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

Moving into an Arab community in Israel, however, means changing one’s definition of privacy. There is no sense of the anonymity that is a major component of life in Tel Aviv, New York or London. Hajji’s door is never closed, unless she is out. And it would never occur to anyone in the family to knock before entering her home, or to ask before opening her fridge. That doesn’t just go for Hajji, it applies to everyone here. (Apart, I should add, from me. A special allowance is made in my case, and the family knocks before entering my apartment.) I find this lack of barriers both rewarding and a drawback. In my first few weeks I was invited to an art exhibition in Haifa by a well-known Palestinian artist, Salam Diab. We arrived back home late to find, unusually, the lights were still on. I went inside to say hello, only to discover Hassan and his two sons, Khalil and Waleed, sitting in a row on the sofa watching the television and nervously awaiting my return. When I saw their worried faces, I looked at Hassan, more than five years my junior, and announced, ‘I’m back!’ We both started laughing. Nowadays I always make sure that they can reach me on my mobile phone, because I know they worry about my safety. At first this seemed like an intrusion, but now I have come to see the advantages. Being absorbed into the family means that I enjoy its protection and its concern for my welfare.

Not all the loss of privacy is cultural, however. Someone I met in my first week in Tamra equated living here with being in a goldfish bowl. I already knew what she meant. On my first morning in my new apartment I opened the blinds of my bedroom window, at the back of the house, to find that I was staring directly across at my neighbours’ house a few metres away—and at my neighbours, who were looking out from their own window. On all sides of the house, apart from my balcony at the front, neighbours’ homes are pressing up against mine. If I have the blinds up, there is almost nowhere in the apartment where I can be free from prying eyes. Ghetto living is more than just a feeling of confinement; it is a sense of suffocation too.

During my first weeks the sense of being watched followed me into the streets. Walking around Tamra I felt like a specimen in the zoo, as if every article of clothing I wore, and every movement I made, was being observed from a thousand different angles. When I went to the shops everyone stared at me. Everyone. People would stop dead in their tracks, and on a few occasions there were nearly traffic accidents—the drivers couldn’t quite believe what they were seeing. What, their eyes were asking, was a blonde-haired woman doing here alone? There was never any enmity in their looks; only surprise or bewilderment.

I cannot claim to be the only non-Arab woman ever to have lived here. There are a few others, though you’ll find them concealed by the hijab, the Islamic headscarf. These women have found love with local men who studied or worked abroad, and returned home with them. There are even former Jews in the town, women who maybe met their husband-to-be at university or through work. But they have all converted—as they must do by law in Israel, where there is no civil marriage—and live here as Muslims. Many of these newcomers struggle with the culture shock and the lack of amenities. A young doctor recently left Tamra with his new Romanian wife to live in the more cosmopolitan city of Haifa, perhaps the one place in Israel where Jews and Arabs can live in some sort of mutual accommodation, if not quite equality.

But for a woman to be living here without an Arab husband is unheard of. And for her to be a self-declared Jew is off the register. As I negotiated the town’s streets during the first few weeks, learning Tamra’s chaotic geography, I would see groups of people sitting outside their homes drinking coffee and chatting. The women’s heads would move closer together as I went past. They never pointed—Arabs are far too polite for that—but it was clear I was the topic of conversation. After a few days, the odd person worked up the courage to stop me in the street and strike up a conversation. They always addressed me in Hebrew, a language Arabs in Israel must learn at school. This made me uncomfortable, especially after an early warning from one of my occasional neighbours, Dr Said Zidane, head of the Palestinian Independent Commission in Ramallah, in the Palestinian West Bank. His mother lives next to me, and on a visit to see her he advised me not to speak Hebrew as it might arouse the suspicion that I was working for the government or the security services, the Shin Bet, which is known to run spies in Arab communities. He suggested I exploit my lack of fluent Hebrew and speak English instead.

Always I would be asked where I had lived before moving to Tamra, and the questioners would be amazed by my reply. ‘Why would you want to live here after living in Tel Aviv?’ they would ask. Why not, I would say. ‘But it’s obvious: Tel Aviv has cinemas, theatres, coffee houses, proper shops, tree-lined streets, libraries, community centres, a transport system…’The list was always long. Their incomprehension at my choice revealed the difference between my life and theirs. Although I choose to live in Tamra, as a Jew I am always free to cross back over the ethnic divide. I think nothing of an hour’s train ride from Haifa to Tel Aviv. But for them the trip involves crossing a boundary, one that is real as well as psychological. To be an Israeli Arab visiting a Jewish community is to be instantly a target, an alien identiflable through the give-aways of language, culture and often appearance. They must enter a space where they are not welcome and may be treated as an intruder. The danger, ever-present in their minds, is of encountering hostility or even violence. They know from surveys published in local newspapers that a majority of Israeli Jews want them expelled from the country. They also hear about frequent attacks on Arabs by Jewish youths and racist policemen. Many of my Arab friends have told me how uncomfortable they feel about going to Jewish areas. Khalil in my house, who is a film-maker, travels to Tel Aviv only when he has to, on business or to buy new equipment, and he leaves as soon as his work is done.

Unlike the cold, impersonal atmosphere of Tel Aviv, Muslim communities like Tamra take a pride in their hospitality to friends and strangers alike. But when you are living in—as opposed to visiting—an Arab community, the hospitality comes as a double-edged sword. One March morning I told Hassan I was going to the chemist, a couple of hundred metres down the hill. I was gone for an hour and a half: on the way, at least fifteen people stopped me for a chat or to invite me in for coffee. On my return Hassan asked with concern where I had been. When I told him, he laughed and suggested I start wearing the veil. ‘At least that way you can go about your business without attracting so much attention,’ he joked.

It’s true that trying to get things done always seems to take longer in Arab society, and although being welcomed into people’s homes is a wonderful thing, equally it can be inconvenient, time-consuming and stifling. The fear of insulting a neighbour or a friend by refusing an invitation for coffee or a meal can make a quick trip to the shops a dismaying prospect. There is a vague formula to invitations to people’s homes, which in essence involves being offered a cold drink, possibly accompanied by nuts, fruit or biscuits. There may be tea later, or a meal depending on the time of day and the closeness of the relationship. The signal that the host needs to get on with something else—or that he or she is tired of your company—usually comes when they produce a pot of coffee.

Conversations in people’s homes are wide-ranging, particularly with older Tamrans, who have experienced enough earth-shattering events to fill anyone’s lifetime. One old man told me in detail about the different train routes that could be taken from the Galilee all over the Middle East before the creation of Israel, when the borders existed as no more than lines on maps produced by the area’s British and French rulers. Here in the Galilee, he told me, we were at the very heart of the Middle East, with all the region’s biggest cities—Beirut (Lebanon), Damascus (Syria), Amman (Jordan) and Jerusalem (Palestine)—a two-hour trip or less away. Today only Jerusalem is easily accessible: Beirut and Damascus are in enemy states and Amman lies across a heavily guarded international border. Personally I felt frustration at being barred from visiting most of these places, but for Arab citizens the borders represent something far more tragic. Many people in Tamra, like other Palestinians, have loved ones still living in refugee camps in Lebanon and Syria more than five decades after they were forced to flee during the war that founded the Jewish state. Israel refuses to let the refugees return, and neither Israel nor Lebanon or Syria want their populations crossing over the borders. So a meeting between separated relatives—even brothers and sisters, and in a few cases husbands and wives—remains all but impossible.

Few Israeli Arabs in the Galilee, apart from an educated elite, know much of the world outside their immediate region. Many venture no further than Haifa, less than twenty-five kilometres away. Few can afford to travel to Europe for a holiday, and most of the Arab states are off limits. They can at least go by bus to Jordan and Egypt, which have signed peace treaties with Israel, but even then the reception is not always warm. Egyptians in particular have difficulty with the idea that someone can be an Israeli and an Arab at the same time. The assumption—shared, to be honest, by most Westerners—is that if you are Israeli you must be Jewish. ‘I get fed up hearing the Egyptian taxi drivers telling me that I speak good Arabic for a Jew,’ Khalil once remarked to me.

Many conversations in Tamra concern the town’s history. It had often occurred to me that Tamra looked much like a refugee camp. Like other Israelis, I had seen plenty of television images of the bleak camps of Gaza and the West Bank, the background to Palestinian children throwing stones at Israeli tanks. Those camps, some no more than an hour’s drive from Tamra, and other Palestinian towns and villages are inhabited by more than three and a half million Palestinians who are not Israeli citizens but live under Israeli military occupation. What shocked me was that, as Shaher had observed, Tamra looked much the same as Gaza and the West Bank—only the tanks and the soldiers were missing. But Tamra’s inhabitants, unlike those of the occupied territories, are not at war with Israel. They are citizens of a democratic state.

During a conversation one morning over coffee with Hajji, I learned that my observation about the town’s appearance was far nearer the truth than I could have imagined. Much of Tamra was in fact a refugee camp. It was like a dark, ugly secret that no one in the town would dwell on for too long. But photographs from 1948, the year in which the Jewish state was declared, prompting a war with the indigenous Palestinian population, show not only a scattering of Tamra’s stone houses but also a sea of Red Cross tents housing refugees from the fighting.

In 1947 Tamra had a population of no more than two thousand people, but a year later that figure had risen to three thousand. Today, according to Amin Sahli, a civil engineer and the local town planner, a third of Tamrans are classified as internal refugees, refused permission ever to return to their original homes. In the callous, Orwellian language of Israeli bureaucracy they and another quarter of a million Israeli Arabs are known as ‘present absentees’: present in Israel in 1948, but absent from their homes when the authorities registered all property in the new Jewish state. Everything these refugees owned, from their land and homes to their possessions and bank accounts, has been confiscated and is now owned by the state. They and their descendants lost everything they had in 1948. The members of my own family are refugees too, having fied from neighbouring villages in the Galilee.

More than four hundred Palestinian villages were destroyed by the Israeli army during and after the war of 1948, to prevent the refugees from returning. There was even a special government department created to plan the destruction. So why did Tamra and another hundred or so Palestinian villages remain relatively untouched by the fighting fifty-seven years ago? Amin told me that the town survived for two reasons: first, it was located off the main routes used by the advancing Israeli army, and therefore its defeat was not considered a military necessity; and second, Tamra was a small community that had a history of, to phrase it generously, ‘cooperating’ with the pre-state Jewish authorities as well as with local Jewish businesses. It was, in other words, a useful pool of cheap labour in the area. Soon the farmers of Tamra were turning their skills to the advantage of Jewish farming cooperatives like the kibbutzim or were being ‘reskilled’ to work in building cheap modern estates of homes for the Jewish immigrants who flooded into the new state of Israel. Tamrans lost their traditional skills of building in stone and wood and learned to construct only in the bland, grey, concrete garb of modern Tamra.

According to Hajji, the first refugees into Tamra were sheltered in the homes of the existing inhabitants. But soon the town was being overwhelmed: hundreds of Palestinians arrived from the destroyed villages of Damun, Ein Hod, Balad al-Sheikh, Haditha and Mi’ar. The early warm welcome turned much colder. Most of the new arrivals fell under the responsibility of the Red Cross, who housed them in tents, but after a few years the international community passed responsibility for the internal refugees’ fate back to Israel. It was some fifteen years before the last tents were gone, recalls Hajji, as many people were reluctant to give up the hope that one day they would be able to return to their original homes.

Stripped of all their possessions, the refugee families had to work and save money to buy land from the original inhabitants of Tamra, so that they could turn their fabric homes into concrete ones. That fact alone goes a long way to explaining the unplanned, chaotic geography of Tamra and other Israeli Arab communities. The roads, originally designed for the horse and cart, were simply diverted around the maze of ‘concrete tents’.

During the subsequent decades Israel has re-zoned most of Tamra’s outlying lands as green areas, doing yet more damage to the town’s already unnatural development. Hemmed in on all sides by land that it cannot use, Tamra’s rapidly growing population has been unable to expand territorially. Instead it has had to grow much denser. Today’s twenty-five thousand inhabitants exist in a town that in reality barely has room for a quarter of that number. This is apparent in even the tiniest aspects of the town’s infrastructure. Consider the toilets, for example. Nothing has been spent on improving the sewerage system since the days more than half a century ago when the few dozen houses here each had a basic hole in the ground. Now all families have a flushing toilet, but they all feed into an overstretched network of ancient pipes that catered to a different reality. In my first few days, the family tactfully explained to me why there was a bucket by the toilet. If I continued to flush toilet paper down the bowl, they warned me, I would block the pipes in no time.

The overcrowding isn’t restricted to the humans of Tamra. Everywhere there are animals: not cats or dogs, but those more familiar from the farmyard. In the early evening it is common to see teenage boys riding horses bareback down the streets at high speed, jostling for space with the cars. When not being ridden, these horses are to be found tethered in families’ tiny backyards or under their houses, along with pens of sheep and goats, and chicken sheds. In some parts of Tamra, particularly in the Abu Romi quarter, every home seems to be operating as a cramped small farm. Sheep and goats are often penned up in the space where you would expect to find the family car. I found this quite baffling until Hajji explained the reason. Before 1948 most of Tamra’s families had either farmed commercially or owned land to subsist on, but in the intervening years Israel had either confiscated or re-zoned their fields. Families lost their crops, but they were at least able to hold onto their animals by bringing them to their homes. Samira’s daughter Omayma, who lives with her husband’s family in the middle of town on the main street, has a vast collection of animals. Until recently they included an impressive flock of geese, but their numbers were slowly whittled down by a pack of wild dogs.

Another striking feature of Tamra is the apparent absence of shops. None of the Israeli high street names are here, nor are the international chains. It is not for lack of local interest: Tamrans will drive long distances, to Haifa and elsewhere, to shop at the larger clothes stores, and they are as keen to eat an American burger as any Jew. Presumably, however, these chains are too nervous to set up shop in an Arab town. (McDonald’s Israel claims to have a branch in Tamra, but in truth it is to be found well outside the town, on the opposite side of the dual carriageway, where it services the passing traffic.) The town’s shops are all local businesses, though even their presence is largely concealed. Apart from a couple of dozen clothes, fruit and veg and electrical goods stores on the main street, it is impossible for a visitor to know where Tamrans do their shopping. The hairdressers, doctors and dentists, furniture shops, pharmacies and ice cream parlours are invariably in anonymous houses, hidden behind the same grey concrete and shutters as residential properties. The local inhabitants, of course, know precisely where to find these shops, but for quite some time the lack of clues made it a nightmare for me.

Such difficulties were exacerbated by the problem of orientating myself. Because of the unplanned streets and the lack of regulations on construction, the local council has never attempted to name roads or number houses. So if I asked directions the reply would always involve telling me to turn right or left at a building that obviously served as a landmark for the local population, but which to me looked indistinguishable from the rest of the concrete. After a year I started to recognise at least a few of these landmarks. One felafel shop might be used as a signpost rather than its neighbour simply because it had been around for decades, and the community felt its long-term usefulness had been established.

In the early days I would think, ‘I will never find my way around this place, I will never understand how to get from A to B.’ I started walking every day to learn the complex patchwork of alleys and side streets. I was immediately struck by the huge number of roads that were incomplete, unmade or scarred by endless potholes. Streets would come to an abrupt end or peter out. There were embarrassing moments when, having started to rely on a shortcut, using what I thought was a footpath or an empty piece of ground, I would find one day that it was now blocked by concrete walls. A family, it would be explained to me, was squeezing yet another house into one of the last remaining spaces open to them. Because it was me, no one ever showed offence at the fact that I had been tramping through their yard.

The sense of community in Tamra is reinforced by its festivals. Anyone who has been to the Middle East quickly learns that public space is treated differently in Arab countries. On their first night, foreign visitors usually wake in the early hours of the morning, startled by the loud wailing of the local imam over the mosque’s loudspeakers calling the faithful to prayer. For the first week or so these calls to prayer—five times a day—disturbed me too, but they soon became part of the background of life, as reassuring as the sound of church bells echoing through an English village.

One of the things I soon noticed about Muslim festivals is how much they resemble those celebrated by religious Jews, including the Orthodox members of my own Jewish family. When Asad Ghanem, a political science lecturer at Haifa University and one of the coun-try’s outstanding Israeli Arab intellectuals, took me to Nazareth for a Muslim engagement party, he asked me on the way back: ‘So, how was it at your first Arab party?’ He laughed when I told him: ‘It’s just like being at an engagement party in North London. I feel like I’m living with my first cousins.’ Israel, and more recently the West, spends a lot of time warning us about the dangers of ‘the Arab mind’, instilling in us a fear of Arab culture and of Islam by accentuating their differences from us and by removing the wider context. Even though intellectually I knew that Jews and Arabs were both Semitic races with their roots in the Middle East, I was still unprepared for the extent to which the traditions in Islam and Judaism and the two cultures were so closely related.

Take, for example, death. The rituals of the two faiths closely mirror each other. The most important thing is that the dead person must be buried on the same day, before sundown, or failing that as soon as possible. So when Samira’s sister died early one morning, she was in the ground by 1 p.m. As in Orthodox Judaism, the family and close friends went to the home and gathered around the body to pray while it was washed and the orifices were stuffed with cotton. After the body had been buried, the family sat in the house for a three-day mourning period during which guests were welcomed to share in the sorrow (in Judaism this period lasts seven days). The purpose in both religions is the same: to expunge the grief from the mourners’ souls in a communal setting, and thereby to allow them to move on. In both faiths the family continues to mark its grief for a longer period by abstaining from celebrations and parties, and not playing music. During the three days of mourning the family’s house is open from early morning to late evening, with the men and women sitting apart. Another tradition both religions share is that neighbours bring food to the dead person’s family during the grieving period. That is what happened when my mother died in London. In Tamra we laid out a large meal of meat, rice and pine nuts for the mourners. On the second day I brought coffee and milk to the women for breakfast.

The most joyous and lavish occasion is a wedding, which can last from three days to a week. If it is the marriage of the eldest son or an only son, the celebration is always huge. The basic schedule is three days: one for the bride’s party, one for the groom’s, and the third for the wedding itself. On each occasion the party starts at sunset and goes on till the early hours, with a guest list of a few hundred family and friends. Often the road where the family lives will be shut down to accommodate the party as it spills into the street. Music is played very loudly, with wild, throbbing, hypnotic beats that reverberate around the town. During the summer months there is rarely an evening when you cannot hear the thumping boom of wedding songs somewhere in Tamra. The noise is like an extended invitation, ensuring that everyone can join in—at a distance—even if they have not been officially invited.

On the bride’s day the women come together to eat, dance and talk. I found it fascinating to see so many women, their heads covered by the hijab headscarf, dancing together. You might expect that their dancing would be modest, but there is something very sensuous and provocative about the way Arab women dance, slowly gyrating their hips and swaying as they twist their arms and hands in the air. The messages are very conflicting. At my first Arab wedding I felt overwhelmed by the noise, the dancing and the huge number of bodies packed together. Later in the evening a group from the groom’s side was allowed to join the party. Arriving in a long chain, they danced into the centre of the celebrations, with everyone else standing to the side and clapping their hands in time. As the noise grew louder, the clapping turned ever more excited until people were opening their arms wide and snapping them shut together, like huge crocodile jaws. Finally, a pot of henna was brought and the bride’s fingers decorated with her and the groom’s initials entwined. On her palm and the back of her hands were painted beautiful patterns to make her more attractive for the wedding.