Fragile Ethnic Mosaic of Galilee Suffers Strains : Mideast: Many call the home of Jesus the “bridge to peace,” a model for how two groups can put aside old grievances and work toward a common future.

In Galilee, even the weather sometimes seems biblical. Mighty, swift-moving thunderstorms darken the skies and smite the earth in this rugged hill country of northern Israel. Then the gray marble clouds part, and a single incandescent beam pours through like a searchlight, probing the green hills and bone-white stones like a miracle looking for a place to land.

Galilee is best known, perhaps, as the home of Jesus of Nazareth, and with its stony hillsides and gnarled old olive trees it looks the part.

Unlike people in other regions of this troubled land, Jews and Arabs in Galilee have lived together quietly for decades. Many Israelis have gone so far as to call Galilee the “bridge to peace,” a model for how the two groups can put aside old grievances and work toward a common future.

But the political climate in Galilee--about half Jewish, half Arab--suggests that mending fences with the Arabs outside Israel may turn out to be only the first, and most difficult, step toward lasting peace.

The second--making peace with the 850,000 Arabs living inside Israel as citizens, whose discontent has been simmering for nearly 50 years.

Galilee is critically important to Israel in many ways. Its Jordan River and Sea of Galilee supply more than a third of Israel’s freshwater. Its fertile valleys put food on the nation’s table. Its shrines and ancient cities serve as a storehouse of the Jewish spirit.

Galilee also contains the heaviest concentration of Arabs in Israel, many of whom were displaced by the Arab-Israeli war in 1948, but remained within the new state instead of fleeing to neighboring lands.

The 450,000 Arabs in Galilee are a diverse group--most are Muslims, with minorities of Christians and Druze. Some 50,000 are Bedouin. But all are caught in this dilemma. They are outsiders, non-Jews in a nation that defines itself as the home for all Jews.

And, in a country that has fought six wars against Arab nations and lost thousands of lives to Arab terrorists, they are still considered by many to be potential enemies.

The 447,000 Jews of Galilee are also a study in diversity. There are Ashkenazic Jews of European origin, Sephardic Jews from North Africa and the Middle East and black Jews from Ethiopia. There are Jews from America, Iraq, the Caucasus region and many thousands of Jews from Russia.

There are ultra-religious Jews, secular Jews who rarely set foot inside a synagogue and Jews of a hundred variations in between. They mostly live in separate communities and don’t agree on much except the most important thing of all--they are Jews in the homeland of the Jews, and they are here to stay.

The glue binding all these lives together into the human mosaic of Galilee is very thin. And it doesn’t take much to shake the pieces loose, along cracks left over from 1948, when the Jews and Arabs of Galilee went to war.

“Ninety-nine percent of the time, Arabs and Jews in Galilee are scrupulously correct in their behavior,” observed Arnon Soffer, a geographer at Haifa University. “It’s that other 1% that will give you a glimpse of the volcano we’re sitting on.”

The Golan’s strategic position overlooking Galilee makes it a great vantage point from which to lob an occasional artillery shell at a neighbor or pick him off his tractor with a high-powered rifle--which is what the Syrian military regularly did until 1967 and why so many Jews in Galilee are against returning the Golan to Syria, a sworn enemy.

It’s also why all kibbutzim near any of these borders are part farm and part fortress.

Like Israel itself, Maagan, a kibbutz (communal farm) on the south shore of the Sea of Galilee, serves as a refuge for Jews who lived through the Holocaust. Many of the old folks here survived the Nazi camps.

A Galilean Jew, who was asked why these kibbutzniks stayed, even during the worst of the sniping and terrorism, replied simply, “Because there’s nowhere else to go. This is the cloud that hangs over every Jew in Israel.”

Terrorism destroys progress on the bridge to peace between Israeli Arabs and Jews. Many Galileans quietly express hope that one day it will be built. But terrorism tends to cleave Galilee exactly in two. You are an Arab or you are a Jew. Period. Nothing in between.

“Listen, every Jew in America or Russia or Ethiopia or Argentina has more rights in this country than we do,” declared Mufid Qassoum, a 35-year-old teacher and community organizer in Ibillin, a village of 8,200 people in western Galilee.

More than a third of Israeli Arab families live below the poverty line. Arabs in Galilee do the jobs nobody else wants to do. They clean the hotel rooms, build the houses, pump the gasoline and bring in the crops.

Emboldened by the new atmosphere of peace that emerged in 1994 after Israel’s return of the Gaza Strip and Jericho in the West Bank, Arabs inside Israel are openly embracing an identity they’ve kept hidden for nearly 50 years.

This is what frightens geographer Arnon Soffer, who fervently supports Judaizing, the deliberate effort to attract more Jewish settlers to Galilee and ensure that Arabs don’t outnumber Jews.

Sensing the mood in Arab villages, Soffer foresees “more and more friction between Arabs and Jews, more demands for Arab autonomy and self-determination.”

But Stef Wertheimer, a 68-year-old industrialist and entrepreneur from Nahariyya, has a vision for the future of Israel--a “new Zionism” to replace the farms and fortresses of the previous, worn-out version.

“It’s time for Israelis--both Arabs and Jews--to stop looking backward,” he said. “Instead, I say, let’s get up early and make a product. Declare a truce, then begin to fight a new enemy--overseas competition and on-time delivery to Japan or Europe.”