The Israeli Arab extended family and the inner courtyard: a historical portrait

Abstract

This article presents significant transformations in the social history of the Israeli Arab extended family as reflected in the architectural history of the inner courtyard – once the focal point of the extended family's economic and social life. The article places this socio-architectural perspective within its broad political, economic and demographic contexts. As an interdisciplinary study in the sociology of space, it weaves together anthropological insights regarding social structures and processes and geographical explanations of the rapid changes in the landscape of Israeli Arab villages, towns, and cities.

Keywords:

• extended family
• inner courtyard
• Israeli Arabs
• sociology of space
• domestic architecture

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank the residents of Wadi Ara and its environs for their generous hospitality and kind assistance in the interpretation of the built environment.

Notes

 1. This train of thought is primarily based on the classic work of E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: V. Gollancz, 1963), which is not only a sophisticated Marxist history, but also a path-breaking study in cultural history.

 2. George Macaulay Trevelyan, Illustrated English Social History (London: Longmans, 1942–51), 1: xi.

 3. George Macaulay Trevelyan, Illustrated English Social History (London: Longmans, 1942–51), 1: xi

 4. Wadi Ara lies in the northern part of ‘The Triangle’ – a territory annexed to Israel according to the Armistice Agreements signed between Israel and Jordan on April 3, 1949. The northern part of ‘The Triangle’ stretches between Baqa-Jatt (34,312 inhabitants as of 2009) and Umm al-Fahm (46,053 inhabitants as of 2009), the two principal towns in the area.

 5. This claim is analysed in the work of Amos Rapoport, one of the founding fathers of architectural anthropology, House Form and Culture. In this influential study, Rapoport examines the various factors that affect the design of traditional domestic architecture, and attributes great importance to socio-cultural factors. For more on this subject, see Amos Rapoport, House Form and Culture (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1969), 46–82. A clear and enlightening example of the contribution of architectural forms to the understanding of social structures, which supports Rapoport's work, is Jean-Pierre Beguin et al., L'Habitat au Cameroun: Présentation des Principaux Types d'Habitat, Essai d'Adaptation aux Problemes Actuels (Paris: Éditions de L'Union Française, 1952).

 6. The influence of climate on the architecture of the house is discussed in Rapoport, House Form and Culture, 83–103; and the influence of technology: 104–25.

 7. An inspiring example of a geographer's perspective, that draws insights from the architectural text, can be found in the work of Yi-Fu Tuan, Segmented Worlds and Self: Group Life and Individual Consciousness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 52–85.

 8. The results of Rosenfeld's research were published at the end of the 1950s: Henry Rosenfeld, “Processes of Structural Change within the Arab Village Extended Family,” American Anthropologist 60, no. 6 (1958): 1127–39. This theory was refined and processed in detail in his essay: “Cultural Reasons for Tensions in the Arab Village,” in They were Peasants: Social Anthropological Studies on the Arab Village in Israel [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1964), 7–73.

 9. For a critical review of the structural functionalism school in British social anthropology, see Edmund Ronald Leach, Rethinking Anthropology (London: University of London, Athlone Press, 1961), 1–27. For more on structural functionalism in Henry Rosenfeld's anthropological work, see: Dan Rabinowitz, Anthropology and the Palestinians [in Hebrew] (Raanana: The Institute for Israeli Arab Studies, 1998), 75–91.

10. Rosenfeld's studies were the point of origin for two important anthropological studies in Arab villages in Israel. The first is Abner Cohen, Arab Border-Villages in Israel: A Study of Continuity and Change in Social Organization (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1965). Cohen's work was criticized by Talal Asad, “Anthropological Texts and Ideological Problems: An Analysis of Cohen on Arab Villages in Israel,” Economy and Society 4, no. 3 (August 1975): 251–82. The other is Joseph Ginat, Women in Muslim Rural Society: Status and Role in Family and Community (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1982).

11. A comprehensive geographical review based on Rosenfeld's work and further developed in this article is Michael Meyer-Brodnitz, “Dynamics of Physical Changes in Israeli Arab Villages,” in The Lands of Galilee, ed. Avshalom Shmueli et al. [in Hebrew] (Haifa: The Society for Applied Scientific Research, 1983), 2: 745–62.

12. Between 1946 and 1978, the built-up areas of the Arab settlements increased more than tenfold, according to Meyer-Brodnitz, “Dynamics of Physical Changes,” 745.

13. For more on this subject, see for example Moshe Brawer, “The Internal Structure of the Traditional Arab Village,” in The Arabs in Israel: Geographical Dynamics, ed. David Grossman and Avinoam Meir [in Hebrew] (Ramat-Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 1994), 103–7.

14. The history of the relations between the village centre and its periphery (the development of the periphery, emptying of the centre, and the new building therein) is described in Rassem Khamaisi, “The Impact of Centrifugal and Centripetal Factors on the Structure of Arab Settlements,” in Grossman and Meir, eds., Geographical Dynamics, 114–27.

15. Rosenfeld, They were Peasants, 10–11.

16. Rosenfeld, They were Peasants[0], 12, and see for example Sharif Kanaaneh and Lubna Abd Al-Hadi, Lifta [in Arabic] (Birzeit: Birzeit University Press, 1991), 22–3.

17. The political economy under the British Mandate in Nablus mountain, which is adjacent to Wadi Ara, was described by Sarah Graham-Brown, “The Political Economy of Jabal Nablus, 1920–48,” in Studies in the Economic and Social History of Palestine in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, ed. Roger Owen (London: Macmillan, 1982), 88–176.

18. For a comparable socio-architectural study of gender and space in the same region of Wadi Ara, see Kobi Peled, “The Architectural Metamorphosis of the Israeli–Arab Kitchen: Social Structures, Cultural Patterns, and Gender Identities in a Spatial Perspective,” Journal of Women of the Middle East and the Islamic World 7 (2009): 199–228.

19. Among the classical studies of traditional Palestinian domestic architecture are Karl Jäger, Das Bauernhaus in Palaestina: Mit Rücksicht auf das biblische Wohnhaus (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1912); Taufik Canaan, “The Palestinian Arab House – Its Architecture and Folklore,” Journal of the Palestine Oriental Society 12 (1932): 223–47, 13 (1933): 1–83; Gustaf Dalman, Arbeit und Sitte in Palästina, vol. 7, Das Haus (Gütersloh: C. Bertelsmann, 1942); Yizhar Hirschfeld, The Palestinian Dwelling in the Roman-Byzantine Period (Jerusalem: Franciscan Printing Press, 1995); Suad Amiry and Vera Tamari, The Palestinian Village Home (London: British Museum Publications, 1989).

20. In good weather, visitors could be accommodated in the courtyard, as described in the story “A Women's Prudence,” which relates the life of a woman in Baqa al-Garbiyya at the beginning of the twentieth century. See Joram Meron et al., Seed of Pomegranate: The Woman in Arab Folktales [in Hebrew and Arabic] (Givat-Haviva: Jewish–Arab Center for Peace, 1997), 235.

21. Yosef Meyuhas, The Fellahs [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1937), 1. Meyuhas (1868–1942) was a Jewish author, educator and a scholar of Arab folklore.

22. For further details, see Taufik Canaan, The Palestinian Arab House: Its Architecture and Folklore (Jerusalem: Syrian Orphanage Press, 1933), 41–2.

23. Rosenfeld, “Processes of Structural Change,” 1137.

24. This is one of Rosenfeld's central claims. For further details, see Rosenfeld, “Processes of Structural Change,”, 1130–34.

25. Rosenfeld holds that the daughter has official rights and a legal share in her father's property, but it is customary for her to waive these rights in return for the support of her brothers. She is promised their help in times of need. Although the married daughter is subservient to her husband in his father's household and is required to obey her mother-in-law, legally and emotionally she is closely tied to her brothers and her father's family. For further details, see Rosenfeld, “Processes of Structural Change,”, 1128.

26. For example, see Shmuel Avitsur, Man and his Work: Historical Atlas of Tools and Workshops in the Holy Land [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Carta, The Israel Exploration Society, 1976), 206–23.

27. In the mid-1940s, less than one-fifth of Arab village residents lived outside of the crowded built-up area. This information is based on a survey of Arab villages conducted by the Mandate authorities in 1945. At that time, in villages that were very close to cities and main roads, there were many more residents residing outside of the crowded built-up village centre. See Brawer, “The Internal Structure,” 105.

28. Rosenfeld, They were Peasants, 23, 48, 78.

29. Rosenfeld, They were Peasants, 35–6.

30. Valuable information can be found in Grossman and Meir, eds., The Arab Settlement in Israel; Meyer-Brodnitz, “Dynamics of Physical Changes”; G. Golany, “Geography of Settlements of Eron Valley Region” [in Hebrew] (PhD diss., The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1966); Avshalom Shmueli et al., The Little Triangle: Transformation of a Region [in Hebrew] (Haifa: University of Haifa, The Jewish–Arab Center, Institute of Middle Eastern Studies, 1985).

31. For further details, see Khamaisi, “The Impact of Centrifugal and Centripetal Factors,” 121–2.

32. This policy is briefly described in For further details, see Khamaisi, “The Impact of Centrifugal and Centripetal Factors,”, 124.

33. The spatial isolation of the Arabs in Israel stems from socio-economic elements within the village itself, as well as from attachment to the land and the place. For further details on this subject and on the subject of urbanization in periphery conditions, see Yitzchak Schnell, “Processes of Change in the Israeli Arab Village: Urbanization in Periphery Condition,” in Grossman and Meir, eds., The Arabs in Israel, 128–49. For an interpretation of spatial isolation as a component in the control of the Jewish state over its Arab citizens, see: Ian Lustick, “Segmentation as a Component of Control: The Isolation and Fragmentation of the Arab Minority,” in Arabs in the Jewish State: Israel's Control of a National Minority (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980), 82–149.

34. Compare with Meyer-Brodnitz, “Dynamics of Physical Changes,” 757. Interesting information on the attitude toward living together with the extended family in the same house, as opposed to adjacent dwellings, is found in Majid Al-Haj, Social Change and Family Processes: Arab Communities in Shefar-Am (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1987), 93.