fate someone who bore him a grudge waylaid him in Sakhnin’s olive fields and shot him dead. Hussain’s mother was astute enough to demand to be allowed to pass under his late father’s coffin as we carried him to the cemetery. Just short of nine months later Hussain was born and was given the same name as his father (a very unusual thing in Arab culture). And here he is already a grandfather. But I can still see it as if it had happened only yesterday. Time passes so fast! And it is always from bad to worse, believe me!”
I inquired about the mysterious ritual of a widow parading under her husband’s coffin in full view of the funeral procession crowd. Hussain himself explained the significance of the move. A widow who suspects that she might be pregnant takes the embarrassing step to avoid people’s ‘qeel-ow-qaal’ – speculation and rumors as to the paternity of the child when it is born. Everyone in the room knew at least one more such case, that of the recently departed Said Mustafa el-Daud, the son of a shaheed – martyr- from the preNakba uprising against the British Mandate whose mother had asked to take the same preemptive exhibitionist step at her husband’s funeral to avoid false rumors.
This all sounds distant and a bit quaint compared to current suffering of other Palestinians. Here is one example of that, discovered accidentally thanks to the availability of mobile phones. It illustrates the vulnerability of Palestinians in their current status as pariahs reduced to asking favors from world leaders for their daily survival needs:
While in Ramallah for my book launch held at the Friends Meeting House there, my sister-in-law, Pat, used her mobile phone to order a taxicab. The dispatcher started to inquire about who exactly she was and she hung up on him. Then the phone rang and it was the same dispatcher begging her to please put him in touch with Tony Blair; it was a matter of life and death for a young child, he said. She hung up again and related the story to her husband. Her tone of voice imparted a sense of intrigue admixed with halfway complaining and seeking her husband’s intervention and protection. Sharif called the number and proceeded to ask questions then asked us if anyone in the group knew how to reach Tony Blair. Sure enough someone knew the number of Blair’s press officer and this was conveyed to the man with apologies for the delay in responding to his request.
It turned out that the taxi dispatcher sensed from Pat’s accent in Arabic that she is an American and figured that she might be privy to information about how to reach the representative of The Quartet. The image that comes first to mind is of some PR wheeler-dealer seeking to engage a famous musical group to play at a banquet. But no, reality in Ramallah is much more sordid than you think. The Quartet is the group of four international actors, (the USA, Russia, the EU, and the UN) presumably pursuing peace in the Middle East. And Tony Blair is their envoy preoccupied, as indeed he should be, with efforts to get all parties to adhere to the agreed Roadmap to final status peace. Locals in Ramallah have come to value his services in his mighty capacity as the one man that could obtain a permit for a sick child in need of treatment unavailable locally to leave their collective prison, designated in the Roadmap speak as Area A, the most autonomous of the three types of Palestinian Bantustans, A, B, and C. The taxi dispatcher knows that and he has a weighty contact within the Palestinian National Authority in waiting with sufficient clout to appeal personally on behalf of the sick child to Blair’s office, for they would surely know who he is. All that is missing is the phone number of that office and someone fluent enough in English to explain the situation so that Mr. Blair can obtain the permit from the Israelis for the child and its mother to exit Area A and seek medical care abroad. But Mr. Blair is not available right now and in the meanwhile the child is reaching a critical stage. He probably is away from his office, missing the one day a month that he keeps office hours in Ramallah. As rumor has it, the man is in Tel Aviv in connection with the one-million-dollar prize that the Tel Aviv University is awarding him for "exceptional leadership and steadfast determination in helping to engineer agreements and forge lasting solutions to areas in conflict." That means Gaza, I am sure, witness the lasting solution forged there!
The taxi dispatcher and his terminally ill child surely will understand.
Two new developments have changed all of that: I have published a book of memoirs and someone has invented the internet. Now I am in touch with thousands of people I can only imagine the color of their eyes or the shape of their noses. And they are a fascinating bunch to handle and to please as I am always at pains to do with all my human contacts. It is a weakness I can never overcome much as I try: Every human I deal with is automatically my equal in status and rights. That obligates me to deal with him or her not only on the basis of equality but also as a shareholder in my own humanity. Buddhists may recognize this as karma, Sufis as the Divine Unity, and Quakers as the light of God in each and every one of us. But, believe me, it is a burden not always easy to shoulder.
Across the cyberspace I am called on to acknowledge a debt of sorts to four separate individuals, three of whom are fellow Palestinians, I never met except via email exchanges. All four stayed up all night to finish reading my book of memoirs at one sitting. I know they mean this as a compliment and I am duly flattered; but I sense that now they can make demands on me in line with their inflated appraisal of my writing skills. And here I am, sitting at my desk at four in the morning, computer alight and coffee-cup in hand, trying to respond to their implied urging of me to produce more readable memoirs.
Just to balance the picture I will now bring up the opposite end of the range of my newly expanded circle of human contacts. A woman psychotherapist, formerly an Israeli resident of Tel Aviv, writes me from Australia. Having finished her Army service in her country of birth and with the insight of a psychoanalyst she started to see it in a different and disturbing light and had to escape the lies and cheating by fleeing to a new and remote country. Avigail now writes me that she gets ‘psychological hives’, breaks out with itching all over her body, as she reads my book of memoirs. To her also I owe the debt of responding across cyberspace with words to sooth the itch that I have caused.
More close to home, several Israeli Jewish friends, the type I have met physically and not only as email addresses, and I do have a few of those, have expressed praise for my book, A Doctor in Galilee. Yet, without exception, their words of praise have focused on passages in it that relate intimate family anecdotes, cute stories about my children, or folksy tales about village culture. One such friend did state that the book should be published in Hebrew so that “our children would get a glimpse of the reality as experienced by the other side.” This is a true reflection of the kind of relationship I maintain with such friends: our encounters are purely social, devoid of political discourse beyond such clichés as ‘this government is for the dogs’ or ‘the violence is mounting again’ … etc. Both sides struggle to keep the tenuous pretense of superficial normality despite the mutual constant awareness of the strain that the Zionist nature of Israel places on our friendship. Lois Nakhli, a Palestinian friend, has a simile for this; it is the elephant in the room that no one dares mention.
I admit that the number of my Israeli Jewish friends suffered a rapid decline shortly after my departure from the Ministry of Health in 1992.Until then I had a good number of colleagues and co-workers that I took to be my friends. Upon being forced out of my position with the ministry I attempted to stay in touch with many of them through visits to the office or by calling them, though I had little purpose in doing so beyond maintaining the nominal friendship between us. Then one morning I looked the guy in the mirror in the eyes and said; "This is the last time you keep up this hypocrisy. Friendship is mutual; If they are true friends they should reciprocate and take the initiative in contacting you." That day I called about a dozen such colleagues for the last time. No one called back and I stopped my nagging. I still am happy to see some of them on occasion in professional meetings and they act duly cordial to me. But that was before I published my book of memoirs, I am not sure how they will act the next time they see me.
One exception, though: Only two days ago, while visiting with a long-time friend I was properly chided for misbehaving: Biatte Davidson is a retired gynecologist who is now in her mid-nineties. She is a relative of the Peterkowskis, our weekend gracious hosts in Naharya in the days when I had to escape with my family out from our village, Arrabeh, to get one night of good sleep a week. She is still with it and a pleasant company who can carry her end of a meaningful conversation. Every so often we call and take her out from her nursing home for dinner for the sake of the good old days. This time we drove to the Jarhi Brothers by the boat harbor of old Acre. The Jarhis are fishmongers who had fixed up an adjacent old-style room, probably constructed in the Ottoman days, and put some tables and chairs in it. You choose your fish from their catch-of-the-day and they clean it and roast it right there for you to eat, our favorite dining experience.
On the occasion of our last visit with Biatte I had given her a copy of ‘A Doctor in Galilee’ as a present. She now tells me that she couldn’t read more than a few pages in it; it was that disturbing to her that she sent it to Hanna, another Peterkowski gynecologist in her nineties who had passed away only last week. Hanna and her late husband, at the time the head of the Danish Royal Space Research Institute, hosted us for few weeks in their house in Copenhagen in the summer of 1976 when we were struggling with the decision if to emigrate to Hawaii.
Biatte shared with me her true feeling of anger at the negative overall tone of my book and harsh assessment of Israel’s influence on my community’s life. She admitted to having avoided political discussions with us over the many years that we have known her but thought the time had now come for that. She also told me flat out that she had thought that she will never talk to me again, but now that we called on her again she still finds us the best of friends and can’t help but be pleasant. She admitted that many a mistake has been made by the successive Israeli governments in dealing with their Arab citizens but that I should give credit for such positive aspects of our life as the equal rights under the National Health Insurance law. And now that we had discussed politics, she will get her copy of my book back from our common dead friend in Denmark and finish reading it.
The political discussion that we had amounted to her spelling out her memories of all the horrible things that she suffered under the Nazi’s in Germany in the 1930’s, of escaping to Italy and the rough time she had studying medicine there with all the disturbing incidents that befell her as a single woman with no male protector in the Italian chauvinistic and fascist society, of her escape to Palestine and the difficulties of life as an outsider in a mainly Polish Jewish kibbutz, and of the crime of the extermination of her parents at the hands of the Nazis.
I am not one to argue with a grandmotherly pitiful old friend especially when there was nothing really to argue about in what she related to us. I decided to defer any mention of my people’s functioning as surrogate Europeans to be the target of her community’s anger, blame or revenge. I may bring that up at the next visit after she would have finished reading the book.
And yet another friend who decided to drop the book after the first few pages: Nadia is a friend, a daughter of close friends and a close friend of my daughter. Though she grew up in Germany she knew Arrabeh and the Galilee as a child from her annual vacations with her father’s extended family and friends here. She particularly remembers her childhood playmates, the many friends and cousins, who would attend her birthday party each summer. She now finds the reality revealed in my book too harsh and is reluctant to ruin her fond memories by knowing the full truth; she prefers to stay ignorant and to keep her beautiful dreams alive.
That is reminiscent of Seth, my son in law, who has never seen the videos we recorded of the three-night-long village celebration we held in Arrabeh for him and Rhoda two weeks after their Central Park wedding in New York. He knows it can never be as beautiful as the memory he holds in his head and heart. He thinks he may watch those videos with his grandchildren when they arrive.
Memories are a form of malleable reality, thanks to our ability to highlight and expand certain aspects of it and nearly erase others. That dawned on me again the other night as I chatted with an elder neighbor while sitting in the Diwan to receive condolences after the burial of a common distant cousin. He started reminiscing about the good old days and what nice neighbors my parents were to his family. He started by reminding me, in whispers as is appropriate to the occasion, that my sister Jamileh was also his sister; when he was only a few months old, his late mother fell ill and stopped producing milk while my late mother was still breastfeeding her two-year old daughter. After consulting with my late father she decided to wean her own daughter and breastfed her neighbor’s baby till he could take solid foods. “Where can you find that sort of kindness nowadays? I would be dead and buried if it had happen these days.”
I moved closer and prompted Falah for more.
“Your late father was the personification of honesty and neighborliness. Shortly after el-ihtilal -the occupation, the local usage for the 1948 Nakba- one of our cousins accused me of owning a gun that was found in a cave in our land, right there where my son’s house now stands. It turned out actually to belong to the accuser himself; someone else ratted on him and he, may he roast in hellfire, blamed me. The military governor was holding court in the olive fields to the west of the village, in Said el-Khalil’s almond field, to be exact. They dragged me there in the evening and tried to get me to admit to owning the gun that I had never touched or seen before. When I refused to admit to the false accusation an Arabic speaking soldier took me aside and offered me a bargain; he wanted me to be on the look-out for weapons and smugglers in the village and in exchange he would release me. I refused and they set the dogs on me. I kept saying to them ‘I am a farmer and the son of farmers. Ask me about land, about ploughs and whose threshing board is the fittest in the village and I will tell you.’ They wouldn’t listen and their dogs tore my clothes off completely. They then tied me to the trunk of an olive tree naked and bleeding from so many dog bites all over my body. Here you can see the scars on my arm!” and he lifted his shirtsleeve to show me. “Eventually they let me go and someone from the Nassar family saw me and brought me water and a’aba - the traditional woolen tunic men wear over their clothes for warmth and as a symbol of status – and I limbed home in the early hours of the morning to find the gate to our courtyard bolted. Much as I banged no one woke up. I then remembered that the gate to your family’s courtyard had a metal bolt, not the heavy wooden type that was in use in those days. I took a thin stick and managed to dislodge it and open the gate. Your father, Allah yerhamu – may god’s mercy be upon him - was still up reading the Koran. When he saw my condition he started crying and asking God to punish those who tortured me. His tears soaked the pages of his holy book. He swore he will never forgive his own nephew, the informer. Where do you find that sort of neighbor nowadays?”
“It all happened so long ago but I remember it as if it were only yesterday,” Falah continued as another wave of male well-wishers entered the room and conveyed their standard messages of condolence. “You see Hussain there? He is a grandfather no doubt. Yet when el-ihtilal happened he was still in his mother’s womb. His late father was not killed by the Jews; in the mayhem that they created after the English abandoned us to our fate someone who bore him a grudge waylaid him in Sakhnin’s olive fields and shot him dead. Hussain’s mother was astute enough to demand to be allowed to pass under his late father’s coffin as we carried him to the cemetery. Just short of nine months later Hussain was born and was given the same name as his father (a very unusual thing in Arab culture). And here he is already a grandfather. But I can still see it as if it had happened only yesterday. Time passes so fast! And it is always from bad to worse, believe me!”
I inquired about the mysterious ritual of a widow parading under her husband’s coffin in full view of the funeral procession crowd. Hussain himself explained the significance of the move. A widow who suspects that she might be pregnant takes the embarrassing step to avoid people’s ‘qeel-ow-qaal’ – speculation and rumors as to the paternity of the child when it is born. Everyone in the room knew at least one more such case, that of the recently departed Said Mustafa el-Daud, the son of a shaheed – martyr- from the preNakba uprising against the British Mandate whose mother had asked to take the same preemptive exhibitionist step at her husband’s funeral to avoid false rumors.
This all sounds distant and a bit quaint compared to current suffering of other Palestinians. Here is one example of that, discovered accidentally thanks to the availability of mobile phones. It illustrates the vulnerability of Palestinians in their current status as pariahs reduced to asking favors from world leaders for their daily survival needs:
While in Ramallah for my book launch held at the Friends Meeting House there, my sister-in-law, Pat, used her mobile phone to order a taxicab. The dispatcher started to inquire about who exactly she was and she hung up on him. Then the phone rang and it was the same dispatcher begging her to please put him in touch with Tony Blair; it was a matter of life and death for a young child, he said. She hung up again and related the story to her husband. Her tone of voice imparted a sense of intrigue admixed with halfway complaining and seeking her husband’s intervention and protection. Sharif called the number and proceeded to ask questions then asked us if anyone in the group knew how to reach Tony Blair. Sure enough someone knew the number of Blair’s press officer and this was conveyed to the man with apologies for the delay in responding to his request.
It turned out that the taxi dispatcher sensed from Pat’s accent in Arabic that she is an American and figured that she might be privy to information about how to reach the representative of The Quartet. The image that comes first to mind is of some PR wheeler-dealer seeking to engage a famous musical group to play at a banquet. But no, reality in Ramallah is much more sordid than you think. The Quartet is the group of four international actors, (the USA, Russia, the EU, and the UN) presumably pursuing peace in the Middle East. And Tony Blair is their envoy preoccupied, as indeed he should be, with efforts to get all parties to adhere to the agreed Roadmap to final status peace. Locals in Ramallah have come to value his services in his mighty capacity as the one man that could obtain a permit for a sick child in need of treatment unavailable locally to leave their collective prison, designated in the Roadmap speak as Area A, the most autonomous of the three types of Palestinian Bantustans, A, B, and C. The taxi dispatcher knows that and he has a weighty contact within the Palestinian National Authority in waiting with sufficient clout to appeal personally on behalf of the sick child to Blair’s office, for they would surely know who he is. All that is missing is the phone number of that office and someone fluent enough in English to explain the situation so that Mr. Blair can obtain the permit from the Israelis for the child and its mother to exit Area A and seek medical care abroad. But Mr. Blair is not available right now and in the meanwhile the child is reaching a critical stage. He probably is away from his office, missing the one day a month that he keeps office hours in Ramallah. As rumor has it, the man is in Tel Aviv in connection with the one-million-dollar prize that the Tel Aviv University is awarding him for "exceptional leadership and steadfast determination in helping to engineer agreements and forge lasting solutions to areas in conflict." That means Gaza, I am sure, witness the lasting solution forged there!
The taxi dispatcher and his terminally ill child surely will understand.
Sunday, March 29, 2009
An Open Letter to Dr. Bernard Kouchner
An Open Letter to Dr. Bernard Kouchner,
French Minister of Foreign and European Affairs.
Dear Dr. Kouchner,
The news that you have preemptively spoken against any official objection to the expected appointment of Avigdor Lieberman to the post of Foreign Minister of Israel distresses me. By making this diplomatic move in the service of Israel’s international image you have encroached on my rights and on my community’s aspirations to ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’.
But first let me introduce myself: I am a Palestinian citizen of Israel, a Public Health physician who, for nearly four decades, has served humanity through serving his own people by promoting their better health and community development. For engaging in these efforts, your late president Francois Mitterrand awarded me the medal of “Ordre National du Merite”. In connection with that recognition I visited France as the guest of the Ministry of the Interior. You were gracious enough to receive me in your office while serving as the Minister of Health, though my special enchantment with your personage was, and still is, as the founder of Medecins Sans Frontieres.
As a fellow physician, I want to ask you, Dr Kouchner, to put yourself momentarily in my position and consider how I should react to the step you have taken: Here is another presumably equal co-citizen of Israel who calls openly for my disqualification from our shared citizenship because I want to be equal to him under the laws of our common country. He insists on having me step down from our presumed common stand of equality and kowtow openly to his privileged status as the son of a certain race and religion. Would you do that, Dr. Kouchner, were it to be demanded from you by a fellow French citizen who is an immigrant from Algeria?
Barring that, Mr. Lieberman wants me transferred out of the country though I have lived on land I inherited legally from forefathers who may have better claim to descent from the ancient Jews than his do. And mind you, Dr. Kouchner, my residence in the home he wants me evacuated from predates the establishment of the state he wants to appropriate as his, and his alone, while he is a recent immigrant from Moldova. Would you, Dr Kouchner, take a loyalty oath confirming your second class status?
Mr. Lieberman’s best-case scenario for tolerating my existence in his vicinity is to have the homes of the likes of me re-zoned into one of the Bantustans he envisions creating and running by remote control from behind an ethnic separation wall. Would you succumb peacefully to such a scheme, Dr. Kouchner?
Sir, you have to understand that I am speaking of existential issues for me and my family. Mr. Avigdor Lieberman, head of “Israel is Our Home” party and Israeli Foreign Minister designate attained this impressive status through an openly racist election campaign that featured mass gatherings at which calls of “Death to Arabs” were standard. Would you trust such a man with your future in the international arena, Dr. Kouchner, especially knowing that the man earned a living in the past through reliance on his muscle power?
These are matters of record, Dr. Kouchner. When you call on your fellow diplomats to accept this man as an equal and to forget about his announced plans for my further subjugation and for the infringement of my human rights, if not for my physical elimination, you are aiding and abetting him in his evil scheme.
As a colleague and a former acquaintance, I call on you to openly commit to protecting me before it is too late. I ask you to act on the basis of our shared professional dictum of “primum non nocere - first, to not harm!” and to withdraw your call to accept Mr. Lieberman to the diplomatic fold for that is sure to do me harm. As the founder of a humanitarian organization that recognizes no borders in seeking to alleviate suffering, you owe me and my community, as per your organizations humanitarian standards, a pledge to defend us against this man’s evil designs.
If you are unable to stand up to the degradation and injustice the man promises to reek against me and my family, then please, step aside, withdraw your diplomatic initiative on his behalf, and allow the many courageous and impartial souls to act on the basis of their conscience.
As to the license the chauvinistic far rightist government he joins takes in dealing with me and my community, I intend to fall back on my equally tenuous claim to camaraderie with President Obama.
With Highest Regards,
Your colleague,
Hatim Kanaaneh, MD, MPH
French Minister of Foreign and European Affairs.
Dear Dr. Kouchner,
The news that you have preemptively spoken against any official objection to the expected appointment of Avigdor Lieberman to the post of Foreign Minister of Israel distresses me. By making this diplomatic move in the service of Israel’s international image you have encroached on my rights and on my community’s aspirations to ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’.
But first let me introduce myself: I am a Palestinian citizen of Israel, a Public Health physician who, for nearly four decades, has served humanity through serving his own people by promoting their better health and community development. For engaging in these efforts, your late president Francois Mitterrand awarded me the medal of “Ordre National du Merite”. In connection with that recognition I visited France as the guest of the Ministry of the Interior. You were gracious enough to receive me in your office while serving as the Minister of Health, though my special enchantment with your personage was, and still is, as the founder of Medecins Sans Frontieres.
As a fellow physician, I want to ask you, Dr Kouchner, to put yourself momentarily in my position and consider how I should react to the step you have taken: Here is another presumably equal co-citizen of Israel who calls openly for my disqualification from our shared citizenship because I want to be equal to him under the laws of our common country. He insists on having me step down from our presumed common stand of equality and kowtow openly to his privileged status as the son of a certain race and religion. Would you do that, Dr. Kouchner, were it to be demanded from you by a fellow French citizen who is an immigrant from Algeria?
Barring that, Mr. Lieberman wants me transferred out of the country though I have lived on land I inherited legally from forefathers who may have better claim to descent from the ancient Jews than his do. And mind you, Dr. Kouchner, my residence in the home he wants me evacuated from predates the establishment of the state he wants to appropriate as his, and his alone, while he is a recent immigrant from Moldova. Would you, Dr Kouchner, take a loyalty oath confirming your second class status?
Mr. Lieberman’s best-case scenario for tolerating my existence in his vicinity is to have the homes of the likes of me re-zoned into one of the Bantustans he envisions creating and running by remote control from behind an ethnic separation wall. Would you succumb peacefully to such a scheme, Dr. Kouchner?
Sir, you have to understand that I am speaking of existential issues for me and my family. Mr. Avigdor Lieberman, head of “Israel is Our Home” party and Israeli Foreign Minister designate attained this impressive status through an openly racist election campaign that featured mass gatherings at which calls of “Death to Arabs” were standard. Would you trust such a man with your future in the international arena, Dr. Kouchner, especially knowing that the man earned a living in the past through reliance on his muscle power?
These are matters of record, Dr. Kouchner. When you call on your fellow diplomats to accept this man as an equal and to forget about his announced plans for my further subjugation and for the infringement of my human rights, if not for my physical elimination, you are aiding and abetting him in his evil scheme.
As a colleague and a former acquaintance, I call on you to openly commit to protecting me before it is too late. I ask you to act on the basis of our shared professional dictum of “primum non nocere - first, to not harm!” and to withdraw your call to accept Mr. Lieberman to the diplomatic fold for that is sure to do me harm. As the founder of a humanitarian organization that recognizes no borders in seeking to alleviate suffering, you owe me and my community, as per your organizations humanitarian standards, a pledge to defend us against this man’s evil designs.
If you are unable to stand up to the degradation and injustice the man promises to reek against me and my family, then please, step aside, withdraw your diplomatic initiative on his behalf, and allow the many courageous and impartial souls to act on the basis of their conscience.
As to the license the chauvinistic far rightist government he joins takes in dealing with me and my community, I intend to fall back on my equally tenuous claim to camaraderie with President Obama.
With Highest Regards,
Your colleague,
Hatim Kanaaneh, MD, MPH
Saturday, March 28, 2009
Zaitun
The olive is no match to the cedar of Lebanon in majestic looks or to the Atlantic Oak in grace when in full spring attire. Yet no tree in the Mediterranean basin inspires more respect and deeper love than the olive. Worship is no exaggeration in describing the ardent regard in which we hold the life-giving native plant that had sustained us through the ages.
As I arose from my bed this morning, early as if I were one of the good practicing Moslems anxious to perform the first of their five daily prayer rituals at the crack of dawn when they are first able to distinguish a black from a white thread, I had a deep feeling of disappointment at having received the news that my book of memoirs, A Doctor in Galilee, had not been shortlisted for the year’s Orwell Prize for political writing. I wished I were religious enough to beat a quick retreat to the mosque to immerse myself in pious blaming of my failure on Allah’s all enveloping will.
Disappointed that I had failed both Allah and George Orwell, I sit now as a supplicant to the olive. The closing chapter of my book does pay homage to a multi-millennium old olive tree. Yet I am perturbed by a sense of failure at having fallen short of giving the reader the full sense of the special relationship between a Palestinian farmer and his/her olive tree. Recently, this dawned on me again as I sat awe-struck listening to a Palestinian grandmother describing her struggle to stop the Israeli settlers and army from uprooting the olives in her field on the far side of the apartheid wall. Her picture clutching for life, both the tree’s and her own, at the trunk of her olive has become an icon of Palestinian struggle for their land, life and liberty. The particular enmity the settlers and the Israeli Occupation Forces seem to hold against the olive is understood by all to illustrate their conscious attempt at erasing Palestinian memory and culture.
A week earlier I had made a trip to Rehovot to visit Yoav, a Jewish friend I inherited in the line of family obligations from my late brother Mahmoud who once taught him. Yoav once mentioned to me that he knows of an olive tree with a more massive trunk than the one I had transplanted to my front yard. He challenged me to come, see and compare. It turned out to be an amazing specimen in the fields of an Italian monastery near Beit-Jammal in the Jerusalem hills. True, its gargantuan trunk is larger than that of my tree but it had split open and a fire had eaten a side away. It may well be older than mine and age may take precedence over beauty but I would never consider a swap.
The missing side of this other ancient tree has been replaced by a spry shoot, a decade or two old that has risen sphinx-like from the ashes of the scorched roots. I was reminded of a passage in Ilan Pappe’s book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, in which he describes how imported pine forests replacing uprooted Palestinian olive groves in modern Israel have succumbed to disease. To everyone’s surprise new growth from olive stumps that have survived for over half a century in the ground has pushed through often splitting asunder the failing pine trunks, a botanical metaphor writ in the Jerusalem hills.
The olive seed is encased in a hard cover that prevents it from sprouting unless it undergoes a natural softening process in the gut of a bird. Nowadays olives are fed to flocks in turkey farms before they are collected and delivered to specialized nurseries. In the old days, in early spring farmers would scout the hills for the wild seedlings to bring back to their land. There were known locations for this, the sites of nesting of wild birds. One such famous spot in these parts was the summit of Abu-Qarad or ‘tick hill’, a steep and rocky mountain two-hours walk from Arrabeh that has long been tamed into a Jewish-only settlement with a winding paved road, an electric gate, and barbwire fence around its modern homes and lush green lawns.
If one looks hard enough one can still find some wild olives among the boulders that intermingle with the tin shacks of the unrecognized village of el-Naim next door. That was one of the rewards of my frequent solidarity visits to the Bedouin community in support of their struggle to gain access to such basic amenities as water, electricity and access road, not to mention their struggle to stay put in their ancestral village against the state’s designs to relocate them.
The communal celebratory atmosphere of the olive harvesting season in Palestinian villages is a childhood memory I still cherish decades after my estrangement from active agricultural involvement beyond maintaining my showy fruit and flower garden. Still today I make it a habit every fall when not traveling to invite myself to the grove of a friend or a relative and to join in their family’s arduous labor of olive picking. I time it to coincide with their noon mealtime and may have secretly connived to have the lady of the household prepare mjaddarah, the local cracked wheat, lentil, onion and olive oil dish savored with fresh yogurt. Prof. McLaren, the famed child nutritionist, once told me that he experimented for years with locally-based infant weaning preparations before he came up with a most nutritious mixture which he was surprised to learn was nothing but the classic mjaddarah and yogurt. Locals traditionally consider it musmar el-batin; it ‘nails’ your stomach firm for the day. But I eat it for its satisfying taste not nutritional value.
As a side dish when dining out in the fields, it is customary to eat home-preserved veggies including both green and black olives. A standard joke mocking foreigners is about how they think that the two types of preserved olives come from different tree varieties and not two stages in the ripening process of the same fruit. Such ignorance of people who have reached the moon is always entertaining. A friend of ours from Galilee who married and moved to live in California tried once to share her special recipe for preserving olives with a neighbor. With her limited English she tried to explain that you add enough salt to the water you use to preserve the green olives till an egg floats in it. With her limited English communicating skills her neighbor must have misunderstood. When our friend enquired later about the success of her neighbor’s experiment, the latter expressed satisfaction with the taste of the product but complained of the smell of the rotting raw egg she had cracked on top of the container.
On such occasions, passing through the empty village streets –everyone is in the olive fields- I am struck by what an uplifting effect the sharp acrid scent of akar, the rancid liquid refuse from the olive presses in the various neighborhoods, has on my soul. My late brother who ran the perfect country store would close it in season and join everyone in the fields. When I would chide him for abandoning his shop he would respond: “I feel as if there is a wedding to which everyone in the village is invited except for me.” Ahmad was handicapped, his lift arm paralyzed by a childhood accident that must have torn his axillary nerve plexus. But he lived his entire life in full denial of his disability and often outdid others in functions that required the coordination of two hands. At the end of each day when the collected olives needed to be brought home in huge bags, Ahmad was the expert in sealing them shut. He would fashion a series of long thin spikes out of the suckers, the useless new shoots at the base of the trees, that he would use to drive through the joined edges of each sack’s opening to sew it shut. And Ahmad would join forces with the strongest member of the team to pick up each sack and load it on our donkey’s back.
The real big finale was always the day when the olive crop that we had collected for the season was taken to my uncle Salih’s press for the golden magic liquid to be squeezed out of it. We lived not far from the press which we called el-babour, a generic Arabic term for an engine, whether the one that drives an olive press, a train or a ship. Everyone would pitch in to bring the olives to the press: women carrying open containers on their heads, men sacks on their shoulders and donkeys heavier ones on their backs. The olives were piled up in one of the wide concrete-rimmed basins along the sidewall of the babour. We all hung around and waited our turn. My father would be torn between using his prerogative as the brother of the owner of the press to secure an early turn and his wish not to alienate strangers and loose their business. When our turn came, the two baddads, or press workers, shabby dress and unwashed skin thoroughly drenched with the semi-sacred juice of the olive, would start dipping their measuring devices, Jeri cans opened at the top and with hefty sticks affixed across them as handles, and delivering their content under the two huge rotating stones while keeping count so that they put aside every twelfth measure as charge for the chore.
As a child I would stand to the side and try to memorize the entertaining counting system they used, the same one I would hear my parents using when measuring out olive oil or wheat from our field to sell to a merchant or to another villager. The counting system relies on altering the Arabic words for the numbers one to ten to expressions of blessing the produce, the moment and the contract of sale to protect from envy and the evil eye. It goes something like this: Baraki, blessing, for one; min karim, God’s generous gift, for two, … samha, forgiveness, for seven, yella el-amani, God’s trust, for eight, and so on. Those alternative numbers would be shouted loud and clear to overcome the noise of the machinery in the press. Yet the same was done also in the calm of our house, the blessing numbers repeated several times each while my parents scooped out the produce to fill the standard volume measure in use, the ratil for oil and the saa’ for wheat. The party at the receiving end of the transaction often would repeat the same pronouncement in equally loud and reverential voice. The whole process had a ritualistic serenity to it and would put my parents and their interlocutors in a semi-trance not unlike the one they entered into five times a day to perform their prayers.
As a child and a member of the owner’s extended family my presence in the inner sanctum of the press was tolerated by the beddads and their bosses, my older cousins, who frequently kept an eye on what was happening there. I was fascinated by the mechanical magic of the process from beginning to end. Every so often one of the workers would reach under the humongous rotating stones and swipe a handful of the crushed olives to assess how fine the mush has become. When he judged it right a side outlet would be opened manually and the pulp pushed out by the metal side arms attached to the rotating stones. Donut-shaped flat jute baskets are filled with the crushed pulp and stacked up around the central metal rod jutting from the base component of a hydraulic press. As the pressure is applied with the turning of a lever the precious fluid flows into massive vats on the side. Jift, the solid refuse remaining after all the liquid has been pressed, is an excellent fuel valued by housewives for heating, cooking and baking of bread.
For hours at end I would sit atop a pile of jift, enjoy the warmth emanating from its fermenting innards, and wait for the moment when a mechanical failure occurred so I could go closer and touch all the magic parts of the engine. Babours were the only modern mechanical equipment in our village. On the very rare occasion when a taxi arrived from the city, we children would run after it and compete in sneaking a ride on the back fender till the driver would stop and chase us away. With the advent of WWII the British established a training camp at the edge of our village and we got the chance to ride in their armored trucks and even tanks, thanks to our mutual curiosity with so many thick mustachioed Sikh’s, nimble Indians, and skeleton-thin Senegalese conscripts.
What fascinated me most as I sat in my warm jift perch was the two piston engine mounted such that the two arms, ‘dancers’ the beddads called them in warning me to keep away from them, stood upright and alternated in their labored up-sideways-then-downward strokes to force the metal rim that transmitted the mechanical energy through thick leather belts to all the moving parts of the press. I would watch and watch till I would fall asleep marveling at the fact that those two dancers never once moved out of synch with each other. Still today, the hypnotic effect of the synchronous circular motion of the two pistons hugging the opposite sides of the metal rim and cooperatively moving it round and round provides a better remedy for my occasional insomnia than the flock of sheep jumping over that imaginary green fence.
There were no electric centrifuges in those days, only huge open barrels in the dark back area of the babour, for the mixed extract to sit in. Within hours the oil would float to the top and be decanted into smaller containers and carried home to be stored in large glazed ceramic jars imported from France where they apparently were intended originally for wine storage. As I sit now in my study I look out at one of the half-dozen jars that my family once owned and that I now display in my center courtyard atop a wine press stone dating back few centuries before Christ. Those jars were bought, I was told, from Gazan traders who transported them on camelback from Jaffa’s port to outlying villages.
The day we pressed our olives would always end with a gala celebration. My mother would have made a stack of msachan, bread soaked in fresh olive oil, topped with chopped onions flavored with sumac and sweet paprika, and roasted with chickens in our outdoor oven, the taboun. For the finale we always indulged in a treat of sweets, especially halva bartered from the country store for a ratil or two of oil.
As the oil was skimmed off in frequent consecutive visits from my parents to the final fruit of their year-long labor, the separating oil would diminish to the thinnest of layers. My mother would carefully and patiently touch her flat palm to the liquid surface, bring it out over a flat container held in her other hand and with the tips of her fingers massage the drops of oil from it in a repetitive milking motion. The process even has a specific term for it locally, yqaffi. The minor impurities floating in the oil gave it an additional bite, a burning aftertaste that I never ceased to appreciate. To this day, my favorite dish in season is fresh olive oil savored with freshly-baked flat bread and a few green onion leaves. Recently I have discovered that you can freeze the special fresh taste of olive oil direct from the press. I have several liter-size bottles in my freezer. Especially when Didi is not around to force a proper meal on me, that is what I eat.
As I arose from my bed this morning, early as if I were one of the good practicing Moslems anxious to perform the first of their five daily prayer rituals at the crack of dawn when they are first able to distinguish a black from a white thread, I had a deep feeling of disappointment at having received the news that my book of memoirs, A Doctor in Galilee, had not been shortlisted for the year’s Orwell Prize for political writing. I wished I were religious enough to beat a quick retreat to the mosque to immerse myself in pious blaming of my failure on Allah’s all enveloping will.
Disappointed that I had failed both Allah and George Orwell, I sit now as a supplicant to the olive. The closing chapter of my book does pay homage to a multi-millennium old olive tree. Yet I am perturbed by a sense of failure at having fallen short of giving the reader the full sense of the special relationship between a Palestinian farmer and his/her olive tree. Recently, this dawned on me again as I sat awe-struck listening to a Palestinian grandmother describing her struggle to stop the Israeli settlers and army from uprooting the olives in her field on the far side of the apartheid wall. Her picture clutching for life, both the tree’s and her own, at the trunk of her olive has become an icon of Palestinian struggle for their land, life and liberty. The particular enmity the settlers and the Israeli Occupation Forces seem to hold against the olive is understood by all to illustrate their conscious attempt at erasing Palestinian memory and culture.
A week earlier I had made a trip to Rehovot to visit Yoav, a Jewish friend I inherited in the line of family obligations from my late brother Mahmoud who once taught him. Yoav once mentioned to me that he knows of an olive tree with a more massive trunk than the one I had transplanted to my front yard. He challenged me to come, see and compare. It turned out to be an amazing specimen in the fields of an Italian monastery near Beit-Jammal in the Jerusalem hills. True, its gargantuan trunk is larger than that of my tree but it had split open and a fire had eaten a side away. It may well be older than mine and age may take precedence over beauty but I would never consider a swap.
The missing side of this other ancient tree has been replaced by a spry shoot, a decade or two old that has risen sphinx-like from the ashes of the scorched roots. I was reminded of a passage in Ilan Pappe’s book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, in which he describes how imported pine forests replacing uprooted Palestinian olive groves in modern Israel have succumbed to disease. To everyone’s surprise new growth from olive stumps that have survived for over half a century in the ground has pushed through often splitting asunder the failing pine trunks, a botanical metaphor writ in the Jerusalem hills.
The olive seed is encased in a hard cover that prevents it from sprouting unless it undergoes a natural softening process in the gut of a bird. Nowadays olives are fed to flocks in turkey farms before they are collected and delivered to specialized nurseries. In the old days, in early spring farmers would scout the hills for the wild seedlings to bring back to their land. There were known locations for this, the sites of nesting of wild birds. One such famous spot in these parts was the summit of Abu-Qarad or ‘tick hill’, a steep and rocky mountain two-hours walk from Arrabeh that has long been tamed into a Jewish-only settlement with a winding paved road, an electric gate, and barbwire fence around its modern homes and lush green lawns.
If one looks hard enough one can still find some wild olives among the boulders that intermingle with the tin shacks of the unrecognized village of el-Naim next door. That was one of the rewards of my frequent solidarity visits to the Bedouin community in support of their struggle to gain access to such basic amenities as water, electricity and access road, not to mention their struggle to stay put in their ancestral village against the state’s designs to relocate them.
The communal celebratory atmosphere of the olive harvesting season in Palestinian villages is a childhood memory I still cherish decades after my estrangement from active agricultural involvement beyond maintaining my showy fruit and flower garden. Still today I make it a habit every fall when not traveling to invite myself to the grove of a friend or a relative and to join in their family’s arduous labor of olive picking. I time it to coincide with their noon mealtime and may have secretly connived to have the lady of the household prepare mjaddarah, the local cracked wheat, lentil, onion and olive oil dish savored with fresh yogurt. Prof. McLaren, the famed child nutritionist, once told me that he experimented for years with locally-based infant weaning preparations before he came up with a most nutritious mixture which he was surprised to learn was nothing but the classic mjaddarah and yogurt. Locals traditionally consider it musmar el-batin; it ‘nails’ your stomach firm for the day. But I eat it for its satisfying taste not nutritional value.
As a side dish when dining out in the fields, it is customary to eat home-preserved veggies including both green and black olives. A standard joke mocking foreigners is about how they think that the two types of preserved olives come from different tree varieties and not two stages in the ripening process of the same fruit. Such ignorance of people who have reached the moon is always entertaining. A friend of ours from Galilee who married and moved to live in California tried once to share her special recipe for preserving olives with a neighbor. With her limited English she tried to explain that you add enough salt to the water you use to preserve the green olives till an egg floats in it. With her limited English communicating skills her neighbor must have misunderstood. When our friend enquired later about the success of her neighbor’s experiment, the latter expressed satisfaction with the taste of the product but complained of the smell of the rotting raw egg she had cracked on top of the container.
On such occasions, passing through the empty village streets –everyone is in the olive fields- I am struck by what an uplifting effect the sharp acrid scent of akar, the rancid liquid refuse from the olive presses in the various neighborhoods, has on my soul. My late brother who ran the perfect country store would close it in season and join everyone in the fields. When I would chide him for abandoning his shop he would respond: “I feel as if there is a wedding to which everyone in the village is invited except for me.” Ahmad was handicapped, his lift arm paralyzed by a childhood accident that must have torn his axillary nerve plexus. But he lived his entire life in full denial of his disability and often outdid others in functions that required the coordination of two hands. At the end of each day when the collected olives needed to be brought home in huge bags, Ahmad was the expert in sealing them shut. He would fashion a series of long thin spikes out of the suckers, the useless new shoots at the base of the trees, that he would use to drive through the joined edges of each sack’s opening to sew it shut. And Ahmad would join forces with the strongest member of the team to pick up each sack and load it on our donkey’s back.
The real big finale was always the day when the olive crop that we had collected for the season was taken to my uncle Salih’s press for the golden magic liquid to be squeezed out of it. We lived not far from the press which we called el-babour, a generic Arabic term for an engine, whether the one that drives an olive press, a train or a ship. Everyone would pitch in to bring the olives to the press: women carrying open containers on their heads, men sacks on their shoulders and donkeys heavier ones on their backs. The olives were piled up in one of the wide concrete-rimmed basins along the sidewall of the babour. We all hung around and waited our turn. My father would be torn between using his prerogative as the brother of the owner of the press to secure an early turn and his wish not to alienate strangers and loose their business. When our turn came, the two baddads, or press workers, shabby dress and unwashed skin thoroughly drenched with the semi-sacred juice of the olive, would start dipping their measuring devices, Jeri cans opened at the top and with hefty sticks affixed across them as handles, and delivering their content under the two huge rotating stones while keeping count so that they put aside every twelfth measure as charge for the chore.
As a child I would stand to the side and try to memorize the entertaining counting system they used, the same one I would hear my parents using when measuring out olive oil or wheat from our field to sell to a merchant or to another villager. The counting system relies on altering the Arabic words for the numbers one to ten to expressions of blessing the produce, the moment and the contract of sale to protect from envy and the evil eye. It goes something like this: Baraki, blessing, for one; min karim, God’s generous gift, for two, … samha, forgiveness, for seven, yella el-amani, God’s trust, for eight, and so on. Those alternative numbers would be shouted loud and clear to overcome the noise of the machinery in the press. Yet the same was done also in the calm of our house, the blessing numbers repeated several times each while my parents scooped out the produce to fill the standard volume measure in use, the ratil for oil and the saa’ for wheat. The party at the receiving end of the transaction often would repeat the same pronouncement in equally loud and reverential voice. The whole process had a ritualistic serenity to it and would put my parents and their interlocutors in a semi-trance not unlike the one they entered into five times a day to perform their prayers.
As a child and a member of the owner’s extended family my presence in the inner sanctum of the press was tolerated by the beddads and their bosses, my older cousins, who frequently kept an eye on what was happening there. I was fascinated by the mechanical magic of the process from beginning to end. Every so often one of the workers would reach under the humongous rotating stones and swipe a handful of the crushed olives to assess how fine the mush has become. When he judged it right a side outlet would be opened manually and the pulp pushed out by the metal side arms attached to the rotating stones. Donut-shaped flat jute baskets are filled with the crushed pulp and stacked up around the central metal rod jutting from the base component of a hydraulic press. As the pressure is applied with the turning of a lever the precious fluid flows into massive vats on the side. Jift, the solid refuse remaining after all the liquid has been pressed, is an excellent fuel valued by housewives for heating, cooking and baking of bread.
For hours at end I would sit atop a pile of jift, enjoy the warmth emanating from its fermenting innards, and wait for the moment when a mechanical failure occurred so I could go closer and touch all the magic parts of the engine. Babours were the only modern mechanical equipment in our village. On the very rare occasion when a taxi arrived from the city, we children would run after it and compete in sneaking a ride on the back fender till the driver would stop and chase us away. With the advent of WWII the British established a training camp at the edge of our village and we got the chance to ride in their armored trucks and even tanks, thanks to our mutual curiosity with so many thick mustachioed Sikh’s, nimble Indians, and skeleton-thin Senegalese conscripts.
What fascinated me most as I sat in my warm jift perch was the two piston engine mounted such that the two arms, ‘dancers’ the beddads called them in warning me to keep away from them, stood upright and alternated in their labored up-sideways-then-downward strokes to force the metal rim that transmitted the mechanical energy through thick leather belts to all the moving parts of the press. I would watch and watch till I would fall asleep marveling at the fact that those two dancers never once moved out of synch with each other. Still today, the hypnotic effect of the synchronous circular motion of the two pistons hugging the opposite sides of the metal rim and cooperatively moving it round and round provides a better remedy for my occasional insomnia than the flock of sheep jumping over that imaginary green fence.
There were no electric centrifuges in those days, only huge open barrels in the dark back area of the babour, for the mixed extract to sit in. Within hours the oil would float to the top and be decanted into smaller containers and carried home to be stored in large glazed ceramic jars imported from France where they apparently were intended originally for wine storage. As I sit now in my study I look out at one of the half-dozen jars that my family once owned and that I now display in my center courtyard atop a wine press stone dating back few centuries before Christ. Those jars were bought, I was told, from Gazan traders who transported them on camelback from Jaffa’s port to outlying villages.
The day we pressed our olives would always end with a gala celebration. My mother would have made a stack of msachan, bread soaked in fresh olive oil, topped with chopped onions flavored with sumac and sweet paprika, and roasted with chickens in our outdoor oven, the taboun. For the finale we always indulged in a treat of sweets, especially halva bartered from the country store for a ratil or two of oil.
As the oil was skimmed off in frequent consecutive visits from my parents to the final fruit of their year-long labor, the separating oil would diminish to the thinnest of layers. My mother would carefully and patiently touch her flat palm to the liquid surface, bring it out over a flat container held in her other hand and with the tips of her fingers massage the drops of oil from it in a repetitive milking motion. The process even has a specific term for it locally, yqaffi. The minor impurities floating in the oil gave it an additional bite, a burning aftertaste that I never ceased to appreciate. To this day, my favorite dish in season is fresh olive oil savored with freshly-baked flat bread and a few green onion leaves. Recently I have discovered that you can freeze the special fresh taste of olive oil direct from the press. I have several liter-size bottles in my freezer. Especially when Didi is not around to force a proper meal on me, that is what I eat.
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