By Michael Rom

At first glance, Peki’in is a tourist’s dream. The Galilean village is situated on the side of a hill, overlooking a green valley, from which it takes its Arabic name, al-Buqe’a (little valley). In the centre of the Galilean village is an ancient spring, ringed by cafes and restaurants. A little ways north of the spring is a cave, said to be the spot where the 2^nd century kabbalist Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai hid for fourteen years from Roman soldiers. According to legend, although the great rabbi subsisted only on carobs from an adjacent tree, and water from the spring, he was able to compose the Zohar, the seminal text of kabbalah.

These days Peki’in remains a spiritual place. It is known widely as the village of the four religions. While Peki’in’s population of four thousand is predominantly Druze, a mystic offshoot of Islam that emerged in Egypt in the 10^th century, there are also handfuls of Christians, Muslims and Jews. The village is home to numerous places of worship: a Druze hilwah, two churches, and a synagogue dating to the 19^th century.

Peki’in’s Jews claim to have lived in the village since the time of the second temple. Until 1936 three prominent Jewish families lived in Peki’in: the Zinati, Tuma and Ouda clans. For all intents and purposes, they were Palestinian Jews, indistinguishable in language, dress, or food from their Druze, Christian and Muslim neighbours. This coexistence lasted until the Arab Revolt of 1936, at which time most of Peki’in’s Jews fled to Hadera, a Jewish town near the coast.

Only the Zinati family remained. To this day, Margalit Zinati lives in a house emblazoned with stars of david opposite the synagogue. Now in her seventies, she takes great pride in her role as the synagogue’s caretaker, maintaining it and showing it off to the scores of Jewish Israeli children that come to Peki’in on school trips.

I was curious to meet Margalit, the last of the Palestinian Jewish villagers. I stopped off in Peki’in on a Friday afternoon in early July. To my disappointment, she was not home, and the synagogue was locked. Not knowing what else to do, I wondered through the narrow village streets to the spring. I sat at a restaurant, and had a plate ofmjaddara, lentils and bulgur. I watched the people come and go, and thought about how I would spend the coming Shabbat.

At a nearby table sat a Jewish Israeli family: a middle aged woman, a young couple, and an enfant, enjoying a meal together. I took them for tourists, but in talking to them, I learned that the middle aged woman had been living in Peki’in for several months. She invited me to stay with her, starting Sunday- until then her time would be taken up with her grandson. But if I wanted to stay in Peki’in over Shabbat, I could bed down in one the vacant houses nearby, owned by the Jewish Agency but thoroughly dilapidated.

I was surprised to discover another Jew living in Peki’in, and a newcomer. What did the other villagers think of her moving in? Where there other Jews beside her and Margalit? It was getting late, and soon the buses would stop running. I opted to stay in Peki’in- the village’s charm made it hard to leave.

The hostel was closed, and the inn was prohibitively expensive. I made my way to one of the Jewish Agency houses, climbed the outer staircase, and tried the door, which was unlocked. Entering furtively, I cleared away a pile of dust, and placed my sleeping bag on the floor. The apartment was filthy, but it would have to do.

I returned to the town square, and chatted to some Druze guys my age. Most were friendly, but as the afternoon turned into evening, a few become suspicious. How long did I plan on staying in town? Did I want to move here? I was surprised at the questions, and their suspicious tone- why would I want to move here? I had only just arrived. I explained that I was planning on only staying until Sunday.

A little while later, after I had wondered off from the group, a minivan passed by. Its driver was a national religious Jewish man, with a black beard and baseball cap. I greeted him with a “Shabbat shalom”, and he wasted little time in inviting me over to his house for Shabbat dinner. He lived on the other side of the square.

Aviv and Orit Ziegelman were a young couple with half a dozen children. They had been living in Peki’in for two years in a house that they had bought from a third party. Prior to moving to Peki’in, they had lived in Gush Katif, a settlement in Gaza. The Ziegelmans believed strongly in Jewish settlement in Peki’in, in reclaiming the village for the Jews. All the same, they did not wish to antagonise their Druze neighbours.

The Ziegelmans were not the only national religious Jews to have recently moved to town. The Zilkas, a Yemenite Jewish family, had also moved in not long before. I had launch with them on Saturday, and they were an affable couple. The proudly showed me the fruit trees that they had planted in their garden, with the help of some of their Druze neighbours. After lunch we sat on their balcony, which looked out across the valley to New Peki’in, a town built in the fifties for Moroccan Jewish immigrants.

I thanked them for lunch, and walked toward the cave of Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai. Beside the cave was a little stand with a bell, and above the stand was a house. Beside the house, a blond man was working in his garden. His name was Gavriel and he was a Jew from Holland. The house belonged to his parents and he lived there with his wife.

Unlike Zilka and Ziegelman, Gavriel had little interest in Peki’in’s Jewish roots. If anything, he was more interested in the ruins of Suhmata, a nearby Palestinian village destroyed in the war of 1948. Gavriel’s interest in Peki’in’s history concerned mainly the cave of Bar Yohai, and its mysticism. The cave’s mystique had prompted his father to buy the house next door years before. Gavriel’s respect for the cave did not preclude him from taking advantage of its commercial potential. He operated the stand, selling souvenirs and carob jams made from Bar Yohai’s carob tree, the earnings from which he supplemented with work in nearby moshavim.

Gavriel had little to do with Zilka or Ziegelman. However, he got on well with his neighbours, whom we visited. Unlike Zilka and Ziegelman, Gavriel had asked permission from the town council before moving in, and they had granted it. It didn’t hurt that his parents already owned the house.

The residents of Peki’in had accepted Gavriel, and they considered Margalit one of their own. Both contributed to the town’s tourism industry, and brought in customers for the restaurants and other businesses. Gavriel looked after the cave, and Margalit took care of the synagogue (when she wasn’t taking therapeutic cures at the Dead Sea, as was the case that weekend). The residents of Peki’in felt threatened, however, by the prospect of an influx of nationalist Jewish settlers, seeking to change the nature of the village in the name of historical right. This threat dated to the eighties, when the Jewish Agency purchased its houses, meant for Jewish settlers that never came. These days, people such as Ziegelman and Zilka were buying their homes through third party organisations, a process over which Peki’in’s Arab Druze majority has little control.

As Peki’in’s coexistence begins to unravel, it is beginning to seem like a microcosm of the Arab/Jewish conflict. Not the conflict as it plays itself out today, in the West Bank and Gaza, but an earlier time, roughly eighty or ninety years ago, when Jews first began returning to their ancient homeland. They came in search of ancient Jewish roots, in a land blessed with holy sites of four religions, and a tradition of coexistence between them. On lands in which Jews settled, they encountered a Palestinian Arab population that become increasingly fearful of encroachment and dispossession, a process which it was largely powerless to stop.

That this process should be playing itself out in Peki’in is somewhat bizarre- after all the majority of the village’s population is Druze, and serves in the Israel Defence Forces.  A whole suburb of Peki’in has been built in the valley, homes built by the army for its veterans. Peki’in’s residents are all fluent in Hebrew, identify as Israeli rather than Palestinian, and many of them depend on Israeli tourism for their livelihood.

         It has been more than two years since I visited Peki’in. This past October, the tension in the village recently reached its boiling point. Youths from Peki’in vandalised a cellphone antenna in New Peki’in, which they claimed was causing cancer. Police entered town at dawn on October 30 to arrest the youths, and were greeted with rocks and stun grenades. In the ensuing riot, police opened fire with live ammunition. Dozens of people were injured, including those shot by the police. The home of Shimon Freulich, a new Jewish arrival in town, was burned down.

In an interview with Ha’aretz, Mohammed Khir, head of the Peki’in council, blamed the riots on “provocations meant to fan the flames”. He was referring to associations such as the Lower Galilee Association and Peki’in Forever, which were actively working to change Peki’in’s ethnic makeup in favour of rightist Jewish arrivals. ”We have Jewish families who arrived here and became part of the village,” Khir said. “By contrast, there are extreme rightists who give us the feeling that they are there to take over the village in the name of historical right.”[1] In promoting Jewish rights to Peki’in, these rightist organisations are disrupting the traditional coexistence of the village, a coexistence which sustained Peki’in’s Jews for millennia.