Chief Complaint

With these short stories, Hatim Kanaaneh explores the changing, precarious, and ever-shrinking world of Palestinians living in Israel. As his village’s first Western-trained physician, Kanaaneh had intimate access to his neighbor’s lives, and he chronicles them here in a fictionalized collection of vignettes. His cunningly crafted stories reveal the struggles, triumphs, memories, and hopes of the indigenous Palestinian community living in a state that neither acknowledges their past nor supports their future.



Following a diagnostic scheme used by physicians worldwide, each story is titled with the “chief complaint” of its protagonist. Taken together, the stories poignantly convey the indigenous Palestinian community’s foundational chief complaint: its conflicted relationship with the state of Israel.