The Other Side of Israel: My Journey Across the Jewish/Arab Divide

SUSAN NATHAN

The Other Side of Israel

MY JOURNEY ACROSS

THE JEWISH-ARAB DIVIDE

In memory of my parents,Sam and Maisie Levy.

And for my children,Daniel and Tanya.

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

1: The Road to Tamra

2: Death of a Love Affair

3: Second-Class Citizens

4: Echoes of Apartheid

5: The Missing Left

6: A Traumatized Society

7: Where Next?

Glossary

Sources

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

About the Author

Praise

Copyright

About the Publisher

1 The Road to Tamra

The road to the other side of Israel is not signposted. It is a place you rarely read about in your newspapers or hear about from your television sets. It is all but invisible to most Israelis.

In the Galilee, Israel’s most northerly region, the green signs dotted all over the highways point out the direction of Haifa, Acre and Karmiel, all large Jewish towns, and even much smaller Jewish communities like Shlomi and Misgav. But as my taxi driver Shaher and I look for Tamra we find no signs. Or none until we are heading downhill, racing the other traffic along a stretch of dual carriageway. By a turn-off next to a large metal shack selling fruit and vegetables is a white sign pointing rightwards to Tamra, forcing us to make a dangerous last-minute lane change to exit the main road. Before us stretching into the distance is a half-made road, and at the end of it a pale grey mass of concrete squats within a shallow hollow in the rugged Galilean hills. Shaher looks genuinely startled. ‘My God, it’s Tulkaram!’ he exclaims, referring to a Palestinian town and refugee camp notorious among Israelis as a hotbed of terrorism.

A few weeks earlier, in November 2002, I had rung the removals company in Tel Aviv to warn them well in advance of my move to Tamra, a town of substantial size by Israeli standards, close to the Mediterranean coast between the modern industrial port of Haifa and the ancient Crusader port of Acre. Unlike the communities I had seen well signposted in the Galilee, Tamra is not Jewish; it is an Arab town that is home to twenty-five thousand Muslims. A fact almost unknown outside Israel is that the Jewish state includes a large minority of one million Palestinians who have Israeli citizenship. Comprising a fifth of the population, they are popularly, and not a little disparagingly, known as ‘Israeli Arabs’. For a Jew to choose to live among them is unheard of. In fact it is more than that: it is inconceivable.

When I told my left-wing friends in Tel Aviv of my decision all of them without exception were appalled. First they angrily dismissed my choice, assuming either that it was a sign of my perverse misunderstanding of Middle Eastern realities or that it was a childish attempt to gain attention. But as it became clear that my mind was made up, they resorted to more intimidatory tactics. ‘You’ll be killed,’ more than one told me. ‘You know, the Arabs are friendly to start with, but they’ll turn on you,’ advised another. ‘You’ll be raped by the men,’ said one more. Finally, another friend took me aside and confided darkly: ‘I have a telephone number for a special unit in the army. They can come in and get you out if you need help. Just let me know.’

The woman at the removals company was less perturbed. ‘Will it be possible for you to move me from Tel Aviv to Tamra?’ I asked, concerned that as far as I could discern no one was living as a Jew inside an Israeli Arab community. I told her that if they had a problem with the move, they should tell me now. ‘Madam, we will deliver your belongings to anywhere in the state of Israel,’ she reassured me.

I arranged for Shaher, who I had used often in Tel Aviv, to collect me from my apartment on the day of the move. On the two-hour journey north we would lead the way in his taxi, with the removal truck following behind. Shaher phoned the day before to reassure me. ‘I have been looking carefully at the road map and I’ve devised a route to the Galilee which won’t involve passing too many Arab villages,’ he told me. ‘But we are heading for an Arab town,’ I reminded him. ‘Why on earth would I be worried about the route?’ Shaher did not seem to get my point.

We set off early the next day. Shaher was soon announcing, unbidden, his concern at my move to Tamra. What followed was a surreal exchange, the first of many such conversations I would have with taxi drivers and other Jews I met after I started living in Tamra. ‘So why are you moving there?’ he asked several times, apparently not persuaded by my reply each time, ‘Because I want to.’ Finally, he changed tack: ‘You know it’s an Arab area?’ Yes, I said, I think I know that. ‘So have you got an apartment there?’ Yes. ‘How did you get an apartment?’ I rented it, I said, just as I had done in Tel Aviv. Under his breath I could hear him muttering, ‘But it’s an Arab area.’ Then suddenly, as though it were a vital question he should have asked much earlier, he said: ‘Do you have a gun?’ Why would I need a gun, I asked. ‘Because they might kill you.’ I told him he was talking nonsense. Silence separated us until his face changed again. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘you must be working for the government and I didn’t know it.’ No, I said, I work just for myself. ‘But it’s an Arab area,’ he said again.

It was a cold winter’s day, but by the time we reached the road into Tamra I could see Shaher starting to break out into a sweat. In a final offer of help, he said: ‘Susan, you have my telephone numbers. If you need to come back to Tel Aviv, just call me.’

We followed the only proper road in Tamra to the central mosque and then negotiated our way up a steeply sloping side-street till we reached my new home, hidden down a small alley. I was renting the top-floor apartment in a three-storey property belonging to a family I had already befriended, the Abu Hayjas. Several members of the family came out to greet me, including the matriarch of the house, Hajji, and one of her granddaughters, Omayma. I went into the ground-floor apartment and had been chatting for maybe twenty minutes when Omayma interrupted. ‘Susan, why don’t they get out and start moving your furniture?’ I went to the door and looked over to the removal truck for the first time since we entered Tamra. The two young men sitting inside the cab looked as if they were afflicted with total paralysis. I turned to Omayma and replied, only half-jokingly: ‘Because they think you are going to eat them.’

I went over to the truck and knocked on the closed window, telling them it was time to get to work. They didn’t look too convinced, and could only be coaxed out when Hajji proved the natives’ hospitality by bringing out a pot of coffee, two cups and some biscuits, and placing them on a table close to the truck. Once out in the street the removal men opened the back of the truck and did the job in no time, running up and down the stairs with the boxes. Finished, they hurried back into the truck and raced down the steep street back towards the mosque and onwards to freedom. I never saw them again. The reinforced cardboard packing boxes they were supposed to return for a week later remained in my spare room uncollected for weeks. Eventually I rang the company. ‘I’m sorry, but they won’t come back to an Arab area just for the boxes,’ said the woman Ispoke to.

It started to dawn on me that I had crossed an ethnic divide in Israel that, although not visible, was as tangible as the concrete walls and razor-wire fences that have been erected around the occupied Palestinian towns of the West Bank and Gaza to separate them from the rest of the country. Nothing was likely to be the same ever again.

I had no intention of hiding from Tamra’s twenty-five thousand other inhabitants the fact that I was a Jew. But from the moment I arrived in the town to teach English I began redefining my identity, as a Jew, as an Israeli and as a human being. The first and most apparent change was that I was joining a new family, the Abu Hayjas, who immediately accepted me as one of their own, as integral to the family’s life as any new daughter-in-law. In keeping with Arab tradition, I was soon renamed ‘Umm Daniel’ (Mother of Daniel), after my eldest son, a status conferred on older, and wiser, parents.

The immediate family I live with is small by Tamra’s standards, consisting of only six other members. The eldest is the widowed Fatima, sixty-eight years of age and called Hajji by everyone because she has completed the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca, one of the duties incumbent on all Muslims during their lifetime. She married at seventeen, living with her husband for four years before he died. For a woman of her generation there was never any possibility that she could remarry, and so she has remained a widow all her adult life. Hajji had two children, a son and a daughter, but in Arab tradition only the son stays in the family home after marriage, while the daughter goes off to live with her new husband. So Hajji’s son, Hassan, fifty, and his wife Samira, forty-seven, live with her in the same building, and the couple’s two unmarried grown-up sons, Khalil and Waleed, each have their own apartments there in preparation for their marriages. Hassan and Samira’s two eldest daughters, Heba and Omayma, are married, and so have left home to be with their new families, though they spend a large part of their time visiting their parents and helping in the house. That leaves only Suad, aged seventeen, the one daughter still at home.

Although that is the core of the family, it extends much further. Hajji’s own father married twice, so we have a vast network of aunts, uncles and cousins, and half-aunts, half-uncles and half-cousins, who come to visit and drink coffee with us in Hajji’s apartment. They are all related in complex patterns that I cannot even begin to unravel but that the rest of my family understand intimately. Unlike me, they are helped by a lifelong familiarity with their extensive family tree and by the Arabic language, which has adapted to accommodate these relationships in more sophisticated ways than English. Aunts, uncles and cousins have titles which denote the blood relationship to each parent’s side of the family. So, for example, the word ‘ami’ tells any Arab child that one of his father’s sisters is being referred to, while ‘hali’ reveals that one of his mother’s sisters is being identified. The English equivalent for both words, ‘aunt’, is far less helpful.

And then beyond the extended family there is the bigger family structure, known as the ‘hamula’ or clan. There are four main hamulas in Tamra—the Abu Hayja, the Abu Romi, the Diab and the Hijazi—with each controlling a portion of the town, its quarter. My own family, as its name suggests, belongs to the Abu Hayja hamula, which dominates the southern side of Tamra. The hamula system means that everyone in our neighbourhood is related to us, even if it is in some very distant fashion. The importance of the hamula cannot be overstated: it is the ultimate body to which members of traditional Arab society owe their loyalty. In the West the hamula, or tribal system, is seen as backward and a block to progress, but I soon realised that this is a gross simplification. In Middle Eastern countries the tribe still fulfils a positive role (one usurped in the West by the welfare state), ensuring its members have access to land, housing, jobs, loans, and a pool of potential marriage partners. The hamula is the best protector of its members’ rights, and it provides an impartial forum in arbitrating disputes. It is revealing that in Israel, where a strong welfare state has developed, at least for Jewish citizens, the hamula still plays an invaluable role in many Arab citizens’ lives. Because the state continues to behave as though the Arab citizens are really not its responsibility, many choose to rely on the traditional tribal structure for support.

The hamula serves other functions. It is a crucial point of social reference, a guarantor, if you like, of an individual’s good family name. For example, I soon noticed that when two Arabs met for the first time they would spend several minutes tied up in trying to establish a significant mutual acquaintance. Evidently it was important for both of them to identify each other’s place in relation to the various hamulas. Sometimes there would be a series of ‘Do you know so and so?’ until both parties could relax at the discovery of a common bond; things could be tense if it took them some time to reach that point. Now, when people are introduced to me, they ask similar questions of me, and are reassured by my link to the good name of the Abu Hayja hamula and my immediate family.

For me, as for the rest of my family, the centre of gravity in our lives is to be found in a single figure: Hajji. Her ground-floor apartment is where we often congregate for food, and it is outside her front door that I like to sit with her on a stool first thing in the morning while she makes us strong black Arabic coffee over a stove. The ritual of coffee-making is taken very seriously in all Palestinian households, and Hajji is an expert practitioner. Over a gas flame she dissolves a home-made mixture of coffee and cardamom powder with water and sugar in a small open pot. Just before the liquid boils over she pulls it away from the heat, stirs it until it settles and then heats it again, repeating this process up to half a dozen times. Finally the pot is left standing for five minutes, a saucer over the top, as the sludge sinks to the bottom. When the coffee is ready, it is poured into tiny cups.

In the time I have been in Tamra, Hajji and I have forged a very deep bond, despite communication difficulties. Speaking in a mixture of broken English, Hebrew and Arabic, we laugh about our common ailments, and our love of flowers and nature. Hajji is an authority on traditional Arab remedies, and when I damaged my knee, for example, she suggested wrapping cabbage leaves around it to draw out the fluid.

Widowed at twenty-one, Hajji has known severe economic hardship, and raised her family in extreme poverty. She tells stories from her youth of going out into the fields to catch hedgehogs and, desperate for protein, stripping the animals of their prickly skin and roasting them on a spit. Hajji’s skills in making the most of the little she has are phenomenal. She knits incredibly beautiful children’s clothes without a pattern to follow; it’s all there in her head. She also has a profound understanding of nature, which I marvel at whenever I watch her in the garden. She has large hands with delicate fingers that plant seeds at high speed and deftly pick out herbs. She selects the Arab mint, sorrel and chamomile plants for our tea, picks off the parts she doesn’t want, and lays the rest out to dry in large round wooden sieves. Later she breaks them up into small pieces for storage in jars. There is a calm, rhythmic quality to her work that I find reassuring and meditative.

But she is getting weaker with age, and nowadays has trouble visiting the rest of the family, who live on the first and second floors of the building. So family occasions are invariably held in her flat. The family now jokes that the only time Hajji leaves her apartment is if someone in the extended family has a child, gets married or dies. It’s more or less true. Recently, though, she has started going to an old people’s centre, where she does embroidery and knitting. She is collected in the morning and arrives home early in the afternoon. But she generally prefers to be at home, and I don’t like it when she is away too long. I never really knew either of my two sets of grandparents, and even though she is little more than ten years older than me, Hajji, I think, has become a surrogate grandmother.

Hajji and her daughter-in-law Samira together form the backbone of what in the West would surely have become a small business. For downstairs, next to Hajji’s apartment, is a garden and covered area where they produce, manufacture and store the huge quantities of food the family needs. We are a restaurant, plant nursery, canning and pickling plant and bakery all in one. Every week there seems to be a different task, each one revolving around the particular growing season. It might be pickling cucumbers, cauliflowers and carrots for use during the rest of the year; or going to collect zatar (a herb akin to thyme and oregano) out in the wilds, then bringing it back to dry it, mix it with sesame seeds and grind it; or buying staples like rice, flour and bulgar wheat for storage in big containers. There are always piles of boxes, sacks and barrels waiting to be labelled and stored away.

A special occasion in the year is the olive harvest in late October, when we all disappear off to the edge of town, to a small patch of ground where the family has an olive grove. There for three or four days we crowd among the trees, up ladders picking off handfuls of the green and black fruit and throwing them onto tarpaulins below. At the end of the day the tarpaulins are gathered up and the olives bagged into sacks. Some we later pickle in glass bottles, while the rest goes to the press in town. After the harvest, the family gave me the first bottle of oil as a gift.

Much of our diet, however, grows next to us in the small garden. That is the traditional way in Arab communities, although it is a way of life slowly dying because of both the arrival of out-of-town supermarkets and the extensive confiscation of Arab communities’ agricultural land by the Jewish state. Some Arab areas have lost all their farming lands, but at least Tamra has managed to hold onto some. The ever increasing territorial confinement of the town, however, means that few families can spare what little land they have left to grow subsistence crops for their own use. Instead they have tended to construct homes for other family members, building ever more tightly next to each other.

In my family’s garden a huge number of herbs, some I do not know by any English name, grow amid the more common vegetables such as cabbages, peppers, courgettes, cucumbers and beans. We have our own orange and lemon trees, figs, pomegranates and vines. The leaves of the vines, like other vegetables, are cooked after being stuffed with a mixture of rice and meat. But first they must be stripped of their stalks, an art that both Hajji and Samira mastered decades ago but which, despite many attempts, I cannot perform without tearing the leaves.

Many of the dishes we eat here are uncommon to Western eyes, even though they are just as delicious and healthy as the cuisines of Mediterranean countries such as Italy and Spain. We serve up a huge array of stuffed vegetables, not just the more familiar vine leaves and peppers, but also artichokes, cabbage leaves, courgettes, aubergines and small marrows known as kari’a. Other familiar traditional dishes are okra in a rich tomato sauce (bamiye) or with beans (lubia); a dry lentil and onion stew (majedera); a tasty paste of green leaves known as mloukiye; and a seasonal thorny weed called akoub that is found in Galilean fields and has to be carefully prepared before eating. These dishes are made in large pots at lunch-time, the main meal, and then kept hot with a thick blanket wrapped around them so that family and visitors can eat at any time during the rest of the day.

But given the size of Arab families and the need to have something on the stove ready for guests, Hajji and Samira also make lots of healthy snack food. There are always large quantities of freshly made hummous available, far better than anything you can buy in a shop; a creamy sesame paste called tahina mixed with parsley; a puree of broad beans, tahina and garlic known as fool; a mash of aubergine and tahina called mutabal; and a bitter home-made yoghurt known as labaneh. All of these are served up with the local pitta bread, which we bake ourselves in a special oven. The equivalent of pizza here is something known as manakiesh, a bread topped with melted salty cheese or zatar. Hajji sits squat on the floor, as Africans do when preparing food, to roll out the dough. For special occasions the family will also make finger food: pastry parcels (ftir) stuffed with cheese, spinach or zatar; or mini-pizzas topped with meat and pine nuts (sfiha). The most prized dish of all is tabouli, a salad of minutely chopped parsley, bulgar wheat, tomato and spring onion, soaked in olive oil and lemon.

My apartment in Tamra was never meant as a temporary base, nor as a social experiment. It is as much my home as was Tel Aviv when I first arrived in Israel six years ago, or as was London before that. This is where, aged fifty-six, I am choosing to root myself for the foreseeable future. I have filled my apartment with all the most precious things I have collected over a lifetime: the mementoes of my childhood in Britain, of my many travels to South Africa, where much of my family still lives, and of my more recent life in the Middle East. I have original paintings by South African and Palestinian artists, Bedouin carpets on the floor, stacks of CDs of music from around the world, and a wide range of books on subjects that especially interest me: from psychology and politics to biographies. My father instilled in me a deep appreciation of Jewish culture and ethics, and many of my favourite books reflect that. Like me, it is an eclectic mix.

From my balcony the main view is of Tamra, its grey homes pressing upon their neighbours, offering no privacy at all. Electricity and telephone cables are slung haphazardly across the streets, attached chaotically to metal pylons or wooden poles, many of which are planted in the centre of roads, creating a major traffic hazard. The roads themselves drop precipitously in a network of lanes that no one appears ever to have planned, their surfaces only half-made or scarred by potholes. Every street is lined with rubble or rubbish, and piles of dust swirl in the wind. Children with no parks or even gardens to play in squat in the streets making games with stones, discarded bottles or sticks, dodging the passing traffic. In the winter, which is when I arrived, showers instantly overwhelm the drains, bringing torrents of water washing down the streets, a miserable stain of brown and grey.

But the story inside people’s homes is very different. Amid all this public squalor, everyone maintains their private space in meticulous order. Homes are cleaned daily, with the surfaces so spotless that you could eat off them. Even the poorest families invest their energies in making their homes bright and attractive, bringing as much colour into their domestic lives as is possible within Tamra’s dour surroundings.

Despite the oppressive atmosphere there are many compensations to living in Tamra, including the warmth and friendliness of the people and the town’s location. Here in the Galilee the air is clean and the light pure. From my lofty position both on a hillside and on the building’s top floor I overlook my neighbours to see far to the north, to the high hills of the Upper Galilee and almost to Lebanon. The rocky slopes embracing Tamra change colour through the day, settling into wonderful hues of orange and purple at sunset. In the late afternoon the shadows of the tall cypress trees lengthen rapidly, like nature’s timepieces. I love to look out at the clear sky at night, as the stars slowly emerge into life and a luminous moon rises over the horizon. Out on the nearby hills are to be found an amazing variety of wildflowers in the spring, including breathtaking displays of baby cyclamen and anemones. In the summer the air is filled with the perfume of the blossoms of jasmine, hibiscus, orange and oleander, which somehow manage to root themselves in spite of all the concrete. There are fig and pomegranate trees everywhere, affording another of the great joys of living here: being able to pluck the heavy fruit directly from the trees as one walks in the street.