GALILEE

panorama view of the Galilee, courtesy, Wikipedia

The Galilee is a region in what is today, northern Israel and southern Lebanon. In Biblical times, it covered the Israelite tribal territories of Asher, Naphtali, Zvulun, Yissasschar, and the northern branch of Dan. After the destruction of Jerusalem, it was also home to two of the four holy cities of Judaism – Safed and Tiberias – as well as the ports of Haifa and Acre. It extends north to south, from the Litani River in southern Lebanon in the north to the Mount Carmel-Mount Gilboa ridge in the south. From east to west, it stretches from the Acre coastal plain north of Haifa in the west to the northern Jordan Valley in the east. It also consists of a sliver of land between Dan and the Golan Heights including the foothills of Mount Hermon. In addition, the Galilee is often divided into several sub-regions: Lower Galilee; Upper Galilee; the Jezreel Valley; the "Galilee Panhandle"; the northern Jordan Valley; the Hula Valley; the Korazim Plateau; the Sea of Galilee and its valley; the Beit She'an Valley; Mount Gilboa; and Western Galilee. Demographically, the region is almost half Arab, almost half Jewish, and the rest, Druze and others. The largest cities in the region are Acre, Bet She’an, Nahariya, Nazareth, Cana, Metulla, Qiryat Shmona, Safed, Karmiel, Shaghur, Shefa-'Amr, Afula, and Tiberias. The port city of Haifa serves as a commercial center for the whole region.

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 19^th 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.