Once a bustling pilgrimage site, today’s decaying Nazareth is a city in crisis

NAZARETH — During the Christmas season, Nazareth briefly appeared to be a city recovering. Holiday celebrations returned, visitors arrived, and businesses saw movement they had not felt in years.

But as the holidays ended, so did the illusion. In mid-morning, the Old City lies silent — green shutters bolted over market stalls, trash piling up in the alleys — and the deeper political and economic crisis facing Israel’s largest Arab city remains unresolved.

“It used to be alive,” says Sami Jabali, owner of the Liwan Café — one of the few businesses still open in the maze of arched stone lanes. “Now almost everyone has closed again. No tourists, no locals — nothing.”

After Israel’s founding, Nazareth transformed almost overnight from a quiet pilgrimage town into the political heart of Arab society inside the new Jewish state — the city where Arab citizens first built independent political institutions and asserted a measure of self-rule. But this summer, after years of friction between the Nazareth municipality and the Interior Ministry, the government dissolved the city’s elected council and appointed a state-run committee in its place.

Officials said the move was needed “to stabilize and rehabilitate” the municipality, citing financial crisis, administrative paralysis, and rising crime. For many residents, though, it symbolized more than municipal failure — it marked a retreat from the experiment of Arab self-governance within a Jewish state, sharpened by a climate of fear and polarization in the shadow of the October 7, 2023, Hamas atrocities and the subsequent war in Gaza.

Jabali gestures toward the shuttered Old City market where his café doubles as a small cultural center.

“This market used to be the soul of the city,” he says. “It never fully recovered after years of reconstruction and neglect.”

When he opened the Liwan Café in 2011, a brief period of revival took root — art studios, craft shops, and visitors returning to the Old City. But the pandemic’s hit to tourism and the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led massacre and subsequent two years of war have quietly undone that fragile revival.

“Most of the shops that reopened after COVID have closed once more,” Jabali says. “Only a handful of us are still holding on.”

‘The political heart of Arab society in Israel’

The Christmas season offered a partial and temporary change. According to Suheil Diab, former deputy mayor of Nazareth, the holidays brought a surge of activity unlike anything the city had seen in the past three or four years, which were disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic and war. On peak days, he said, Nazareth received as many as 70,000 visitors, drawn by holiday celebrations and events.

“The holidays helped,” Diab said, “but they didn’t change the underlying situation. There were celebrations, festivals, and events.”

Visitors continued to arrive even after December 25, into early January, around Orthodox Christmas and the New Year — including to the largely shuttered Old City market.

Still, Diab cautioned against reading the season as a turning point. Visitor numbers remained well below pre-pandemic levels, particularly from within Israel, and the broader picture, he said, remains uncertain.

To understand the deeper stakes, Diab says, one must look back to the traumatic upheavals of 1948.

“Nazareth absorbed 12,000 refugees from surrounding villages overnight — it doubled in size, lost most of its land, and its traditional leadership collapsed. A new working-class, leftist leadership rose in its place, linked to the Communist Party. From then on, Nazareth became not just a city of churches but the political heart of Arab society in Israel,” Diab says.

A watershed moment came in 1975, when poet and Communist leader Tawfiq Zayyad won the mayoralty at the head of an independent Arab political movement — non-Zionist and opposed to the government-aligned Arab slates that had dominated local politics.

Around the same time, Nazareth became the cradle of a new wave of Arab civic organization: the National Committee of Arab Local Authorities was founded in the city, and a year later, the first Land Day protests of 1976 would be organized from its midst.

“It was the first time Arab citizens had a municipal government that expressed their national identity, not just their municipal needs,” says Diab. “From then on, every time Nazareth tried to raise its voice, the state found ways to contain it.”

The current crisis is now being managed by Yaakov Efrati, a former senior civil servant appointed by the Interior Ministry to replace the elected council. In a late-November interview with Hebrew-language outlet Maariv, Efrati painted a bleak picture of what he found when he arrived.

“The recovery plan brought us NIS 30 million [$9.3 million], and that’s a drop in the ocean because our deficit is NIS 350 million [$109 million],” he said. “Then we received about another NIS 20 million [$6.2 million]. I hope that within a relatively short period of time, we will reach a new plan.”

The financial collapse, Efrati argued, has spilled into every corner of daily life.

“At four or five, darkness falls and people abandon the public space. It’s not a good situation. The streets are empty. Businesses with no traffic close early. People vote with their feet and don’t go out when it gets dark,” he told the outlet.

Even school safety has unraveled: “Unfortunately, I don’t have guards in the schools right now because we owe the security company a large debt… We haven’t had any guards in the schools since mid-October. The Education Ministry knows, the Interior Ministry knows — we can’t manage to staff another company.”

Nahda Mansour, who was recently appointed director-general of the Nazareth municipality by the state-run committee overseeing the city, described the holiday season as a successful attempt to stabilize morale and commerce. Municipal officials, she said, were unsure in advance how much impact Christmas would have after years of pandemic disruption and political crisis.

“But it did have an effect,” Mansour said. “It helped businesses, it brought movement into the city, and it raised morale — socially and economically.”

Mansour emphasized that the effort was part of a broader rehabilitation process rather than a solution. The committee, she said, is now preparing similar initiatives ahead of Ramadan, hoping to revive domestic tourism and local commerce. At the same time, she underscored the temporary nature of the current administration.

“We believe in democracy,” she said. “We want to return the city to its elected representatives as soon as possible.”

But to Dr. Muhammad Khalaily, a researcher of Arab society at the Israel Democracy Institute, the crisis exposes a deeper paradox in Israel’s system of local governance.

“Arab municipalities are told they embody local democracy,” says Khalaily, “but the ministry treats them with both control and neglect — leaving them to fail, then stepping in only after collapse.”

Khalaily says Nazareth’s situation has deteriorated too far for a quick political fix.

“The city can barely pay salaries or provide basic services,” he says. “New elections now would only reproduce the same problems. The appointed committee may be undemocratic, but it’s a stopgap, not a solution.”

‘Women bear a double burden’

Former MK Sondos Saleh, a Nazareth native who now advises the National Committee of Arab Local Authorities, sees the crisis as part of a wider collapse in Arab local governance.

“Nazareth is not an exception,” she said. “Most Arab municipalities sit in the lowest socioeconomic brackets. Whenever there is a war, a protest, or a political crossroads, their budgets are the first to be cut.”

A social entrepreneur and advocate for Arab women, Saleh says the impact of these crises falls hardest on them.

“When budgets dry up, women lose jobs, programs, and mobility,” she says. “The system around them collapses first.”

Jabali says the city’s political disorder feels distant from daily life.

“People don’t care who runs the municipality anymore. They just want someone to collect the trash,” he says.

Yet the longer Nazareth’s historic quarter remains neglected — revived briefly during holidays, then abandoned again — the harder it becomes to restore civic pride.

“We are losing not only our shops,” he says, “but our sense of belonging.”

Salah believes strengthening local governance could rebuild faith between citizens and the state.

“The Knesset and ministries change every few months, but local government is relatively stable,” she says. “If the state invests in strong Arab municipalities, it invests in shared citizenship.”

“As a woman, a mother, and a human being, I’m always optimistic,” she says. “Nazareth has amazing people who care deeply about their city. If they’re given the resources and trust, I believe Nazareth will shine again.”