panorama view of the Galilee, courtesy, Wikipedia |
The
area’s Israelite name is from the Hebrew word “Galil”,
“district”. The Hebrew form used in Isaiah 8:23
(or 9:1 in different Biblical versions) is “Galil haGoyim”, 'district of the
nations', i.e. the part of Galilee inhabited by Gentiles at
the time that the book was written. Chapter 9 of 1 Kings states
that Solomon rewarded
his Phoenician ally, King Hiram I of Sidon, with twenty cities in the land of Galilee, which would then
have been either settled by foreigners during and after the reign of Hiram, or
by those who had been forcibly deported there by later conquerors such as
the Assyrians. Hiram, to reciprocate previous gifts given to David, accepted the upland
plain among the mountains of Naphtali and
renamed it for a time, "the land of Cabul". During the expansion under
the Hasmonean dynasty much of the region was conquered and annexed by the first
Hasmonean King of Judaea Aristobulus I (104 - 103 BCE).
The
archaeological discoveries of synagogues from the Hellenistic and Roman period
in the Galilee show strong Phoenician influences, and a high level of tolerance
for other cultures relative to other Jewish religious centers. By the
first century, Galilee was dotted with small towns and villages numbering approximately
204 according to the Jewish historian Josephus. Many of these were located
around the Sea of Galilee where the land was most fertile and in which
contained an abundance of fish. Salted, dried, and pickled fish were an
important export item.
In
4 BCE, the rebel Judah plundered Galilee's largest city, Sepphoris. Later, the Syrian
governor Publius Quinctilius
Varus sacked Sepphoris and sold the population into slavery. After
the death of Herod the Great that same year, the Roman emperor Augustus appointed
Herod’s son Herod Antipas as tetrarch of Galilee, which remained a Roman client state.
Antipas paid tribute to the Roman Empire in
exchange for protection. The Romans did not station troops in Galilee, but
threatened to retaliate against anyone who attacked it. As long as he
continued to pay tribute, Antipas was permitted to govern however he
wished and was permitted to mint his own coinage. He was also relatively
observant of Jewish laws and customs. Although his palace was decorated
with animal carvings, which many Jews regarded as a transgression against the
law prohibiting idols, his coins bore only agricultural designs, which his
subjects deemed acceptable.
In
general, Antipas was a capable ruler. Josephus does not record any instance of
him using force to put down an uprising and he had a long, prosperous
reign. However, many Jews probably resented him as not sufficiently
devout. Antipas rebuilt the city of Sepphoris and, in either 18 CE or
19 CE, he founded the new city of Tiberias. These two cities became
Galilee's largest cultural centers. They were the main centers of
Greco-Roman influence, but were still predominantly Jewish. A massive gap
existed between the rich and poor, but lack of uprisings suggest that
taxes were not exorbitantly high and that most Galileans did not feel their
livelihoods were being threatened. This was also the period of Jesus of
Nazareth.
Late
in his reign, Antipas married his half-niece Herodias,
who was already married to one of her other uncles. His wife, whom he
divorced, fled to her father Aretas, an
Arab king, who invaded Galilee and defeated Antipas's troops before
withdrawing. Both Josephus and the Gospel of Mark 6:17–29 record that the itinerate preacher John the Baptist criticized Antipas over his marriage and Antipas
consequently had him imprisoned and then beheaded. In around 39 CE, at the urging of Herodias, Antipas went to Rome to request that
he be elevated from the status of tetrarch to the status of king. But the
Romans found him guilty of storing arms, so he was removed from power and
exiled, ending his forty-three-year reign. During the Great Revolt (66–73 CE), a
Jewish mob destroyed his palace.
According to medieval Hebrew
legend, Simeon bar Yochai, one of the most
famed of all the Tannaim, wrote the Zohar while living in
Galilee. After
the fall of the Jewish state a new period of local prosperity set in and Galilee
gradually became the center of Jewish life in Palestine and was enumerated,
mainly for religio-legal purposes, in the Talmud.
Eastern Galilee retained a Jewish majority until at least the seventh century.
The region then fell to
the Muslim Arabs in 635/6 and became part of the province of al-Urdun (Jordan)
with its capital in Tiberias. The Jewish villages continued diminishing but
some existed until the time of the Crusades.
Following the expulsion from Spain in 1492, the
Sephardic refugees were welcomed by the Ottoman Empire and the Jewish population of Galilee increased significantly. The
community for a time made Safed an international center of cloth weaving and
manufacturing, as well as a key site for Jewish learning. As a result, it
was deemed one of Judaism's four holy cities and a center for kabbalah. In 1563, the
resettlement of Tiberias was engineered by Don Joseph Nasi,
a banker and diplomat in Turkey, who had intended the town and the
surrounding area as the center of a proposed Jewish province.
In the
process of the 1834 Arab
revolt, the Jewish
community of Safed was greatly reduced when it was
plundered by the local Arabs. But the situation improved by the second half of the 19th century when Galilee's
population increased and, on the whole, progressed, thanks to an extended
period of peace. The Jewish community, concentrated mainly in Safed, somewhat
improved its standard
of living, although it continued to be dependent on ḥalukkah (donations
from the Diaspora). In 1856, Ludwig
August Frankl found 2,100 Jews in Safed, and 50 in Peki'in
which was a community of mustarabi Jews, those who had never left Israel and
had remained on the land since time immemorial. Until 1895, the number
of Jews in Safed increased to 6,620, and in Peki'in to 96. Even before the
arrival of settlers of the Ḥovevei Zion and Bilu movements, there were
stirrings within the Safed community for a more productive way of life, and in
1878 a group formed, and settled at Gei
Oni, the forerunner of Rosh
Pinnah; later a second group which formed to settle in
the Golan eventually established Benei
Yehudah. Rosh Pinnah became the cornerstone of a Jewish settlement network
in eastern Upper Galilee and on the rim of the Ḥuleh
Valley. In 1891, Russian Jews founded Ein Zeitim north of Safed. A second phase began in 1900 when
the Jewish
Colonization Association bought rather flat land with
basalt soil in eastern Lower Galilee with the object of establishing
"true" farming villages, i.e., based on grain crops, and Ilaniyyah, Kefar
Tavor, Jabneel,
and other settlements were founded. More moshavot were added through private
initiative, and a training farm was set up on Jewish
National Fund land at Kefar
Ḥittim. The Galilean moshavot set the stage for the beginnings
of the cooperative
movement of Jewish laborers and of the Ha-Shomer guardsmen.
In the following decade, however, the Galilean moshavot and the Tiberias
community stagnated, and those of Safed and Peki'in even decreased. As a result
of World War I, Safed's Jewish community was decimated.
During the Third, Fourth,
and Fifth aliyot, which gave a powerful impulse to Jewish
settlement, new Jewish areas were created, mainly in the Jezreel Valley to the
south in the 1920s, and in the Zebulun
Valley to the southwest in the 1930s. There was also the expansion of
the Stockade and
Watchtower network during the 1936–39 Arab riots, especially in the Acre
Coastal Plain to the northwest, in the Bet Shean Valley to the southeast, and
in the Ḥuleh Valley to the northeast. The Jewish Colonization Association and
the Jewish National Fund, reacting to the British White
Paper of 1939, strengthened the "settlement
bridge" in southeastern Lower Galilee connecting the Jezreel and
the Kinneret valleys (e.g.,
Sharonah, Ha-Zore'im,
etc.). In the 1940s, several more outpost settlements were set up, some of them
at particularly difficult and isolated sites (e.g., Manara, Yeḥi'am, Misgav
Am).
The largest part of Galilee, however, continued to be
exclusively non-Jewish, causing the UN partition plan of 1947 to allocate to
the proposed Arab state the bulk of the area, from the Lebanese border south
to, and including, Nazareth and from the shore of the Acre Plain east to the
vicinity of Safed; only a strip of eastern and southeastern Galilee was left to
the Jewish state.
After
the 1948 Arab–Israeli war, nearly the whole of Galilee came under Israel's control. A
large portion of the population fled or was forced to leave, leaving dozens of
entire villages empty; however, a large Israeli Arab community remained based in and near the cities of Nazareth, Acre, Tamra, Sakhnin,
and Shefa-'Amr. The Druze population decided to
side with the Jews and so their population remained stable and later greatly
increased. In the meantime, the kibbutzim around
the Sea of Galilee were sometimes shelled by the Arab army of Syria until
Israel seized the western Golan Heights in the 1967 Six-Day War.
During
the 1970s and the early 1980s, the Palestine
Liberation Organization (PLO) launched
multiple attacks on towns and
villages of the Upper and Western Galilee from Lebanon.
This came in parallel to the general destabilization of Southern Lebanon, which became a scene of fierce sectarian fighting which
deteriorated into the Lebanese Civil War. In the course of the war, Israel initiated Operation Litani (1979) and Operation Peace
For Galilee (1982) with the
stated objectives of destroying the PLO infrastructure in Lebanon, protecting
the citizens of the Galilee and supporting allied Maronite/Phoenician Lebanese
militias, later, the South Lebanon army. Israel took over much of southern Lebanon
in support of Maronite Lebanese fighters until 1985, when it withdrew to
a narrow
security buffer zone.
From
1985 to 2000, Hezbollah,
and earlier Amal, engaged the South Lebanon Army, sometimes shelling Upper Galilee communities with Katyusha rockets. In May 2000, Israeli prime
minister Ehud Barak unilaterally withdrew IDF troops from southern Lebanon,
maintaining a security force on the Israeli side of the international border recognized by the United Nations. The move brought a collapse to the South Lebanon Army and takeover of Southern Lebanon by Hezbollah. However,
despite Israeli withdrawal, clashes between Hezbollah and Israel continued
along the border, and UN observers condemned both for their attacks.
The 2006
Israel-Lebanon conflict was
characterized by round-the-clock Katyusha rocket attacks (with a greatly
extended range) by Hezbollah on the whole of Galilee, with long-range,
ground-launched missiles hitting as far south as the Sharon Plain, Jezreel Valley,
and Jordan Valley below the Sea of Galilee.
Nowadays,
Galilee is a popular destination for domestic and foreign tourists who enjoy
its scenic, recreational, and gastronomic offerings. The Galilee attracts
many Christian pilgrims, as many of the miracles of Jesus occurred, according to the New Testament, on the shores of the Sea of Galilee—including his walking on water, calming the storm, and feeding five thousand
people in Tabgha. In addition, numerous sites
of biblical importance
are located in the Galilee, such as Megiddo,
the Jezreel Valley, Mount Tabor, Hazor, Horns of Hattin, and more.
Numerous
festivals are also held throughout the year, especially in the autumn and
spring holiday seasons. These include the Acre (Acco) Festival of Alternative
Theater, the olive harvest festival, music festivals featuring
Anglo-American folk, klezmer,
Renaissance, and chamber music, and the Karmiel Dance Festival.
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