Elected in 2009, Gapso ran on an overtly anti-Arab platform -- later dropped on legal advice -- of setting up a municipal fund designed to help Jews buy homes in the city.
He has refused to allow a mosque or church to be built, or to allot a section of the municipal cemetery for non-Jews. In 2010, he banned Christmas trees in public buildings.
His officials were also found in contempt by the supreme court in 2011 for failing to implement a 2002 ruling that road signs include Arabic as well as Hebrew.
After protests in Nazareth against Israel's attack on Gaza in late 2012, Gapso made headlines calling the neighboring city "a nest of terror" and demanding the government declare it "a city hostile to the state of Israel."
But most controversially, he has refused to approve an Arabic-language school for the city's 2,000 Palestinian children. Instead, given Israel's segregated education system, pupils have been forced to scramble for places in heavily over-subscribed schools in neighboring Nazareth.
Letters from ACRI demanding that the mayor honor his legal commitment to the city's Arab children were characterized by Gapso as "a provocative nationalist statement." The education ministry has so far declined to intervene.
Giant Israeli flagsIn 2013, as Gapso came under mounting pressure on the schools issue, he sent out a pamphlet to residents warning: "This is the time to guard our home!... All requests for foreign characteristics in the city are refused."
He explained that he had erected giant Israeli flags, bearing the Star of David, at every intersection between Nazareth and Upper Nazareth "so that people will know that [Upper Nazareth] is a Jewish city."
Gapso's very public struggle against an "Arab takeover" has resonated more widely in Israel, where there are long-standing fears among Israeli Jews about the faster growth rate of the Palestinian population.
Other Judaisation cities, faced with growing migration from Palestinian citizens living in surrounding communities, have tried to adopt similar policies.
Officials in Karmiel, in the central Galilee, set up a hotline in 2010 for Jewish residents to inform on neighbors planning to sell homes to Arabs. There have also been reports of vigilante-style patrols deterring Palestinian residents of neighboring villages from entering the city.
Nationalist politicians regularly refer to the country's Palestinian citizens, a fifth of the population, as a "demographic time-bomb."
The minority, which is increasingly highlighting its historic and emotional links to Palestinians in the occupied territories, has also been characterized as a "cancer" and "fifth column."
Darling of the rightGapso rapidly became the darling of right-wing parties in Benjamin Netanyahu's two previous governments for his outspoken stance. He found an especially close ally in Uri Ariel, a settler and the housing minister until elections last month.
Together, they devised a plan to quickly restore the city's Judaisation role. A new neighbourhood of 3,000 homes is being built that will be available only for Jews. It is being marketed exclusively to the ultra-Orthodox population.
The decision to bring fundamentalist religious Jews into a city that is currently dominated by secular immigrants from the former Soviet Union appears to have been guided chiefly by demographic considerations.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
2
2
1
