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A Doctor in Galilee: The Life and Struggle of a Palestinian in Isreal | 
 enlarge | Author: Hatim Kanaaneh
Publisher: Pluto Press
Category: Book
List Price: $28.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 297939
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 310
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 8.9 x 5.9 x 0.9
ISBN: 0745327869
Dewey Decimal Number: 956
EAN: 9780745327860
ASIN: 0745327869
Publication Date: July 28, 2008
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Shipping: International shipping available
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Product Description
"Scarcely any personal narratives of the lives of Israel's Arab minority exist. Kannaneh's fascinating exposure of this little-known subject is written with passion and authority. Essential reading for students of the Israel/Palestine conflict."
---Dr. Ghada Karmi "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 "Our libraries are full with historical and political analyses of the Palestine question, but we still have very few personal diaries and journals that help to humanize the complex reality of the torn land. This personal account is a unique and vital contribution."
---Ilan Pappe "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 humor and his eye for striking detail. This is a truly touching book that is hard to put down."
---Rashid Khalidi 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 and entertaining memoir that shows how grassroots organizations can loosen the Zionist grip upon Palestinian lives. Hatim Kanaaneh, M.D., 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). He has written extensively on human rights.
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| Customer Reviews:
"A Doctor in Galilee" -- the ultimate "MUST READ"! August 5, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
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)
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