Hatim Google Drive

[Hebe Zuelke]

Itis always a struggle. The hardest was in 1970, after I finished my medical training. Beyond lucrative job offers, Hawaii's comforts and beauty tugged at our heartstrings. But the Galilee won. I was needed there - and I owed Arrabeh more than she did Honolulu.

My family had sold land to our neighbours to put two of my four brothers and me through high school in Nazareth. In our subsistence farming culture, that was blasphemous. Land was holy and farming was worship.

Still, with the promise of returning as a physician, I persuaded my father to sell another acre of land to pay for my one-way ticket to America. It was his last plot of land in our fertile Battouf Valley, believed to be the home of the ancient Natufians, the first settled agricultural society in human history. He held onto his olive grove and apricot orchard on the mountainside. Those roots go deep; to cop out when I became a physician would have been more than blasphemous; it would have been treasonous, un-Palestinian.

When I returned, there was no other physician among Arrabeh's 6,000 people. Sheikh Kaid, the village imam, had led a committee of civic activists and brought running water into homes, a great public health feat. But no one had thought of liquid waste disposal. Soon, sewage seeped into the dirt alleys and pooled in puddles. This public health nightmare alarmed me more than the lack of rubbish collection, electricity, telephone, paved roads and adequate public transportation combined. As I surveyed the situation, I discovered that it was black and white: All the Jewish settlements in Israel had a functioning sewage network, but no Arab village had one, nor could afford to install one.

I wrote memos to my superiors in the Ministry of Health. It wasn't their responsibility, I was told. Arrabeh had elected a village council, an ineffectual invention representing the Zionist central authority in the village and the punching bag the state could blame for all its shortcomings. Israel was the state of the Jews, and we were left to stew in our own foul juices. After all, we didn't serve in the Israeli army, the IDF.

Israel was "a light to the nations," but we were no nation; we were hardly human in their eyes. Incidentally, I should use the term "bnei-miutim" - minority members - in my reports, not Arabs or, God forbid, Palestinians, I was advised.

Fast-forward to the present, and Arrabeh claims the highest physician-to-resident ratio in any town of its size in the world, thanks in large part to the sacrifices of parents and siblings that toiled away in construction and manufacturing to support those doctors' studies.

The mainly foreign-trained physicians, pharmacists, dentists and other health professionals among Palestinian citizens of Israel are fast becoming the backbone of Israel's healthcare system, contrary to its planners' vision. In 1976, an internal government document known as the Koenig Report recommended that the state encourage our brain drain, among other measures.

In 1948, Arrabeh and a few dozen Palestinian villages miraculously escaped the ethnic cleansing of Palestine and the systematic "erasure from space and memory" of 531 Palestinian towns and villages by Israel's own count.

Like Arrabeh, many of those erased had previously survived the riptide of history for as many as four millennia since the Canaanites first established them. With the arrival of the invading Zionist forces, the 11-year-old child I was at the time faced a weighty decision: carry the cage in which I kept the two blackbirds I had collected from a nest in our apricot orchard or abandon them.

My parents, meanwhile, faced the impossible choice of staying in Palestine and likely suffering the fate of Deir Yassin - a Jerusalem village where Zionist forces massacred men, women and children - or leaving and becoming refugees like the distraught people of Suffoureyeh we had seen passing through our olive groves, some of whom even lost their children along the way. But soon, crossing to Lebanon was no longer possible. Every home in Arrabeh and in the two neighbouring villages, Sakhnin and Deir Hanna, planted a stick on its roof and tied a white sheet to it. The Haganah, a Zionist militia, took able-bodied, Palestinian men to labour camps as prisoners of war, and collected our milking cows and work bulls to feed its soldiers.

In the Nakba (catastrophe) of 1948, Palestine lost its cohesion as a nation; all Palestinian urban centres in what became Israel were ethnically cleansed. Our major human, cultural, and financial capital was decimated. But Nazareth was an exception: a commander of the invading Haganah, based on his exceptional awareness of the war crime they encoded, disobeyed the orders of his superiors.

In the 1950s, David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, saw this Palestinian geographic continuity as a demographic threat and wedged the Jewish town of Upper Nazareth, Natzeret Illit, in its heart. On one occasion, about three decades later, Upper Nazareth let its collected sewage flood the fields of its downhill neighbour, the Palestinian town of Kufr Kana, the biblical Cana of Galilee. When I, as the regional public health official at the time, demanded they stop the public health menace, the city countered with the demand that Kufr Kana stop their "sound pollution": the dawn-time call for prayer.

In 1948, my aunt, Samiyeh Rustom, exiled from her home in Sheikh Dannoun, one of three such aunts, passed through Arrabeh with her family on their way to Lebanon. They bequeathed us Arrabeh's first radio and second Singer sewing machine, both adding to the prestige and livelihood of the Kanaanehs. It was only after Israel's takeover of south Lebanon and its propaganda ploy of The Good Wall - during which Israel opened the gates in the barbwire border with Lebanon to allow workers and some visitors from south Lebanon to enter - that we briefly reconnected with our cousins again.

Shortly thereafter, the Sabra and Shatila war crime - the massacre of Palestinian civilians in two refugee camps in Beirut - shocked the conscience of the world. Ariel Sharon was then Israel's defence minister. Under his command, Israeli soldiers besieged Sabra and Shatila and watched as the Lebanese Phalangist militias they sent in perpetrated the killings.

After the 1956 Kafr Qassim Massacre, Israeli military Commander Issachar Shadmi was fined one cent for ordering the execution of 49 Palestinian civilians, including 23 children. In contrast, Sharon fully escaped punishment for the Sabra and Shatila massacre and even went on to become Israel's prime minister. That reconfirmed our convictions that Zionism was intent on expelling, if not exterminating, us. The IDF had contingency plans.

Then came the Oslo Accords, in which we, the 48 Palestinians (Palestinian citizens of Israel), were totally excluded as possible caddies for either side. In part, then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin paid with his life for even flirting with us in election politics; his 1992 government relied on non-coalition, Arab support in parliament.

Then, at the start of the second millennium, Sharon played the fanatic religious card with a visit to Al-Aqsa mosque grounds in Jerusalem and inflamed the Second Intifada. Demonstrations broke out within the Green Line, the imaginary armistice line that separates the occupied West Bank from Israel proper, in solidarity. Israeli police, most notably its snipers, killed 13 of our youth, including two from Arrabeh: Aseel Asleh and Ala'a Nassar. The earth rose and wouldn't sit, as the Arabic expression goes.

An Israeli investigative committee, The Or Commission, was appointed to look into the events. It fed media cycles for months before a hefty, final report blamed the violence on unequal access to state resources between Jewish and Palestinian communities. Plans for development funding for our communities were drawn then, but they are still being debated by the Israeli settler cabinet of today. No one was punished for the execution-style deaths of October 2000. Cynics discern a pattern of periodic punishments meant to keep us in line, not unlike Israel's genocidal attacks on Gaza that its commanders call "mowing the lawn".

When Palestinian civil society launched its boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) campaign to hold Israel accountable under international law, we were represented. Ameer Makhoul led Ittijah - the Union of Arab Community-Based Associations - and was a civil society champion if we ever had one. He reportedly played a role in the end of Israeli state discrimination against Palestinian citizens being one of the BDS campaign's three central demands. Not long after that, and with his continued international activism, Makhoul was arrested on trumped-up charges. He is currently serving a nine-year prison term.

Israel's Declaration of Independence spoke of equal citizenship for us, but binding laws were promulgated to grant special rights to Jews, starting with the Law of Return, which bestowed Israeli citizenship to any Jewish person, regardless of where they are from in the world. Nationality trumped citizenship. On its website, Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, lists dozens of laws discriminating against us.

As leaderless peasantry, we were placed under draconian, Israeli military rule for nearly two decades (from 1948 to 1966), a period during which our land, our youth, our culture and our minds were targeted. The "abandoned property" of refugees, including internally displaced Palestinians, reverted to the state for the benefit of Jews only. We were elided from the beneficiaries of Israel's "public domain," for which our land was appropriated disproportionately. The cumulative effects of dozens of specifically fashioned laws and the discriminatory practices of the Jewish majority led to the current situation in which Palestinian citizens, despite constituting one-fifth of Israel's population, own less than three percent and have legal access to less than seven percent of the land.

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