Hatim Kanaaneh is a Palestinian doctor who has worked for more than 35 years to bring medical care to Palestinians in Galilee, against a culture of anti-Arab discrimination.

A native of Galilee, he studied at the University of Hawaii and at Harvard before returning to Galilee to practice. His wife, Didi, is originally from Hawaii and taught in the Palestinian village where Kanaaneh practiced.

Kanaaneh, author of the 2008 book, “;A Doctor in Galilee: the Life and Struggle of a Palestinian in Israel,”; is in Hawaii for a series of talks.

He speaks at 3 p.m. today at Revolution Books, 2626 S. King St. Then at 8 p.m. Tuesday, he will appear with UH Professor Ibrahim Aoude on “;Island Connections,”; channel 55.

(This is excerpted from an open letter to President Barack Obama.)

Dear President Obama,

In approaching the task of addressing you directly about a personal issue, I feel daunted by the abyss that separates the two of us in status and power. I am a retired public health physician, attempting to maintain a hold on his sanity and physical health by puttering around his garden in a Palestinian village in Galilee. You are the president of the nation most of humanity envies and desires to join, burdened with the task of saving the world from economic and political chaos and now from nuclear war.

Yet I find enough shared experiences between us to embolden me to speak to you as an equal in humanity if in no other regard. Like you, I am a product of Hawaii, where I attended university at the time your late parents did, and of Harvard, where we both received our professional training. I subsequently returned to my village and worked among my people to treat their illnesses and improve their wellbeing physically, mentally and socially with varying degrees of success and frustration. Unlike you, I came up fast against the glass ceiling set very low for Palestinian citizens of Israel like me. ...

... Now to the subject of my message, Mr. President: The newly-elected prime minister of Israel, Mr. Benjamin Netanyahu, and his foreign minister, Mr. Avigdor Lieberman, plan to evict me from my home and to take away my garden. These two persons and their fellow ministers were democratically elected to their positions and will use “;democratic”; means at their disposal to legitimize my disenfranchisement as have previous Israeli governments done in the past. The difference is that the current leaders are explicit and aggressive about disadvantaging me based on my ethnicity. They have devised a way to blame me for my victimhood. They intend to ask me to sign an oath of allegiance to Israel as a Jewish state, a state that defines itself as exclusive of me and my people.

Democracy, Mr. President, may be the best political system, but, alas, it is no guarantee of justice and equality when it is abused to give unrestricted power to an exclusivist majority. My community, citizens of Israel since its establishment, makes up a fifth of the country's population but owns a constantly shrinking share of the land that currently stands at 3 percent of the total. Our towns and villages receive 3-5 percent of municipal budgetary allocations. Our infants and children die at over twice the level of our Jewish co-citizens — and the relative ratio is rising of late. Our two communities continue to live in racially segregated residential areas often separated by walls and barbwire. Mr. President, I am not writing of the West Bank or Gaza but of neighborhoods in “;mixed cities”; within the Green line. ...

...I ask you, Mr. President, to put yourself momentarily in my position and consider how I should react to the racially-based transfer designs of these politicians. Here, in the person of Avigdor Lieberman, is another presumably equal co-citizen of Israel who calls openly for my disqualification from our shared citizenship because I want to be equal to him under the laws of our common country. He insists on having me step down from our presumed common stand of equality and kowtow openly to his privileged status as the son of a certain race and religion. Would you do that, Mr. President, were it to be demanded from you by a fellow American citizen, be he Anglo-Saxon, Hispanic or Asian immigrant, or even a Native American?

As an alternative, Mr. Lieberman wants me transferred out of the country though I have lived on land I inherited legally from forefathers who almost surely have better claim to descent from the ancient Hebrews than his. ... Would you, Mr. President, take a loyalty oath confirming your second-class status?

Mr. Lieberman's best-case scenario for tolerating my existence in his vicinity is to have the homes of the likes of me rezoned into one of the Bantustans he envisions, to be created and run by remote control from behind an ethnic separation wall. ...

You have to understand, sir, that I speak here of life-and-death issues for me and my family. ...

Past injustices, and those were many and massive against my people, were never so clearly foretold as the ones the current Israeli government threatens to perpetrate against me, my family, my village and my people. It is with this clearly articulated plan of my transfer in mind that I call on you to use the undeniable prestige of your office to stop such plans from being implemented. ...

...With my best wishes for peace for you and your family and for all of humanity,

Hatim Kanaaneh