c. 1998 Religion News Service

DEIR HANNA, ISRAEL _ The olive press was in an ancient stone room with an arched ceiling, which could somehow hold 50 tourists and a donkey. The donkey walked patiently in a circle around the press, grinding the last of the fall olive harvest under a round stone wheel into rough, black granules _ katif in Arabic.

A few feet away, 76-year-old Jerias Khoury put the black mash under the clamps of an old wrought-iron press. Down into a bin in the floor flowed the precious droplets of golden juice _ the olive oil central to both Jewish and Arab culture.

Until just a few years ago, Khoury’s olive press, located in the village of Deir Hanna in the Galilee hills, was just one more obscure relic of local history left forgotten by modernity.

Today, however, the press has become a lively tourist attraction as Israel’s Arab citizens of the Galilee learn to market their culture, culinary treats and history to Jewish and Christian tourists hungry for a peek at the”other”side of Israel and the Holy Land.

Such ventures, dubbed”coexistence tourism”by their promoters, are thriving at a time when the Israeli-Palestinian peace process has stalled, driving away many of the pilgrims and travelers from more conventional Holy Land destination.

Coexistence tourism, moreover, has spawned a cooperative network of Jewish and Arab travel operators willing to portray the Galilee in an uncommon light _ not only as the region where Jesus walked and where the Jewish sages of the Talmud taught, but as a modern-day melting pot of Jews, Christians, and Muslims _ intertwined in history, culture and cuisine.”I think it was Israel’s former president Yitzhak Navon who said that if God has fated us to live together in this country _ and if this is the case, then it can only be our role and duty to advance coexistence,”said Rabbi Elliot Skiddell, who immigrated to Israel from Philadelphia and is today co-director of the Jewish seminar center,”A Place in the Galilee.” Each year, the center brings thousands of American, Canadian and South African tourists, mostly Jews and Christians, to northern Israel on”Galilee Experience”tours that include visits to Arab Muslim communities in the area.

About five years ago, a group of young Arab entrepreneurs seized on the economic potential of the visits, and undertook to create a network of Arab community-based tourism facilities, including bed-and-breakfast hostels. They were supported by a small grant from Israel’s Tourism Ministry and by low-interest loans from overseas Jewish groups, such as the New York-based Abraham Fund, which foster coexistence activities.

The locus of the activity became Sakhnin, a major Galilee center of 25,000 people, about two miles from Deir Hanna, which had no hotel, and no tourist trade before the effort began.”We wanted to give tourists the feeling that Arab communities were also a part of Israel,”says Nimr Elias, a former social worker who now heads Sakhnin’s brand-new municipal tourism department.”As a Christian, I believe that God created all of us, Arab and Jew equally,”adds Elias, a lay leader of Sakhnin’s Christian Arab minority.”We have to learn to love our enemies _ after all loving our friends is easy.” While Sakhnin can’t compete for prestige with internationally famous Nazareth, only a few miles away, the local tourism network offers something city’s like Nazareth cannot _ an intimate encounter with Arab Muslim and Christian society in the Holy Land, and with a traditional Arab lifestyle fast disappearing into the broader Israeli culture of modernity.

For many Israeli Jews, as well as for foreign Jewish and Christian visitors, the”coexistence tourism network”also represents a unique opportunity to meet Arabs who regard themselves both as Palestinian and Israeli _ a bridge between two rival cultures.”Visiting Sakhnin, I got a taste of what peace could be like,”said BaKol Ruben Gellar, a former high school teacher from Toronto, and present-day resident of Jerusalem, who toured the city recently.

A typical two-day tour of Sakhnin and its Galilee environs encompasses an eclectic mix of Arabic cuisine, culture and religious heritage, a mosque run by a mystical Sufi sect which practices rhythmic prayer dances, Greek Orthodox churches and the grave of the 4th-century sage, Rabbi Yehoshua, revered by local Muslim and Christian Arabs, as well as Jews.

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Near Sakhnin’s main mosque, in the recently renovated”Old City,”is the workshop of Arab cartoonist and traditional calligrapher Said Nahari, who gained brief international fame two years ago when his cartoon featuring a peace dove trapped in the entwined beards of an ultra-orthodox Jew and a fundamentalist Muslim was published by The New York Times.

Locally, he is better known for his work as an Islamic calligrapher, currently at work decorating a mosque. The ban on the use of images in religious Muslim art is what gives Islamic calligraphy its distinctive form, Nahari said, sipping cups of strong, sweet coffee as the muezzin called prayer-goers to evening services in the mosque next door. “We gave life with color and geometric design, rather than with shape and dimension,”said Nahari.

Nahari does his work with homemade inks culled from the local materials of the Galilee hills _ green mountain grasses, and glues extracted from apricot and plum trees. The color brown is derived from ground walnut shells. Maki, the black ink forming the backbone of a calligrapher’s work is distilled from acorns, chimney ash and pure honey.

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At Sakhnin’s Museum of Palestinian Folk Heritage, director Amin Abu Raia escorts tourists through the kind of home in which he lived until the age of 10, the one-room home and kitchen of a traditional Galilee farmer. There, cooking was done over an open fire in a corner of the stone hut, and fresh food was stored on a shelf hanging from the center of the room, covered by mosquito netting.

Egyptians were the first residents of Sakhnin, some 3,500 years ago, says Abu Raia. They were sent by the pharaohs of Egypt to mine for snails, which produce the purple Argaman dye, prized by ancient royalty.

During the Second Temple period, extending roughly from 520 B.C. to 70 A.D., the town became known as”Sicha,”or”Sucha,”from the Hebrew term for”anointment,”Raia says. Then, olive oil used in religious services for the anointing of priests or the lighting of the menorah was imported from the Sakhnin area.

In everyday Galilean society, it is Arab Muslim culture that has preserved the cult of the olive, said Fathi Haleila, a Sakhnin tour guide for the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel.

Haleila, like most of Sakhnin’s residents, still cultivates his own olive trees on a family plot located at the fringes of the Sakhnin. He harvests enough fruit to produce a year’s supply of oil for his household, as well as a surplus to sell.”The family which doesn’t have an olive grove has no social status, and olive groves are never bought or sold, except in the most extreme financial crisis,”observed Haleila.”Since they can grow for hundreds of years, without irrigation water, olive trees preserve ancient land rights, and they are also a traditional form of security from hunger,”Haleila adds.

Jerias Khoury, whose family name reflects an ancestral link to a line of Christian priests, described how he resisted offers to sell the family’s press or modernize it, simply because he”liked the taste”of the cold-pressed, hand-made oil.

Little did he imagine the taste he so prized would eventually become a favored flavor on the palates of modern-day food connoisseurs and, perhaps, a part of teaching people to live together.

MJP END FLETCHER