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

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.’