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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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, СКАЧАТЬ