Ancient City Divided : Israel’s Acre: Rocky Soil for Good Will

ACRE, Israel —  In the Old City, narrow, cobbled alleys zigzag through the shadows of aged stone-block homes, past open doorways where Arab women sit cutting vegetables and processing the neighborhood news.

Young men trot from the nearby quay shouldering baskets glistening with fresh catch for the fish merchants of the souk . The air is filled with the smell of the sea and the sharp-sweet scent of Oriental spices.

Under the shade of a tenting, two venerables of this ancient city stand wrapped in the gesticulated conversation of the Middle East, eyebrows arched, jaws set, fingers ticking off their points. One of the men wears the white skullcap of a Muslim hajji , a man who has made the pilgrimage to Mecca. A smaller, lightly embroidered cap, the Jewish kippa , rests on the head of the second.

Old City Like a Postcard

On the surface, Acre still seems to have it all: a reputation as the most integrated Arab-Jewish community in Israel. The postcard perfect Old City, a magnet for tourism. And the rich, fabulous history: conquered, rebuilt and ruled by every ancient imperial power within reach; a Crusader capital of the Holy Land; the walls that blunted Napoleon’s ambitions in the Near East.

But another page is turning in the long history of the city that Israelis call by its Biblical name Akko. Many among the Jewish community, which comprises three-quarters of Acre’s 40,000 citizens, are no longer comfortable with their Arab neighbors.

Where Jew and Arab once made an effort to be good neighbors in a mixed community, and some still do, the divisive strains that have chilled other Israeli cities can now be felt here.

“The intifada cannot be ignored,” said an Arab official of City Hall, pointing out the “solidarity” of his people with Palestinians rising in increasingly violent protest against Israeli rule in the occupied territories.

Mayor Concedes Problems

“More and more, we have walls,” conceded Mayor Eli De Castro in a recent interview in the Old City. “We do have a problem.”

De Castro, a Labor Party man beginning his second full term, won just 52% of the vote in last spring’s election. The opposition included proponents of “a Jewish Acre” and David Bar-Lev, candidate of the nationally dominant Likud Bloc, who used the politically freighted word “transfer” in his campaign.

In a wider Palestinian-Jewish context, “transfer” has come to mean the threat of forced deportation of Palestinian communities in the occupied territories to neighboring Arab countries. Here in Acre, Bar-Lev insisted during the campaign, “transfer” means the voluntary relocation of Old City Arabs to a nearby village to relieve congestion.

“I want to help them with their housing problems,” he said.

The relationship between Arab and Jew, the pride of Acre for the past quarter century since city fathers adopted a housing policy that deliberately mixed the two communities, became the central issue in the campaign.

The opposition charged that “De Castro likes the Arabs more than the Jews,” recalled the mayor, whose slim margin of victory was provided by a solid Arab vote. He insists that he has tried to be even-handed, that both sides should work together on the problems of Acre.

The political debate focused on the Old City, built under Ottoman Turkish rule in the 18th and early 19th centuries. It stands on a headland looking southwest to Haifa, across the only bay on Israel’s Mediterranean coastline.

Built by Crusaders

Within the city walls, built originally by the Crusaders, stands a large, green-roofed mosque built by the Pasha Ahmed Jazzar, an Albanian adventurer who ruled here under the Turks 200 years ago and earned the nickname “Butcher of Acre” for his cruel administration of justice. In the spirit of present times, however, one of Mayor De Castro’s Arab aides noted that the top adviser of the Muslim pasha was Jewish.

Around the mosque and three well-preserved caravansaries--Ottoman inns of columned arcades built around an open courtyard for the caravan’s camels--two-century-old, multilevel dwellings house the Arab population of the Old City in medieval proximity. Hundreds of the houses are considered dangerously decrepit. No Jews live here.

Bid for Tourism

Much of the tourist treasure lies below street level, the Crusader citadel and Christian religious structures erected in the 11th through 13th centuries and since built over by succeeding populations. High, barrel-vaulted chambers, cold and imposing, housed the facilities of Knights of the Cross like the Order of St. John, commonly called the Hospitallers, who administered to the cares of Christian pilgrims with sword and surplice. One of the halls is now used for concerts.

De Castro’s idea is to develop Acre’s tourism focused on the hub of the Old City and its attractions, and to restore a mixed population there “to show that Jew and Arab can live and work together.” But, under questioning, he seemed long on generalities and short on specific plans.

Beyond the ancient walls, out in the New City, the problems of Acre are unvarnished by the romantic images of history. This Acre is contemporary Israel, a society strained by the long years of Jewish-Arab antagonism, economic distress and governmental neglect. This is the Acre of the Wolfson Projects.

In the heart of the projects, where construction of big, now-bleak housing projects began in the late 1960s, are the storefront offices of the Assn. for Education and Community, Jewish and Arab, Akko. The sign outside says Van Leer Project, denoting the Dutch foundation that has funded the activities of the association, which operates under the animated co-direction of two men in their 30s, Mohammed Assadi, who was born in a nearby Arab village, and Harry Frey, a 1981 Jewish immigrant from Melbourne, Australia.

Burglars Cooperate

A small staff of paraprofessionals helps Assadi and Frey in a range of programs designed to aid families in a troubled area. Bi-community coordination is stressed in classes, some of which are conducted in Acre’s inactive community bomb shelters. The problems are considerable.

“Arab-Jewish cooperation in Wolfson?” mused Frey. “Well, take crime. Teen-age burglars of the two communities have always worked very well together.”

What’s happening in Wolfson is typical of other Acre neighborhoods. The city was Arab before the 1948-49 Israeli War of Independence. When the fighting was over, only 1,000 Arabs were left in town, less than a fourth of the prewar population. Meanwhile, Jewish refugees from Europe began pouring in, until the balance reached its recent levels, fluctuating between one-fourth and one-third Arab.

Under Labor Party economic policies laid down in Jerusalem, Acre became part of the greater Haifa industrial belt, the heart of heavy industry in the country--steel, petroleum refining and other similar state-controlled enterprises. Jewish workers raised their families here and stayed on in retirement as the heavy industrial segment of the Israeli economy turned sour.

Those retired Jewish workers are still in Wolfson today, hanging on with small pension checks, hollering out the window for quiet on the Jewish Sabbath in the projects where Arab parents are raising growing families. The Arab trend has seen young villagers coming into Acre for work and life with modern facilities, while older Arabs, having made their money, are returning to the villages and building comfortable retirement homes.

Young Arabs and immigrant Jews, most of them from North Africa, compete for scarce jobs. The immigrants feel threatened. They do not vote for Mayor De Castro.

To break through these growing walls of distrust, Assadi said, the Van Leer project reaches out to the parents of both communities to help in programs of general welfare.

“We want to build an awareness that this project came from them to them,” declared the intensely commanding Arab social worker. “They’ve got to be involved to understand that. The people here have been apathetic and divided. The municipality has fled its responsibilities. I say to him (Mayor De Castro), ‘Don’t talk, just act’.”

Williams, based in Nicosia, Cyprus, was recently on assignment in Israel.