Media Analysis

Hatim Kanaaneh: What Mondoweiss Means To Me

Here is the latest message in our series, “What Mondoweiss Means To Me.” We are honored that leaders in the movement for justice in Israel/Palestine respect the site enough to offer these statements in order to help us raise $60,000 by December 31. Please read Hatim Kanaaneh’s comments, and if you agree that quality news and analysis are essential, join him in giving. And please be sure to check out the messages from Steven SalaitaRebecca VilkomersonOmar BarghoutiCindy Corrie, John MearsheimerScott Roth and Phil Weiss as well!

Each one of you has your own reasons for visiting Mondoweiss, a unique news operation that serves an amazing community of activists and thinkers. Please donate today, and tell us what Mondoweiss means to you.

If you would like to know how donations will be used, click here to understand how dollars and cents are transformed into truth-telling.

Dear fellow Mondoweiss readers:

For a Palestinian citizen of Israel the media horizons are quite constricted. There is Al-Ittihad, the one and only Arabic daily in Israel. But using it as one’s forum will color one with the red tinge of its communist base and limit your readership to those of like color. Besides, its outreach is strictly local and any stirring of international aspirations have to seek an alternative mouthpiece.

Hatim Kanaaneh
Hatim Kanaaneh

You subscribe to the English version of Haaretz, Israel’s liberal daily, in your judgment the only news source in the country that shows a tolerant side, limited and tenuous as it usually is. At least you can empathize with the sentiments of such commentators as Gideon Levy and Amira Hass and get some new information you can reliably quote from their reports. And Haaretz has a challenging daily Sudoku puzzle. And you know that there is an international readership waiting to hear your opinion if you succeed to splash it across the pages of this national mouthpiece even if Zionist at source. You approach the editors with some of your analyses and comments on current issues and they sound interested. You engage them in a dialogue and you feel good: they want “your voice” to be heard. A few more exchanges of emails and the picture becomes clear: true, they will give you a chance to make “your voice” heard. But they insist on your voice saying what they think. You bolt and continue to seek a media outlet for your occasional bright ideas that you think worth sharing.

In retirement you acquire enough technical savvy to start your own online blog. You blush (yes, I still do on occasion!) at some of the encouraging remarks. And your blog shows visitors by the dozens. Yes, dozens, even scores and hundreds on occasion. Then it dawns on you that they are probably the very same “fans” on your mailing list, friends and relations who are attuned to your pronouncements in the first place. But you wanted to reach those others across the ocean, figurative and real ocean.

You start looking. And, lo and behold, there are media outlets with a wider readership and fresher frontiers, media organs that are opening new frontiers in fact. Mondoweiss for one. You try them and find enthusiastic people with similar bent of mind who are busy informing the wider world about your very own issue, “the War of Ideas in the Middle East.”

Voila! I will part with some of my retirement cash to support them. Please join me and donate today.

Hatim Kanaaneh, MD, MPH
Author of A Doctor in Galilee: the Life and Struggle of a Palestinian in Israel (Pluto Press, 2008), and the upcoming short story collection Chief Complaint: A Country Doctor’s Tales of Life in Galilee due to be published February 2015 by Just World Books.

Fuel the Momentum

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Dr. Hatim Kanaaneh. A moral giant.