Marwan was very angry. ‘You treat people well and they show you no ihtiram [respect]’, he shouted at no one in particular. Marwan usually presented as a confident and self-assured man. He was never seen in Bayt Hajjar without his oversize black blazer, gold rings, and collection of mobile phones. Now, however, as I talked to him on the side of the road, Marwan was clearly agitated and angry. ‘I want to leave this place’, he complained; ‘the people here no longer know how to behave.’ Confused, I asked Marwan what he was talking about. ‘This!’ he shouted, pulling out a brown envelope from his pocket and waving it under my nose. ‘I help people and all I get in return is this.’ The letter, written in Hebrew, was from a lawyer in Tel Aviv, who claimed that Marwan owed a certain Khalid Rashid Abdallah from Bayt Hajjar over 15,000 new Israeli shekels (NIS), or about US$3,500, and threatened to take Marwan to court if he did not pay.

Marwan was not alone in being involved in a court case. Nearly everyone I met in Bayt Hajjar seemed to have a story to tell about taking a case to court, usually in Israel. Legal disputes such as Khalid's seemed to be part of the everyday currency of social exchange in the village. Sometimes it seemed that everywhere I went people talked about qanun (state law) and huquq al-‘ummal (labour rights, lit. rights of labourers), in particular.