NAZARETH

"Synagogue-Church", Nazareth, courtesy Expedia

Today, Nazareth is a largely peaceful Arab town in the Lower Galilee, two thirds of whom are Muslim and one third Christian. Historically associated with the life of Christ, a Jew born in the Jewish city of Bethlehem, until the 7^th century, Nazareth was a wholly or largely Jewish town.

According to some medieval Jewish scholars, the area was settled by Jews during the time of the prophet Jeremiah who wrote of the watchmen (netzarim) of Ephraim whence the town may have gotten its name. Centuries later, it became the boyhood home of Jesus Christ. According to the New Testament account, when Jesus tried to preach to the people of the town, he was attacked and almost thrown off a cliff, identified by tradition as the nearby Jebel Qafza. After the end of the Bar Kochba revolt in 135, Nazareth became the home of, and ruled by, the Hafitzatz family of Cohanim, descendants from the House of Levi son of Jacob. They remained the priestly rulers of Nazareth for the next few centuries.

During the early Byzantine period, many massacres and expulsions of Jews took place throughout the Land of Israel, including Nazareth. Forced conversion attempts were commonplace. In the 4^th century, Epiphanius, an anti-Jewish Jewish convert to Christianity, was given permission by the authorities to build a church in Nazareth in an attempt to convert the Jews. According to tradition, it was built on the site of the synagogue where Jesus worshipped and thus became known as the “synagogue church”. This conversion attempt was unsuccessful but a small body of Jewish Christians grew up around it. The “church” exists to this day and is one of many focal points for Christian pilgrims. By the 6^th century, another church was built, apparently converted from a synagogue.

In reaction to centuries of ceaseless persecutions under the Christians, Jews would actively support anyone who came to relieve their plight. The answer came in 614 when the Persians invaded the Land of Israel aided by some 20,000 Jews who served in the Persian army. Those in and around Nazareth, especially the mountain areas, also actively aided the Persians and contributed much to the Persian takeover, massacring many Christians in the process. The Jews finally got their revenge but this victory however, was short-lived. By 630, the Byzantines finally expelled the Persians. All Jews were expelled from Nazareth which was, then, settled by Christians from throughout the Empire. Nazareth became a Christian town. So much so that the Hebrew word for Christian, “Notzri”, derives from the name Nazareth. Much later, a small number of Jews did return and remained there for centuries. After the Arab conquest in 636, Arab Muslims also began to settle there. The “synagogue church” was later purchased by the Franciscans in 1741. Today, the site belongs to the Melkite Greek Catholic Church.

Christian prejudice against Jews had never ceased during the centuries of Christian and Muslim rule. In 1849 upon the visit to Nazareth of British philanthropist Sir Moses Montefiore, someone had accused him of killing a child and using his blood for making Passover Matza – an old anti-Semitic trope from Europe, centuries in the making. Fortunately, the ruling Ottoman Turks found the accusation baseless and Montefiore was then able to go on his way.

After the British conquest of the Land of Israel in World War I and the subsequent increase in Jewish immigration spurred on by the Zionist movement, representatives of Nazareth who opposed Zionism, sent a delegation to the First Palestine Arab Congress and issued a letter of protest in 1920 that condemned the movement while also proclaiming solidarity with the Jews of Palestine as one of many religions in the country. In 1922, Nazareth had a remaining Jewish population of 53 that had survived over the centuries. They were ethnically cleansed from there, as were other places in the Land of Israel during the bloody Arab riots in the ‘20s and ‘30s.

In the 1936–1939 Arab Revolt, Nazareth played a minor role, contributing two rebel commanders to the Arab militias – the Christian Fu'ad Nassar and Tawfiq al-Ibrahim. The leaders of the revolt sought to use Nazareth as a staging ground to protest the British proposal to include the Galilee into a future Jewish state. To give expression to that opposition, on September 26, 1937, the British district commissioner of the Galilee, Lewis Yelland Andrews, was assassinated in Nazareth by local rebels.

Nazareth was in the territory allotted to the Arab state under the 1947 UN Partition Plan. In the months leading up to the 1948 War of Independence, the town became a refuge for Arabs fleeing the urban centers of Tiberias, Haifa and Baysan before and during the Haganah's capture of those cities in April and May.

During the War, Nazareth was conquered by Arab forces under the direction of the Nazi-trained Fawzi al Kaukji from Syria but was taken by Israeli forces in July. The town surrendered and after the War, was incorporated into the State of Israel.

In 1957, the adjacent Jewish town of Nazrat Illit (Upper Nazareth) was established. It became populated by native born Israelis and European immigrants and in 1974, it achieved city status.

VALLEY OF JEZREEL

Valley of Jezreel, Israel, courtesy, Wikipedia

The Jezreel Valley, also known as the Valley of Megiddo or the Plain of Esdraelon, is a large fertile plain and inland valley in northern Israel formed by the Kishon River. It takes its name from the ancient city of Jezreel which was located on a low hill overlooking the southern edge of the valley. The name “Jezreel” is of Hebrew origin and means "God sows", aptly named since the valley has become known as the breadbasket of Israel. It is bordered to the north by the highlands of the Lower Galilee region, to the south by the Samarian highlands, to the west and northwest by the Mount Carmel range, and to the east by the Jordan Valley, with Mount Gilboa marking its southern extent. Today the largest city in the valley is the Arab Muslim/Christian city of Nazareth which lies near its center. In Christian eschatology, the Final Battle between the forces of Gog and Magog, good and evil, will be fought at the site of Har Megiddo – Mount Megiddo, near the village of the same name. Centuries later, the name of this site became Latinized to “Armageddon”.

In the Biblical period, the Jezreel Valley partly covered the Israelite territories of Asher, Menasheh, Zvulun, and Yissasschar. During the rule of the Prophetess Deborah, a major battle occurred at Mount Tabor, in the eastern part of the valley, between the Israelites under Barak and the Canaanites under Sisera. The valley was also the scene of a victory by the Israelites under Gideon, against the Midianites, the Amalekites, and the Children of the East (Judges 6:3), but was later the location at which the Israelites, led by King Saul, were defeated by the Philistines at Mount Gilboa (1 Samuel 28:4, 29:1–29:6, 31:1-31.6). During the period of the Divided Kingdom, Jehu, an army captain of the northern Kingdom of Israel, killed King Jehoram in the valley, and had Jezebel killed in Jezreel town (2 Kings 9:1-9:10).

After the Roman destruction of Jerusalem and due to subsequent invasions and counter-invasions in the following centuries, the area gradually lost its population and by the 13^th century, after the Crusader period, it was largely deserted, became a swampland, and abandoned to nomads. However, the edges of the valley, namely villages like Bet Shean were still populated, mainly by Muslim Arab settlers but also by some Jews who remained. The 14th century topographer Ishtori Haparchi settled there and completed his work Kaftor Vaferach in 1322, the first Hebrew book on the geography of Palestine. But in the main, the valley remained swampland which bred malaria making settlement impossible. In the 1870s, the Sursock family, a Greek family in Beirut purchased 80,000 acres of valley land from the Ottoman government for approximately £20,000. In 1910, Yehoshua Hankin completed his first major Jewish purchase in the Jezreel Valley. He bought some 10,000 dunams of land in the area of Al-Fuleh (now Afula), which became the home of two moshav settlements, Merhavia in 1911 and Tel Adashim in 1913. Afula itself, was then an Arab hamlet that was also home to a small Jewish community. By 1924, this community had grown sufficiently and was able to establish the Emek Medical Center which served the entire region. By the 1920s, Nazareth also had a Jewish population (see article on Nazareth). Between 1912 and 1925 the Sursocks sold part of their landholdings to the Jewish National Fund which established Nahalal, the 1^st large moshav, in 1921, and part to the American Zion Commonwealth which purchased Afula in 1925. The Jewish farmers who settled on the land, set about the task of draining the swamps to enable further land development.

In the late 1920s, a synagogue mosaic was uncovered by archaeologists at Bet Alfa. (see Bet Alfa and Synagogue). Valley sites established during the British Mandate period included: Ginnegar, Balfouria (1922), Mizra, Kfar Gidon (1923), Gevat, Ramat David, Bet Shearim, Bet Zaid, Kfar Baruch (1926), Kfar Yehoshua, Sde Yaacov (1927), Kfar Hahoresh (1933), Alonim (1938), Dovrat (1946), and Gazit (1947).

During the Arab riots in the 1930s, Bet Shean served as a base for Arab attacks against Jews whether they were immigrants or not. Throughout the centuries, Jews have live in Bet Shean, on and off, but during the riots, the Arabs finally expelled them. During this time, the settlement of Tel Amal was established as a Tower and Stockade settlement for the purpose of defense against Arab attacks. Today, it is part of Gan Hashlosha National Park, one of the most popular recreation areas in Israel. After Israeli independence, development of the valley increased in pace. In 1954, Kibbutz Yifat was established. It houses the Museum of the Beginning of Settlement and contains exhibiting items and photos of the pioneer settlement in Israel. Max Stern Yizreel Valley College, located between Afula and Nazareth, was founded in 1965 and offers BA degrees and holds courses in such fields as Economics, Behavioral Sciences, Social Sciences, Communication Studies, Human Services, Health Administration, Nursing Studies and General Studies. In 1980, the Jezreel Valley gained regional status and the Jezreel Valley Regional Council was established in Nahalal. In 2006, the Israeli Transportation Ministry and the Regional Council announced plans to build an international airport near Megiddo but the project was shelved due to environmental objections.

BALFOUR FOREST, ISRAEL

Balfour Forest, courtesy KKL-JNF, photo: Dennis Zin

In Biblical times, the area that is now the Balfour Forest in the hills west of Nazareth, as with the rest of the Land of Israel, was a well-wooded and well-farmed region and located in the tribal territory of Zvulun. After the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 and the consequent occupation and invasions of foreign empires – Arabs, Crusaders, Mameluke Egyptians, and Ottoman Turks, etc., and their havoc on the land, Israel gradually became denuded of any forestry whatsoever with the exception of a few small areas scattered throughout the country. It wasn’t until c. 1870 that Jews started to re-plant trees, further south at Mikve Yisrael outside of Jaffa. Around the same time, the Sursock family, a Greek Christian family resident in Beirut, purchased from the Ottoman government, large swathes of the Jezreel Valley, including the Nazereth hills which was sparsely covered with steppes and shrubberies at the time.

With the founding of the Jewish National Fund in 1901, tree planting and land reclamation became more organized and on a national scale. In 1921, after lengthy negotiations, the Sursock landholdings were legally transferred to the JNF and Kibbutz Ginegar was founded the following year west of Nazareth and at the southern foothills. It was the wish of the JNF as well as of the Jewish leadership that this area be made to look like what it was originally in Biblical times and the idea for the Balfour Forest was born, named after Arthur Balfour, British Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs at the end of World War I, who was sympathetic to Jewish national aspirations in the Jewish ancestral homeland.

This was to be the JNF’s first major forestry project, requiring a large amount of capital. So fund-raising began almost immediately spearheaded by the Balfour Forest Committee based in London and headed by Major George Nathan, assisted by the Marquess of Reading. The funds were then transferred to the JNF and, in 1928, on the barren hilltop north of Ginegar, the planting of the forest commenced attended by Jewish and British officials including Menachem Ussishkin, chairman of the JNF, Sir Alfred Mond, accompanied by Lady Mond, who planted the first saplings, Chaim Weizmann, president of the World Zionist Organization, David ben Gurion, head of the Executive of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, High Commissioner Lord Plumer and Lady Plumer, Harry Sacher of the Palestine Zionist Executive, David Yellin, chairman of the Vaad Leumi (the National Council of Palestine), M. Bernard Baron, and Lady Erleigh. After the ceremonial first planting, labor groups from Ginegar were recruited for the project assisted by labor activists from California. All were in agreement that the forest would be economically beneficial to both Jew and Arab alike. When the forest was inaugurated later that year, it was a festive occasion with speeches which were broadcast to England. Well wishes came in from London including from Balfour himself, Sir Herbert Samuel, the previous High Commissioner of Palestine, the Earl of Reading, former Viceroy of India, and former Prime Minister David Lloyd-George. Chaim Solomon, member of the Jerusalem Municipal Council, then presented the forest in the name of British Jewry to the Jubilee Committee as a “symbol of loyalty to the throne and a token of gratitude for the freedom the Jews have enjoyed in Britain during the King’s reign.” The inauguration ceremony ended with the singing of Hatikvah.

In 1933, a major forest fire occurred. Firefighters from Ginegar, and nearby Nahalal and Afula helped to put out the fire. Its cause was uncertain, but during the Arab intifada of 1936-1939, one of many that would periodically erupt since even before the advent of Zionism, Arab arsonists would torch the forest several times causing extensive damage. In one incident in 1939, an arson attempt was thwarted due to the timely intervention by the Police Inspector of Tiberias.

After the intifada had run its course and the onset on World War II, the forest was well guarded and it quickly recovered – so much so that it became a location of frequent recreational and cultural activities. In 1942, a Biblically theme theatrical performance took place at a natural theater setting in the middle of the forest.

In the 1950s, additional trees were planted by refugees from Europe and North Africa. In 1985, a large grove of trees was planted in memory of William MacRae, a prominent member of the Scottish National Party (Balfour was a fellow Scot) and long-time friend of Israel. He was also Professor Emeritus at the University of Haifa.

Today, the forest is surrounded by villages and towns including Migdal HaEmek on the north and west, Yefe an-Nasariyye on the north, Ginegar on the south, and Nazareth on the east. Part of a popular recreational bike path beginning at Migdal haEmek traverses the forest, and weekly visits are arranged by the Haifa Jewish Hospitality Committee.

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.