This article examines environment and ecology in the urban space of Nazareth through a focus on ḥawākīr (sing. ḥākūra), or traditional domestic gardens, as a cultural and ecological institution, and the changes they have undergone in recent decades.Footnote 1 We document the process by which ḥawākīr, which were once a basic element of all or most households in Nazareth, have contracted continuously to the brink of disappearance, without vanishing entirely. Through the biography of these traditional gardens, we trace major transformations in the character of the city's neighborhoods, and residents’ shifting attitudes toward these upheavals, to unravel the cultural logic that informs hawākīr. Lastly, dwelling on the intense condensation of the built environment and the rapid shrinkage of green open spaces, our study explores the potential of incorporating a renewed version of ḥawākīr into a balanced and sustainable future urban development. This ecoanthropological study aspires to broaden the discussion of urban ecology within Palestinian Arab society in Israel, and in Middle Eastern cities more broadly, by showing the relevance of a local cultural tradition to globally circulating ideas of sustainability.
Until 1948 the ḥākūra was an essential and integral part of the home in Nazareth. It provided food, was a source of income in times of need, and constituted a major locus of social life, particularly for women. This classic type of ḥākūra, which many in the city still remember vividly, no longer exists because of overcrowded building areas, land overuse, rising water prices, competition over urban space, and changing lifestyles. In their place, we find two main types of ḥawākīr: one that we call “temporary ḥawākīr,” which are provisional gardens on relatively small plots that families wish to keep open until their sons are ready to build homes of their own; and another that we call “contemporary ḥawākīr,” which, unlike the temporary ḥawākīr, are cultivated gardens, though their size and richness are usually much smaller than the classic ḥawākīr. Typically, these latter ḥawākīr are kept as a hobby—or an enterprise—by dedicated individuals and are not an integral part of the family's daily life. Some are kept by aging, affluent men, at quite a significant cost. Others are kept by women of lesser means as part of microbusiness schemes that encourage them to open their home to tourists. Still others are kept in the backyards of businesses, serving as a nostalgic consumer product and an emblem of authenticity. Lastly, we document one attempt, replete with challenges and obstacles, to keep a ḥākūra as an environmental practice. The discussion then dwells on the resonances between changing practices around and meanings of ḥawākīr and the changing character of the urban landscape, on the value of ḥawākīr as sites of attachment and identity, and on the potential of their revival to enhance urban sustainability.
ENVIRONMENT AND ECOLOGY IN PALESTINIAN SOCIETY IN ISRAEL
Within the growing body of scholarship on Palestinians, “environmental” research is a very recent addition. Only a handful of studies focus on the more specific interaction between environment and culture.Footnote 2 Considering that some of the main concerns of Palestinian society are quintessentially “environmental”—lack of access to land and water, poor infrastructure, lack of urban planning, high exposure to pollution and environmental hazards, improper management of wastewater and waste, overcrowded villages, and moreFootnote 3—it is intriguing that ecology and environment are still under-researched. The same holds for historical-environmental research. Areas that were under the rule of the Ottoman Empire are well archived with many sources on environmental conditions and events throughout the Ottoman period. But research on the ecology of Ottoman Palestine is still relatively poor.Footnote 4
Perhaps more than the relative dearth of academic research, it is striking that Palestinian political discourse does not include an environmental agenda, particularly considering the enormous grievances of Palestinian citizens concerning land confiscations. Although Yawm al-Ard (Land Day), commemorated annually since 1976, consciously puts the land at the center of the conflict, it is not associated with environmental grievances. Palestinians and Israeli authorities alike instead frame it as national protest.Footnote 5
NAZARETH AND ITS HAWĀKĪR: BACKGROUND
Until the first decades of the 20th century, Nazareth was the smallest and least important city in Palestine. During the nakba in 1948, unlike other Palestinian cities in what became the State of Israel, Nazareth wasn't depopulated. Instead it absorbed Palestinian internal refugees from its surrounding villages and doubled its population. Also unlike other Palestinian cities in Israel, Nazareth remained exclusively Arab. Over time it grew to become a major Palestinian city, and eventually the capital city of Palestinians in Israel. Nevertheless, since the establishment of the State of Israel, Nazareth has been subjected to processes of deurbanization, which entailed gradually evacuating its official offices, forestalling the development of the infrastructure necessary to accommodate rising residential density, imposing an economic blockade that forced residents back to a subsistence economy, and other measures.Footnote 6
Over this stretch of time, the needs of Nazareth's Palestinian citizens, who underwent nearly two decades of military rule, were largely ignored. Authorities focused mainly on setting rules for construction permits aimed primarily at preventing Palestinian villages from expanding.Footnote 7 The Israeli planning system, which is highly centralized and bureaucratically cumbersome, with local plans subject to the approval of regional and then national planning committees, and often affected by intricate bargains between various parties beyond the municipal level, only added to residents’ difficulties.Footnote 8 In the case of Palestinian towns and villages, the 1965 Israeli Planning and Building Law decreed that all localities should have a master plan within three years from the day the law was announced, and that their approval process should not last more than four years from the day a plan was submitted. However, the actual approval process lasted at least twelve years.Footnote 9 Nazareth itself did not have an approved master plan for decades. Until 2003 it was left with its 1942 master plan devised during the British Mandate period. In 1982 the Nazareth municipality submitted a new plan, but it was rejected by the district planning committee. In 1986 the regional committee submitted another plan for the city but it was not filed because of the objections of the local municipality, which claimed that the plan did not reflect the needs of the city. In 1998, the local municipality together with governmental agencies cooperated and submitted another master plan for the city for 2020, based on the principles of condensation and densification. Like its predecessors, it was not approved because of a conflict between the planning team and the steering committee, which included representatives of the various ministries. Thus in 2003 Nazareth was left with its 4,500 hectares master plan of 1942, while its actual area amounted to about 12,500 hectares.Footnote 10
For the city's ḥawākīr, the extended period of stalled or even reversed urbanization was a blessing. As we will detail, these gardens played an important role in sustaining the city's food supply under military rule, and because people were not allowed to build new houses, there was little pressure to convert them into building spaces. Like other Arab and Muslim cities in the Ottoman Empire,Footnote 11 Nazareth's first maps (1868, 1914) show communal divisions of space.Footnote 12 This pattern, which weakened under the British Mandate, was reinstated after 1948. Communal division of space and deurbanization have continued to play a major role in the ecology of the city, and both features can be traced to the transformations that its ḥawākīr underwent over the past few decades. The story of these orchards thus reveals the complexity of environment and environmentalism in Nazareth through their entanglement with dynamic political economy, kinship politics, and gender relations.
The historic ḥākūra was a cultural institution well adapted to the region's environmental conditions and political-economic institutional setting. The gardens’ species composition and irrigation methods, and their immersion in a complex system of exchange among neighbors, made sense amid the Levant's semiarid climatic conditions, significant fluctuations in annual rainfall, and limited water availability. At the same time, the ḥākūra was adapted to the laws of mashāʿ, or collective ownership, which prevailed in Palestine during the Ottoman period. As we will explain in more detail shortly, within the general system of mashāʿ, the ḥawākīr were part of the small mashāʿ, a hybrid form that combined collective and private land ownership. This system allowed households to use specific plots continuously, even if they were not allowed to sell or transfer them, thus optimizing their subsistence practices.
Since the nakba and the creation of the State of Israel, the main factor affecting ḥawākīr in Nazareth was the rapid decline in the availability of land and water. During the Mandate period, the British had restricted free access to these resources, but Israel restricted it further through its unequal distribution of resources between Jews and Palestinians. Palestinians who remained in Israel have suffered oppression and discrimination in many aspects of daily life. Immediately after the 1948 war and the displacement and exile of most Palestinians, the state declared 93 percent of the land under its tutelage to be “State Lands.”Footnote 13 The amount of land owned by Palestinians was thus reduced from nineteen hectares per person in 1945 to 3.4 hectares per person in 1950.Footnote 14 In sum, in less than a decade Palestinian landholdings inside Israel had been reduced to only 2.6 percent,Footnote 15 and this figure subsequently decreased further. After the initial confiscation, the state activated more than thirty-four regulations as part of a policy of spatial Judaization. The most prevalent actions were the construction of new Jewish settlements on the territory of the remaining Palestinian localities, the designation of certain areas as military zones to prevent farmers from reaching their plots, and the confiscation of these plots on the pretext that they were not being cultivated; areas within the Palestinian localities were rezoned as green or slotted for reforestation, further reducing their growth potential. The extreme land scarcity that resulted is particularly evident in the Galilee, which used to have a Palestinian majority.Footnote 16 Through this process, between 1945 and 1962 Nazareth lost 62 percent of its land to the new, neighboring Jewish city of Natsrat Illit.Footnote 17
Alongside the rapidly dwindling land, water also became a scarce resource. Under Ottoman and British rule water owned by the state was free, available, and accessible, while water sources on private land were considered private. Sources for water included springs and streams, groundwater, and collected rainwater.Footnote 18 Under the Israeli Water Law (1959), such sources were nationalized. Losing free access to water had a crucial effect on Palestinian agriculture.Footnote 19 The historical ḥawākīr were not based on irrigation. Yet years later, with the increasing use of fertilizers and pesticides, they became dependent on irrigation.Footnote 20 This dependence made it difficult for the crops to survive droughts—a situation exacerbated by the water reform, which caused a sharp rise in water prices and taxes that disproportionally affected poor and disadvantaged families.
HĀKŪRA: A CULTURAL ECOLOGICAL INSTITUTION
The classical hākūra was a plot of land attached to the house whose main, though not exclusive, component was fruit-bearing trees. Our interlocutors recount fourteen to sixteen species of trees in a typical ḥākūra: lemon, clementine, orange, grapefruit, fig, pomegranate, mulberry, peach, almond, apricot, plum, apple, grape, olive, ʿinab (jujube), and arāsya (black plums) (the last two disappeared from the city during the 1980s). Alongside the trees, families would grow vegetables, herbs, and beans, and rear livestock. Vegetables and herbs included onions, tomatoes, eggplant, zucchini, peas, squash, peppers, lettuce, corchorus, potato, green onion, parsley, mint, and more. Beans included chickpeas and lentils. Livestock was typically poultry, ducks, pigeons, rabbits, goats, and donkeys. Some families bred pigs.
Beside the ḥākūra was the jinayna (another word for garden), which stood between the ḥākūra and the courtyard, or sāḥa, that led to the back entrance of the house, often partially encroaching on the sāḥa. The ḥākūra, jinayna, and sāḥa were behind the house, not in front, providing extended space for an economically productive and socially rich domesticity. Some houses had an additional jinayna in front. The jinayna mainly contained flowers and herbs, with impressive richness and a generous diversity of species, including roses, jasmin, full (jasminum sambac), futna (plumeria), banafsaj (viola), thūm al-samaka (antirrhinum majus), al-shāb al-ẓarīf (mirabilis jalapa), ḥalak bint al-malik (fuchsia), thūm al-ʿaṣfūr, khush-khāsh (papaver), ʿūṭra (pelargonium graveolens), and more.Footnote 21
The average size of the ḥākūra was one to two acres. The house was typically located on a corner. Because of the hilly and rocky nature of the area, the land was terraced into small plots called rubāʿāt. The terraces were reinforced with rocks from the land cleared for the ḥākūra. To separate neighboring ḥawākīr, these rocks were also used to build walls. The latter were rather flimsy, tending to crumble in the rain and easily blurring the borders between neighboring ḥawākīr, which could create friction and even conflict between neighbors. A fifty-four-year-old interviewee named Zuhayr said the following about his father's ḥākūra in the 1960s:
The borders of the ḥākūra were contested. They were made of sanāsil, a fence made of stones. So although neighbors would agree where it should go, because it was easy to move there would often be troubles later on. My dad suffered a lot from the neighbors. After the rain the fence would fall and the neighbor would rebuild it inside our land. Or he would dig caves so he could encroach on our ḥākūra from below, and that would destabilize the earth. My dad was alone. He didn't have brothers or cousins and we [his sons] were young; the neighbor used to attack him in the street and he would fight back. He made a huge effort to protect the land.Footnote 22
Almost every ḥākūra had a bīr, or cistern, for water collection. The roof of the house and the ground of the courtyard were typically sloping, which conveniently caused the seasonal rain to drain into the cistern. Some of these containers continued to serve households in Nazareth until the 1970s, especially in elevated homes atop the hills that lacked an orderly water supply due to low water pressure. They were built and maintained by specialists, and official inspectors would test them and approve or bar use of the water. Fawzi Shliyan, one of those specialists, published a detailed description of the technique of cistern building and upkeep, together with other crafts typical to Nazareth.Footnote 23 Although the 1955 Israeli Water Law had prohibited the collection of rain water, these cisterns continued to function with the support of the state's water authority until the mid-1970s.Footnote 24 The last three official water inspectors to work in Nazareth, ʿAwad Ibrahim, Amin Mahli, and Ibrahim Badawi, retired between the late 1960s and mid-1970s.
The ḥawākīr’s crops were seasonal and people avoided planting the same crop for consecutive seasons so as not to “rob the quality of the soil,” as Zuhayr put it. In order to still get the full variety of food that was necessary for the household, neighbors coordinated among themselves the distribution of crops and plants, exchanging the yield of crops that they did not grow in particular years. Besides seasonal crops, the trees produced fruit year-round, each in its season. The water used in the household flowed down channels to the ḥākūra, and because the soap was made of olive oil it did not harm the crops. Still, though recycled water was good for most trees, including citrus, fig, pomegranate, and olives, some trees, such as peach, apple, and pear, were too delicate and needed cistern water. In addition, some ḥawākīr had natural or manmade caves. They were close to the house and served as storage space and shelter for livestock.
HĀKŪRA RELATED TO MASHĀʿ
The word ḥākūra appears in Arabic dictionaries as vernacular for a piece of land close to the house that is designated for planting trees.Footnote 25 The root h-k-r also produces the words ḥikr, iḥtikār (exclusivity), and ḥakr (little amount of water and food). The same root in different inflections also designates “stability,” “hardness,” and “encumbrance.” The geographer Shukri ʿArraf mentions the phrase taḥkīr al-ard as “plowing” and clearing the rocks, and the word ḥikr as “border.”Footnote 26 Neither appears in dictionaries, which suggests that they might be local derivations of the word ḥākūra.
ʿArraf mentions ḥawākīr as part of the “small mashāʿ” (al-mashāʿ al-saghīr), which he distinguishes from the “big mashā” (al-mashāʿ al-kabīr). He divides the typical Palestinian village into three concentric rings: the village core, surrounded by ḥawākīr, springs, and cemeteries, and jidhr-al-balad (the village fence), which together formed al-mashāʿ al-saghīr, and an outer ring encompassing the fields and the farmlands of the village, which formed al-mashāʿ al-kabīr. Unlike the latter, which was customarily redivided every several years among the village households according to the number of males living in them, al-mashāʿ al-saghīr remained stable over years and did not change owners. The ḥawākīr belonged to the same household and were bequeathed from father to son, allowing owners to invest more in them. The result was reflected in the building and maintaining of terraces and in the planting of perennial trees. The proximity of ḥawākīr to the houses added to their value. On the other hand, this proximity also worked against them. In later years, as we shall see, they were the first lands to be identified as available for building and expanding residential areas.
ḤAWĀKĪR IN THE ECONOMIC LIFE OF HOUSEHOLDS IN NAZARETH
The ḥakūra undoubtedly played a major role in the economic life of Nazarene households. However, this role changed according to circumstances and political conditions. In the late Ottoman period, for example, when many men were absent from the city after being conscripted or fleeing to escape conscription, the amount of physical labor invested in the ḥawākīr decreased. In addition, heavy taxes imposed by the Ottoman government meant that although people could rely on ḥawākīr for food, they were unable to use their crops for profit, as the government would expropriate most of the revenue. Accordingly, in our interviewees’ family memories this period is recalled as one in which households, often managed by women, were obliged to reduce their investments in the ḥākūra to the minimum necessary to meet basic needs.
During the British Mandate, when the political circumstances and general conditions made it possible, people relied on the ḥawākīr for their livelihood to various extents. In times of political instability the ḥawākīr flourished, and had a crucial role in food supply. According to Samira, born in 1929, between 1936 and 1939 Nazareth endured a massive food shortage due to lengthy strikes. In those years ḥawākīr were the city's main food source. After the 1948 war, the city absorbed many refugees and was under curfew and military rule for nearly twenty years. During this period of austerity in Nazareth and in the country at large, the city again relied on ḥawākīr to feed its residents and refugees. Zuhayr recounted his childhood in the 1960s as one of abundant food but few other luxuries:
Growing up in the 1960s we were poor, but we didn't feel poor. It was not poverty of hunger. There is a difference if you don't have a car, a villa, and beautiful clothes, but at the same time you are never afraid that one day you will not find food to eat, because food was always in abundance. What we wanted and didn't have was a bigger house—our house was small. Others had a good life and we got used to simplicity and lived according to our means. Nevertheless, our basic needs of food and drink were met. We always had meat in abundance. We had sheep, rabbits, chickens, pigs, ducks, and geese. We had all kinds [of food] and much more. We had a daily slaughtering. The neighbors bought the meat from us.
As mentioned, seasonal fruit was found in all households. Vegetables, legumes, and livestock were grown as it suited family members, with quantities varying by class and status. Families that could afford buying their groceries from neighbors often put less effort into growing crops themselves and were satisfied with trees and flowers. But hardly any household abandoned livestock and vegetables entirely, as seventy-three-year-old Samya indicates in her description of her parents’ ḥākūra in the 1940s and 1950s:
The hākūra contained everything, and it was a place to do anything [you wanted]. People didn't need to buy food and stuff. It was a source of income for families with private situations [i.e., with no money]. Not everyone used it to sell, but those who were in need [of money] were able to generate income. Those who didn't need [cash] used it solely for their own needs. We didn't need to raise sheep for example. We bought them from neighbors. But chickens, ducks, and pigeons were easy to raise and we always had them.
Talking about her hākūra from the 1970s, eighty-three-year-old Juliet likewise describes poverty alongside abundance:
We had everything in the arḍ (lit. “land,” though commonly used as an alternative term for ḥākūra). It gave generously, gave a lot. We ate from it and all the neighbors ate from it and it never ended. Plenty of grapes—we picked them and gave to the neighbors. Abundant figs, substantial yield. The lemon tree gave fruit all year round and fed the entire neighborhood. We ate, the neighbors ate, and lots stayed on the trees. But this situation didn't last. Today I can't take care of the arḍ anymore. My back hurts. A few years ago my husband had an injury and hasn't been able to work anymore. All the work on the arḍ fell to me and my daughters. We used to have chickens; we had a goat, but not anymore. Today I can't grow things as before. It isn't worth the effort. Everything is now available at the market, and it's cheaper to buy.
Thus, during the British Mandate period and the early decades of the Israeli state, the ḥākūra allowed households in the city to rely to various degrees on a subsistence economy, even as the country was becoming increasingly capitalist. However, as Juliet alludes to, this aspect did not last.
THE HOUSE AND THE COURTYARD
Until the 1950s most of the private buildings in Nazareth outside the old city center were single story. A typical house consisted of two rooms, along with the sāḥa, jinayna, and ḥākūra. The sāḥa was where women did all the housework. Relatives and neighbors would gather and do their chores together. These gatherings were termed qaʿdāt, jamaʿāt, ṣabaḥiyāt, and lammāt, and were exclusively for women. It was disrespectful and improper for a man to take part in them. Men could gather in the sāḥa at night as part of family gatherings, but not during the day. The sāḥa, in other words, was a gender-exclusive space in daytime, and a gender-mixed space in the evening. Women used it for cleaning and cooking, for processing and preserving food, for filling mattresses and pillows with wool, and for a whole range of other tasks under their responsibility.
The courtyard was directly related to the ḥākūra, the bountiful produce of which would be piled up in it for the women to take care of. They would sort out the harvest and decide how to use it according to quality, quantity, and year-round considerations. Some they would use immediately, some they would put aside for sale, and some they cooked and preserved for leaner seasons. They made jam from the fruit, pickled the vegetables, made cheese from the milk, and dried and preserved the meat with salt. A lot happened in the sāḥa. People say that women managed the life of the city from their courtyards. The seventy-four-year-old Nazarene Samya says:
The courtyard was for the women [al-sāḥa kānat li-l-niswān]. They did everything in it. They cooked, cleaned, did laundry; it was a space that gave them relief. Everything they did barra [outside], under the trees, and in the sāḥāt. The women gathered to work and help each other. They talked, took care of the children, and told stories. At the end of the day they stayed and ate together.
However, families differed in the tasks assumed by women. For example, although making fire in the sāḥa for cleaning and cooking was a woman's task, the women in Samya's family paid other women to do it for them.
ḤĀKŪRA IN TRANSITION
After the nakba in 1948, people were shocked by and felt great uncertainty over the massive changes that had taken place. One upshot was that they did not build new homes. In fact, construction in Nazareth stopped entirely for about a decade. Large-scale land confiscations and the influx of refugees created a severe shortage of land.Footnote 27 When construction was resumed in the mid-1950s, the style had changed. New houses typically had two additional floors, each with a separate apartment, above the ground floor. Compared to the earlier houses that had two rooms altogether, the new ones were much bigger, each apartment comprised of two bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen, a bathroom, and a toilet. This expansion of the internal space of the house came at the expense of the outdoors, namely, the ḥākūra and the courtyard. Between the mid-1950s and the 1980s courtyards and ḥawākīr still existed as an integral part of the house, but they were smaller than in the past, and people's attitudes to them changed. Suspecting that there would not be enough land for the needs of future generations, some held onto ḥawākīr to serve as open plots until the time came to build on them. Still, even though they shrank in size, many people kept planting and tending their ḥawākīr until the mid-1970s or early 1980s. During these years, especially following the 1967 war, through which Israel occupied the West Bank and came to control its market, the local markets were flooded with cheap fruits and vegetables. This made work and investment in ḥawākīr seem useless. Gradually, people stopped cultivating their ḥawākīr, though many families kept the plots open until their sons were ready to build their homes.
Most of what we call temporary ḥawākīr had disappeared from Nazareth by the late 1980s. The plots were generally used for construction; a few still exist as “suspended ḥawākīr,” namely, plots kept primarily because families were not able to divide or sell them. To understand what creates such a situation, where in a very crowded city with huge demand for land there are plots that are left open and unused, or unwittingly kept as suspended ḥawākīr, we need to look more deeply into the divisions and history of Nazareth.
NAZARETH: DIVISION AND HISTORY
As mentioned earlier, in the Ottoman period Nazareth was divided into neighborhoods on a communal, namely, religious and parochial, basis. This way of organizing urban space was intended to minimize the kind of friction and bloodshed within neighborhoods that was commonplace in the Levant at that time. It helped the government maintain control, empowered individuals within their communities, enhanced people's sense of security, and answered residents’ need to maintain kinship relations and use neighborhood space for religious rituals.Footnote 28
Maps of Nazareth from 1868 and 1914 show that it was divided into three main quarters: Latin, Muslim, and Greek Orthodox.Footnote 29 This division changed during the British Mandate as a result of the expansion of the middle class through new employment opportunities opened by the Mandate administration as well as general changes in the city's lifestyle. New, mixed neighborhoods appeared mainly in the southern part of the city. The old quarters also became more mixed than before, though some parts were actually redivided by dominant families into homogeneous subquarters. For example, ḥarat al-mazāzwī and ḥarat al-shufānī became subquarters of ḥarat al-lātīn (Roman Catholic quarter), and jabal dār faraḥ became a subquarter of ḥarat al-rūm (Greek Orthodox quarter).
After the nakba, however, the transition to mixed neighborhoods was brought to a sudden standstill. New communal neighborhoods appeared as internal refugees, who relocated to Nazareth and resettled close to their original neighbors, attempted to preserve the social structure of their family and village of origin.Footnote 30 For their part, long-standing residents sought to share space with relatives, and the old pattern of segregated space along sectarian lines emerged anew, and with it the familiar distinctions between qarīb (close, relative) and gharīb (stranger).
Juliet, a widow with six daughters and no sons, lives in a two-story private house. The second floor is the main family dwelling and the ground floor is the mīliya, a small dwelling unit of one room, a kitchen, and a bathroom typically used by young families or older parents. At our meeting she mentioned financial difficulties, and when asked if she would rent out the mīliya to a young family to generate some income, she responded:
Never. I'd rather keep it closed than let a gharīb enter my house, even if I need money. I may allow my daughter or granddaughter with her husband and family to live in it but not a gharīb. Others in the neighborhood do the same. Never sell or rent to a gharīb. Al-qarīb mish mithl al-gharīb [a relative is unlike a stranger].
Juliet's sister-in-law used to live next door to her in their father-in-law's house, sharing with Juliet a plot of land divided by a small fence. After the death of her husband, who left her without children, she moved back to the neighborhood of her family of origin so that her young nieces and nephews could take care of her, and left her house closed up. It stands empty with no one living in it. Similarly, Zuhayr, who lived in his father's home until his recent move to the neighboring city of Natsrat Illit, says he will not rent or sell his house to a gharīb even if that means it will stay vacant. For a few years now, following a family conflict, he has not been speaking to his brother, who lives on the second floor in the family building. Still, he says he would not let a gharīb enter the family area, for that would escalate the conflict. Most Nazarenes with whom we spoke agreed with this principle.
Besides being a cultural institution, then, the ḥākūra is an ecological marker in the urban landscape of Nazareth that reflects the city's history and current condition. Although people in the older neighborhoods still keep open plots as “suspended ḥawākīr” or, as we will show shortly, a pastime, the outer rings of the city feature two distinct types of newer buildings, both without ḥawākīr—albeit for very different reasons. One type is the shikunāt, an Arabic adaptation of the Hebrew shikunim, or standardized housing projects built en masse in Jewish localities throughout Israel in the first decades of the state. The other type is private houses called villa (plural villāt) or kawtij, also an adaptation of the kawtij, as suburbia-style houses that emerged throughout the country from the 1970s on are popularly called in Hebrew.
Until the mid-1980s the lion's share of construction projects in Nazareth were private buildings erected on private land by private entrepreneurs. Shikunāt appeared in Nazareth during the late 1970s. A governmental enterprise built by private companies, they were intended for people who had no share in private lands and for people who are entitled to subsidized housing but can't implement it in communal property. The shikunāt were the first houses in Nazareth without ḥawākīr and courtyards.
Hanin, aged forty-five, has lived in three different residences over the course of her life. The first was the house she grew up in, her parents’ house, which stood on the same land as her grandfather's, uncles’, and cousins’ houses. The second was the house in which she lived with her husband in a neighboring village. In keeping with the patrilocal norm, it was built on land that her husband had received from his father and shared with his brother. Yet unlike her parents’ house, Hanin's marital house was built as an independent unit side by side with her brother-in-law's house in a style that was midway between the classical Palestinian extended family home and the new suburban-style kawtij. Lastly, after her divorce, she moved to a shikun, or small apartment, in a building in a new neighborhood of Nazareth.
Despite strict norms of preference for private residence as reflected in the gharīb–qarīb binary, over the years even the old neighborhoods have changed to some extent. Although many people remain committed to the gharīb-qarīb rule, in practice it has become flexible. Hanin's uncle was among those who stretched it. At some point he was in need of money, and decided to sell his share in the family residence. She says: “It was difficult to do it: first to convince the family and make them accept it, then to find someone who was willing to take the risk and buy a unit in another family's residence. Eventually, he managed to sell it to a distant cousin.”
For Hanin, though, this cousin was a gharīb. Although he was a relative, she had never met him. Since he bought the house and moved in to live among them, the house “doesn't feel comfortable as before.” She says: “I enter the house and I feel that there is a stranger in the house [anu fī ḥada gharīb fī al-bayt]. I can't behave freely as I used to. If my uncle hadn't sold the house, one of his sons, my cousin, would be living here today. Still he is my cousin, not a gharīb.”
In her marital house in an adjacent village, Hanin had a two-story house surrounded by a small courtyard and a jinayna. For Nazarenes this type of house falls into the above-mentioned villa or kawtij style. Unlike the old houses, in this style the house is built in the center of the land and is surrounded by a jinayna designed by an architect. The construction of such a kawtij can last for years, depending on costs and supplies, and in some cases, like Hanin's, “it was never finished.” For example, when Hanin got divorced after sixteen years of marriage, the jinayna was still not complete; they were 10,000 shekels short (approximately US$2,500) and never accumulated enough money to make up the difference.
Hanin says that after moving to a shikun following her divorce, she “had no choice but to be satisfied with three flowerpots on the balcony.” Her apartment has three bedrooms and is smaller than both the house in the village and her parents’ house. As she describes:
Today I live in a shikun; it's different from living in a private house. I have no say in anything here. It doesn't feel like home. It feels like I own what I have inside the apartment, but what is outside is not mine. At my parents’ home it is different; it is still my home. Today when I go there and there is a stranger whom I need to pass by, it's not comfortable. It feels like a stranger has entered my private area.
Hanin's lost sense of ownership over space reflects the general transformation of space in Nazareth, from a “privacy” defined by extended kinship relations to a nuclear-type privacy with which she finds difficulty relating.
Villāt or kawtij neighborhoods appeared in the city in the early 1990s. In general, villāt or kawtij are later versions of neighborhoods influenced by what started as a government-subsidized prestigious national housing project called bnei betkhah (build your own home) in Hebrew. Emerging in the 1970s, this project was part of a government-induced suburban sprawl that encouraged middle-class Jews to move to the countryside. Ironic as it may seem considering that the bnei betkhah project was distinctly designed for middle-class Jews, since the 1990s the ideal of a private, two-story home surrounded by a green lawn and a garden has been officially extended to Nazareth without any cultural adaptation. Even the name of the project, “build your own home,” was borrowed without change from Hebrew, ignoring the fact that residents of Nazareth have built their own homes for generations, and the gap between the ideal encapsulated in the kawtij of independent nuclear families and the Palestinian norm of extended family residence.
In Nazareth, the prestigious bnei betkhah project came with clear rules of style and design by which owners had to abide. As a result, the new neighborhoods are villa neighborhoods with large, two-story houses surrounded with a fence, double parking, and green annual plants at the entrance. This vegetation projects onto the streets, creating a visual marker of difference between these neighborhoods and the city's other residential areas, the old quarters and the shikunāt alike.
The new order in the urban space of Nazareth, then, is still largely informed by a sense of community, or lack of it. While the rule of gharīb-qarīb is still fairly dominant in the old neighborhoods of the inner city area, and in neighborhoods where internal refugees resettled over sixty years ago, in the new neighborhoods the rules of affinity are changing and gaining new meanings. Both the lower income shikunāt and the villāt or kawtij neighborhoods for upwardly mobile families accommodate neighbors who in the old order would be considered gharīb. Yet now they suit each other on account of their shared class background.
Neighborhoods in Nazareth, in other words, have changed not only in their physical and social structure but also in their social class composition. The old neighborhoods tend to be homogeneous in terms of kinship and mixed in terms of social class, as relatives may have diverse income levels but still consider it entirely appropriate to share neighborhoods and even homes. The new neighborhoods, by contrast, tend to be mixed on the community level but economically homogeneous, so that neighborhoods are distinguished according to class. Intriguingly, both new types are almost devoid of ḥawākīr: the shikunāt because the socialist-modernistic rationale of public housing negated the idea of private ownership of outdoor spaces; the villāt because the modernist suburban dream has replaced the idea of the garden as a productive and communal space with the notion of the garden as a space for privacy and family recreation.
CONTEMPORARY ḤAWĀKĪR
Despite this transition, ḥawākīr can still be observed in Nazareth. In addition to “suspended ḥawākīr”—uncultivated plots that are kept open for future construction—contemporary cultivated ḥawākīr can be seen in all neighborhoods, including the villāt and the shikunāt. In the villāt neighborhoods one can find a ḥākūra standing side by side with a jinayna. In the shikunāt a ḥākūra can appear as the “private garden” of a ground floor tenant. Others appear in unexpected places. Abu Bilal, the guard at the parking lot of a new shopping mall, creatively appropriated a nearby street corner and turned it into a small ḥākūra.
To understand the haphazard appearance of contemporary ḥawākīr in Nazareth, we sort them into three types according to their characteristic use: a pastime for well-to-do retired or middle-aged men, memorabilia integrated into the city's consumer and touristic landscape, or a space in which to implement an environmental lifestyle.
Starting with the first subtype, ḥākūra as a pastime for well-to-do men, we have noted that keeping a ḥākūra today has become an expensive practice. The cost is due to the severe general shortage of land and water, as well as to a growing dependency on chemical fertilizers and insecticides, which are not only costly in themselves but also push out local, baladī species that need little or no irrigation. This means that the ḥākūra entails costly irrigation.Footnote 31 The sixty-four-year-old ʿAbd al-Halim, a physician and father of two daughters and a son, says:
Al-ard [the land] is my hobby. My favorite part at home is the ḥākūra. I planted Palestinian trees years before I built the house. . . . In the past water for the gardens was cheap; today it is expensive. It costs more than the household water. The water bill I pay for the ḥākūra is more than the electricity bill I pay for the house.
ʿAbd al-Halim treats the land as if it were a person: “I don't calculate the money. I know that al-ard needs [water] so I give it what it needs.”
Samya says similar things about her late husband: “Abu Ziyad loved the land [al-ard]. It was his pleasure. Our children learned to love it the way he used to. [But] since he died it's different. Yes the children love it and care about it, but it seems that the land feels who walks on it.” Abu Ziyad was a lawyer. He died in 1997 in his late seventies. Until the last days of his life he spent considerable time in the ḥākūra or, to use Samya's expression, al-ard. He invested a lot in it, not just money but also time and energy. They did not need the produce. As Samya says, Abu Ziyad simply “liked it, it was his love.” He brought a range of species from his parents’ home and planted them in his ḥākūra. He would bring manure from friends who raised livestock and spread it under the trees. “After a long day's work he would come home and the first thing he would do even before changing his clothes was water the trees; today things are different,” she says. Her sons take care of the land but they consider it expensive. They hire someone twice per year to clean it, so together with water costs and other expenses they pay a lot. Last year they stopped irrigating because, as Samya states, “the water is too expensive and we can't manage it anymore.”
Samya's plot is big enough to accommodate her two married sons in the same three-story building. They have another house on the same land, which they rent out, and a small old unit (ʿaqd) nearby that her daughter-in-law uses for a private business. The people who rent the house behind them are her husband's old friends and they have been living there for more than thirty years. She says she is lucky to have her children living nearby and to still have the ḥākūra. “Everyone else in the neighborhood had to give up their ḥawākīr in order to have space to build.” As she observes, “You don't see anything green in the neighborhood anymore. In the past it was full of ḥawākīr; today it's all cement, you see nothing but cement.”
ʿAbd al-Halim also says that his ḥākūra is the last one in his neighborhood, and he too feels his is temporary. “I'm lucky I have just one son so I can build a house for him above mine. If I had two sons I would need to get rid of the ḥākūra, divide the land in two, and build two separate houses.” ʿAbd al-Halim is describing changes in the extended-family dwelling in Nazareth. In the past brothers lived one above the other in the same building, as Samya's sons do. Seeking greater privacy and independence, brothers now tend to prefer to divide the land and live side by side in separate houses.
The second subtype, ḥawakīr that have reappeared in the backyards of commercial businesses or old inner city houses as tourist attractions, replete with nostalgic representations of cultural authenticity, is exemplified by a microenterprise project that aimed to help women who were sole providers earn some extra income by inviting tourists to visit their homes, enjoy their hospitality and food, and hear their family story. The overwhelmingly positive response to this project stimulated its expansion in two ways: wealthier women began to join in, “even if just to have someone visit them, drink coffee with them, and listen to their stories,” as one of the organizers explained; and ḥawākīr began to be revived to make more room to entertain the visitors. Similar revived ḥawākīr can be observed in the backyards of trendy cafes and other enterprises, where the commercial potential makes the investment worthwhile. Thus, somewhat unintentionally, the ḥawākīr in the old city started coming back to life. It is perhaps ironic that the revival of the ḥākūra as a social space is made possible by its commodification and repackaging as an emblem of tradition and cultural authenticity, when the high costs of land, water, and pesticides make it impossible to maintain it in its original domestic setting.
The third subtype, the ḥākūra as a place in which to implement an “environmental” lifestyle, is reflected in the story of Sally. Sally is a thirty-four-year-old English teacher and environmentally conscious social entrepreneur who aspires to apply the principles of sustainability to her own lifestyle. She lives with her husband and two young daughters in a rented house built in the mid-1930s, which they chose “because it had a ḥākūra.” The house has a jinayna and a small balcony in the front, and a sāḥa and a huge ḥākūra in the back. The ḥākūra and sāḥa together are triple the size of the house and the jinayna. Sally's initial intention was to use the ḥākūra as a space for environmental action. However, her efforts were not successful.
Sally herself was raised in a house that had a ḥākūra. As she describes,
As a child I didn't appreciate it. Today I see the ḥakūra as the best present I can give to my daughters. The fact that they have an outdoor space to play in, that they see trees flourishing and watch an ant or even a snake, these are things that they will appreciate later.
As a child Sally, who was born and raised in Nazareth, heard the word bīʾa (environment) only at school and it meant nothing to her. The first compost she saw was much later in Tiv'on, a Jewish town near the college she attended, but she didn't know what it was until someone explained it to her. In hindsight, she reckons that this incident was the trigger that got her interested in “environment.” Yet becoming environmentally active has meant isolation and detachment from Jews and Palestinians alike. In the Israeli environmental movement most activists are Jewish and largely blind to the Palestinian environmental heritage. Meanwhile, Sally has not been able to find Palestinian partners either. As an environmentalist, she feels like a gharība—a stranger—and that she is treated by others as such. Nazarenes often mock her attempts to recycle and practice sustainability, or dismiss them as “Jewish” practices, alien to Palestinian culture.
In her ḥākūra Sally struggles to implement what she considers an “environmental lifestyle.” For example, when she tried to create a joint compost heap with her neighbors, she found that they were unwilling to participate. Meanwhile, rising water prices rendered her attempt to grow vegetables too expensive. As an alternative, she planted small patches of vegetables and invited friends to participate in the labor with her in return for produce. Although she enjoyed this endeavor, she ultimately realized that it was cheaper to buy fruit and vegetables than to grow them. Sally also discovered that maintaining a ḥākūra is time consuming, and her busy daily schedule does not leave her sufficient time for it. Thus, except for a few fruit-bearing trees, her ḥākūra stands empty.
Admittedly, Sally was the only person we encountered who used the third subtype of ḥākūra. It is therefore not clear whether this subtype has broad relevance. Yet we expect it is likely to recur with the growing popularity of environmentalism, particularly among young people.
DISCUSSION
The anthropology of gardens has come a long way since Bronislaw Malinowski's early focus on gardens and gardening as a component of local economies.Footnote 32 Renewed scholarly interest in domestic gardens since the late 1980s has embraced a significantly wider scope, particularly following Michel Conan's call to include in the study of gardens their environmental, cultural, and political conditions.Footnote 33 In addition, scholars have begun to focus on the symbolic value of gardens, for example in connection to identity and to processes of home making. Scholars are looking at gardens as sites social and human–nature relationships, loci of diversity, creativity, and personal style,Footnote 34 and at the physical act of gardening as a means for satisfaction and peace.Footnote 35 Many of these aspects came up in our ethnography. We have shown how, at the level of political ecology, the near disappearance of ḥawākīr mark the trajectory of Nazareth's development—after an initial regression immediately following the nakba—and echo the social and environmental tolls of this process; we also note, however, that they offer a vision for a more sustainable urban future. On a different level, we have shown how people continue to invest meaning in the ḥawākīr and to use them as tokens of relationships, identities, and attachments, even as they are on the brink of disappearance. In telling the story of the ḥawākīr of Nazareth, we therefore aim to engage with environmental scholarship in the social sciences that sees gardens as “key locales” within which nature and wider environmental issues are debated and understood.Footnote 36
Nazareth is an interesting case in terms of urbanity. As Palestinian residents were expelled from large cities of Mandate Palestine and Palestinian cities lost their urban heritage, small Nazareth inadvertently became the main Palestinian city in Israel. Since 1948 two main processes influenced the formation of its space: a dramatic increase in population density and a process of deurbanization, led by the state's concentrated efforts to replace Nazareth as a center with the neighboring Jewish city Natsrat Illit, which deprived it of its urban components.Footnote 37 Today Nazareth's landscape is densely constructed. Narrow roads winding through the older neighborhoods are unable to accommodate the overflow of private cars, and open spaces are few. This density and the high demand for land come at the expense of the ḥawākīr, the number of which has dropped drastically, making space for a newer type of garden found mostly in the new, suburban-style kawtij neighborhoods. These neatly designed flower gardens are one of several commodified forms of natureFootnote 38 that have emerged following the decline of the classic ḥawākīr. We mentioned the (partial) revival of ḥawākīr in the old city as part of women's microfinance efforts to turn their homes into a show of cultural authenticity, their transformation into an expensive hobby for older affluent men, and their incorporation, as a stylish adornment, into commercial businesses such as cafes and shops.
As we explained, the near disappearance of the ḥawākīr from today's Nazareth is not an inevitable consequence of a unilineal process of “development.” In the first half of the 20th century their centrality to the city's economic and social life reflected core elements of Nazareth's semirural character: a mixed local economy that combined market and subsistence components, an expansive, women-dominated domestic domain with rich and diverse social life, and a spatial division into neighborhoods organized according to kinship and religious affiliation. In the aftermath of the 1948 war, with the influx of refugees, the experience of trauma and uncertainty, and an economic standstill, the ḥawākīr proved an important lifeline that allowed residents to avoid some of the severe pitfalls of the extended semisiege conditions. However, twenty years later, after Israel occupied the West Bank in 1967, the ḥawākīr lost their economic value as food providers because they could not compete with the cheap prices of fruits and vegetables in the market. As Juliet put it, “everything now sells for one shekel: the zucchini, the cucumber, the tomato. They're not worth growing.”
The progressive loss of the ḥawākīr since the 1970s had numerous ecological and social repercussions. In some respects, notably people's attempts to keep ḥawākīr as inalienable possessions for future construction, they continue to serve as a buffer in the transition of the city to a full-scale market economy. For example, although today the landed property value of the ḥawākīr has overshadowed their value as spaces for food production, people still refrain from selling them. Instead, as we saw in the gharīb-qarīb trope, many tend to uphold the rules of kinship and prioritize social commitments over capitalist rationality.
Nevertheless, despite the partial preservation of the gharīb-qarīb spatial code, the abandonment of the ḥawākīr as a site for growing food has had dire consequences for the social fabric of the city. Juliet expressed this succinctly:
We used to have lots of grapes. We'd pick them and distribute them to the neighbors. The fig tree never stopped giving figs. The lemon tree was generous; everyone in the neighborhood picked from it. We ate, the neighbors ate, and still there was a lot on the trees. We had goats and we had chickens. But later it stopped. I couldn't work on the land anymore; my husband went to work at the kibbutz, and everything we needed we found in the market. And the prices were cheap.
As we learn from Juliet's words, kinship and social relationships did not exist in a vacuum, but in an actual space that held and supported them. In actor-network terminology, as applied by Russell Hitchings to the context of people–plant relations,Footnote 39 the ḥawākīr drew people to engage with each other. Giving up on cultivating them even while keeping them as provisional spaces has had high costs in kinship and social terms, with specific repercussions for women. As those who metaphorically owned this site and used it to forge and maintain relationships, women lost a major space of influence and cultural performance.
This was coupled with another significant loss. By moving to mixed and less communal neighborhoods, marked by the absence of ḥawākīr, people—and women in particular—began to feel that the space around them was no longer theirs. This is clearly the case in the new neighborhoods that are planned exclusively for individuals and nuclear families, but also, albeit more subtly, in the old communal neighborhoods that still provoke the rules of gharīb-qarīb, yet with less power than in the past, to the great sorrow of women like Hanin.
Beside its collective importance as a key locale, on the individual level the ḥākūra contains profound significance for identity, memory, and personal history. ʿAbd al-Halim, Abu Ziyad, Abu Bilal, and other men for whom gardening is a hobby, refer to the ḥākūra as a person and describe their feelings toward it as love, using the same terms they deploy to describe their feelings toward relatives. As Julie Soleil Archambault asserts regarding human–plant relations in Mozambique, such terms of endearment should be “taken seriously” as ontological relations in their own right, even when they are engulfed in a setting where intimacy is being commodified.Footnote 40 These men in Nazareth likewise brought to their contemporary gardens seedlings from their original family ḥawākīr, thus carrying over memories and relationships, and referred to traditional trees in their gardens as “Palestinian trees.”
Sixty-seven-year-old ʿAtallah excitedly recalled the lemon tree he brought to his house as a seedling from his parents’ ḥākūra in the village about forty years earlier. He said each time he moved to a new house he took the lemon tree with him. He did that at least three times. Upon hearing his father reminisce, ʿAtallah's married eldest son, who lived in the mīliya on the first floor, complained about the lemon tree and exclaimed that it needed to be cut down. ʿAtallah responded sharply without a second's interruption, “The day you cut it down I will start charging you rent,” intimating that his relationship to the lemon tree is neither less meaningful nor less important than his relationship to his own son.
Over the decades the ḥākūra has changed its form, content, and meaning. It has become much smaller, and its fences changed from terraces and stones to concrete and wire. It now needs constant irrigation. The original baladī seeds have been replaced by commercial ones. Some species, which did not enter the market, disappeared, while new ones appeared. For elders such as Juliet, “the ḥākūra has turned from an entity that was everything and included anything a person could want or need to an entity that is nothing.” Its role in the household has been transformed from a main source of food and potential income to a daily chore and an economic burden. In the past it was part of the homes of all social classes; today it is a luxury that only the wealthy can afford. These changes echo broader and dramatic changes in the character of Nazareth's neighborhoods, particularly the older ones. They have shifted from being extensions of domestic space, in which all are “relatives,” and where poor and rich mix readily and as one watch out for strangers, to spaces in which bounded nuclear families comprise the basic residential units; domestic space has shrunk to the confines of the house's walls—or the solid fence of the jinayna—and former strangers are now natural neighbors practicing privacy among themselves. The class homogeneity of the new neighborhoods, as opposed to the mixed-class character of the old ones, is the upshot of a more general socio-economic polarization. In the past, the ḥākūra acted as an economic regulator and poverty shield. Its decline has turned shortage of money into real poverty. Families such as Zuhayr's “didn't have money but didn't know poverty.” Other interviewees referred to such families in the past as having “a private situation” and in the present as “families in economic hardship.”
By losing its ḥawākīr Nazareth has lost its urban biodiversity and the local ecological knowledge that was accumulated over generations. Considering that in general there is more biodiversity in an average suburban garden than in many agricultural areas in the countryside,Footnote 41 the impact of this loss extends well beyond the area of Nazareth and its residents. Throughout our fieldwork and in all of our in-depth interviews, Sally was the only person who mentioned the words “environment” and “environmentalism.” Palestinians in Nazareth and in Israel in general do not frame their struggle for the land as “environmental” but as a comprehensive struggle for life; “without land there is nothing,” as one of our interviewees put it. Emphatically, “environment” and “environmentalism” are cultural terms. Using them as universals imposes the imagery and meanings of the hegemonic culture and obliterates nonhegemonic dimensions.Footnote 42 For Palestinians the terms “environment” and “environmentalism” have acquired negative connotations because they are associated with dispossession and discrimination by state authorities.Footnote 43 Concomitantly, the Israeli environmental movement has been an alienating factor in its systematic complicity with the state's anti-Palestinian policies and the tendency of many of its members to adopt a culturist perspective on Palestinians as environmental provocateurs.
Still, the ḥawākīr by their nature are places that can support an “environmental” lifestyle. Although clearly the classical ḥākūra belongs to the past—Nazarenes do not wish to go back to a subsistence economy and many also appreciate the privacy of the new housing—a new and adapted version of it can be incorporated into future planning in Nazareth and other Middle Eastern cities. The high cost of water, scarcity of land, and cheaper prices of commercially grown foods notwithstanding, this article has shown that the overall value of small-scale local food growing well exceeds the produce's cash worth. The strong sentiments towards ḥawākīr, their place in living memory, and their persistence in all neighborhoods despite the odds against them, suggests that, provided limited water subsidies or land allocations as part of environmentally oriented policy, Nazarenes can turn the ḥawākīr into a sound vernacular practice of urban sustainability.
