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