Jisr az-Zarqa

The shape of the place explains most of what a visitor notices. The council's own description puts the town on a kurkar ridge 25 metres above the sea, next to the lower section of the Nahal Taninim nature reserve. The Central Bureau of Statistics gives the municipal area as 1,650 dunams in its 2021 land-use table, of which 830 dunams is housing, and records a density of 9,522 people per square kilometre across the whole jurisdiction and 18,452 across the built residential part alone. That is a large town packed into the footprint of a small one.

Access is awkward by design rather than by accident. Highway 2, the main coastal motorway, forms the eastern boundary, and the Hebrew account of the town describes the two ways in: a bridge over the highway at the northern end and an underpass beneath it in the middle. The English account puts it more bluntly, noting that the coastal highway was built without providing access to the village at all. Ahmad Juha, who set up a guesthouse here, told the Times of Israel in 2015 that the village is like an island.

The population is young and entirely Muslim. The statistics bureau records the religious composition as 100 percent Muslim and 45 percent of residents as under twenty, with 2.4 percent aged 65 or over. Thirteen people sit on the local council, which the same bureau dates to 1963.

The practical consequence is simple. Streets are narrow, unsignposted and often without pavements, and there is nowhere central to leave a car. The beach car park at the western edge is the place to start, and everything else is a walk from it.

• Jurisdiction: 1,650 dunams, of which 830 dunams is housing (CBS, 2021 land use)
• Density: 9,522 people per km², or 18,452 per km² of built residential land
• Age: about 45 percent under 20, and 2.4 percent aged 65 or over
• Local council status since 1963, with 13 council members

The people here are Ghawarina, marsh Arabs, and the English account of the town calls it the only surviving Palestinian village inhabited primarily by them. They were not one clan but several: the Jurban from the Jordan Valley, the 'Ammash from Kafr Qaddum, the al-Najjar from Al Arish in Egypt, the Shihab from the Hauran, and the Tawat-ha and Umbashi, freed people of Sudanese origin. The Palestine Exploration Fund's survey of 1882 recorded small encampments of Arabs living permanently in the marshes of the river Zerka, and a population list of 1887 gave Guwarnet ez Zerka about 335 inhabitants, all Muslim.

The marshes themselves were the second largest wetland in the country after the Huleh, roughly six square kilometres of standing water on the Carmel coastal plain, and a reservoir of anopheles mosquitoes and malaria. In 1922 the Jewish Colonization Association bought the ground with Rothschild money and began draining it; from 1924 the work passed to PICA. The first plan, by a French engineer, Leon Krone, was reworked by a Russian agricultural engineer, Dov Koblanov, after he found that underground seepage was feeding the swamp.

Draining the marsh took away the marsh dwellers' living. The Hebrew account records that PICA bought replacement land and that the Ghawarina were moved onto the kurkar ridge in 1926, which is why it calls Jisr az-Zarqa the only Arab locality in the country founded by Zionist institutions. The dates do not line up neatly: the local council dates its fishermen's village to 1922, four years before the resettlement. Mandate censuses count 348 Muslims in 1922, 572 in 1931 and 620 by 1945, on 3,428 dunams of land.

The town survived 1948 for an unusual reason: Jewish residents of Zikhron Ya'akov and Binyamina, whose farms depended on labour from Jisr, intervened to prevent its population being dispersed. Every other Arab community on this stretch of coast, including the Bosniak village inside the Caesarea ruins, went in that war. This one did not.

The fishermen's village is the reason most visitors come, and the claim made for it is a strong one. The local council's English page dates the village to 1922, calls it the only remaining fishing village along the coast of Israel that is still active, and says it supports about thirty families who own fishing boats. There is no gate and no ticket: the boats sit on the sand at the mouth of Nahal Taninim, and the working day is dawn and dusk rather than the middle of the afternoon.

How much of the town still lives from the sea is a different question, and the sources do not agree. The council presents the fishery as active. The Hebrew account of the town says there is a small fishing harbour with boats near the stream mouth but that few residents actually make a living from fishing, and lists teaching, domestic work and regional industry as the real employers. The English account notes pollution and overfishing in the coastal waters as the pressures on what remains. A visitor should expect a small working beachfront rather than an industry.

The wage figures behind that picture come from the statistics bureau rather than from anybody's argument. Of salaried residents in 2022, 39.2 percent earned below the minimum wage and 68.9 percent below the median wage, on a mean monthly salary of 7,642 shekels.

None of that is on display at the harbour, which is a working slipway with nets, crates and a view south to Caesarea. It is worth walking down early: the fish served in the town's restaurants comes off these boats.

The bridge in the name is a real structure over Nahal Taninim, known locally as Wadi az-Zarqa, the blue. The council says it was built at the end of the Ottoman period in honour of the visit of Kaiser Wilhelm II to Palestine in 1898, and the Hebrew account adds that it was restored in 2020. The Palestine Exploration Fund's surveyors, describing the crossing in 1882, thought the masonry looked Roman and that it was properly speaking a dam rather than a bridge, built across the river so as to form a large pool. Flour mills worked on the water here until after the state was founded.

The most remarkable piece of engineering in the town is invisible and stays that way. The Roman aqueduct that carried water south to Caesarea crosses the kurkar ridge here in a quarried tunnel 442 metres long with fifteen shafts opening to the surface, on the line running from Beit Hananya to Caesarea. The council calls it one of the most significant archaeological features in the country and states plainly that it remains closed to the public pending a development plan for visitor access. Do not arrive expecting to walk it.

North of the town, Tel Tanninim holds the remains of a Crusader tower and pool with a Byzantine mosaic floor and aqueduct. Excavation in the town itself has turned up walls with first-century pottery, amphorae of the fourth to seventh centuries, and a structure carrying a ceramic pipe that has been read as part of an unfinished channel for the Caesarea system.

The one large modern building is the Umar ibn al-Khattab mosque. The council says the original single-storey building of 1968 was rebuilt in 2001, with help from the An-Nahda society, into 1,200 square metres on three floors: an entrance hall, prayer halls for men and a prayer hall for women. Its minaret and dome identify the town from the Caesarea side.

The two places are almost touching. The gap between Jisr az-Zarqa and the built-up part of Caesarea is a corridor of open ground about 160 metres wide by the English account, and the Times of Israel put the two settlements 200 metres apart in 2015. Anyone standing on the Caesarea aqueduct beach can see the town on its ridge to the north.

In November 2002, according to both the English and Hebrew accounts, the Caesarea Development Corporation built a large earth embankment running the length of that corridor. The stated reasons were noise from the muezzin in the town's mosques, celebratory gunfire and property crime in the surrounding communities. Residents of Jisr az-Zarqa argue that the embankment, along with the national park to the south, the highway to the east and the sea to the west, is what keeps the town from expanding. The Times of Israel described the same structure, three years later, as an earthen wall.

The two sides of the bank are the sharpest contrast on this coast. Caesarea is the only locality in Israel managed by a private body, with a golf course and villas; Jisr az-Zarqa sits in socio-economic cluster 2 of 10, ranked eighteenth from the bottom of 255 local authorities in the bureau's 2021 index. The two are neighbours.

None of this is signposted and there is nothing to visit. It explains why a visitor cannot walk north out of the national park into the town: the coastal corridor is blocked, and the way in is from Highway 2.

The tourism here is small, local and recent. Juha's Guesthouse was set up by Neta Hanien, an Israeli lawyer and former diving instructor, and Ahmad Juha, a businessman from the town; the Hebrew account dates the opening to 2013, and the Times of Israel wrote it up in June 2015. The council lists it alongside The Blue Bridge Experience, a hosting and workshop venture founded in 2016, the Al-Zarqa Gallery, where women of the town sell handicrafts and straw weaving and run workshops, and Zarka Tours, which guides on local history and heritage. All of them are booked by phone or email rather than through a ticket office.

The Israel National Trail passes through the town, and the council makes a point of it: young people from Jisr az-Zarqa, working with the Basmala association, look after their section of the route, host walking groups and answer questions, under a Nature and Parks Authority programme aimed at communities living along the trail. Waymarks and a QR code carry the local information.

The beach is the simplest thing to do and the council states the terms: lifeguard services and a lifeguard hut, shaded areas, parking, and free entrance. It is an ordinary working shore rather than a groomed resort beach, and it is one of very few stretches of this coast where nothing has to be paid to reach the water.

Two courtesies are worth observing and are printed nowhere. This is a residential Muslim town rather than an attraction, so photographing houses and people without asking is not welcome, and modest dress is the norm. Friday midday is prayer time, and during Ramadan it is worth telephoning before turning up expecting lunch.