Red Star over Nazareth

And in your throat we shall stay, A piece of glass, a cactus thorn, And in your eyes, A blazing fire.

When he wrote those lines several years ago, Arab Poet Tawfiq Zayad could scarcely have imagined how sharp a thorn he would become to the Israelis. In a stunning election victory last week, Zayad, 46, a lifelong Communist agitator, became the new mayor of Nazareth, which is not only the town where Jesus spent his youth but also the largest (pop. 40,000) all-Arab city in Israel. Zayad polled an overwhelming 67% of the vote, while members of his broad Democratic Front coalition won eleven of the 17 seats on the city council.

Protest Symbol. The election gave Israel its only Communist-controlled city hall, and many in the country were worried. The Tel Aviv daily Ma'ariv called the vote "the most extreme expression of opposition to Israel." The Nazarenes viewed the election somewhat less extravagantly. Although Zayad's political record includes a dozen arrests for antigovernment activity, he was backed by most of Nazareth's leading doctors, lawyers and businessmen.

They were less interested in Zayad's Marxist politics than his usefulness as a symbol of protest against years of abuse by local leaders. Zayad prudently soft-pedaled his membership in Rakah, the small Moscow-leaning Israeli Communist party that holds four of the Knesset's 120 seats. "I did not run as a representative of Rakah," he insists. "I am a Nazarene."

Nazareth's population has doubled in the past 25 years, and the city is without factories, traffic signals, sidewalks, theaters and libraries. Cement purchased for paving streets has at times been used to build private homes. Last year state officials investigated corruption, and the mayor and the entire city council resigned.

While their own city has been falling apart, many Nazarenes have nervously watched the growth of nearby Upper Nazareth, an all-Jewish city (current pop. 20,000) that was begun by the Israeli government in the mid-1950s. Today it has several factories, neatly paved sidewalks and streets and attractive houses and apartments.

As last week's election approached, more and more Nazarenes listened to Zayad, who promised to "tear down the Chinese wall between the people and the city council." The voters were also upset when heavy-handed Israeli ministers from Jerusalem suggested that Zayad might be "an Arafat spy."

Jerusalem has an understandable worry. The Nazareth election could encourage Israel's 400,000 Arab citizens (12% of the total population), who are now fragmented among several Jewish-led parties, to gather together in a single political organization and thus possibly exert real power at the polls for the first time. With this prospect in mind, some unhappy officials in Jerusalem are already pondering the question in St. John in the New Testament: "Can there any good thing come out of Nazareth?"

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