A Doctor in Galilee

Hatim Kanaaneh

Description

Hatim Kanaaneh is a Palestinian doctor who has struggled for over 35 years to bring medical care to Palestinians in Galilee, against a culture of anti-Arab discrimination. This is the story of how he fought for the human rights of his patients and overcame the Israeli authorities' cruel indifference to their suffering.



Kanaaneh is a native of Galilee, born before the creation of Israel. He left to study medicine at Harvard, before returning to work as a public health physician with the intention of helping his own people. He discovered a shocking level of disease and malnutrition in his community and a shameful lack of support from the Israeli authorities. After doing all he could for his patients by working from inside the system, Kanaaneh set up The Galilee Society, an NGO working for equitable health, environmental and socio-economic conditions for Palestinian Arabs in Israel.



This is a brilliant memoir that shows how grass roots organisations can loosen the Zionist grip upon Palestinian lives.

1. Cat and Mouse

2. A Second Homecoming

3. Legends of the Diwan

4. Present Absentees

5. My First Shaheed

6. Lost in the System

7. The Evil Eye

8. Galilee Folkways

9 . Galilee Panoramas

10. Genocide, Here and There

11. Out of the Closet

12. Tribal Politics

13. Tales from Area Nine

14. Donkeys with Neckties

15. Different Resistance

16. Suffering the Lashes

17. Agonies of War

18. In the Shin Bet's Sights

19. Reaping the Whirlwind

20. Deja Vu

21. A Little Piece of Palestine

Notes

Index

Sujets

• Political
• Historical
• Lettres et linguistique
• Fuerzas de Defensa de Israel
• Ariel Sharón
• Biography
• Birzeit University
• Shin Bet
• Military
• Palestinian refugee
• Bedouin
• Zionism
• Galilee
• Palestine
• Autobiography
• Shabak
• IDF
• Intifada
• Ariel Sharon

Informations

• Publié par: Pluto Press
• Date de parution: 20 juin 2008
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781849644051
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 10 Mo

Extrait

A Doctor in Galilee

The Life and Struggle of a Palestinian in Israel

HATIM KANAANEH

with a Foreword by Jonathan Cook

P Pluto Press LONDON • ANN ARBOR, MI

First published 2008 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA and 839 Greene Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48106

www.plutobooks.com

Copyright © Hatim Kanaaneh 2008

The right of Hatim Kanaaneh to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN ISBN

978 0 7453 2787 7 hardback 978 0 7453 2786 0 paperback

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data applied for

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin.

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Designed and produced for Pluto Press by Chase Publishing Services Ltd, Fortescue, Sidmouth, EX10 9QG, England Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton Printed and bound in the United States of America

To those who have suffered with me: my family, Didi, Rhoda and Ty, my extended family, the Kanaanehs, my fellow villagers in Arrabeh, and my people, the Palestinians, and to all suffering people in the world with love.

———

The closing chapter in the book tells of an ancient olive tree that I transplanted to my garden. The passage encapsulates, conceptually and emotionally, the entire narrative of this book of memoirs. This olive tree serves as a metaphor for my community’s struggle for survival and its sense of belonging.

Contents

Map of the Galilee Preface Forewordby Jonathan Cook

 1 Cat and Mouse  2 A Second Homecoming  3 Legends of the Diwan  4 Present Absentees  5 My First Shaheed  6 Lost in the System  7 The Evil Eye  8 Galilee Folkways  9 Galilee Panoramas 10 Genocide, Here and There 11 Out of the Closet 12 Tribal Politics 13 Tales from Area Nine 14 Donkeys with Neckties 15 Different Resistance 16 Suffering the Lashes 17 Agonies of War 18 In the Shin Bet’s Sights 19 Reaping the Whirlwind 20 DÈjá Vu 21 A Little Piece of Palestine

Index

viii ix xv

1 16 31 39 54 65 78 88 99 113 123 136 147 165 179 188 202 215 229 238 258

268

A schematic map of the Galilee with localities mentioned in the book. (Prepared by Maysoon Nassar.)

Preface

A Doctor in Galilee: The Life and Struggle of a Palestinian in Israel is a memoir arising from my struggle as a physician to bring the benefits of public health and community development to my people, the Palestinian Arab minority citizens of Israel. The intimate personal narrative introduces readers to this little known and often misunderstood population that is nonetheless key to understanding the ArabIsraeli conflict. I was born in 1937 in Arrabeh Village in the Galilee at the height of the Palestinian peasant uprising against the British Mandate for its sympathy with and accommodation of the designs of the Zionist Movement on their land. On my eleventh birthday, Israel was officially declared an independent state, marking the Palestinian Nakba or catastrophe. The vast majority of Palestinians from the area of the new state became refugees in neighboring Arab countries. Their towns and villages were systematically raised or their homes occupied by Jewish immigrants. We, the few Palestinians who remained on their land, found ourselves on the wrong side of the border, a leaderless and alienated minority in an enemy state. For 18 years we were placed under oppressive military rule. As subsistence olive farmers my family sacrificed much to put me through the Nazareth Municipal High School. Two years later, in 1960, I struck out to study medicine in the USA. In 1970, having obtained Harvard degrees in medicine and public health and turning down several lucrative offers in America, I returned with my Hawaiian wife, a teacher, to Arrabeh and found employment with the Ministry of Health in my field of specialty. The dearth of physicians in my region forced me to double as solo village general practice doctor. I lasted for six years before I could take it no more. I found my public health work unproductive in light of state systems openly hostile to Arab citizens. This included policies of massive land confiscation that led to a mini uprising by my people, known thereafter as Land Day.

ix

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A DOCTOR IN GALILEE

Frustrated and angry, in 1976 I moved with my wife and two children to Hawaii. After two years of vacillating we returned home to the Galilee and to the same setting we had left. I started looking for a way around the discriminatory and antagonistic governmental system in which I worked. Within three years I and three other disgruntled local physicians established a nongovernmental organization, the Galilee Society, dedicated to improving the health and welfare of the Palestinian minority within Israel. This NGO became the conduit for my professional endeavors actively challenging the system of which I was formally a part and to which, for pragmatic considerations, I continued to hold for another ten years. The Ministry of Health, under Ehud Olmert, eventually ejected me and I became persona non grata in my former professional home. For four additional years I continued to use the NGO service sector as a means of consciousness raising and community mobilization. I reached out to international circles and built alliances with likeminded minority rights activists abroad. This, together with a confrontation with the Israeli military industrial complex over environmental protection of the Galilee, apparently was beyond the tolerance of all concerned. In 1995 I found myself out of a job at the Galilee Society, the institution I created and led for a decade and a half. On my way to retirement I then served briefly as a consultant to UNICEF’s mission to the Palestinian National Authority before returning to my home village to establish a center for child rehabilitation. The narrative follows a simple chronological pattern, but is replete with contemplative pauses, flashbacks, village scenes and foibles from rural Palestine and from my childhood days. In terms of its subject matter, the major theme of the book revolves around the politics of dispossession and the nature of Israel’s majorityminority ‘coexistence’ as it plays out in the life of Arrabeh and similar communities and as experienced and recorded by me in real time. Straddling the socioeconomic and political divide between this disadvantaged minority amongst whom I lived and the dominant Jewish majority amongst whom I worked, my daily experience bordered on the schizophrenic. The book delves particularly deep into the struggle over land, which underlies all aspects of the conflict between the two groups that people my two realities.

PREFACE

xi

On July 12, 2006, as I was working on these memoirs, war broke out between Israel and the Lebanese Hezbollah. My wife and I were beseeched by family and friends in the US to leave Israel right away. We had planned a lengthy vacation in Hawaii in late summer and we considered advancing the date of our departure. But that didn’t seem right: we had a couple of weddings to attend; there were two scheduled functions at Elrazi Center for Child Rehabilitation, my last public service venture; and the fig, grape, passion fruit, and prickly pear season was at its peak in my orchard. True, in Arrabeh, our village in the Galilee, the deafening shriek of Israeli jet fighters alternated with the sirens from closeby Jewish communities and the thud of Katyusha rockets falling there. And at night we could see the fireworks in the northern skies. In Arrabeh, as in other Palestinian towns and villages in Israel, we lack such civil defense amenities as sirens or shelters, but we felt secure in the knowledge that we were not targeted; Hezbollah had maps and knew there were no military installations close by; their aim was fairly accurate. We decided to stick to our original schedule. Two weeks into the war I sat in my garden sipping my morning coffee, reading the paper, and observing two dozen finches noisily feed at the thicket of decorative sunflowers around the ancient olive tree I had recently transplanted to my garden. The thud of Katyushas was rhythmically repetitive, almost hypnotic. With each beat of the drum the finches would interrupt their feeding, raise their heads, and look north. Then the conductor went berserk; the beat picked up; the explosions became continuous and moved closer; the finches flew southward in formation; I lost my nerve. Quickly, I entered my study, turned my computer on and wrote a lengthy email to my friends in the States. Within an hour I regained my equanimity; I put the war out of my mind; I was in control again. Since high school this has been my way of dealing with crises and with the imponderables of the ebb and flow of life. Together with gardening, writing has been my psychotherapy. Whenever a major issue weighed heavily on my mind, whenever I wanted to maximize the pleasure from an experience I enjoyed, to savor the aftertaste of an achievement or to lick the wounds of a defeat, I would steal time from my busy schedule to sit in a quiet corner and write. I would read each piece I wrote after I had finished it and then I would put it away never to look at it again.

xii

A DOCTOR IN GALILEE

On occasion I would find what I wrote in a letter to a friend or relative meaningful enough to make a copy of it and to store it away as well. Soon I realized that the experience of putting my especially troubling and indigestible thoughts to paper was therapeutically more effective if I addressed them to a specific person, even when I had no intention of sending the material to her or him. When in the United States I would address my brother Ahmad or my childhood friend Toufiq. When in Israel I had a different set of imaginary confessors, recipients of my telepathic communications: my adopted Indonesian, Indian and Dutch brothers from college days. Especially to Bessel, my Dutch psychiatrist friend, I related as my “confidant in absentia” because of his professional competence, everlasting childlike innocence, open mindedness, and creative appreciation of much of what I say or do. Whenever I was in a tight spot where I felt particularly vulnerable, I would speak to him in my mind. I have always enjoyed penning down my thoughts. But, alas, I became a physician; in 1970 I returned to practice my profession in Arrabeh, my home village in the Galilee. With the mounting demands on my time at the prime of my professional, family and public life, as my sleep deprivation turned every quiet period into naptime, and with the enticement of technical gadgetry, I found an easyout; I shifted to recording my “compositions,” my soulsearching diatribes, and my confessions, on audiotapes that I stored away never to hear again. The act of facing myself across the page or vocally, not the content itself, had the therapeutic effect I sought in my many hours of need. In 2004, upon formally retiring, I found myself at a loss—and who wouldn’t at such a time. The urge to further serve my community, my people and humanity at large, in that order and using the former as the conduit to the latter, was still the driving force of my life. But how could I serve? I could afford the time and effort for personal enjoyment, a luxury I had always been short on. But what pleasurable activity could I engage in that would be productive? I traveled and, between trips, I gardened, but both activities failed the criterion of significant benefit to others. And I felt tethered to my past; my future perspective was too limited to permit movement in new directions. Why not, then, indulge myself in reminiscences? I had a vague premonition that something significant might lurk in the shipping box in my study full of old papers and shoeboxes stuffed with audiotapes.