In Green Crescent over Nazareth, Professor Israeli provides a very provocative and meticulous account of Nazareth in modern times—as part of the British Mandatory Palestine and as part of the State of Israel since 1948—and the changing demography of the city, which he characterizes as the hostile and deliberate displacement of Christians by Muslims. The story of Nazareth, and the political and cultural struggle between the Christian and Muslim communities that clearly characterize it, is explained in great detail and is the focus of the book.

Prior to the creation of the State of Israel, Christians formed the majority in Nazareth, and the city—where the Virgin Mary is believed to have conceived Christ—was always considered sacred to Christendom. With the 1948 war and the influx of Muslim refugees into Nazareth, the demographic balance began to shift. The subsequent and growing emigration of Christian residents further tilted the balance in favor of the Muslim community.

A key factor in the ascendance of the Muslim population in Nazareth is tied to the nature of Arab politics in Israel. As Israeli explains, Nazareth has always been the center of Arab nationalist politics in Israel, particularly with regard to the emergence and growth of the Communist Party. At its height, the Community Party was led by Christian Arabs and represented the mainstream of Palestinian nationalism among the Arab population of Israel. With the rise of the Islamic movement in Israel during the 1980s (and the election of six Muslim mayors in 1988), and the fall of the Soviet Union and communism in 1991, Nazareth's centrality in Arab politics began to diminish. While Nazareth remains the center of the Communist Party in Israel, the decline of the party after 1991 created a vacuum that the Islamists began to fill. Furthermore, according to Israeli, other factors played a role in the weakening influence of the Christian community, including the tenure of the immensely popular poet, Tufiq Zyad, a Muslim who served as mayor of Nazareth for twenty years. With his death in 1994 and the assumption of his deputy, the Christian Ramiz Jeraysi, of the mayoralty, the stage was set for the Muslim majority (now 70 percent of the population) to finally take control of local political affairs.

Three years after Zyad's death, the underlying conflict openly erupted over control of the plaza in front of the Basilica of the Annunciation and came to be known as the Shihab a-Din Affair. The plaza was scheduled for renovation for the millennium celebrations in 2000, which were expected to bring vast numbers of tourists to the city. However, on Christmas Eve 1997, a group of Muslims “invaded” (p. viii) the plaza, claiming that it was waqf land on which they wanted to build a mosque. The ensuing and ongoing crisis embroiled not only the Christian and Muslim populations of Nazareth (and by extension, the Arab community in Israel), but also the municipality, the mayor, the Vatican, and the Israeli government.

Israeli's command of the history of the city and its political evolution since 1948 is comprehensive and often informative. However, his thesis—that the Christian minority is being forcibly and continually displaced by the Muslim majority in Israel—is marred by a political and cultural bias that is pronounced. It permeates the book throughout and consequently raises serious questions about the author's presentation and interpretation of events. For example, the Muslim population in Nazareth and in Israel are consistently characterized—with certain exceptions—as hostile, attacking, fundamentalist, destructive, dangerous, menacing, and backward. In a statement typical of this characterization, Israeli writes: “[The Christian mayor, Jeraysi,] was oppressed by the thought that his city, which has known universal glory as a Christian city…would probably wane as the Muslim fundamentalists took it over, Islamized it and turned it into a backwater center for the Islamic Movement in Israel” (p. 108).

Similarly, in referring to the tension between Christian and Muslim Arabs, Israeli writes: “as the literature on political violence has shown, rhetorical delegitimization of the rival or the enemy is the first step towards making him a free prey for all. If the Jew cannot be defeated at this point, then it becomes imperative to separate oneself off from him. Or, in a process known by psychologists as ‘displaced aggression’ the weak Christians in Israel are attacked while stronger Jews are avoided, although the Jews are the indirect target” (p. 68).

Although he distinguishes between Islamists and the Muslim Arab majority, the author treats them interchangeably. In a concluding section of the book titled, “Lessons and Conclusions,” Israeli writes about the divisive issues separating Jews and Arabs: “[i]n questions of national security or development, the Arabs would not lift a finger: they could not care less if their country were defeated at war…. So it goes for land confiscation for the purpose of building roads and airports, which when touching upon areas populated by Arabs—though not necessarily owned by Arab—is always sure to create havoc as if a foreign power had invaded the land in question” (pp. 166–67).

Christians, conversely, are seen as “weak,” “scared,” “marginalized,” passive, peace-loving, and development-oriented. Despite attacks by the “Muslim Movement” (p. 60) against them, they react “like a dhimmi people, who sing the praise of the ruler as they are being beaten by him” (p. 60). He continues: “[t]hey are already looking with horror at their cities being Islamized, their holy shrines diminished or challenged, and their traditional protectors in the West and the Vatican standing by while their millennial culture is being decimated…and their history rewritten” (p. 175). Furthermore, the very last line of the book concludes, “After the recent loss of Bethlehem to Palestinian Islamists, the Christian world is not about to swallow complacently the fall of another Christian city to Islam” (p. 180).

The State of Israel is consistently presented as a benign third party—“democratic,” “humane,” “understanding,” with “limitless freedom of expression” (p. 68). According to the author, the Israeli authorities, for political reasons of their own, committed some mistakes in making concessions to the Muslim majority, which inadvertently fueled the crisis. Indeed, he warns, “As long as the Israeli authorities collaborate with them [the Islamists], they [the Islamists] have no reason to reverse course. But when in the future they sense that the day of Jihad has come, they will not hesitate to do violently to the Jews what they are now doing to the Christians” (p. 176).

Sadly, despite the considerable amount of research that went into this book, one cannot help but feel that it is being used—at its core—as a (not so) veiled attack on all Muslim Arabs in Israel, the distinctions made among them notwithstanding. It is sad because without the polemics and hyperbole, and without the lack of nuance, depth, and completeness that run through this work, the author could have made a compelling case for the complexities of intra-communal politics and the conflicts, difficulties, and possible solutions that naturally accompany them.