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.
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.
A Doctor in Galilee: The Life and Struggle of a Palestinian in Israel
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A Doctor in Galilee: The Life and Struggle of a Palestinian in Israel
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Overview
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.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780745327860 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Pluto Press |
| Publication date: | 08/20/2008 |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 320 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d) |
About the Author
Jonathan Cook is a former staff journalist for the Guardian and Observer newspapers. He has also written for The Times, Le Monde diplomatique, International Herald Tribune, Al-Ahram Weekly and Aljazeera.net. He is based in Nazareth.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Cat and Mouse
November 1, 1977
On the return leg of my trip things turned a bit farcical. It all began with the halva I was taking back for my children. The box in which the Oriental delicacy was packed set off the alarm of the metal detector at Tel Aviv airport. At that point one of my fellow travelers — an elderly woman — stepped in to take matters into her own hands. As I was explaining to the security officials that I had bought the halva in the Palestinian city of Jenin in the occupied West Bank, she interjected. Israel produced the best-tasting halva around so there could be no reason for me to go to Jenin except to bring a bomb to the airport. When I ignored her comments and joked to the security officials that if they wanted to take the halva away for closer examination they had better promise not to eat it all, she demanded they bodysearch me and check my shoes for explosives. The officials were more than happy to oblige.
I was returning to Los Angeles, and then on to Hawaii, after a two-week visit to see my family in my home village of Arrabeh. It is an Arab village in the Galilee, one of about 120 Palestinian communities that were not erased in 1948 by the war that established Israel on my homeland, a land once called Palestine. As I took my seat on the plane, I realized that my elderly friend could see me from where she sat provided she turned her head back. She must have ended up with a very stiff neck by the time we landed eleven hours later, when she was finally relieved of her terror watch. Throughout the flight she observed my every movement and followed me wherever I went; she accompanied me to the door of the bathroom and on my frequent strolls in the aisles. Mischievously, a couple of times I waited till she started to doze off before leaving my seat; then I watched from a distance as she panicked on waking and rushed around the aisles looking for me. By the end of the flight, I had developed a certain intimacy with the woman and even felt a little bad for being so mean to her, reduced to playing cat and mouse in the most childish way.
I had arrived for my short stay in Israel, back in August, in equally unwelcoming circumstances. As the aircraft touched down at Tel Aviv airport, I found myself singled out from the 261 mainly Jewish passengers by the security agents who boarded the plane before we had a chance to disembark. They took me off for a three-hour interrogation solely on the strength of my Arabic name. When I eventually emerged to be greeted by a dozen waiting relatives and friends, Ahmad, my eldest brother, could see how angry I was about the security agents' a priori determination that, from my ethnicity alone, I must harbor ill intent and plot harm. He tried to lift my spirits: the humiliating treatment was a sign of the respect shown by an Israeli security service threatened by my international connections. I felt like explaining that both they and he are way off the mark, that I hold myself above their thinly-veiled assumption of my potential for intrigue and violence. But I hold Ahmad in higher respect than to contradict him on matters of feeling. I simply dropped the subject.
I returned to Arrabeh in fulfillment of a promise I had made my family and myself not to stay away for more than a year in Hawaii, where I was working as a family physician. I sought to reclaim my peace of mind and inner balance to sustain me for another year away. We drove to the village in great excitement but, after an absence of a year, I was surprised again by my repugnance and dismay at the squalor of the Arab villages we drove through and the obvious poor health of the people. The hot and dusty air, the flies everywhere, the garbage-strewn, sewage-drenched alleys, the overcrowding, and the innumerable children in the streets scrambling out of the car's way, with scabbed impetigo lesions on their bare skin, mocked me and my Harvard medical degrees. These were the conditions awaiting me if and when I decided to return from the US — testimony to my failure to make a dent in the community's dismal health care, despite the six years I had already invested in the attempt before I left for Hawaii. It was enough to instill despair in my heart — or redouble my commitment.
Those six years had proved to me beyond any shadow of a doubt the enduring hostility shown by "my" state towards the one in five citizens who are not Jewish but the natives of the country, its Palestinian minority. Even during my brief time away, there had been new and troubling developments. One of the most concerning was a shortage of drinking water in many Arab communities in the Galilee.
"I am becoming the laughing stock of my own community," the mayor of Arrabeh, a former schoolmate of mine, tells me. "For most of the day the water supply to Arrabeh is turned off by Mekorot. It shows the degree of ill-will the state bears us. How else can you explain the fact that Yodfat, the Jewish settlement next door, never lacks water for its cattle, cotton fields and green lawns?"
"But you must have raised the issue with government officials, haven't you?"
"You know who it is I report to, don't you? Israel Koenig! It takes me months to get an appointment with the little dictator and whatever topic I bring up he winds up chiding me for failing to do my duty; he wants me to limit the number of births in Arrabeh. He claims that Mekorot can no longer provide enough water for the Arab communities' needs because of the rapid natural growth rate of our population."
Such acrimonious exchanges had apparently intensified after the leak of a secret report written by the District Commissioner of the Galilee, Israel Koenig, who had recommended to his superiors in the Interior Ministry that, among many other apartheid measures, Arab women should be forced to have their fertility limited. This, of course, is meant to protect the Jewish character of the state. To my dismay, at least half a dozen women in our Kanaaneh clan have apparently come off the pill I had started them on. Two of them I spoke with mentioned Koenig's infamous report as a background to, if not the direct cause of, their decision to get pregnant again. They approvingly cited a popular gesture made by Toufiq Zayyad, the poet mayor of Nazareth. On the birth of his most recent child, shortly after the leaking of the Koenig Report, he telegraphed a birth announcement in the form of a message of condolence to Mr. Koenig.
"And it is not just one sick official we are talking about," Arrabeh's mayor explains; "imams in mosques and folk singers at village weddings are being interrogated and even jailed by the Shin Bet for making traditional pronouncements that have nationalistic overtones. Yousif here can tell you what happened to him and to his fellow Arab workers the other day," he adds as he beckons to a young man to join us. Yousif, a strapping muscular young man, comes over and without any further prodding bashfully relates to me a recent incident in which he was caught up. Apparently a civil defense exercise was recently held in the vegetable market of the nearby city of Haifa. The police, rehearsing what to do in the event of an explosion at the market, rounded up a few dozen Arab men, including Yousif, who were waiting in a neighboring square in the hope of being hired for casual labor by small-time contractors. A crowd of Jewish shoppers, agitated by the arrests, mistook what they saw for a real security incident and attacked the Arab laborers with their bare fists and spat at them. Things got so out of hand the police had to hide the Arab men in their headquarters, where they were detained "for their own protection" till after sundown. Yousif ends his story with a shy giggle, his eyes fixed to the ground, as if somehow feeling guilty. Ali, a younger haughty relative of mine confirms Yousif's story but adds proudly:
"Those day laborers are pitiful. You need smarts to get by in the city. I saw it all. I was working at my boss's falafel stand in the market. No one there knows I am an Arab; I go by the name 'Eli' and I speak better Hebrew than most Jews."
Now, as I weigh up the consequences of leaving the comfort of Hawaii to return to live in the Galilee, I can't help but consider what happened in 1970, the first time I went back after an absence of a decade. During that decade I had obtained degrees in medicine and public health from Harvard University and completed an internship at the Queen's Medical Center in Honolulu, Hawaii. I was Arrabeh's first son ever to leave to study abroad, a historic moment made possible by my father's agreement to sell some of his farming land to pay my way and by the charity of a childless American couple, Byrd and Amie Davis of Clarion, Pennsylvania, who had become my pen pals after meeting me during a visit to Nazareth. They sponsored me through college and, at the end of my studies, offered to adopt me and leave me their considerable fortune as an inheritance should I agree to carry on the family banking business in their hometown. Tempting though the offer was, rejecting it did not delay me long. As soon as I had reached the point in my medical training where I mustered the skill and fortitude to stand before another human and tell him or her what to do with their body, I rushed home to play God to my friends and next of kin. I had studied medicine so that one day I could return to repay the debt to my community. I was committed to the professional life of a physician, to a life dedicated to healing bodies, to guiding and uplifting spirits, and to improving the living conditions of my village — a life, in short, dedicated to saving humanity through serving my people. More than a little optimistically, I thought I was going to change the world.
In the summer of 1970, on the way back from the US, I had spent a pleasant month camping across Western Europe, in the company of my seven-month pregnant wife, Didi, in a brand new VW Kombi minibus that we had pre-ordered in Germany. It was difficult not to wonder at the wisdom of turning our backs on my promising medical career in the US, and on the paradise of Didi's native state of Hawaii, where we had for a time considered settling. But head back to the Galilee and Arrabeh we did nonetheless. After all, that was why I studied medicine; any other decision would have robbed me of the rationale for accepting a profession I would never have chosen on my own. People in Arrabeh tell of the village simpleton who bought a donkey. When asked why he needed a donkey, he answered:
"To carry loads of grass from the fields."
"But you own no cattle! What do you need the grass for?"
"To feed my donkey, of course!"
That is how it would have been for me to have settled and practiced medicine in America.
The Harvard name opened at least one door on my return. When I applied for a position at the Ministry of Health, a fellow Harvard alumnus, Dr. Hedy Frank-Blume, the chief physician of the Acre subdistrict, picked up my letter and responded positively, against all the racially and politically unfavorable odds in an Israeli bureaucracy resistant to employing Arabs for anything more than menial tasks. Deciphering her motives was harder: was it simply the Harvard connection that spoke across the ethnic divide, or did she somehow approve of my stated intention to help my people by trying to reverse in whatever ways I could the neglect and hostility shown them by their state?
I started off with two jobs: as an official in the Ministry of Health and as a family physician in my own community of Arrabeh. My first day in the latter role was sobering. Here was a suspicious, needy and hardened rural village all too ready to judge me if I did not deliver on its expectations of me. There was not a single nurse in the village to help. The challenge of tending to the villagers seemed insurmountable: every man smoked; the elderly wheezed and complained of arthritic pains; every child looked malnourished and anemic, their skin covered with impetigo sores; every father was overweight; and every mother seemed overworked, and visibly exhausted by her phenomenal reproductive rate. It was summer and diarrhea was rampant. And everyone was after a magic cure by a single injection, and would not take "no" for an answer.
I looked at my wife's diary and saw the daunting list she had made of objectionable things she had already noticed in her new environment:
1. Immigration officials discriminate.
2. Khalid, a fifteen-year-old nephew, spent a week in jail in a "tiger cage" for loitering in Naharya, a Jewish town.
3. Malnourished children, deficient in iron, protein and vitamins. I will buy them milk if the mothers provide eggs.
4. Impetigo and rheumatic fever everywhere.
5. A relative's child has pneumonia.
6. No garbage collection.
7. Innumerable flies.
8. The village's only medical clinic stinks.
9. Sanitation abhorrent; bathing infrequent; children play in dirt.
10. Prescription drugs sold over the counter in shops.
11. No refrigeration; food poisoning common.
12. Babies are bound tightly and kept out of the sun. No vitamin D supplement.
The problem of being an Arab in a Jewish state had confronted me even before I set foot back in Israel. In preparation for my first return to Arrabeh, after a decade of studying in the US, I sent my passport to the Israeli consulate in Los Angeles for renewal. The officials replied with a standard package of information for returning students that included details of interest-free loans readily available from offices across Israel to help with my re-absorption into my community. Once in Arrabeh I tracked down the nearest office in Haifa. It was actually the office of the Jewish Agency, where no one had ever come across a similar case of a returning Arab student demanding that his government honor its promise to him. A few visits later, a kindly lady there made a phone call to the Prime Minister's Advisor on Arab Affairs to set up an appointment with Yorum Katz, a seemingly pleasant young Ashkenazi who claimed to know some of the Kanaaneh elders. Unfortunately he was very open that he saw this meeting as a chance to recruit me as an informer in exchange for securing me the promised loan:
"Scratch my back and I will scratch yours," he told me in fluent Arabic.
"My itch is gone," I told him and walked out.
Back in Arrabeh people knew Yorum Katz well. Ahmad, my brother, gave me a piece of his mind for even thinking of getting a government loan:
"You might be a doctor alright, but you don't know beans about this country. Yorum Katz is probably the man behind the military order banning me from entering Gaza to sell and buy and make a living. Don't let anyone know that you've met this guy or else you will be considered another lackey. You don't want to shame us all. I want to continue holding my head high when your name is mentioned!"
I expressed my frustration to my brother:
"Ahmad, I am a good doctor; I know what needs to be done here, but I don't know how to go about it."
"Now you are making sense. The task you assign yourself is nearly impossible. But you have done the impossible before, you have become a doctor."
"Thanks in great measure to your support and to that of our late father."
"Don't lose faith, then; don't give up on me! I have already found you a temporary place for a clinic, right across from the hillside where our parents are buried. In a month or two I will start building a permanent clinic for you."
So, there I was, having realized my impossible dream of old, but now embarking on a collective nightmare. Fully conscious and in full command of my senses I committed to meeting the immediate curative health needs of friends and relatives in the hope of enlisting them on my side in the battle to arrest further deterioration in our communal spirit and collective health. I felt like a trained athlete jumping to clear the bar, only to realize in mid-air that the rules had been changed and the bar was now too high for me, or anyone else, to clear. The political climate in the whole of the Middle East was, and still is, not conducive to better health and development for us. It takes a redirecting of the dominant winds of ill will and enmity, a friendlier atmosphere of care and solidarity, to change our fortunes and health conditions, caught as we are on the wrong side of the Arab-Israeli conflict. And that change, alas, is still an impossible dream.
A sense of despair finally overwhelmed me at a feast Ahmad had prepared for village elders to celebrate my return. I ran from the crowd of well-wishers and locked myself in my mini-camper. I drew the curtains, turned on the motor and, with its noise for cover, sobbed loudly. And I had not yet had to deal with the most formidable opponent to my long-cherished dream of bringing public health to my community: the Israeli Ministry of Health.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "A Doctor in Galilee"
by .
Copyright © 2008 Hatim Kanaaneh.
Excerpted by permission of Pluto Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
1 Cat and Mouse2 A Second Homecoming
3 Legends of the Diwan
4 Present Absentees
5 My First Shāheed
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