In Herodian times, according to Josephus, 204 towns in these hills supported about 15,000 residents each, giving Galilee a population of three million. This estimate is regarded by most historians as high, but there is no doubt that the ancient Galilee supported a population unsurpassed until modern times. Today, this fertile countryside is the site of most of Israel's collective farms (kibbutzim), and it is also home to most of Israel's one million Arab citizens, who maintain a traditional way of life and close ties to the land.
Roughly speaking, everything to the north and east of Haifa is known as "the Galilee" (Ha-Galil) -- Israel's lushest region. In February and March, the residents of Israel pour into the Galilee to enjoy the ocean of wildflowers and blossoming trees that cover the valleys and slopes, and to recall the perseverance of the original late-19th- and early-20th-century settlers of the Galilee's Jewish agricultural communities who lived in tents, risked malaria, and performed backbreaking labor to cultivate land that had been neglected for centuries. Today, the landscape is a carefully designed texture of fields, olive groves, vineyards, orchards, kibbutzim, and traditional Arab villages with minarets and ancient churches.
It was only natural that this once fertile region should have been the first area to be redeveloped in the early 20th century, when the region began to reawaken. Initially it was to the shores of the Sea of Galilee, in the Jordan Valley and around the Emek Yizreel (Valley of Jezreel, usually just called the Emek) that the early Zionist pioneers came with their dreams of a socialistic utopia, founded on principles of agricultural toil. Then, in the 1920s and '30s, they brought their communal settlements to the western plains and to the mountains of the north of Galilee. They established Israel's front line of defense, sweating out malaria attacks and returning the fire of Arab snipers. Babies born in these settlements grew into hardy young farmers, their playgrounds not the ghettos of Russia and Poland that their parents had known, but rather the meadows and fruit fields of their settlements. During the War of Independence in 1948, several Galilee settlements fought and farmed at the same time. War memorials throughout the region are a testament to these times.
