Spring was heralded by the return of Mes’ha’s cattle to the village. Spare in flesh and produce, the herd consisted of Arab cows unflatteringly known as “tails.” In winter, when a thin mantle of green covered the hills, Arab cowhands would lead them to pasture north of the colony—“on vacation” according to the local jesters. Two months later, the cows came home, filling the air with mooing and lowing as each found its way to its master’s yard and every farmer spotted his beast.47
Summer’s sign was the threshing floor: the entire family with the exception of the farmwife would scramble to bring in the grain out of harm’s way, be it from natural or human elements. To guard the harvest from thieves, everyone slept in the granary. Girls and young women brought along food and drink, someone would reach for a harmonica, and the sound of song would soon be heard. Couples seeking privacy clambered to the top of the piled-up sheaves, away from prying eyes.
Mes’ha may have been lean, but it did not suffer from hunger. Most of the food was home grown. The seeds from the harvest were ground at the Kafr Kama flourmill, which worked like a charm, unlike Mes’ha’s contraption. For the children, the walk to Kafr Kama, a Circassian village, was like a holiday: in addition to the half day off from work, there was the anticipation of waiting in line for their turn at the mill, of buying sweets for a penny, of roaming through the narrow village lanes—all of it was a lingering adventure.48
For cooking and baking, the Arab outdoor tabun was used. The first settlers to arrive in the Lower Galilee had erected the usual barred range, but the lack of wood for fuel soon posed a problem, while rising smoke made housework grueling. Into the breach stepped the wife of the harat, the Arab laborer: kneading together grass and earth, straw and water, she marked off a tabun in the ground to present the women with a superior technical upgrade. It was fueled three times a week with the help of slow-burning, kneaded animal droppings, but since matches were not always handy, great care was taken to keep the embers alive. The tabun became hearth and home.49
The food was simple and natural: bread, milk, cheese, and butter. Eggs from the chicken coop were plenty and were often sold to a wholesaler in exchange for such luxuries as herring or halva. Cooked food was based on cereals and legumes: bulgur, cholent, and so forth. Meat was less common, although for the Sabbath and holidays a hen would be slaughtered. Fruit and vegetables were bought from Arabs hailing from the water-rich Bet-Netofah Valley who made the rounds of the villages. Mes’ha’s vegetable patches yielded only herbs, onions, and sometimes a potato.50
In times of trouble, the hardships of living in an out-of-the-way village were all too palpable: if illness struck, the bumpy wagon ride to a hospital in Tiberias or Nazareth could well hasten a patient’s end. In winter, the trip was out of the question altogether and the sick simply had to cope on their own. For childbirth, the bobbeh or midwife was called in—she was a Mes’ha institution in herself.
The village was too small to support good services. It had no store worthy of the name, medical treatment was poor, and the school left much to be desired. Rosh Pinnah, in contrast, was already a small town boasting various service providers from artisans to ICA officials, as well as farmers. The service providers were able to maintain a store and their presence lent the colony a sense of relative ease.51 Mes’ha had none of these.
Predictably, Mesh’ha’s relations with its Arab neighbors were complex from the first. Although the interaction was rather simple and unsophisticated, at the same time, it had many aspects: hostility was tempered by affection, dependency by self-sufficiency, aggression by friendship, and distance by closeness. Mes’ha’s attitude stemmed neither from ideology nor politics; largely, it was an extension of the attitude shtetl Jews had toward the Russian or Ukranian muzhiks who brought Jews the produce of their fields and gardens, sold them their butter and eggs, and at their stores bought the provisions they required for their farms—rope, nails, tools. The shtetl Jews’ singular attitude to the country goyim reflected both Jewish uniqueness and the Jewish anomaly: on the one hand, Jews were contemptuous of the goyishe dunderheads, who were the butt of their ridicule and deception; on the other hand, Jews had a gnawing fear of the goyim’s violent outbursts: come pogroms, all of Jacob’s wisdom would prove useless against Esau’s brawn. In Mes’ha on the whole, however, calm reigned as business dealings and interdependence spilled over onto the personal plane, sparking friendships and loyalties across national and religious divides. To a great extent, the relations between Mes’ha’s residents and their Arab neighbors were patterned along these lines.
Built on the ruins of an Arab village abandoned in the latter half of the nineteenth century, Mes’ha did not face the sort of strife that had poisoned Metullah’s early years (when the Druze claimed dispossession). It did come under attack from a-Zbekh Bedouin—though not more so than other villages, whether Arab or Jewish. Marauding was the Bedouin way of life and roving tribes had declared war on settled homesteaders. Added to this was the rivalry over water, with the wars of the herdsmen taking on biblical dimensions at times. But it was not a national conflict. Much like the Wild West where cattlemen were pitted against homesteaders, everyone did as he wished; to survive, a man—no matter how inherently nonviolent—had to learn to shoot, to fight, to ride a horse, and to defend his life, his honor, and his property.
Mes’ha’s residents drew a sharp line between friendly and unfriendly neighbors. Kafr Kama, where they sent their children to grind flour, was very friendly. The Maghreb villages whose population stemmed from North Africa were not considered dangerous. From beyond the hills, fruit and vegetable sellers came to peddle their produce. And within the village itself, each and every farmyard had a shack for the harat and his family. A harat was usually a landless peasant who hired himself out in exchange for 20 percent of the harvest. He worked alongside the farmer in any job that needed doing, plowing and sowing, reaping and threshing. His wife would spend the day with the farmer’s wife, helping with the housework, seeing to the tabun fire, washing the laundry, and doing the heavy work. Their children, too, would lend a hand and they played with the Jewish family’s children, speaking a Yiddish mixed with Arabic and Hebrew. The farmer and the harat would take their meals together in the field, tasting one another’s morsels. If a cow was stolen from the farmyard, the harat joined in the chase after the thief. During harvest, he too was recruited for guard duty. Nonetheless, the idyll was shattered at times: a harat might be suspected of pilfering from the farmer’s harvest and his wife and children “accused of” impertinence and a lack of hygiene. Quarrels could degenerate, a harat and his family resorting to violence against the farmer.52 But this show of muscle, as in Russia, was the exception to the rule; it made no real dent in the way of life. The lack of green, the smoke of the tabun, the argot of playing children, the dirt, and the neglect all lent Mes’ha the appearance of an Arab village, no different from its surroundings.
The ICA’s contracts stipulated that hired hands could be used only in the high season, and Reuven Paicovich’s contract stated explicitly that only Jews could be hired.53 It was an impossible demand. Mes’ha’s residents hailed from Rosh Pinnah, Metullah, and Zikhron Ya’acov. All of these communities, especially the last, had used Arab labor, and their former residents saw no reason to