San Diego, CA (special) -- Dr. Mohammad Abou Foul, an orthopedic surgeon who also is mayor of the Arab village of Jatt, describes himself as a pioneer of Arab-Jewish exchange programs and as a man with a vision of turning Jatt into a center of tourism and archeology. 

His village of 8,000 people is adjacent to an archeological tell that is 6,000 years old, "as old as Jerusalem," he said during a  July 17-21 visit to San Diego. "We have lot of things that the Museum of Israel took from the (old) village and I hope that in the future we will find a foundation or a university that will engage in research and do an excavation," Abou Foul said. "This is the future of our village, to be a destination for tourism," he added. "Until now we were an agricultural village, but new highway construction has taken a lot of earth from the village and water costs a lot of money." The mayor said Jatt is known as a village of "professional persons -- we have 1,000 educators who work outside the village. We also have a lot of doctors of medicine (like himself), a lot of lawyers and a lot of chemists and biologists."

Dr. Muhammad Abou Foul of Jatt

When people ask him how Jatt has been able to produce so many professionals, Abou Foul said, "I tell them that we are like the Jewish persons who came from Poland who wanted their sons to be doctors or lawyers. Our mothers are also like that. They want us all to be doctors or lawyers."

Thirty years ago, Abou Foul attended a Jewish high school in Hadera because there were no such educational opportunities then in his village. He said he learned much about Jewish culture and also studied the Tanach and the Talmud. 

"To see the dominant Jewish society and the recessive Arab society was hard," Abou Foul said. In the late 1960s, however, an Arab member of the Knesset named Mohammad Watteb developed a program to take a half dozen boys from Arab villages and have them live for a month on a Jewish kibbutz. 

"He told us, 'we must live together' and 'if you want to make a good life, you must know them and learn,' Abou Foul recalled. The first night staying on the kibbutz "all the guys were afraid, but after three weeks we were all friends," he said. "It was good, a good meeting."

As an orthopedic surgeon, Abou Foul serves both Arab and Jewish patients at a hospital in Haifa. A member of the Arab Union party, he voted for fellow Arabs for the Knesset and for Ehud Barak for prime minister during the recent elections.

"More than 95 percent of the Arabs voted for Barak," he said. "We had two reasons: equality between Arabs and Jews in Israel and two, the peace. The two things go together."

Abou Foul, who serves as a leader of the bloc of 64 Arab mayors in Israel's council of local authorities, described relations between citizens of his village and the nearby kibbutzim and moshavim as quite good. "There are agricultural workers from our village who go there to work," he noted. 

Addtionally, he said, Jatt and two nearby Arab villages cooperate to treat and recycle waste water. "I think the kibutzim will buy from us, and in the future there will be other kinds of cooperation," he said. "We plan a regional shopping center and we hope also to build a center for sports."