From his vantage point on the upper reaches of Safed in the Galilee’s highlands, Israel’s youngest mayor, Ilan Shohat, looks out from his municipal balcony like a king surveying his realm. He points at a pedestal in the square below him, to the romantically named Davidka, or little David. It is the original mortar that in 1948 fired its projectiles in an all too general direction. On May 9, 1948, it struck an arms dump that Palestinian irregulars had stashed in the fortress on the brow of the hill, triggering an explosion so terrible that, he says, the city’s Palestinian population “miraculously” fled. Zionist fighters rolled barrel bombs down the slopes into the marketplace, no doubt providing a further incentive. Centuries of existence as a shared Jewish-Muslim town ended in days.
Ever since, Safed’s mayors busied themselves filling the empty space the city’s Palestinians left behind. They revamped the Muslim quarter, itself a misleading designation since it has spread over not one but three quarters of the city. In its place, they constructed an artists quarter, a Kabbalist quarter, and a bohemian quarter. They turned the main mosque into an art gallery, the General Exhibition, and painted dancing Hasidic Jews in soft pastels on street maps to give the town the feel of a Torah city. They worked with a local youth group, Banim le-banim (building for the sons) to bring Jews the world over on educational and volunteer programs to rebuild homes destroyed in the 1948 war. Amplifying the call, a new yeshiva took the name Shuvu Banim (come back, sons).
But the Muslim quarter still has the emptiness of a ghost town. The muezzins keep their silence. Almost apologetically, the Friday night Sabbath service in the Saraya, the former Ottoman government compound, takes place in the basement and not in the main hall. Someone has erected a cheap-looking memorial to Israel’s fallen in the 1948 war in the mihrab, or niche, of a grand Mamluk mausoleum. Neighbors have dumped coils of barbed wire, a rotten mattress and assorted rubbish up the side of its ablaq—alternative rows of black basalt and white limestone, though its crest of sculptured stone stalactites hanging down from the roof still give it a look of splendor. The defunct Great Red Mosque next door still evokes the time when Safed was a major staging post on the road from Damascus to the Mediterranean, not the peripheral dead-end of heavily fortified northeastern Israel.
Shohat’s attempts to revive his city as a regional hub have met with mixed success. The bohemians who came in the 1950s have largely left. The busloads of Jewish tourists in search of a religious experience invest in little more than a falafel before heading downhill to the Sea of Galilee. Universal has opened a biscuit factory, but it has struggled to get the ultra-Orthodox out of their yeshivas, off welfare, and onto the factory floor. Almost as an afterthought, Shohat turned to the Arab towns surrounding Safed to support his drive for relevance the city lost in 1948.
The results have been transformative. Over the past four years two colleges and a medical school have opened in the city, predominantly catering to the Galilee’s Arab majority. A city that was empty of Arabs for 60 years has reconnected with its environs and its past. The high streets bustle with thousands of Arab students. The mayor who deemed the Arab exodus a miracle now weighs the economic and security benefits of reintegration. “If Arabs are part of the festivities, they won’t blow them up,” he says. He invited Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, a refugee from Safed, to visit (“though not to stay”). And he has even helped open the first cracks in the barriers that for three decades have barred contact between Israel and Syria. Over the course of Syria’s civil war, Safed’s Ziv Medical Center has treated hundreds of Syrian victims, who are often accompanied by their relatives. They might yet serve as ambassadors for a future coexistence, Shohat says. The possibilities seem endless.
The backlash was not long in coming. Ultra-Orthodox Jews leave messages on his answering machine protesting that Arab students renting in the depressed housing estates they share desecrate the Sabbath by playing loud music and smoking water pipes. To appease the outcry, he went on campus appealing to Arab students to help with the Passover spring clean by whitewashing ultra-Orthodox homes. He also launched a festival of oriental music for Sephardi Jews and local Arabs hoping they might play together. But the accusations that he has opened the gates for Arab as well as Jewish sons to return keep growing. God forbid, soon the students will want to reopen the Great Red Mosque for Friday prayers, protests a burly blond-haired yeshiva student in the white woolly cap of the Na Nach, a popularized form of the Breslov Hasidic order. “Never again.”
The town’s chief rabbi, a salaried government appointee, led several dozen rabbis in issuing a psak din, the Jewish equivalent of a fatwa, banning Jews from selling or renting homes to Arabs. “Jews should not flee from Arabs, they should make the Arabs flee,” admonished Safed’s chief rabbi, Shmuel Eliyahu. To publicize it he organized a town hall meeting under the banner “The Quiet War — Fighting Decay in the Holy City of Safed.” Developers moved in, building plush Jewish-only estates offering “Jewish air.” Far from taking action against his state employees, in 2013 Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appointed one of the psak din’s signatories, Rabbi Shai Piron, his education minister.
Over 400 Palestinian villages were erased in or after the 1948 war, but Palestine’s urbanscape suffered more than its landscape. Before the exodus, a third of the Palestinian population lived in cities. Many a family built an architectural gem. Palestinian cinemas, theatre halls, and printing houses abounded. By the end of 1948, 90 percent stood vacant. Palestine’s cosmopolitan, educated middle class was broken.
Four generations on, it is finally beginning to revive. In part because their own villages and towns are hemmed within tight planning zones and overcrowded, Palestinians have begun to repopulate the coastal cities once again. Students attending universities on the coast put down roots. In a few places Jewish and Arab graduates have created bohemian neighborhoods that consciously seek to lay the foundations for a post-conflict society and attempt to replace the traditional hierarchies of Jewish owners and Arab laborers with a non-sectarian bourgeoisie. “We are not only serving, we are ordering,” says a bartender in an Arab-owned bar on Masada Street in the port city of Haifa, in one of Israel’s first neighborhoods where the ownership, workforce, and clientele of local amenities and cafés are mixed. Isha-l-Isha (woman to woman), Israel’s oldest grassroots feminist association, has an Arab chairwoman and insists on a joint Jewish-Arab administration and staff. Some see the seeds of a more egalitarian future. “When I was my 17-yearold daughter’s age, I didn’t dare speak Arabic in public,” says a Haifa lawyer. “It was like handing yourself in. Now we do it everywhere.”
Mayors of municipalities with mixed Arab and Jewish populations have long oscillated between serving as ciphers of and cushions against nationalist politicians at the center. Many are torn between espousing a multi-cultural, cosmopolitan city and a Jewish one that Zionism promised to build, and even the most liberal flinch from describing their cities as shared. Most opt instead for an ad hoc approach that might be described as ad kan, Hebrew for just so much, preserving the dominant status of Hebrew and Jewish culture. While Tel Aviv celebrated its first centenary with a dazzling show of white lights, the mayor of Haifa, Yona Yahav, shied from marking his city’s 250th anniversary lest it revive memories of its Palestinian past.
Yahav is a web of contradictions. He fought in Israel’s formative wars and then climbed the ranks of the Labor Party when it was the prime driver of Zionism. He opposed the construction of new Arabic schools, churches, or mosques in districts that were once Jewish but are now distinctly mixed. And yet he has gone further than other mayors in ensuring his own staff is mixed. Israeli Palestinians head its finance and, perhaps more significantly, conservation departments. He has flouted demands from Netanyahu’s transport minister to Hebraize Israel’s streets name, naming a roundabout after Emil Habibi, a leading local Palestinian writer and politician. He let an Arabic hip-hop band, Ministry of Dub-Key, perform in front of the Haifa Museum of Art. And he broke a tacit ban on celebration of non-Jewish festivals in public, staging a “Festival of Festivals,” marking Christmas while discreetly avoiding its name. Initially, the municipality balked at erecting a Christmas tree, but in 2010 it installed a plastic-bottle tree, and two years later a real tree with a small menorah alongside it, lest anyone forget it was Hanukkah.
Governments in other historically Arab cities are also tentatively opening a door to the past. In 2009 Lod began hosting a joint Arabic and Hebrew music festival, and in 2011 opened its first state high school for Arabs. The desk of Lod’s deputy mayor, Aviv Wasserman, is covered with designs for his “megaplan”—the reconstruction of the old medina souq that army bulldozers largely leveled after the 1948 war. Though as yet merely an architect’s fancy on paper, the project provides for renovation of the dilapidated buildings that survived the wreckage. “We want to restore it to how it looked in 1948,” says Wasserman. After years of resisting calls to erect a signpost listing Acre’s name in Arabic at the city’s entrance, the municipality agreed.
And yet every year or two, just when the country seems to be normalizing, national politics intervenes and Israel has another battle with its neighbors, which refreshes nationalist animosities. Though the 2014 Gaza War was in Israel’s far south and Safed was out of reach of its rockets, Shohat dismissed any Arab municipal worker suspected of sympathizing with Gaza on social media, and advised Arab students to go back to their villages on security grounds. Jewish militants in the city relaunched their campaign, scrawling “Death to Arabs” on Arab front doors, to make the city Arab-free once again.
While the world’s headlines focused on Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, the battle inside Israel went largely unreported. In response to the killing of three Jewish students outside their Torah college in a West Bank settlement, Israel’s government fanned calls for reprisals. “Vengeance for the blood of three pure youths,” Netanyahu posted on his Twitter account, calling their killers “human animals.” Israeli television suspended normal scheduling, and broadcast rolling coverage of their funerals, while a mob a few hundred strong spilled onto central Jerusalem’s Jaffa Road, crying death to Arabs. The manager of a shoe shop stood his ground at the shop door to deny entry to thugs baying for his Palestinian assistants, but a guard at McDonald’s proved less effective. For three hours, the mob ran amok. Policemen who tried to restrain them were mocked as Arab-lovers. Some boarded trams and tried to lynch Palestinian passengers. Before dawn the next morning, Jews abducted a Palestinian boy, doused him in gasoline, and burned him to death in a Jerusalem forest. The police delayed release of the autopsy, and spread rumors that it was an inside job. “It might have been a relative pursuing an honor crime for homosexuality,” said Micky Rosenfeld, Israel’s police spokesman and a settler from Britain. No Israeli channel stopped normal transmission for the boy’s funeral.
Fired with emotion, Israel went to war in Gaza, further exacerbating communal tensions within. “We won’t let them destroy Haifa’s co-existence and harmony,” Yona Yahav told me, denouncing Palestinians who staged an anti-war protest in his city. Radio Haifa broadcast a call for a Jewish counter-rally, and on his way to the first demonstration the city’s Arab deputy mayor, Suhail Assad, and his son were mugged. As sirens rang out their alarms across Israel’s cities warning of incoming rockets, Israel’s foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, urged Jews to boycott Arab shops and restaurants. Palestinians closed ranks. “We’re telling Israel that our Palestinian identity is more important to us than our Israeli citizenship,” Jamal Zahalka, an Israeli Arab parliamentarian, who galvanized protesters. Armed riot police moved into Arab towns, dispersing protesters with tear gas and stun grenades. Stone-throwers struck back, forcing the closure of Israel’s main north-south artery, Road 6. Communal interaction all but collapsed. Parents and children from Jerusalem’s only mixed school of Arabs and Jews, Hand in Hand, walked twice a week through the city just chatting to show it was still possible. They were heckled as they went. Arsonists spray-painted “Cancer” on its school walls and set a classroom on fire. Palestinians stopped going into West Jerusalem, especially by tram, in part out of fear, in part as a boycott. Sales at Jewish-run malls, which normally soared during Ramadan, slumped. Even after the police sprayed skunk into the shops of East Jerusalem’s main shopping street, Saladin, and the smell hung for days in the air, Palestinians continued shopping in their own neighborhoods.