Word: nazareth
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
That joke was told in Nazareth last week as bands of volunteers scrubbed down the city's scabrous Cactus Quarter for what may have been the first time in 2,000 years. They painted shabby schoolrooms, removed piles of rubbish and hacked away at overgrown cactus plants. "The city has no money and so we are doing the work," explained Ghassoub Matar, 22, a painter...
...nine months since Communist Poet Tawfiq Zayad was elected mayor, some surprising things have taken place in Nazareth, the largest (pop. 40,000) all-Arab city within the borders of Israel. New water and drainage pipes have been laid, three new schools have almost been completed and city council meetings have been thrown open to the public for the first time. Local tax collections have increased...
...have other plans," declared Zayad, 47, as he toured the city last week, wearing a yellow T shirt that bore the message RIGHTS TO NAZARETH MUNICIPALITY. "This city is terrible," he said. "There is not one library here, not one museum, not one sports stadium or traffic signal. City hall is an antiquity." Indeed, the city hall is a rundown pile of stone that looks much like a prison-which in fact is what it used to be. Zayad's father was an inmate there in 1936 after an Arab uprising against the British rulers of what was then...
...little enthusiasm for Zayad and his gadfly coalition of Communists, Christians and Moslems. "When he was elected, we said to ourselves that we would just have to make the best of it," says Shmuel Toledano, the Israeli government's chief expert on local Arab affairs. "Our assessment of Nazareth, after nine months of Zayad, is that things are no better today than they were before...
That is hardly true. Zayad sued the Israeli Ministry of Education for funds that it was withholding, on a technicality, from Nazareth's school system, and he won the case (and $51,000). He is demanding a larger cut of the national budget for municipalities, especially Nazareth, and he loudly complains of government obstructionism...