In her book, “Condition Critical: Life and Death in Israel/Palestine” Dr. Alice Rothchild emotes courage and sincerity to a degree that begs analysis: Who is she addressing and to what end? The book’s title answers the latter of the two interrelated questions: All those who are genuinely concerned with Israel/Palestine should better rush to resuscitate their critically ill charge before it is too late because “the Israeli government is on a suicide mission.” All through her book Dr. Rothchild bears witness to how critical and unjust the condition is.

“It is sad that such a bright scientific light dims a tad at its moral and philosophical edges.” Hatim Kanaaneh reviews Noga Kadman’s ‘Erased from Space and Consciousness: Israel and the Depopulated Palestinian Villages of 1948.’

Israel’s recent wave of house demolitions in Qalansawe and al-Araqeeb is just the latest in a long tradition of limiting Palestinian community growth so that Palestinians will leave and thereby allow more Jews to live on more of the land.

Hatim Kanaaneh’s village in the Galilee has become known in the Israeli press as a “medical mecca” for the large number of doctors and medical professionals that call it home. Although some want to credit Israel for this, Kanaaneh says it has been accomplished through “resilience, often verging on plasticity,” in the face of institutional and societal discrimination in the Jewish state.

Israelis believe without evidence that Palestinians started recent fires near Haifa. Secret Police officials have confirmed that they suspect Arabs and have taken thirty of them into custody. One had toilet paper on his person! Hatim Kanaaneh writes, “Arafat must have started all those fires in our country. Or was it Haj Amine Al-Husseini? After all, we all know the Mufti was the one who convinced Hitler to go after the Jews in Europe. Or could it be Mahmoud Abbas since we can slap him at will?”

Hatim Kanaaneh writes about Brig. Gen. Ofek Buchris, an Israeli general recently indicted for “rape and indecent acts,” who lives one town over from him: “Part of my anguish about the report is the geographic location of the accused general’s residence; Mitzpe Netoufa is practically in my backyard. The basic concept of a Mitzpe—Hebrew for ‘lookout’—the hilltop-positioned barbed-wire-encircled Jewish-only settlement dreamt up by Ariel Sharon in the 1970s to protect the promised land of the Jews from potential ‘goy’ usurpers. Those ‘goys’ turn out actually to be us, the Palestinians who have been ‘squatting’ on the land since the Romans destroyed their second temple! Be that as it may, the good general’s purpose in life and that of his fellow Mitzpe Netoufa religious Jewish residents, is to watch over me so I won’t steal my own Netoufa (Battouf) Valley Land.”

Haaretz has run a series of articles on Israel’s “separate and unequal” education system that allocates more funds to Jewish students than Palestinian students. Hatim Kanaaneh says it’s old news. It’s been this way for the four decades he’s been advocating for Palestinian citizens of Israel. In a state that defines itself as Jewish, what do you expect?

The General’s Son, Miko Peled’s autobiographical account of his voyage from a Zionist youth and the scion of Zionist leaders to an avowed anti-Zionist peace activist, contains trigger points for any Palestinian, bringing back experiences of violence, discrimination and oppression at every turn of the account.

News reports on Hossam Haick, a groundbreaking scholar of nanotechnology who is Palestinian Israeli, abide by the self-imposed Israeli and AIPAC rules of discourse in which positive terminology is reserved for Jewish Israel and negative associations for Palestine and Palestinians.

Hatim Kanaaneh offers a humorous comment on a situation in Lubbock, Texas where a banner declaring “Love to all” in Arabic was reported to Homeland Security and the FBI.