Richard

Former Foreign Service Officer

[Pals @palsofnations]

Dr. Wahbi Jabaji / A Talk About His Father, Dr. Ibrahim Jabaji

“In the beginning, my grandfather practiced medicine in the city of Ramla, where he received his education at the kuttab and studied traditional Arab medicine.

My grandfather sent my father to the Syrian Protestant College in Beirut. When he completed his studies, he was among the first Palestinian students to graduate from there with a medical degree in 1895.

My father returned to the city of Ramla as an official physician. He was told: “We cannot grant you a license to practice medicine unless you authenticate your degree and pass the medical licensing exam in Istanbul.” He therefore traveled there, took the exam, and obtained the certification.

He then returned to Ramla, where he was appointed as a health officer. At that time, he was the only doctor in the city, responsible for the municipality and all other health matters. During his practice, a cholera epidemic spread through the cities of Lydda and Ramla, claiming many lives between 1905 and 1906.

Before the outbreak of the First World War, my father sensed that the country’s security situation under Ottoman rule was unstable. He went to Egypt and joined the British Army, where he served until the end of the war.

He then returned to Ramla with the British army (Palestine front) they had captured a group of Turkish prisoners. Among them was Dr. Bedosian, of Armenian origin, who had served as a physician in the Turkish army.

Upon his release, Dr. Bedosian was appointed in Ramla as the head of the health department. Subsequently, more doctors arrived in the city, including Dr. Iskandar Aranki, Dr. Adib Haddad, and Dr. Elias Sukarieh, but Dr. Bedosian always remained the head of the health department and never transferred elsewhere.

My father opened a private clinic and was known as the oldest general practitioner in the city with a University degree.

He was particularly well-known because of his extensive connections with many Muslim families. Medicine in the city was simple at the time; nevertheless, there was an old government hospital within the city, and a newer one built in the 1940s.
However, these hospitals did not perform complex surgeries, so patients in need of operations were sent to the city of Jaffa.

Our family originates from the city of Ramla, but owned a citrus orchard on the road to Jenin and Nablus near Jacob’s Well, in addition to olive and apricot groves.”

[William Dalrymple @DalrympleWill]

New series from @EmpirePodUK
THE HISTORY OF GAZA

[Richard @RFHanrahan]

@SheilaGreenfiel @nicolelampert Even Ben-Gurion acknowledged that many Palestinians descend from Jews who converted to Christianity and/or Islam.

Many Palestinians can trace their roots in particular cities back for hundreds of years.

[Richard @RFHanrahan]

@SheilaGreenfiel @lizarozovsky If you don’t like UNRWA there’s a simple solution: allow the Palestinian refugees to return, as called for in UNGA Resolution 194.

[Richard @RFHanrahan]

@SheilaGreenfiel @nicolelampert I guess you aren’t that bothered by the murder, rape, looting and vandalism committed by Zionist forces when they ethnically cleansed Jaffa in 1948. The victims of these atrocities deserve justice.

[Richard @RFHanrahan]

@SheilaGreenfiel @nicolelampert The residents of Jaffa didn’t expel anyone from Iraq.

[Juan. @unvalledezorros]

🖤

[Raza Hammad @HammadRazaAi]

THEY JUST STOLE YOUR IPHONE.

The thief turned it off instantly.

In the "Find My" app, you see it's offline.

Your bank accounts, your private photos, your entire life... in their hands.

That phone will just be a brick if you activated these 3 SETTINGS: 👇

[Liza Rozovsky @lizarozovsky]

שר החוץ של לוקסמבורג, חבייר בטל, הגיע אתמול מתוסכל מאוד לכנס בפריז שהפגיש בין החברה הישראלית והפלסטינית לבין דיפלומטים מכל העולם ועלה להתקפה נגד הנרטיב שמשווה בין ביקורת נגד ישראל לאנטישמיות.

אחר כך תוקף את מועצת השלום, מגן על אונר"א וזוכה לתשואות רמות. צפו

[Christiane Amanpour @amanpour]

“A geopolitical Chernobyl.” That’s the stark assessment of the US-Israeli war with Iran, from France’s former prime minister Dominique de Villepin. “What we see is a meltdown of the core reactor that is the US leadership.”

[MENA Visuals @menavisualss]

🇹🇷🇵🇸 An Arab kawass (an Ottoman Lieutenant assigned to all foreign travellers) seated in a garden of a Jerusalem house with a little Albanian boy in his care.

[Daniel Seidemann @DanielSeidemann]

One of the wisest and most chilling analyses I have read in a long time.

Compulsory reading.

[Tovi @wardinpal]

Weird as it may sound, THIS might be one of the best articles you can read in order to digestibly understand Israeli society. It touches on everything: The post-90s hippie aesthetic, the made up "PTSD" bullshit, the Israeli delusion that the world thinks they're (cont)

[MENA Visuals @menavisualss]

🛖 Today, at the slightest hint of heat, we immediately turn on the air conditioner, but people in the Middle East solved this problem thousands of years ago without harming nature.

🇸🇾 These "beehive" houses, built from a mixture of mud, straw, and stone, have been keeping people cool in Syria since around 3700 BCE.

[Mayank Vora @aiwithmayank]

Yale built the entire Open Yale Courses project around one stubborn idea: that a real liberal arts education should not be locked behind a quarter-million-dollar tuition bill.

The woman who launched it is a Yale art history professor named Diana Kleiner.

I only learned her name after going down a rabbit hole trying to figure out why these courses felt so different from everything else online.

Here is what she actually built. Not a preview. Not a stripped-down sampler. The genuine Yale courses, recorded in the real Yale College classroom, released in video, audio, and full searchable transcripts, with the original syllabus and reading lists attached. Free, under a license that lets anyone download, share, and remix the material.

Her stated mission was simple. Expand access to educational materials for everyone who wants to learn, and protect the values of a liberal arts education that goes beyond memorizing facts toward independent thought.

So she put Yale's best introductory courses online and asked nothing in return. No fee, no registration, no certificate dangled to make you pay.

You can audit the same courses Yale students pay over $65,000 a year for, right now.

The hardest part was never getting in. It was knowing the door was already open.

https://t.co/bKiUyWfo2Z

[MENA Visuals @menavisualss]

🇮🇶 A man and a sheep both ride a donkey through the streets, Iraq (1920's)

[Zara Zhar @Boudicca61AD]

"Jaffa Oranges" by Palestinian artist Isra Frehat, paired with an excerpt from from "Earth" poem by Mahmoud Darwish.

In the orchards of Jaffa, oranges once carried the scent of the sea.
They travelled the world,
bright, sweet, unmistakable.

Here, women gather at dusk.
They share bread. They peel fruit. Children run between the trees, laughing.
Oranges drop at their feet, bright against the earth.

[AJ+ @ajplus]

“The occupiers want the land without its people.”

The Palestinian village of Taybeh is one of the oldest Christian communities in the world. Israeli settlers set it on fire.

[MENA Visuals @menavisualss]

"Hassan Ben Moosa, a Bedouin of the Howareen Tribe"

Drawn by Carl Haag (1820-1915)