In the 1950s, Jewish leaders were concerned that Nazareth might expand too far, so they drew a tight boundary around the city and established a new Jewish town, Nof HaGalil, right on its border, cinching the population in tightly.
There are jobs at a strip of factories to the north, making cabinets or truck bodies, but the tax district is drawn so that revenues flow not to the Arab areas, but to Nof HaGalil. This is one reason that the four-lane road that divides the two cities is actually a barrier between one political reality and another. On the Nazareth side, the streets are busy with activity, and seamstresses and electronics-repair shops dominate the first floors of the buildings, but the trash isn’t collected regularly, and there are hardly any public parks or playgrounds. On the Nof HaGalil side, a sterile quiet pervades, but the smoothly paved streets run past children playing in parks, and office buildings and shopping malls loom over the surrounding hills.