Because of Palestine's history as an important place, Israeli and West Bank society are very diverse. There are black African Jews, mostly from Ethiopia, and there are black, originally African Palestinian Arabs from the past millennia. There are red-haired Jews from Europe and red-haired Palestinian Arabs. There are Arab Jews from Morocco, Egypt, Yemen, Iraq and the whole Arab world in Israel - they may even be the plurality - and there are Arab Jews in the West Bank who have always been there - Samaritans - as well as Israeli settlers and pacifists. There are many people straight out of American suburbs, right down to the accent, even in the cities of the West Bank. In Israel there are also workers from India and Southeast Asia. There are people with one parent a Jew from Israel and another parent an Arab from the West Bank. There are common Palestinian last names like al-Masri, al-Hindi and al-Turki - the Egyptian, the Indian and the Turk - to remind people of the immigrant merchants of the past. There are stereotypical cultures, but people act in many different ways and are used to seeing others act as they please. There are stereotypical phenotypes, but context - location, clothing, demeanor, language - is used more than phenotype by people who live there to determine if another person probably lives there. That said, there are ways to better live the culture, and there are ways to better go native.In Israel, unless one is wearing something really unique to some region of the world, or walking out of the airport or into a hotel, it's almost impossible to avoid being assumed to be a resident of Israel. The main culture in Israel is sort of a mix of Eastern Europe, the Middle East and the USA, and all the nice things that go along with that. The orthodox culture and the kibbutz culture are very complex and interesting, but I'm sorry to say I know little about them. So the focus of this section will be on the West Bank.
Jerusalem is a major tourist destination, and outside of the tourist areas there are areas like the West Bank and areas like Israel. People, even software engineers, really do still live in the four quarters of the old city.
Israeli youth waiting for the bus in Haifa, and Palestinian youth talking in the lab and playing guitar in Jenin.
Greetings are very important; Arabs usually greet people they pass, especially if they may be intruding, for example when driving around a neighbourhood that is not theirs - any odd stare can be disarmed with a wave and "Salaam aleikum". For men, as in many places, standing up and shaking hands is very important, and kissing on the cheeks is as common as in all former Ottoman areas. A man greeting a woman should wait for her to extend her hand, as many women choose not to.
Arabs in general have sort of the opposite concept of American personal space between people. People sit and stand close together. Small children, youths and even middle-aged men frequently have their arms over each other's shoulders when walking or sitting. People feel no need to move or turn away if one is composing an email, and even though everyone has a mobile phone, it's acceptable to pick up someone else's, since usually everyone knows everyone and can answer any questions. People talk and walk in the street, and only barely move for passing vehicles, which may politily sound the horn. In crowded markets and universities, the same laws of the road exist between humans. This isn't a suggestion to embrace strangers, pick up others' phones when they ring and jump in front of trucks, but a description of what one will observe, and of a way in which Arabs who have visited the West could see Arab society as more free.
The Arab spirit is different. As individuals, each person is very normal - talking to them they seem like people right out of life anywhere, wanting to go to school, spend time with their families, listen to music and so on. People are trapped in a situation, so it would be natural for them to become angry, but in daily life they never do. They may joke and argue at length for entertainment, but this is never a cause for alarm. Of course, if one doesn't understand Arabic and has been Hollywood-educated, the heated arguments in the shared taxi about whose nephew is a doctor or the loudspeaker coming from the vegetable truck can both seem very sinister. They also don't really fear death; there's a remarkable similarity between the way that people only slowly move for cars and the way that people only slowly give up pleas to armed soldiers. As a culture, they seem very relaxed and accepting of the young, of the old, of the obese, of the slow and of the tongueless foreigners.
In fact, there is even a sentimental love for the old, embodied for Palestinians most fully in the old city of Jerusalem, the image of which graces more than a few desktop backgrounds, and the wildly popular living star Fairuz, a singer and actress born to a Christian family in Lebanon in 1935. Praise for the oldness, diversity and beauty of Jerusalem - even though many Palestinians have not seen it since before 2000 - and love for the music and film of Fairuz - even though her music plays on every radio station every morning - could even outweigh an insult to the local cuisine. Watching Fairuz, whose works are mostly about Levantine village life in the context of the Ottoman occupation and Lebanon in the 60s and 70s in the context of emigration that has left a few times more Lebanese and Palestinians outside Lebanon and Palestine than inside - can help explain the way that people in Palestine understand their diversity, their history of occupation, and the rhythm of life. They see their home in contrast to the Arabian peninsula: green and fertile, urban, innovative and progressive, tragically occupied by Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Crusaders, Ottomans, French and British and now Israelis, and yet richer for those influences.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubEaWUpu8eM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_xo4bPf-8s
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUbQcxsJwWQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sQo2S5ezY0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLb-n6OUfyk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLFs-D67Itc
At the same time, people want to be seen as human; in both Israel and the occupied territories, people know that the world sees them only in bad news, and never as modern human beings driving Mazdas, studying accounting, chatting on Yahoo! Messenger with their girlfriends and boyfriends and sitting in a cafe, even as they curse the checkpoints and each other. The Palme d'Or-winning film by Elia Suleiman, Divine Intervention (Yadon Ilaheyya), is a good and hilarious example of this sentiment.
Clothing in the West Bank ranges from hipster to chic to shtetl to Bedouin, but it's mostly chic. People tend to dress conservatively by Western standards - it's more rare to see someone's underwear - but everything is allowed, contrary to the assumptions of surprisingly many. (If anything, the society of the West Bank is in anarchy, not authoritarianism, of course within the framework of the occupation.) It depends a lot on the city, the time, and the place - in the same way it's rare to see someone walking around an office or Manhattan in a bathing suit - but at a university one will see the full range, including two foreign imports, the short skirt and the niqab (which shows only the eyes). (Many, many people in the West Bank have lived and worked in the Gulf, and one who was in Saudi Arabia as a child explained why Palestinians see the idea of every woman being forced to wear the same black clothes in public as crazy: one day in the supermarket, he turned around, and he couldn't find his mother, because all the women looked the same, and he was calling for a while before she heard him.) The standard minimum dress for both young men and young women is tight jeans and a shirt in basic global style. The headscarf (hijab) is, of course, optional. It would be viewed almost comically if a Western woman were to wear one, but it's surely been done. Many people in the West Bank are and have always been Christians, so the headscarf is as optional as it is in Europe, where it was also once popular but not prescribed by all religions.
For specifics, nice tight jeans, nice sweater vests, nice sweaters, leather jackets, scarves and so on are favourites of the men. (The keffiyeh, mostly the black-and-white Palestinian one but also the red-and-white Jordanian one, is a common choice for the scarf.) At least in the springtime, men do not really wear sandals except around the house, preferring tennis shoes or leather shoes. One could advise to be clean shaven and remember the hair gel, but barbershops (and salons for women) are where people collect at night, and they're quite good and cheap, so forgetting this until arrival will not be a problem.
In the end, the thing that helps most with not standing out is the fact that one is there: so few people visit all but the most notable places in the West Bank, and when they do they are often part of a conspicuous tour group, that just being there alone or with local friends makes one seem native or at least familiar. Even people from the West Bank will be mistaken for a foreigner when they are with a foreigner or especially with a group of foreigners. On the other hand, I walked with two friends into a lecture hall at a university, holding my MacbookPro and wearing my sole pair of pants and the jacket with the logo of my company, x, and the man setting up the projector looked at us and said in Arabic:"Sorry, boys, if you have class here it's cancelled today, there's a guy from x that's going to give a talk here in a few minutes."
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