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BEHIND THE DOORS OF THE MIDDLE EAST Twelve Homes, Three Peoples, and the Humanity We Share

Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: This paper was possible from many conversations and gatherings that allowed the writer to not only experience all the three cultures and the beauty of the people but how we all have hopes and dreams. -Kaveh Dimitri Salahi INTRODUCTION Beyond the Headlines, Behind the Doors There are few parts of the world where history weighs so heavily upon the lives of ordinary people as it does in the Middle East. Here, the past is rarely something confined to museums, textbooks or the memories of grandparents. It is carried into everyday conversations, woven into family histories, reflected in religious traditions and, at times, heard in the distance through the sound of conflict. It shapes how people understand themselves, how they regard their neighbours and how they imagine the future of their children. To someone observing the region from the outside, it can sometimes seem as though every street, every town and every household belongs to a much larger argument, one that has continued for generations and appears to have no easy conclusion. The Middle East is frequently described through the language of governments, military alliances, religious divisions, territorial claims and political movements. Its people are often introduced to the rest of the world through the circumstances surrounding them rather than through the ordinary details of their lives. Iran becomes a question of international relations and nuclear negotiations. Israel becomes a question of security, identity and its relationship with the Palestinians. Palestine becomes a question of occupation, displacement, recognition and national independence. These matters are important, and the suffering associated with them cannot be dismissed. But there is something missing when an entire population is reduced to the policies of its government, the actions of its political movements or the history of its conflicts. Behind every political argument are people who still have to go home at the end of the day. There are fathers who worry about their children's education, mothers who spend hours preparing meals, grandparents who want their grandchildren to remember the stories of their ancestors, young people wondering where they will work, whom they will marry and whether they will be able to build a life in the place where they were born. There are families who have considerable wealth and families who struggle to meet their everyday expenses. Some live in beautiful villas overlooking mountains or the sea; others occupy small apartments, unfinished houses or rooms divided by curtains. Their circumstances may be profoundly different, but their homes remain places where the same ordinary human concerns find expression. I wanted to encounter this part of the Middle East through its households. Not through the official language of political institutions, nor through the familiar images that appear on television screens whenever another crisis unfolds, but through the people themselves. I wanted to sit at their tables, listen to their conversations, understand what they cooked, see how they arranged their homes and learn what they hoped their children might inherit. I wanted to understand what people thought about their own lives, what they remembered about their past and what they feared about the years ahead. Above all, I wanted to meet them as individuals before making any judgement about the larger identities that the outside world so readily attaches to them. Our journey would take us through Iran, Israel and Palestine, visiting twelve households in circumstances that could hardly have been more different. In Iran, we would encounter three families whose lives reflected different sides of Tehran: a war veteran in the south, a working family in the east and a prosperous household in the northern foothills of the Alborz Mountains. In Israel, we would visit five households, from a family whose roots in Safed stretched back generations to an ultra-Orthodox family in Bnei Brak, immigrants who had rebuilt their lives in Ashdod, and families whose economic circumstances and expectations of the future were very different. In Palestine, we would meet families whose lives were shaped by hardship, agriculture, questions of identity, professional responsibility and the difficult relationship between two peoples whose histories have become so deeply entangled.
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.24101327
Language: English
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7225759142
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