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

The second party, for the groom, follows a similar pattern of eating and dancing. At the end of the night the groom is prepared for the wedding day with a ceremonial shaving. Carrying a tray bearing a bowl, shaving cream and a razor, his mother and sisters dance towards him. Just as with the henna, the tray is decorated with flowers. Then, as they sing, the closest male relatives put him on a chair raised up on a table and begin to shave him in a great flourish of excitement. Soon there is foam flying in all directions, with the raucous men smearing it over each other’s faces. Everyone is having so much fun there is often a reluctance to finish the job. But once he is smooth, the groom is held aloft on the shoulders of a strong male relative who dances underneath him as he moves his arms rhythmically above. The symbolic significance of this moment of transition into manhood is immense: the close relatives often burst into uncontrollable tears.

On the final day, the groom’s family must go to collect the bride from her parents’ home and bring her to her new family. As in Judaism there is no equivalent of the church ceremony familiar in the West. Before they set off, the groom’s family invites everyone for a great feast of meat and rice followed by sweet pastries. Then the groom’s closest friends wash him while the women dance holding his wedding clothes. He is dressed, and the family is then ready to fetch the bride. In one of the family weddings I attended, we formed a long convoy of cars, taking a circuitous route through Tamra so that we could toot our horns across the town, letting everyone know we were coming. The lead car was decorated with a beautiful display of flowers and ribbons. The bride’s family welcomed us with drinks and plates of delicate snacks while the bride stood by in her white dress. As the moment neared for her to leave, small goatskin drums were banged and the women ululated a traditional song, which to my ears sounded sad and tragic but which actually wishes her health and happiness in the future. It is an emotional moment for the bride, who often cries. She dances on her own, holding in each hand a lighted long white candle, surrounded by a circle of relatives. When she is finished she steps on the candles to extinguish them, and leaves.

The highlight of the year for me is Ramadan, the spiritual month of fasting that commemorates the first revelation of the Muslim holy book, the Koran, to the Prophet Mohammed by God. No food or drink may be consumed from the moment the sun rises till the moment it sets. Muslims are expected to reflect on their behaviour at this time of year, during which they should not lie, cheat or fight. Special TV programmes concentrate on the spiritual aspect of Ramadan, showing live footage from Mecca and talks by religious leaders. It is a very physically demanding time: we have to rise at 4 a.m. for breakfast and then endure the heat of the day without any sustenance. Some Middle Eastern countries effectively grind to a halt during Ramadan, with offices and shops closed during the day. But in Israel no allowances are made for non-Jewish religious festivals, so people have to carry on with their normal work.

A unique time of day during Ramadan is just before sunset, when the imams call out a special prayer on the mosques’ loudspeakers. This is the signal to the community that they can start eating again. At the precise moment the imam begins his prayer, I like to think that the streets of every Muslim community in the world are like ours: deserted and profoundly quiet, in a way unimaginable at any other time. Nothing moves or makes a noise. Even the birds seem to know they should not stir. Inside the houses, families start with a watery soup to accustom their stomachs to food again, then tuck into a table filled with their favourite foods. By the end of Ramadan people have lost weight and look tired; it asks a lot of them.

Unlike Judaism, which has many festivals, there are only two major feasts in Islam: the three-day Eid al-Fitr, which marks the end of Ramadan, and the four-day Eid al-Adha. There is a huge celebration in Tamra at both times of year, with the centre of town grinding to a virtual halt as improvised stalls are set up along the edge of the main road, selling children’s toys and sweets. Teenage boys show off their horse-riding skills, while the younger children are pulled along more sedately in a horse-drawn carriage painted in vivid colours. Tamra has no parks or public spaces where these festivities could be held more safely, so the stallholders, children, horses and cars simply jostle for priority.

Both of these eids entail endless visiting of relatives, especially for the younger children, who are dressed in smart new clothes for the occasion. They receive money as a gift from each relative they visit. Unfortunately the boys invariably choose to spend their windfalls on toy guns—convincing replicas of the weapons they see being used by Palestinian gunmen and Israeli soldiers on the television.

Homes are stuffed with sweets, chocolates, dried fruits and special shortbread biscuits filled with date paste. Extended families congregate in large circles, eating and drinking tea or coffee while they chat. But the main celebration at each of these festivals is the barbecue, when huge quantities of meat are consumed. The Eid al-Adha (Feast of the Sacrifice) is, as its name suggests, a celebration of meat consumption. The feast commemorates the familiar Biblical story in which Ibrahim—Abraham in Christianity and Avraham in Judaism—is asked by God to sacrifice his son Isaac as a sign of devotion. Ibrahim proves his devotion, but God substitutes a ram for his son at the last moment. For Muslims this story is quite literally reenacted, with blood running in the streets as families slaughter a sheep, cutting its throat for the barbecue. I found it a shock to see an ancient story I had learned as a schoolchild coming to life before my eyes. Once butchered, the meat is cut into three equal parts: one portion for the immediate family, one for the extended family, and one for the poor. We then eat barbecued meat for four days.

At other times of the year, leisure time in most families revolves around a single object: the nargilleh, or what we in the West refer to as a hookah or water pipe. The popularity of the nargilleh in Tamra doubtless partly reflects the fact that there is no equivalent of the pub here. Although alcohol—mostly beer and whisky—is sold in a few grocery shops, people rarely drink outside the privacy of their home. But puffing on a nargilleh for an hour or so can be just as intoxicating as a few beers. The nargilleh plays a central role in my family’s life: there is rarely an evening when I don’t see Waleed or Khalil cleaning or carefully preparing the pipe before loading it with apple-flavoured tobacco. They own several nargillehs, large and small, each decorated in different colours. The family forms a circle of chairs around the pipe outside Hajji’s house and begins smoking. Although I occasionally puff on the nargilleh, the other women in the house do not. It is generally considered unbecoming for a woman to smoke in public.

In the West, the most identiflable, and controversial, thing about Islam—after Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda—has become the hijab, the headscarf widely seen as part of a system of oppression of Muslim women. The arguments against the hijab rarely touch on its significance in the lives of modern Muslims. I once asked seventeen-year-old Suad which tradition meant most to her, and was surprised when she replied: ‘The wearing of the hijab.’ Her head is uncovered and she is a very modern teenager, so I asked her why. ‘Because it makes you proud of your femininity.’ I asked what she meant. ‘When you are covered by the hijab it is the opposite of being repressed; you feel free and proud to be a woman. It gives you your dignity.’ Part of the problem in the debate in the West is that it focuses exclusively on the hijab, without seeing that the headscarf is only one—if the most visible—of the dress codes that apply to all Muslims, both men and women. The concept of personal and family dignity is deeply important to the society, and clothing is one of the overt ways a person demonstrates that they deserve respect.

Showing a lot of one’s body to people outside the family suggests quite the opposite. How that rule is interpreted can appear quite arbitrary and eccentric to outsiders. So, for example, I quickly found that, whatever the heat, the men in Tamra would not dream of wearing open-toed sandals or shorts outside the immediate environment of the home. A code applied to them too: if they wanted to be accorded respect and earn it for their family, they had to dress in respectable ways. In the case of women, this policy of covering up can seem oppressive to Western eyes which have become used to the idea that women should show as much flesh as possible. Since living in Tamra, I find myself appalled every time I return to Europe or America to see the virtually pornographic images of women, and even children, crowding high street billboards. As they go unnoticed by everyone else, I can only assume that living in Arab society has fundamentally changed my perception.

This did not happen overnight. I arrived in Tamra with suitcases full of thin, almost see-through linen garments that I had relied on to cope with the Tel Aviv heat. I knew I had to be much more careful about the way I dressed in Tamra, but was unsure exactly where the boundaries lay. Certainly I was not about to wear the hijab, but that did not mean that I was going to refuse to accept any limitations. So during my first summer I would dress each morning and go down to Hajji’s flat for a clothing inspection. She would extend her finger and turn it round to show that she wanted to see me from every angle. She would look at me in the light and out of the light, and then if she couldn’t see anything she would give me the thumbs-up. T-shirts that showed my shoulders were out, as were skirts higher than the knee or tops that had plunging necklines. Some of my thinnest tops I realised I would have to wear with something underneath. Now this self-discipline has become automatic and unthinking. I have long ago thrown away all the tops that reveal too much. Visitors to Tamra are shown great tolerance when they break these unwritten rules, but living here I decided it was important that I earned people’s respect by showing them similar respect.

Nowadays I find it shocking to return to Tel Aviv in the summer and see the women, including older women, wearing crop-tops that expose their stomachs, or blouses revealing their bras. It seems vulgar in the extreme. I see the Arab women around me as much more dignified; they even seem to move in a more upright, graceful manner. I now find the idea of being covered liberating in much the same way as Suad does: it frees me from confrontations with men, the kind of situations I had experienced all my life without fully realising it. With my body properly covered, men have to address what I am saying rather than my body. It was only after covering myself that I started realising I had been used to men having conversations with my body, rather than with me, most of my life.

Also, covering up gives me a sense of independence and self-containment that still surprises me. Like other Westerners I had always assumed that Muslim women were repressed, but I now know that’s far too simplistic. Although there are places in the world where the hijab is misused as a way to limit women’s possibilities, that is not by definition true. I have met plenty of professional Palestinian women, in Tamra and elsewhere, who wear the hijab but are strong-willed, assertive and creative. They expect men’s respect and they are shown it.

Not that women’s lives here are without problems. I find it difficult to accept the social limitations on young, unmarried women, including the fact that they can never venture out alone in the evenings. Teenage girls are definitely not allowed to date boyfriends, or in many cases even openly to have a boyfriend. When I asked Suad how she coped, she admitted it was hard. She felt torn between two cultures: the Western way of life she sees on television and in many Jewish areas, where girls do what they please, and her own Arab traditions, of which she is proud and which she wants to obey. My own daughter did not hesitate as a teenager in London to tell me she was going to the pub or cinema with a boyfriend, but girls here simply are not allowed to do that. For a long time I wondered how anyone found a marriage partner, with all these restrictions. But in reality many girls have secret boyfriends whom they ‘date’ over the phone. The arrival of mobile phones has quietly revolutionised the dating game in Muslim communities. But even so, I still marvel how a girl ever finds a husband. In many cases she has few opportunities to meet men outside events like weddings, and so her choice of partners is pretty much limited to the men inside her hamula. But slowly, with more education about the problems of marrying a first cousin and the genetic legacy for the offspring, such marriages are being discouraged. The situation is far from static.

Although as Westerners we are encouraged to believe we have a right to sit in judgement of other cultures, what I heard from women in Tamra alerted me to the weaknesses in our own culture—flaws we are little prepared to acknowledge. For example, one evening a group of about a dozen local women visited me in my home so that we could learn more about each other. They were keen to know both why after my divorce I had left my children behind in Britain, and how I coped living alone in Tamra. In Arab society a woman would never separate herself from her family, even her grown-up children. Because I had left Britain they assumed I had abandoned Tanya and Daniel; they were astonished that I could turn my back on my children, even though they were in their late twenties and early thirties. I had to explain that in Britain grown-up children leave home, often moving long distances from their parents. Many mothers are lucky if they are visited by their children more than a couple of times a year. The group were appalled, and pointed out the huge advantages of having families that remain together for life. When I see how we all gather in Hajji’s apartment, how she is never alone unless she wants to be, I can see their point. I have concluded that there are many benefits to having your family around you as you grow older.

The central place of the hamula in organising not only the lives of Tamra’s individual families but also the political life of the whole community was revealed to me during the first municipal elections after my arrival. It was an uncomfortable lesson, revealing a side to Tamra that dismayed me. As one Israeli Arab academic, Marwan Dwairy, has observed: ‘In politics we still have parties dressed up as families and families dressed up as parties.’

The aggressive and tribal nature of political campaigning in Arab areas is often cited by Israeli intellectuals as proof of the primitive character of Arab societies and their inability to cope with modern democratic principles. Apart from glossing over the tribal nature of Jewish politics inside Israel, that argument misses a larger point. The continuing feudal nature of Arab politics in Israel is neither accidental nor predetermined by the ‘Arab mind’; it results from the failure of Israeli Jewish society to allow the country’s Arab minority to join the national political consensus. Arab politicians are considered hostile to the state unless they join a Zionist party, and Arab parties have been excluded from every government coalition in Israel’s history. These coalitions are a hotchpotch of diverse, often antagonistic and extremist, political parties, but the bottom line is that they must be Jewish. When Arabs are excluded from the Knesset table, it is not surprising that they fight for whatever municipal scraps they can get. Sensing that their voice is irrelevant to the process of their governance, they end up seeking solace in the kind of posturing and feudal politics familiar from the days of their grandfathers.

I experienced this in a very direct way myself: during Tamra’s local elections I was quickly and easily sucked into the town’s hamula-based politics. The fervour and excitement surrounding the elections were something I had never witnessed anywhere else, and contrasted strongly with the calm, slightly stultifying atmosphere of a British municipal election. In the final week of campaigning there were flreworks and street parties every night, with loud music and mountains of food on offer. The tribal divisions within the community were far more visible than usual, not least because the two candidates for mayor were the heads of the two largest hamulas. The campaign, it was clear, was less about competing political platforms than about rivalry between the family leaderships. On one side was Adel Abu Hayja, standing for the Communist Party, and on the other was Moussa Abu Romi, the incumbent mayor, representing the Islamic Movement. The victor would be in charge of the town’s limited municipal budget for the next five years and so, in the great tradition of patronage systems, would be able to reward his followers. The stakes were therefore extraordinarily high, as each of the two biggest hamulas fought to secure the floating votes of the two smaller hamulas with promises. In the run-up to the election there were even incidents of young men from one hamula pulling guns or knives on those from another.

By election day the temperature in Tamra had rocketed. The whole town was alive with activity, with party buses roaming the town looking to transport supporters to the polling booth. Since I lived inside the Abu Hayja hamula, my support for Adel Abu Hayja’s candidacy was taken for granted. There was never any question for whom I was expected to vote: I would vote for the family.

It was widely known in Tamra that I was making history: this was the first time that an openly Jewish woman had voted in a municipal election in an Arab area. When I arrived at the school on the hill above my home where I was due to vote I found complete pandemonium. Everyone was pushing and shoving and shouting. People who thought they had been waiting in line too long would start hitting those in front of them, and trying to push past to get to the room where the polling booth was located. Standing in their way was an old wooden door, holding back at least 150 people who were pushing each other up against it. One policeman was inside, desperately trying to keep the door closed as the crowd pressed forward, and another was doing his best, without success, to keep order. Finally one huge man lost control and started hitting the women in front of him before lunging for the door. Using all his might he managed to push it open and to get inside. The door closed behind him.

Hassan, the head of my family, who had come with me, was outside in the street but could see I was getting crushed. He is a big man, and he forced his way through the crowd to reach me so that he could hold me tightly around my shoulders, using his arms to protect me. I could tell how much he feared for my safety, because it is rare for Arab men and women, even husband and wife, to touch in public. But it was the only way to keep me upright and on my feet. When there was a brief gap in the crowd he pushed me forward and I was propelled through the door. The door slammed shut, but with all the hammering on it I feared it would come down. I found myself in a tiny room with a small window, and I remember thinking with a little relief that if I could not get out through the door, at least I could climb through the window.

I gave my ballot card to the Jewish official who was overseeing polling at the station. I also had to give him my ID card, and when he saw that I was a Jew and living in Tamra he gave me a strange look, as though there had been an administrative mistake he could not quite figure out how to correct.* But after a pause he pointed me towards the booth. Behind the curtain were two piles of official voting slips, with the names of Moussa Abu Romi and Adel Abu Hayja. Just before polling day, a rumour had been circulating in Tamra that supporters of the incumbent mayor, Abu Romi, were planning to sabotage Abu Hayja’s chances by printing his voting slips in an ink that would disappear over time, so that when it came to the count all his votes would be blank. My family had persuaded me that I must take with me another slip supplied by Abu Hayja’s party, and I had hidden it in my purse. Standing in the booth, I hurriedly took it out and slipped it into the ballot box. The family’s absolute belief in the truth of the story of the fading ink had led me to believe it myself. I had been so drawn in by the fervour of the elections, by the supreme importance attached to the outcome, that the normal rules of democratic participation could willingly be abandoned.

When I reached the exit door, I wondered how I would ever get out alive. The policeman opened it and I was confronted by a wall of agitated faces. And then everyone appeared to come to their senses. Most of these people I had never met before, but it appeared they knew who I was. In Arab communities the idea of a local newspaper almost seems redundant: by some kind of osmosis, everyone knows everyone else’s news, good and bad. So, as if I were Moses facing the Red Sea, the waves parted. There was, for the first time that day, total silence. As I walked past, people reached out to shake my hand. But as soon as I had reached safety, the scrum resumed.

Apparently there was no truth to the tale of the fading ink, as in the event Abu Hayja was comfortably elected as mayor. The result was not accepted by all of Abu Romi’s supporters: some took to the streets with firearms, and there were several days of flerce confrontations, including a gun battle after which one man was taken to hospital seriously wounded. My family warned me not to go out onto the streets. The violence ended only after the imam called out passages from the Koran over the mosque’s loudspeaker, to calm everyone down.

Word of my presence in Tamra quickly spread further afield, to Haifa and beyond, assisted by an interview I gave to the country’s most famous Hebrew newspaper, Ha’aretz, in September 2003. A short time afterwards I received a phone call from Michael Mansfeld, a senior partner in a firm of architects in Haifa. He said he had been impressed by my critical comments about Israel not having invested in any new housing schemes for the Arab minority in the state’s fifty-five years, despite the population having grown seven-fold. He told me his firm had been appointed by the Interior Ministry to draw up the masterplans for Tamra’s development till 2020, and he wanted to explain what the government had in store. He said I’d be impressed by what I would see. I was sceptical but keen to see the plans, about which no one in Tamra seemed to have been consulted. I invited the newly elected mayor, Adel Abu Hayja, and Amin Sahli, the town planner, to come to my home to see Mansfeld’s presentation.

But before the meeting I talked to Mansfeld privately. I told him about the severe land problems facing Tamra, and that I didn’t see a future for Israel unless Jews and Arabs were able to become equal partners. When he agreed, I asked him: ‘Why do so many Israeli Jews agree with me in private but refuse to speak out?’ He replied that if he spoke publicly, things could be made difficult for him and his business, and that his family was his first priority. His words reminded me that it is not only the Arabs who live in fear of their own state, but Jews of conscience too. It was a depressing realisation. Mansfeld, whose father won Israel’s most prestigious award, the Israel Prize,* is part of what might be termed the establishment Israeli left. If he does not feel he can stand up and be counted, who can? And without more people prepared to speak out and expose the crisis at the heart of the Jewish state, what kind of country will we leave to our children?

The presentation which was supposed to impress us boiled down to the fact that Tamra’s inhabitants would have to accept that there was a shortage of land in Israel. In Mansfeld’s words, ‘From now on we must all build upwards.’ Afterwards, I took a copy of the plans to Professor Hubert Law-Yone, a Burmese academic who came to Israel after marrying a Jewish woman and who is an expert on town planning, based at the Technion in Haifa. He did a few quick calculations and concluded that the plan was bad news for Tamra: based on the population growing to forty-two thousand by 2020, it required very high-density living—eighty-eight people per acre. He suggested that the Interior Ministry brief probably had a hidden agenda, one familiar to the Arab population: the maximum number of Arabs on the minimum amount of land. Its reverse is of course the minimum number of Jews on the maximum amount of land. That is why the Jewish communities around Tamra—farming cooperatives and small luxury hilltop settlements like Mitzpe Aviv—have been allotted land for the benefit of their inhabitants that once belonged to Tamra. That’s also why Tamra’s Jewish neighbours have impressive villas with big gardens, often including swimming pools, and communal parks and playing areas for the children. The plan for Tamra, on the other hand, envisages ever more crowding in a community already stripped of all public space. In Professor Law-Yone’s words: ‘There is plenty of land in Israel. Building upwards is just code for cramming more Arabs in.’