The Other Side of Israel: My Journey Across the Jewish/Arab Divide
The Other Side of Israel: My Journey Across the Jewish/Arab Divide
Susan Nathan
The pioneering autobiographical story of a British Zionist in her fifties who moves to Israel and chooses to live among 25,000 Muslims in the all-Arab Israeli town of Tamra, a few miles from Nazareth.Susan Nathan’s revelatory book about her new life across the ethnic divide in Israel is already creating international interest. At a time when Middle Eastern politics (in many ways central to the current world disorder) have become mired in endless tit-for-tat killings, Susan Nathan is showing – by her own daily example – that it is perfectly possible for Jews and Arabs to live peacefully together in a single community, recognising their common humanity.The author’s familiarity with the former injustices of apartheid South Africa enables her to draw telling comparisons with the state of Israel. The increasing segregation of, and discrimintation against, the million-strong Arabic population of Israel is something she witnesses at first hand, but in describing her experiences in Tamra she is as observant of Arab frailties as of Jewish oppression.Written with warmth, compassion and humour, ‘The Other Side of Israel’ is one courageous woman’s positive life-enhancing response to a situation in which entrenched attitudes lead only to more violence and bloodshed.
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 (#uedfdaaa4-8da9-5006-9f49-38f07787835a)
Title Page (#u4763c426-1858-5f2b-9671-314f9350748a)
Dedication (#u1f7f2f79-da08-5007-9f3b-5afc1e24e321)
1: The Road to Tamra (#ud631e44f-4014-5ab1-9d1b-70caaeac0206)
2: Death of a Love Affair (#u19d437a3-17f1-576c-8b8f-79e5c7d19aed)
3: Second-Class Citizens (#litres_trial_promo)
4: Echoes of Apartheid (#litres_trial_promo)
5: The Missing Left (#litres_trial_promo)
6: A Traumatized Society (#litres_trial_promo)
7: Where Next? (#litres_trial_promo)
Glossary (#litres_trial_promo)
Sources (#litres_trial_promo)
INDEX (#litres_trial_promo)
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Praise (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
1 The Road to Tamra (#ulink_28a50e94-8684-5116-a552-384ce1c40c01)
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.
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.
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.
(#ulink_614c5edd-feb8-5993-80d6-e5012aac3c6a) 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,
(#ulink_b7199f4b-09ea-50ba-8643-028114d392d0) 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.’
Speaking to Amin later, I sensed that there was almost nothing that Tamra could do to change its bleak future. The government land bodies and the planning committees that set the guidelines for these masterplans are always Jewish-dominated, and often have no Arab members at all. Arab citizens have no voice in their own future, let alone the state’s. Amin was deeply depressed. He had just returned from a meeting of the Knesset’s economics committee which, at the instigation of an Arab Knesset member, Issam Makhoul, had discussed the land and housing crisis in Tamra. Amin had compiled the figures, which showed that the town had little more than a thousand acres for building, all of which was developed. The rest of its six thousand acres were zoned either for farming or as Green Areas which could not be developed. The result, he told the committee, was that because the Interior Ministry refused to release any new land for development, young Arab couples had no choice but to build their homes illegally, often on their own land which was zoned for agriculture. Their parents could not build ‘upwards’ to provide them with an apartment—as Mansfeld had suggested—because they had already reached the building-regulation limit of four storeys for their homes. There were 150 buildings in Tamra under demolition orders, threatening hundreds of young couples and their children with homelessness and destitution.
I found there was nothing I could say to reassure Amin as he spoke in a tone of absolute despair about Tamra’s future. He had exhausted all the official channels, commuting to Jerusalem regularly to try to persuade Jewish officials and politicians of Tamra’s crisis, only to be met by a uniform lack of interest or by condescension. It seemed to me the height of irony, given our history, that the Jewish state has so little concern about the ghetto living it has forced on its Arab citizens. Amin said he felt humiliated and powerless every time a young couple came to him seeking help with their housing problems. All he could do was to turn them away empty-handed. It was not as though they had other choices available to them. Israel makes it virtually impossible for Arabs to live in Jewish communities, and other Arab communities are in the same dire straits. Couples would simply be moving from a ghetto they know to another they did not, to a place where they could not even rely on the support of their hamula.
‘You know, Susan,’ Amin said, ‘even dying is a problem if you are an Arab in Israel. In Tamra we have run out of land to bury our dead.’
I asked him how he felt about living here. His head in his hands, he told me he was thinking about a way to leave Israel with his wife and three young children. If he did, he would be joining the rest of his three siblings, all of whom are doctors, in exile: his two brothers are in the United States, and his sister in France. ‘It feels to me like a subtle way of ethnically cleansing me off my land,’ he said. Today there are an equal number of Jews and Arabs living in the Galilee, he pointed out, but it is obvious from looking at the region’s development plans that one ethnic group is benefiting at the expense of the other. ‘These plans are about making life impossible for us, the Arabs, to remain here. Israel destroys the structure of our family life, making us weak and fragmented. If it continues like this, anyone who can leave will do so. I want to stay here, to raise my children in their homeland, but I have to be realistic. How can I stay when all the messages my state sends me are that I am not welcome?’
(#ulink_299b7597-e537-5049-a56a-038b46c165e2) Until recently all Israeli ID cards divulged the ethnic group of the holder. New ID cards often have a row of stars in the place where nationality is identified (see glossary entry on citizenship, page 267). It is widely believed that the cardholder’s ethnic group is revealed by the ID number.
(#ulink_dafd724b-839b-5371-80f2-2e88f0f40319) Since 1953 it has been awarded each year to an Israeli citizen who has demonstrated excellence or broken new ground in a particular field.
2 Death of a Love Affair (#ulink_53cc0003-5e3a-55c3-809f-b786f1c1ad5b)
Inside the information pack from the Jewish Agency office in London was a badge and an accompanying letter: ‘Wear this as you walk off the plane to begin your new life as an Israeli citizen,’ the instructions stated. So on 10 October 1999, as I made my way down the flight of steps onto the tarmac of Tel Aviv’s Ben-Gurion international airport, I had a badge pinned to my chest bearing the slogan: ‘I’ve come home’.
The thought that I and the hundreds of other new immigrants arriving each week on El Al flights from all over the world were reclaiming a right that had lain dormant for two thousand years did not strike me as strange. For the fuel that brought me late in life to Israel as a new immigrant, with only a couple of suitcases of belongings with me, was a dream I had secretly harboured since my childhood. The object of my desire was to make aliya, the Hebrew word for ‘ascent’, an idea that in returning to Israel a Jew is fulfilling a divinely ordained mission.
At the age of fifty I was leaving behind my home in Wimbledon, South London, two grown-up children, Daniel and Tanya, a recently failed marriage and my work as an Aids/HIV counsellor. Other than these attachments, not much stood in my way: Israeli law entitles me and every other Jew in the world to instant citizenship if we choose to live in Israel. There are no visa applications, points systems or lengthy residency procedures. As a Jew I had a right to Israeli citizenship by virtue of my ethnicity alone. The Jewish Agency in London had been able to process my application for Israeli citizenship in just a week, and it made sure the immigration process was as pain-free as possible: my flight ticket was paid for, and accommodation was provided while I found my feet in the Promised Land. The only hesitation on my part was a reluctance, when confronted by an official issuing my Israeli identity card, to adopt a Hebrew name. My friends suggested I become either Shashana or Vered—the names of two flowers—but at the last minute I decided to stick with Susan.
I am not sure I can identify the exact moment I became a committed Zionist, but I do know that a single childhood incident changed the direction of my life, and my understanding of what it was to be a Jew. I was eleven years old and on an outing with some girls from my boarding school to nearby High Wycombe, one of the many commuter towns that ring London. Browsing through the shelves of a small bookshop in one of the backstreets, away from the other girls, I stumbled across the most horrifying picture book. As I leafed through its pages I found photo after photo of emaciated corpses piled high in pits, of men ripping out gold fillings from teeth, of mountains of hair and shoes. At such a young age I was not aware that these were pictures of the Holocaust, an event that was still fearsomely present in the imaginations of Jews around the world fifteen years after the end of the Second World War. But the awfulness of the images transfixed me.
I learned the story behind these photographs from my parents shortly afterwards, so beginning my compulsive interest in the Holocaust and Jewish history. The following year, 1961, after I had moved to a new boarding school in Buckinghamshire, the trial of the Gestapo leader Adolf Eichmann began in Jerusalem. I read the newspapers every day, appalled by the accounts of the Final Solution, Hitler’s attempt to exterminate the Jewish people. I also recall weekends spent poring over copies of the Jewish Chronicle in my parents’ home, reading in the personal columns the notices from individuals and families still searching for relatives in Europe they had been separated from for as much as two decades. These heart-rending messages were an uncomfortable reminder that the legacy of loss and destruction wrought by the concentration camps was continuing. My exposure to the Holocaust—and my new understanding that millions of Jews had died at the hands of the Nazis—launched me on an ever wider quest for knowledge: not only of what had happened to its victims, but also of what had led to such barbarity.
My own family, I was soon aware, had only narrowly escaped—by a quirk of destiny—the tragedy that had consumed so many others. My father’s parents, before they met, were refugees from the pogroms in Lithuania in the 1880s, fleeing separately to Odessa where each hoped they might catch a ship to Hamburg and a new future in Germany. But when they arrived at the port they, and many other refugees, found the ship full and so were forced to travel on the only other vessel, bound for Cape Town in South Africa. As we now know, their fates and their children’s were sealed by that missed boat: instead of finding themselves caught up in the rise of European fascism, they watched the horrific events unfold from the safe distance of Cape Town. My father was, however, in Europe at the outbreak of war. He had left South Africa in the late 1920s, travelling streerage class on a boat bound for Ireland, a penniless but brilliant medical student. He enrolled at Trinity College, Dublin, where he was mentored by Yitzhak HaLevi Herzog, the chief rabbi of Ireland and the father of Israel’s sixth president, who helped him become a passionate Zionist. By the time Nazism was on the rise in Germany my father was a leading surgeon in London, where he met my mother, a nurse. They spent the war itself tending to the injured in Tilbury docks in Essex, one of the most heavily bombed places in Britain.
If my family had survived the war unscathed, the plight of the many who had not touched me deeply. As with many others, the story of the Exodus—as told by novelist Leon Uris—shaped my perception of the tragedy that had befallen my people. I read of the ship that left Europe in July 1947, its decks choked with Holocaust survivors in search of sanctuary in what was then Palestine; of the refugees who tried to jump ship and reach the shores of the Promised Land; of the decision of the British to send the 4,500 refugees to internment camps in Cyprus because they had agreed to limits on Jewish immigration to avoid further antagonising the local Palestinian population and neighbouring Arab countries; and of the horrifying eventual return of the ship and its Jewish refugees to Germany. I was outraged by the thought that British soldiers—ruling Palestine under a mandate from the League of Nations—could have acted with such callousness. My alienation from my country, Britain, began from that point on.
The middle classes exercised a subtle, sophisticated discrimination against Jews in post-war Britain which was apparent enough to make me increasingly aware of my difference. There were the comments about my ‘funny name’—my maiden name is Levy. I heard tales that disturbed me about the clubs that excluded Jews as policy. Among my parents’ friends there were worried conversations about the ‘quotas’ on Jewish children that might prevent their offspring from being admitted to a good school. And my mother, who was born a Protestant but converted to Judaism after marrying my father, would tell of how everyone in her family apart from her own mother disowned her for choosing to marry a Jew.
During my childhood, at the rural boarding schools outside London where most of my time was spent, I felt as if I were wearing a yellow star, as if my Jewishness was a visible stain to the teachers and other pupils. These were demonstratively Christian schools, with chapel services and morning prayers. I was aware of my vulnerability, too: out of hundreds of children, only four others were Jewish in the senior school I attended. I swung between contradictory emotions. On the one hand I feared appearing different, and on the other I wanted to proudly own that difference. Although I did not have the courage to refuse to attend morning prayers, I resolutely kept my mouth closed during the hymns. It was a very isolating experience: I felt outside the consensus, subtly but constantly reminded of my difference. This is, I think, a common experience for Diaspora Jews, but one little appreciated by Israeli Jews who were born and raised in a state where they comprise the majority.
My growing distance from British society was reflected in an ever greater attachment, if only emotionally, to Israel. I was raised on stirring stories of the great and glorious Jewish state. For non-Jews it is perhaps difficult to appreciate what an enormous impact the creation of the state of Israel had on us. It reinvented our self-image, anchoring our pride in a piece of territory that had been our shared homeland two thousand years before. It satisfied our sense of historic justice and showed we could forge our own place among the modern nation states. But more than that, many Jews, myself included, were excited by the triumphs of our army, particularly those of 1948 and 1967, when Israel took on its Arab neighbours and won substantial territory from them. Here we were, a persecuted, isolated people, freeing ourselves from the ghettos of Europe and rising phoenix-like from the ashes of the gas chambers to become warriors. No longer a helpless minority always at risk of persecution, we were a proud people reclaiming our homeland, and willing and able to fight to defend it on the battlefleld. Young Jews need not imagine a future as either merchants or intellectuals, but rather as brave and courageous soldiers. We could call ourselves ‘Sabra’—identifying with the prickly Middle Eastern cactus that flourishes in even the most hostile terrain.
I married my husband, Michael Nathan, a successful lawyer, in 1970 at the age of twenty-one. My early marriage, frowned upon by my parents, brought me into the embrace of a much more religious family than my own. Michael’s mother and father were traditional and Orthodox, in sharp contrast to my own parents’ secular, liberal background, and our differences in upbringing, culture and outlook would eventually push us apart. During the twenty-six years of our marriage, however, Michael and I only ever visited Israel together once, when we went to see his brother in Jerusalem. Michael never shared my attachment to the Jewish state, and on the seven other occasions I visited I was always alone. Our two children forged their own relationships with Israel, touring the country as part of youth groups or working on kibbutzim. But although this was officially my state I always left Israel as a tourist, an outsider, with a feeling that its inner substance had not been fully revealed to me.
So when I arrived to claim Israeli citizenship in 1999, my head was still full of romantic notions of Zionism and the Jewish state. The Jews had reclaimed an empty, barren land—‘a land without people for a people without land’. We had made the desert bloom, we had filled an uninhabited piece of the Middle East with kibbutzim, the collective farms that were the pioneering backbone of the state in its early years. At that stage, the thought that the country was full of strangers, people whom I and my countrymen lived alongside but entirely apart from, did not enter my head. The one million Arabs who share the state with Jews—Palestinians who remained on their land after the 1948 war that founded Israel, and so by accident rather than design became Israeli citizens—were invisible to me, as they are to almost all Israeli Jews. Their culture, their society and their story were a mystery.
The excitement of being in Israel did not quickly dissipate. My first months were filled with thrilling moments of feeling, for the first time in my life, that I belonged to the majority. I did not need to explain my family name, nor did I have to hide my pride in my Jewishness. I could have walked down the street with a Star of David emblazoned on my lapel if I wanted to; no one would have batted an eyelid. There was even a strange sense of liberation in calling a plumber and opening the door to a man wearing a kippa, the small cloth disc worn by religious Jewish men as a head covering. It made me think, I really am in the land of the Jews.
Even the stories that had inspired me as a child now came dramatically to life. Soon after my arrival I was hanging the laundry outside the kitchen window of my Tel Aviv flat when I noticed an old woman waving down to me from a neighbouring apartment block, a dilapidated building erected in the early 1950s. Noticing a new face in the area, she called out that her name was Leah, and asked who I was and where I was from. I told her, then asked whether she had been born in Israel. No, she replied, she had been born in Poland. During the Second World War she had been separated from her parents, who were later killed in a concentration camp. She went into hiding in the woods, staying with several Russian families, before envoys from the Jewish Agency tracked her down and put her on a ship to Palestine. That ship was the Exodus. She recounted the story of the trip in the packed boat that I had read about in my teenage years, and how they were turned back to Germany. She told me of the horrific overcrowding on the ship, of the bodies stuffed together, but also of the excitement as they neared the Promised Land. Here in Leah I had found a living, breathing piece of history, a woman who made flesh all the reasons why I felt attached and committed to Israel.
Most Jews are all too ready to tell you how much Israel means to them as a sanctuary. How safe they feel knowing that there is a country they can flee to should anti-Semitism raise its ugly head again. How reassuring it is to have a country that will protect them, having inherited the legacy of centuries of persecution and the horrors of the Holocaust. What they are much less ready to admit is that Israel is not just a safe haven and a homeland; it also embodies the value of naked Jewish power. What I felt arriving in Israel—as I suspect do many other Jews—was that through my new state I was defying a world that had persecuted my people. Being in the majority, and not needing to explain myself, was a condition I was unfamiliar with after five decades as a British Jew. The sense of being in charge, of putting the boot on the other foot, was more than a little intoxicating.
I did not come to Israel the easy way, though as a middle-class Londoner I could have strolled into any flat in Tel Aviv. I chose instead a path that I believed followed in the footsteps of the pioneering Jewish immigrants to Palestine. I arranged with the Jewish Agency in London to spend my first six months in an immigrant absorption centre in Rana’ana, close to Tel Aviv. I knew what I was letting myself in for: an apartment shared with strangers newly arrived from all over the world, separated by different languages, cultures and traditions. All we would have in common was the knowledge that we were Jews and that we wanted to become Israelis.
These first months were something of a culture shock that tested the resources of many of the inmates. I arrived with my British culture, but the absorption centre was also home to people from many other cultures, including Americans, Dutch, Russians, Swiss, French and South Americans. All of us had to adjust both to these other cultures and to the new Israeli culture. We also struggled with the abruptness of Israelis, which many took for rudeness. The Rana’ana centre has perhaps the most privileged intake of Jewish immigrants anywhere in Israel, with most coming from developed countries. It beats by a considerable margin the caravan transit camps reserved for Ethiopian Jews, the Jewish group most discriminated against inside Israel. Many of the one million Russian Jews who arrived in Israel during the 1990s following the collapse of the Soviet Union also stayed in far less salubrious surroundings.
Nonetheless, the absorption centre was a tough and uncomfortable introduction to Israel, which I remember left several people close to a nervous breakdown and ready to fly back home. I still have a cutting from a local newspaper, Ha Sharon, headlined ‘Immigrants Complain of Poor Conditions’. A letter written by some of the French and American inmates to the absorption centre’s management is quoted: ‘The apartments are old and full of mould and fungus. The kitchens are broken, the showers don’t work properly, the walls are peeling and we have no air-conditioners.’ And it is true that in many ways Rana’ana was as much a prison as a melting pot. Having spent my childhood from the age of seven onwards, however, in the harsh, disciplinarian atmosphere of British boarding schools, coping with these material hardships only slightly marred the wonderful experience of being absorbed into a new country and culture, and meeting so many like-minded Jews.
But in these early months I started to experience darker moments. A big disappointment was that the only family I had in Israel, religious cousins living in the southern city of Ashdod, who originally approved of my decision to make aliya, kept their distance from the moment I arrived. They did not even meet me at the airport. For a while their attitude baffied me, but eventually I came to understand how my migration challenged their sense of their own Israeliness. They belong to the right-wing religious camp, and still hold onto a vision of Israelis as pioneering frontiersmen, settlers implanting themselves in hostile terrain. I think they were convinced that, with my ‘European softness’, I would not be able to stay the course. And when I confounded them by securing almost immediately a well-paid position in Tel Aviv teaching English to business professionals, my easy assimilation served only to antagonise them yet further.
My job involved travelling from one office to the next, which meant that I quickly learned my way around Tel Aviv. I also met and got to know a range of Israelis with different political views and insights into the ‘Israeli experience’. I heard from some of them about their own problems as immigrants being absorbed into Israeli society, about their concerns at their children serving in the army, and about the country’s economy.
Four months after my arrival I suffered a devastating blow when I was diagnosed with a rare form of eye cancer. I had to begin a crash-course in negotiating my way single-handedly around Israel’s health care system, and eventually found myself in Jerusa-lem’s Hadassah hospital, awaiting an operation on my eye. Hadassah occupies a striking position, set in a pine forest overlooking the old stone houses of Ein Kerem, a Palestinian village that was cleansed of its population in the 1948 war and is now a wealthy suburb of Jerusalem to which many rich Jews aspire to move. It has state-of-the-art medical equipment and is staffed by a mix of Israeli Jews and Arabs, and it was there that I got my first inkling that the country I had so longed to be a citizen of might not be quite what I imagined. I was lying in a ward surrounded by beds filled not just with other Jews but with many of the diverse, and confusing, ethnic and religious components of the Holy Land: Jews, Christians, Muslims and Druze. This was before the intifada of September 2000, but still it was surprising to see Israelis and Palestinians sharing the same ward. Even more confusingly, many of the Palestinians were Israeli citizens, members of a group I discovered were commonly referred to as the ‘Israeli Arabs’. The Jewish state was clearly a lot less ethnically pure than I had been led to believe.
It was another experience on the ward that started me questioning what was really going on inside Israel. One day a young Orthodox woman arrived on the ward clutching her month-old baby, who had just undergone surgery on an eye. That evening her husband came to visit. He was wearing a knitted kippa, long sidelocks, and had a pistol on one hip and a rifie slung casually over his shoulder. This is the uniform of the nationalist religious right in Israel—better known abroad as ‘the settlers’. The thought that a heavily armed civilian could wander freely around a hospital where women and children were ill appalled me. I engaged him in conversation as he was leaving. In a strong American accent he told me: ‘I’ve just requisitioned an Arab home in East Jerusalem. I never leave home without a weapon.’ I suggested to him that he would be better off living in the Jewish quarter in the Old City. No, he retorted. ‘All of East Jerusalem belongs to the Jews.’
His words left a nasty taste in my mouth. Why was he stealing homes from Arabs in the Palestinian part of the city, the section captured by Israel in the 1967 war, when there were vast tracts of the country he could choose to live in? And why did I appear to be the only person on the ward who thought it strange for a visitor to arrive in a hospital wearing a gun?
I left the hospital confused by the signals Israel was sending me. Here was a state that prided itself on having one of the best medical systems in the world. And access to health care seemed not to be affected overtly by grounds of race or creed. But it was also clear that some Israelis had an unhealthy admiration for violence and an appetite for what did not belong to them. Israel did not appear to place many controls on their behaviour.
My strong humanist values derive from an understanding of both my family’s history and my people’s. My father raised me on stories about my great-grandfather, Zussman Hershovitz, who lived in one of the Jewish ghetto communities, the shtetls, in Lithuania. I was taught as a small child the consequences of being Jewish for men like my great-grandfather, how it was not possible for him to go to school as a boy, how he ended up as a peddler moving from place to place to avoid the pogroms. In addition my father, Samuel Levy, a respected Harley Street doctor, instilled in me a deep appreciation of Jewish ethics, culture and history. I cannot claim he was a good father. Much of my childhood was spent living in terror of his rages and under the shadow of his disappointment. But outside the immediate family circle he was never less than a flercely loyal and dedicated healer. Although he was very successful, he believed he had wider social responsibilities than simply accumulating money from the wealthy clientele who visited his London practice. He continued to dedicate much of his time to a practice he started when he was younger in a deprived part of Essex. After he retired in 1973 he returned to the country of his birth, South Africa, during the apartheid years to be medical health officer and practise in a clinic for blacks only in Groote Schuur, Cape Town.
So even though I was soon earning good money as an English teacher in Tel Aviv, I could not simply accept the privileges that came with being a successful ‘new Israeli’. A few months after I had recovered from the eye operation, I was approached by a student organisation called Mahapach, which had heard of my experience in community work and raising money for Aids charities in London. They asked if I could write a funding application in support of their work for disadvantaged communities inside Israel, particularly the indigenous Arab population and the community of Jews of Middle Eastern descent, known in Israel as the Mizrahim. Much of Mahapach’s work involves encouraging students to go into deprived communities to teach such youngsters core subjects like Hebrew, Arabic, English and maths outside the often limiting arena of the formal classroom.
I sat down and read about these communities and their problems. I knew about the difficulties of the Mizrahim, who because of their Arab culture—they originally came from Morocco, Iraq, Syria and Egypt—have long been treated as inferior Jews by the European elite, the Ashkenazi Jews, who run Israel. But questions quickly began to surface in my mind about the indigenous Arab communities. Where did these Arabs I was writing about live? Why had they been so invisible, except briefly when I was in hospital, during my first two years in Israel? In those days I had little time for anything except my work as an English teacher. I would usually be up at 5 a.m., start work at six (before my clients’ offices opened), and finish at 8 or 9 p.m. Still, I was not satisfied with simply regurgitating the dry statistics I found in newspaper articles which suggested that Israeli Arabs were discriminated against. They were as faceless and unconnected to my life as bacteria living at the bottom of the ocean. I wanted to meet these Arabs for myself. When the chance arose to visit an Arab town as part of the research, I leapt at it. The destination was Tamra in the western Galilee.
Within minutes of driving into Tamra I felt that I had entered another Israel, one I had never seen before. It was almost impossible to believe that I could turn off a main highway, close to the luxurious rural Jewish communities of the Galilee, and find myself somewhere that was so strikingly different from any Jewish area I had ever visited before, and not just culturally. It was immediately obvious that Tamra suffered from chronic overcrowding. The difference in municipal resources and investment was starkly evident too. And a pall of despair hung over the town, a sense of hopelessness in the face of so much official neglect. It was the first time I had been to an Arab area (apart from visits as a tourist to the Old City of Jerusalem), and I was profoundly shaken by it. A disturbing thought occurred to me, one that refused to shift even after I had driven back to Tel Aviv. Tamra looked far too familiar. I thought, where have I seen this before? I recognised the pattern of discrimination from my experience of apartheid South Africa, which I had visited regularly during my childhood. I could detect the same smell of oppression in Tamra that I had found in the black townships.
These initial impressions were reinforced by a meeting at the home of Dr Asad Ghanem, who lives in the neighbouring village of Sha’ab. One of the few prominent Arab academics in Israel, Dr Ghanem impressed me with his direct and unemotional explanations of the discrimination exercised in all spheres of Israeli life against the Arab population, from employment and education to land allocations and municipal budgets. But he found it difficult to remain detached about one topic he brought to my attention, an issue that would later become the theme of many conversations with my new Arab neighbours and friends. In Arab communities across Israel there are tens of thousands of homes judged illegal by the state, and under threat of demolition. In Tamra, Dr Ghanem told me, there were 150 homes facing destruction. Intermittently the police would target an Arab community, bringing in bulldozers at the crack of dawn and tearing down the illegal homes. The razing of these buildings, some of them up to four floors high, might mean dozens of extended families, comprising hundreds of people, were made homeless at a stroke.
I knew from my research that there was widespread illegal building in Arab communities, which was represented by the Israeli authorities as the act of law-breakers, people who were squatting on state land or who did not want to pay for a building licence. But as Dr Ghanem pointed out, no one chooses to invest their life savings and their dreams in a home that could be razed at any moment. Arab families have been forced to build illegally because in most cases the state refuses to issue them with building permits. And then he delivered the knockout blow: he told me his own beautiful home was illegal and threatened with demolition.
There can be little doubt that the land on which Dr Ghanem’s home stands has belonged to his family for generations. From the salon, visitors can see the old stone foundations of his grandparents’ house. A few years ago he had decided, with the arrival of his own children, that he and his wife Ahlam could no longer live in his parents’ apartment; they would build a home on the only land the family had left. But the authorities refused him a building permit. Effectively branded criminals by the state—like tens of thousands of Arab families—he and Ahlam had been paying regular heavy fines ever since, as much as £15,000 sterling a time, to ward off demolition. Their lives have become a routine of paying the state to prevent the destruction of everything they hold dear.
The question that echoed in my mind as I heard Dr Ghanem’s story was: where were he and his family supposed to live? What was the future envisaged for them by the state? I knew well that there were endless housing developments springing up all over Israel, and illegally in the occupied territories, for Jewish families. But where was the next generation of Arab citizens to live? Dr Ghanem and Ahlam are the pillars not only of their own community in Shaab, but of the whole Arab community inside Israel. Nonetheless, the state is forcing them to live with a terrible threat hanging over their heads. They are raising their children in an environment of continual insecurity. Every day when they leave home they do not know whether they will return to find a pile of rubble. They have been made to live in an unstable world which I have no doubt is deeply damaging to them and their children.
My meeting with Dr Ghanem ended uncomfortably. In a matter-of-fact tone he asked me whether I had made aliya, whether I had claimed my right as a Jew to come to live in a country from which the overwhelming majority of his people had been expelled little more than half a century earlier. These Palestinians still live in refugee camps across the Middle East, refused the opportunity to return to their former homes in Israel. It was the first time I hesitated to answer this question. I understood that my privileges as a Jewish immigrant had come at the expense of his people. Sitting in his home, reality finally hit me. The intoxicating power trip had come to an abrupt halt.
As is my way, I could not live long in ignorance. So I began the long and difficult task of becoming informed. I read and absorbed anything I could find on the position of the Israeli Arabs, questioning the official narrative. My left-wing friends in Tel Aviv, mainly academics and people working in non-profit organisations whom I had met through a fellow inmate of the absorption centre, were quick to reassure me they had Arab friends. I asked who exactly were these friends? Where did they live? What did they talk about together? The reply was always more or less the same. They were on good terms with the owner of an Arab restaurant where the felafel was excellent. Or they got their car fixed in a garage in an Arab village where the prices were low. What did they talk to these ‘friends’ about? When did they meet outside these formal relationships? What intimacies did they exchange? The Tel Aviv crowd looked at me aghast, as if I were crazy. They did not have those sorts of relationships with Arabs.
In fact, it was clear they had no Arab friends at all. I was mortified. The revelation that I had stumbled across the same kind of master-servant relationship as exists in South Africa was something I was little prepared for. For a week I was racked by pains in my stomach and head. It was as if I was purging myself of all the lies I had been raised on.
When I was stronger, I returned to Tamra. Asad Ghanem’s wife Ahlam invited me to spend the night with them. We ate dinner together, and then she and I sat on the terrace in the warm evening air and talked. We exchanged confidences and intimacies that people rarely share until they have known each other for a long time. I remember thinking as we sat close together that here were an Arab and a Jew getting to know each other at a very deep and personal level, and that this was the way it was supposed to be. Cut off briefly from a society that always privileges Jews, we could feel like equals. I went back to Tel Aviv firm in my resolution that something in my life would have to change. Israel, as it was presently constituted, required me to choose a side: would I carry on with my life in Tel Aviv, turning a blind eye like everyone else to the suffering of the Arab population; or would I do something to highlight the reality and work towards changing it?
As it happened, my mind was effectively made up for me. I started to see much more clearly the paternalistic and colonialist attitudes of my left-wing friends. Being around them became unbearably suffocating. Invited in the winter of 2001 by Asad to teach English to Arab professionals at his Ibn Khaldun Association in Tamra, I had little hesitation in agreeing to take up the position. The Abu Hayjas, whom I knew through my work for Mahapach, offered to rent me the empty top-floor flat in their home, on the hillside overlooking the town’s central mosque.
I knew breaking away from the Jewish collective would be traumatic, but I could not know how profoundly I would alienate those I thought I was close to. Almost overnight I lost my Jewish friends. Individualism is highly prized in many societies, but not in Israel, where the instinct of the herd prevails. Doubtless the reasons can be found in Jewish history, in the centuries of persecution culminating in the Holocaust. There is an attitude of you’re either with us or against us. No one should step outside the consensus, or question it, because this is seen as weakening the group. But human beings are immeasurably more important to me than labels or institutions. By choosing to live as a Jew in a town of Muslims I hoped I could show that the fear that divides us is unrealistic. It is based on ignorance, an ignorance that the state of Israel tries to encourage among its Jewish citizens to keep them apart from their Arab neighbours. I know Jews who have lived on a left-wing kibbutz near Tamra, yet have never ventured into the largest Arab community in their area.
I have pondered long and hard why I was able to break away from the Jewish collective when other Israelis and Jews feel so bound to it, prisoners of a belief that they must stand with their state and their people, right or wrong. At the core of modern Jewish identity is the idea of victimhood, shaped by our history of persecution and the singular outrage of the Holocaust. The sense among Jews in Israel and the Diaspora that they are uniquely victims, both as individuals and as an ethnic group, cannot be overstated. Victimhood has become something akin to a cult among Jews, even among the most successful in Europe and America. It is developed as part of the Jewish nationalist ideology of Zionism, creating an ‘Alice Through the Looking Glass’ world for most Jews: they sincerely and incontrovertibly believe that Israel, a nation with one of the strongest armies in the world, backed by the only nuclear arsenal in the Middle East, is in imminent danger of annihilation either from its Arab neighbours or from the remnants of the Palestinian people living in the occupied territories.
The improbability of this scenario, however, can safely be ignored by most Jews as long as suicide bombers wreak intermittent devastation on crowded buses in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. No one can say I do not understand the suffering inflicted on families by these attacks. One day I was waiting at Ben-Gurion airport for a flight to the UK when a good friend called, her voice barely audible, to tell me that her son, a serving soldier, had been horrifically injured by a suicide bomber. I had introduced this young man to my daughter Tanya the previous summer, and the two had formed a deep bond. Since then he has undergone more than thirty-five operations to try to repair the damage done to his body. His father has suffered eight heart attacks. All their expectations about their life were destroyed in an instant. That suicide bombing has torn apart the lives of my friends as easily as a piece of paper can be ripped.
But while I understand that these attacks can be terribly destruc-fitive of Israelis’ lives and their sense of their own security, they can easily become an excuse not to confront the reality of what is taking place, the wider picture. They can simply reinforce in a very negative fashion this sense of Jewish victimhood. I understand this well. Like most Jews, I was brought up to see myself as a victim too: in a collective sense, as a Jew raised in the shadow of the Holocaust, and in an individual sense, as a Jew growing up in a post-war Britain tinged with anti-Semitism.
I was born in January 1949 into the grey, tired world of Britain under rationing. My family in Grays, Essex, appeared to me even at a very young age to be unlike those around me: there were no grandparents, brothers, sisters, aunts or uncles. My father’s family were thousands of miles away in South Africa, and my mother’s immediate family were all dead, victims of the First World War, tuberculosis and bad luck. There were only me and my parents. But my isolation did not end there. My parents, preoccupied with the heavy duties of running a successful medical practice, abandoned me to the care of the cleaning lady. I was banned from playing with the local ‘rough’ children, who arrived with the building of a council estate near our home, and instead consoled myself with games with our Golden Retriever dog, Laddie, and my rubber doll, Pandora, in the back garden.
My only early recollection of true friendship is with a black servant called Inyoni who looked after me—effectively as a substitute mother—when I was two years old, when my father tried a brief experiment in returning to South Africa. It did not last long: after spending six months just outside Cape Town we headed back to Britain. But Inyoni is a vivid feature in all my memories of that period in South Africa, much more so than my grandparents, whom I can barely recall. In that half-year I formed a deep attachment to him. He would teach me to strap Pandora to my back and carry her the way the local black women carried their babies. (Back in Essex I would see other little girls in the street holding their dolls in their arms and tell them off, showing them how to do it properly.) I would also spend hours squatting with Inyoni on the floor in his servant quarters at the back of the house as he prepared the vegetables. At other times we would play tea-party games on the lawn with Pandora. After my family left South Africa in 1952 I felt the loss of Inyoni deeply.
I was a sickly child, suffering repeated bouts of severe sinusitis which served only to provoke anger and resentment in my father, whose repeated interventions with drugs and operations failed to improve my condition. In total contrast to the way he treated his patients, he had no sympathy for my suffering and would simply tell me to get a grip on myself. I suppose to a highly respected doctor my recurrent illnesses must have seemed like a reproof: in the very heart of his family was a sick child he was powerless to heal. This failure was compounded, in his eyes, by my lack of success at school by any of the yardsticks he held dear. The many days I missed from school, and his overbearing demands, took their toll on my academic performance. I was constantly being dragged off to teacher-parent meetings to discuss my poor results. Eventually, at the age of seven I was packed off to the first of my boarding schools, cut off from contact with my parents apart from one weekend out of every three. Even when I returned home my father was usually too busy with patients to spend time with me.
Before leaving for boarding school, during the long periods when I was sick at home my father would lock me in my room with what he considered educational material. He would give me a National Geographic magazine to read, or throw me a pile of postcards he had been sent from around the world and demand that I find the country or city they had been posted from in an atlas. Sometimes he would want me to draw the outline of the country too. I would be beaten if I could not answer his questions on his return. By the age of six I was an expert at finding foreign places.
There were compensations in this harsh regime, trapped in the small world of my bedroom, deprived of companions. The biggest was the National Geographic itself, which opened up another, far more exciting, world to me. In my head I had incredible adventures in places most British children had never heard of. Remote South American hill tribes became my friends, as did the pygmies of the Congo. They never seemed any stranger to me, maybe less so, than the children at school. My favourite place was the Himalayas, somewhere that looked awe-inspiring and magnificent; I would think that if only I could climb to the very top I would be able to see the whole world. I felt a huge desire to go to these places and experience them for myself.
One of the features in the National Geographic that fascinated me most was about India. I was attracted to the pictures of that country, as I was to those of Africa, because of the bright colours, the beauty of the landscapes, the different way of life and the great variety of groups living within one subcontinent. What fascinated me most about India was the caste system, and in particular the group classified as the lowest caste: the Untouchables. I would study the pictures that accompanied the article, and then read the copy that explained that the Untouchables were supposed to be the ugliest, dirtiest, most stupid Indians, and had to live on the outskirts of the towns. I would trace my fingers first around the faces of the Untouchables and then around those of the highest caste, the Brahmans, flicking backwards and forwards between the pictures. But however long I looked at them, I could not see where the difference lay. Why were the Untouchables supposed to be uglier? I could not understand how you could designate one group as dirtier or less worthy than another.
Although I have always rejected this fear of the Other, and the racism that it inevitably fuels, I have learned from experience that it is a deeply rooted need in the human psyche. At the slightest provocation we will put distance between ourselves and those we cannot or do not want to understand. At an early stage of the Aids crisis I trained to be a therapist at Great Ormond Street hospital in London. In the late 1980s, when without the slightest shred of scientific evidence there were stories all over the British media warning that Aids was highly contagious, I was working at the London Lighthouse Project with infected women and children, and with the partners of infected people. At the Project we tried to challenge people’s prejudices by bringing Aids into the community: we even established a commercial restaurant, where the staff were all Aidsor HIV-infected, so people could see that they were not going to catch the disease simply by eating there.
Nonetheless, some evenings I would attend social functions with my husband Michael, and would wait for the moment when another guest would ask what I did. My reply—that I was an HIV/Aids counsellor—always elicited the same response: overwhelmed with revulsion, the other person would take a step back. There was a double disgust: the fear that I might be carrying that terrible disease, and also the incomprehension that a nice, presentable middle-class woman would be doing a ‘dirty’ job like mine. It was as though they thought they were shaking the hand of a Brahman only to discover that they had been tricked into making contact with an Untouchable.
Moving to Tamra seemed to cause equivalent offence to my former Jewish friends. While Israeli Jews looked at the Palestinian uprising and responded by choosing to disengage—either by building a wall to separate themselves from the occupied population their army rules over or, inside Israel, by boycotting Arab areas, refusing to buy felafel or get their cars fixed in Arab garages—I elected to put myself right in the middle of the problem. To join the Untouchables. The response of my friends, like that of the well-heeled party crowd in London, was to withdraw in revulsion. Now that I am outside the Jewish collective, outside the herd, I must be treated like the enemy, as if I have committed a crime of treason or incitement.
Although the decision to leave Tel Aviv and cross the ethnic divide seemed the natural reaction to my new understanding of what was happening inside Israel, it was never easy. There were days when I felt tearful and isolated. I cried not out of fear but out of a terrible sense of how much my country was failing not just its Arab citizens but also its Jewish ones, and how catastrophically fragmented it was growing. It dawned on me at an early stage that I had to be 100 per cent committed to my new course. My Jewish friends chose to dismiss my decision as a silly passing episode, and even some of my new friends in Tamra appeared to doubt whether I could withstand the pressures. Hassan’s son Khalil said to me in the first few days: ‘After three months you’ll go back. You won’t be able to stand it here without cinemas at the end of the road or elegant restaurants.’
Neither side could understand why anyone would choose a primitive life over a sophisticated one. There was a double error in this thinking. First, I never saw Tamra as more primitive. Life was simpler, certainly, but my view has always been that life’s greatest pleasures are simple. Second, it ignored the fact that there are some values more important than being comfortable, such as developing a consciousness about the rights and wrongs of the society one lives in, and an awareness of what each of us can contribute to improving it. In this sense the sophistication of the West increasingly appears to me to be a veneer, concealing the fact that most of us have lost our understanding of where our communities are heading. We are encouraged to believe in the sanctity of the safe little bubbles we inhabit, to the point where we can imagine no other life, no other possibilities.
My rejection by my Jewish friends was matched by an early suspicion of my motives and my seriousness expressed by a few people in Tamra. An Israeli newspaper took pleasure in quoting a former Arab Knesset member and resident of Tamra, Mohammed Kaanan, when he was asked about me: ‘I want to believe she is an innocent woman working in the interests of the inhabitants here, but if a suspicion arises that she is working for an organisation that is against the Arab population that may harm her. We won’t stand for it.’ I was saddened by Kaanan’s comments, but understood where such distrust springs from: for the first two decades after the state of Israel was born the Arab minority lived under harsh military rule, and today their lives are still controlled by a special department of the Shin Bet security services, which runs a large network of informers inside Arab communities. In the circumstances good intentions from Jews are treated with caution.
Far more disorientating was the initial reaction of a Tamran woman who would later become one of my closest friends. I met Zeinab, an English teacher at the local high school, on my first trip to Tamra when I was doing research for Mahapach. In her home she greeted me warmly and invited me to sit with her and have coffee while we discussed the discrimination in education. She explained the smaller budgets for Arab schools, the bigger class sizes, the shorter learning days, the shoddy temporary buildings in which Arab children learn and which usually became permanent classrooms, the severe restrictions on what may be taught (restrictions that do not apply to Jewish children), and the rigid control exercised over the appointment of Arab teachers and principals by the security services, which weed out anyone with a known interest in politics or Palestinian history. She added that Jewish schoolchildren receive hidden benefits not afforded Arab pupils, such as double the school allowance if their parents serve in the army. I learned that by law all classrooms must be built with air conditioners, a requirement strictly enforced in the construction of Jewish schools, but usually ignored in Arab ones. And she explained that in most cases heating equipment, computers and books have to be bought by Arab parents because Arab schools lack funds to pay for them.
Then, after calmly informing me of this discrimination, her eyes turned glittery with suppressed anger and she asked: ‘Why all of a sudden are you so interested in the Arabs? Is it because of 9/11?’ It had not occurred to me that there was a connection between my being here in Tamra and what had occurred in New York. But her accusing tone suggested otherwise: it was as though she was saying, ‘We have been here all these years with the same problems and you Jews have always neglected us. Why the interest now?’ As our meeting came to a close she showed me to the door and said, ‘You are always welcome in an Arab home.’ I had rarely felt less welcome in my life. Although I felt confused by her barely contained rage, I was also impressed by her and wanted to know her better.
On my subsequent visits to the Galilee I always called on Zeinab, and she was one of the first people I informed of my planned relocation to Tamra. As the day of the move neared I rang her from Tel Aviv. She answered, saying she had been cleaning the house and thinking about me. I asked her what she was thinking. ‘I was wondering whether I will be able to trust you,’ she replied.
It was at this moment I started to understand the roots of Zeinab’s anger. I realised that she had always been let down by Jews, even those left-wingers who claimed to be on her side, and she had no reason to think I would be any different. The few co-existence groups in Israel operate mainly in the Galilee, often bringing together Jewish and Arab women, but they are almost always run by Jews, and the debate is always controlled and circumscribed by the group’s Jewish members. Off-limits is usually ‘politics’, which in effect means any discussion that touches on the power relationship between Jews and Arabs. These groups almost universally failed to survive the outbreak of the second Palestinian intifada in September 2000, precisely because the central concerns of their Arab members had never been addressed. The Jewish participants had not been prepared to make any sacrifices to promote equality, believing that if they did so they would undermine the thing they hold most dear, the eternal validity of a Jewish state. Allowing their Arab neighbours an independent voice was seen as threatening the Jewishness of Israel. I felt Zeinab had set me a test in her own mind, convinced I would betray her like all the other well-intentioned Jews she had known. I began to persuade her otherwise by the very fact of moving to Tamra; she was soon at my door with a bowl of beautiful cacti.
In those early days in Tamra I also came to understand that my image as a Jew was problematic. Months before my move, in the spring of 2002, Israel had launched a massive invasion of the West Bank, known as Operation Defensive Shield, in which the army reoccupied the towns that had passed to the control of the Palestinian Authority under the 1993 Oslo Accords. All summer and winter, families including my own in Tamra sat each night watching disturbing images on Israeli television and the Arab satellite channels of Israeli soldiers ransacking Palestinian homes in Ramallah, Nablus and Jenin, or of tanks ploughing down the streets, crushing anything in their way, from cars to electricity pylons. For the people in Tamra, as in other Israeli Arab communities, these were even more dispiriting times than normal. Many had held out the hope that with the arrival of a Palestinian state next door maybe they would finally come to be accepted as equal citizens of the Jewish state, rather than as a potential fifth column. Now they saw that hope unravelling before their eyes.
There were several disturbing incidents at this time which brought home to me the fact that I had little control over how my image as a Jew was being shaped and distorted by my country, my government and my army. One came when I joined Suad, then aged fifteen, for a walk on the far side of Tamra. We reached a spot where a group of a dozen or so children aged between seven and eleven were playing outside the neighbourhood homes. It is a point of honour for most Arab families that they and their children are immaculately dressed, but these children were wearing ragged clothes. When they saw us, they rushed out shouting to Suad: ‘Is she a Jew, is she a Jew?’ and ‘Jews are dirty, they kill people.’ Looking upset, Suad refused to translate straight away, and called out to them: ‘Stop it!’ She wanted to run, but I told her to stay calm. As we walked away, the children picked up stones from the roadside and threw them in our direction, though not strongly enough to hit us. It was a symbolic demonstration. Shaken, I thought afterwards that I understood their message: ‘We hate Jews, so stay away. They only ever bring trouble with them.’
On another occasion, when I was out with Samira, we took a shortcut through a school playground in front of a group of transfixed ten-year-olds. A few came running up behind me, shouting, ‘Yehudiya, Yehudiya!’ and throwing handfuls of leaves that I could feel caressing my back.
When I reflected on these incidents I understood that what most Arab children learn about Jews comes from the media, and what they see is violence, oppression and abuse. The image of the strong, aggressive Israel that had so enthralled me in my early Zionist days I now saw in a very different light. These children—lacking the sophistication to discriminate between the media image of the Jew as an ever-present, menacing soldier and the reality of many kinds of Jews living in different circumstances all around the world—related to me in the only way they knew how. They saw the children of Jenin or Ramallah throwing stones at the Jewish soldiers, and now they were mimicking them.
This problem of my image as a Jew was illuminated for me on another occasion when I visited the home of Asad Ghanem. As he introduced me to his two young children, they asked: ‘Is your friend who doesn’t speak like us a Jew?’ Asad answered: ‘Yes, but she’s a good Jew.’ I had been reclassified in a way that shocked me: I was not a human being, not an Israeli, and not even a Jew, but a ‘good Jew’. I came to realise that for most Arab children living in Israel their first lesson—something they learn from watching what happens in Jenin, Nablus, Hebron or Gaza—is that Jews are bad. They have to be taught that not all Jews kill and destroy. This is something the older children understand: they have learned it as part of their survival training for later life, when they will have to venture into a society which will mostly treat them as an enemy. When they are old enough to leave the safety of Tamra, they must know when to conceal their Arabness and keep their mouths shut.
When I think of those children throwing stones at me, I don’t get angry with them but with all those Jews who tell me that the Palestinians living inside Israel are unaffected by the occupation, that it has nothing to do with them. They forget or choose to ignore the fact that, although Palestinian citizens of Israel are separated from Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza by the reality that one has citizenship and the other does not,
(#litres_trial_promo) the bonds of their shared nationality—the fact that they are all Palestinians—are far stronger. Many Palestinian citizens, whether living in Tamra, Nazareth or Haifa, have family living under occupation in refugee camps in the West Bank and Gaza, or in extreme poverty in Lebanon and Syria. When they see a child being shot in Jenin or Nablus, it could be a cousin or a nephew. Even progressive Jews appear deeply blocked in understanding this reality. When I explained the complex identity problems faced by Israeli Arabs to a left-wing friend from Tel Aviv who belongs to Rabbis for Human Rights, an organisation which vehemently opposes the occupation, he told me simply: ‘But they live in the state of Israel. The occupation doesn’t touch them.’
How wrong he is was proved one evening while I was still smarting from the stone-throwing incident. I was sitting in my home with a group of twelve Arab friends watching a video of Mohammed Bakri’s controversial documentary film Jenin Jenin, originally banned in Israel and a powerful record of the traumatic effects on Jenin’s inhabitants of the violent invasion by Israel of the West Bank city in the spring of 2002. It was a disturbing moment at many levels. Sitting there as the only Jew, I was aware that I had to choose where I stood in this battle between two peoples, and that I had to be committed to the cause of justice and humanity. I watched the film through my Arab friends’ eyes, learning exactly how they see us Jews as occupiers and oppressors. It made me question very deeply how I had been able to identify with a country that could send its child soldiers to behave in this fashion.
The film prompted in me a recollection of a conversation I had had on one of my increasingly rare and strained visits to my religious cousins, Jeffrey and Doreen, in Ashdod shortly after Operation Defensive Shield. Their granddaughter’s husband, a medic in the reserves, had been sent to the Jenin area, and Doreen was apoplectic at the media suggestions that there had been a massacre there. ‘Good Jewish boys who serve in the Israel Defence Forces like our Ofer don’t harm people,’ she asserted confidently. And then, as if providing the proof, she told me that Ofer had even been asked by his commanders to give medical assistance to a Palestinian woman who was having a heart attack during the invasion. This level of naïety and self-satisfaction I found profoundly unsettling. I told her: ‘The reality is that no one can know what their children get up to in a war. Soldiers carry secrets they will never divulge to their families.’
Although I am sure there are soldiers who attempt to hold onto their humanist values while in uniform, I am also convinced that the inherent immorality of enforcing an occupation makes good intentions almost futile. Worse than this, there is plenty of evidence that many soldiers lose their judgement entirely under the pressure of the barbaric tasks they are ordered to carry out. One need only consider the reports in the Hebrew media of the high suicide rates in the army, of the number of soldiers who are receiving psychological help and counselling, or who are discharged from duty, to know the truth of this. But on this matter Israelis are in deep denial.
Later, after visiting Jenin, I was convinced that something terrible had happened there, and that atrocities had been carried out by the Israeli army. When I watched the film, before I had been there, I was unprepared for the horrifying details of what had taken place, and of the terrible destruction wrought on the inhabitants’ lives as well as on the centre of Jenin camp. Watching the survivors, broken-hearted amid the rubble of their homes, hopeless and with an understanding that their voice would never be properly heard, I felt their rage. It dismayed me to realise that I too was seeing the Israeli army, full of those ‘good Jewish boys’, as a terrorist army, and that for the first time I was beginning to understand the emotions that can drive a suicide bomber to action. I could see how unfair it sounds to a Palestinian to hear a suicide bomber being labelled a terrorist when we refuse to do the same if an Israeli soldier bulldozes a house with a family inside.
As I attempted to cope with these images on the screen, I was also confronted by the unexpected reactions of my Arab friends watching alongside me. Afterwards we talked about the film, and though I felt near to tears, as they spoke about the horrifying events they were smiling. I vividly remember Heba from my family recalling one particularly unpleasant scene, when an old man tells of being shot in the leg at close range by a soldier, and all the while she maintained a fixed smile. I thought: ‘Is this a mask, is this the only way she can contain her emotions, suppress the pain? And if it is, is the mask reserved for me, the Jew here, or is it one they maintain with each other too?’ The answer possibly came when the group got up to leave. Zeinab turned to me at the door and said, with the same fixed smile and glittering angry eyes I had seen before: ‘Sweet dreams.’ It was as if I had been hit in the stomach. I desperately wanted to say, ‘But that’s not me, don’t hold me responsible, I’m with you.’ But anything I said would have been inadequate. Maybe that night was the ultimate test for me in Zeinab’s eyes. Maybe she thought I would go running home to Tel Aviv the next day. But I didn’t; I stayed. And afterwards my friendship with Zeinab deepened and strengthened.
Listening to and coming to understand the Palestinian narrative was an important part of unlearning my lifelong Zionist training, which had dismissed the Palestinians’ history and culture as irrelevant or non-existent. One of the most poignant episodes occurred when I was reading the autobiography of the Jerusalem doctor Mufid Abdul Hadi, which had been given to me by his nephew, Dr Mahdi Abdul Hadi, the director of the Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs (Passia), based in Jerusalem. There is a moving passage concerning his escape, along with many other refugees, from Palestine in 1948, after the Israeli state was declared. It concludes with a scene on a boat, al-Malik Fuad, which heads for Sweden packed with Palestinian refugees being taken away, most of them forever, from their homeland and their families. ‘When al-Malik Fuad lifted its anchor and began its westward-bound journey, it met another ship going in the opposite direction. Its gunwale was occupied by hundreds of singing and rejoicing people, who were greeting “The Promised Land” for the first time. The happy people greeted our ship by waving the Jewish state’s flag.’
Here was the flipside of the Exodus story that inspired my love affair with Israel. In all my time as a teenager learning my people’s history I had never been encouraged to think in those terms, that our people’s rejoicing came at the cost of another’s bereavement. The Zionist story I had learned was that this country was ‘a land without people’. But here was one of those supposedly non-existent Palestinians telling me his story of loss and betrayal. I thought how much we could change history if we could raise Jewish children with that simple understanding.
The obstacles to doing it are huge. The apparent inability of Jews in Israel and the Diaspora to address the true roots of the Middle East conflict and accept their role in the Palestinians’ suffering is given an alibi by their fears, which are in turn stoked by stories in the media of the ever-present threat of anti-Semitism, a Jew-hatred in both Europe and the Arab world that we are warned has troubling echoes of the period before the Second World War. A disproportionate part of the media coverage of anti-Semitism concentrates on tarring critics of Israel with this unpleasant label. Anyone who has disturbing things to say about what Israel is doing to the Palestinians is, on this interpretation, an anti-Semite. I have little doubt that the motivation of Israel’s defenders in many cases is to silence the critics, whether their criticisms are justified or not.
My own critique of Israel, that it is a state that promotes a profoundly racist view of Arabs and enforces a system of land apartheid between the two populations, risks being treated in the same manner. So how does one reach other Jews and avoid this charge of anti-Semitism?
Given the sensitivities of Jews after their history of persecution, I think it helps if we distinguish between making a comparison and drawing a parallel. What do I mean? A comparison is essentially a tool for making quantitative judgements: my suffering is greater or lesser than yours, or the same. Jews have a tendency to demand exclusive rights to certain comparisons, such as that nothing can be worse than the Holocaust, because it involved the attempt to kill a whole people on an unprecedented industrial scale. Anyone who challenges that exclusive right, for example by suggesting that Israel is trying to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians from their homeland, is therefore dismissed as an anti-Semite. The debate immediately gets sidetracked into the question of whether the argument is anti-Semitic rather than whether it is justified.
Drawing a parallel works slightly differently. It refuses, rightly, to make lazy comparisons: Israel is neither Nazi Germany nor apart-heid South Africa. It is unique. Instead a parallel suggests that the circumstances people find themselves in can be similar, or that one set of events can echo another. Even more importantly, the emotions people feel in these circumstances may share something of the same quality. That common quality is what allows us to see their suffering as relevant and deserving of recognition, without dragging us into a debate about whose suffering is greater.
I will give an example from my first few weeks in Tamra. I had been visiting families and hearing stories of what had happened to them in the war of 1948, when 750,000 Palestinians were either deported or terrorised from their homes by the Israeli army to refugee camps across the Middle East. This is an event commemorated by Palestinians as the Nakba (the Catastrophe), the loss of their homeland to the Jewish state and the dissolution of the Palestinian people as a nation. 150,000 or so Palestinians managed to avoid this fate, remaining within the borders of the new state of Israel and becoming Israeli citizens. Nonetheless, many of them had experiences similar to the refugees: all the members of my own family in Tamra, for example, were internally displaced in the 1948 war. They lost their homes and most of their possessions when they were forced to flee from villages in the Galilee.
The family of Hassan’s wife, Samira, were expelled from a small coastal village near Haifa called Ein Hod. She once tried to visit Ein Hod to see her parents’ home, which still stands but for decades has been occupied by Jews. When she knocked on the door to ask whether she could look inside, the Jewish owners angrily told her to go away. She has not dared go back since. When I talk to Samira I see the pain she feels at being uprooted, at living only a short distance from her family’s home, but having no access to it or right to reclaim it. In fact, she does not even have the right to a history: the state refuses to remember her story, commemorate it or teach it to new generations. Her past is denied her, which damages her sense of who she is. It is a feeling we Jews should know only too well. After all, Jews have campaigned for the right to reclaim their properties in Europe, seek restitution, win recognition of the wrongs done them, and build museums. In this battle they have been increasingly successful. Why is Samira’s pain not equally worthy of acknowledgement?
This lesson was reinforced by Rasha, a bright eighteen-year-old girl to whom I taught English and who is hoping to go to Haifa University to study psychotherapy. During a tutorial I asked her how she felt about life in Tamra, and she replied that she always felt afraid. This was clearly a sensitive topic, and I proceeded carefully. I asked her what she knew of her family history, such as where her parents were born. She said they were born in Tamra. And what about your grandparents, I asked. She said she knew they weren’t from Tamra. ‘They came from a village,’ she added, only revealing with hesitancy that they were among the hundreds of thousands of refugees forced out of some four hundred villages by Israeli soldiers in the 1948 war. I asked if her parents ever talked about this with her at home. ‘No, because they are afraid too,’ she said. ‘I ask them questions, but they don’t like to talk about it.’
Rasha, it struck me, was living in fear of connecting with her past and her roots. Her eyes filled with tears. I thought, this is the story of this country. How can we educate our Jewish children about the Holocaust, the centuries of discrimination against Jews, and yet here sitting next to me is a Palestinian child who has been forced by the Jewish state to cut herself off emotionally and psychologically from both her personal and her people’s narratives, who is truly afraid to learn about her past? I asked her how she felt about not knowing the truth, and not being able to talk about it in her home. She replied: ‘I don’t feel like I have a future.’
Other families told me of the massacres that took place in their villages and of the tactics used by soldiers to terrify them from their homes. These are not fanciful stories: they are supported by the research of respected Israeli Jewish historians who have spent years trawling Israel’s state and military archives.
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Susan Nathan
The pioneering autobiographical story of a British Zionist in her fifties who moves to Israel and chooses to live among 25,000 Muslims in the all-Arab Israeli town of Tamra, a few miles from Nazareth.Susan Nathan’s revelatory book about her new life across the ethnic divide in Israel is already creating international interest. At a time when Middle Eastern politics (in many ways central to the current world disorder) have become mired in endless tit-for-tat killings, Susan Nathan is showing – by her own daily example – that it is perfectly possible for Jews and Arabs to live peacefully together in a single community, recognising their common humanity.The author’s familiarity with the former injustices of apartheid South Africa enables her to draw telling comparisons with the state of Israel. The increasing segregation of, and discrimintation against, the million-strong Arabic population of Israel is something she witnesses at first hand, but in describing her experiences in Tamra she is as observant of Arab frailties as of Jewish oppression.Written with warmth, compassion and humour, ‘The Other Side of Israel’ is one courageous woman’s positive life-enhancing response to a situation in which entrenched attitudes lead only to more violence and bloodshed.
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 (#uedfdaaa4-8da9-5006-9f49-38f07787835a)
Title Page (#u4763c426-1858-5f2b-9671-314f9350748a)
Dedication (#u1f7f2f79-da08-5007-9f3b-5afc1e24e321)
1: The Road to Tamra (#ud631e44f-4014-5ab1-9d1b-70caaeac0206)
2: Death of a Love Affair (#u19d437a3-17f1-576c-8b8f-79e5c7d19aed)
3: Second-Class Citizens (#litres_trial_promo)
4: Echoes of Apartheid (#litres_trial_promo)
5: The Missing Left (#litres_trial_promo)
6: A Traumatized Society (#litres_trial_promo)
7: Where Next? (#litres_trial_promo)
Glossary (#litres_trial_promo)
Sources (#litres_trial_promo)
INDEX (#litres_trial_promo)
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Praise (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
1 The Road to Tamra (#ulink_28a50e94-8684-5116-a552-384ce1c40c01)
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.
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.
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.
(#ulink_614c5edd-feb8-5993-80d6-e5012aac3c6a) 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,
(#ulink_b7199f4b-09ea-50ba-8643-028114d392d0) 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.’
Speaking to Amin later, I sensed that there was almost nothing that Tamra could do to change its bleak future. The government land bodies and the planning committees that set the guidelines for these masterplans are always Jewish-dominated, and often have no Arab members at all. Arab citizens have no voice in their own future, let alone the state’s. Amin was deeply depressed. He had just returned from a meeting of the Knesset’s economics committee which, at the instigation of an Arab Knesset member, Issam Makhoul, had discussed the land and housing crisis in Tamra. Amin had compiled the figures, which showed that the town had little more than a thousand acres for building, all of which was developed. The rest of its six thousand acres were zoned either for farming or as Green Areas which could not be developed. The result, he told the committee, was that because the Interior Ministry refused to release any new land for development, young Arab couples had no choice but to build their homes illegally, often on their own land which was zoned for agriculture. Their parents could not build ‘upwards’ to provide them with an apartment—as Mansfeld had suggested—because they had already reached the building-regulation limit of four storeys for their homes. There were 150 buildings in Tamra under demolition orders, threatening hundreds of young couples and their children with homelessness and destitution.
I found there was nothing I could say to reassure Amin as he spoke in a tone of absolute despair about Tamra’s future. He had exhausted all the official channels, commuting to Jerusalem regularly to try to persuade Jewish officials and politicians of Tamra’s crisis, only to be met by a uniform lack of interest or by condescension. It seemed to me the height of irony, given our history, that the Jewish state has so little concern about the ghetto living it has forced on its Arab citizens. Amin said he felt humiliated and powerless every time a young couple came to him seeking help with their housing problems. All he could do was to turn them away empty-handed. It was not as though they had other choices available to them. Israel makes it virtually impossible for Arabs to live in Jewish communities, and other Arab communities are in the same dire straits. Couples would simply be moving from a ghetto they know to another they did not, to a place where they could not even rely on the support of their hamula.
‘You know, Susan,’ Amin said, ‘even dying is a problem if you are an Arab in Israel. In Tamra we have run out of land to bury our dead.’
I asked him how he felt about living here. His head in his hands, he told me he was thinking about a way to leave Israel with his wife and three young children. If he did, he would be joining the rest of his three siblings, all of whom are doctors, in exile: his two brothers are in the United States, and his sister in France. ‘It feels to me like a subtle way of ethnically cleansing me off my land,’ he said. Today there are an equal number of Jews and Arabs living in the Galilee, he pointed out, but it is obvious from looking at the region’s development plans that one ethnic group is benefiting at the expense of the other. ‘These plans are about making life impossible for us, the Arabs, to remain here. Israel destroys the structure of our family life, making us weak and fragmented. If it continues like this, anyone who can leave will do so. I want to stay here, to raise my children in their homeland, but I have to be realistic. How can I stay when all the messages my state sends me are that I am not welcome?’
(#ulink_299b7597-e537-5049-a56a-038b46c165e2) Until recently all Israeli ID cards divulged the ethnic group of the holder. New ID cards often have a row of stars in the place where nationality is identified (see glossary entry on citizenship, page 267). It is widely believed that the cardholder’s ethnic group is revealed by the ID number.
(#ulink_dafd724b-839b-5371-80f2-2e88f0f40319) Since 1953 it has been awarded each year to an Israeli citizen who has demonstrated excellence or broken new ground in a particular field.
2 Death of a Love Affair (#ulink_53cc0003-5e3a-55c3-809f-b786f1c1ad5b)
Inside the information pack from the Jewish Agency office in London was a badge and an accompanying letter: ‘Wear this as you walk off the plane to begin your new life as an Israeli citizen,’ the instructions stated. So on 10 October 1999, as I made my way down the flight of steps onto the tarmac of Tel Aviv’s Ben-Gurion international airport, I had a badge pinned to my chest bearing the slogan: ‘I’ve come home’.
The thought that I and the hundreds of other new immigrants arriving each week on El Al flights from all over the world were reclaiming a right that had lain dormant for two thousand years did not strike me as strange. For the fuel that brought me late in life to Israel as a new immigrant, with only a couple of suitcases of belongings with me, was a dream I had secretly harboured since my childhood. The object of my desire was to make aliya, the Hebrew word for ‘ascent’, an idea that in returning to Israel a Jew is fulfilling a divinely ordained mission.
At the age of fifty I was leaving behind my home in Wimbledon, South London, two grown-up children, Daniel and Tanya, a recently failed marriage and my work as an Aids/HIV counsellor. Other than these attachments, not much stood in my way: Israeli law entitles me and every other Jew in the world to instant citizenship if we choose to live in Israel. There are no visa applications, points systems or lengthy residency procedures. As a Jew I had a right to Israeli citizenship by virtue of my ethnicity alone. The Jewish Agency in London had been able to process my application for Israeli citizenship in just a week, and it made sure the immigration process was as pain-free as possible: my flight ticket was paid for, and accommodation was provided while I found my feet in the Promised Land. The only hesitation on my part was a reluctance, when confronted by an official issuing my Israeli identity card, to adopt a Hebrew name. My friends suggested I become either Shashana or Vered—the names of two flowers—but at the last minute I decided to stick with Susan.
I am not sure I can identify the exact moment I became a committed Zionist, but I do know that a single childhood incident changed the direction of my life, and my understanding of what it was to be a Jew. I was eleven years old and on an outing with some girls from my boarding school to nearby High Wycombe, one of the many commuter towns that ring London. Browsing through the shelves of a small bookshop in one of the backstreets, away from the other girls, I stumbled across the most horrifying picture book. As I leafed through its pages I found photo after photo of emaciated corpses piled high in pits, of men ripping out gold fillings from teeth, of mountains of hair and shoes. At such a young age I was not aware that these were pictures of the Holocaust, an event that was still fearsomely present in the imaginations of Jews around the world fifteen years after the end of the Second World War. But the awfulness of the images transfixed me.
I learned the story behind these photographs from my parents shortly afterwards, so beginning my compulsive interest in the Holocaust and Jewish history. The following year, 1961, after I had moved to a new boarding school in Buckinghamshire, the trial of the Gestapo leader Adolf Eichmann began in Jerusalem. I read the newspapers every day, appalled by the accounts of the Final Solution, Hitler’s attempt to exterminate the Jewish people. I also recall weekends spent poring over copies of the Jewish Chronicle in my parents’ home, reading in the personal columns the notices from individuals and families still searching for relatives in Europe they had been separated from for as much as two decades. These heart-rending messages were an uncomfortable reminder that the legacy of loss and destruction wrought by the concentration camps was continuing. My exposure to the Holocaust—and my new understanding that millions of Jews had died at the hands of the Nazis—launched me on an ever wider quest for knowledge: not only of what had happened to its victims, but also of what had led to such barbarity.
My own family, I was soon aware, had only narrowly escaped—by a quirk of destiny—the tragedy that had consumed so many others. My father’s parents, before they met, were refugees from the pogroms in Lithuania in the 1880s, fleeing separately to Odessa where each hoped they might catch a ship to Hamburg and a new future in Germany. But when they arrived at the port they, and many other refugees, found the ship full and so were forced to travel on the only other vessel, bound for Cape Town in South Africa. As we now know, their fates and their children’s were sealed by that missed boat: instead of finding themselves caught up in the rise of European fascism, they watched the horrific events unfold from the safe distance of Cape Town. My father was, however, in Europe at the outbreak of war. He had left South Africa in the late 1920s, travelling streerage class on a boat bound for Ireland, a penniless but brilliant medical student. He enrolled at Trinity College, Dublin, where he was mentored by Yitzhak HaLevi Herzog, the chief rabbi of Ireland and the father of Israel’s sixth president, who helped him become a passionate Zionist. By the time Nazism was on the rise in Germany my father was a leading surgeon in London, where he met my mother, a nurse. They spent the war itself tending to the injured in Tilbury docks in Essex, one of the most heavily bombed places in Britain.
If my family had survived the war unscathed, the plight of the many who had not touched me deeply. As with many others, the story of the Exodus—as told by novelist Leon Uris—shaped my perception of the tragedy that had befallen my people. I read of the ship that left Europe in July 1947, its decks choked with Holocaust survivors in search of sanctuary in what was then Palestine; of the refugees who tried to jump ship and reach the shores of the Promised Land; of the decision of the British to send the 4,500 refugees to internment camps in Cyprus because they had agreed to limits on Jewish immigration to avoid further antagonising the local Palestinian population and neighbouring Arab countries; and of the horrifying eventual return of the ship and its Jewish refugees to Germany. I was outraged by the thought that British soldiers—ruling Palestine under a mandate from the League of Nations—could have acted with such callousness. My alienation from my country, Britain, began from that point on.
The middle classes exercised a subtle, sophisticated discrimination against Jews in post-war Britain which was apparent enough to make me increasingly aware of my difference. There were the comments about my ‘funny name’—my maiden name is Levy. I heard tales that disturbed me about the clubs that excluded Jews as policy. Among my parents’ friends there were worried conversations about the ‘quotas’ on Jewish children that might prevent their offspring from being admitted to a good school. And my mother, who was born a Protestant but converted to Judaism after marrying my father, would tell of how everyone in her family apart from her own mother disowned her for choosing to marry a Jew.
During my childhood, at the rural boarding schools outside London where most of my time was spent, I felt as if I were wearing a yellow star, as if my Jewishness was a visible stain to the teachers and other pupils. These were demonstratively Christian schools, with chapel services and morning prayers. I was aware of my vulnerability, too: out of hundreds of children, only four others were Jewish in the senior school I attended. I swung between contradictory emotions. On the one hand I feared appearing different, and on the other I wanted to proudly own that difference. Although I did not have the courage to refuse to attend morning prayers, I resolutely kept my mouth closed during the hymns. It was a very isolating experience: I felt outside the consensus, subtly but constantly reminded of my difference. This is, I think, a common experience for Diaspora Jews, but one little appreciated by Israeli Jews who were born and raised in a state where they comprise the majority.
My growing distance from British society was reflected in an ever greater attachment, if only emotionally, to Israel. I was raised on stirring stories of the great and glorious Jewish state. For non-Jews it is perhaps difficult to appreciate what an enormous impact the creation of the state of Israel had on us. It reinvented our self-image, anchoring our pride in a piece of territory that had been our shared homeland two thousand years before. It satisfied our sense of historic justice and showed we could forge our own place among the modern nation states. But more than that, many Jews, myself included, were excited by the triumphs of our army, particularly those of 1948 and 1967, when Israel took on its Arab neighbours and won substantial territory from them. Here we were, a persecuted, isolated people, freeing ourselves from the ghettos of Europe and rising phoenix-like from the ashes of the gas chambers to become warriors. No longer a helpless minority always at risk of persecution, we were a proud people reclaiming our homeland, and willing and able to fight to defend it on the battlefleld. Young Jews need not imagine a future as either merchants or intellectuals, but rather as brave and courageous soldiers. We could call ourselves ‘Sabra’—identifying with the prickly Middle Eastern cactus that flourishes in even the most hostile terrain.
I married my husband, Michael Nathan, a successful lawyer, in 1970 at the age of twenty-one. My early marriage, frowned upon by my parents, brought me into the embrace of a much more religious family than my own. Michael’s mother and father were traditional and Orthodox, in sharp contrast to my own parents’ secular, liberal background, and our differences in upbringing, culture and outlook would eventually push us apart. During the twenty-six years of our marriage, however, Michael and I only ever visited Israel together once, when we went to see his brother in Jerusalem. Michael never shared my attachment to the Jewish state, and on the seven other occasions I visited I was always alone. Our two children forged their own relationships with Israel, touring the country as part of youth groups or working on kibbutzim. But although this was officially my state I always left Israel as a tourist, an outsider, with a feeling that its inner substance had not been fully revealed to me.
So when I arrived to claim Israeli citizenship in 1999, my head was still full of romantic notions of Zionism and the Jewish state. The Jews had reclaimed an empty, barren land—‘a land without people for a people without land’. We had made the desert bloom, we had filled an uninhabited piece of the Middle East with kibbutzim, the collective farms that were the pioneering backbone of the state in its early years. At that stage, the thought that the country was full of strangers, people whom I and my countrymen lived alongside but entirely apart from, did not enter my head. The one million Arabs who share the state with Jews—Palestinians who remained on their land after the 1948 war that founded Israel, and so by accident rather than design became Israeli citizens—were invisible to me, as they are to almost all Israeli Jews. Their culture, their society and their story were a mystery.
The excitement of being in Israel did not quickly dissipate. My first months were filled with thrilling moments of feeling, for the first time in my life, that I belonged to the majority. I did not need to explain my family name, nor did I have to hide my pride in my Jewishness. I could have walked down the street with a Star of David emblazoned on my lapel if I wanted to; no one would have batted an eyelid. There was even a strange sense of liberation in calling a plumber and opening the door to a man wearing a kippa, the small cloth disc worn by religious Jewish men as a head covering. It made me think, I really am in the land of the Jews.
Even the stories that had inspired me as a child now came dramatically to life. Soon after my arrival I was hanging the laundry outside the kitchen window of my Tel Aviv flat when I noticed an old woman waving down to me from a neighbouring apartment block, a dilapidated building erected in the early 1950s. Noticing a new face in the area, she called out that her name was Leah, and asked who I was and where I was from. I told her, then asked whether she had been born in Israel. No, she replied, she had been born in Poland. During the Second World War she had been separated from her parents, who were later killed in a concentration camp. She went into hiding in the woods, staying with several Russian families, before envoys from the Jewish Agency tracked her down and put her on a ship to Palestine. That ship was the Exodus. She recounted the story of the trip in the packed boat that I had read about in my teenage years, and how they were turned back to Germany. She told me of the horrific overcrowding on the ship, of the bodies stuffed together, but also of the excitement as they neared the Promised Land. Here in Leah I had found a living, breathing piece of history, a woman who made flesh all the reasons why I felt attached and committed to Israel.
Most Jews are all too ready to tell you how much Israel means to them as a sanctuary. How safe they feel knowing that there is a country they can flee to should anti-Semitism raise its ugly head again. How reassuring it is to have a country that will protect them, having inherited the legacy of centuries of persecution and the horrors of the Holocaust. What they are much less ready to admit is that Israel is not just a safe haven and a homeland; it also embodies the value of naked Jewish power. What I felt arriving in Israel—as I suspect do many other Jews—was that through my new state I was defying a world that had persecuted my people. Being in the majority, and not needing to explain myself, was a condition I was unfamiliar with after five decades as a British Jew. The sense of being in charge, of putting the boot on the other foot, was more than a little intoxicating.
I did not come to Israel the easy way, though as a middle-class Londoner I could have strolled into any flat in Tel Aviv. I chose instead a path that I believed followed in the footsteps of the pioneering Jewish immigrants to Palestine. I arranged with the Jewish Agency in London to spend my first six months in an immigrant absorption centre in Rana’ana, close to Tel Aviv. I knew what I was letting myself in for: an apartment shared with strangers newly arrived from all over the world, separated by different languages, cultures and traditions. All we would have in common was the knowledge that we were Jews and that we wanted to become Israelis.
These first months were something of a culture shock that tested the resources of many of the inmates. I arrived with my British culture, but the absorption centre was also home to people from many other cultures, including Americans, Dutch, Russians, Swiss, French and South Americans. All of us had to adjust both to these other cultures and to the new Israeli culture. We also struggled with the abruptness of Israelis, which many took for rudeness. The Rana’ana centre has perhaps the most privileged intake of Jewish immigrants anywhere in Israel, with most coming from developed countries. It beats by a considerable margin the caravan transit camps reserved for Ethiopian Jews, the Jewish group most discriminated against inside Israel. Many of the one million Russian Jews who arrived in Israel during the 1990s following the collapse of the Soviet Union also stayed in far less salubrious surroundings.
Nonetheless, the absorption centre was a tough and uncomfortable introduction to Israel, which I remember left several people close to a nervous breakdown and ready to fly back home. I still have a cutting from a local newspaper, Ha Sharon, headlined ‘Immigrants Complain of Poor Conditions’. A letter written by some of the French and American inmates to the absorption centre’s management is quoted: ‘The apartments are old and full of mould and fungus. The kitchens are broken, the showers don’t work properly, the walls are peeling and we have no air-conditioners.’ And it is true that in many ways Rana’ana was as much a prison as a melting pot. Having spent my childhood from the age of seven onwards, however, in the harsh, disciplinarian atmosphere of British boarding schools, coping with these material hardships only slightly marred the wonderful experience of being absorbed into a new country and culture, and meeting so many like-minded Jews.
But in these early months I started to experience darker moments. A big disappointment was that the only family I had in Israel, religious cousins living in the southern city of Ashdod, who originally approved of my decision to make aliya, kept their distance from the moment I arrived. They did not even meet me at the airport. For a while their attitude baffied me, but eventually I came to understand how my migration challenged their sense of their own Israeliness. They belong to the right-wing religious camp, and still hold onto a vision of Israelis as pioneering frontiersmen, settlers implanting themselves in hostile terrain. I think they were convinced that, with my ‘European softness’, I would not be able to stay the course. And when I confounded them by securing almost immediately a well-paid position in Tel Aviv teaching English to business professionals, my easy assimilation served only to antagonise them yet further.
My job involved travelling from one office to the next, which meant that I quickly learned my way around Tel Aviv. I also met and got to know a range of Israelis with different political views and insights into the ‘Israeli experience’. I heard from some of them about their own problems as immigrants being absorbed into Israeli society, about their concerns at their children serving in the army, and about the country’s economy.
Four months after my arrival I suffered a devastating blow when I was diagnosed with a rare form of eye cancer. I had to begin a crash-course in negotiating my way single-handedly around Israel’s health care system, and eventually found myself in Jerusa-lem’s Hadassah hospital, awaiting an operation on my eye. Hadassah occupies a striking position, set in a pine forest overlooking the old stone houses of Ein Kerem, a Palestinian village that was cleansed of its population in the 1948 war and is now a wealthy suburb of Jerusalem to which many rich Jews aspire to move. It has state-of-the-art medical equipment and is staffed by a mix of Israeli Jews and Arabs, and it was there that I got my first inkling that the country I had so longed to be a citizen of might not be quite what I imagined. I was lying in a ward surrounded by beds filled not just with other Jews but with many of the diverse, and confusing, ethnic and religious components of the Holy Land: Jews, Christians, Muslims and Druze. This was before the intifada of September 2000, but still it was surprising to see Israelis and Palestinians sharing the same ward. Even more confusingly, many of the Palestinians were Israeli citizens, members of a group I discovered were commonly referred to as the ‘Israeli Arabs’. The Jewish state was clearly a lot less ethnically pure than I had been led to believe.
It was another experience on the ward that started me questioning what was really going on inside Israel. One day a young Orthodox woman arrived on the ward clutching her month-old baby, who had just undergone surgery on an eye. That evening her husband came to visit. He was wearing a knitted kippa, long sidelocks, and had a pistol on one hip and a rifie slung casually over his shoulder. This is the uniform of the nationalist religious right in Israel—better known abroad as ‘the settlers’. The thought that a heavily armed civilian could wander freely around a hospital where women and children were ill appalled me. I engaged him in conversation as he was leaving. In a strong American accent he told me: ‘I’ve just requisitioned an Arab home in East Jerusalem. I never leave home without a weapon.’ I suggested to him that he would be better off living in the Jewish quarter in the Old City. No, he retorted. ‘All of East Jerusalem belongs to the Jews.’
His words left a nasty taste in my mouth. Why was he stealing homes from Arabs in the Palestinian part of the city, the section captured by Israel in the 1967 war, when there were vast tracts of the country he could choose to live in? And why did I appear to be the only person on the ward who thought it strange for a visitor to arrive in a hospital wearing a gun?
I left the hospital confused by the signals Israel was sending me. Here was a state that prided itself on having one of the best medical systems in the world. And access to health care seemed not to be affected overtly by grounds of race or creed. But it was also clear that some Israelis had an unhealthy admiration for violence and an appetite for what did not belong to them. Israel did not appear to place many controls on their behaviour.
My strong humanist values derive from an understanding of both my family’s history and my people’s. My father raised me on stories about my great-grandfather, Zussman Hershovitz, who lived in one of the Jewish ghetto communities, the shtetls, in Lithuania. I was taught as a small child the consequences of being Jewish for men like my great-grandfather, how it was not possible for him to go to school as a boy, how he ended up as a peddler moving from place to place to avoid the pogroms. In addition my father, Samuel Levy, a respected Harley Street doctor, instilled in me a deep appreciation of Jewish ethics, culture and history. I cannot claim he was a good father. Much of my childhood was spent living in terror of his rages and under the shadow of his disappointment. But outside the immediate family circle he was never less than a flercely loyal and dedicated healer. Although he was very successful, he believed he had wider social responsibilities than simply accumulating money from the wealthy clientele who visited his London practice. He continued to dedicate much of his time to a practice he started when he was younger in a deprived part of Essex. After he retired in 1973 he returned to the country of his birth, South Africa, during the apartheid years to be medical health officer and practise in a clinic for blacks only in Groote Schuur, Cape Town.
So even though I was soon earning good money as an English teacher in Tel Aviv, I could not simply accept the privileges that came with being a successful ‘new Israeli’. A few months after I had recovered from the eye operation, I was approached by a student organisation called Mahapach, which had heard of my experience in community work and raising money for Aids charities in London. They asked if I could write a funding application in support of their work for disadvantaged communities inside Israel, particularly the indigenous Arab population and the community of Jews of Middle Eastern descent, known in Israel as the Mizrahim. Much of Mahapach’s work involves encouraging students to go into deprived communities to teach such youngsters core subjects like Hebrew, Arabic, English and maths outside the often limiting arena of the formal classroom.
I sat down and read about these communities and their problems. I knew about the difficulties of the Mizrahim, who because of their Arab culture—they originally came from Morocco, Iraq, Syria and Egypt—have long been treated as inferior Jews by the European elite, the Ashkenazi Jews, who run Israel. But questions quickly began to surface in my mind about the indigenous Arab communities. Where did these Arabs I was writing about live? Why had they been so invisible, except briefly when I was in hospital, during my first two years in Israel? In those days I had little time for anything except my work as an English teacher. I would usually be up at 5 a.m., start work at six (before my clients’ offices opened), and finish at 8 or 9 p.m. Still, I was not satisfied with simply regurgitating the dry statistics I found in newspaper articles which suggested that Israeli Arabs were discriminated against. They were as faceless and unconnected to my life as bacteria living at the bottom of the ocean. I wanted to meet these Arabs for myself. When the chance arose to visit an Arab town as part of the research, I leapt at it. The destination was Tamra in the western Galilee.
Within minutes of driving into Tamra I felt that I had entered another Israel, one I had never seen before. It was almost impossible to believe that I could turn off a main highway, close to the luxurious rural Jewish communities of the Galilee, and find myself somewhere that was so strikingly different from any Jewish area I had ever visited before, and not just culturally. It was immediately obvious that Tamra suffered from chronic overcrowding. The difference in municipal resources and investment was starkly evident too. And a pall of despair hung over the town, a sense of hopelessness in the face of so much official neglect. It was the first time I had been to an Arab area (apart from visits as a tourist to the Old City of Jerusalem), and I was profoundly shaken by it. A disturbing thought occurred to me, one that refused to shift even after I had driven back to Tel Aviv. Tamra looked far too familiar. I thought, where have I seen this before? I recognised the pattern of discrimination from my experience of apartheid South Africa, which I had visited regularly during my childhood. I could detect the same smell of oppression in Tamra that I had found in the black townships.
These initial impressions were reinforced by a meeting at the home of Dr Asad Ghanem, who lives in the neighbouring village of Sha’ab. One of the few prominent Arab academics in Israel, Dr Ghanem impressed me with his direct and unemotional explanations of the discrimination exercised in all spheres of Israeli life against the Arab population, from employment and education to land allocations and municipal budgets. But he found it difficult to remain detached about one topic he brought to my attention, an issue that would later become the theme of many conversations with my new Arab neighbours and friends. In Arab communities across Israel there are tens of thousands of homes judged illegal by the state, and under threat of demolition. In Tamra, Dr Ghanem told me, there were 150 homes facing destruction. Intermittently the police would target an Arab community, bringing in bulldozers at the crack of dawn and tearing down the illegal homes. The razing of these buildings, some of them up to four floors high, might mean dozens of extended families, comprising hundreds of people, were made homeless at a stroke.
I knew from my research that there was widespread illegal building in Arab communities, which was represented by the Israeli authorities as the act of law-breakers, people who were squatting on state land or who did not want to pay for a building licence. But as Dr Ghanem pointed out, no one chooses to invest their life savings and their dreams in a home that could be razed at any moment. Arab families have been forced to build illegally because in most cases the state refuses to issue them with building permits. And then he delivered the knockout blow: he told me his own beautiful home was illegal and threatened with demolition.
There can be little doubt that the land on which Dr Ghanem’s home stands has belonged to his family for generations. From the salon, visitors can see the old stone foundations of his grandparents’ house. A few years ago he had decided, with the arrival of his own children, that he and his wife Ahlam could no longer live in his parents’ apartment; they would build a home on the only land the family had left. But the authorities refused him a building permit. Effectively branded criminals by the state—like tens of thousands of Arab families—he and Ahlam had been paying regular heavy fines ever since, as much as £15,000 sterling a time, to ward off demolition. Their lives have become a routine of paying the state to prevent the destruction of everything they hold dear.
The question that echoed in my mind as I heard Dr Ghanem’s story was: where were he and his family supposed to live? What was the future envisaged for them by the state? I knew well that there were endless housing developments springing up all over Israel, and illegally in the occupied territories, for Jewish families. But where was the next generation of Arab citizens to live? Dr Ghanem and Ahlam are the pillars not only of their own community in Shaab, but of the whole Arab community inside Israel. Nonetheless, the state is forcing them to live with a terrible threat hanging over their heads. They are raising their children in an environment of continual insecurity. Every day when they leave home they do not know whether they will return to find a pile of rubble. They have been made to live in an unstable world which I have no doubt is deeply damaging to them and their children.
My meeting with Dr Ghanem ended uncomfortably. In a matter-of-fact tone he asked me whether I had made aliya, whether I had claimed my right as a Jew to come to live in a country from which the overwhelming majority of his people had been expelled little more than half a century earlier. These Palestinians still live in refugee camps across the Middle East, refused the opportunity to return to their former homes in Israel. It was the first time I hesitated to answer this question. I understood that my privileges as a Jewish immigrant had come at the expense of his people. Sitting in his home, reality finally hit me. The intoxicating power trip had come to an abrupt halt.
As is my way, I could not live long in ignorance. So I began the long and difficult task of becoming informed. I read and absorbed anything I could find on the position of the Israeli Arabs, questioning the official narrative. My left-wing friends in Tel Aviv, mainly academics and people working in non-profit organisations whom I had met through a fellow inmate of the absorption centre, were quick to reassure me they had Arab friends. I asked who exactly were these friends? Where did they live? What did they talk about together? The reply was always more or less the same. They were on good terms with the owner of an Arab restaurant where the felafel was excellent. Or they got their car fixed in a garage in an Arab village where the prices were low. What did they talk to these ‘friends’ about? When did they meet outside these formal relationships? What intimacies did they exchange? The Tel Aviv crowd looked at me aghast, as if I were crazy. They did not have those sorts of relationships with Arabs.
In fact, it was clear they had no Arab friends at all. I was mortified. The revelation that I had stumbled across the same kind of master-servant relationship as exists in South Africa was something I was little prepared for. For a week I was racked by pains in my stomach and head. It was as if I was purging myself of all the lies I had been raised on.
When I was stronger, I returned to Tamra. Asad Ghanem’s wife Ahlam invited me to spend the night with them. We ate dinner together, and then she and I sat on the terrace in the warm evening air and talked. We exchanged confidences and intimacies that people rarely share until they have known each other for a long time. I remember thinking as we sat close together that here were an Arab and a Jew getting to know each other at a very deep and personal level, and that this was the way it was supposed to be. Cut off briefly from a society that always privileges Jews, we could feel like equals. I went back to Tel Aviv firm in my resolution that something in my life would have to change. Israel, as it was presently constituted, required me to choose a side: would I carry on with my life in Tel Aviv, turning a blind eye like everyone else to the suffering of the Arab population; or would I do something to highlight the reality and work towards changing it?
As it happened, my mind was effectively made up for me. I started to see much more clearly the paternalistic and colonialist attitudes of my left-wing friends. Being around them became unbearably suffocating. Invited in the winter of 2001 by Asad to teach English to Arab professionals at his Ibn Khaldun Association in Tamra, I had little hesitation in agreeing to take up the position. The Abu Hayjas, whom I knew through my work for Mahapach, offered to rent me the empty top-floor flat in their home, on the hillside overlooking the town’s central mosque.
I knew breaking away from the Jewish collective would be traumatic, but I could not know how profoundly I would alienate those I thought I was close to. Almost overnight I lost my Jewish friends. Individualism is highly prized in many societies, but not in Israel, where the instinct of the herd prevails. Doubtless the reasons can be found in Jewish history, in the centuries of persecution culminating in the Holocaust. There is an attitude of you’re either with us or against us. No one should step outside the consensus, or question it, because this is seen as weakening the group. But human beings are immeasurably more important to me than labels or institutions. By choosing to live as a Jew in a town of Muslims I hoped I could show that the fear that divides us is unrealistic. It is based on ignorance, an ignorance that the state of Israel tries to encourage among its Jewish citizens to keep them apart from their Arab neighbours. I know Jews who have lived on a left-wing kibbutz near Tamra, yet have never ventured into the largest Arab community in their area.
I have pondered long and hard why I was able to break away from the Jewish collective when other Israelis and Jews feel so bound to it, prisoners of a belief that they must stand with their state and their people, right or wrong. At the core of modern Jewish identity is the idea of victimhood, shaped by our history of persecution and the singular outrage of the Holocaust. The sense among Jews in Israel and the Diaspora that they are uniquely victims, both as individuals and as an ethnic group, cannot be overstated. Victimhood has become something akin to a cult among Jews, even among the most successful in Europe and America. It is developed as part of the Jewish nationalist ideology of Zionism, creating an ‘Alice Through the Looking Glass’ world for most Jews: they sincerely and incontrovertibly believe that Israel, a nation with one of the strongest armies in the world, backed by the only nuclear arsenal in the Middle East, is in imminent danger of annihilation either from its Arab neighbours or from the remnants of the Palestinian people living in the occupied territories.
The improbability of this scenario, however, can safely be ignored by most Jews as long as suicide bombers wreak intermittent devastation on crowded buses in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. No one can say I do not understand the suffering inflicted on families by these attacks. One day I was waiting at Ben-Gurion airport for a flight to the UK when a good friend called, her voice barely audible, to tell me that her son, a serving soldier, had been horrifically injured by a suicide bomber. I had introduced this young man to my daughter Tanya the previous summer, and the two had formed a deep bond. Since then he has undergone more than thirty-five operations to try to repair the damage done to his body. His father has suffered eight heart attacks. All their expectations about their life were destroyed in an instant. That suicide bombing has torn apart the lives of my friends as easily as a piece of paper can be ripped.
But while I understand that these attacks can be terribly destruc-fitive of Israelis’ lives and their sense of their own security, they can easily become an excuse not to confront the reality of what is taking place, the wider picture. They can simply reinforce in a very negative fashion this sense of Jewish victimhood. I understand this well. Like most Jews, I was brought up to see myself as a victim too: in a collective sense, as a Jew raised in the shadow of the Holocaust, and in an individual sense, as a Jew growing up in a post-war Britain tinged with anti-Semitism.
I was born in January 1949 into the grey, tired world of Britain under rationing. My family in Grays, Essex, appeared to me even at a very young age to be unlike those around me: there were no grandparents, brothers, sisters, aunts or uncles. My father’s family were thousands of miles away in South Africa, and my mother’s immediate family were all dead, victims of the First World War, tuberculosis and bad luck. There were only me and my parents. But my isolation did not end there. My parents, preoccupied with the heavy duties of running a successful medical practice, abandoned me to the care of the cleaning lady. I was banned from playing with the local ‘rough’ children, who arrived with the building of a council estate near our home, and instead consoled myself with games with our Golden Retriever dog, Laddie, and my rubber doll, Pandora, in the back garden.
My only early recollection of true friendship is with a black servant called Inyoni who looked after me—effectively as a substitute mother—when I was two years old, when my father tried a brief experiment in returning to South Africa. It did not last long: after spending six months just outside Cape Town we headed back to Britain. But Inyoni is a vivid feature in all my memories of that period in South Africa, much more so than my grandparents, whom I can barely recall. In that half-year I formed a deep attachment to him. He would teach me to strap Pandora to my back and carry her the way the local black women carried their babies. (Back in Essex I would see other little girls in the street holding their dolls in their arms and tell them off, showing them how to do it properly.) I would also spend hours squatting with Inyoni on the floor in his servant quarters at the back of the house as he prepared the vegetables. At other times we would play tea-party games on the lawn with Pandora. After my family left South Africa in 1952 I felt the loss of Inyoni deeply.
I was a sickly child, suffering repeated bouts of severe sinusitis which served only to provoke anger and resentment in my father, whose repeated interventions with drugs and operations failed to improve my condition. In total contrast to the way he treated his patients, he had no sympathy for my suffering and would simply tell me to get a grip on myself. I suppose to a highly respected doctor my recurrent illnesses must have seemed like a reproof: in the very heart of his family was a sick child he was powerless to heal. This failure was compounded, in his eyes, by my lack of success at school by any of the yardsticks he held dear. The many days I missed from school, and his overbearing demands, took their toll on my academic performance. I was constantly being dragged off to teacher-parent meetings to discuss my poor results. Eventually, at the age of seven I was packed off to the first of my boarding schools, cut off from contact with my parents apart from one weekend out of every three. Even when I returned home my father was usually too busy with patients to spend time with me.
Before leaving for boarding school, during the long periods when I was sick at home my father would lock me in my room with what he considered educational material. He would give me a National Geographic magazine to read, or throw me a pile of postcards he had been sent from around the world and demand that I find the country or city they had been posted from in an atlas. Sometimes he would want me to draw the outline of the country too. I would be beaten if I could not answer his questions on his return. By the age of six I was an expert at finding foreign places.
There were compensations in this harsh regime, trapped in the small world of my bedroom, deprived of companions. The biggest was the National Geographic itself, which opened up another, far more exciting, world to me. In my head I had incredible adventures in places most British children had never heard of. Remote South American hill tribes became my friends, as did the pygmies of the Congo. They never seemed any stranger to me, maybe less so, than the children at school. My favourite place was the Himalayas, somewhere that looked awe-inspiring and magnificent; I would think that if only I could climb to the very top I would be able to see the whole world. I felt a huge desire to go to these places and experience them for myself.
One of the features in the National Geographic that fascinated me most was about India. I was attracted to the pictures of that country, as I was to those of Africa, because of the bright colours, the beauty of the landscapes, the different way of life and the great variety of groups living within one subcontinent. What fascinated me most about India was the caste system, and in particular the group classified as the lowest caste: the Untouchables. I would study the pictures that accompanied the article, and then read the copy that explained that the Untouchables were supposed to be the ugliest, dirtiest, most stupid Indians, and had to live on the outskirts of the towns. I would trace my fingers first around the faces of the Untouchables and then around those of the highest caste, the Brahmans, flicking backwards and forwards between the pictures. But however long I looked at them, I could not see where the difference lay. Why were the Untouchables supposed to be uglier? I could not understand how you could designate one group as dirtier or less worthy than another.
Although I have always rejected this fear of the Other, and the racism that it inevitably fuels, I have learned from experience that it is a deeply rooted need in the human psyche. At the slightest provocation we will put distance between ourselves and those we cannot or do not want to understand. At an early stage of the Aids crisis I trained to be a therapist at Great Ormond Street hospital in London. In the late 1980s, when without the slightest shred of scientific evidence there were stories all over the British media warning that Aids was highly contagious, I was working at the London Lighthouse Project with infected women and children, and with the partners of infected people. At the Project we tried to challenge people’s prejudices by bringing Aids into the community: we even established a commercial restaurant, where the staff were all Aidsor HIV-infected, so people could see that they were not going to catch the disease simply by eating there.
Nonetheless, some evenings I would attend social functions with my husband Michael, and would wait for the moment when another guest would ask what I did. My reply—that I was an HIV/Aids counsellor—always elicited the same response: overwhelmed with revulsion, the other person would take a step back. There was a double disgust: the fear that I might be carrying that terrible disease, and also the incomprehension that a nice, presentable middle-class woman would be doing a ‘dirty’ job like mine. It was as though they thought they were shaking the hand of a Brahman only to discover that they had been tricked into making contact with an Untouchable.
Moving to Tamra seemed to cause equivalent offence to my former Jewish friends. While Israeli Jews looked at the Palestinian uprising and responded by choosing to disengage—either by building a wall to separate themselves from the occupied population their army rules over or, inside Israel, by boycotting Arab areas, refusing to buy felafel or get their cars fixed in Arab garages—I elected to put myself right in the middle of the problem. To join the Untouchables. The response of my friends, like that of the well-heeled party crowd in London, was to withdraw in revulsion. Now that I am outside the Jewish collective, outside the herd, I must be treated like the enemy, as if I have committed a crime of treason or incitement.
Although the decision to leave Tel Aviv and cross the ethnic divide seemed the natural reaction to my new understanding of what was happening inside Israel, it was never easy. There were days when I felt tearful and isolated. I cried not out of fear but out of a terrible sense of how much my country was failing not just its Arab citizens but also its Jewish ones, and how catastrophically fragmented it was growing. It dawned on me at an early stage that I had to be 100 per cent committed to my new course. My Jewish friends chose to dismiss my decision as a silly passing episode, and even some of my new friends in Tamra appeared to doubt whether I could withstand the pressures. Hassan’s son Khalil said to me in the first few days: ‘After three months you’ll go back. You won’t be able to stand it here without cinemas at the end of the road or elegant restaurants.’
Neither side could understand why anyone would choose a primitive life over a sophisticated one. There was a double error in this thinking. First, I never saw Tamra as more primitive. Life was simpler, certainly, but my view has always been that life’s greatest pleasures are simple. Second, it ignored the fact that there are some values more important than being comfortable, such as developing a consciousness about the rights and wrongs of the society one lives in, and an awareness of what each of us can contribute to improving it. In this sense the sophistication of the West increasingly appears to me to be a veneer, concealing the fact that most of us have lost our understanding of where our communities are heading. We are encouraged to believe in the sanctity of the safe little bubbles we inhabit, to the point where we can imagine no other life, no other possibilities.
My rejection by my Jewish friends was matched by an early suspicion of my motives and my seriousness expressed by a few people in Tamra. An Israeli newspaper took pleasure in quoting a former Arab Knesset member and resident of Tamra, Mohammed Kaanan, when he was asked about me: ‘I want to believe she is an innocent woman working in the interests of the inhabitants here, but if a suspicion arises that she is working for an organisation that is against the Arab population that may harm her. We won’t stand for it.’ I was saddened by Kaanan’s comments, but understood where such distrust springs from: for the first two decades after the state of Israel was born the Arab minority lived under harsh military rule, and today their lives are still controlled by a special department of the Shin Bet security services, which runs a large network of informers inside Arab communities. In the circumstances good intentions from Jews are treated with caution.
Far more disorientating was the initial reaction of a Tamran woman who would later become one of my closest friends. I met Zeinab, an English teacher at the local high school, on my first trip to Tamra when I was doing research for Mahapach. In her home she greeted me warmly and invited me to sit with her and have coffee while we discussed the discrimination in education. She explained the smaller budgets for Arab schools, the bigger class sizes, the shorter learning days, the shoddy temporary buildings in which Arab children learn and which usually became permanent classrooms, the severe restrictions on what may be taught (restrictions that do not apply to Jewish children), and the rigid control exercised over the appointment of Arab teachers and principals by the security services, which weed out anyone with a known interest in politics or Palestinian history. She added that Jewish schoolchildren receive hidden benefits not afforded Arab pupils, such as double the school allowance if their parents serve in the army. I learned that by law all classrooms must be built with air conditioners, a requirement strictly enforced in the construction of Jewish schools, but usually ignored in Arab ones. And she explained that in most cases heating equipment, computers and books have to be bought by Arab parents because Arab schools lack funds to pay for them.
Then, after calmly informing me of this discrimination, her eyes turned glittery with suppressed anger and she asked: ‘Why all of a sudden are you so interested in the Arabs? Is it because of 9/11?’ It had not occurred to me that there was a connection between my being here in Tamra and what had occurred in New York. But her accusing tone suggested otherwise: it was as though she was saying, ‘We have been here all these years with the same problems and you Jews have always neglected us. Why the interest now?’ As our meeting came to a close she showed me to the door and said, ‘You are always welcome in an Arab home.’ I had rarely felt less welcome in my life. Although I felt confused by her barely contained rage, I was also impressed by her and wanted to know her better.
On my subsequent visits to the Galilee I always called on Zeinab, and she was one of the first people I informed of my planned relocation to Tamra. As the day of the move neared I rang her from Tel Aviv. She answered, saying she had been cleaning the house and thinking about me. I asked her what she was thinking. ‘I was wondering whether I will be able to trust you,’ she replied.
It was at this moment I started to understand the roots of Zeinab’s anger. I realised that she had always been let down by Jews, even those left-wingers who claimed to be on her side, and she had no reason to think I would be any different. The few co-existence groups in Israel operate mainly in the Galilee, often bringing together Jewish and Arab women, but they are almost always run by Jews, and the debate is always controlled and circumscribed by the group’s Jewish members. Off-limits is usually ‘politics’, which in effect means any discussion that touches on the power relationship between Jews and Arabs. These groups almost universally failed to survive the outbreak of the second Palestinian intifada in September 2000, precisely because the central concerns of their Arab members had never been addressed. The Jewish participants had not been prepared to make any sacrifices to promote equality, believing that if they did so they would undermine the thing they hold most dear, the eternal validity of a Jewish state. Allowing their Arab neighbours an independent voice was seen as threatening the Jewishness of Israel. I felt Zeinab had set me a test in her own mind, convinced I would betray her like all the other well-intentioned Jews she had known. I began to persuade her otherwise by the very fact of moving to Tamra; she was soon at my door with a bowl of beautiful cacti.
In those early days in Tamra I also came to understand that my image as a Jew was problematic. Months before my move, in the spring of 2002, Israel had launched a massive invasion of the West Bank, known as Operation Defensive Shield, in which the army reoccupied the towns that had passed to the control of the Palestinian Authority under the 1993 Oslo Accords. All summer and winter, families including my own in Tamra sat each night watching disturbing images on Israeli television and the Arab satellite channels of Israeli soldiers ransacking Palestinian homes in Ramallah, Nablus and Jenin, or of tanks ploughing down the streets, crushing anything in their way, from cars to electricity pylons. For the people in Tamra, as in other Israeli Arab communities, these were even more dispiriting times than normal. Many had held out the hope that with the arrival of a Palestinian state next door maybe they would finally come to be accepted as equal citizens of the Jewish state, rather than as a potential fifth column. Now they saw that hope unravelling before their eyes.
There were several disturbing incidents at this time which brought home to me the fact that I had little control over how my image as a Jew was being shaped and distorted by my country, my government and my army. One came when I joined Suad, then aged fifteen, for a walk on the far side of Tamra. We reached a spot where a group of a dozen or so children aged between seven and eleven were playing outside the neighbourhood homes. It is a point of honour for most Arab families that they and their children are immaculately dressed, but these children were wearing ragged clothes. When they saw us, they rushed out shouting to Suad: ‘Is she a Jew, is she a Jew?’ and ‘Jews are dirty, they kill people.’ Looking upset, Suad refused to translate straight away, and called out to them: ‘Stop it!’ She wanted to run, but I told her to stay calm. As we walked away, the children picked up stones from the roadside and threw them in our direction, though not strongly enough to hit us. It was a symbolic demonstration. Shaken, I thought afterwards that I understood their message: ‘We hate Jews, so stay away. They only ever bring trouble with them.’
On another occasion, when I was out with Samira, we took a shortcut through a school playground in front of a group of transfixed ten-year-olds. A few came running up behind me, shouting, ‘Yehudiya, Yehudiya!’ and throwing handfuls of leaves that I could feel caressing my back.
When I reflected on these incidents I understood that what most Arab children learn about Jews comes from the media, and what they see is violence, oppression and abuse. The image of the strong, aggressive Israel that had so enthralled me in my early Zionist days I now saw in a very different light. These children—lacking the sophistication to discriminate between the media image of the Jew as an ever-present, menacing soldier and the reality of many kinds of Jews living in different circumstances all around the world—related to me in the only way they knew how. They saw the children of Jenin or Ramallah throwing stones at the Jewish soldiers, and now they were mimicking them.
This problem of my image as a Jew was illuminated for me on another occasion when I visited the home of Asad Ghanem. As he introduced me to his two young children, they asked: ‘Is your friend who doesn’t speak like us a Jew?’ Asad answered: ‘Yes, but she’s a good Jew.’ I had been reclassified in a way that shocked me: I was not a human being, not an Israeli, and not even a Jew, but a ‘good Jew’. I came to realise that for most Arab children living in Israel their first lesson—something they learn from watching what happens in Jenin, Nablus, Hebron or Gaza—is that Jews are bad. They have to be taught that not all Jews kill and destroy. This is something the older children understand: they have learned it as part of their survival training for later life, when they will have to venture into a society which will mostly treat them as an enemy. When they are old enough to leave the safety of Tamra, they must know when to conceal their Arabness and keep their mouths shut.
When I think of those children throwing stones at me, I don’t get angry with them but with all those Jews who tell me that the Palestinians living inside Israel are unaffected by the occupation, that it has nothing to do with them. They forget or choose to ignore the fact that, although Palestinian citizens of Israel are separated from Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza by the reality that one has citizenship and the other does not,
(#litres_trial_promo) the bonds of their shared nationality—the fact that they are all Palestinians—are far stronger. Many Palestinian citizens, whether living in Tamra, Nazareth or Haifa, have family living under occupation in refugee camps in the West Bank and Gaza, or in extreme poverty in Lebanon and Syria. When they see a child being shot in Jenin or Nablus, it could be a cousin or a nephew. Even progressive Jews appear deeply blocked in understanding this reality. When I explained the complex identity problems faced by Israeli Arabs to a left-wing friend from Tel Aviv who belongs to Rabbis for Human Rights, an organisation which vehemently opposes the occupation, he told me simply: ‘But they live in the state of Israel. The occupation doesn’t touch them.’
How wrong he is was proved one evening while I was still smarting from the stone-throwing incident. I was sitting in my home with a group of twelve Arab friends watching a video of Mohammed Bakri’s controversial documentary film Jenin Jenin, originally banned in Israel and a powerful record of the traumatic effects on Jenin’s inhabitants of the violent invasion by Israel of the West Bank city in the spring of 2002. It was a disturbing moment at many levels. Sitting there as the only Jew, I was aware that I had to choose where I stood in this battle between two peoples, and that I had to be committed to the cause of justice and humanity. I watched the film through my Arab friends’ eyes, learning exactly how they see us Jews as occupiers and oppressors. It made me question very deeply how I had been able to identify with a country that could send its child soldiers to behave in this fashion.
The film prompted in me a recollection of a conversation I had had on one of my increasingly rare and strained visits to my religious cousins, Jeffrey and Doreen, in Ashdod shortly after Operation Defensive Shield. Their granddaughter’s husband, a medic in the reserves, had been sent to the Jenin area, and Doreen was apoplectic at the media suggestions that there had been a massacre there. ‘Good Jewish boys who serve in the Israel Defence Forces like our Ofer don’t harm people,’ she asserted confidently. And then, as if providing the proof, she told me that Ofer had even been asked by his commanders to give medical assistance to a Palestinian woman who was having a heart attack during the invasion. This level of naïety and self-satisfaction I found profoundly unsettling. I told her: ‘The reality is that no one can know what their children get up to in a war. Soldiers carry secrets they will never divulge to their families.’
Although I am sure there are soldiers who attempt to hold onto their humanist values while in uniform, I am also convinced that the inherent immorality of enforcing an occupation makes good intentions almost futile. Worse than this, there is plenty of evidence that many soldiers lose their judgement entirely under the pressure of the barbaric tasks they are ordered to carry out. One need only consider the reports in the Hebrew media of the high suicide rates in the army, of the number of soldiers who are receiving psychological help and counselling, or who are discharged from duty, to know the truth of this. But on this matter Israelis are in deep denial.
Later, after visiting Jenin, I was convinced that something terrible had happened there, and that atrocities had been carried out by the Israeli army. When I watched the film, before I had been there, I was unprepared for the horrifying details of what had taken place, and of the terrible destruction wrought on the inhabitants’ lives as well as on the centre of Jenin camp. Watching the survivors, broken-hearted amid the rubble of their homes, hopeless and with an understanding that their voice would never be properly heard, I felt their rage. It dismayed me to realise that I too was seeing the Israeli army, full of those ‘good Jewish boys’, as a terrorist army, and that for the first time I was beginning to understand the emotions that can drive a suicide bomber to action. I could see how unfair it sounds to a Palestinian to hear a suicide bomber being labelled a terrorist when we refuse to do the same if an Israeli soldier bulldozes a house with a family inside.
As I attempted to cope with these images on the screen, I was also confronted by the unexpected reactions of my Arab friends watching alongside me. Afterwards we talked about the film, and though I felt near to tears, as they spoke about the horrifying events they were smiling. I vividly remember Heba from my family recalling one particularly unpleasant scene, when an old man tells of being shot in the leg at close range by a soldier, and all the while she maintained a fixed smile. I thought: ‘Is this a mask, is this the only way she can contain her emotions, suppress the pain? And if it is, is the mask reserved for me, the Jew here, or is it one they maintain with each other too?’ The answer possibly came when the group got up to leave. Zeinab turned to me at the door and said, with the same fixed smile and glittering angry eyes I had seen before: ‘Sweet dreams.’ It was as if I had been hit in the stomach. I desperately wanted to say, ‘But that’s not me, don’t hold me responsible, I’m with you.’ But anything I said would have been inadequate. Maybe that night was the ultimate test for me in Zeinab’s eyes. Maybe she thought I would go running home to Tel Aviv the next day. But I didn’t; I stayed. And afterwards my friendship with Zeinab deepened and strengthened.
Listening to and coming to understand the Palestinian narrative was an important part of unlearning my lifelong Zionist training, which had dismissed the Palestinians’ history and culture as irrelevant or non-existent. One of the most poignant episodes occurred when I was reading the autobiography of the Jerusalem doctor Mufid Abdul Hadi, which had been given to me by his nephew, Dr Mahdi Abdul Hadi, the director of the Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs (Passia), based in Jerusalem. There is a moving passage concerning his escape, along with many other refugees, from Palestine in 1948, after the Israeli state was declared. It concludes with a scene on a boat, al-Malik Fuad, which heads for Sweden packed with Palestinian refugees being taken away, most of them forever, from their homeland and their families. ‘When al-Malik Fuad lifted its anchor and began its westward-bound journey, it met another ship going in the opposite direction. Its gunwale was occupied by hundreds of singing and rejoicing people, who were greeting “The Promised Land” for the first time. The happy people greeted our ship by waving the Jewish state’s flag.’
Here was the flipside of the Exodus story that inspired my love affair with Israel. In all my time as a teenager learning my people’s history I had never been encouraged to think in those terms, that our people’s rejoicing came at the cost of another’s bereavement. The Zionist story I had learned was that this country was ‘a land without people’. But here was one of those supposedly non-existent Palestinians telling me his story of loss and betrayal. I thought how much we could change history if we could raise Jewish children with that simple understanding.
The obstacles to doing it are huge. The apparent inability of Jews in Israel and the Diaspora to address the true roots of the Middle East conflict and accept their role in the Palestinians’ suffering is given an alibi by their fears, which are in turn stoked by stories in the media of the ever-present threat of anti-Semitism, a Jew-hatred in both Europe and the Arab world that we are warned has troubling echoes of the period before the Second World War. A disproportionate part of the media coverage of anti-Semitism concentrates on tarring critics of Israel with this unpleasant label. Anyone who has disturbing things to say about what Israel is doing to the Palestinians is, on this interpretation, an anti-Semite. I have little doubt that the motivation of Israel’s defenders in many cases is to silence the critics, whether their criticisms are justified or not.
My own critique of Israel, that it is a state that promotes a profoundly racist view of Arabs and enforces a system of land apartheid between the two populations, risks being treated in the same manner. So how does one reach other Jews and avoid this charge of anti-Semitism?
Given the sensitivities of Jews after their history of persecution, I think it helps if we distinguish between making a comparison and drawing a parallel. What do I mean? A comparison is essentially a tool for making quantitative judgements: my suffering is greater or lesser than yours, or the same. Jews have a tendency to demand exclusive rights to certain comparisons, such as that nothing can be worse than the Holocaust, because it involved the attempt to kill a whole people on an unprecedented industrial scale. Anyone who challenges that exclusive right, for example by suggesting that Israel is trying to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians from their homeland, is therefore dismissed as an anti-Semite. The debate immediately gets sidetracked into the question of whether the argument is anti-Semitic rather than whether it is justified.
Drawing a parallel works slightly differently. It refuses, rightly, to make lazy comparisons: Israel is neither Nazi Germany nor apart-heid South Africa. It is unique. Instead a parallel suggests that the circumstances people find themselves in can be similar, or that one set of events can echo another. Even more importantly, the emotions people feel in these circumstances may share something of the same quality. That common quality is what allows us to see their suffering as relevant and deserving of recognition, without dragging us into a debate about whose suffering is greater.
I will give an example from my first few weeks in Tamra. I had been visiting families and hearing stories of what had happened to them in the war of 1948, when 750,000 Palestinians were either deported or terrorised from their homes by the Israeli army to refugee camps across the Middle East. This is an event commemorated by Palestinians as the Nakba (the Catastrophe), the loss of their homeland to the Jewish state and the dissolution of the Palestinian people as a nation. 150,000 or so Palestinians managed to avoid this fate, remaining within the borders of the new state of Israel and becoming Israeli citizens. Nonetheless, many of them had experiences similar to the refugees: all the members of my own family in Tamra, for example, were internally displaced in the 1948 war. They lost their homes and most of their possessions when they were forced to flee from villages in the Galilee.
The family of Hassan’s wife, Samira, were expelled from a small coastal village near Haifa called Ein Hod. She once tried to visit Ein Hod to see her parents’ home, which still stands but for decades has been occupied by Jews. When she knocked on the door to ask whether she could look inside, the Jewish owners angrily told her to go away. She has not dared go back since. When I talk to Samira I see the pain she feels at being uprooted, at living only a short distance from her family’s home, but having no access to it or right to reclaim it. In fact, she does not even have the right to a history: the state refuses to remember her story, commemorate it or teach it to new generations. Her past is denied her, which damages her sense of who she is. It is a feeling we Jews should know only too well. After all, Jews have campaigned for the right to reclaim their properties in Europe, seek restitution, win recognition of the wrongs done them, and build museums. In this battle they have been increasingly successful. Why is Samira’s pain not equally worthy of acknowledgement?
This lesson was reinforced by Rasha, a bright eighteen-year-old girl to whom I taught English and who is hoping to go to Haifa University to study psychotherapy. During a tutorial I asked her how she felt about life in Tamra, and she replied that she always felt afraid. This was clearly a sensitive topic, and I proceeded carefully. I asked her what she knew of her family history, such as where her parents were born. She said they were born in Tamra. And what about your grandparents, I asked. She said she knew they weren’t from Tamra. ‘They came from a village,’ she added, only revealing with hesitancy that they were among the hundreds of thousands of refugees forced out of some four hundred villages by Israeli soldiers in the 1948 war. I asked if her parents ever talked about this with her at home. ‘No, because they are afraid too,’ she said. ‘I ask them questions, but they don’t like to talk about it.’
Rasha, it struck me, was living in fear of connecting with her past and her roots. Her eyes filled with tears. I thought, this is the story of this country. How can we educate our Jewish children about the Holocaust, the centuries of discrimination against Jews, and yet here sitting next to me is a Palestinian child who has been forced by the Jewish state to cut herself off emotionally and psychologically from both her personal and her people’s narratives, who is truly afraid to learn about her past? I asked her how she felt about not knowing the truth, and not being able to talk about it in her home. She replied: ‘I don’t feel like I have a future.’
Other families told me of the massacres that took place in their villages and of the tactics used by soldiers to terrify them from their homes. These are not fanciful stories: they are supported by the research of respected Israeli Jewish historians who have spent years trawling Israel’s state and military archives.
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Susan Nathan
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Биографии и мемуары
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 18.04.2024
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О книге: The pioneering autobiographical story of a British Zionist in her fifties who moves to Israel and chooses to live among 25,000 Muslims in the all-Arab Israeli town of Tamra, a few miles from Nazareth.Susan Nathan’s revelatory book about her new life across the ethnic divide in Israel is already creating international interest. At a time when Middle Eastern politics (in many ways central to the current world disorder) have become mired in endless tit-for-tat killings, Susan Nathan is showing – by her own daily example – that it is perfectly possible for Jews and Arabs to live peacefully together in a single community, recognising their common humanity.The author’s familiarity with the former injustices of apartheid South Africa enables her to draw telling comparisons with the state of Israel. The increasing segregation of, and discrimintation against, the million-strong Arabic population of Israel is something she witnesses at first hand, but in describing her experiences in Tamra she is as observant of Arab frailties as of Jewish oppression.Written with warmth, compassion and humour, ‘The Other Side of Israel’ is one courageous woman’s positive life-enhancing response to a situation in which entrenched attitudes lead only to more violence and bloodshed.