TARSHIHA, ISRAEL // The Jewish community of
Kfar Vradim, set in the still-verdant hills of northern Israel close to the
Lebanese border, has taken the idea of neighbourly feuds to a new – and noisier
– level.
Last week, it set up a large sound system, pointed it at the
neighbouring homes in the Arab town of Tarshiha, the nearest of which are less
than 1km away, and blasted them with Beethoven and Mozart.
Officials said they were forced to take the drastic step in
retaliation for what they call the “deafening” blare of Arab music from
late-night street parties the villagers have to endure each summer through the
wedding season.
“You can’t believe how loud it is,” said Sue Goodman, 67, whose
home faces Tarshiha’s noisiest neighbourhood across a small valley. “Even with
the windows shut, you can’t hear the TV. And when it goes on late there’s no way
to fall asleep.”
“It must damage the hearing of the people actually at the party,”
added her husband, Geoffrey, 79. “At midnight they usually let off fireworks and
start shooting guns too. It can sound like a war zone.”
“It can be loud,” conceded Amjad Dakwar, 25, an engineer from
Tarshiha who lives close to the Bedouin neighbourhood where the loudest weddings
are held. “The families there tend to have parties in the street rather than in
wedding halls and it’s difficult to get away from the noise.”
But Mr Dakwar, like many people in Tarshiha, has little sympathy
for his neighbours in Kfar Vradim. “Wedding parties are part of our culture. The
people of Kfar Vradim chose to live right next to Tarshiha and build on our
land. If they don’t like it, they should move back to Tel Aviv.”
Relations between Israeli Jews and the country’s large minority
of 1.3 million Arab citizens have been marked by tension since Israel’s founding
in 1948. Jews typically claim the minority is disloyal, while Arabs say they
face endemic discrimination.
Rarely, however, has music become such a contentious issue.
According to Kfar Vradim’s council, they turned up the volume on
recordings of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, Mozart’s Requiem and Puccini’s opera
Tosca only after talks failed with Tarshiha’s residents.
One unnamed official told Israel’s popular website Ynet: “We just
felt we had no other choice. All of our attempts to explain that the loud music
is undermining our quality of life have failed.”
A council spokesman, Golan Yossifon, denied claims that Kfar
Vradim is trying to recast its dispute with Tarshiha as a “clash of
civilisations”. “Generally we have excellent relations,” he said.
The unnamed official, however, issued a barely veiled threat,
saying Kfar Vradim might blast Tarshiha for a second time if it did not quieten
down. “Everything will depend on developments. However, if we are forced to play
the music again we shall put the speakers closer to the neighbours’ houses.”
There has been no official response from Tarshiha.
Kfar Vradim is also preparing to buy a
meter to measure the decibels of the wedding party music. It says that such a
move would “render matters clear and not up for discussion or interpretation”.
Despite Mr Yossifon’s claim of good relations, both the Goodmans
and Mr Dakwar admitted there were other, long-term tensions between the two
communities.
“The Arab families complain that we are sitting on their land but
they sold it to Kfar Vradim,” said Mrs Goodman, a potter. She said there had
been demonstrations in Tarshiha when they and other families moved in to their
new neighbourhood 10 years ago.
“Most of us shop in Tarshiha and they know they can’t have it
both ways. If there are nationalist demonstrations, we can always take our
business elsewhere.”
Tarshiha’s inhabitants, however, say most
of the land was not sold but confiscated by state bodies that wanted it for
settling Jews.
Rowda Bishara, whose famous Christian
family is from Tarshiha – her brother is the exiled political leader Azmi
Bishara – and herself heads the Arab Cultural Centre in Nazareth, said her
father’s extensive land holdings had been confiscated many years ago.
Much of the town’s seized land was later transferred to Jewish
communities like Kfar Vradim for their expansion, she added.
Both neighbouring communities are unusual. Unlike Israel’s other
rural Jewish villages, which were established by the state or Jewish
organisations, Kfar Vradim was founded by one of Israel’s wealthiest
businessmen, Stef Wertheimer, in the mid-1980s.
It was created as a well-to-do private housing estate for workers
in his nearby Tefen industrial zone. As his business empire grew, so did the
estate, creeping ever nearer Tarshiha. Today it is a thriving community of
nearly 6,000 Jews.
Tarshiha, meanwhile, is the only Arab
community in Israel merged with – and, many residents complain, dominated by – a
Jewish town, the much larger Maalot.
“Although we have a joint municipality, Maalot is actually
further away from Tarshiha than Kfar Vradim and unaffected by the wedding
parties,” said Mr Dakwar.
Tarshiha, which dates back to the Canaanite
period, has a mixed population of 5,000 Muslims and Christians compared to
Maalot’s 16,000 Jews.
But like most Arab communities inside Israel, Tarshiha has little
control over its room for growth, which has been tightly restricted by
successive governments.
“You have to ask why Vradim is so close to Tarshiha. The goal, as
with other Palestinian communities, is to surround us and limit our space for
development,” said Ms Bishara.
Mr Dakwar said Kfar Vradim was preparing to expand on to a new
area of Tarshiha’s lands, to its east, bringing yet more Jews close to Tarshiha
– and its weddings.
Although most Jewish and Arab citizens live in entirely separate
communities, a long-standing policy by the authorities’ to “Judaise”, or make
more Jewish, areas heavily populated with Arab citizens, like the Galilee, has
often brought the two groups into uncomfortable proximity.
Complaints by Jews about noise from Arab neighbours typically
concern disturbances caused by the early morning call to prayer from mosque
loudspeakers.
In 2002 the mixed city of Jaffa, next to Tel Aviv, announced that
it was buying a system to limit the volume of local mosques’ speakers after
complaints that the muezzins were too noisy.
Not all Jews living near Tarshiha agree with Kfar Vradim’s method
of retaliation. Rina Liebovitch, who lives in a community called Meona, said:
“The residents of Vradim are acting like kindergarten children.”
She accused them of being “snobs”, and added: “There’s more to
this than just a complaint about noise. I don’t know exactly what’s behind it
but it’s not pleasant.”
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