Frank Viviano Writes   Peaceful balance In the Israeli port city of Haifa, Israelis and Palestinians coexist easily Haifa, Israel -- It could almost be said that this bustling port on Israel's Mediterranean coast has made a separate peace. A scant 40 miles from the unremitting tensions of the West Bank, Haifa clings to a fragile multicultural vision of Israel that has all but vanished from its violence-racked capital, Jerusalem.   Against the odds posed by a conflict that has taken nearly 1,000 lives in the past year, Arabs and Jews alike here are determined to live normally. " 'Jihad' doesn't mean 'war,' the way the Western media seem to think," said Maha Dabbous, who leads a local Muslim women's group. "It means 'exerting an effort,' and we have found that such an effort can be focused within the law in Haifa." "OK, we have our disagreements like anyone else. But at the end of the day, we understand that we need to live together," said Moshe Tzur, a retired Israeli Army colonel who is a close aide to the city's mayor. More than any other city in Israel and its occupied territories, Haifa has committed itself to "normal" concerns like jobs and housing - while communities less than one hour's drive away engage in daily gunbattles. One reason, say residents, is that Haifa is too busy to hate. An industrial city long noted for oil and chemical processing, it has transformed itself into a major center of Israel's emerging high-technology economy. Intel, Microsoft and IBM all have research and development facilities here. A popular Israeli saying has it that "Jerusalem prays, Tel Aviv plays and Haifa works." But a more fundamental difference with Jerusalem is that Haifa is not divided by fixed ethnic and religious borders.   Haifa's population of 270,000 includes 35,000 Palestinians. They are present in virtually every neighborhood, rather than crowded into an "Arab ghetto" such as East Jerusalem, where public services are far below citywide standards. Arabs hold as many seats on the elected city council as the hard-line Likud Party of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. They are part of a Labor Party-led ruling coalition in which pro-peace forces enjoy a 2-to-1 majority.   The religious monuments that dominate the city's verdant hillside skyline are the domes of an Islamic theological center and a mosque, both of them built in the past two decades. Haifa is the only city in Israel that provides public transportation between sundown Friday and sundown Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath. But it is in scenes of ordinary daily life - in unquantifiable factors such as the relaxed body language of young Arabs and Jews walking the same corridors at Haifa University - that the mix is most striking. On a picturesque market street in Wadi Nisnas, once an all-Arab quarter in the city's historic center, a reporter finds tea rooms where elderly men in yarmulkes, the skullcap worn by observant Orthodox Jews, play cards with their Muslim neighbors. Amid a crisis that threatens to plunge Israel into a full-fledged war with Palestinians on the West Bank, Haifans offer a variety of explanations for the surprising calm that reigns in their city.   Lebanon, where an occupying Israeli army was bogged down for two decades in a bloody civil war - and from where it only withdrew its soldiers last year - is one of the reasons most often cited. The southern Lebanese border is easily visible from the 1,500-foot heights of Mount Carmel on which much of residential Haifa lies. "We look up that coast every day and think about what went wrong," says a former Israeli intelligence officer, one of many retired army officers who have settled here. The experience left them with an understanding of Arab grievances that other Israelis sometimes fail to grasp.   "In Lebanon, we learned things about Arab culture and the Arab mentality that apply everywhere in the region, including the West Bank," said Reuven Goder, a retired lieutenant colonel who served as a military attache to the Lebanese Christian militia, which allied itself with Israel. "For Arabs, the importance of a parcel of earth cannot be exaggerated. A man without land is not a man."   Among younger Israelis here, attitudes toward Israel's current invasion of Palestinian cities, which has left at least 40 dead in one week, are unusually critical. "The occupation of the West Bank is the biggest mistake Israel has ever made," said Chen Ravon, 26, a graduate student in Jewish philosophy at the University of Haifa. "It's like a cancer eating at us from the inside, that we have to watch what our boys are doing to these people."   One result of these perceptions is Haifa's overwhelming support for political parties calling for a negotiated settlement with the Palestinians, bucking a vast shift to the right elsewhere in Israel. Another is a conscious determination on the part of both communities to negotiate local disputes peacefully. "When you have things like genuinely free elections and freedom of opinion, there isn't a reason to resort to force, to violence," says Mohammed Sharif, a leading Muslim cleric. When Sharon's controversial incursion onto the grounds of Jerusalem's al- Aqsa Mosque initiated not only the current Palestinian intifada but also nationwide protests among Israeli Arabs, most cities cracked down hard. Thirteen Israeli Arabs were killed in clashes with police after the al-Aqsa incident. But Haifa Mayor Amron Mitzva - a retired major general and another veteran of Lebanon - ordered his police not to interfere with an angry demonstration in a downtown square, and went in himself to address the crowd. "I am here to listen to what you have to say," he told demonstrators. "And what I want to say in return is that when your complaints are genuine, I intend to be out there demonstrating with you."   Some measures in the city haven't been popular. For example, a ban on political demonstrations at the university for the first two weeks of the academic year, which began this month, was denounced by an Arab student group. "We can't sit here silently when all around us the arena is boiling or going up in flames," said Nekad Nekad, leader of the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality. Yet there are signs that the larger Palestinian community is soundly behind the municipal government's policies - and that it has offered a vote of confidence almost without parallel in Israel.   Since the intifada began in September 2000, a military intelligence officer told The Chronicle, four suicide bombers have been dispatched by extremist factions to Haifa. "Each time," the officer said, "someone from the Arab community has quietly approached the city police and let them know that something dangerous was afoot." back to index page     back to