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