Waiting For Godot

Gideon Levi is unique among Israeli journalists. He is a man of integrity. Because of it he is as controversial as one can get in Israel. From were I stand he towers like a giant, almost a demigod. ‘Godot Levi,’ I had grown accustomed to thinking of him. On more than one occasion I had spoken to him on the phone or exchanged brief emails with him. Last week I finally met him in person. He spoke at the Arab Human Rights Association in Nazareth about racial discrimination in Israel. His line of thinking went as follows: The underlying cause for discrimination by Israel’s Jewish majority against its Palestinian minority is twofold: Its belief in the superiority of the Jewish mind and all that follows in terms of the chosen people’s rights and God-given privileges and dehumanizing of the other, especially the Arab other and most especially the Palestinian other. The process is given legitimacy and full sway by a system-wide media conspiracy and unquestioning promotion. In conclusion, Mr. Levi opined that change on this matter would not come from within the Israeli society.

I may have missed some of the finer points of Mr. Levi’s discourse. Still, when the Q&A period came, I asked the leading question if, given this conclusion he supported the international Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel that a wide circle of Palestinian civil society activists had called for starting in 2005 and which seemed to be gaining strength and currency abroad. Mr. Levi gave a less than convincing response to the effect that he found the Israeli public so lacking in self understanding that it failed to link BSD to its actions and attitudes. I felt personally aggrieved. My idol was self-mutilating right in front of my eyes; he was hedging, perhaps because it is illegal in Israel to support the call for BDS, I thought. But he didn't hedge at all about another equally weighty political point. In fact he volunteered the information that he no longer draws a line under 1948 like so many soft-hearted Israeli liberals do. 

A young man named Ahmad raised a different point: In his near one-hour –long discourse on the sensitive issue Mr. Levi did not mention Zionism once. Didn’t Zionism contribute to the promotion of racial discrimination against its colonial native population? I waited for my idol to confirm my assumption regarding his anti-Zionism. To his credit he acknowledged the special importance of the issue raised by the young questioner, calling him Ahmad and not the usual ‘Achmid.’ But he went on to dodge the core issue stating that he no longer knew what Zionism was and hence he couldn’t take a stand on the matter. I found this even more disappointing than Mr. Levi’s response to my question. He also smoked and I am a public health physician. Alas my giant of a hero was disintegrating before my own eyes. It was enough to drive one to desperation.

Then today I read his op. ed. piece in Haaretz entitled “A patriot’s final refuge” in which he sees the light. The credit for this sudden change may well go to Tzipi Livni who seemed to see the writing on the wall, so to speak. It is not the Apartheid Wall as one may have hoped that she saw. Rather it is the more alarming wall of the EU where warnings are flashing for Israel to take notice or else its profitable occupation products will be banned. Mr. Levi now seems to tackle his reluctance to call for BDS frontally, making the link to South Africa and ending with “the call for a boycott is required as the last refuge of a patriot.”

Is anti-Zionism next Mr. Godot? I am waiting.

The Other Palestinian Noble Laureate And His Jewish Connection

A review of “The Almond Tree”

By Michelle Cohen Corasanti, Garnet Publishing, 2012.

Achmid, the name of the narrator and main protagonist of Ms. Cohen’s debut novel, “The Almond Tree,” turned me off so badly that at first I was tempted to drop the miserable fake altogether. Didn’t the woman know that such rendition of one of the prophet’s names is offensive to Arabic speakers? Only now, after devouring the spellbinding account of the dramatic life of the Palestinian prodigy with the insulting misnomer from his dirt-poor village beginnings to the halls of the Swedish Academy of Science, do I really appreciate the cunning choice of the name. What better statement could the author have made about the mixed-up identity and muddled self-conception of the average Palestinian Arab citizen of Israel? Truly, the Ashkenazy cultural hegemony in Israel had taken hold of us all. We speak the Ashkenazy dialect of Hebrew even when conversing in Arabic with each other, we eat the Ashkenazi sheminit instead of labane for breakfast in our arabesque-tiled kitchens, and we hang Hebrew billboards at the entrance to our businesses catering to our 100% Arab cliental. There are no ‘Ahmads’ left among us. ‘Achmid’ gives a taste of the colonization of our indigenous culture, the appropriation of our falafel, hummus and tabbouleh as items of Israeli cuisine, and the violent mangling of our psyche.

But the novel is not another artful attempt at whitewashing Israel and singing the praises of its civilizing influence on its Palestinian citizens. On the contrary, it presents in full force and gory detail Israel’s violent suppression and merciless punishment of the Palestinians’ attempts at resisting its land theft and iron-fist practices of its military. Trigger-happy Israeli soldiers kill Palestinian children just as they continue to do daily in the West Bank and Gaza, and bulldozer operators and their commanders raze Palestinian homes crushing American activist protestors in a detailed and faithful recreation of the mechanized assassination of Rachel Corrie. If any figure shines in the narrative, it is Achmid’s father, a pillar of wisdom, kindness, sacrifice and understanding and an accomplished painter and traditional musician committed to nonviolence and reconciliation. A near perfect negative mirror image is Achmid’s boss and scientific guardian. He is bigoted and full of hate and accepts Achmid as his student against his will. Achmid’s wrongly jailed father’s image never leaves his mind. His constant wise admonition to his obedient son together with the family’s extreme poverty pacifies the young man’s every step of the way. His submissiveness and mathematical genius force the holocaust-scarred professor to put up with him. The compromise eventually succeeds in tethering the two scientists for life, a camaraderie that costs both dearly in terms of their respective family relationships.

Ms. Cohen does a good job of stringing a series of violent atrocities into a near believable sequence of events that shape the life of Achmid and his family. Along with this, she manages to visit traditional Palestinian customs and lore, with an occasional slip-up such as depicting them living on a steady diet of rice when in fact wheat is the Palestinian staple. But this is more than balanced by her lively and colorful portrayal of their daily life, take her description of the traditional wedding ceremony and the Dabkeh, the Palestinian group dance, for example. This incongruity and fluctuating fidelity in reporting the horrendous life experiences and many losses of the family at the core of the powerful narrative colors it with a hue of unreality though it hardly affects its truthfulness. Throughout the entire saga, the Palestinian is the underdog, the defeated and powerless sufferer left to survive by his wits and the kindness and care of his next of kin. The Jew, whether Israeli or American, is his occasional but obligatory benefactor, be it in obtaining a permit for him to build a house or to travel or securing him a post-doctorate position at MIT. The latter stipulation is an accurate account of the real experience of every Palestinian scientist in Israel that I know. This patronizing gesture, often processed through the collegial close contact with a fellow scientist at an American research institute, reflects the unequal relationship between the needy Palestinian and his magnanimous Jewish boss regardless how their relative scientific abilities compare. The fact that the deal is often sealed between two scientist who happen to be Jewish adds a further rub to the ethnically nuanced benevolent gesture. Overall, “The Almond Tree” conforms to this stratified ordering of the parties’ relative outreach and power: The Arab always needs the input of the Jew to get ahead in the world, a basic premise of Shimon Peres’s Oslo era dream of the New Middle East.

I may have stretched my feeling of awkwardness regarding the role of Achmid’s professor and enabler a bit too far. After all, there is a precedent: Arafat had to drag two Israeli's along to qualify for his prize. (just kidding! Actually all three were falsely accused.) Still, reading the novel did leave me wishing Ms. Cohen had invented a more equal relationship despite the contrary reality. Even more thought provoking was imagining reading the novel wearing the hat of an Israeli Jew: After dismissing the initial urge to call the author anti-Semitic and a self-hating Jew, more out of blind habit than out of conviction, I found myself kneeling to the ground under the weighty burden I needed to shoulder in seeking true peace and reconciliation with the Palestinians, starting with those sharing Israel’s citizenship with me since day one, those on whom the author purports to shine the international spotlight.

Having sung the praise of this powerful and timely novel, I am still at a loss as to how to convey my gut-level revulsion at the choice of name for its hero, clever and meaningful as it truly is. For the Arabic speaking reader and the student of Arabic culture, I have just discovered a convincing illustration of what I mean: Go to the link and see how the IDF greets its Moslem soldiers and tell me how your stomach feels?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ovf1MB3s4-k#at=21

Others just have to believe me: “Achmid” stinks. Yet he is a true reflection of our reality. And who am I to complain? The hero of my forthcoming novel lives for two decades with the name “Eli” instead of the Arabic “Ali” for the sake of convenience and to keep peace in his mixed family.

A Swim with Mohammad Assaf

“On this earth what deserves living for,” Mahmoud Darwish wrote. I just watched a video on You-tube of the Palestinian singer Mohammad Assaf, nicknamed by the judges of the pan-Arab competition, Arab Idol 2013, ‘the Rocket’ – a rocket of peace, they were careful to stress-- performing his signal song “Alli el-kuffyeh” from the night before he won the title. I cried all through it. Here is the link

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aj-pyJF6ckU

But you have to speak the Palestinian dialect of Arabic to really appreciate the full impact of what this Palestinian refugee sings. An audience of some 150 million watched of whom 65 million voted for the 23 year old idol. Here is my translation of the opening stanza:

By God, the letters of the homeland are like a necklace over a beautiful chest:

The F (fa’a) is for beloved Palestine. Oh how dear is the homeland; how dear it is!

The L (lam) is for the time when they united and how powerful was the stone.

The S (seen) is the question of the prisoner: when will I gain liberty?

The T (Ta) is the rise of the full moon over the martyr in his grave.

The I (ya’a) is how sweet is the ingathering of the diaspora.

The N (noon) is the light of the prophet as he treads in Jerusalem.

And that is only the opening! He follows that with the refrain, a joyous call to twirl the kuffyeh high in dance and jubilation. Two birds with one stone: the kuffyeh is the emblem of Palestinian pride and, especially since the first Intifada, it has come to signify resistance and revolution to youth the world over. In Assaf’s voice and with his charisma, the mix of nationalist sentiment and invitation to dance is pure magic. It is surely what Mahmoud Darwish spoke of. The most appropriate scream that struggled to escape my throat on hearing it was a loud “Allahu Akbar!” in praise of Assaf’s creator. But one has to be careful. Just the day before, a poor Sephardic man was riddled with bullets by a guard at the Western Wall for shouting that.

“I waited 30 years to see the Palestinian flag waved in Nazareth in something that is not a demonstration,” Sally Azzam, our Nazarene friend, noted on Facebook. She wished her baby had seen it. The split TV screen showed the celebrating Palestinian crowds in three different cities: Ramallah, Gaza and Nazareth in addition to the pan-Arab crowd on location in Beirut for the announcement of the winner of the Arab Idol competition. Another friend noted that one almost forgets that they could not exchange visits; the occupation keeps them apart. A fourth Palestinian locale, Jerusalem, was not even present on screen. The police there threatened violence early in the evening and carried out the threat to quell the enthusiasm of the celebrating crowd as the announcement of Mohammad Assaf as the winner was broadcast. In fact Fox News eliminated both Jerusalem and Nazareth from its report of the event altogether. What do Israeli citizens have to do with a Palestinian celebration anyway?

I had spent the evening with the family of a nephew. Their satellite dish catches MBC-1, the Saudi-owned station in Beirut that doesn’t seem to mind Western-style exposure of shoulders and other bodily attractions short of “that which God has forbidden.” Going by the stations standards, He apparently forbids little in the way of body parts. At any rate, I had spent most of the day tending my garden. I am spoiled, I know. My wife and I enjoy a plot of land that had come down to me through a long string of ancestors. It would have accommodated thirty people had it been located in Gaza. My back ached and I claimed the choice seat in the crowded living room of my nephew, stretched out in it and proceeded to perform relaxing exercises for my back muscles. Soon, I found myself dozing off between the ruckus highlights of the evening. The two pre-teen boys of the hosting family jumped and screamed their excited approval and encouragement every time Assaf came on screen or his name was mentioned. I am no music critic. My vote went to the Syrian woman competitor, Farah: for one thing, I am partial to young women and the charm of their lilting voices. For another, Syria needs a pleasant surprise no less than Palestine. The third finalist was Ahmad Jamal, an Egyptian with talent. But he risks being outlawed if he wins. At least Mohammad Assaf, when he was warned against continuing his sacrilegious practice of singing at penalty of loosing his prison ID in Gaza, was offered alternative accommodations in the wider facility in the West Bank contracted out by Israel to the PLO and its president Abbas. The long and short of his crime is that his singing preoccupies good Moslems from the worship of God. Now that he had become the Arab “idol,” he is in direct and open competition. Apropos the strict rules of the religion, a nephew whispered to me the essence of a new fatwa he heard: observant women should sit cross-legged on the floor and not on chairs. Sitting on a chair or a couch is conducive to relaxing and letting ones legs split apart, which is an open invitation to the devil. Could they have read my secret thoughts, I wondered?

Muhammad Assaf is already a legend. To hear young Palestinians speak of him you would think he were the young JFK winning the USA presidency. A mature nephew of mine quoted a distant relative of his who had taken part together with Assaf two years ago in a national level singing competition:

“He was the best, absolutely the best. But they had to disqualify him early because it was too much trouble to provide him with all the needed documents every time he came to Bethlehem to compete.”

A second young man related the via dolorosa of Assaf in the current competition. The Israeli authorities had held him back so long that it was already too late. When he arrived in Cairo the gate to the enclosure housing the studio was already closed. He begged the guard and explained his plight to no avail. So he climbed over the wall, a usual feat for Gazan refugees. And Beirut is calm enough these days: guards don’t shoot Palestinian ‘infiltrators’ at will there. But the studio had run out of numbers for additional contestants. A fellow Palestinian who knew how good Assaf was, gave him his number. And that is how he entered the competition.

A cynical colleague expressed the fear that Israel may choose to assassinate a few Palestinian leaders while no one is looking. Now that Assaf has won I worry more about him. For one thing, JFK was assassinated. For another, Palestinian history is rich with rubbed-off prominent artists. Ghassan Kanafani and Naji Elali come to mind. And like in their cases, a Palestinian hand will be implicated in the murder regardless how obvious the Mossad’s behind the scenes role is. Mind you, I am careful: I am not making any claim, direct, implied or allegorical, about the case of JFK. Never mind Robert’s case.

Muhammad Assaf is truly a phenomenon. Except that he is your usual Palestinian phenomenon: a refugee born to refugee parents temporarily exiled to Misrata, Libya, from their camp in Gaza, where they had successfully competed for enough air to breath in the most densely populated spot on earth. He attained normal physical growth, albeit of the thin build type, on the typical daily ration of 2279 calories of the Israeli enforced Gazan style diet and learned to turn his life’s challenges to opportunities.

As best as I can figure it out the boy sang from as early as any one in his family can remember. It apparently started with his childhood cries of pain and hunger to which few paid attention, and those who did had no recourse to corrective steps to alleviate the distress. So the kid turned his cries to songs of longing, perhaps at first for food and later for romance and company. As his Adam’s apple burst to full bloom, he flavored his longstanding yearning and dreams of return to his family’s much glorified paradise in pre-Nakba rural Palestine with a touch of testosterone. With that he converted his trans-generationally transmitted memories of Palestine absent Zionism and Wahhabi religiosity into a more suitable teenage dream of frolicking with age mates of both sexes in the lap of spring season in Palestinian. And, lo and behold, it worked! ‘Alli el-kuffyeh’ was born and there was hardly an Arab teenage girl, let alone Palestinian ones, who had a bed of her own to sleep on who didn’t dream of Assaf in it. Nancy Ajram is a superstar and one of the four judges of the competition. But she is the kind of judge I wouldn’t mind condemning me to the gallows just so I could claim a relationship with her. I swear I caught Nancy on screen offering Assaf a free swim in the emerald green sea of her eyes and beyond.

I dozed off doing laps in the shallows. I woke up to my two young grand nephews dancing wildly with their chairs raised over their heads for lack of dance partners. Chairs! What perverts!

A New Year Message

2012 In Review

This year Didi and I decided to divide the pleasure of wishing you all a good holiday season and a Happy New Year: I am writing this summary of the highlights of the year for us while Didi will add a personal note and do the mailing:

It is now a tradition: Since the two of us retired, every year around mid November we head to California to stay with our son’s family in San Jose. There we also get together with the families of our two Kanaaneh nephews in the SF Bay area. About a month later we join our Daughter’s family for their winter vacation. That is how we found ourselves in Lima, the Peruvian Andes and the Amazon at the start of 2012 and swimming with the dolphins off the Kona coast of the Big Island of Hawaii today as we bid goodbye to the same year.

I usually write a piece on my blog about every foreign country we visit. In the case of Peru I experimented with fictionalizing my impressions because it fit well with an assignment I had as a fellow for the 2011-12 academic year at the Writers’ Institute at CUNY. Here is the link to that piece for those who have the interest and the time:

http://a-doctor-in-galilee.blogspot.com/2012/12/a-wet-dream.html

For the rest of that winter vacation I returned home to Arrabeh, our village in Galilee, for a couple of weeks to tend our garden and check on friends and relatives. It was a sad visit during which I lost two nephews, one who was my namesake and the other, a teenager, who was my volunteer gardening helper. I also committed this experience to my blog. Especially those among you who are interested in Palestinian village culture may want to read it at:

http://a-doctor-in-galilee.blogspot.com/2012_01_01_archive.html

 Shortly after returning to NY, Didi left to California to help with the care of Zara, Ty and Katherine’s new daughter and our fifth grandchild. I continued to enjoy the instructive, intriguing and invigorating input of my dozen fellow writers and instructors at the WI till mid-May when I travelled to join the families of both of our children when all of us congregated at a California beach to meet Zara for the first time and to celebrate my 75^th birthday. From there we returned home to Galilee. At home I continued the task of rewriting my novel, the reason I had enlisted in the WI for the one academic year in NY. During that period Didi joined the Chinatown YMCA and shed off a good number of pounds doing regular exercises from swimming to Zumba. In Arrabeh we both reverted to gardening and the treadmill.

In July Rhoda and her two daughters arrived for their annual visit to family and friends at the height of the wedding season in the village. After few such celebrations in the Kanaaneh clan we drove our car to Jordan for a weeklong sojourn at the Dead Sea and Petra in temperatures of above 110 F in the shade. Because of the new baby, Ty and his family did not make it for the obligatory annual get-together in Arrabeh. Instead we all met for two week at a rented vacation mansion in Woodstock, NY where the four children swam and frolicked to their hearts’ content and did their best to teach us, the grandparents, the art of the hula-hoop to Malaika’s delight as a budding photographer.

For the remaining couple of months we visited with relatives and friends, tended our garden, replenished our flock of chickens that had been decimated by a vicious mongoose and invested in a large electric dehydrator to handle the plentiful summer fruits. Didi waxed inventive with fig, grape and persimmon fruit leather preparations. In the meantime I embarked on a set of basic repairs including two dental implants and a bunion surgery before returning to San Jose for the start of a new cycle.

With our Best Wishes.

Hatim and Didi Kanaaneh

P.S.

Hatim didn’t mention that he has continued to work on his “Palestinian novel” honing it with his newly acquired writing skills!  If you happen to know of a suitable literary agent, let him know! Didi