In Wadi Nisnas, hope screams silently from the walls, the terraces and from the streets. In a country where the heroic Israeli narrative has not yet run its course, where forgetting their persecution over centuries is a sin and memorials built to remember the victims of the wars dot the landscape, where looking beyond the immediate has never been an alternative, this small neighbourhood shows another way. Here, Jews, Christians and Muslims have lived together for years and stories of coexistence are painted, moulded and hung by artists from all over the country on walls ravaged by rockets. From the blackened walls, they lead you to believe another way is out, that peace can be a possibility.

On such weary, grey walls, hope is the little white bird that some artist hung on a small balcony, peace is graffiti on a crumbling building fa?ade where an artist drew a safety pin in the shape of the Mediterranean Sea?bright blue, calm and beautiful. But the open ends of the safety pin speak of the Middle East?s dilemmas and tryst with elusive peace, the peace that exists in talks, in people?s dreams, in artists? visions. It?s not closed, the region isn?t secure and the loose ends need to be secured?that?s what the artist envisioned.

Sixteen years ago, the municipality of Haifa began the Holidays of Holidays celebration in December in Wadi Nisnas, which in Arabic means Mongoose. Over the years, artists have created their pieces dictated by the different themes of the festival, but much of the artwork revolves around personal stories of loss, and of hope, like that of Haya Tuma, wife of Emil Tuma, a communist leader and one of the founders of ?Al-Ittihad?, an Aradic newspaper, who also led the Haifa communist party with Emile Habibi. Emil was killed in the neighbourhood after he returned from Lebanon.

Haya?s marriage with Emil, an Arab Orthodox Christian, personified Jewish-Arab unity in a country torn apart by strife. Haya met Emil when she was 18 and married him a couple of years later. For the Jewish bride, her marriage also opened windows to the other side ? the story of the Palestinian suffering?and she learned to mourn for the Palestinians and hoped to leap over the chasm to the other side.

Haya, a ceramic artist, came to live in Wadi Nisnas with her husband. To the wife, her husband became her canvas, her story. In the narrow alleys, in cramped quarters, her artworks speak of her love, her desperation and its deep sadness. They also speak of her hope that another way is possible, of peace that is not so elusive after all, and of countless lost opportunities for the Jewish and Arab people who could have buried the angst long ago.

So, on a wall in one of the alleys near the market, Haya Tuma nailed her vision, and her despair. There?s a wooden door. Above the door hangs what seems like a framed wedding photograph of Haya Tuma and Emil Tuma. In its sepia shades, a smiling, coy Haya looks radiant. It?s the picture of their union, of an alternative. Next to the wooden door, there?s a large key that hangs from the wall. But there?s no keyhole. In a way it symbolises the Arab dilemma, of its refugee status, our guide explains.

?There?s space for all, for Arabs too. But we have to find it. Just like how Haya saw it. There?s the key but there?s no keyhole. It?s a political art work,? our guide says.

Haya made the artwork in 2001. She died in 2008. After her death, her son Michael Tuma, who is an artist in Germany, opened up her trunk and found the little pieces of ceramics she had made and stuck them on in the shape of a tree in the parking lot of the neighborhood across from where Haya?s artworks from the past hang in her memory and as a tribute to her vision. This experiment in coexistence that started 16 years ago has now become one of the major celebrations in the city and many

come to walk through the undulating lanes of the neighbourhood.

In this little space, in its alleys that lead nowhere in particular, people, it seems, have realised that life is too short for such a long conflict, it?s perhaps too short to even count the losses, too short to remain victims whichever side you belonged to. So, when they step out of their homes and walk to the bus stop or to their shops, they glance at the graffiti calling for change, for a solution to the division of people, of humanity, like the graffiti that Haya put up saying ?somebody lived here in 1948?.

At a shop, many locals sat drinking thick Turkish coffee and chatting in between puffs of their cigarettes. Ever since the municipality began the experiment, the neighbourhood is full of people?tourists, locals, schoolkids.

Amir, a local, says the air is oppressive. It is heavy with history, religion, and conflict, but in Wadi Nisnas, it is different. ?You can still feel the tension, but it is different from Jerusalem. We have lived together and we still do,? he says.

In 2006, this coexistence was threatened when rockets from Lebanon struck the office of the newspaper that Tuma and Habibi edited. It killed at least two people. In those days, tension flared up again. Jews became suspicious of their Arab neighbours who didn?t criticise the Hezbollah leader and his organisation, as one newspaper reported. It is then that Hassan Nasrallah managed to create a rift, it says.

But then, Wadi Nisnas managed to pick up the pieces and the festival once again showed them that there was a way out of this chaos. Artists got back to work and the area was once again buzzing with tourists and those seeking elusive peace. Wadi Nisnas to them became the oasis of peace. Similar projects were considered in other cities but never took off, as ?tolerance is hard to find ,? as one local put it.

On the day we visited, schoolchildren from Hadera, a nearby city, filled the streets of the neighbourhood, chatting and laughing. It was a Wednesday and the sun shone through the chinks in the parapets and on the huge graffiti, infusing them with light and energy. It was just before Christmas. Hanukkah had just concluded. An Arab Christian girl waited for customers at her house front. Her table was full of cookies and other Christmas sweets. In a shop window, Christmas decorations were displayed and red and green were the colours that stood out the most.

The festival today is the pride of Haifa. Built on the slope of Mount Carmel and overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, Haifa, a mixed city, is the third largest city in Israel. Most of its Arab population is Christian and some of its Jewish people came from Russia. It also houses the Bahai Gardens, the pilgrimage site for the Bahais all over the world, and also a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The terraced gardens that are maintained by the followers of the Bahai faith is one of the most visited sites in Haifa.

While tourists walk down the northern slope through the garden, the pilgrims walk up the mountain, stopping by its fountains to meditate. When Israel claimed its statehood in 1948, it was at the Haifa port that Jewish immigrants landed. The city became the gateway for a new life in the promised land to the Jews who came to Israel in thousands.

The stories of loss and war and identity accompanied us everywhere. In Jerusalem, it shouted from the Wailing Wall, from the Dome of the Rock, from the streets of the Old City. In Tel Aviv, we listened to the narratives of death in the Holocaust Museum, in its party clubs where men and women drank away through the night to create an illusory world where who knows what tomorrow might bring.

But in Wadi Nisnas, such stories were touched with a tinge of hope and optimism. Here, we, too, became hopeful. If there was ever a way out of conflict, Wadi Nisnas would be its first turn.