The subject matter of this book is the life (and struggle) of the Palestinian citizens of the State of Israel as seen through the eyes of a Palestinian doctor in his native Galilee.
During the Nakba (Disaster) of 1948 more than 750.000 Palestinians were uprooted from their land, villages, towns and cities. They fled or were expelled through force of arms by the victorious military forces of the nascent Zionist State of Israel. Hundreds of villages were levelled and destroyed in an effort to erase the memory of Palestinian society as it existed prior to 1948.
Most of the Palestinian refugees ended up in camps in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, the Westbank and the Gaza Strip. Only a remnant of around 150.000 Palestinians managed to remain on their land in what became Israel, mostly in the Galilee with smaller communities in the Little Triangle and the Negev and pockets in cities like Haifa, Jaffa, Acre, Lod and Ramle. For a long time, until 1966, they lived under a harsh military regime overseen by a military governor to be replaced later by civilian officials like Israel Koenig, who dealt with the Galilee's Arab citizens for 26 years and gained notoriety with the Koenig Memorandum.
How these Palestinians fared under the regime of Zionist overlords is explained in this fascinating book, the memoirs of Dr Hatim Kanaaneh, a native from the village of Arrabeh in the hills of the Galilee, not far from the Horns of Hittin, where Salaheddin and his forces defeated the Crusader armies.
When we hear about "Israeli Arabs" or "Israel's Arabs", as the Palestinian citizens of Israel are often referred to we are told things like: 1. They have the vote, 2. They never had it so good, much better than in the surrounding Arab countries. Hatim Kanaaneh's book goes far beyond these standard phrases and offers us a unique insight into the life of Palestinian citizens of Israel.
His father sold some of his land to his neighbours to enable Hatim to get a plane ticket to the USA and $500,-. After he arrived in the USA he struggled and worked hard, finally securing a scholarship for Harvard medical school. He was among the first young Palestinians in the early 1969s to embark on a medical career in this way.
After he qualified as a medical doctor he specialised in public health and family practice. He became an employee of Israel's Ministry of Health and tried - working within a system, prejudiced against the interest of the Palestinian citizens - as a District Public Health Physician to bring benefits to his community. He resisted attempts by the Shin Beth, the internal security agency, which is present at all levels of Palestinian society in Israel, to recruit him and tried doggedly - working with Jewish colleagues - to improve public health and bring sanitation to the villages. He soon encountered a wall of bureaucratic indifference and even outright hostility. We learn how from the perspective of bringing health services to the Palestinian community in Israel the system systematically discriminates against Palestinians.
Particularly in the Galilee the Palestinians were the legal owners of vast tracts of fertile farmland. The villages depended on subsistence farming to a large extent. The Galilee was relatively sparsely populated with Jewish Israelis and the growth of the Palestinian community was and is perceived as a 'demographic threat'. The Jewish state aimed to change all that by confiscating as much land as possible and settling it with Jewish kibbutzim, moshavim and townships, the so-called judaisation of the Galilee.
Over the years much land has indeed been expropriated, forcing Palestinians to become cheap labourers in the Jewish economy. In 1976 the efforts at mass expropriation led to a general strike and mass demonstrations, during which the army killed 6 unarmed Palestinian demonstrators. This became known as Land Day. Since 1976 Land Day is held annually on March 30.
For the Galileans nothing is more sacred than their land and Hatim Kanaaneh describes in a wonderful way the tenacity with which Palestinian farmers hang on to it. The State usually tries to confiscate land for the purpose of a 'green belt' or as a 'military area'. Next it uses the pretext that the land lies fallow and then proceeds quasi-legally to disposses their Palestinian owners. Kanaaneh describes how Palestinian farmers brave the dangers of a closed military zone with unexploded munitions (some of them dating back to the British mandate) to keep their fields plowed. Some of them clear their fields from stones and boulders with nothing more than their bare hands and a pick axe to make it ready for cultivation. The all important aim is to hang on to the land.
His colourful depiction of Palestinian village life with it's clan system, the interactions of the Palestinian citizens with the State - marked by racism and discrimination - as cheap labourers, peasant farmers, informers, sometimes as collaborators, as politicians and professionals, as present absentees and activists is masterful with many hilarious moments and self-depreciative humour, but also with moving stories of steadfastness/sumud.
Hatim Kanaaneh finally gave up the struggle to improve public health by working from within the system. He resigned from the Ministry of Health and went on to establish the Galilee Society, which became an NGO and aimed to do what he could not accomplish as District Public Health Physician of Israel's Ministry of Health.
He tells us of his disappointment in many of his liberal Jewish colleagues who were not able to transcend their Zionist mindset. Curiously Ezer Weizmann gets a positive mention with his insistence that Palestinians should be treated fairly.
Over the years the Palestinian citizens of Israel have been struggling doggedly for equal rights, but there is still a long way to go. They now make up somewhere between 20 and 25% of the population of Israel, but the racism and discrimination, the exclusion and the branding as '5th column' continues. The idea of 'transfer' is poisoning the minds of too many Jewish Israelis.
In 2000 with the outbreak of the second Intifada in the Occupied Territories there were also demonstrations in the Galilee, with Palestinians protesting at the treatment meted out to their brethren in the Occupied Territories and against the discrimination and racist practices they themselves were exposed to. As if to underline the situation of Apartheid Israeli police and border guards shot and killed 13 unarmed demonstrators. These were supposedly citizens of the democratic State of Israel, but the distinction was that they were non-Jews.
Most recently extreme rightwing Jews petitioned the Israeli Supreme Court and won the right to march through the Arab town of Umm al-Fahm, invoking memories of what happened in the American town of Skokie in 1977.
What becomes clear in the memoirs of Hatim Kanaaneh is that many Palestinians in Israel hang on to their identity. They consider their brothers and sisters in the Occupied Territories and in the refugee camps of Lebanon, Jordan and Syria as fellow Palestinians. At the same time they are citizens of the State of Israel and strive to a future coexistence with Jewish Israeli's as equals. Personally I find it doubtful that this will ever be possible without Israel revising its Zionist foundation as a "Jewish and democratic" state.
The last chapter of Hatim Kanaaneh's book tells about his endeavour to transplant an ancient Rumi olive tree (from Roman times) to his garden. Through this olive tree he declares his attachment to the land.
"This gnarled behemoth, with its two meter wide, beautifully sculptured trunk and over ten metres of exposed root system saw it all. I can prove my belonging to this piece of the earth's crust through it; its roots are my surrogate roots. And they are taking hold in my land that I inherited from my father, who inherited it from his father, who..."
This book - with Jonathan Cook's foreword a welcome addition - is the most important publication in a long time offering unique insights into the life of Palestinian citizens of the State of Israel. It has literary qualities and deserves the widest possible readership.