A Druse Family Gathering
Families are in every culture. And there are many cultural differences, but also many similarities. At this time of year when we think of getting together with our families for Thanksgiving, I remember a Druse family gathering I can never forget. It was in the fall of 1987 when I was living in Israel and was invited to join my Druse friend and her family for a very unusual family gathering.
Whole families with babes in arms were there. Food was handed around. Radios blared music and people sang. Greetings were exchanged, and family news shared about who was well, who was sick, who had died, who had married.
The beauty of the nature surrounding the gathering was stark. Bold mountains dotted with gray and white rocks contrasted with the deep blue of the sky and the brown strip of road that wound its way up and over the mountaintop. Scrubs of plants dotted the mountainsides. Clumps of people stood or sat among the scrub. Mothers and fathers spoke to sons and daughters, children to grandparents, sisters to brothers, uncles, aunts, cousins.
But this ordinary family gathering was not ordinary in many ways. Instead of hugging and handshaking, towels and arms waved from the separate mountainsides. Instead of looking into each other’s faces, they struggled to find one another through binoculars. Instead of quietly chatting and sharing family secrets, their strained voices shouted and broke the silence of the mountains, distorted and amplified through hand-held loudspeakers.
In between the children and their parents, brothers and their sisters, nephews and nieces, aunts and uncles, cousins — in between the mountains was a strip of land mined to explode at the pressure of a human foot. Two strong brown fences sandwiched a brown strip of road on which only an army jeep patrolled, with a soldier and a machine gun protruding from each side aimed at opposite mountainsides.
These were families like many others, but some lived now on Israel’s side of the mountains, and the others on Syria’s side. Their Druse Arab villages were divided by the ugliness of war. Letters and phone calls are forbidden. Being close is forbidden. But families are not easily divided, and so they continue to come to their country’s side of the mountain for family reunions.
The talk of this day was a 12-year-old boy who had had a fight with his parents and had run away to his uncle, who happened to live on the Israeli side of the village. By sheer luck, he had somehow eluded the notice of soldiers and the land mines in between the two sides of the village. How complicated and dangerous a simple family fight could be in one village divided by two countries!
Yes, this was a big family gathering repeated with different families every weekend. It was one of the saddest things I saw in Israel.
Tags: Israel; Druse in Israel; divided Druse villages in Isra, Travel
