A Doctor in Galilee: The Life and Struggle of a Palestinian in Israel [Paperback]

Hatim Kanaaneh (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 20, 2008

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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

A moving account of the plight of the Palestinians by one of them: a physician struggling to alleviate his people's lot. -- Desmond M. Tutu, Archbishop Emeritus

Hatim Kanaaneh sheds a unique light on the lives of the over one million Palestinians who hold Israeli citizenship in a beautifully readable and engrossing memoir of his years as a village doctor in the Galilee. His account of the rank racial discrimination, difficult social circumstances and pervasive poverty of most Palestinians in the Jewish state is leavened by Kanaaneh's humour and his eye for striking detail. This is a truly touching book that is hard to put down. -- Rashid Khalidi

About the Author

Dr Hatim Kanaaneh completed his medical and public health degrees at Harvard in 1970. He then returned to Galilee where, in 1973, he became the Public Health Doctor of the sub-district of Acre. He is the founder of the NGO, the Galilee Society (The Arab National Society for Health Research and Services).

Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Pluto Press (June 20, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0745327869
• ISBN-13: 978-0745327860
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.9 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #453,137 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Meaningful Life, June 5, 2009

By 

Anne Finkelstein (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Doctor in Galilee: The Life and Struggle of a Palestinian in Israel (Paperback)

The whole time I was reading this book I had an odd feeling of déjà vu. Dr. Kanaaneh's personal and moving story of his journey from the small Palestinian village of Arrabeh, to Harvard, Hawaii, and back to Arrabeh, has a strikingly quality of honest self-examination. He openly acknowledges that the nature of his motivation to "save the world" has been both altruistic and egotistical. When I finished I realized that the place I had recently encountered this same combination of impulses was in Barak Obama's "Dreams from My Father".

Dr. Kanaaneh describes the complex obstacles and opportunities he has encountered in his life journey with an unsparing eye for the morally ambiguous positions of all of the actors in the drama, from Israeli officials in the Ministry of Health, to Jewish and Palestinian colleagues and personal friends and neighbors. Eventually the torturous compromises involved in working within a system which was stacked against the achievement of his goals forced Dr. Kanaaneh to leave the Ministry of Health and start the Galilee Society.

Running throughout this story is Dr. Kanaaneh's connection to the land of his forefathers and his deep concern for both the physical and spiritual health of the people who live there. This is symbolized in the last chapter by his pursuit and cultivation of an ancient olive tree. The meaning of this deep connection is all the more profound at this moment, when the Israeli state is threatening to take away the land that Dr. Kanaaneh has spent his life working to keep and improve. Here is a quote from his letter to President Obama:

"The newly-elected prime minister of Israel, Mr. Benjamin Netanyahu, and his foreign minister, Mr. Avigdor Lieberman, plan evict me from my home and to take away my garden. These two persons and their fellow ministers were democratically elected to their positions and will use `democratic' means at their disposal to legitimize my disenfranchisement as have previous Israeli governments done in the past. The difference is that the current leaders are explicit and aggressive about disadvantaging me based on my ethnicity. They have devised a way to blame me for my victimhood. They intend to ask me to sign an oath of allegiance to Israel as a Jewish state, a state that defines itself as exclusive of me and my people."

All readers of this book will be moved by Dr. Kanaaneh's life of devotion to the improvement of the plight of his people, and the position he finds himself in today. Perhaps the poisoned atmosphere, fueled by the words and actions of the Israeli government and its absolutely unquestioning support by recent American administrations, will begin to clear slightly after the overtures that President Obama made in his speech Cairo. We can only hope so!

In any case this book is a beautifully written and poignant account of the position of Arabs living with Israel's border, a topic which is rarely discussed in the polarized characterizations of the Middle East in American media. The indefatigable creativity which is at the heart Dr. Kanaaneh's quest for social justice is source of inspiration.

In January of 2009 I had the good fortune to meet Dr. Kanaaneh on the street in Manhattan during a protest of Israel's latest violent incursion in Gaza. He told me he was in the United States to visit his children and grandchildren, because, although some things have improved, they still face the same prejudices and lack of opportunities that he encountered as a bright, ambitious, young student, many years ago.

5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A unique insight into the life of the Palestinian citizens of Israel, September 14, 2008

By 

Ben Alofs (Bangor, North Wales, UK) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Doctor in Galilee: The Life and Struggle of a Palestinian in Israel (Paperback)

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.

8 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "A Doctor in Galilee" -- the ultimate "MUST READ"!, August 4, 2008

By 

Robert H. Stiver - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Doctor in Galilee: The Life and Struggle of a Palestinian in Israel (Paperback)

Good books explicating the reality of the poison spreading throughout the world via Zionist Israel's founding in 1948 continue to arrive--e.g., Professor Ilan Pappe's "The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine"; Dr. Ghada Karmi's "Married to Another Man: Israel's Dilemma in Palestine." One must simply maintain pace with them and learn. (My personal advice to anyone wishing to educate him/herself about the Holy Land tragedy is to start with Stephen R. Shalom`s great, concise 2002-issued history at http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Israel/Background_I_P_Crisis.html [I searched in some alarm before finding this site; Professor Shalom's backgrounder had disappeared from its initial ZNet repository]; and then to visit Alison Weir's www.ifamericansknew.com . Don't stop at those founts of information but continue to search and gain knowledge. Please.)

In terms of resources, the just-issued "A Doctor in Galilee: The Life and Struggle of a Palestinian in Israel" is perhaps the best yet. Dr. Hatim Kanaaneh's memoir, which I characterize as a series of journal entries skipping through varying intervals of time from the late 1970s to early 2006, gives new meaning to tour de force. It captures the essence of a visionary, humorous, earthy, self-effacing man of our world, fully capable of interacting with Christian, Muslim and Jew alike. (Indeed, it was the occasional note of Dr. Kanaaneh's dealings with and obvious respect for Christian leaders in Palestine--surely reciprocated--that endeared me greatly as I pursued my read.)

I admit to having great empathy for the rightful inhabitants of Palestine...an empathy birthed by a life-changing experience in 1964-5 when the Army sent my 21-year-old enlisted body to Monterey, California's Defense Language Institute to study the Arabic language and culture for one year.

So I should have been ready for "A Doctor in Galilee," but I was not. My prime focus for 45 years has been the beleaguered souls and trashed "holy" land of the Occupied Palestinian Territories: Jerusalem, the West Bank, Gaza. Aghast at the unrelenting evil of the Zionist enterprise corrupting Judaism and roiling all with which/whom it comes in contact, my obsession for truth and justice for the Muslims and Christians of the OPT is all-consuming. Vicarious suffering, outrage, white-hot anger, sadness, resignation, camaraderie with those of kindred mind whose journey leads along many diverse paths but converges at recognition of a vast injustice perpetrated on an entire people who deserve, and are owed, so much in recompense and deliverance: these and more are the defining elements of my life.

Now comes Dr. Kanaaneh, who explicates the everyday and long-term continuum of existing as a "citizen" of a "state" which, for 60 years-plus, has done all in its inordinate power to make him and his people feel unwelcome, unwanted, unneeded. The stress level of persevering under such conditions must be well-nigh unendurable. But that the good doctor has functioned for decades in the midst of unremitting hostility, blatant discrimination, grudging concessions, the understandable-but-grating capitulation of those of his people selling out their own cause is at once mysterious and a tribute to the inventiveness and resilience of humanity. (Memo to President Jimmy Carter: Sir, you must read this book!)

From his personal history and actions to his family to the people around him to whom he administers medicine to his professional interactions with the Zionist adversary, Dr. Kanaaneh perseveres with spirit and an indomitable determination to overcome. One step forward, one-and-a-half-steps back, for decades: readers of this review must invest in "A Doctor in Galilee" to attain even a semblance of the full impact of this man's storied life. I am humbled and all the more resolved to seek justice where even a partial measure of justice is inadequate: such is the extent of the evil perpetrated on the Palestinian Arab "citizens" of the oxymoronic "Jewish democracy" avid to make "life" so difficult that they (along with their brethren in the OPT--it is all the same in the end) will just go away.

"A Doctor in Galilee" is replete with great moments and is hard to set down. To whet readers' appetites, here are some vignettes to anticipate:

-- pps. 105-106 (1981): I wept as I wondered "Have overall health conditions for Palestinian Arab kids improved by this 2008?"

-- pps. 181-185 (1986): an awesome, enlightening dialog on Zionism and resistance to it.

-- pps. 191-193 (1988): the revolting and humiliative treatment of Dr. Kanaaneh's beloved daughter Rhoda.

-- pps. 226-227 (1994): an ideal passage illuminating the perception of Dr. Kanaaneh as a skilled political infighter.

-- pps. 242-243 (2001): a rumination, a "lecture" which should be a must read for GW Bush, C. Rice et al...superb, wonderfully profound.

-- pps. 243-246 (2002): a medical visit to Jenin, OPT; once again, I cried copious tears.

Finally, the concluding chapter (2006) makes the book an invaluable, essential read. I'm not sure Dr. Kanaaneh intended this closing to be such, but I take it as a metaphor for the entire six-decade matrix of Zionist crimes against the Palestinian humanity. The ancient olive tree which Dr. Kanaaneh sought and acquired via a fascinating process symbolizes any/all Palestinians' reverence for that venerable mainstay of their land. It also cannot but make any minimally knowledgeable reader seethe with righteous indignation for the hundreds of thousands of olive trees in groves across the OPT (and surely in Israel from 1947 onward as the Zionists erased 500-plus Palestinian villages, desecrating and thieving land wholesale) which have been methodically and vindictively removed from the land. (Of course, among the myriad numbers of olive trees uprooted, probably by U.S.-manufactured Caterpillar D-9 armored bulldozers, are those which have been brazenly stolen and sold for profit to Jews illegally settled on Palestinian land and now arrogant "owners" and harvesters of that which would be bitter fruit to any sensitive human being....)

(Prepared August 4, 2008; revised August 5th)