Sept. 5, 2009
Dear Jane,
Welcome aboard to the rank and file of those working for peace and justice in the Middle East. I never in my wildest dreams imagined that the day will come when I would be a step ahead of you in another effort to save humanity from itself. In the heady days of the nineteen sixties I marched against the war in Vietnam because you did. You were then, and you still are today, an idol of worship and adulation to me and my generation. To read now of your joining ‘my’ struggle for justice for the Palestinians, another different people in another faraway land, is as fantastic, refreshing and inspiring as reading the news of Rosalyn and Jimmy Carter fasting with the people of Gaza. Imagine how stirring such news to a people on the verge of losing hope in all of humanity for the way it has abandoned them.
As I read the news of your joining the group of more than 50 prominent international filmmakers, writers, artists and academics who have signed a letter protesting the Toronto International Film Festival’s spotlighting of Israel in its forthcoming season I am tempted to embark on a range of grandiose schemes: I want to write the signatories to invite all of them to join the Palestinian Friday Bil’in villager’s demonstration against the apartheid wall that had separated them from their olive fields and farmland just as the group of The Elders did recently. But then Bil’in is in another land illegal for me to enter and its people are another people illegal for me to contact; on occasion I sneak illegally there and join the demonstration. But should I one day fall in love with a fellow Palestinian from Bil’in she can never join me in my home in Galilee. My Jewish neighbor not only can fall in love and marry across borders but is actively encouraged to do so provided the bride is another Jew who would help buttress Israel’s Jewishness. Can you comprehend the underlying racism!
So let us leave Bil’in alone for now. I am dreaming instead of hosting you in my neck of the woods, in Galilee, the stomping ground of the youthful Jesus. It would be indeed an honor to serve as your guide on your pilgrimage here. I am not a Christian but I do revere Jesus and know well his hometown of Nazareth where I attended high school a few years before we ‘met’ on those anti-war marches in California and DC. And if you want a more faith-based tour then Dolores, my wife and fellow marcher from the 1960s could do the honor of guiding you to all the holy sights of Nazareth. Incidentally, did you know that as a Muslim and a Christian we couldn’t have married across the denominational boundary in Israel? Be that as it may, we both would love to accompany you on your tour of Galilee and could take you to the homes of some of our Jewish friends.
And in Nazareth I would like to introduce you to my friend, Taha Muhammad Ali, acclaimed as “probably the most accessible and delightful poet alive today.” And while you chose some of the souvenirs on display in his shop I will impose on him to read us in his own hesitant and raspy septuagenarian voice from his “Revenge’ poem. Here for your perusal is how Peter Cole, Yahya Hijazi, and Gabriel Levin translate it from the Arabic original
At times … I wish
I could meet in a duel
the man who killed my father
and razed our home,
expelling me
into
a narrow country.
And if he killed me,
I’d rest at last,
and if I were ready—
I would take my revenge!
*
But if it came to light,
when my rival appeared,
that he had a mother
waiting for him,
or a father who’d put
his right hand over
the heart’s place in his chest
whenever his son was late
even by just a quarter-hour
for a meeting they’d set—
then I would not kill him,
even if I could.
*
Likewise … I
would not murder him
if it were soon made clear
that he had a brother or sisters
who loved him and constantly longed to see him.
Or if he had a wife to greet him
and children who
couldn’t bear his absence
and whom his gifts would thrill.
Or if he had
friends or companions,
neighbors he knew
or allies from prison
or a hospital room,
or classmates from his school …
asking about him
and sending him regards.
*
But if he turned
out to be on his own—
cut off like a branch from a tree—
without a mother or father,
with neither a brother nor sister,
wifeless, without a child,
and without kin or neighbors or friends,
colleagues or companions,
then I’d add not a thing to his pain
within that aloneness—
not the torment of death,
and not the sorrow of passing away.
Instead I’d be content
to ignore him when I passed him by
on the street—as I
convinced myself
that paying him no attention
in itself was a kind of revenge.
And if the spirit moves you, you may want to accompany Taha on a brief tear-jerking visit to the ruins of his village Saffuriyya, from which he and his family were violently expelled to make place for Jewish immigrants in turn unwanted in their place of residence in Christian Europe. We all share a measure of guilt for what happened to Jews in Europe, if for nothing else then at least for belonging to the same species as those Nazi monsters. But then again, you also share your cultural roots with them while Taha and I wound up paying up the guilt money for ‘your’ crime. Sorry to bring this up but every once in a while one needs to state the obvious just for the record.
Let me make that up to you, Jane! I will invite you to a cup of coffee, my special brew of hazelnut flavored Kona coffee (my wife is from Hawaii and we are kept in good supply of the world famous bean by friends and relatives in the islands) sipped in the afternoon Mediterranean breeze in the shade of the multi-millennia-old Roman olive tree in my front yard. You see, in the 1948 Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe), for reasons beyond our comprehension, we were spared the same fate as Taha’s and I still live on land that has been in my family for so many generations I have lost count. Apparently my folks came from the original stock of this area, Canaanites (for that is where my family name derives from) who may have intermixed with another Semitic group, the Jews and possibly adopted their faith converting later to Christianity and then, later yet, to Islam with all the attendant admixture of genes from all the conquerors who crisscrossed the region: Hyksos, Egyption, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Persian, crusaders, … and the list goes on. I can hardly prove any of this to you, but neither can those who subscribe to the biblical myths of King David et. al. and of the Hebraic ethnic identity of all of Europe’s Ashkenazi Jews prove any of their claims.
But I digress. Back to my invitation: You have to come for your visit soon. A bully, recently arrived from Moldova, plans to take my home, garden and olive tree away from me and to send me packing across the border I don’t exactly know to where. And the man is no small fry; he is the foreign minister of the most powerful country and the only nuclear power in the Middle East, sustained, aided and abetted by your country. And his plan is acceptable to the clear majority of my fellow citizens of Israel. Perhaps if you come to visit me I can explain more. But do come because your visit may well give another glimpse of hope for all of the desperate peaceniks here, Arabs and Jews alike.
I am vain enough to think that you, Joan Baez and I stopped the Vietnam War. Perhaps we can change the course of history here as well.
By the way, whatever happened to Joan?
Monday, September 7, 2009
Wednesday, September 2, 2009
China Revisited
August 4, 2009
At the break of dawn this morning I got out of bed to urinate. It was still dark and I felt hot and sweaty in the Chinese forest temple where I had fallen asleep on the edge of a cot in front of an altar. The overwhelming scent of incense made my stomach turn. I groped my way toward a wisp of morning light around the altar stand that was cut into the side of a huge tree trunk. But I walked into a solid wall. I turned and headed in a different direction in the dark and unfamiliar maze. With my mounting bladder urgency I frantically sought a way to the outdoor. It would be really pleasant, I felt, to stand between the rows of corn in those lovely and well-tended farm plots we walked through in Michael’s home village and piss in the breeze. Or to relieve myself in that traditional outhouse in his grandfather’s yard that was so traditional that I had to take a picture of its seating arrangement. Hands extended before me I kept traipsing around and hitting tree trunks, locked doors, solid walls and massive statues in the strange temple. Till my hands fell upon a recognizable object, the buckle of my wide belt still threaded in a pair of jeans draped over the back of my imitation-leather office chair. What in the name of heaven is my office chair doing in this side shack of the Chinese temple? I had no recollection of taking my clothes off or of how I got into the temple in the first place. I suddenly realized that something unusual was happening. I felt my way back to the edge of the cot, sat down and summoned all my reserve analytical brainpower under the physiologic stress of the urge to empty my bladder: When I got out of the bed it was Michael, our Shanghai host, who was sharing the cot with me. I now reached over to wake him up and ask for his ever-ready assistance. My hand touched another familiar object, my wife’s buttock. She reeked of the Tiger Balm ointment she had applied to her aching knees challenged in the extreme only two days earlier by climbing down 1600 steps from a Taoist holy site followed by a walking tour of Confucius Temple compound. In a wakeful flash I suddenly realized where I actually was. I reached over, turned my bedside light on, and walked to the bathroom.
I had been sleepwalking in a vivid dream for the first time in my life. China had stirred me beyond reason.
On July 29, 2009, another strange event had taken place in the village of Dongmajia, in Zhaoyuan county of Shandong province. It will probably be remembered for years to come not only by Didi and me but also by over a hundred Chinese villagers. Judging by the way everyone in the village acted it must have been the most memorable thing that had ever happened there since the liberation of the region by the Red Army: A strange-looking foreign couple were the guests of honor at a wedding there. And we were that couple.
And two days later, on the evening of July 31, I was paid a great compliment: We were eating dinner at a restaurant in Zibo, a Chinese eatery maintaining the old regional rural culinary style and atmosphere. Pictures of all the communist big shots adorned the walls, from Engels and Marx through Chairman Mao and the six field marshals of the Liberation Army all the way down to the current presidency of China. We were hosted by the locals: the librarian sister of our primary host, her young teenage daughter, both with sufficient English fluency for basic communication, and her civil servant husband. I felt a certain intimacy with the pleasant mother and daughter team struggling to keep us engaged on subjects of food and family. They had presented us with a real China cup and saucer decorated with a classic motif. But what endeared the two to me more was the fact that the daughter had recently recovered from a bout of glumerulonephritis, a nasty and life-threatening disease, and the mother questioned me about the future prognosis for her girl. That put me back in my old benevolent caregiver mode where empathy with a mother concerned about her child counted at least as much as the medicines I prescribed.
Then my temporary emotional high was suddenly interrupted. The husband spoke no English and was deep in conversation with his brother-in-law. I was gnawing at the last morsel of the tendons on a knuckle I extracted from the donkey stew that we had ordered. (Sorry if that turns your stomach! Would it have been better to change the item to a lamb shoulder or to pig trotters? You either are a carnivore or not a carnivore; if you are, then the kind of carnie you devour is only of secondary importance.) Suddenly Michael turned to us and said:
“We are talking about you. My brother-in-law works in the city’s Department of Social Services. I have told him about the two of you. He says that their ministry gives an annual prize for individuals who set a good example of volunteerism and service to others. He thinks that he would have nominated you if you two were citizens of the country.”
He may have been just trying to humor us. But the sudden unsolicited praise caused the chopsticks in my hand to quiver and the bone to drop in my shirt pocket. How come no Israeli official has ever thought of that, I wondered? Had we belonged to the Chosen People we would certainly have been rewarded. Or if I were another Palestinian physician who had three of his children executed by the Israeli ‘Defense’ Forces and still blurted empty slogans of love and peace, I would certainly have been rewarded.
But this all happened in the second half of our second trip to China. First we visited the province of Yunnan where we started with a stop at Stone Forest.
Stone Forest, not far from Kunming, the capital of Yunnan, is just that: a wild natural forest made out of rock. Not much can be added to the descriptive name in terms of a comment on the phenomenal outcropping of carstic rock that has been sculpted by natural forces and the flow of water over eons of years. The awe inspired by the scene forces one to fall back on the old cliché that a picture is better than a thousand words. And that is exactly what we did here and all along the three week trip; we took hundreds of pictures of natural scenery, of man-made edifices, of exotic and inspiring human forms and fashions, but above all of faces: faces of friends and acquaintances, faces of total strangers, of children and the aged, and of just about anyone we saw that had specially expressive features, faces shining with inner peace, trust and hope. And, of course, pictures of the two of us and of our beloved hosts, adding up together to the perfect three layered generational family package: Two children, their two parents and us, the adoptive or rather adopted grandparents. The Confucian tradition of filial piety and respect bordering on worship for one’s elders put us in the enviable position of demigods to whom the two younger generations in our group kowtowed and gave preference and primacy. Add to that the attentive care of the accompanying aunt of the family, attentive to every need of ours despite the absolute language barrier between us, who fits in the group rather well socially and chronologically, being of an age to be our daughter had we started procreating early, and you have a perfect setup for an enjoyable family vacation in the natural wonders of this beautiful region known to the Chinese as The Land of Eternal Spring.
This time around, our second visit to China, both times as guests of Michael and Limie Jiang, friends and former associates of our son, has a different flavor altogether. On our first visit our itinerary was planned as a sightseeing tour for visiting foreigners. This time we are joining the Jiangs on their holiday, seeing China as the Chinese see it. Originally the plan was to tour the more exotic Xinjiang but the outbreak of violent ethnic clashes in the region caused the travel agency to cancel all scheduled tours of the area for the summer. Our hosts switched their vacation destination to Yunnan and we followed suit. They must have taken our preference for rural environs into consideration for we wound up joining a busload of middle-class Shanghiese to a series of rural charming localities in Yunnan with a focus on the province’s exotic minority groups. The full exoticism of China having faded after our one-month long first tour, we were now looking at the matter as if through Chinese eyes, sharing our hosts’ experience and figuring things the way they do.
On the whole, most Chinese seem to deal with life as if they were totally neutral in terms of internal politics; The Communist Party runs the show and ‘we’ all trust in the ability of the leaders to make the right decisions. If political meddling is left alone, as it most certainly it was in the case of everyone we spoke to or associated with on this trip, China can be experienced as a most citizen-friendly system. For example, one is hardly aware of the existence of the traffic police. The speed and slalom-driving style of our bus driver combined with his minority ethnicity would have earned him a long rest in the slammer in an uptight legalistic system with ‘minority sensibilities’ like Israel’s. And at least on one occasion we associated socially with few village-level officials and they seemed like very decent people, not the sleaze balls they usually are in my community.
Yunnan had enough negative attributes to alienate me had I heard about it from a distance: Its financial prosperity derives mainly from its tobacco farming, a fact alone sufficient to dismay a public health hardliner like me. Add to that the indisputable fact that it is the world capital of mushrooms, the façade of many a house along our travel rout being decorated with murals of every shape and type of mushroom that exists from toadstools to the massive tree-leaf variety adorning the dilapidated trunks of old trees. Not that I have a gripe in principle with mushroom growing. It is rather a personal matter: It has taken me and my gastroenterologist colleague the better part of the last two years to discover the cause of my frequent intestinal obstruction-like attacks. Despite a most thorough work-up with multiple blood, urine and stool analysis and all the imaging procedures at the disposal of modern medicine requiring multiple technicians to assail my innards with their dredging equipment and contrast materials, the explanation remained a mystery. Till my village friend, Toufiq, overdid his hospitality routine with two cook-ups of a favorite dish of his, broccoli and mushrooms, and noticed that both times I started wreathing with intestinal colic an hour after the delicious meal. On further experimentation I confirmed his suspicion of a newly acquired sensitivity to mushrooms, formerly one of my favorite dishes, what with its zero calorie count and its old village romantic image as ‘the meat dish of the poor.’
And Yunnan has snakes, the curse that has inhabited my wife’s worst nightmares since ever she left snake-free Hawaii. Dali was the capital of a proud and separate nation from China till the Moguls conquered it some seven centuries ago. Today it is a major destination of internal tourism with a unique and engaging ambiance and a major Buddhist shrine, the Santasi (Three Pagoda) Temple. While stopping for a lunch break, we ventured to a visibly imposing old Pagoda, realizing that we lacked the time for a full visit to the Santasi Temple. Our taxi driver gave us the insiders’ scoop: It was named the Snake Pagoda in honor of the town’s legendary hero famed for ridding it of a massive snake that had menaced the farmers in the region for years, sacrificing his own life in the process. But with the dominance of the Three-Pagoda temple this one has fallen to disrepair and neglect. As we arrived to the out of-the-way compound the gate was barred with a length of bamboo pole which Michael pushed to the side. As we alighted from the car and headed to the abandoned structure at the far end of the enclosure, a woman we thought must be blind emerged from an equally ancient home to the side and came toward us swishing a long and thin bamboo stick on the surface of the ground overgrown with wild grass and bramble. She warned us not to go any further without the use of a similar stick; the grass was thoroughly infested with cobras. We beat a quick retreat.
In village after beautiful village in the green hilly countryside we came to appreciate the enviable Feng Shui geo-positioning of such communities with the requisite mountain behind it to the north, a river in front to the south and fertile fields on both sides. It is hard not to see the views as a series of brush strokes by a giant master artist. Houses are preferably oriented with the same plan as well, though China’s cities’ overcrowding has done away with such considerations in so many public housing divisions, not to mention those of the slum we found ourselves in late one night.
But that came later. In Yunnan our tour guide, himself a colorful member of a colorful local minority, went on for hours at end about what a great place the province was: It doesn’t take much imagination to see the outline of China’s map as a chicken. Yunnan corresponds with the part that lays the eggs. And what golden eggs it does produce, including 80% of China’s famed leaders and one third of China’s tax revenues, mostly from Dali’s tobacco agriculture. Dali’s unique historical grandeur and its long record of resistance to Mongol invaders was transmitted to us diluted and contracted down through translation. What seemed to enthuse our tour guide even more was the long spiel he gave about Tibet. He even sang a song allegedly written by the sixth Dalai Lama whom he informed us was a dandy and a womanizer. Though the man, a deity to his people, lived before air travel was known to man, the song spoke of how sweet it was to land from the air into Lhasa’s airport. Our guide proceeded to be down on Tibet picturing it as a dead-end stinking hole of little saving graces. It sounded like the man had a grudge against Tibet and its people, perhaps part of an inter-minority feud or something.
In Lejiang we witnessed the cultural edifices of the Naxi and the historical old city that has been granted the status of a World Heritage Site by UNISCO. The Naxi minority has the distinction of being a matriarchal polygamist society and, like the Tibetans, several brothers can share the same wife or vise versa. And they have the only living hieroglyphic written language in the world. Lejiang, their capital, has an endearing mix of natural beauty stemming from the layout of the ancient market town around a branching tame river together with a delicately reconstructed walls, waterwheels and cascading stone houses down the side of the hill that have been refashioned into tourist facilities. Somehow, the touristic hype doesn’t diminish the ancient town’s charm, thus turning it into the Chinese honeymooners’ Mecca. We walked along the riverbank one evening and soaked in some of the loud western music blaring out of the congested bars and the gaiety of the raucous nightlife and appreciated the magic of it all: a capital of exoticism, history, and joyful youthfulness. Somehow it symbolizes the stored regenerative energy of the Chinese people, their ongoing burst of reclaiming their history and their flourishing promise.
Then there were the other natural wonders of the high mountains of the region: The Jade Dragon Snow Mountain with its live glaciers and the Pu Dacuo Natuional Park, fashioned to match in its scenery and size that of Yellowstone Park in the Rockies. Here again, it seems, generalizing is of the essence: The majority of the thousands of internal tourists took the advice of the guide, rented a full-length warm coat and purchased a mini oxygen tank for the trek. We did neither and walked a total of over seven kilometers with little distress from the low temperature or the thin air. This led me to accuse my fellow internal tourists of innocent consumerism: a guide interested in his kickback from a store recommends an item and everyone falls for the trick. That wouldn’t have happened with most of your hard boiled American tourists. Yet the Chinese rightly pride themselves on their hardiness and endurance, witness the heroic Long March of which we were reminded on more occasions than one whenever we crossed a bridge or narrow pass where the Liberation Army crossed.
In Shangri-La, another exotic town granted the name only recently in hope of attracting tourists, we had a full yak experience: We ate yak stew, drank yak yogurt and munched on yak cheese with homemade buckwheat thins. I could resist no more and successfully bargained with an old woman for a yak bone inscribed with some Naxi blessings in Naxi hieroglyphic script. From another woman I bought a yak horn fossil at a fifth of the asking price in full expectation of it being a fake.
For a full week I travelled next to a man whose face looked quite familiar. His very short stature and disproportioned arms added to the sense of familiarity though I couldn’t quite place the character. Till my wife made a comment and it clicked: Indeed he was a spitting image of Yitzhak Shamir, the underground leader of the Stern Gang during the British Mandate destined to become Israel’s prime minister. Except that this one spat in Chinese. It was on our long walk through the Pu Dacuo National Park, shortly before the near full eclipse of the sun gave added magic to the nature scene around us, a lush expansive meadow with a huge lake all in the midst of a thick green forest. A fellow traveler with minimal English fluency asked where I was from. When I answered she and half a dozen other hikers in their long red coats and with their oxygen tanks hanging from their elbows failed to recognize any of the names I mentioned: Nazareth, Palestine, Israel, Gaza, and Jerusalem, When I said ‘The Holy Land’ she smiled widely and explained to her group including my bus neighbor with the familiar face: “Holland!”
That is when my wife said: “At least he should know; he looks like Shamir.” In fact I was happy to be away from it all, to be free of the fatal pull of the black hole named Israel/ Palestine. I was cut off from the internet and engulfed by masses that never even heard of my homicidal background. Only on one occasion a learned and well-to-do man who hosted our friends, and us by extension, seemed familiar with Middle East issues. He recalled marching in his college days in demonstrations in support of ‘the Palestinian man with the funny headdress.’ He then posed the challenging question to me of: “Why is peace evading you in the Middle East for so long?”
Not wanting to spoil the party’s dinner or to burden my friends with the job of translating a long soliloquy, I tried to be very brief:
“The inalienable rights of the Palestinians have been totally trampled by Israel which feels free to do what it wants because the USA, the strongest player in the international arena, has given it full and blind support. Neither side is willing to compromise to the degree demanded by the other. The Palestinians ask for justice and recognition and Israel asks for them to disappear as a people. It is time China stepped in to put an end to the only colonial project still in progress in today’s world.”
Perhaps I even put it more concisely. Discussion ended with the serving of the soup.
In Kunming we had an unplanned visit with a Muslim family, a young couple who had just opened a soft drink and ice cream shop and their mother who hovered around the tiny shop with her hijab style dress and offered sunflower seeds to waiting customers. Like most Muslims in the region she was a member of the Ma, knew herself to be a Muslim, and recognized the Arabic script prayer affixed above the door of the shop when I read it but couldn’t read herself. The whole family seemed pleased to have us visit the shop and may have taken it as a good omen to have a Muslim from the land of al-Aqsa mosque enter their shop on its day of opening. We enquired about other children and she informed us that she had another daughter with whom she usually stays; the daughter had married a Li who is not a Muslim and has one child, the reason the grandmother stays with the couple so as to be sure it doesn’t grow up in the tradition of the Li. This struck me as a little strange given the fact that most Muslim restaurants we ate at offered alcohol and that the old woman was the only one I had noticed wearing the traditional Islamic garb.
We then flew back to Shanghai. We needed a little rest from the incomprehensible guide’s loudspeaker. The continuous raspy cacophonous sing-song of his harangues was getting to us. After a day’s rest we hit the road again, this time in the Jiangs’ private car, Michael serving as pilot, guide, translator and overall organizer. Our first stop was at a costal village outside of the city of Rizhao. The children enjoyed clamming at low tide after which we had a wealth of fresh seafood for dinner. The next morning Didi ad I rose early and took a walk in the village. The proprietor of the mini-beachfront motel we stayed at would not let us out of his sight. When we stopped at a small shack with a few rickety shelves stocked with canned goods, toys, cigarettes and candies he followed us in. We bought a food item, paid for it and then I picked up the shopkeepers abacus and enquired about its worth using hand gestures. The man dismissed the idea out of hand. I made an offer of RMB 20 and proceeded to show more bills till I made an offer of RMB 50, the equivalent of seven US dollars and a half. He seemed troubled but continued to wave his hand in a dismissive gesture. He offered me a plastic toy abacus but I insisted on taking the real thing. Didi kept asking me to stop it out of a sense of pity for the old shopkeeper figuring that he must have a deep attachment to the grimy old article. Our companion then stepped in, grabbed the money from my hand and forced it on the shopkeeper. The deal was sealed and we shook hands and took pictures together. Down the road the farmers market was in full swing and our friend came through again acquiring a handheld scale for me for RMB 30. On the way back he kept taking out the two items and showing them to the neighbors who beamed at us, nodded their heads in approval and muttered in Chinese. Our friend seemed proud of us and our achievement. But then he could have been making fun of us. Who knows!
Then came the absolute highlight of the whole trip. True, we enjoyed the sightseeing and the multitude of natural wonders and cultural fêtes that we saw so far in this exotic land. But we usually find the social encounters and sharing in the lives of other peoples, despite the language and culture barrier, much more meaningful and unforgettable. Add to that the common bond I automatically sense with villagers and their agricultural surroundings. Our hosts knew this and saw to it that we would be exposed to their rural roots in the most authentic way possible. We drove up to the Jiang’s ancestral village where we met Michael’s parents and his grandfather, the recognized community wise man and predictor of things to come who had built the house in which Michael grew up and which is still kept in its original solid form with the traditional stove releasing its appetizing smells throughout the house and its hot fumes through the traditional zigzag air vent that runs under the brick bed stand.
The gracious parents who divide their time between this traditional village dwelling of the aging wise grandfather and their city apartment had arranged for us to visit two neighbors and to the fields so as to appreciate the life of average villagers still engaged in farming, in building their families, and in modernizing their homes. Our estimate of the cost of some of the upscale new bedroom sets that we saw ran up to ten fold of the actual price. Yet the grandfather’s storage rooms had such a variety of used tools, stoneware, pots and pans that I found it even more enticing for the constant clicking of my camera.
Then came the wedding party to which the good father had arranged an invitation for us. He advised us about what is expected from us as honor guests, about the box of sweets and the amount of the monitory gift placed in a red envelope that we should present to the groom (RMB 800 and not 1000 because of the good luck associated with number 8), and about the speech I should make. First we joined the bride’s family, took group pictures with them, partook of the food and drink at the joyfully decorated home, and then had our car decorated as well and drove as part of the bride’s entourage. As she stepped into her car, assisted by two elder uncles and welcomed by the groom’s family representative, her sisters and other family members proceeded to load her car and other accompanying ones with traditional presents of silken pillows and bed-covers and other household items. The strangest items however were the various sizable animal forms and dragons and the smallish decorative flowers all fashioned out of baked dough, part of which was forced upon us at the end of the formal proceedings as mementos from the auspicious occasion.
Every step of the bride, and later on of the groom, was guided by the professional wedding director and recorded by the professional photographer, the two outsiders (except for us) in the whole process. We first drove to a city park on the way to the grooms village some 15Km away. There the wedding director insisted on having us pose with the bridal couple for one photo after the other. It was rather embarrassing but we took it all in our stride and clowned our way through it all.
As the bridal entourage arrived at the groom’s village the real excitement began: The entrance of the village was decorated with a red inflated plastic arch in the shape of a dragon. As the bride alighted from her car various family members, hers and the groom’s, tended to her every movement including putting her red sandals on her feet as she stepped out on the red carpet, crossing under the arch to trumpet music and the tremendous explosive sound of fireworks and of the dozen canon shots spreading confetti over her head as she advanced supported on the arm of the groom. Every few steps she would slow down while few village men rushed to grab the length of red carpet that she had cleared and run with it to cover another few meters of the dirt road ahead of her. Till the party arrived to the groom’s family home and the groom was instructed to carry her up the ramp which he did despite the incessant heckling and blocking of his older brother. It was all done with much laughter, gaiety and applause of the younger generation of villagers. The parents-in-law had been seated on two chairs in the courtyard of their house. And the wedding organizer proceeded to cheer the bride on and instruct and quiz her on her feelings toward the new parents. After this formal greeting I was introduced to the crowd and asked to give a word of blessing to the bridal couple which I managed to do hoping that it would sound better in translation than it sounded in English. Finally the bridal couple was put through an entertaining set of exercises including eating a length of noodle each starting at one end and advancing till their teeth touched and downing a drink each simultaneously while ones arm is looped around the other’s neck. The organizer continued with more such acrobatics after leading the couple to their bridal bed having them sit cross-legged and facing each other while family children and women crowded the tiny bedroom giggling and screaming with delight.
At this point we were led out to the adjacent village communal facility where the festive feast was being served. But not before the groom’s brother led us to the family’s pigpen where we were introduced to the siblings of the one we were about to be served. We sat in the special room with only two tables and not in the larger one where most of those attending crowded. One of the two tables was for the elders of the groom’s and the bride’s families. On our table we were joined by such honor guests as the young elected village secretary, and the regional interior ministry official as well as a couple of local venerable former officials who proceeded to relate to us through our good translator their record of service to their community and nation. Michael’s father joined the same table but did not mention his record of service. Immediately after his graduation from college he was assigned to a job in a far away province where he served till age forty, able to see his young wife and children only once a year. At one point I brought up the subject of minorities and heard a series of mild objections to the central government’s policies of positive discrimination such as exempting minorities from the one-child limit on reproduction or the higher priority for minority students at college.
As the thirty-plus course feast proceeded we were toasted again and again, each fellow celebrant insisting on a series of three drinks; one for the bridal couple, one for us the honor guests, and one for whatever the occasion called to his or her mind. I labored under the influence to find an appropriate toast that would reflect my admiration for all these guys’ record of service and at the same time include me. I could neither toast ‘our’ countries’ minority policies nor ‘our’ record of service to ‘our’ countries. At last I found the courage to stand up and toast their record of service to their country. It left a bitter taste in my mouth though it was the only glass I emptied to the end as they had been demanding from me to do in every toast. I have no country. It just doesn’t feel good to be an orphan, not to belong.
Perhaps I should seek political asylum in China, join one of its 56 minorities and see if that may not quench my thirst for belonging. Historically an American physician of Syrian origin with the last name of Hatim accompanied Chairman Mao on the Long March. Would that bit of history facilitate my entry in the system, I wonder? Would it give me a shot at the first spot in China’s hierarchy? After all, a Georgian headed Russia and a black is now the president of the USA. So why shouldn’t I dream of becoming the emperor of China? My plans for reforms I would dictate from that position are simple and straightforward: Ban men from rolling up their T-shirts on hot days, offer silicon breast implants free of charge for young women, and impose the introduction of the technology of the water seal in all rural bathrooms.
And stop all arms trade with Israel.
At the break of dawn this morning I got out of bed to urinate. It was still dark and I felt hot and sweaty in the Chinese forest temple where I had fallen asleep on the edge of a cot in front of an altar. The overwhelming scent of incense made my stomach turn. I groped my way toward a wisp of morning light around the altar stand that was cut into the side of a huge tree trunk. But I walked into a solid wall. I turned and headed in a different direction in the dark and unfamiliar maze. With my mounting bladder urgency I frantically sought a way to the outdoor. It would be really pleasant, I felt, to stand between the rows of corn in those lovely and well-tended farm plots we walked through in Michael’s home village and piss in the breeze. Or to relieve myself in that traditional outhouse in his grandfather’s yard that was so traditional that I had to take a picture of its seating arrangement. Hands extended before me I kept traipsing around and hitting tree trunks, locked doors, solid walls and massive statues in the strange temple. Till my hands fell upon a recognizable object, the buckle of my wide belt still threaded in a pair of jeans draped over the back of my imitation-leather office chair. What in the name of heaven is my office chair doing in this side shack of the Chinese temple? I had no recollection of taking my clothes off or of how I got into the temple in the first place. I suddenly realized that something unusual was happening. I felt my way back to the edge of the cot, sat down and summoned all my reserve analytical brainpower under the physiologic stress of the urge to empty my bladder: When I got out of the bed it was Michael, our Shanghai host, who was sharing the cot with me. I now reached over to wake him up and ask for his ever-ready assistance. My hand touched another familiar object, my wife’s buttock. She reeked of the Tiger Balm ointment she had applied to her aching knees challenged in the extreme only two days earlier by climbing down 1600 steps from a Taoist holy site followed by a walking tour of Confucius Temple compound. In a wakeful flash I suddenly realized where I actually was. I reached over, turned my bedside light on, and walked to the bathroom.
I had been sleepwalking in a vivid dream for the first time in my life. China had stirred me beyond reason.
On July 29, 2009, another strange event had taken place in the village of Dongmajia, in Zhaoyuan county of Shandong province. It will probably be remembered for years to come not only by Didi and me but also by over a hundred Chinese villagers. Judging by the way everyone in the village acted it must have been the most memorable thing that had ever happened there since the liberation of the region by the Red Army: A strange-looking foreign couple were the guests of honor at a wedding there. And we were that couple.
And two days later, on the evening of July 31, I was paid a great compliment: We were eating dinner at a restaurant in Zibo, a Chinese eatery maintaining the old regional rural culinary style and atmosphere. Pictures of all the communist big shots adorned the walls, from Engels and Marx through Chairman Mao and the six field marshals of the Liberation Army all the way down to the current presidency of China. We were hosted by the locals: the librarian sister of our primary host, her young teenage daughter, both with sufficient English fluency for basic communication, and her civil servant husband. I felt a certain intimacy with the pleasant mother and daughter team struggling to keep us engaged on subjects of food and family. They had presented us with a real China cup and saucer decorated with a classic motif. But what endeared the two to me more was the fact that the daughter had recently recovered from a bout of glumerulonephritis, a nasty and life-threatening disease, and the mother questioned me about the future prognosis for her girl. That put me back in my old benevolent caregiver mode where empathy with a mother concerned about her child counted at least as much as the medicines I prescribed.
Then my temporary emotional high was suddenly interrupted. The husband spoke no English and was deep in conversation with his brother-in-law. I was gnawing at the last morsel of the tendons on a knuckle I extracted from the donkey stew that we had ordered. (Sorry if that turns your stomach! Would it have been better to change the item to a lamb shoulder or to pig trotters? You either are a carnivore or not a carnivore; if you are, then the kind of carnie you devour is only of secondary importance.) Suddenly Michael turned to us and said:
“We are talking about you. My brother-in-law works in the city’s Department of Social Services. I have told him about the two of you. He says that their ministry gives an annual prize for individuals who set a good example of volunteerism and service to others. He thinks that he would have nominated you if you two were citizens of the country.”
He may have been just trying to humor us. But the sudden unsolicited praise caused the chopsticks in my hand to quiver and the bone to drop in my shirt pocket. How come no Israeli official has ever thought of that, I wondered? Had we belonged to the Chosen People we would certainly have been rewarded. Or if I were another Palestinian physician who had three of his children executed by the Israeli ‘Defense’ Forces and still blurted empty slogans of love and peace, I would certainly have been rewarded.
But this all happened in the second half of our second trip to China. First we visited the province of Yunnan where we started with a stop at Stone Forest.
Stone Forest, not far from Kunming, the capital of Yunnan, is just that: a wild natural forest made out of rock. Not much can be added to the descriptive name in terms of a comment on the phenomenal outcropping of carstic rock that has been sculpted by natural forces and the flow of water over eons of years. The awe inspired by the scene forces one to fall back on the old cliché that a picture is better than a thousand words. And that is exactly what we did here and all along the three week trip; we took hundreds of pictures of natural scenery, of man-made edifices, of exotic and inspiring human forms and fashions, but above all of faces: faces of friends and acquaintances, faces of total strangers, of children and the aged, and of just about anyone we saw that had specially expressive features, faces shining with inner peace, trust and hope. And, of course, pictures of the two of us and of our beloved hosts, adding up together to the perfect three layered generational family package: Two children, their two parents and us, the adoptive or rather adopted grandparents. The Confucian tradition of filial piety and respect bordering on worship for one’s elders put us in the enviable position of demigods to whom the two younger generations in our group kowtowed and gave preference and primacy. Add to that the attentive care of the accompanying aunt of the family, attentive to every need of ours despite the absolute language barrier between us, who fits in the group rather well socially and chronologically, being of an age to be our daughter had we started procreating early, and you have a perfect setup for an enjoyable family vacation in the natural wonders of this beautiful region known to the Chinese as The Land of Eternal Spring.
This time around, our second visit to China, both times as guests of Michael and Limie Jiang, friends and former associates of our son, has a different flavor altogether. On our first visit our itinerary was planned as a sightseeing tour for visiting foreigners. This time we are joining the Jiangs on their holiday, seeing China as the Chinese see it. Originally the plan was to tour the more exotic Xinjiang but the outbreak of violent ethnic clashes in the region caused the travel agency to cancel all scheduled tours of the area for the summer. Our hosts switched their vacation destination to Yunnan and we followed suit. They must have taken our preference for rural environs into consideration for we wound up joining a busload of middle-class Shanghiese to a series of rural charming localities in Yunnan with a focus on the province’s exotic minority groups. The full exoticism of China having faded after our one-month long first tour, we were now looking at the matter as if through Chinese eyes, sharing our hosts’ experience and figuring things the way they do.
On the whole, most Chinese seem to deal with life as if they were totally neutral in terms of internal politics; The Communist Party runs the show and ‘we’ all trust in the ability of the leaders to make the right decisions. If political meddling is left alone, as it most certainly it was in the case of everyone we spoke to or associated with on this trip, China can be experienced as a most citizen-friendly system. For example, one is hardly aware of the existence of the traffic police. The speed and slalom-driving style of our bus driver combined with his minority ethnicity would have earned him a long rest in the slammer in an uptight legalistic system with ‘minority sensibilities’ like Israel’s. And at least on one occasion we associated socially with few village-level officials and they seemed like very decent people, not the sleaze balls they usually are in my community.
Yunnan had enough negative attributes to alienate me had I heard about it from a distance: Its financial prosperity derives mainly from its tobacco farming, a fact alone sufficient to dismay a public health hardliner like me. Add to that the indisputable fact that it is the world capital of mushrooms, the façade of many a house along our travel rout being decorated with murals of every shape and type of mushroom that exists from toadstools to the massive tree-leaf variety adorning the dilapidated trunks of old trees. Not that I have a gripe in principle with mushroom growing. It is rather a personal matter: It has taken me and my gastroenterologist colleague the better part of the last two years to discover the cause of my frequent intestinal obstruction-like attacks. Despite a most thorough work-up with multiple blood, urine and stool analysis and all the imaging procedures at the disposal of modern medicine requiring multiple technicians to assail my innards with their dredging equipment and contrast materials, the explanation remained a mystery. Till my village friend, Toufiq, overdid his hospitality routine with two cook-ups of a favorite dish of his, broccoli and mushrooms, and noticed that both times I started wreathing with intestinal colic an hour after the delicious meal. On further experimentation I confirmed his suspicion of a newly acquired sensitivity to mushrooms, formerly one of my favorite dishes, what with its zero calorie count and its old village romantic image as ‘the meat dish of the poor.’
And Yunnan has snakes, the curse that has inhabited my wife’s worst nightmares since ever she left snake-free Hawaii. Dali was the capital of a proud and separate nation from China till the Moguls conquered it some seven centuries ago. Today it is a major destination of internal tourism with a unique and engaging ambiance and a major Buddhist shrine, the Santasi (Three Pagoda) Temple. While stopping for a lunch break, we ventured to a visibly imposing old Pagoda, realizing that we lacked the time for a full visit to the Santasi Temple. Our taxi driver gave us the insiders’ scoop: It was named the Snake Pagoda in honor of the town’s legendary hero famed for ridding it of a massive snake that had menaced the farmers in the region for years, sacrificing his own life in the process. But with the dominance of the Three-Pagoda temple this one has fallen to disrepair and neglect. As we arrived to the out of-the-way compound the gate was barred with a length of bamboo pole which Michael pushed to the side. As we alighted from the car and headed to the abandoned structure at the far end of the enclosure, a woman we thought must be blind emerged from an equally ancient home to the side and came toward us swishing a long and thin bamboo stick on the surface of the ground overgrown with wild grass and bramble. She warned us not to go any further without the use of a similar stick; the grass was thoroughly infested with cobras. We beat a quick retreat.
In village after beautiful village in the green hilly countryside we came to appreciate the enviable Feng Shui geo-positioning of such communities with the requisite mountain behind it to the north, a river in front to the south and fertile fields on both sides. It is hard not to see the views as a series of brush strokes by a giant master artist. Houses are preferably oriented with the same plan as well, though China’s cities’ overcrowding has done away with such considerations in so many public housing divisions, not to mention those of the slum we found ourselves in late one night.
But that came later. In Yunnan our tour guide, himself a colorful member of a colorful local minority, went on for hours at end about what a great place the province was: It doesn’t take much imagination to see the outline of China’s map as a chicken. Yunnan corresponds with the part that lays the eggs. And what golden eggs it does produce, including 80% of China’s famed leaders and one third of China’s tax revenues, mostly from Dali’s tobacco agriculture. Dali’s unique historical grandeur and its long record of resistance to Mongol invaders was transmitted to us diluted and contracted down through translation. What seemed to enthuse our tour guide even more was the long spiel he gave about Tibet. He even sang a song allegedly written by the sixth Dalai Lama whom he informed us was a dandy and a womanizer. Though the man, a deity to his people, lived before air travel was known to man, the song spoke of how sweet it was to land from the air into Lhasa’s airport. Our guide proceeded to be down on Tibet picturing it as a dead-end stinking hole of little saving graces. It sounded like the man had a grudge against Tibet and its people, perhaps part of an inter-minority feud or something.
In Lejiang we witnessed the cultural edifices of the Naxi and the historical old city that has been granted the status of a World Heritage Site by UNISCO. The Naxi minority has the distinction of being a matriarchal polygamist society and, like the Tibetans, several brothers can share the same wife or vise versa. And they have the only living hieroglyphic written language in the world. Lejiang, their capital, has an endearing mix of natural beauty stemming from the layout of the ancient market town around a branching tame river together with a delicately reconstructed walls, waterwheels and cascading stone houses down the side of the hill that have been refashioned into tourist facilities. Somehow, the touristic hype doesn’t diminish the ancient town’s charm, thus turning it into the Chinese honeymooners’ Mecca. We walked along the riverbank one evening and soaked in some of the loud western music blaring out of the congested bars and the gaiety of the raucous nightlife and appreciated the magic of it all: a capital of exoticism, history, and joyful youthfulness. Somehow it symbolizes the stored regenerative energy of the Chinese people, their ongoing burst of reclaiming their history and their flourishing promise.
Then there were the other natural wonders of the high mountains of the region: The Jade Dragon Snow Mountain with its live glaciers and the Pu Dacuo Natuional Park, fashioned to match in its scenery and size that of Yellowstone Park in the Rockies. Here again, it seems, generalizing is of the essence: The majority of the thousands of internal tourists took the advice of the guide, rented a full-length warm coat and purchased a mini oxygen tank for the trek. We did neither and walked a total of over seven kilometers with little distress from the low temperature or the thin air. This led me to accuse my fellow internal tourists of innocent consumerism: a guide interested in his kickback from a store recommends an item and everyone falls for the trick. That wouldn’t have happened with most of your hard boiled American tourists. Yet the Chinese rightly pride themselves on their hardiness and endurance, witness the heroic Long March of which we were reminded on more occasions than one whenever we crossed a bridge or narrow pass where the Liberation Army crossed.
In Shangri-La, another exotic town granted the name only recently in hope of attracting tourists, we had a full yak experience: We ate yak stew, drank yak yogurt and munched on yak cheese with homemade buckwheat thins. I could resist no more and successfully bargained with an old woman for a yak bone inscribed with some Naxi blessings in Naxi hieroglyphic script. From another woman I bought a yak horn fossil at a fifth of the asking price in full expectation of it being a fake.
For a full week I travelled next to a man whose face looked quite familiar. His very short stature and disproportioned arms added to the sense of familiarity though I couldn’t quite place the character. Till my wife made a comment and it clicked: Indeed he was a spitting image of Yitzhak Shamir, the underground leader of the Stern Gang during the British Mandate destined to become Israel’s prime minister. Except that this one spat in Chinese. It was on our long walk through the Pu Dacuo National Park, shortly before the near full eclipse of the sun gave added magic to the nature scene around us, a lush expansive meadow with a huge lake all in the midst of a thick green forest. A fellow traveler with minimal English fluency asked where I was from. When I answered she and half a dozen other hikers in their long red coats and with their oxygen tanks hanging from their elbows failed to recognize any of the names I mentioned: Nazareth, Palestine, Israel, Gaza, and Jerusalem, When I said ‘The Holy Land’ she smiled widely and explained to her group including my bus neighbor with the familiar face: “Holland!”
That is when my wife said: “At least he should know; he looks like Shamir.” In fact I was happy to be away from it all, to be free of the fatal pull of the black hole named Israel/ Palestine. I was cut off from the internet and engulfed by masses that never even heard of my homicidal background. Only on one occasion a learned and well-to-do man who hosted our friends, and us by extension, seemed familiar with Middle East issues. He recalled marching in his college days in demonstrations in support of ‘the Palestinian man with the funny headdress.’ He then posed the challenging question to me of: “Why is peace evading you in the Middle East for so long?”
Not wanting to spoil the party’s dinner or to burden my friends with the job of translating a long soliloquy, I tried to be very brief:
“The inalienable rights of the Palestinians have been totally trampled by Israel which feels free to do what it wants because the USA, the strongest player in the international arena, has given it full and blind support. Neither side is willing to compromise to the degree demanded by the other. The Palestinians ask for justice and recognition and Israel asks for them to disappear as a people. It is time China stepped in to put an end to the only colonial project still in progress in today’s world.”
Perhaps I even put it more concisely. Discussion ended with the serving of the soup.
In Kunming we had an unplanned visit with a Muslim family, a young couple who had just opened a soft drink and ice cream shop and their mother who hovered around the tiny shop with her hijab style dress and offered sunflower seeds to waiting customers. Like most Muslims in the region she was a member of the Ma, knew herself to be a Muslim, and recognized the Arabic script prayer affixed above the door of the shop when I read it but couldn’t read herself. The whole family seemed pleased to have us visit the shop and may have taken it as a good omen to have a Muslim from the land of al-Aqsa mosque enter their shop on its day of opening. We enquired about other children and she informed us that she had another daughter with whom she usually stays; the daughter had married a Li who is not a Muslim and has one child, the reason the grandmother stays with the couple so as to be sure it doesn’t grow up in the tradition of the Li. This struck me as a little strange given the fact that most Muslim restaurants we ate at offered alcohol and that the old woman was the only one I had noticed wearing the traditional Islamic garb.
We then flew back to Shanghai. We needed a little rest from the incomprehensible guide’s loudspeaker. The continuous raspy cacophonous sing-song of his harangues was getting to us. After a day’s rest we hit the road again, this time in the Jiangs’ private car, Michael serving as pilot, guide, translator and overall organizer. Our first stop was at a costal village outside of the city of Rizhao. The children enjoyed clamming at low tide after which we had a wealth of fresh seafood for dinner. The next morning Didi ad I rose early and took a walk in the village. The proprietor of the mini-beachfront motel we stayed at would not let us out of his sight. When we stopped at a small shack with a few rickety shelves stocked with canned goods, toys, cigarettes and candies he followed us in. We bought a food item, paid for it and then I picked up the shopkeepers abacus and enquired about its worth using hand gestures. The man dismissed the idea out of hand. I made an offer of RMB 20 and proceeded to show more bills till I made an offer of RMB 50, the equivalent of seven US dollars and a half. He seemed troubled but continued to wave his hand in a dismissive gesture. He offered me a plastic toy abacus but I insisted on taking the real thing. Didi kept asking me to stop it out of a sense of pity for the old shopkeeper figuring that he must have a deep attachment to the grimy old article. Our companion then stepped in, grabbed the money from my hand and forced it on the shopkeeper. The deal was sealed and we shook hands and took pictures together. Down the road the farmers market was in full swing and our friend came through again acquiring a handheld scale for me for RMB 30. On the way back he kept taking out the two items and showing them to the neighbors who beamed at us, nodded their heads in approval and muttered in Chinese. Our friend seemed proud of us and our achievement. But then he could have been making fun of us. Who knows!
Then came the absolute highlight of the whole trip. True, we enjoyed the sightseeing and the multitude of natural wonders and cultural fêtes that we saw so far in this exotic land. But we usually find the social encounters and sharing in the lives of other peoples, despite the language and culture barrier, much more meaningful and unforgettable. Add to that the common bond I automatically sense with villagers and their agricultural surroundings. Our hosts knew this and saw to it that we would be exposed to their rural roots in the most authentic way possible. We drove up to the Jiang’s ancestral village where we met Michael’s parents and his grandfather, the recognized community wise man and predictor of things to come who had built the house in which Michael grew up and which is still kept in its original solid form with the traditional stove releasing its appetizing smells throughout the house and its hot fumes through the traditional zigzag air vent that runs under the brick bed stand.
The gracious parents who divide their time between this traditional village dwelling of the aging wise grandfather and their city apartment had arranged for us to visit two neighbors and to the fields so as to appreciate the life of average villagers still engaged in farming, in building their families, and in modernizing their homes. Our estimate of the cost of some of the upscale new bedroom sets that we saw ran up to ten fold of the actual price. Yet the grandfather’s storage rooms had such a variety of used tools, stoneware, pots and pans that I found it even more enticing for the constant clicking of my camera.
Then came the wedding party to which the good father had arranged an invitation for us. He advised us about what is expected from us as honor guests, about the box of sweets and the amount of the monitory gift placed in a red envelope that we should present to the groom (RMB 800 and not 1000 because of the good luck associated with number 8), and about the speech I should make. First we joined the bride’s family, took group pictures with them, partook of the food and drink at the joyfully decorated home, and then had our car decorated as well and drove as part of the bride’s entourage. As she stepped into her car, assisted by two elder uncles and welcomed by the groom’s family representative, her sisters and other family members proceeded to load her car and other accompanying ones with traditional presents of silken pillows and bed-covers and other household items. The strangest items however were the various sizable animal forms and dragons and the smallish decorative flowers all fashioned out of baked dough, part of which was forced upon us at the end of the formal proceedings as mementos from the auspicious occasion.
Every step of the bride, and later on of the groom, was guided by the professional wedding director and recorded by the professional photographer, the two outsiders (except for us) in the whole process. We first drove to a city park on the way to the grooms village some 15Km away. There the wedding director insisted on having us pose with the bridal couple for one photo after the other. It was rather embarrassing but we took it all in our stride and clowned our way through it all.
As the bridal entourage arrived at the groom’s village the real excitement began: The entrance of the village was decorated with a red inflated plastic arch in the shape of a dragon. As the bride alighted from her car various family members, hers and the groom’s, tended to her every movement including putting her red sandals on her feet as she stepped out on the red carpet, crossing under the arch to trumpet music and the tremendous explosive sound of fireworks and of the dozen canon shots spreading confetti over her head as she advanced supported on the arm of the groom. Every few steps she would slow down while few village men rushed to grab the length of red carpet that she had cleared and run with it to cover another few meters of the dirt road ahead of her. Till the party arrived to the groom’s family home and the groom was instructed to carry her up the ramp which he did despite the incessant heckling and blocking of his older brother. It was all done with much laughter, gaiety and applause of the younger generation of villagers. The parents-in-law had been seated on two chairs in the courtyard of their house. And the wedding organizer proceeded to cheer the bride on and instruct and quiz her on her feelings toward the new parents. After this formal greeting I was introduced to the crowd and asked to give a word of blessing to the bridal couple which I managed to do hoping that it would sound better in translation than it sounded in English. Finally the bridal couple was put through an entertaining set of exercises including eating a length of noodle each starting at one end and advancing till their teeth touched and downing a drink each simultaneously while ones arm is looped around the other’s neck. The organizer continued with more such acrobatics after leading the couple to their bridal bed having them sit cross-legged and facing each other while family children and women crowded the tiny bedroom giggling and screaming with delight.
At this point we were led out to the adjacent village communal facility where the festive feast was being served. But not before the groom’s brother led us to the family’s pigpen where we were introduced to the siblings of the one we were about to be served. We sat in the special room with only two tables and not in the larger one where most of those attending crowded. One of the two tables was for the elders of the groom’s and the bride’s families. On our table we were joined by such honor guests as the young elected village secretary, and the regional interior ministry official as well as a couple of local venerable former officials who proceeded to relate to us through our good translator their record of service to their community and nation. Michael’s father joined the same table but did not mention his record of service. Immediately after his graduation from college he was assigned to a job in a far away province where he served till age forty, able to see his young wife and children only once a year. At one point I brought up the subject of minorities and heard a series of mild objections to the central government’s policies of positive discrimination such as exempting minorities from the one-child limit on reproduction or the higher priority for minority students at college.
As the thirty-plus course feast proceeded we were toasted again and again, each fellow celebrant insisting on a series of three drinks; one for the bridal couple, one for us the honor guests, and one for whatever the occasion called to his or her mind. I labored under the influence to find an appropriate toast that would reflect my admiration for all these guys’ record of service and at the same time include me. I could neither toast ‘our’ countries’ minority policies nor ‘our’ record of service to ‘our’ countries. At last I found the courage to stand up and toast their record of service to their country. It left a bitter taste in my mouth though it was the only glass I emptied to the end as they had been demanding from me to do in every toast. I have no country. It just doesn’t feel good to be an orphan, not to belong.
Perhaps I should seek political asylum in China, join one of its 56 minorities and see if that may not quench my thirst for belonging. Historically an American physician of Syrian origin with the last name of Hatim accompanied Chairman Mao on the Long March. Would that bit of history facilitate my entry in the system, I wonder? Would it give me a shot at the first spot in China’s hierarchy? After all, a Georgian headed Russia and a black is now the president of the USA. So why shouldn’t I dream of becoming the emperor of China? My plans for reforms I would dictate from that position are simple and straightforward: Ban men from rolling up their T-shirts on hot days, offer silicon breast implants free of charge for young women, and impose the introduction of the technology of the water seal in all rural bathrooms.
And stop all arms trade with Israel.
Monday, July 13, 2009
Revenge of the Colonies
With the revolutionary imaging techniques now available, neuroscientist are able to pinpoint brain activity down to the minutest of details. It has become clear that memory plays a much more significant role in our perceptions than we ever suspected before. It turns out that when looking at an object the image that one sees, as reflected in the visual cortex of the brain, is drawn more from stored memory than from the new input created by the light stimulus of the retina. In Paris, believe you me, I had the chance to verify this claim to my own satisfaction: Every which way I looked I saw Bridgette Bardot. True, more often than not, on closer inspection she would turn out to be African, Arab, Vietnamese, Indian, or any one of a dozen other racial imports from France’s former colonies. Yet the ravishing BB in the flesh was veritably there: the innocent flaunting of all that there is for a teenager to flaunt, the youthful indolent pomp, the reckless absent-minded and mischievous tease, and the silly abandon and cigarette smoking.
The colossal grandeur and opulence of Paris’s historical edifices, the glorious monuments to France’s past, the epic proportions and splendor of its public gardens, and the multiplicity and magnificence of its museums, all inspire awe and admiration of the cultural essence of this most European of Europe’s capitals. And yet, all of that is not enough to dispel the impression gained at first glance of a revolutionary transformation of Paris as a society, a veritable melting pot of France’s former colonized subjects. Historic examples abound of victors, France included, ravaging the capitals and cultural icons of the vanquished. The Taliban’s recent defacing of two Buddhist statues in Afghanistan was but a cruel reminder of the savagery and thievery of most conquerors. Need I mention what the Hispanic conquistadores did to the Aztec culture or the ancient Egyptian obelisk on display in Paris’s Place de la Concorde!
Paris as a whole appears to be more the image of its former colonies than the other way round when it comes to the varieties of humanity amassing at its center. It is tempting to conclude that the peoples of its former colonies have conquered Paris. And what benevolent occupiers they seem to have been, leaving all of its historical icons intact and preserving the essence of its cultural milieu by reinventing themselves in France’s image, the conqueror emulating the vanquished. It is the ultimate revenge of the colonies.
******
I had visited Paris at least three times that I remember: once as a starving university graduate touring Europe in a camper and twice “on business,” the business of promoting attention to the health and development needs of the Palestinian Minority in Israel. The very last time, I actually was the guest of the French Foreign Ministry in connection with President Mitterrand awarding me a medal of honor. As such, it was a little tedious and too stiff for my usual lifestyle, what with the standard official wining and dining that goes with France’s medal awarding fare. Each day I was accompanied by an English-speaking guide for the duration of my appointments. Then, when that was over, it would be the turn of my two ‘nephews’. The two brothers weren’t really my nephew’s but they are the children of cousins and they called me uncle out of respect. They made a living in Paris by serving as summertime drivers-cum-guides for “rich Arab princes” and/or their wives. The rest of the year they hung loose or did odd jobs whether at a garage, a fruit stand or a restaurant. The two insisted on taking me around and declared me more worthy of their attention and services than “the richest damned prince” that there ever was. And that was, dear reader, how I found myself one Saturday midnight in the company of two ‘dancers’, a mother and daughter team as it turned out, at a floating restaurant-bar on the Seine where one of my ‘nephews’ worked as a bouncer. The dancing was good but the pair’s profession was sure to be of an older sort.
One other highlight of that trip was my visit with Dr. Bernard Kouchner as Minister of Humanitarian Affairs. I was particularly enamored with him for being a founder of the NGO ‘Medicin sans Frontiers.’ After visiting him I was even more enamored with his personal secretary, one of the most elegantly beautiful young women I ever met. Very personable too. As she chatted me up in preparation for my meeting with her boss, several times I would choke on my coffee when she chuckled and winked at me. But that is all in the past. Now Kouchner is Foreign Minister and has taken on the task of clearing the international field of obstacles for Israel’s bulldog of a racist foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman. That is why I wrote him a letter chiding him for having distanced himself from the field of human rights and from the task of aiding the desperate and the voiceless, for opting to confine himself within the oppressive and exclusive borders of racist diplomacy.
To be fair I hasten to add that on the whole this time I found the French, the true blue-blood European French included, to be much friendlier than I ever found them before. I recall on the first trip to Paris being repeatedly ignored despite my wife’s usage of her practiced college French to get directions to the bank. “Ou est la Bank?’ she would twitter in as many charming turns of the phrase as she could muster to convince the Parisians to direct us. When that failed I took out my last dollar bill, waved it under people’s nose and shouted: “Bank? Bank?” and they still walked away. This time every one is helpful to a fault; gone seems to be the haughty dismissive Parisian aloofness. Old ladies with their poodles in tow would stop to offer unsolicited assistance to us, four lost-looking foreigners. If I ever doubted the efficacy of the European Union, this put an end to my doubts.
There were two pre-arranged meetings with Parisians as well: One was with a hippy and arty-looking type who gave us instructions to meet her “in front of the defunct movie house at the exit from the metro. You can’t miss me. I am a short woman with red dyed hair and green pants.” Sure enough she was there when we emerged from the metro station but she didn’t seem to be aware of our presence. Later, when I asked what happened to get her so preoccupied she explained: “That is a standard meeting place for hookers and their clients and I didn’t want to be taken for one, acknowledging every man that looked in my direction.”
The second prearranged meeting was no less surprising. We had arrived at the Resistance Bookstore to find a lecture in progress about the Algerian Revolution by one of its long-dimmed heroes. A couple of the people we ran across there turned out to be of Palestinian refugee stock. They inquired about our whereabouts in the old country. Hearing the name of Arrabeh, a Hijab adorned young woman became agitated with curiosity: What was our family name and did we know the Labans and who exactly among them did we know and was Bader Laban, the father of Qasim Laban, her sister’s husband who now lives in Canada, one of them? etc. etc. It turns out that she hails from a refugee family originally from Haifa. Her parents had fled their home to Lebanon in 1948. In the camps in Lebanon her sister met and married Qasim, the son of another refugee family, who is now an engineer working in Canada. I said I knew the father and his extended family. In fact they were next-door neighbors in the days of my childhood before the Nakba.
What I didn’t have the heart to share with the lady was the rumors I had heard in Arrabeh about her sister’s father-in-law. As a doctor I came to know Bader as a blind and frail old man who came to see me a few times to establish his disability status under Israeli law. The explanation he gave for his return from Lebanon was rather far-fetched; it was a gesture of good will by the Israeli authorities under the rubric of family unification, a lengthy process for which my medical report on his failing health would come handy as well, he claimed. But his miraculous return to the village in the midst of the confusion that followed Israel’s 1982 invasion of South Lebanon and the selective opening of the borders with it had sparked suspicions about the man’s past. There was hardly any precedent for this magnanimous gesture by the Israeli authorities toward an old Palestinian refugee desiring to return to “die in the lap of my Hamuli --the extended family-- in the village in former Palestine” as he put it. It was rumored that there was a death sentence issued against him in absentia in Lebanon for collaboration and spying for Israel.
I now recall that something seemed fishy about the way Bader insisted on seeing me after regular clinic hours to get his medical certificate and that it created a moral dilemma for me. You see, I had set a rule very early in my solo GP practice in Arrabeh to lighten my burden and avoid conflict of interest; I had decided never to accept payment for a deserved medical certificate. “I am here to treat the sick; I don’t trade in paperwork” I would declare to dissatisfied customers seeking false medical certification. “But lawyers live from that. Are you better than them?” some smart aleck would argue back to no avail. So, here I was being aroused from bed to supply a grimy old man with a sick report possibly as part of a process to cover his dubious past career. Shouldn’t I be skinning him alive with an exuberant charge for my services and in partial punishment for his treasonous past, I wondered?
******
The present trip to Paris was decided on the common assumption that every life deserves to be enriched by a leisurely week or two in the world’s fashion and cuisine capital so as to absorb some of its culture and savor some of its delectable specialties. A couple we know intended to meet this obligation, invited us to join them, and invested some six months in its planning. For every day of the two weeks we spent in Paris there was an hour-by-hour schedule with metro and bus details of how to navigate between the various museums, parks, gardens, churches and restaurants together with a plan B in case the original failed or we opted to split for a day. And for each sight detailed information was copied fro two dozen travel books with differing perspectives and historical accounts. Together with the general commentary about Paris as a whole, the standards of behavior for good tourists, the pictures of the Euro coins and bills, the range of temperatures, when to go where to avoid all the other tourists who, it would turn out, read the same directions, etc. etc. it added up to a sizable tome that we were provided gratis upon arrival. Never in all of my life did I ever have such thoroughly planned two weeks.
This all was the wife’s work. Like us, the husband followed the same game plan of his wife’s. Unlike us though, he came thoroughly prepared for all touristic eventualities. Take for example his top of the line miniature camera with capacity for video and still color photography, image stabilization, forty-fold zoom, infrared mode, and dark adaptability. It would probably pose in his place if he weren’t there at the right moment. And he had GPS in addition to being excellent in deciphering maps: you step out of the Paris Metro and he is automatically oriented and moves in the right direction. At the post office when we wanted to mail a package, right on the spot, like Inspector Gadget, he came up with the required masking tape and spring-scales. The man wore a 23-pocket jacket and had them all stocked with the right items. When at the Louvre, he led us to the original black marble column on which the Hammurabi code is inscribed in Cuneiform Chaldean script and had his picture taken standing next to it. That seemed to be the crowning event of the visit. He knew the details of the code and found the column awe-inspiring. I guess when you are that orderly in your own life and thoughts, you respect those who impose order on their surroundings, even if it means chopping few idle heads here and there.
If nothing else, I can now drop names of Parisian sites and cultural icons should I need to. I now have seen it all: from the Louvre to the Pantheon; from Notre Dame to the church where Dante worshipped when in Paris, to St. Eustach with its 8,000 pipes organ; from The Palace of Versailles, Marie Antoinette’s old romping grounds, to the Concierge where she spent the last three months of her life and where she carefully applied her rouge before stepping up to the guillotine, and from Rodin’s garden to the bust of Dalida to that goofy saint Denis carrying his severed head in his arm and making a scene of it wherever he stopped in Paris. And we practically lived in the Eifel Tower, our hotel was that close to it.
And we visited The Pasteur Institute. In recent months we had discovered that Didi has a severe reaction to dust mites causing her an occasional allergic cough. About the worst cough spasm she suffered in Paris was at the Pasteur Museum, former home of the father of hygiene himself. It happened as we were leaving the mausoleum where he is buried. I could hear creaking and was sure it was Pasteur turning in his coffin. But it was only the old wooden stairs.
But to be fair, Paris is much more hygienic than I remember some of its poorer sections being in the past. And the metro system is such a vast improvement on that of New York, for example, though it still feels like living in an alien society with tunneling as its dominant cultural feature. Like Gazans nowadays, Parisians may well have descended from a mole-like branch of the human species. Not unlike moles, both seem to have adapted well to the subterranean conditions with so many of them fully at ease playing their music, asking for help or reading their papers. One destitute person particularly piqued my curiosity with her very proper upper-class apparel, including fashionable high heels and proper makeup, sitting primly in a respectable-looking chair and reading a book with her extended hand the only condescending admission of her need. Alas I was not alone to approach her and satisfy my curiosity; I handed her my change.
During the many hours we spent in the bowels of the metro a memory from rural childhood days kept recurring in my mind. Pesky moles were a common abomination in the small vegetable plots most village homes had for the family’s daily supply of fresh produce. I remember a neighbor explaining to his son why he needed him to catch a gecko and bring it back alive. Geckoes were plentiful and if you stood still next to any of the stonewalls or thorny cactus hedges separating the plots you were sure to see one popping out next to you to do its daily push-up routine. We used to think they were praying though they often didn’t seem to follow the rule of facing towards Mecca and prayed all day long and not five times at the appointed hours when the Muezzin called for prayer. If patient, gutsy and agile enough, a child was sure to manage to grab one alive. The animal often lost its tail in the process.
This task accomplished by his son, Abu-Salim clasped the rough-skinned animal with one hand and with the other took two cactus thorns and with them blinded its eyes. He then released the blind gecko in the single opening he had dug to the maze of mole tunnels in his vegetable garden. He held his ax high above his head and waited for the scared mole to run out of the opening and wacked it dead. The blind gecko doesn’t see the opening to escape and it drives the mole stir-crazy as it runs randomly in the unfamiliar metro maze.
The cruelty of my childhood neighbor was now haunting me as I sat at a bar-restaurant by one of the Metro stations in central Paris to savor a dish of chicken. It didn’t take me long to logically exonerate Abu-Salim of all charges of cruelty. He was acting to protect the foodstuffs that sustained his children. And he didn’t do anything worse than what I had just done to a once pretty bird. Also the Israelis do that to the Gazans every day. Though they don’t eat them, they destroy their tunnels in the sand and kill them in the process.
**********
Whoever invented the axiom that all members of the human race need a measure of Parisian acculturation did not deal with the concomitant expense. The exorbitant prices of all aspects of Parisian life inspired me to develop a fancy dieting scheme. Potentially, it makes for a highly profitable enterprise for some ambitious and style-conscious young entrepreneur. And it is simple: The dieters are taken to Paris for a month on a tight budget.
There is no where better than Paris on an inadequate budget and with a developed taste for French cuisine to demonstrate the validity of the old adage: “necessity is the mother of invention.” Paris was the perfect place to try and shed the extra weight I have been lugging around all the last few months. Whether in the park, visiting a museum or using the metro, you wind up walking considerable distances and work up an appetite. But food is terribly expensive; hence your budget limitation has to be factored in. This brought back a quaint quasi-scientific explanation I used while still in medical practice: I had read a report by a Harvard team based on a review they did of the claims made by the various experimental dieting regimes and the claimants’ own figures and reported outcomes. The Harvard team’s bottom line was that there was no magic bullet; the deciding factor was how many calories a dieter eats and how many s/he burns up. I adapted this simple fact as my standard explanation in response to customers’ frequent queries about weight management: I would sum-up by alluding to the example of a bank account: “The calorie content of what you eat is like the amounts you deposit in your account; the energy you spend is equivalent to your withdrawals; and the weight gain is your savings. Let us see how much we can get you in the red within a month’s time.”
While in Paris it dawned on me that you can give a third dimension to the above two-dimensional equation by factoring in the actual funds to which you have access. While using the theoretical example of the bank account as a simile for losing weight you fall back on the limitation of your actual bank account as a compelling factor in such a plan. Whoever tries to implement my Parisian dieting scheme has to use something more binding than an honor system for it to work. I know because I didn’t loose much weight. Perhaps only the leader of the group should be allowed access to cash that s/he distributes daily with a heavy fine for cheaters.
Another compelling factor for losing weight in Paris is the clash in physical dimensions one is apt to experience in Paris, and I speak literally here. Accommodations are costly and space is at a premium. Hotel rooms in pensions and cozy bed-and-breakfast joints are highly utilitarian and functional in their design. Space is at a premium and a heavy-set person seems often to need a shoehorn to fit in some of the facilities. One is likely to have trouble fitting in his or her shower and on more than one occasion I would end up unintentionally changing the faucet setting of the water and getting a cold or a scalding gush of water. What better reminder of the need to slim down a little. Good thing I have never visited Tokyo where hotel rooms are reported to be even moreutilitarian.
**********
While at the Louvre I had an inspiration: I have to reread Edward Said’s treatise on Orientalism. Hungry, exhausted and with my head spinning from running circles in its endless corridors, I sat down on a bench in the middle of one of the halls of the Louvre and gazed at the massive paintings covering the walls. After regaining a semblance of full consciousness I suddenly started comprehending the details of the painting I was looking at. It was another of Delacroix’s depictions of the Levant, full of violent and lascivious turbaned men and seductive lewd harem. It felt uncomfortable and insulting in the extreme: Here is what the average European child is brought up to assume about my culture, the images he or she incorporates into their subconscious as representing me and my world. It probably wouldn’t have meant so much to me and I wouldn’t have taken it so personally was I not looking that day for cards to mail to my four grandchildren. After all they are the product of Europe’s culture regardless how hard their American parents try to instill in them a sense of pride in their Arab roots.
Speaking of which I have to admit to an awful oversight. One of the Paris tourist attractions was not on our itinerary and when Didi suggested it I was too tired to pick up on the offer of another couple of miles’ urban hike. We ended never visiting the Grand Mosque of Paris and its North African surroundings. I learned later that the sight is underrated by others as well; few are aware today of the role it played in providing sanctuary for Jews hiding from German and Vichy troops when they ruled France. It came as a big surprise to me to read someone’s description of it “as a virtual Grand Central Station for the Underground Railroad of Jews in France." [The story is told in a 1991 film Une Resistance Oubliee: La Mosque de Paris (A Forgotten Resistance: The Mosque of Paris) by Derri Berkani, a French documentary filmmaker of Algerian Berber origin.]
One final piece of advice for the ambitious tourist in Paris: Don’t kill yourself trying to cover all its parks, all of its palaces or all of its museums. You need a lifetime for each genre. And if you have to visit one museum it should be the Picasso. It is one of a kind not only because of the genius of the man but also because when you walk in you suddenly realize that here finally is a museum that makes sense; it starts at the start, with his early years, and ends at the end, with his death. I didn’t see another with such obvious logic. What a fittingly simple way to celebrate a unique and complex giant.
The colossal grandeur and opulence of Paris’s historical edifices, the glorious monuments to France’s past, the epic proportions and splendor of its public gardens, and the multiplicity and magnificence of its museums, all inspire awe and admiration of the cultural essence of this most European of Europe’s capitals. And yet, all of that is not enough to dispel the impression gained at first glance of a revolutionary transformation of Paris as a society, a veritable melting pot of France’s former colonized subjects. Historic examples abound of victors, France included, ravaging the capitals and cultural icons of the vanquished. The Taliban’s recent defacing of two Buddhist statues in Afghanistan was but a cruel reminder of the savagery and thievery of most conquerors. Need I mention what the Hispanic conquistadores did to the Aztec culture or the ancient Egyptian obelisk on display in Paris’s Place de la Concorde!
Paris as a whole appears to be more the image of its former colonies than the other way round when it comes to the varieties of humanity amassing at its center. It is tempting to conclude that the peoples of its former colonies have conquered Paris. And what benevolent occupiers they seem to have been, leaving all of its historical icons intact and preserving the essence of its cultural milieu by reinventing themselves in France’s image, the conqueror emulating the vanquished. It is the ultimate revenge of the colonies.
******
I had visited Paris at least three times that I remember: once as a starving university graduate touring Europe in a camper and twice “on business,” the business of promoting attention to the health and development needs of the Palestinian Minority in Israel. The very last time, I actually was the guest of the French Foreign Ministry in connection with President Mitterrand awarding me a medal of honor. As such, it was a little tedious and too stiff for my usual lifestyle, what with the standard official wining and dining that goes with France’s medal awarding fare. Each day I was accompanied by an English-speaking guide for the duration of my appointments. Then, when that was over, it would be the turn of my two ‘nephews’. The two brothers weren’t really my nephew’s but they are the children of cousins and they called me uncle out of respect. They made a living in Paris by serving as summertime drivers-cum-guides for “rich Arab princes” and/or their wives. The rest of the year they hung loose or did odd jobs whether at a garage, a fruit stand or a restaurant. The two insisted on taking me around and declared me more worthy of their attention and services than “the richest damned prince” that there ever was. And that was, dear reader, how I found myself one Saturday midnight in the company of two ‘dancers’, a mother and daughter team as it turned out, at a floating restaurant-bar on the Seine where one of my ‘nephews’ worked as a bouncer. The dancing was good but the pair’s profession was sure to be of an older sort.
One other highlight of that trip was my visit with Dr. Bernard Kouchner as Minister of Humanitarian Affairs. I was particularly enamored with him for being a founder of the NGO ‘Medicin sans Frontiers.’ After visiting him I was even more enamored with his personal secretary, one of the most elegantly beautiful young women I ever met. Very personable too. As she chatted me up in preparation for my meeting with her boss, several times I would choke on my coffee when she chuckled and winked at me. But that is all in the past. Now Kouchner is Foreign Minister and has taken on the task of clearing the international field of obstacles for Israel’s bulldog of a racist foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman. That is why I wrote him a letter chiding him for having distanced himself from the field of human rights and from the task of aiding the desperate and the voiceless, for opting to confine himself within the oppressive and exclusive borders of racist diplomacy.
To be fair I hasten to add that on the whole this time I found the French, the true blue-blood European French included, to be much friendlier than I ever found them before. I recall on the first trip to Paris being repeatedly ignored despite my wife’s usage of her practiced college French to get directions to the bank. “Ou est la Bank?’ she would twitter in as many charming turns of the phrase as she could muster to convince the Parisians to direct us. When that failed I took out my last dollar bill, waved it under people’s nose and shouted: “Bank? Bank?” and they still walked away. This time every one is helpful to a fault; gone seems to be the haughty dismissive Parisian aloofness. Old ladies with their poodles in tow would stop to offer unsolicited assistance to us, four lost-looking foreigners. If I ever doubted the efficacy of the European Union, this put an end to my doubts.
There were two pre-arranged meetings with Parisians as well: One was with a hippy and arty-looking type who gave us instructions to meet her “in front of the defunct movie house at the exit from the metro. You can’t miss me. I am a short woman with red dyed hair and green pants.” Sure enough she was there when we emerged from the metro station but she didn’t seem to be aware of our presence. Later, when I asked what happened to get her so preoccupied she explained: “That is a standard meeting place for hookers and their clients and I didn’t want to be taken for one, acknowledging every man that looked in my direction.”
The second prearranged meeting was no less surprising. We had arrived at the Resistance Bookstore to find a lecture in progress about the Algerian Revolution by one of its long-dimmed heroes. A couple of the people we ran across there turned out to be of Palestinian refugee stock. They inquired about our whereabouts in the old country. Hearing the name of Arrabeh, a Hijab adorned young woman became agitated with curiosity: What was our family name and did we know the Labans and who exactly among them did we know and was Bader Laban, the father of Qasim Laban, her sister’s husband who now lives in Canada, one of them? etc. etc. It turns out that she hails from a refugee family originally from Haifa. Her parents had fled their home to Lebanon in 1948. In the camps in Lebanon her sister met and married Qasim, the son of another refugee family, who is now an engineer working in Canada. I said I knew the father and his extended family. In fact they were next-door neighbors in the days of my childhood before the Nakba.
What I didn’t have the heart to share with the lady was the rumors I had heard in Arrabeh about her sister’s father-in-law. As a doctor I came to know Bader as a blind and frail old man who came to see me a few times to establish his disability status under Israeli law. The explanation he gave for his return from Lebanon was rather far-fetched; it was a gesture of good will by the Israeli authorities under the rubric of family unification, a lengthy process for which my medical report on his failing health would come handy as well, he claimed. But his miraculous return to the village in the midst of the confusion that followed Israel’s 1982 invasion of South Lebanon and the selective opening of the borders with it had sparked suspicions about the man’s past. There was hardly any precedent for this magnanimous gesture by the Israeli authorities toward an old Palestinian refugee desiring to return to “die in the lap of my Hamuli --the extended family-- in the village in former Palestine” as he put it. It was rumored that there was a death sentence issued against him in absentia in Lebanon for collaboration and spying for Israel.
I now recall that something seemed fishy about the way Bader insisted on seeing me after regular clinic hours to get his medical certificate and that it created a moral dilemma for me. You see, I had set a rule very early in my solo GP practice in Arrabeh to lighten my burden and avoid conflict of interest; I had decided never to accept payment for a deserved medical certificate. “I am here to treat the sick; I don’t trade in paperwork” I would declare to dissatisfied customers seeking false medical certification. “But lawyers live from that. Are you better than them?” some smart aleck would argue back to no avail. So, here I was being aroused from bed to supply a grimy old man with a sick report possibly as part of a process to cover his dubious past career. Shouldn’t I be skinning him alive with an exuberant charge for my services and in partial punishment for his treasonous past, I wondered?
******
The present trip to Paris was decided on the common assumption that every life deserves to be enriched by a leisurely week or two in the world’s fashion and cuisine capital so as to absorb some of its culture and savor some of its delectable specialties. A couple we know intended to meet this obligation, invited us to join them, and invested some six months in its planning. For every day of the two weeks we spent in Paris there was an hour-by-hour schedule with metro and bus details of how to navigate between the various museums, parks, gardens, churches and restaurants together with a plan B in case the original failed or we opted to split for a day. And for each sight detailed information was copied fro two dozen travel books with differing perspectives and historical accounts. Together with the general commentary about Paris as a whole, the standards of behavior for good tourists, the pictures of the Euro coins and bills, the range of temperatures, when to go where to avoid all the other tourists who, it would turn out, read the same directions, etc. etc. it added up to a sizable tome that we were provided gratis upon arrival. Never in all of my life did I ever have such thoroughly planned two weeks.
This all was the wife’s work. Like us, the husband followed the same game plan of his wife’s. Unlike us though, he came thoroughly prepared for all touristic eventualities. Take for example his top of the line miniature camera with capacity for video and still color photography, image stabilization, forty-fold zoom, infrared mode, and dark adaptability. It would probably pose in his place if he weren’t there at the right moment. And he had GPS in addition to being excellent in deciphering maps: you step out of the Paris Metro and he is automatically oriented and moves in the right direction. At the post office when we wanted to mail a package, right on the spot, like Inspector Gadget, he came up with the required masking tape and spring-scales. The man wore a 23-pocket jacket and had them all stocked with the right items. When at the Louvre, he led us to the original black marble column on which the Hammurabi code is inscribed in Cuneiform Chaldean script and had his picture taken standing next to it. That seemed to be the crowning event of the visit. He knew the details of the code and found the column awe-inspiring. I guess when you are that orderly in your own life and thoughts, you respect those who impose order on their surroundings, even if it means chopping few idle heads here and there.
If nothing else, I can now drop names of Parisian sites and cultural icons should I need to. I now have seen it all: from the Louvre to the Pantheon; from Notre Dame to the church where Dante worshipped when in Paris, to St. Eustach with its 8,000 pipes organ; from The Palace of Versailles, Marie Antoinette’s old romping grounds, to the Concierge where she spent the last three months of her life and where she carefully applied her rouge before stepping up to the guillotine, and from Rodin’s garden to the bust of Dalida to that goofy saint Denis carrying his severed head in his arm and making a scene of it wherever he stopped in Paris. And we practically lived in the Eifel Tower, our hotel was that close to it.
And we visited The Pasteur Institute. In recent months we had discovered that Didi has a severe reaction to dust mites causing her an occasional allergic cough. About the worst cough spasm she suffered in Paris was at the Pasteur Museum, former home of the father of hygiene himself. It happened as we were leaving the mausoleum where he is buried. I could hear creaking and was sure it was Pasteur turning in his coffin. But it was only the old wooden stairs.
But to be fair, Paris is much more hygienic than I remember some of its poorer sections being in the past. And the metro system is such a vast improvement on that of New York, for example, though it still feels like living in an alien society with tunneling as its dominant cultural feature. Like Gazans nowadays, Parisians may well have descended from a mole-like branch of the human species. Not unlike moles, both seem to have adapted well to the subterranean conditions with so many of them fully at ease playing their music, asking for help or reading their papers. One destitute person particularly piqued my curiosity with her very proper upper-class apparel, including fashionable high heels and proper makeup, sitting primly in a respectable-looking chair and reading a book with her extended hand the only condescending admission of her need. Alas I was not alone to approach her and satisfy my curiosity; I handed her my change.
During the many hours we spent in the bowels of the metro a memory from rural childhood days kept recurring in my mind. Pesky moles were a common abomination in the small vegetable plots most village homes had for the family’s daily supply of fresh produce. I remember a neighbor explaining to his son why he needed him to catch a gecko and bring it back alive. Geckoes were plentiful and if you stood still next to any of the stonewalls or thorny cactus hedges separating the plots you were sure to see one popping out next to you to do its daily push-up routine. We used to think they were praying though they often didn’t seem to follow the rule of facing towards Mecca and prayed all day long and not five times at the appointed hours when the Muezzin called for prayer. If patient, gutsy and agile enough, a child was sure to manage to grab one alive. The animal often lost its tail in the process.
This task accomplished by his son, Abu-Salim clasped the rough-skinned animal with one hand and with the other took two cactus thorns and with them blinded its eyes. He then released the blind gecko in the single opening he had dug to the maze of mole tunnels in his vegetable garden. He held his ax high above his head and waited for the scared mole to run out of the opening and wacked it dead. The blind gecko doesn’t see the opening to escape and it drives the mole stir-crazy as it runs randomly in the unfamiliar metro maze.
The cruelty of my childhood neighbor was now haunting me as I sat at a bar-restaurant by one of the Metro stations in central Paris to savor a dish of chicken. It didn’t take me long to logically exonerate Abu-Salim of all charges of cruelty. He was acting to protect the foodstuffs that sustained his children. And he didn’t do anything worse than what I had just done to a once pretty bird. Also the Israelis do that to the Gazans every day. Though they don’t eat them, they destroy their tunnels in the sand and kill them in the process.
**********
Whoever invented the axiom that all members of the human race need a measure of Parisian acculturation did not deal with the concomitant expense. The exorbitant prices of all aspects of Parisian life inspired me to develop a fancy dieting scheme. Potentially, it makes for a highly profitable enterprise for some ambitious and style-conscious young entrepreneur. And it is simple: The dieters are taken to Paris for a month on a tight budget.
There is no where better than Paris on an inadequate budget and with a developed taste for French cuisine to demonstrate the validity of the old adage: “necessity is the mother of invention.” Paris was the perfect place to try and shed the extra weight I have been lugging around all the last few months. Whether in the park, visiting a museum or using the metro, you wind up walking considerable distances and work up an appetite. But food is terribly expensive; hence your budget limitation has to be factored in. This brought back a quaint quasi-scientific explanation I used while still in medical practice: I had read a report by a Harvard team based on a review they did of the claims made by the various experimental dieting regimes and the claimants’ own figures and reported outcomes. The Harvard team’s bottom line was that there was no magic bullet; the deciding factor was how many calories a dieter eats and how many s/he burns up. I adapted this simple fact as my standard explanation in response to customers’ frequent queries about weight management: I would sum-up by alluding to the example of a bank account: “The calorie content of what you eat is like the amounts you deposit in your account; the energy you spend is equivalent to your withdrawals; and the weight gain is your savings. Let us see how much we can get you in the red within a month’s time.”
While in Paris it dawned on me that you can give a third dimension to the above two-dimensional equation by factoring in the actual funds to which you have access. While using the theoretical example of the bank account as a simile for losing weight you fall back on the limitation of your actual bank account as a compelling factor in such a plan. Whoever tries to implement my Parisian dieting scheme has to use something more binding than an honor system for it to work. I know because I didn’t loose much weight. Perhaps only the leader of the group should be allowed access to cash that s/he distributes daily with a heavy fine for cheaters.
Another compelling factor for losing weight in Paris is the clash in physical dimensions one is apt to experience in Paris, and I speak literally here. Accommodations are costly and space is at a premium. Hotel rooms in pensions and cozy bed-and-breakfast joints are highly utilitarian and functional in their design. Space is at a premium and a heavy-set person seems often to need a shoehorn to fit in some of the facilities. One is likely to have trouble fitting in his or her shower and on more than one occasion I would end up unintentionally changing the faucet setting of the water and getting a cold or a scalding gush of water. What better reminder of the need to slim down a little. Good thing I have never visited Tokyo where hotel rooms are reported to be even moreutilitarian.
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While at the Louvre I had an inspiration: I have to reread Edward Said’s treatise on Orientalism. Hungry, exhausted and with my head spinning from running circles in its endless corridors, I sat down on a bench in the middle of one of the halls of the Louvre and gazed at the massive paintings covering the walls. After regaining a semblance of full consciousness I suddenly started comprehending the details of the painting I was looking at. It was another of Delacroix’s depictions of the Levant, full of violent and lascivious turbaned men and seductive lewd harem. It felt uncomfortable and insulting in the extreme: Here is what the average European child is brought up to assume about my culture, the images he or she incorporates into their subconscious as representing me and my world. It probably wouldn’t have meant so much to me and I wouldn’t have taken it so personally was I not looking that day for cards to mail to my four grandchildren. After all they are the product of Europe’s culture regardless how hard their American parents try to instill in them a sense of pride in their Arab roots.
Speaking of which I have to admit to an awful oversight. One of the Paris tourist attractions was not on our itinerary and when Didi suggested it I was too tired to pick up on the offer of another couple of miles’ urban hike. We ended never visiting the Grand Mosque of Paris and its North African surroundings. I learned later that the sight is underrated by others as well; few are aware today of the role it played in providing sanctuary for Jews hiding from German and Vichy troops when they ruled France. It came as a big surprise to me to read someone’s description of it “as a virtual Grand Central Station for the Underground Railroad of Jews in France." [The story is told in a 1991 film Une Resistance Oubliee: La Mosque de Paris (A Forgotten Resistance: The Mosque of Paris) by Derri Berkani, a French documentary filmmaker of Algerian Berber origin.]
One final piece of advice for the ambitious tourist in Paris: Don’t kill yourself trying to cover all its parks, all of its palaces or all of its museums. You need a lifetime for each genre. And if you have to visit one museum it should be the Picasso. It is one of a kind not only because of the genius of the man but also because when you walk in you suddenly realize that here finally is a museum that makes sense; it starts at the start, with his early years, and ends at the end, with his death. I didn’t see another with such obvious logic. What a fittingly simple way to celebrate a unique and complex giant.
Friday, June 19, 2009
Interviews
This series of interviews spans a period of one year. It is posted for those interested in my views on several issues, specifically about the Nakba and Land loss by Palestinian Citizens of Israel.
1) http://imeu.net/news/article0013633.shtml
Untold stories: Hatim Kanaaneh
IMEU, Jul 15, 2008
To interview Hatim Kanaaneh contact the IMEU at 714-368-0300 or info@imeu.net.
[Photograph]
Palestinian-American doctor and author Hatim Kanaaneh, seen here outside of his home in Arrabeh, in the Galilee.
Dr. Hatim Kanaaneh remembers the day in 1948 that his native village of Arrabeh in the northern Galilee fell to Zionist forces intent on turning Palestine into a Jewish state. "Everyone had a white sheet hanging on a stick on their roof," he recalls sixty years later from his home in Arrabeh. "The village elders in the neighboring villages of Arrabeh, Sakhnin and Dier Hanna had met and decided that no one would leave. My father was among them."
During the previous months, the eleven year-old Kanaaneh had seen streams of refugees from Palestinian villages further south flowing through Arrabeh, intent on reaching the safety of the Lebanese border in the north.
Eventually, as they witnessed an escalation in attacks on Palestinian villages by Jewish militias, Dr. Kanaaneh's family had begun preparing to flee the country themselves, at least until the fighting had ceased. "I had a dilemma as to whether to take my birds," he remembers. "Everyone else was making decisions about pots and pans and mattresses, and I cried as I was told that I could not take my birds."
Word soon arrived, however, that the Lebanese border had been closed, leaving the Palestinians in Arrabeh with no way to escape. It was at this point that the decision was made by several of the Galilee villages near Nazareth to surrender to Israeli forces.
That is how the village of Arrabeh found itself inside of the newly formed Israeli state.
For nearly two decades, the Palestinian residents of the new state were placed under a military regime. "I remember standing in line and waiting for hours to get a permit to go from Arrabeh to Haifa. We had to go to Shefa Amr and stand in line to get a permit to go five additional kilometers."
Dr. Kanaaneh remained in his home village despite the difficulty of living as a non-Jew in Israel, before leaving to the United States to earn his medical degree. He soon returned to the Galilee, however, and established the Galilee Society to offer better health services to the underprivileged Palestinian residents of the region.
Kanaaneh often misses the personal and individual freedoms he was granted in the United States but still has yet to attain in his homeland, and feels it is important for Americans to learn about the Nakba (Arabic for "catastrophe," and the word Palestinians use to refer to the loss of their homes and homeland in 1948) for this reason. "I felt a sense of powerlessness when I returned to the Galilee - that I couldn't do anything but accept it," he says. "But I never really regretted the decision to come back."
Pluto Press of London has just published Dr. Kanaaneh's book of memoirs, A Doctor in Galilee, which shows what life is like for a Palestinian living as a citizen of Israel. The book is available from University of Michigan Press and at Amazon.com.
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2) http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10431.shtml
Palestinians remember Land Day
Jonathan Cook writing from Arrabeh, The Electronic Intifada, 30 March 2009
[Photograph]
Hatim Kanaaneh, a former physician who witnessed the Land Day protests, stands by a monument in Sakhnin's cemetery to six Palestinians shot dead by the Israeli army during the confrontations of 30 March 1976 (Jonathan Cook)
Palestinians across the Middle East were due to commemorate Land Day today, marking the anniversary of clashes in 1976 in which six unarmed Palestinians were shot dead by the Israeli army as it tried to break up a general strike.
Although Land Day is one of the most important anniversaries in the Palestinian calendar, sometimes referred to as the Palestinians' national day, the historical event it marks is little spoken of and rarely studied.
"Maybe its significance is surprising given the magnitude of other events in Palestinian history," said Hatim Kanaaneh, 71, a doctor, who witnessed the military invasion of his village.
"But what makes Land Day resonate with Palestinians everywhere is that it was the first time Palestinians inside Israel stood together and successfully resisted Israel's goal of confiscating their land."
The confrontation took place between the army and a group usually referred to as "Israeli Arabs," the small minority of Palestinians who managed to remain in their homes during the 1948 war that led to the founding of Israel. Today they number 1.2 million, or nearly one-fifth of Israel's population.
"We were given citizenship by Israel, but have always been treated as an enemy, perceived of as a threat to the state's Jewishness," said Dr. Kanaaneh, who last year published his memoir, A Doctor in Galilee, which offers a rare account in English of Palestinian life inside Israel during the Land Day period.
In 1976, Dr. Kanaaneh, having completed his medical studies at Harvard University in the United States, was the only physician in Arrabeh.
Israel crushed organized political activity among Israel's Palestinian citizens between 1948 and 1966, Dr. Kanaaneh said. Nonetheless, popular frustration had mounted as the state expropriated privately-owned Palestinian land to build new communities for Jewish citizens, many of them recent immigrants.
During military rule, historians have noted, vast swathes of land were taken from Palestinians, both from refugees in exile and from Israel's own citizens. Jews had bought only six per cent of Palestine by the time of the 1948 war, but today the state has nationalized 93 percent of Israel's territory.
"Government policy was explicitly to make the land Jewish -- or Judaize it, as it was called," Dr. Kanaaneh said.
The announcement in the mid-1970s of the confiscation of a further 2,000 hectares led to the creation of a new body, the National Committee for the Defense of Arab Lands, which provided a more assertive political leadership.
The minority's decision to strike, Dr. Kanaaneh said, shocked the Israeli authorities, which were not used to challenges to official policy. "Both sides understood the significance of the strike. For the first time we were acting as a national minority, and Israel was very sensitive to anything that suggested we had a national identity or a unified agenda, especially over a key resource like land."
Although the strike was strictly observed by Palestinians throughout Israel, the focus of the protest were three villages in the central Galilee that faced the loss of a large area of prime agricultural land: Arrabeh, Sakhnin and Deir Hanna.
The prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, and his defense minster, Shimon Peres, acted on the eve of the strike.
"What was surprising was that they didn't send in the police, as you'd expect when dealing with citizens of a country, but the army," Dr. Kanaaneh said.
The government's original plan, he said, was to break the strike and force employees to go to work, but when villagers began throwing stones, the army imposed a curfew.
"When a neighbor called me to attend to his wife who had gone into labor, I walked out of my house towards an armored vehicle waving my stethoscope," Dr. Kanaaneh said. "A soldier aimed his rifle straight at me and I hurried back inside."
[Photograph]
Ahmed Khalaila stands by a road sign dedicated to his brother, Khader, who was shot dead by the Israeli army during Land Day protests in the village of Sakhnin in 1976. (Jonathan Cook)
Ahmed Khalaila, who was 18 and living in Sakhnin, remembered being woken early by loudspeakers. "Soldiers were calling out that we must not leave the house ... We couldn't even look out of the windows," he said.
When a neighbor stepped outside her house, she was shot and injured, Khalaila said. He and his older brother, Khader, tried to help the woman. When they were about 50 meters from her, Khader was shot in the head.
"He was still breathing and we hoped he could be saved, but there were checkpoints at all the entrances to the village. We knew no ambulance would be coming for him."
Eventually the family managed to get him into a car and drove towards the nearest hospital. Held at a checkpoint, Khalaila said, the family watched as Khader bled to death as he lay across his younger brother's legs on the back seat. Khader was 24 and recently married.
No one ever came to investigate what had happened, or offered the family compensation. "It was as if a bird had died," he said. "No one was interested; no questions were asked in the parliament. Nothing."
As well as the six deaths, hundreds more Palestinians were injured and sweeping arrests were made of political activists.
Dr. Kanaaneh said the stiff resistance mounted by the villagers eventually forced the government to revoke the expropriation order.
Victory, however, was far from clear cut. The next year, Ariel Sharon, as agriculture minister, announced a program of new Jewish settlements called "lookouts" in the Galilee "to prevent control of state lands by foreigners," meaning Israel's own Palestinian citizens. The three villages were surrounded by the lookout communities, which came to be known collectively as Misgav regional council.
"They were intended to be agricultural communities, but Land Day stopped that," Dr. Kanaaneh said. "Instead they became small bedroom communities, and much of the land we defended was passed to Misgav's jurisdiction.
"Today the owners of the land pay taxes to the regional council rather than their own municipalities, and Misgav can decide, if it wants, to try to confiscate the land again. We may have got our land back, but it is not really in our hands."
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (Pluto Press) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net.
A version of this article originally appeared in The National, published in Abu Dhabi at the following link: http://www.thenational.ae/article/20090330/FOREIGN/382507494&SearchID=73350038543283
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3) http://www.menassat.com/?q=en/news-articles/6298-doctor-galilee-physicians-struggle-community-health-and-peoples-surivial
A Doctor in Galilee: A physician's struggle for community health and a people's survival
Posted April 2nd, 2009
A rare glimpse into the dire health situation of Palestinians living in Israel, Hatim Kanaaneh's memoir - "A Doctor in Galilee: The Life and Struggle of a Palestinian in Israel" - reveals the politics of health care and community development affecting the Arab minority in a Jewish-only state. MENASSAT's Tania Tabar interviewed the author earlier this week to discuss Kanaaneh's work.
By TANIA TABAR
[Photograph]
The cover of Hatim Kanaaneh's memoir, "A Doctor in Galilee: The Life and Struggle of a Palestinian in Israel," published by Pluto Press (2008).
BEIRUT, April 2, 2009 (MENASSAT) - In his memoir, “A Doctor in Galilee: The Life and Struggle of a Palestinian in Israel," Hatim Kanaaneh tells the story – the hardship, the irony, the internal struggle - of being part of the Arab minority living in Israel.
Known as the ’48 Palestinians, or those “of the inside," Kanaaneh's narrative provides a rare glimpse into the history of Palestinians that remained in Israel (historic Palestine) after the state was formed.
He also produces a compelling record of his experience working for the Israeli Ministry of Health, establishing the NGO, The Galilee Society and eventually founding a child rehabilitation center in his village in the north of Israel, Arrabeh.
What connects the narrative threads is the Palestinian struggle for land.
Born in 1937 in Arrabeh, Palestine, Kanaaneh’s family were one of the 150,000 Palestinians – now numbering 1.3 million - who remained on their land when the state of Israel was created in May 1948.
The first person in his village to study abroad, Kanaaneh obtained two Harvard degrees in medicine and public health, and decided to return with his Hawaiian wife Didi to his village near Galilee.
In his attempt to provide much-needed services to the Palestinian minority in Israel (historic Palestine), Kanaaneh explains he worked “to bring the benefits of public health and community development to my people.”
And as he learned about Israel's “intentional neglect of the health and well being of its Arab citizens,” the reader is exposed to what Kanaaneh characterizes as medical apartheid - Israel's "politicization of health."
He quotes a “wise" senior medical co-worker: "Apartheid is unhealthy, full stop."
Kanaaneh’s book is honest in every sense of the word, and does not not shy away from self-criticism. The book in fact encompasses his personal journey and struggle - wrestling with the ethics of working as a medical doctor within the Israeli system - a position in which complicity out of necessity is implied.
“Such self-searching episodes are frequent in the book and led eventually to me facing up, not only to system but to my own role in it,” he told MENASSAT.
MENASSAT interviewed Kanaaneh to discuss his book, the recent Land Day commemoration, Israeli public opinion and what's next for the physician/writer.
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MENASSAT: Can you tell me about how the idea to write a book came about? How has it been received?
Hatim Kanaaneh: "Since high school I have written memoirs. Mainly when something disturbed or pleased me I would take time out to write about my feelings."
"Later in my professional life when I didn't have the time to sit down and write I started recording on audiotape."
"Over the years, I accumulated a lot of material and only when I retired some 5 years ago was i able to start listening to the tapes and reading what I had written."
"It occurred to me that there was a lot of material that would be of interest to western readers and that would tell them about the life of Palestinian people in Israel."
"That's when I started selecting pieces from what I had written or taped and the book came out of that."
MENASSAT: The book touches on so many issues Palestinians in Israel are faced with. What really fascinated me was how you discussed the relation of Palestinians to a state that is built with the goal of physically eliminating or displacing the native population. Was it difficult to write about internal Palestinian issues such as the local rivalries, collaborators, informers, and so on?
Hatim Kanaaneh: "There was some of that especially in terms of the groups of people that were co-opted and not so much the individuals. For example, teachers and religious leaders were particularly targeted as potential collaborators and I addressed those issues clearly in the book."
"I didn't set out to write a book of memoirs. What I wrote at the time...I wrote it, or recorded it, was not meant for others but a form of psychotherapy. In that sense, I did not feel the urge to address issues that might be interesting to lots of people as long as they were not directly affecting me personally."
"I did mull it over in my mind, and in my memoirs, the deeper meaning of my own working within the system in as much as that implied being part of the system and thus being co-opted even when I was intent on serving my people."
"Such self-searching episodes are frequent in the book and led eventually to me facing up, not only to the system but to my own role in it."
"As soon as I made that clear to myself, I initiated a project - what eventually became the Galilee Society for Health Research and Services, a non-governmental organization that was independent of government influence and even confronted that governmental system about its shortcomings vis-a-vis the Palestinian citizens of Israel."
"So the issue you raise is addressed in my book only so far as it impacts on me personally and on my role as an 'Uncle Tom.' I was quick to recognize that and managed to deal with it in mid-career."
MENASSAT: Yes, that was a very interesting element to the book - your internal struggle...working in the system. Has this left you to believe that it is useless to work within the system in Israel to achieve self-determination and equality for Palestinians in Israel?
Hatim Kanaaneh: "The moment I realized that I was working within a system that is based on an ideology, the Zionist ideology, of building up a state and a culture designed to disenfranchise me and my people, it became clear that it was useless to try to render service to my people even in such presumably apolitical field as health and community development."
"I deemed it unwise to break away completely from the system because then I would have lost touch with the bigger picture and what was happening within the system."
"That's why I and a few fellow Arab health professionals built an alternative mechanism to serve the Arab community in which we lived. At the same time, we had to keep in touch with the system and even maintain some influence within it, limited as it was."
"The alternative mechanism as I mentioned was the Galilee Society, which has since become a leading organization for the civil society structures of the 1.3 million Palestinian citizens of Israel."
"It has served as a hot house for the establishment in the early years of functioning of such prominent NGOs as Ittijah, the Arab Union of Community-Based Organizations, and Adalah, the Organization for Arab Minority Rights."
MENASSAT: In my opinion, one of the most bold and powerful statements your book is: ''It now occurs to me that there is a different form of genocide practiced against us, a chronic and hidden genocide. …Israel’s intentional neglect of the health and well-being of its Arab citizens amounts to the intentional liquidation of many people, especially children. Infant mortality rates among Arabs in Israel have been twice the levels of Jews in Israel since the establishment of the state.'' Can you comment on this?
Hatim Kanaaneh: "I think the statement speaks for itself."
"It is factually correct. At its core is the willful neglect by the state of parts of its citizenry set aside strictly based on its ethnicity."
"As I have said repeatedly in my book, groups of Jewish immigrants who arrived in Israel with health conditions worse than our own have been targeted by the state for preferential treatment and sophisticated socio-economic programs that brought them to a health-care level much better than our own."
"The statement you quote puts the emphasis strictly on infants because of the starkness of the comparison that the Infant Mortality Rate allows."
MENASSAT: I think you did a great job of portraying the feeling of Palestinians in Israel vis-a-vis Jews living in Israel. You even referred to it as, ''the emotional schizophrenia of our daily lives.'' Why was it important to discuss this? Do you think it will help people understand the position of Palestinians in Israel?
Hatim Kanaaneh: "Yes, indeed it does in my opinion. Once again what you are reading in the book reflects my own internal struggle in my effort to seek some psychological internal balance."
"It would be strange and highly improbable if we were to work and be in daily contact with the Jewish majority in Israel and not admit to any positive feelings towards those individuals."
"Yet, the collective that makes up the Zionist political majority of Israel embodies all the comparative disadvantages and inequities that befall us."
"So, in reflecting on my own mixed feelings, I do to a great extent illustrate the bind in which my entire community finds itself. And it is good for the world to realize the daily tension of our lives."
MENASSAT: What about the situation now? Israel has turned more openly to the right. The idea of transfer is even more normalized in public opinion than ever before. Where does this leave Palestinians? Do you still have hope?
Hatim Kanaaneh: "The Israeli Jewish public opinion has never been this racist before."
"True, the danger of transfer or wars is ever present and it causes me, personally, to fear for my life and that of my community. Yet, there are signs that the world is waking up to fascist threat of such people as Lieberman and Netanyahu."
"That provides a glimpse of hope for us."
"We should not forget that there are Israeli peace activist who oppose this. Even if they are small in number, their voices probably reach a larger audience in the world than mine and yours do. Again, that has an element of reassurance in it."
MENASSAT: Also, Monday was Land Day. What does the day mean to Palestinians? It has been over 30 years since the 1976 incident that saw thousands of Palestinian protest government appropriation of Arab-Israeli land, and Israel is still trying to confiscate their lands.
Hatim Kanaaneh: "It is 33 years to be exact!"
"What Land Day signifies is the ability of our community to act in unison when it comes to the issue of land. No other occasion has elicited such a unified response from Arab-Israelis."
"True, land confiscation still happens, though to a lesser degree than before, and with a greater degree of resistance than before."
"Let's remember that I am speaking of the Palestinians within the Green Line, the 1948 community and not of Gaza and the West Bank. Especially in the West Bank the confiscation of land is rampant under the heavy hand of the occupying armed forces and the rightist settlers."
MENASSAT: Last question. What are you working on now? What's next for you?
Hatim Kanaaneh: "I am busy with promoting my book to the widest possible readership in the West. It was entered in the competition for the 2009 George Orwell Prize for Political Writing and placed on the long list of 18 out of 180 competitors."
"I will be traveling for book events in the U.S. I maintain an active blog in which I write in the same spirit of my memoirs of old. Perhaps something will come out of that as well. I do gardening and I hunt for fossils. That keeps me busy."
MENASSAT: Thank you so much for the interview. Is there anything else you would like to add, that I may have missed?
Hatim Kanaaneh: "I should have mentioned that this interview is the first of its kind in an Arabic country. It is my hope that one day A Doctor in Galilee will be made available in Arabic."
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4) http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/04/shattering-the-myth-of-democracy-and-equality-in-israel/
Shattering the Myth of Democracy and Equality in Israel
An Interview with Dr. Hatim Kanaaneh
by Angie Tibbs / April 6th, 2009
Hatim Kanaaneh was an eleven year old boy when his peaceful village of Arrabeh, Galilee, was invaded by Jewish terrorists and the villagers forced to surrender in 1948. What followed was living under a military regime, which had absolute powers, a life filled with terror and humiliation, coupled with a curtailment of freedom and infringements on human rights. Discrimination was evident in all aspects of everyday life, even in the education system, something Dr. Kanaaneh experienced first hand when he was denied entry to the Hadassah medical school because he was deemed to be unqualified.
He later attended Harvard and received his medical degrees, following which he returned to Galilee where he worked as a physician for thirty-five years. He founded the Galilee Society for Health Research and Services, and also the Elrazi Center for Child Rehabilitation, the first such facility specifically designed to serve rural Palestinian children. He is now retired from clinical practice but continues to be an active member of the Galilee Society and serves on the Board of Directors of Elrazi.
Dr. Kanaaneh’s memoirs have been published in a book, A Doctor in Galilee: The Life and Struggles of a Palestinian in Israel, (Pluto Press, June 20, 2008), which gives readers an in-depth look at the struggles he, and the Palestinian minority in the Jewish state, have faced over the last 60 years, and which they continue to face. His first-hand experience of life inside Israel contrasts with ex-US President Jimmy Carter’s contention that the term “Apartheid” only applies to Israeli practices in the Occupied West Bank and Gaza.
I spoke with him via e-mail.
Angie Tibbs: Dr. Kanaaneh, it’s been almost 61 years since Arrabeh was forced to surrender to Jewish terrorists. What is life like today, not just for the people of Arrabeh, but for all Palestinians who are living inside what is called Israel?
Dr. Kanaaneh: A prime feature of our life is our imposed separate residential areas, separate towns and villages. Even in so-called ‘mixed cities’ some Arab slums are separated by concrete walls and barbwire from the better-off Jewish neighborhoods. Our communities, with one or two exceptions, fall in the bottom three centile rungs in the socio-economic grading of Israeli communities.
AT: Tell me about that.
Dr. K: Our towns and villages have fewer internal resources, be it industry, commerce, tourism, or agriculture. And they receive much less financial assistance from common central budgets, only 3-5% of the total.
Sixty-one years after the establishment of the state, one has to be blind not to see the physical differences between an Arab town, even the best-off one, and a Jewish town: pot-holed roads without sidewalks, no public spaces, no private lawns, overcrowding, children playing in the streets for lack of playgrounds, … and the list of signs of neglect is endless.
But these are only the physical symptoms. At a deeper level we constitute an undesirable element, a foreign element in the body of a state whose planners and decision makers define it to exclude us. Israeli Zionist Leaders have variously likened us to a cancer in the body of the state or a fifth column not to be trusted. At best we are seen as a hindrance, a stumbling block for planners to maneuver around in formulating their visions of the future of the state. At worse, we are a demographic ticking bomb to be dismantled at all costs.
The late Rabin was the most tolerant of Israeli leaders, accepting our presence up to a limit of twenty percent of the total population of Israel, a limit we have nearly reached now. That kind of pronouncement by presumed liberal leaders of Israel is ready fodder for incitement by openly racist politicians, the likes of Avigdor Lieberman, an immigrant from Moldova, who legitimized and popularized the concept of transfer to where over two thirds of Israeli Jewish adults approve of it.
How do I feel living in such openly hostile socio-political environment? I feel quite insecure: mentally anguished and physically threatened. I function with an ample reserve of paranoia, constantly on the lookout for signs of harmful intent behind every move by anyone outside my immediate circle of family and friends. When I start doubting those, I will know that I have lost the fight.
AT: Progressive writers, Kim Petersen and B.J. Sabri, wrote a 12-part series entitled “Defining Israeli Zionist Racism” which deals at length with racism inside Israel. What, if any, discrimination and/or racism have you observed and/or encountered?
Dr. K: Discrimination is a built-in part of life and the laws of the country. Remember that what we are dealing with here (and the basic issue of contention in the conflict between Zionism and all of us native Palestinians) is a conflict over land.
As a Palestinian I am disqualified by law from equal access to land ownership or use. This is given a deeper expression in the form of the Law of Return granting any Jewish person anywhere in the world automatic citizenship with all the benefits that accrue with it of access to land, housing, financial and social assistance, and to the symbols of the state while no Palestinian who is not born here can dream of ever becoming a citizen.
Recently laws were passed specifically to prevent our children from marrying other Palestinians and from the right to bring their spouses under the standing laws of family unification applicable to Jewish citizens.
The absolute majority of land we, the Palestinian citizens of the state of Israel since its establishment in 1948, once owned has been confiscated for the benefit of our Jewish co-citizens through a maze of some three dozen laws specifically designed for the purpose. Were it not for the 1976 uprising that has come since to be commemorated as Land Day, we would have lost the remainder. We, nearly one-fifth of the total population of Israel, now own about 3 % of its land. After all, we are dealing with what has been defined by Zionism as ‘the land of Israel’ in an ethnic sense, a definition that excludes us, Palestinians. The last stroke in the continuing saga of disenfranchisement is the requirement from us to pledge allegiance to Israel as the state of the Jews. And once we take such an oath, it would be up to the same racist crowd to define what constitutes a breach of it, a process inevitably leading to our expulsion one way or the other.
Beyond such basic discriminatory laws the whole official system and all Zionist civilian structures, many of which are legally entrusted with state-level powers and duties, are imbued with a sense of messianic zeal. Our experience with such bodies is not unlike a preview of the current practices in the Palestinian Occupied Territories where Palestinians are not allowed to drive on roads for settlers. The multitude of new settlements, named ‘Mitzpim’, or hilltop lookouts, are intended to guard the land in Galilee from us, its indigenous population, and they are surrounded by barbwire and interconnected by special roads that bypass our villages. True, we were not prevented from using those roads, but they were of little use to us because they led only to the various settlements.
At the practical level this translates into set rules and regulations that exempt Palestinians like me from all sorts of benefits if they are not openly anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian. Much of this is practiced under the blanket justification of security, the holiest of all holy cows in the country.
AT: What about employment opportunities for Palestinians, in particular, young people?
Dr. K: A psychologist colleague just informed me that he had gone through two years of theoretical and practical training as a lie-detector expert/operator before he found out that one needs to have served in the Israeli armed forces to qualify for a license.
Our youth, unlike Jewish youth, are exempt from the draft. Positions from which they are disqualified on this basis when they seek employment run the gamut from civil aviation all the way down to the manufacturing of ice-cream.
The worst part of the daily discrimination that we meet with is the fact that much of the final decisions on so many little items are left to the discretion of low-level bureaucrats. These, by and large, have been brought up on a deeply self-centered world-view that sees the world as one of constant struggle between ‘us’-the Jews and ‘them’-the Goyim and considers one’s duty as serving his own people. This, of course, leaves me out of ‘the favors’ many officials consider it their duty to do their clients. Intentional obstructionism is more often what we face.
Another area in which this phenomenon is evident is the differential implementation of the law. Take, for example, the practice of house demolition within Israel. Mind you, we are not speaking here of the savage collective punishment practiced by the Israeli occupying forces against Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. We are speaking of the practice of demolition of homes built without permit within Israel proper.
In absolute numbers there are more illegally constructed structures in Jewish communities, but the demolition is practiced almost exclusively against Arab home owners. The basis for the construction of homes without permit is also rooted in discriminatory practices in the laws of zoning which in many cases have retroactively criminalized all residents of many villages whose existence predated the state, itself. Such “Unrecognized Villages” are frequently the site of home demolitions.
The cumulative end result of all the openly discriminatory laws, the hidden disadvantages, and the differential application of the rules and regulations are clearly seen in comparative figures from officially published data of the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics.
As a Public Health practitioner I can point to the single most telling indicator of the well-being of a community, that of Infant Mortality Rate, or the number out of a thousand infants born in a certain year who die before their first birthday. This statistic regarding the most vulnerable segment of a population reflects such community attributes as the income level, the level of education, the sanitation, etc. etc.
The relative ratio of the IMR between Arabs and Jews in Israel has run at the level of almost exactly 2 since ever statistics were collected on both groups. In the last decade it has been on the rise, a reflection of increasing discrimination. One could look at many other statistics such as the level of poverty, education, housing, etc. and the gap is obvious, but IMR sums it up best.
AT: Do you see East Jerusalem being annexed completely by Israel, and, if so, what will happen to the Palestinians living where they have lived for millennia although the land has been rechristened Israel?
Dr. K: Jerusalem has already been unilaterally and completely annexed by Israel. What many people do not realize is that the city’s municipal boundaries have been expanded tremendously since its annexation to include many formerly independent Arab communities as well as some pristine wilderness turned into housing projects.
Generous funding from Jewish communities around the world and from Western governments made this possible. Yet part of the overall plan is to render the expanded city the Jewish-only capital of the state and of world Jewry. The residents of the old city of about 300,000 Palestinians were granted residence status but not full citizenship in Israel. They are slowly but constantly coerced by various means, legal and otherwise, to evacuate their Jerusalem homes and neighborhoods.
AT: How do Palestinians living in Israel view the ongoing Israeli attacks on their kin in Gaza and the West Bank?
Dr. K: At the personal level I can answer that best by referring you and your audience to my blog where the attack on Gaza featured in more than one posting. To sum that up I can testify to a sense of anger, frustration and impending danger. The daily scenes of war atrocities and destruction are enough to move the conscience of anyone with a morsel of humanity. When the violence is visited on one’s own brethren and next of kin the effect is doubly infuriating.
As a community we reacted by withdrawing into self-imposed isolation in our villages and slum neighborhoods in the cities. There was also an outpouring of donations of food, clothing and medicine though little if any was permitted to enter Gaza. More important, perhaps, were the daily demonstrations in our communities against the carnage, a way for our youth to vent their anger in non-violent ways.
Psychologically, a common theme I have heard expressed by many individuals around me is the fear for our own future.
AT: How so?
Dr. K: The worst case scenario we fear is of the world averting its eyes from our suffering and allowing Israel one day to drive us out of our homes under an imposed news blackout when the next war breaks out with a neighboring country, say, Syria or Lebanon. If the world could sit still and not be moved to protect our brothers and sisters in Gaza from the white phosphorous and DIME bombardments and from the endless air, sea and land assault against them, why would it lift a finger to protect us from summary expulsion from our homes? And such contingency plans for our expulsion are known to exist.
In recent weeks the plot of such conspiratorial theories has thickened even further: In recent years drugs have slowly become available on our streets with little interference from the police. More recently guns and live munitions have become easily available to our youth and the police seem to keep its eyes closed. Older and wiser members of our community theorize that this is done consciously in preparation for the final assault so that the Israeli authorities can claim that an armed uprising is brewing in our community and this would be enough of an excuse for calling in the tanks, the F-16s and the Apaches.
I cite this only as an example of the degree our paranoia has reached as a result of the attack on Gaza.
AT: You mentioned a very real fear is that the world will turn a blind eye to your suffering and allow Israel to one day drive you out of your homes. Who do you see as the strongest supporters of the Palestinian people in their struggle?
Dr. K: At the official level few countries, with the exception of Iran and of South American nations recently liberated form the clutches of USA hegemony, such as Chavez’ Venezuela, openly support the Palestinian people. None of the world’s heavy weights stands behind us. At the individual level, again, few in the world are informed and concerned enough to give our issues much thought. That leaves the fringe activist community in Europe and North America as our best defenders in the corridors of effective power brokerage.
Potentially, the Arab and Islamic masses are a shoo-in as our back-up crowd, but they lack the freedom and democratic means to pressure their dictator presidents, kings and emirs to respond to their wishes. Their countries’ governments mostly follow the straight and narrow path dictated by their American allies with their a’ priori acceptance of all things Israeli.
In the end, we Palestinians, inside and outside historical Palestine, are left burdened with the task of pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps; we are our own best spokespeople and supporters. Despite our spacial dispersal, internal factionalism and disunity, we have so far managed to put our issues on the world’s agenda, albeit belatedly and haltingly. Our resilience and stoicism have proven to be valuable assets in a less-than-caring world.
The Jewish people have elevated their past suffering and future potential to axiomatic heights in the world’s conscience. It is now our turn.
AT: What do you see happening in the future with respect to Palestinians living in Israel? Are you anticipating any improvement or do you expect things to get worse?
Dr. K: It is likely to get worse before it gets better. In the long run, I remain optimistic that general decency and common sense will triumph. The ‘democratic and Jewish state’ that Israel declares itself to be is an oxymoron by definition.
I see it as a three-piece puzzle that has space for only two. One part has to go. So far the Zionist system in Israel has skimped on democracy and successfully hidden the way it has disenfranchised a fifth of its population from the international community. That is no longer possible especially with the rise of civil society organizations and the advent of the Internet.
Also, I do sense a new readiness in the West, and specifically in the USA , to listen to an alternative discourse coming from quarters other than the standard pro-Israel lobby, even if it is still very reluctant to change its stand on ‘minor matters’ such as the issue at hand.
Rightists in Israel who make up the clear majority in Israel have expressed their views clearly in our last elections. Such leaders as the new Israeli Foreign Minister, Avigdor Lieberman, seem to share my analysis of the three-piece puzzle. The only difference is that they plan on throwing the Palestinian minority out and thus maintaining a truly Jewish and democratic Israel.
I am gambling on their failure and betting on the commitment of the majority of humanity to justice and equality. In taking such a risk I am counting heavily on the promising views of President Obama, for example.
It may not happen in my lifetime, but I foresee the eventual decline of fascism and fanaticism in the world, including in our region, and the rise of secular humanitarian views and solutions to common problems.
I know many decent people around me, both Jewish and Palestinian, and I would like to think that our shared humanity and decency are slowly contagious. If good people like you keep the world alert to the short-range dangers and help us avoid a calamitous quick end of our combined dreams through the actions of the Liebermens and Netanyahus, then the rise of true democracy in Israel can be expected.
This will ultimately be the nucleus of the one-state solution for Palestine and Israel.
AT: Thank you very much, Dr. Kanaaneh.
• Dr. Kanaaneh can be reached at hatimkanaaneh@yahoo.com.
Angie Tibbs is a writer/activist. She can be reached at: angie4justice@nl.rogers.com. Read other articles by Angie.
This article was posted on Monday, April 6th, 2009 at 8:00am and is filed under Discrimination, Education, Israel/Palestine, Racism,
The interview has appeared on other websites including:
Uruknet as well: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m53216&hd=&size=1&l=e
Redress (UK): http://www.redress.cc/palestine/atibbs20090408
Iraq War: http://www.iraqwar.mirror-world.ru/article/194101
Here is a commentary about it in
http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/.
Institutional Racism in Israel
I have frequently compared Israel as a state to apartheid South Africa. Citizens of the country are defined and confined by race. it is not just that all ethnic Jews, wherever they were born, have a right to live in Israel whereas many ethnic Palestinians who were actually born in Israel do not. Jews in Israel have a right of immigration for their spouses; arabs in Israel do not. Arab Israelis are actually forbidden by law from marrying Palestinians outside Israel. Many Arab communities are physically cut off by barbed wire.
It is worth reading this interview with Dr Hatim Kanaaneh. ... just concentrate on the substance of what old Dr Kanaaneh, who uses language with care and neutrality, has to say.
Here are some key parts:
Discrimination is a built-in part of life and the laws of the country. … … but IMR sums it up best.
It is worth reading the whole interview carefully. Israel now has a Foreign Minister from a party whose major election platform was the need for further action against Israeli Arabs.
http://www.redress.cc/palestine/atibbs20090408
1) http://imeu.net/news/article0013633.shtml
Untold stories: Hatim Kanaaneh
IMEU, Jul 15, 2008
To interview Hatim Kanaaneh contact the IMEU at 714-368-0300 or info@imeu.net.
[Photograph]
Palestinian-American doctor and author Hatim Kanaaneh, seen here outside of his home in Arrabeh, in the Galilee.
Dr. Hatim Kanaaneh remembers the day in 1948 that his native village of Arrabeh in the northern Galilee fell to Zionist forces intent on turning Palestine into a Jewish state. "Everyone had a white sheet hanging on a stick on their roof," he recalls sixty years later from his home in Arrabeh. "The village elders in the neighboring villages of Arrabeh, Sakhnin and Dier Hanna had met and decided that no one would leave. My father was among them."
During the previous months, the eleven year-old Kanaaneh had seen streams of refugees from Palestinian villages further south flowing through Arrabeh, intent on reaching the safety of the Lebanese border in the north.
Eventually, as they witnessed an escalation in attacks on Palestinian villages by Jewish militias, Dr. Kanaaneh's family had begun preparing to flee the country themselves, at least until the fighting had ceased. "I had a dilemma as to whether to take my birds," he remembers. "Everyone else was making decisions about pots and pans and mattresses, and I cried as I was told that I could not take my birds."
Word soon arrived, however, that the Lebanese border had been closed, leaving the Palestinians in Arrabeh with no way to escape. It was at this point that the decision was made by several of the Galilee villages near Nazareth to surrender to Israeli forces.
That is how the village of Arrabeh found itself inside of the newly formed Israeli state.
For nearly two decades, the Palestinian residents of the new state were placed under a military regime. "I remember standing in line and waiting for hours to get a permit to go from Arrabeh to Haifa. We had to go to Shefa Amr and stand in line to get a permit to go five additional kilometers."
Dr. Kanaaneh remained in his home village despite the difficulty of living as a non-Jew in Israel, before leaving to the United States to earn his medical degree. He soon returned to the Galilee, however, and established the Galilee Society to offer better health services to the underprivileged Palestinian residents of the region.
Kanaaneh often misses the personal and individual freedoms he was granted in the United States but still has yet to attain in his homeland, and feels it is important for Americans to learn about the Nakba (Arabic for "catastrophe," and the word Palestinians use to refer to the loss of their homes and homeland in 1948) for this reason. "I felt a sense of powerlessness when I returned to the Galilee - that I couldn't do anything but accept it," he says. "But I never really regretted the decision to come back."
Pluto Press of London has just published Dr. Kanaaneh's book of memoirs, A Doctor in Galilee, which shows what life is like for a Palestinian living as a citizen of Israel. The book is available from University of Michigan Press and at Amazon.com.
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2) http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10431.shtml
Palestinians remember Land Day
Jonathan Cook writing from Arrabeh, The Electronic Intifada, 30 March 2009
[Photograph]
Hatim Kanaaneh, a former physician who witnessed the Land Day protests, stands by a monument in Sakhnin's cemetery to six Palestinians shot dead by the Israeli army during the confrontations of 30 March 1976 (Jonathan Cook)
Palestinians across the Middle East were due to commemorate Land Day today, marking the anniversary of clashes in 1976 in which six unarmed Palestinians were shot dead by the Israeli army as it tried to break up a general strike.
Although Land Day is one of the most important anniversaries in the Palestinian calendar, sometimes referred to as the Palestinians' national day, the historical event it marks is little spoken of and rarely studied.
"Maybe its significance is surprising given the magnitude of other events in Palestinian history," said Hatim Kanaaneh, 71, a doctor, who witnessed the military invasion of his village.
"But what makes Land Day resonate with Palestinians everywhere is that it was the first time Palestinians inside Israel stood together and successfully resisted Israel's goal of confiscating their land."
The confrontation took place between the army and a group usually referred to as "Israeli Arabs," the small minority of Palestinians who managed to remain in their homes during the 1948 war that led to the founding of Israel. Today they number 1.2 million, or nearly one-fifth of Israel's population.
"We were given citizenship by Israel, but have always been treated as an enemy, perceived of as a threat to the state's Jewishness," said Dr. Kanaaneh, who last year published his memoir, A Doctor in Galilee, which offers a rare account in English of Palestinian life inside Israel during the Land Day period.
In 1976, Dr. Kanaaneh, having completed his medical studies at Harvard University in the United States, was the only physician in Arrabeh.
Israel crushed organized political activity among Israel's Palestinian citizens between 1948 and 1966, Dr. Kanaaneh said. Nonetheless, popular frustration had mounted as the state expropriated privately-owned Palestinian land to build new communities for Jewish citizens, many of them recent immigrants.
During military rule, historians have noted, vast swathes of land were taken from Palestinians, both from refugees in exile and from Israel's own citizens. Jews had bought only six per cent of Palestine by the time of the 1948 war, but today the state has nationalized 93 percent of Israel's territory.
"Government policy was explicitly to make the land Jewish -- or Judaize it, as it was called," Dr. Kanaaneh said.
The announcement in the mid-1970s of the confiscation of a further 2,000 hectares led to the creation of a new body, the National Committee for the Defense of Arab Lands, which provided a more assertive political leadership.
The minority's decision to strike, Dr. Kanaaneh said, shocked the Israeli authorities, which were not used to challenges to official policy. "Both sides understood the significance of the strike. For the first time we were acting as a national minority, and Israel was very sensitive to anything that suggested we had a national identity or a unified agenda, especially over a key resource like land."
Although the strike was strictly observed by Palestinians throughout Israel, the focus of the protest were three villages in the central Galilee that faced the loss of a large area of prime agricultural land: Arrabeh, Sakhnin and Deir Hanna.
The prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, and his defense minster, Shimon Peres, acted on the eve of the strike.
"What was surprising was that they didn't send in the police, as you'd expect when dealing with citizens of a country, but the army," Dr. Kanaaneh said.
The government's original plan, he said, was to break the strike and force employees to go to work, but when villagers began throwing stones, the army imposed a curfew.
"When a neighbor called me to attend to his wife who had gone into labor, I walked out of my house towards an armored vehicle waving my stethoscope," Dr. Kanaaneh said. "A soldier aimed his rifle straight at me and I hurried back inside."
[Photograph]
Ahmed Khalaila stands by a road sign dedicated to his brother, Khader, who was shot dead by the Israeli army during Land Day protests in the village of Sakhnin in 1976. (Jonathan Cook)
Ahmed Khalaila, who was 18 and living in Sakhnin, remembered being woken early by loudspeakers. "Soldiers were calling out that we must not leave the house ... We couldn't even look out of the windows," he said.
When a neighbor stepped outside her house, she was shot and injured, Khalaila said. He and his older brother, Khader, tried to help the woman. When they were about 50 meters from her, Khader was shot in the head.
"He was still breathing and we hoped he could be saved, but there were checkpoints at all the entrances to the village. We knew no ambulance would be coming for him."
Eventually the family managed to get him into a car and drove towards the nearest hospital. Held at a checkpoint, Khalaila said, the family watched as Khader bled to death as he lay across his younger brother's legs on the back seat. Khader was 24 and recently married.
No one ever came to investigate what had happened, or offered the family compensation. "It was as if a bird had died," he said. "No one was interested; no questions were asked in the parliament. Nothing."
As well as the six deaths, hundreds more Palestinians were injured and sweeping arrests were made of political activists.
Dr. Kanaaneh said the stiff resistance mounted by the villagers eventually forced the government to revoke the expropriation order.
Victory, however, was far from clear cut. The next year, Ariel Sharon, as agriculture minister, announced a program of new Jewish settlements called "lookouts" in the Galilee "to prevent control of state lands by foreigners," meaning Israel's own Palestinian citizens. The three villages were surrounded by the lookout communities, which came to be known collectively as Misgav regional council.
"They were intended to be agricultural communities, but Land Day stopped that," Dr. Kanaaneh said. "Instead they became small bedroom communities, and much of the land we defended was passed to Misgav's jurisdiction.
"Today the owners of the land pay taxes to the regional council rather than their own municipalities, and Misgav can decide, if it wants, to try to confiscate the land again. We may have got our land back, but it is not really in our hands."
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (Pluto Press) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net.
A version of this article originally appeared in The National, published in Abu Dhabi at the following link: http://www.thenational.ae/article/20090330/FOREIGN/382507494&SearchID=73350038543283
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3) http://www.menassat.com/?q=en/news-articles/6298-doctor-galilee-physicians-struggle-community-health-and-peoples-surivial
A Doctor in Galilee: A physician's struggle for community health and a people's survival
Posted April 2nd, 2009
A rare glimpse into the dire health situation of Palestinians living in Israel, Hatim Kanaaneh's memoir - "A Doctor in Galilee: The Life and Struggle of a Palestinian in Israel" - reveals the politics of health care and community development affecting the Arab minority in a Jewish-only state. MENASSAT's Tania Tabar interviewed the author earlier this week to discuss Kanaaneh's work.
By TANIA TABAR
[Photograph]
The cover of Hatim Kanaaneh's memoir, "A Doctor in Galilee: The Life and Struggle of a Palestinian in Israel," published by Pluto Press (2008).
BEIRUT, April 2, 2009 (MENASSAT) - In his memoir, “A Doctor in Galilee: The Life and Struggle of a Palestinian in Israel," Hatim Kanaaneh tells the story – the hardship, the irony, the internal struggle - of being part of the Arab minority living in Israel.
Known as the ’48 Palestinians, or those “of the inside," Kanaaneh's narrative provides a rare glimpse into the history of Palestinians that remained in Israel (historic Palestine) after the state was formed.
He also produces a compelling record of his experience working for the Israeli Ministry of Health, establishing the NGO, The Galilee Society and eventually founding a child rehabilitation center in his village in the north of Israel, Arrabeh.
What connects the narrative threads is the Palestinian struggle for land.
Born in 1937 in Arrabeh, Palestine, Kanaaneh’s family were one of the 150,000 Palestinians – now numbering 1.3 million - who remained on their land when the state of Israel was created in May 1948.
The first person in his village to study abroad, Kanaaneh obtained two Harvard degrees in medicine and public health, and decided to return with his Hawaiian wife Didi to his village near Galilee.
In his attempt to provide much-needed services to the Palestinian minority in Israel (historic Palestine), Kanaaneh explains he worked “to bring the benefits of public health and community development to my people.”
And as he learned about Israel's “intentional neglect of the health and well being of its Arab citizens,” the reader is exposed to what Kanaaneh characterizes as medical apartheid - Israel's "politicization of health."
He quotes a “wise" senior medical co-worker: "Apartheid is unhealthy, full stop."
Kanaaneh’s book is honest in every sense of the word, and does not not shy away from self-criticism. The book in fact encompasses his personal journey and struggle - wrestling with the ethics of working as a medical doctor within the Israeli system - a position in which complicity out of necessity is implied.
“Such self-searching episodes are frequent in the book and led eventually to me facing up, not only to system but to my own role in it,” he told MENASSAT.
MENASSAT interviewed Kanaaneh to discuss his book, the recent Land Day commemoration, Israeli public opinion and what's next for the physician/writer.
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MENASSAT: Can you tell me about how the idea to write a book came about? How has it been received?
Hatim Kanaaneh: "Since high school I have written memoirs. Mainly when something disturbed or pleased me I would take time out to write about my feelings."
"Later in my professional life when I didn't have the time to sit down and write I started recording on audiotape."
"Over the years, I accumulated a lot of material and only when I retired some 5 years ago was i able to start listening to the tapes and reading what I had written."
"It occurred to me that there was a lot of material that would be of interest to western readers and that would tell them about the life of Palestinian people in Israel."
"That's when I started selecting pieces from what I had written or taped and the book came out of that."
MENASSAT: The book touches on so many issues Palestinians in Israel are faced with. What really fascinated me was how you discussed the relation of Palestinians to a state that is built with the goal of physically eliminating or displacing the native population. Was it difficult to write about internal Palestinian issues such as the local rivalries, collaborators, informers, and so on?
Hatim Kanaaneh: "There was some of that especially in terms of the groups of people that were co-opted and not so much the individuals. For example, teachers and religious leaders were particularly targeted as potential collaborators and I addressed those issues clearly in the book."
"I didn't set out to write a book of memoirs. What I wrote at the time...I wrote it, or recorded it, was not meant for others but a form of psychotherapy. In that sense, I did not feel the urge to address issues that might be interesting to lots of people as long as they were not directly affecting me personally."
"I did mull it over in my mind, and in my memoirs, the deeper meaning of my own working within the system in as much as that implied being part of the system and thus being co-opted even when I was intent on serving my people."
"Such self-searching episodes are frequent in the book and led eventually to me facing up, not only to the system but to my own role in it."
"As soon as I made that clear to myself, I initiated a project - what eventually became the Galilee Society for Health Research and Services, a non-governmental organization that was independent of government influence and even confronted that governmental system about its shortcomings vis-a-vis the Palestinian citizens of Israel."
"So the issue you raise is addressed in my book only so far as it impacts on me personally and on my role as an 'Uncle Tom.' I was quick to recognize that and managed to deal with it in mid-career."
MENASSAT: Yes, that was a very interesting element to the book - your internal struggle...working in the system. Has this left you to believe that it is useless to work within the system in Israel to achieve self-determination and equality for Palestinians in Israel?
Hatim Kanaaneh: "The moment I realized that I was working within a system that is based on an ideology, the Zionist ideology, of building up a state and a culture designed to disenfranchise me and my people, it became clear that it was useless to try to render service to my people even in such presumably apolitical field as health and community development."
"I deemed it unwise to break away completely from the system because then I would have lost touch with the bigger picture and what was happening within the system."
"That's why I and a few fellow Arab health professionals built an alternative mechanism to serve the Arab community in which we lived. At the same time, we had to keep in touch with the system and even maintain some influence within it, limited as it was."
"The alternative mechanism as I mentioned was the Galilee Society, which has since become a leading organization for the civil society structures of the 1.3 million Palestinian citizens of Israel."
"It has served as a hot house for the establishment in the early years of functioning of such prominent NGOs as Ittijah, the Arab Union of Community-Based Organizations, and Adalah, the Organization for Arab Minority Rights."
MENASSAT: In my opinion, one of the most bold and powerful statements your book is: ''It now occurs to me that there is a different form of genocide practiced against us, a chronic and hidden genocide. …Israel’s intentional neglect of the health and well-being of its Arab citizens amounts to the intentional liquidation of many people, especially children. Infant mortality rates among Arabs in Israel have been twice the levels of Jews in Israel since the establishment of the state.'' Can you comment on this?
Hatim Kanaaneh: "I think the statement speaks for itself."
"It is factually correct. At its core is the willful neglect by the state of parts of its citizenry set aside strictly based on its ethnicity."
"As I have said repeatedly in my book, groups of Jewish immigrants who arrived in Israel with health conditions worse than our own have been targeted by the state for preferential treatment and sophisticated socio-economic programs that brought them to a health-care level much better than our own."
"The statement you quote puts the emphasis strictly on infants because of the starkness of the comparison that the Infant Mortality Rate allows."
MENASSAT: I think you did a great job of portraying the feeling of Palestinians in Israel vis-a-vis Jews living in Israel. You even referred to it as, ''the emotional schizophrenia of our daily lives.'' Why was it important to discuss this? Do you think it will help people understand the position of Palestinians in Israel?
Hatim Kanaaneh: "Yes, indeed it does in my opinion. Once again what you are reading in the book reflects my own internal struggle in my effort to seek some psychological internal balance."
"It would be strange and highly improbable if we were to work and be in daily contact with the Jewish majority in Israel and not admit to any positive feelings towards those individuals."
"Yet, the collective that makes up the Zionist political majority of Israel embodies all the comparative disadvantages and inequities that befall us."
"So, in reflecting on my own mixed feelings, I do to a great extent illustrate the bind in which my entire community finds itself. And it is good for the world to realize the daily tension of our lives."
MENASSAT: What about the situation now? Israel has turned more openly to the right. The idea of transfer is even more normalized in public opinion than ever before. Where does this leave Palestinians? Do you still have hope?
Hatim Kanaaneh: "The Israeli Jewish public opinion has never been this racist before."
"True, the danger of transfer or wars is ever present and it causes me, personally, to fear for my life and that of my community. Yet, there are signs that the world is waking up to fascist threat of such people as Lieberman and Netanyahu."
"That provides a glimpse of hope for us."
"We should not forget that there are Israeli peace activist who oppose this. Even if they are small in number, their voices probably reach a larger audience in the world than mine and yours do. Again, that has an element of reassurance in it."
MENASSAT: Also, Monday was Land Day. What does the day mean to Palestinians? It has been over 30 years since the 1976 incident that saw thousands of Palestinian protest government appropriation of Arab-Israeli land, and Israel is still trying to confiscate their lands.
Hatim Kanaaneh: "It is 33 years to be exact!"
"What Land Day signifies is the ability of our community to act in unison when it comes to the issue of land. No other occasion has elicited such a unified response from Arab-Israelis."
"True, land confiscation still happens, though to a lesser degree than before, and with a greater degree of resistance than before."
"Let's remember that I am speaking of the Palestinians within the Green Line, the 1948 community and not of Gaza and the West Bank. Especially in the West Bank the confiscation of land is rampant under the heavy hand of the occupying armed forces and the rightist settlers."
MENASSAT: Last question. What are you working on now? What's next for you?
Hatim Kanaaneh: "I am busy with promoting my book to the widest possible readership in the West. It was entered in the competition for the 2009 George Orwell Prize for Political Writing and placed on the long list of 18 out of 180 competitors."
"I will be traveling for book events in the U.S. I maintain an active blog in which I write in the same spirit of my memoirs of old. Perhaps something will come out of that as well. I do gardening and I hunt for fossils. That keeps me busy."
MENASSAT: Thank you so much for the interview. Is there anything else you would like to add, that I may have missed?
Hatim Kanaaneh: "I should have mentioned that this interview is the first of its kind in an Arabic country. It is my hope that one day A Doctor in Galilee will be made available in Arabic."
***********************
4) http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/04/shattering-the-myth-of-democracy-and-equality-in-israel/
Shattering the Myth of Democracy and Equality in Israel
An Interview with Dr. Hatim Kanaaneh
by Angie Tibbs / April 6th, 2009
Hatim Kanaaneh was an eleven year old boy when his peaceful village of Arrabeh, Galilee, was invaded by Jewish terrorists and the villagers forced to surrender in 1948. What followed was living under a military regime, which had absolute powers, a life filled with terror and humiliation, coupled with a curtailment of freedom and infringements on human rights. Discrimination was evident in all aspects of everyday life, even in the education system, something Dr. Kanaaneh experienced first hand when he was denied entry to the Hadassah medical school because he was deemed to be unqualified.
He later attended Harvard and received his medical degrees, following which he returned to Galilee where he worked as a physician for thirty-five years. He founded the Galilee Society for Health Research and Services, and also the Elrazi Center for Child Rehabilitation, the first such facility specifically designed to serve rural Palestinian children. He is now retired from clinical practice but continues to be an active member of the Galilee Society and serves on the Board of Directors of Elrazi.
Dr. Kanaaneh’s memoirs have been published in a book, A Doctor in Galilee: The Life and Struggles of a Palestinian in Israel, (Pluto Press, June 20, 2008), which gives readers an in-depth look at the struggles he, and the Palestinian minority in the Jewish state, have faced over the last 60 years, and which they continue to face. His first-hand experience of life inside Israel contrasts with ex-US President Jimmy Carter’s contention that the term “Apartheid” only applies to Israeli practices in the Occupied West Bank and Gaza.
I spoke with him via e-mail.
Angie Tibbs: Dr. Kanaaneh, it’s been almost 61 years since Arrabeh was forced to surrender to Jewish terrorists. What is life like today, not just for the people of Arrabeh, but for all Palestinians who are living inside what is called Israel?
Dr. Kanaaneh: A prime feature of our life is our imposed separate residential areas, separate towns and villages. Even in so-called ‘mixed cities’ some Arab slums are separated by concrete walls and barbwire from the better-off Jewish neighborhoods. Our communities, with one or two exceptions, fall in the bottom three centile rungs in the socio-economic grading of Israeli communities.
AT: Tell me about that.
Dr. K: Our towns and villages have fewer internal resources, be it industry, commerce, tourism, or agriculture. And they receive much less financial assistance from common central budgets, only 3-5% of the total.
Sixty-one years after the establishment of the state, one has to be blind not to see the physical differences between an Arab town, even the best-off one, and a Jewish town: pot-holed roads without sidewalks, no public spaces, no private lawns, overcrowding, children playing in the streets for lack of playgrounds, … and the list of signs of neglect is endless.
But these are only the physical symptoms. At a deeper level we constitute an undesirable element, a foreign element in the body of a state whose planners and decision makers define it to exclude us. Israeli Zionist Leaders have variously likened us to a cancer in the body of the state or a fifth column not to be trusted. At best we are seen as a hindrance, a stumbling block for planners to maneuver around in formulating their visions of the future of the state. At worse, we are a demographic ticking bomb to be dismantled at all costs.
The late Rabin was the most tolerant of Israeli leaders, accepting our presence up to a limit of twenty percent of the total population of Israel, a limit we have nearly reached now. That kind of pronouncement by presumed liberal leaders of Israel is ready fodder for incitement by openly racist politicians, the likes of Avigdor Lieberman, an immigrant from Moldova, who legitimized and popularized the concept of transfer to where over two thirds of Israeli Jewish adults approve of it.
How do I feel living in such openly hostile socio-political environment? I feel quite insecure: mentally anguished and physically threatened. I function with an ample reserve of paranoia, constantly on the lookout for signs of harmful intent behind every move by anyone outside my immediate circle of family and friends. When I start doubting those, I will know that I have lost the fight.
AT: Progressive writers, Kim Petersen and B.J. Sabri, wrote a 12-part series entitled “Defining Israeli Zionist Racism” which deals at length with racism inside Israel. What, if any, discrimination and/or racism have you observed and/or encountered?
Dr. K: Discrimination is a built-in part of life and the laws of the country. Remember that what we are dealing with here (and the basic issue of contention in the conflict between Zionism and all of us native Palestinians) is a conflict over land.
As a Palestinian I am disqualified by law from equal access to land ownership or use. This is given a deeper expression in the form of the Law of Return granting any Jewish person anywhere in the world automatic citizenship with all the benefits that accrue with it of access to land, housing, financial and social assistance, and to the symbols of the state while no Palestinian who is not born here can dream of ever becoming a citizen.
Recently laws were passed specifically to prevent our children from marrying other Palestinians and from the right to bring their spouses under the standing laws of family unification applicable to Jewish citizens.
The absolute majority of land we, the Palestinian citizens of the state of Israel since its establishment in 1948, once owned has been confiscated for the benefit of our Jewish co-citizens through a maze of some three dozen laws specifically designed for the purpose. Were it not for the 1976 uprising that has come since to be commemorated as Land Day, we would have lost the remainder. We, nearly one-fifth of the total population of Israel, now own about 3 % of its land. After all, we are dealing with what has been defined by Zionism as ‘the land of Israel’ in an ethnic sense, a definition that excludes us, Palestinians. The last stroke in the continuing saga of disenfranchisement is the requirement from us to pledge allegiance to Israel as the state of the Jews. And once we take such an oath, it would be up to the same racist crowd to define what constitutes a breach of it, a process inevitably leading to our expulsion one way or the other.
Beyond such basic discriminatory laws the whole official system and all Zionist civilian structures, many of which are legally entrusted with state-level powers and duties, are imbued with a sense of messianic zeal. Our experience with such bodies is not unlike a preview of the current practices in the Palestinian Occupied Territories where Palestinians are not allowed to drive on roads for settlers. The multitude of new settlements, named ‘Mitzpim’, or hilltop lookouts, are intended to guard the land in Galilee from us, its indigenous population, and they are surrounded by barbwire and interconnected by special roads that bypass our villages. True, we were not prevented from using those roads, but they were of little use to us because they led only to the various settlements.
At the practical level this translates into set rules and regulations that exempt Palestinians like me from all sorts of benefits if they are not openly anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian. Much of this is practiced under the blanket justification of security, the holiest of all holy cows in the country.
AT: What about employment opportunities for Palestinians, in particular, young people?
Dr. K: A psychologist colleague just informed me that he had gone through two years of theoretical and practical training as a lie-detector expert/operator before he found out that one needs to have served in the Israeli armed forces to qualify for a license.
Our youth, unlike Jewish youth, are exempt from the draft. Positions from which they are disqualified on this basis when they seek employment run the gamut from civil aviation all the way down to the manufacturing of ice-cream.
The worst part of the daily discrimination that we meet with is the fact that much of the final decisions on so many little items are left to the discretion of low-level bureaucrats. These, by and large, have been brought up on a deeply self-centered world-view that sees the world as one of constant struggle between ‘us’-the Jews and ‘them’-the Goyim and considers one’s duty as serving his own people. This, of course, leaves me out of ‘the favors’ many officials consider it their duty to do their clients. Intentional obstructionism is more often what we face.
Another area in which this phenomenon is evident is the differential implementation of the law. Take, for example, the practice of house demolition within Israel. Mind you, we are not speaking here of the savage collective punishment practiced by the Israeli occupying forces against Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. We are speaking of the practice of demolition of homes built without permit within Israel proper.
In absolute numbers there are more illegally constructed structures in Jewish communities, but the demolition is practiced almost exclusively against Arab home owners. The basis for the construction of homes without permit is also rooted in discriminatory practices in the laws of zoning which in many cases have retroactively criminalized all residents of many villages whose existence predated the state, itself. Such “Unrecognized Villages” are frequently the site of home demolitions.
The cumulative end result of all the openly discriminatory laws, the hidden disadvantages, and the differential application of the rules and regulations are clearly seen in comparative figures from officially published data of the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics.
As a Public Health practitioner I can point to the single most telling indicator of the well-being of a community, that of Infant Mortality Rate, or the number out of a thousand infants born in a certain year who die before their first birthday. This statistic regarding the most vulnerable segment of a population reflects such community attributes as the income level, the level of education, the sanitation, etc. etc.
The relative ratio of the IMR between Arabs and Jews in Israel has run at the level of almost exactly 2 since ever statistics were collected on both groups. In the last decade it has been on the rise, a reflection of increasing discrimination. One could look at many other statistics such as the level of poverty, education, housing, etc. and the gap is obvious, but IMR sums it up best.
AT: Do you see East Jerusalem being annexed completely by Israel, and, if so, what will happen to the Palestinians living where they have lived for millennia although the land has been rechristened Israel?
Dr. K: Jerusalem has already been unilaterally and completely annexed by Israel. What many people do not realize is that the city’s municipal boundaries have been expanded tremendously since its annexation to include many formerly independent Arab communities as well as some pristine wilderness turned into housing projects.
Generous funding from Jewish communities around the world and from Western governments made this possible. Yet part of the overall plan is to render the expanded city the Jewish-only capital of the state and of world Jewry. The residents of the old city of about 300,000 Palestinians were granted residence status but not full citizenship in Israel. They are slowly but constantly coerced by various means, legal and otherwise, to evacuate their Jerusalem homes and neighborhoods.
AT: How do Palestinians living in Israel view the ongoing Israeli attacks on their kin in Gaza and the West Bank?
Dr. K: At the personal level I can answer that best by referring you and your audience to my blog where the attack on Gaza featured in more than one posting. To sum that up I can testify to a sense of anger, frustration and impending danger. The daily scenes of war atrocities and destruction are enough to move the conscience of anyone with a morsel of humanity. When the violence is visited on one’s own brethren and next of kin the effect is doubly infuriating.
As a community we reacted by withdrawing into self-imposed isolation in our villages and slum neighborhoods in the cities. There was also an outpouring of donations of food, clothing and medicine though little if any was permitted to enter Gaza. More important, perhaps, were the daily demonstrations in our communities against the carnage, a way for our youth to vent their anger in non-violent ways.
Psychologically, a common theme I have heard expressed by many individuals around me is the fear for our own future.
AT: How so?
Dr. K: The worst case scenario we fear is of the world averting its eyes from our suffering and allowing Israel one day to drive us out of our homes under an imposed news blackout when the next war breaks out with a neighboring country, say, Syria or Lebanon. If the world could sit still and not be moved to protect our brothers and sisters in Gaza from the white phosphorous and DIME bombardments and from the endless air, sea and land assault against them, why would it lift a finger to protect us from summary expulsion from our homes? And such contingency plans for our expulsion are known to exist.
In recent weeks the plot of such conspiratorial theories has thickened even further: In recent years drugs have slowly become available on our streets with little interference from the police. More recently guns and live munitions have become easily available to our youth and the police seem to keep its eyes closed. Older and wiser members of our community theorize that this is done consciously in preparation for the final assault so that the Israeli authorities can claim that an armed uprising is brewing in our community and this would be enough of an excuse for calling in the tanks, the F-16s and the Apaches.
I cite this only as an example of the degree our paranoia has reached as a result of the attack on Gaza.
AT: You mentioned a very real fear is that the world will turn a blind eye to your suffering and allow Israel to one day drive you out of your homes. Who do you see as the strongest supporters of the Palestinian people in their struggle?
Dr. K: At the official level few countries, with the exception of Iran and of South American nations recently liberated form the clutches of USA hegemony, such as Chavez’ Venezuela, openly support the Palestinian people. None of the world’s heavy weights stands behind us. At the individual level, again, few in the world are informed and concerned enough to give our issues much thought. That leaves the fringe activist community in Europe and North America as our best defenders in the corridors of effective power brokerage.
Potentially, the Arab and Islamic masses are a shoo-in as our back-up crowd, but they lack the freedom and democratic means to pressure their dictator presidents, kings and emirs to respond to their wishes. Their countries’ governments mostly follow the straight and narrow path dictated by their American allies with their a’ priori acceptance of all things Israeli.
In the end, we Palestinians, inside and outside historical Palestine, are left burdened with the task of pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps; we are our own best spokespeople and supporters. Despite our spacial dispersal, internal factionalism and disunity, we have so far managed to put our issues on the world’s agenda, albeit belatedly and haltingly. Our resilience and stoicism have proven to be valuable assets in a less-than-caring world.
The Jewish people have elevated their past suffering and future potential to axiomatic heights in the world’s conscience. It is now our turn.
AT: What do you see happening in the future with respect to Palestinians living in Israel? Are you anticipating any improvement or do you expect things to get worse?
Dr. K: It is likely to get worse before it gets better. In the long run, I remain optimistic that general decency and common sense will triumph. The ‘democratic and Jewish state’ that Israel declares itself to be is an oxymoron by definition.
I see it as a three-piece puzzle that has space for only two. One part has to go. So far the Zionist system in Israel has skimped on democracy and successfully hidden the way it has disenfranchised a fifth of its population from the international community. That is no longer possible especially with the rise of civil society organizations and the advent of the Internet.
Also, I do sense a new readiness in the West, and specifically in the USA , to listen to an alternative discourse coming from quarters other than the standard pro-Israel lobby, even if it is still very reluctant to change its stand on ‘minor matters’ such as the issue at hand.
Rightists in Israel who make up the clear majority in Israel have expressed their views clearly in our last elections. Such leaders as the new Israeli Foreign Minister, Avigdor Lieberman, seem to share my analysis of the three-piece puzzle. The only difference is that they plan on throwing the Palestinian minority out and thus maintaining a truly Jewish and democratic Israel.
I am gambling on their failure and betting on the commitment of the majority of humanity to justice and equality. In taking such a risk I am counting heavily on the promising views of President Obama, for example.
It may not happen in my lifetime, but I foresee the eventual decline of fascism and fanaticism in the world, including in our region, and the rise of secular humanitarian views and solutions to common problems.
I know many decent people around me, both Jewish and Palestinian, and I would like to think that our shared humanity and decency are slowly contagious. If good people like you keep the world alert to the short-range dangers and help us avoid a calamitous quick end of our combined dreams through the actions of the Liebermens and Netanyahus, then the rise of true democracy in Israel can be expected.
This will ultimately be the nucleus of the one-state solution for Palestine and Israel.
AT: Thank you very much, Dr. Kanaaneh.
• Dr. Kanaaneh can be reached at hatimkanaaneh@yahoo.com.
Angie Tibbs is a writer/activist. She can be reached at: angie4justice@nl.rogers.com. Read other articles by Angie.
This article was posted on Monday, April 6th, 2009 at 8:00am and is filed under Discrimination, Education, Israel/Palestine, Racism,
The interview has appeared on other websites including:
Uruknet as well: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m53216&hd=&size=1&l=e
Redress (UK): http://www.redress.cc/palestine/atibbs20090408
Iraq War: http://www.iraqwar.mirror-world.ru/article/194101
Here is a commentary about it in
http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/.
Institutional Racism in Israel
I have frequently compared Israel as a state to apartheid South Africa. Citizens of the country are defined and confined by race. it is not just that all ethnic Jews, wherever they were born, have a right to live in Israel whereas many ethnic Palestinians who were actually born in Israel do not. Jews in Israel have a right of immigration for their spouses; arabs in Israel do not. Arab Israelis are actually forbidden by law from marrying Palestinians outside Israel. Many Arab communities are physically cut off by barbed wire.
It is worth reading this interview with Dr Hatim Kanaaneh. ... just concentrate on the substance of what old Dr Kanaaneh, who uses language with care and neutrality, has to say.
Here are some key parts:
Discrimination is a built-in part of life and the laws of the country. … … but IMR sums it up best.
It is worth reading the whole interview carefully. Israel now has a Foreign Minister from a party whose major election platform was the need for further action against Israeli Arabs.
http://www.redress.cc/palestine/atibbs20090408
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