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