Abstract
This paper reconstructs the author’s geographies of childhood growing up as a Palestinian in a small village in the Galilee in the early 1950s. It seeks to narrate his experience as a ‘shepherd boy and a schoolboy’ at a certain phase of his life. This type of duality in performance of tasks in everyday life – being a schoolboy but also a shepherd/goatherd contributing to the family’s work, and the maintenance of the household and home from a young age – is presented as a revealing experiential autoethnographic window. It becomes a prism for exploring spatial memory and attachment, and for reading a place and understanding what such places mean to their indigenous inhabitants and occupiers (i.e. people are not ‘thrown’ into places but they make them). The paper further demonstrates that indigenous attachment by individuals to their home place can be a catalyst for political resistance and directly challenge forces emanating from state ideology, as illustrated here in the case of Palestine. Today, as 60 years ago, Palestinian ‘homes’ are seen by Palestinians who are challenging Israeli policies of uprooting on a daily basis as sites impregnated with distinctive existential qualities and a high level of resistance. Such places and spaces acquire substantial new meaning for their indigenous owners who are compelled to dare to protect and guard them.
Introduction
Plant ideas, like yeast in dough The coldness of the Galilee in our nerves Live coal . . . hell in our hearts If thirsty we get rocks we squeeze If hungry we get soil we eat . . . and we never leave Our redolent blood we don’t spare . . . We don’t spare . . . we don’t spare . . . Here we have a past . . . A present . . . And a future
Laou tibnili bayt fi Makka Ana mana raiyh ‘abia’ak bayti (‘If you build a house for me in the holy city of Mecca, I will not sell you my house’) – Mohammad Saleh Ahmad al-Falah
2
(Falahat, Galilee, Palestine)
The two epigraphs to this essay express the core of native Palestinian emotional and existential attachment to their homeland. In his poem ‘Here We Stay,’ Tawfik Zayyad – a Palestinian poet who was mayor of Nazareth at the time of writing – addresses the extent to which the ‘1948 Palestinians’ (those residing in the Galilee and under the hegemony of the Israeli state) are deeply attached to their homes. Their profound sentiment is that no matter what, they will stay put, facing the Israeli authorities and Israeli policies aimed at uprooting them. Zayyad uses the metaphor ‘If hungry we get soil we eat . . . and we never leave’ to remind readers what happened to the Palestinians in an-Nakba, the catastrophe and war of 1948 associated with their violent expulsion from their villages and towns, and to admonish ‘Never again.’ Mohammad Saleh Ahmad Al-Falah, an ordinary native of the Galilee, tells us that he is not prepared to replace his bayt (home) with any other, even in the holy city of Mecca itself. In her ethnographic research in the West Bank, Nadia Abu-Zahra quoted Palestinians expressing similar sentiments of powerful attachment to place and how an individual’s strategy of staying-in-place informs an essential part of both personal and collective identity. A woman named Rema was very assertive: ‘At the end of the day, they [the Israelis] are not going to win. Because we’re stubborn. We’re stubborn bastards, right. I got nowhere else to go. This is my home. They can do what the hell they want. But I’m staying.’
3
Nazeeh, another West Bank resident, was resolute and hopeful:
What makes us hold [tightly] to this [way of] life and to stay in this place – this land – is our right to this land and our right to this country. My right to this land, inherited from my father and my grandfather, is the motivation to continue in this life and resist. Perhaps in the lifetime of my children, or my grandchildren. If I cannot liberate my country, my child will.
4
The passages above are linked in content and spirit with the concept of sumud, Arabic for ‘steadfastness’: the determination ‘to stay put, to cling to our houses and land by all means available.’
5
Edward Said finds sumud ‘an entirely successful tactical solution’ at a time when no efficacious strategy is available. For Palestinian exiles, sumud is manifested in their determination to cling to a sense of self and nation, no matter where they live. Said calls it ‘a way of turning presence into small-scale obduracy.’
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He contends that it is difficult to maintain identity in exile. In his words:
Identity – who are we, where we come from, what are we – is difficult to maintain in exile . . . we are ‘other,’ an opposite, a flaw in the geometry of resettlement, an exodus. Silence and discretion veil the hurt, slow the body searches, soothe the sting of loss.
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In their determination to cling to the notion of Said’s ‘who are we, where we come from, what are we,’ the Palestinian diaspora community in Toronto founded Al-Bayt al Filistini (‘The Palestine House’) – a space of social gathering for the Palestinian community in and around the metropolis. It is a dynamic space in the present that embodies and reproduces a diaspora group’s deep message of belonging and national identity and its memories of a past space and time.
My purpose in this essay is to reconstruct the story of my home village in rural Galilee through the prism of my childhood, and from an exploratory autoethnographic vantage to revisit the notion of the making of a place. 8
Dovetailing with the broad concept of belonging to a place and homeland, a specific natural topography and cultural landscape, I will attempt here to reflect on my own personal experiences of growing up in Galilee, Palestine, selecting a chapter from my childhood. In so doing, I wanted to bring into new light my own village and its ‘geographies of place,’ where I lived during much of my childhood and early youth, and to narrate how the villagers and their children worked and lived and made sense of their place and space. In the process, the place transformed them, and in turn they transformed the topography on the ground, both materially and in their hearts and minds, establishing a strong bond with these places while renewing their ancestral bonds with the landscape.
Writing through an autoethnographic prism
For certain sections in this essay, I employ a kind of autoethnography grounded in self-recollection. 9 While I am now physically far from my home village in Palestine, the chapter of my childhood that I choose to discuss is also removed by some 50 years from the present. Certainly there are many memories that have filtered out of my memory since that time and place. Can I overcome my subjectivity and reveal both the bright and the dark side of my childhood? Do I really want to disclose some of the shameful and childish actions that I did while I was kid? Am I now fully aware of my own positionality while I place myself within the broader social and political context? These are a few salient questions I ask myself as I write. Obviously, I am constrained by the degree to which I am allowing myself to disclose personal details that may hurt others. My recollections do not exist in isolation. There are others who are implicated in my story, and telling the full story may somehow intimidate or embarrass them. These constraints involve the ‘relational ethics,’ which autoethnographers must handle wisely and carefully. 10
My writing is in significant part a self-narrative of my own memories of learning in the methodological armature of autoethnography. Ellis and Bochner describe this as a process where a writer uses one’s own experience to examine a culture or sub-culture. 11 This sub-culture in my case is my Bedouin Palestinian village in Galilee. At the time of my investigation, the village was under Israeli military rule and I and my family also belonged to the Palestinian nation and people with whom Israel was and remains in conflict.
I should admit that after three decades of dedicated work on my homeland and beyond, I do not see myself as an expert autoethnographer. However, in a modest way, some of my previous publications may generally be placed within four categories of autoethnographic practices – three of which were postulated in a typology sketched by Butz and Besio. 12 In some ways, I am an ‘insider research practitioner’ 13 who is an academic researcher studying my own people/homeland and have an intimate knowledge of my sub-culture due to the fact of being in a unique site of representation. Does this allow me to use my ‘insiderness as a methodological and interpretive tool 14 for inquiry? Or am I an ‘indigenous ethnography practitioner’ 15 (equal to native ethnographer 16 ) who has an extensive ‘metropolitan academic training’, 17 studying his own group but ‘often from a position of opposition to existing metropolitan representations’? 18
At this stage, I would stress that both these models of autoethnographic practice would comfortably fit my own unique situation. I started my academic career by writing a doctoral dissertation of the Galilee Bedouin 19 to whom I belong ethnically and culturally, then I wrote another book on the An Naqab Bedouin of southern Palestine 20 and have used my ‘insider’ knowledge and training in order to often refute the Israeli establishment claims of Zionism as a tool for ‘civilizing the Bedouin’ in Israel and supposedly treating them in a just and fair manner. When ‘researchers use themselves as their own primary research subjects’ 21 and employing ‘the dual identities of academic and personal selves to tell autobiographical stories about their experience in daily life . . .’, 22 they are essentially practicing personal experience narrative – a third autoethnographic practice identified by Butz and Besio. 23 In the past, my writing of four essays (two of which were published) after my detention in Israeli prison in July 2006, were very close to this practice, as I was drawing on my experience of how I was interrogated by Israeli secret police during 23 days of captivity. 24 Indeed, the writing of these four essays about my imprisonment would fit better into another autobiographical practice (not mentioned by Butz and Besio), namely ‘writing as therapy’( i.e. writing personal stories (that) can be therapeutic for authors 25 and they try to free themselves from a burden of shattering experience.) An example of such would be a person who is diagnosed with cancer and writes about his own experience and healing process, as reflected in the autobiographical graphic narrative by Marchetto (2006), Cancer Vixen: A True Story. 26
Significantly, doing autoethnography is, as Ellis et al. contend, both a process and product. As process (i.e. method) ‘an author retroactively and selectively writes about past experiences’ 27 and that ‘[m]ost often, autobiographers write about ‘epiphanies – remembered moments perceived to have significantly impacted the trajectory of a person’s life’. 28 I may forget (or try not to remember) many events in my childhood. I will never forget, for example, the day when the motahir (the ritual Muslim circumcision practitioner) came to my village and my father asked him to circumcise me and two brothers in one painful ceremony. I may continue to remember very vividly the funeral of my grandfather who passed away in 1957 and later my grandmother in 1963 – events that touched my heart and familial belonging. These are time markers (signifiers) on which I build other events in my childhood narrative as I build a recollection grounded on emotion and objectivity. Autoethnography as a product is engaging in a practice and narration that is ‘aesthetic and evocative, engage[s] readers, and use[s] conventions of storytelling . . .’, 29 helping to bring the reader into the ‘scene,’ 30 ‘experience an experience’ 31 and better understand the culture in which it is embedded.
The meaning of ‘Bayt = Home’ and Palestine
In the lexicon of Palestinian toponomy, dozens of village names begin with the word Bayt (home). As a prefix in names of localities in Palestine, 32 and elsewhere in the Arab world, Bayt signifies strong attachment to one’s birthplace and community. Bayt also has the deep connotation of ‘home’ within a psychological and existential envelope of personal identity and belonging. No matter where Palestinians are currently residing, they have, as Sa’di writes, an ‘eternal past.’ 33 In his words, Al-Nakbah (The 1948 War) is ‘a Palestinian event and a site of Palestinian collective memory; it connects all Palestinians to a specific point in time that has become for them an “eternal past”.’ 34 It informs and nourishes their sense of homeland, anchored in the specific scale of ‘village’ locality. As Kinnvall stresses, the conception of ‘home’ has the ability ‘to link together a material environment with a deeply emotional set of meanings relating to permanence and continuity.’ 35 In his study of Place, Cresswell discusses the centrality of home in human experience. For him ‘[h]ome is an exemplary kind of place where people feel a sense of attachment and rootedness. Home, more than anywhere else, is seen as a center of meaning and a field of care.’ 36 And for Blunt and Dowling ‘the defining features of home is that it is both material and imaginative, a site and a set of meanings/emotions.’ 37
Homes take on a strong meaning for Palestinians. The right of return – the basic human right for all refugees of any country to return to their homes – formed the basis of UN Resolution 194, which stated that Palestinians had the right to return to their ‘homes.’ The resolution was remarkably specific, and in fact the notes describing General Assembly discussions of the resolution indicate that all broader formulations were rejected in favor of direct reference ‘to their homes.’ 38 The home for the Palestinians can have multiple scales. It can be the concrete home equal to the houses in Resolution 194 (i.e. dwellings inhabited by its residents, in specific villages, towns, and space, and that of the country = homeland). All these scales for those in exile are imagined and binding together all Palestinian refugees is the common anticipation of a return to one’s home; this is the common ‘imaginary’ in Anderson’s sense of ’imagined communities.’ 39
Knox and Marston’s statement that ‘places provide the settings of people’s daily lives,’ 40 as well as Flint’s elaboration on people’s daily experience: ‘[w]hat we may do, what we are aware of, what we think and “know” are a function of where we live’ 41 provide a useful conceptual framework for the present essay. Drawing on Blunt and Dowling’s notion that says ‘[h]ome does not simply exist, but is made,’ 42 Harker focuses on domestic spaces and practices in his research on Palestine because, according to him, ‘they create more intimate knowledges about the people and things that produce such spaces than many geopolitical studies in Palestine.’ 43 Indeed, in some respects both this essay and Harker’s fit neatly with the nested content of Said and Mohr’s After Last Sky, which aimed through photographs and text to ‘capture them [the Palestinians] at their daily work, raising children, teaching, doing homely chores, simple acts of continuance.’ 44
In this essay, I explore domestic practices (anchored in my own experienced everyday life world) pertaining to my village, carried out by its people at a certain point in time, and connect them to events and broader issues that give meaning to places. My intention is to uncover the multifaceted geographies that underpin the cultural and social fabric of a small Palestinian village/community that was once a vibrant place.
Sahl el Battuf and Falahat village in lower Galilee: a historical geography background
I start this section by revisiting my birthplace and its vicinity over hundreds of years, as it was narrated in travelers’ books and maps; 45 it is a sort of outsider metropolitan gaze on what the place looked like to Europeans, and aims to plumb its historical depths.
The Plain (Sahl in Arabic) of el Battuf in the lower Galilee is today the largest remaining tract of land still owned by the local Palestinian villages that surround it on all four sides, including my birthplace, Falahat. This plain, which stretches from east to west, appears in almost all pre-1948 maps attached to travel books. For example, a map dated 1903 and inserted between pages 96 and 97 of the second edition of the Guide to Palestine and Egypt 46 shows Sahl el Battuf prominent in the left upper quarter of the map, surrounded by four Palestinian villages of the time: Kefra Manada, Rummâneh, Nimrîn, and Ilabûn. The map also shows a smaller plain to the south, the Plain of Turân, named after Tur’an village, located midway between Nazareth and Tiberias. The name Jebel Tur’an does not appear on this map, but the brown color shading shows an existing mountain range, stretching from east to west between these two plains. This is the Jebel Tura’an, which along with Sahl el Battuf was a spatial icon in my geographies of childhood (see further discussion below).
Guy Le Strange cites the Arab geographer, Shems ed Din Abu Abdallah Mohammed Al-Damashki (ca. 1300
Turkish sources dating to the late 16th century mention a number of Palestinian Arab villages surrounding Sahl el Battuf that paid taxes to Turkish authorities for the crops they grew: Kafr Mandā, Rūma, Άrrāba, Sahnīn, Saffūriya, Tu’ān, Rūmāna, al-Bu’ayna, and Άylabūn. 49 All these villages still exist, with the exception of Saffuriya, which was depopulated during the an-Nakba war in 1948/49. 50
Conder writes that ‘[t]he brown and fertile plain of the Buttauf, in the basaltic soil of which tobacco, corn, maize, sesame, cotton, and every species of vegetable grow luxuriantly, lay at our feet.’
51
He describes Bu’eina village, the closest village to Falahat:
[o]n the last day of June we marched east to the miserable little hamlet of El B’aîneh, which, with two others, stands on the north of slopes of Jebel Tôr’an, an isolated block of mountain rising out of [the] plateau of Buttauf. Here we found the inhabitants all fever-stricken from malarious exhalations of the great swamp, which even as late as July extended over half the plain. The place was evidently unhealthy, and we were tortured by the armies of large mosquitoes rendering sleep impossible at night.
52
Ten years later, Geikie describes the plain as ‘a spacious sea,’ 53 noting that ‘El-Buttauf is dependent for its fertility on the rains which in their season pour down from the hills that surround it on all sides, and turn its eastern end for part of the year into a marsh.’ 54
Today, the name of Falahat village is nowhere to be found in any Israeli official census or map, although that was the settlement’s name used by everyone in the nearby villages and towns. Falahat was, and remains, one of several dozen officially ‘unrecognized’ Bedouin villages in the Galilee. In field research for my doctorate some three decades ago, I enumerated the Bedouin population of the Galilee and found that as of 1 September 1981, Falahat village was inhabited by 72 persons. According to my enumeration, there were 22,377 persons classifiable as Bedouin in the Galilee, of whom 5313 lived in 23 villages not recognized by the Israeli authorities. 55 Until mid-September 2011, there were only two elderly persons (aged 81) 56 still living permanently in the village, and only one house remains intact (see Figure 1). This single house is visible on maps (e.g. google.com) located between the village of Bu’ayna (as spelled there) and Uzayr to its west.
Photograph remaining of house in Falahat village, Galilee, Palestine, 1995.
Figure 2 is a photograph of the village that I took in June 1977. The photo shows a total of seven modern houses built on the site and still intact. There were two more houses, located some 300 m to the west of the village, which my camera could not capture.
View of Falahat village from north, June 1977.
Social, cultural and political backgrounding
Below, I wish to delineate salient aspects of the social, cultural, political context and time framework that my narrative moves through. This section provides some general background to the more detailed sub-sections that will follow. It should be made clear that the analysis and narrative here center on a case study of a non-western child’s experience, growing up in a traditional rural and powerfully patriarchal household located far from any larger urban or so-called ‘modern society.’ Codes of conduct and social morality are Arab-Palestinian, and distinctively Bedouin. Looking at that lifestyle from today’s perspective, now situated in Western society, I contend that that patriarchal household order, under the political and social circumstance of the time, was a kind of adaptive strategy for survival. It is true that I had to follow the orders of my father (and sometimes my mother) as all kids do, but at the same time parents are constantly empowering their kids in order to grow up as strong individuals and share responsibility in household management. I remember that my father was away when there was a wedding to which he was invited in a neighboring village called Bu’eina. I went and purchased a sack of rice as a gift and I rode the horse, putting the rice sack in front of me on top of the saddle and went to the wedding. The wedding took place outdoors in an open space where hundreds of invitees were gathered. As I arrived, riding the horse, the crowd could see the sort of gift I was bringing, and I received a warm welcome. My horse was taken care of and I was accompanied by the bridegroom’s father and was seated with the elderly men and had dinner with them. So, in this incident, I replaced my father in performing a social obligation and I felt good about myself because I gained a double reward: I was treated well by the elderly people of Bu’eina village and the next day my father was happy and proud of me.
Most everyday life activities were carried out outdoors, in public space in Falahat. For my village at the time of investigation, ‘public space’ encompassed any open ‘waste’ or unutilized space between the village’s houses, and the space extending outside the boundaries of the built-up village. The only ‘public’ space that I would describe that would to some extent match today’s concept of public place is that of the guesthouse that my father inherited from my grandfather. Indeed, unlike the case in most urbanized habitations today, the boundaries between private and public spaces and places were blurred and sometimes obliterated. I was able to enter any house in the village at any time I chose and sleep there overnight, help in household work and be treated as one of the sons. There was no need for prior appointment. This is not some odd custom of Bedouin culture that one can explain simply in terms of hospitality. Rather, it should be interpreted as a kind of social investment that often can be used on occasions when households are in need of assistance from others (e.g. at harvest time, when building a house, wedding ceremonies, funerals, etc. – events and situations where the members of one household cannot perform specially needed activities alone). This was something like the ‘social capital’ present on the American frontier where people ‘offered assistance in giving birth . . . participated in quilting parties, and raised houses and barns.’ 57
Children in our village were not required to be under ‘domestic’ supervision much of the time. They were not expected to stay indoors during non-school time for matters of safety and security, as is the case in many urban spaces across the globe. Village children in my experience had substantial free time and opportunities available for them to create their own places of playground and be more acquainted with wider spaces outside the village. They were more in contact with nature in a natural and free way. When we were young, we made four playgrounds for soccer. My grandfather used to have two threshing floors and we used the sites to play after the harvest season was over.
As indicated above, the children of our village were empowered by their parents at an early age to be independent, do things on their own, and not fear the dark. For example, a child would be rewarded for not being frightened to perform a task after nightfall, to fetch water from a well or search for a goat or a cow that was lost. Sometimes this meant searching long after sunset, in a landscape with no artificial lighting whatsoever. A child, especially male, would be considered as progressing nicely toward manhood by performing such tasks. Dangers for children were quite circumscribed. Some examples: parents often warned their children to be careful not to fall off a horse while riding too fast, not to provoke a dog that might attack, not to fall in the well while fetching water, not to fall from a tree (we used to climb often), and to watch out for poisonous snakes during the summer. Parents often reminded children of these risks, and they were mentioned in traditional stories and tales. I remember an incident that there was a kid from the nearby village of Sakhnin who was visiting his grandfather (named Abu Mosa) in the summer when he was on vacation from school. The grandfather was camping in a tent in el Battuf Plain, facing my village. He was bitten by a highly poisonous snake at night and eventually died because his family was unable to take him to hospital on time. Due to the absence of paved roads and of cars in villages, it normally took some 10 hours until one could reach some of the hospitals. I remember there were only two car owners in Bu’eina village – the closest village to my village. The owners of these cars were the most wanted people (as well as obviously respected), who would take women in labor to hospitals in Nazareth to give birth. Most of my brothers and sisters including me were not born in hospital but at home with the help of my grandmother and other village women.
Children were significantly empowered by their parents by means of extending to them the responsibility of grazing the family herd. This extended the reach of child geographies in a special substantial way: children went out some distance from the core village, and in the process we were engaged in ‘exploring’ the topography of places around homes. We were often assessing the best grazing areas for our domestic animals, searching tirelessly for new markers and sites of ‘fun and excitement.’ We would explore features inside caves, looking for water sources in rocks or digging for water, admiring rocks of different shapes, examining places where we would find mushrooms to harvest in the winter. In the spring, children often observed the nesting places of certain birds in rocks or in high and thick trees and bushes. Another activity we enjoyed was to find a tree and cut a piece from its branch to make a slingshot. These diverse activities brought the children close to their environment and tremendously enriched their leisure time when few other diversions of any kind were available, and few children had store-bought ‘toys.’ We only had small transistor radios to enjoy Arabic music and listen to broadcasts of neighboring Arab countries.
Since the Palestinian schools in Galilee were not conducive to developing any kind of political awareness under the control of Israeli curricula – and down to 1966, a regime of military law 58 – we were constrained to a formal education by teachers who were fundamentally ‘intimidated’ by the state. The upshot of this was that both parents and children were left alone to an appreciable extent in a kind of spatial enclave of their village. As I see that today through an autoethnographic prism, the importance of the place we were living in was the ‘whole world’ for us, it was a distinctively central hub of memorable experience. Consequently, the attachment of the children growing up in Falahat to their village and its spaces and social fabric was especially heightened, deeply felt and consolidated at that time.
In terms of politics, members of Falahat village were not nationalistically motivated or engaged in any clearly demarcated open confrontation with the Israeli authorities. The village was totally neglected by the state, and received no state services during the 1950s and 1960s, including no utilities. So we were left alone, somehow to ourselves, and the state in this period of military rule had few worries about ‘non-loyal’ elements in the Palestinian citizenry. Yet, after the end of military rule, state intervention in the life of village residents was slow in beginning. There was basically no development and no government services in the period after 1966. When the state authorities moved to begin influencing Falahat after about 1980, the Israeli government was already engaged in its policy of rapid Judaization of the Galilee. 59
In closing this sub-section, I wish to stress that I have tried here to point out the wide range of domestic practices and activities I was engaged in during my childhood in a small Palestinian village inside the Israeli state. Limitations of space here permit me to concentrate only on two of my main activity spheres: school attendance and contributing to the economy of my household (see further discussion). But my leisure activities, some alluded to here, were also an essential component of making a place and infusing it with profound personal meaning. I had plenty of opportunity with other children of my village and neighboring villages to carve out free time and develop a wide range of activities that children loved. At the same time, we all were proud that we were engaged in contributing hands-on to the survival of our household and its well being.
Growing up in rural Galilee
I want now to share some thoughts about my experience in Falahat during my early childhood years.
It is 1957, and I am four years old; my grandfather has just died. I remember his funeral well; he was 71 and the founder of the village. I wish here to reconstruct the geographies of my childhood during a period of more than a decade, from that early memory in 1957 until my graduation from elementary school in Bu’eina village, a 3 km trek on foot to the east of Falahat, in 1968. My method of reconstructing such geographies of growing up is to explain personal spatiality as I moved in and around Falahat in the world of my daily life and round of tasks.
During this period, I was growing up as a Palestinian child within a state where my people in Galilee were under military rule – a great iron blanket of coercion that we lived under from 1948, some five years before my birth, until 1966, the year I turned 13. When military rule was imposed, Palestinians were about 11 percent of the population of the Israeli state – the ‘Palestinians of 1948,’ including my father and mother. A year after it was lifted came the great war of June 1967, a shaping memory for me. A third significant event in the somehow distant state I was growing up in was the National Water Carrier, under construction when I was in elementary school and completed in June 1964. All these events had an impact on the lives of Falahat residents and of people living in nearby villages in the lower Galilee.
Prior to the lifting of military rule as I entered my teens, Palestinians within the Israeli state were not allowed to travel to urban centers without prior written permission from a military governor. They could not work in the towns. 60 Villagers had to turn to the land and cultivate all possible cultivable tracts, especially in the mountainous area near Falahat village. Orchards (hawakir in Arabic) were expanded, and more fig trees and grapevines were planted. During the summer season, I can recall how the farmers erected tents in their fields on the Sahl el Battuf, where Falahat is located; they stayed there overnight, watching over and caring for their crops in the fields. With the lifting of military rule in 1966, Palestinians in the lower Galilee and elsewhere were less restricted in their travels to urban centers, especially to Haifa and Tiberias. They could seek job opportunities there and even stay overnight if this was deemed necessary.
A new space now opened up for the villagers: they could search for job opportunities in cities, and pressure on the land eased. As a result, by the mid-1980s, orchards almost vanished. The residents of Falahat had traditionally raised livestock; now they began to purchase land and combine breeding livestock with some agricultural activities.
The construction of the National Water Carrier, which passes through the Plain of el Battuf from east to west along its northern length, was devastating for some villagers, whose land was confiscated by the government to facilitate the construction of the canal. Confiscated land belonged mainly to villagers of Eilabun, ‘Arraba, Sakhnin, and Kafr Manda. At the same time, some villagers in the lower Galilee benefited from the new job opportunities available at the time of the construction of the water carrier. My father was employed as a night watchman at a number of points along the carrier where bulldozers and other equipment were located. He commuted on horseback to Falahat on a daily basis, except on weekends, when he had to stay at work and I or my elder brother had to take food to him – a two-hour journey by donkey from Falahat. I understood that this water carrier was somehow not for us but for the people in the cities far away, where I had never been.
It is very hard to assess the impact of the June 1967 war and its aftermath on the lives of Palestinians in the villages of the lower Galilee, including Falahat, at least from my perspective as a young teenager growing up there. The war came almost immediately after the lifting of military rule. Somehow the Israeli state became more confident in itself militarily. One phenomenon I remember occurred during the first days of the June 1967 war, in Bu’eina and in Nujedat, to the east: the mukhtars (leaders) of these villages placed white flags on the roofs of their houses that could be seen from a distance, signaling that they did not intend to join any army and were ready to surrender to whoever won the war. I also noticed that Bu’eina residents rushed to clean up caves and store food and water there as a precaution against any emergency that might arise from the war that had erupted so suddenly.
How economic necessity and social past re-define distance
In this section, I wish to explore how Falahat’s residents were meshed with their Arab environment through a web of economic and social relations, and then place my household and my personal experience into this existing spatial pattern. Concepts of relative location and microgeography are useful for framing the discussion.
Falahat was a small hamlet composed of a dozen households, located at the intersection of Jebel Tur’an with a point at the mid-southern edge of Sahl el Battuf. The houses themselves were jurisdictionally located on a block of land registered within lands belonging to Tur’an village, located on the other side of the mountain. Yet Falahat’s agricultural lands belong in total to the ‘Arraba village jurisdiction. Villagers from both Sakhnin and ‘Arraba owned parcels of land (mawaris in Arabic) that extended almost to the front yards of Falahat homes. Thus, the entirety of the agricultural land fronting Falahat was known by the local name ‘Qashqush,’ and under this designation was mentioned on pre-1948 maps. 61 Falahat is also located midway between two other villages, ‘Uzeir and Bu’eina. The two closest connections that my father’s household had during the period under investigation were with Bu’eina and Tur’an. The connection with Bu’eina was imperative: Falahat’s children had to walk there to attend school. Bu’eina had also three or four small groceries where residents of Falahat could buy basic food and school supplies. For my father’s household, however, Tur’an was the main economic focus. We purchased many of our household needs from Tur’an; at the same time, we sold individual customers milk products, specifically cheese (labaneh in Arabic), and goat meat. My father had an arrangement with a butcher shop in Tur’an where he was able to send a goat from our herd when he needed immediate cash. Tur’an was also a connecting point for buses going south to Nazareth. 62
The road to Tur’an is longer and more difficult walk than the road to Bu’eina. We first had to climb the southern slope of Tur’an mountain (over 400 m in altitude), taking a narrow, zigzag route suitable only for domestic animals and humans on foot, moving between rocks and trees, until we reached the top plateau of the mountain, then to descend the southwestern slope to reach Tur’an.
Important to stress in the geography of everyday life for Falahat villagers is a fact that transcends all theories of relative location and central place when the villagers of the time made decisions about where to purchase basic daily goods and equipment: the grinding poverty that shaped people’s lives. In general, Falahat villagers were poor and struggling for survival, and as such were ready to walk or travel to quite distant villages where they might find some shop owner ready to give them what they needed on credit. Purchasing on credit is an adaptive survival strategy in traditional societies, typical of Developing World economies, and Falahat’s residents practiced this survival strategy too. It is also known in urban areas, and was probably much more common than is generally realized in low-income neighborhoods of North American cities in the past.
Other households in Falahat also had a distinctive network of connections with the surrounding Arab spaces that I was aware of. Three heads of household in Falahat had wives from ‘Uzeir, and one had married a woman from Luhaib El Furush. Both these villages were located to the west of Falahat, and these households were thus more connected to these villages than to Bu’eina or Tur’an. This also had an impact on how they traveled to Nazareth. The easiest and most suitable route to Nazareth from ‘Uzeir and Luhaib Furush, as well as from Rummana (located between these two villages), is to travel first to Kafr Kanna, and from there take a bus to Nazareth. I observed as a teenager that members of these four Falahat household members whose wives (or mothers) came from ‘Uzeir and Luhaib Furush followed the pattern of the latter villages when they decided to travel to Nazareth, a journey of ca. 15 km.
How trust re-defines the scale of relations
The connection of Falahat residents with both ‘Arraba and Sakhnin villages were minimal, since these two villages were located farther away to the north and had no direct road connection with Falahat. But that minimal connection was most useful for my father and our household, thanks in part to my father’s special hospitality, as I will explain below. Over the years, my father managed to purchase most of his land from residents of these two villages, as well as of Bu’eina. Mother Nature also played a major role. During much of the winter, a certain portion of Sahl el Battuf is flooded with rain, and a huge lake up to 30 or even 50 cm deep forms that lasts for several months. Hence, came the name Marj al Ghark or El Gharaq (the Drowned Meadow), mentioned earlier. This temporary lake separates homes in Sakhnin and ‘Arraba from their winter field crops in Qashqush, that is, immediately adjacent to Falahat village. When the owners of these fields came to visit their crops, my father was a generous host, welcoming them into a guesthouse we owned. 63 My father had inherited from my grandfather the only guesthouse in the village, and there he offered food, coffee, and hot tea at no charge to anyone visiting the village, a mode of traditional Bedouin hospitality. My father continued this tradition until he was hospitalized in mid-September 2011, eventually passing away in early October of that year. The villagers of ‘Arraba and Sakhnin, as I recall, often visited our guesthouse and socialized with my father when he was there during winter.
During the hot summer season, a different form of hospitality was available for the villagers of Sakhnin and ‘Arraba: fresh cold water from a new well (beir in Arabic) that my father had purchased from a resident of Bu’eina village. No doubt that hospitality had a very positive impact on the landowners when they decided to whom they would sell their land. In retrospect, I think there was also another decisive factor: these landowners were confident that my father, once he purchased the land from them, would never sell it to a Jewish buyer or to any Israeli state authority. It was well known that residents of these two villages were highly motivated by Palestinian nationalism at the time, and they remain so today. They did not want their land to end up in non-Palestinian hands. So this is a dimension, at a micro level, of a broader struggle over land and its de-Palestinization that shapes the broader conflict – both the geopolitical and ideological struggle over land in the Galilee and the Palestinian–Israeli conflict in its broadest senses. The trust my father gained transformed the relationship between villagers to one simultaneously between co-nationals. The scale changed from being one of solely the village, to one concurrently of village and nation.
How the nation, village and child re-define one another through reticulations of ‘responsibilities’
Next, I wish to detail my own spatiality and movement in place. First, it is important to note that whatever applied to members of my household or my father’s connections and trips to neighboring villages and towns was partially also the envelope of my own space, because I sometimes accompanied him in these economic and social transactions and connections. At the very least, I was informed of the stories connected with these movements. 64
I had two important tasks at that time. First, as the second child in our family’s division of labor, I was responsible for taking care of the young goats (kids). This was very important to the household’s micro-economy. My older brother (who was pulled out of school after completing fourth grade) had to devote full time to caring for the herd of goats that my family then owned. This herd of approximately 40 to 60 goats was the family’s main source of income. Each year the female goats gave birth to between 30 and 40 new kids. When the kids reached about 10 months of age (around October or November), my father sold the male kids (keeping four or five for breeding purposes and slaughtering some of them for religious holidays and when needed), but kept the sakhlat (female kids) with the herd. Through this practice, the herd doubled itself within three or four years. At that point, my father sold half the herd, reducing it to its original size so that it could be better managed. With the cash proceeds from selling half the herd, our household had to make a major decision: we could either add a new room to the house or buy an additional piece of land – usually the latter.
It should now be apparent that there was a rational survival strategy employed in my father’s household, and a long-term plan for how to survive economically in our location. So our home grew through the hard labor of the people residing there. He and his family members, myself included, shared the burden of accumulating the necessary cash to establish our existence in Falahat. From this perspective and many others, Falahat was transformed by us, and it simultaneously transformed us to love it and be attached to it. Children had a central responsibility to the family, while the family helped to build the village and its community.
My second important task was as a pupil at an Arab school. Starting in 1959, at age six, I was sent to first grade at Bu’eina elementary school, more than an hour’s walk through the hills from Falahat. Bu’eina’s was the closest school, and there were no buses. I had to skip kindergarten because it was so far to walk; most children in Falahat at the time did not go to kindergarten, because our parents did not want us to walk so far as five-year-olds. No government assistance in transportation was available, and children were left alone on their first footpath in life, so to speak. At that time, there was no direct paved road for cars between Falahat and the two neighboring villages, Bu’eina in the east and ‘Uzeir in the west. During the winter, the village was cut off from the rest of the world when the rains came. For local transportation during the 1950s and 1960s, each household had one domestic animal or another – a donkey, a horse, a mule, and/or a camel. While only a microcosm of the relations between state responsibility and childhood, this issue of transport was an early initiation into the realities of a colonizing movement in my homeland, where transport was readily available for the colonizing ‘Other.’
Duality in performance: shepherd boy and a schoolboy
Actual school hours in Bu’eina were not overly long; we had, at best, three to five class meetings per day, and an equal number of recesses in order to adjust to the limited number of teachers and available classrooms. It was not until I was in the fifth or sixth grade that there was a single school building available where all pupils were assembled in one place. Prior to this, classrooms were scattered all over the village, in rented rooms or in people’s private houses. Teachers came from outside Bu’eina, mostly from Tur’an and Eilabun, and nearly half of them were Christians. There was one teacher, originally from the depopulated Saffuriya village, who had married a woman from Bu’eina and lived in the village; but not until my seventh-grade year did Bu’eina produce the first three teachers of its own, who joined the school staff. During my time in elementary school, there were three school principals, who came from Nazareth (a Muslim), Eilabun (a Christian), and Nazareth (a Christian).
Significantly, teachers in Arab public schools were under strict surveillance by state authorities, and during the period of military rule (until 1966), any appointment of a teacher in an Arab school had to be approved by the Mukhabrat (secret police). Teachers ‘were afraid to talk freely in class, to teach history the way they understood it, or to discuss political affairs.’ 65 Continuing well into the 1980s, lists were kept of Palestinian ‘high school and college graduates suspected of “antigovernment activities”’ 66 whose blacklisting then blocked their employment in ‘government agencies [and] in privately owned Jewish establishments.’ 67
I remember an occasion, when I was in fourth or fifth grade, when I and a classmate approached a teacher and asked him the following question: ‘Teacher ‘Ali [‘Ustaz ‘Ali], who are the Bu’eina people siding with? With Jamal Abdul Nasser [then Egyptian president and a major “enemy” of Israel at the time] or with Israel?’ Our teacher, as I recall, was caught by surprise by this ‘political’ question. He got angry, yelled at us, and said: ‘Get out of this room . . . !’ He never did answer our question. Arab schools that adhere to Israeli Zionist curricula were, and still are, not conducive to critical political awareness. For example, we learned more at school about Israeli president Levy Eshkol than about any other leader in the world, and nothing about any Arab leaders. The creation of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1964 was never mentioned by the Bu’eina schoolteachers. I think it is accurate to say that I learned far more about political events and who was the president or king of an Arab country from a few weeks of listening to the radio than during the entire eight years of my education in Bu’eina. There was a kind of blackout on all such knowledge, part of the iron control of young minds by the Israeli state.
I noticed this quite clearly when I moved to Nazareth and attended my first year of high school there, the ninth grade. My classmates born in Nazareth and in other larger villages, such as Umm el-Fahm, Jatt, and Kafr Qari’, were more advanced in their political awareness, and certainly in the configuration and depth of their Palestinian-Arab identity. Their sense of Palestinian self was more mature than my own.
Significantly, I remember that when I was in fourth or fifth grade, almost every household in Falahat had a radio, but there was no TV. I listened to Arab-language broadcasts from Syria and Jordan and to a broadcast called ‘Voice of London.’ There was one TV in Bu’eina, in the household of a community member who charged people to come to watch the wrestling program, usually broadcast at night in black and white. There were no color TVs at the time. My elder brother and I, and other children from Falahat, often went to Bu’eina to watch a weekly wrestling program, and walked back in the total darkness along the hilly road to Falahat.
There was plenty of free time for me during the school year. This disadvantage at school was a kind of boon for our household, because it allowed me to stay at home in Falahat, taking care of the young goats, on days when there were no classes for me in the morning. There were days when the elementary school operated in shifts: younger children were taught early in the morning, and older ones mostly in the afternoon. I recall that in seventh or eighth grade, I never attended school before noon for an entire year. So there was a year when my day was divided into two equal periods: I was a shepherd boy in the forenoon and a schoolboy in the afternoon. Such staggered attendance schedules, of course, remain common in some places today, even in large urban areas in countries such as Malaysia. Structuring school time in this way can have a huge impact on children, especially those with economic tasks at home.
Jebel Tur’an and Sahl el Battuf: two landmarks in the geographies of a Galilee childhood
The Jebel (Arabic for ‘mountain,’ hereafter used to designate Mount Tur’an) and the Sahel (Arabic for ‘plain’ or ‘valley,’ hereafter used to designate el Battuf Plain) are two places in the topography of the lower Galilee that had huge existential meaning in my childhood, closely intertwined with the lives of the Falahat people and with mine in particular. It was from the Jebel that my grandfather, my father, and the rest of Falahat excavated and shaped stones to build their first houses; they used natural caves at the edge of the Jebel to shelter their domestic animals in the cold Galilee winter. The Jebel was also the source of firewood for preparing food and heating homes in winter, and throughout the year, during the 18 years when Israeli military rule left Falahat and its inhabitants on their own, without any state services (though their animals were taxed). More importantly, the Jebel provided grazing space for domestic animals from Falahat and neighboring villages all year long, as I will explain below.
The Jebel
By the time of my grandfather’s death in 1957, though not yet five years old, I had already acquired substantial knowledge related to the grazing habits of different animals. I knew that cows, sheep, donkeys, mules, and horses prefer to eat grass, both dry and green, and thus their grazing domain could be found near the village, so there was no need to ascend high up the slopes of the Jebel. I also knew that these types of domestic animals move very slowly when they graze. By contrast, goats run fast when they graze, and although they eat grass, they have more appetite for bushes and leaf and blossom of trees. Goats also like to climb cliffs and rocks, scrambling up in order to reach a tree branch.
How did this animal behavior affect the division of labor in my family and the spatiality of movement of this livestock? From my simple description, it should be apparent that cows, sheep, donkeys, mules, and horses owned by Falahat households grazed on the lower altitudes of the Jebel, while goats grazed in the middle and especially the upper altitudes, where there is a wealth of thickly wooded areas on the plateau. 68 My parents’ household had no mules or sheep, and none of the other Falahat households had such animals at the time. We owned a horse and two donkeys for transportation and two cows. 69 These animals do not need much care when grazing, and my mother and younger sisters could handle the task of taking them out and bringing them back for watering when needed. They could keep their eye on them from a distance while doing other household tasks.
What remained was the important task of caring for the grazing goats and kids. My job was taking care of the kids, and so my domain was the middle altitude. It was closer to home and grazing was done in the morning. The kids could be kept at home for several hours, then taken out to graze in the late afternoon. Both kids and mature goats had to be accompanied by their goatherd to prevent them from getting lost, since goats like to move fast in one direction. More importantly, once goats move in a new direction in their grazing space, they usually do not return on their own. So the task of the goatherd is to call them and make them return in the opposite direction. This is what a goatherd must know, his or her professional knowledge. Another reason for watching carefully over grazing goats is to prevent them from mixing with other herds from other villages. Very often a goat or two might end up in the herd of another villager if they were not properly supervised. Significantly, kids need to be separated from their mothers during the day and night, so that the mother goats can be milked twice a day (early morning and early evening). Once our mother goats were milked, kids and their mothers mixed together freely. 70
The patterns of goat grazing in the lower Galilee were also complicated in line with the seasons. In the summer, the goatherd had to bring back the goats for watering in designated places, around wells or back home, and let them relax until the noon heat passed. In the winter, on the other hand, there was no need to bring the goats back to designated places for watering. Goatherds usually graze their goats near certain sources of rainwater, retained in the cracks of rocks; in the topography near Falahat, many of these cracks were found in places where humans cut stones in ancient times, creating wide holes in the rock that filled with water in the winter, and this water could last for many days or even weeks. In addition, grass and tree leaves are characteristically damp in winter, so that a goat does not need much additional water. In all seasons except the fall, goatherds had to make sure their goats did not enter the fields and disturb the field crops near the Jebel’s border with the Sahel, causing damage to the crops. This could happen, and when it did, it generated friction between the owners of these fields and the goatherds. The fall was the most relaxing season for goatherds, because both seasonal crops had been harvested and animals could be left to graze without much surveillance.
The Sahl
During the summer, the Sahl played the major role in food production for households, and new grazing opportunities opened up for the livestock. The Sahl el Battuf was, and remains, well known for its succulent watermelons, grown without irrigation. All kinds of vegetables for immediate consumption were grown in nearby fields, including okra, eggplant, tomato, and cucumber. During this season Falahat households had less need to climb the mountain to shop in Tur’an or other places, since produce was readily available from fields near home.
In the summer, managing grazing goats and other domestic animals required a great deal of attention by shepherds and goatherds. This was the time of the year when the two seasonal crops intersected. In early summer, winter crops, mostly wheat and barley, were harvested; in adjacent fields there might be summer crops that would not be ready for harvest until August or September. Shepherds would let their animals graze on the remains of plants in the harvested winter croplands, which were sometimes only tiny tracts between summer fields planted with watermelon or sesame. In such a situation, more than one shepherd was needed to do the job. It was usually handled in one of two ways: either additional members of the household (father, mother, sisters and brothers) joined the grazing activity, or two herds were combined, mixing the animals so that both shepherds could watch over them. At day’s end, they counted their goats or sheep before returning home. Taking care of young goats in the summer is less complicated than herding older goats, but they still need to be managed well. It is common knowledge among goat owners that kids must be fed properly and intensively so that they need less milk from their mothers; that milk can then be sold in the market.
Since school was out for summer vacation from the end of June to the first week of September, I worked full time to take care of my family’s kids, while my elder brother watched over the adult goat herd. Other brothers and younger sisters were mobilized to work when needed. The summer season brought all family members and all domestic animals into ‘one ship,’ so to speak – an intensively shared space. By the time school started in September, my household had already secured enough resources to face the coming cold winter and were able to purchase everything needed to live in dignity in Falahat – a model of a Palestinian household rooted in its place on the land, in tune with nature and the local topography.
Conclusion
I started this essay with quotes from the mayor of Nazareth, my father, and two other Palestinians residing in the West Bank, currently under Israeli military occupation. These individuals are all linked to their localities and expressed strong emotional attachment to their respective homes. I used the term sumud (resistance) loosely in order to show the exceptional situation in which Palestinians living under Israeli hegemony find themselves. To most outsiders living somewhere in a western democracy, it may seem that staying in one’s place is something quite common, nothing exceptional. This is not the case in Palestine; Zionism is still in high gear there and the threat of taking over a Palestinian house, further land or access to water by the Israeli government is in the back of the mind of each Palestinian. This self-reflection is meant to give some answer to the question; who are we? To point out how our home in various scales of analysis is part of us – and our identity. I delved into the past and have chosen a chapter of my childhood that overlaps with the first decade of Israel’s existence. At that time, our village was ‘colonized’ via a strategy of de-development and at schools we were de-Palestinized through strict Zionist curricula and teachers who were under careful surveillance. This strategy emanating from the Israeli metropolitan power was clearly not conducive for training my generation to be future scholars and acquiring genuine technological knowledge. I have shown here that despite the fact that I lost a half day of school while I was taking care of my household business, I succeeded and later became an academic. This success was in large part due to the cultural group and the community in which I was raised. My parents and the Palestinian Bedouin culture I was socialized in were the sole energizing basis for moving on in my life and overcoming material constraints as well as becoming an independent individual. My fascination with landscape and space was nurtured as a young boy roaming the hills around our small, isolated settlement.
Butz and Besio indicate that ‘[i]ndgenous ethnographies are often credited with being more authentic than others.’ 71 This statement holds true in my case as a son of the Galilee and Falahat village. While I am now separated from Falahat by thousands of miles, it is etched in my being, part of a personal identity card forged in mindfulness and memory. The house of my father that he and my grandfather built is still there, as are their graves. There is no guarantee, however, that this house will stay intact much longer. Time erodes the past for us all, but the Israeli state erases Palestinian structures from the very ground as part of the Zionist project. Nonetheless, come what may, my memories and the chapter of my childhood so closely bound up with this house are still alive and fresh in my mind.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I would like to extend my gratitude to two anonymous reviewers, Bill Templer, David Butz, Nadia Abu-Zahea, and Laura J. el-Khoury. Each of them provided me with very useful comments and suggestions in various stages of writing, and I am indebted to them all for their insightful feedback. I take full responsibility for the contents and of course any errors I may have overlooked.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.