Mahmud Abbas, the moderate Palestinian who has replaced Israel's bete noire Yasser Arafat, is still persona non-grata in the Galilee town where he was born. "The people don't want him here for the moment," says Shimon Kubi, a retired Israeli army officer and former deputy mayor of this town perched on the slopes of Mount Canaan.
When the newly-elected president of the Palestinian Authority was born in 1935, Safed was a mixed town. Many Arabs had to flee or were kicked out together with tens of thousands across the region in 1948, when the state of Israel was created.
"We have to wait for him to make peace, then maybe he will be allowed to come back" to see the house where he grew up at 100, Jerusalem road, Kubi says.
"He now has a golden opportunity to change things and achieve peace, it would be great for both peoples," he adds.
"We want peace, but we don't trust them because of what happened in history, because of the 1929 massacre," when thousands of Jews were killed in Arab riots during the British mandate in Palestine.
Nineteen years later, the town's 13,000 Arabs were uprooted by the 1948 Israeli-Arab war and forced to resettle in neighbouring villages or seek refuge in nearby Lebanon and Syria.
Now there are hardly any Arab residents left in Safed, and the mosques of this ancient city have been turned into workshops or souvenir stores, standing alongside a growing number of synagogues or Talmudic schools.
Safed is also the city that saw the birth in the 16th century of Kabbala, a movement based on esoteric Jewish teachings, and has attracted a large ultra-Orthodox community.
"His father was a shopkeeper... We were about the same age. We often had fights between Arabs and Israelis on Saha square. But Abu Mazen (Abbas) never took part in the fights. He was a very well-behaved boy," Kubi recalls.
"The house now belongs to an Israeli whose name escapes me. It is usually rented but right now it's empty," he explains. "Until 2000, it was occupied by a Likud club," he adds, in reference to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's right-wing party. "He tried to come to Safed several times, but several Likud youths opposed it. Mayor Yishai Maimun also opposes an Abbas visit. He was wounded in the Maalot, and Abu Mazen was one of those who prepared this massacre," says the 71-year-old.
In 1974, Palestinian gunmen infiltrated Maalot High School in northern Israel and killed 22 children and youngsters, most of them from Safed. The dramatic hostage-taking was attributed to Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organisation which is now led by Abbas.
Zion Touitou, a 36-year-old from the local council, is also convinced that Abbas has never set foot in Safed since 1948, although he stresses "there was never any attempt to prevent him from doing so." Yet the new Palestinian leader made a brief visit to his home town on September 24, 1996, after being denied this right a year earlier.
When the issue of Abbas's possible "right of return" is brought up, even for a one-day pilgrimage to his family house, the president of the "Association of the elders of Zefat" (Safed's Jewish name) Meir Ameiri's first reaction is a flurry of insults.
He then calms down and says he would condescend to allowing the president of the Palestinian Authority to come to his town "if everybody agrees".
"If he does like Sadat," he says in reference to the former Egyptian president who became the first Arab leader to sign a peace treaty with Israel in 1979, "if he comes to talk to the MPs in the Knesset, then maybe the Israelis will think he really wants peace."
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