ON A biblical outcrop overlooking the Jezreel valley near Nazareth, Israel’s largest Arab town, a state-of-the-art complex has opened its doors to high-tech companies. “We’ll be famed for computing as well as Jesus,” quips Ramez Jaraisi, mayor of the city where Christ grew up.

Stef Wertheimer, an octogenarian Israeli tycoon whose company produces cutting tools and who has financed the project to the tune of $22m, wants to get more Arabs into Israeli high-tech. Start-ups have helped lift Israel’s GDP per person by nearly a quarter in the past decade, to $32,000, and account for two-fifths of its exports. But most high-tech workers are Jewish former conscripts who got their skills doing algorithms in electronic-warfare units. Israel’s Arabs, largely excluded from the draft and Israel’s security apparatus, make up a fifth of Israel’s people but fewer than 3% of its booming high-tech sector.

Yet in Israel’s hunt for new markets, its Arabs bring some advantages. Thousands of Arab computer scientists graduate from Israeli colleges every year. They can write programs for Arab users, visit the Arab world and market Arabic software direct to app-thirsty fellow Arabs. Projects under way include the sale of Arabic e-books and an online booking service for the region’s hotels. Amdocs, an Israeli-owned multinational that produces automated billing software, has already moved into the new site at Nazareth.

The last Palestinian intifada (uprising), which ended in 2005, scuppered Mr Wertheimer’s plans for an industrial park that would have straddled Israel’s border with Gaza and for a similar complex in the Jordanian port of Aqaba that abuts Israel. Moreover, the prospect of Israel’s Arab citizens getting into a sector dominated by sensitive military industries has made Israeli governments nervous, thus further slowing down Mr Wertheimer’s plans.

Whereas he rushed through construction of his seven other industrial parks in Israel and Turkey in only a few years, red tape has turned his Nazareth scheme into what Mr Jaraisi calls a 13-year “Via Dolorosa”. President Shimon Peres attended the complex’s recent grand opening. But Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, and his ministers pointedly stayed away. “He thinks only of security,” snaps Mr Wertheimer. Israel’s leaders, he says, have yet to make the transition to thinking that their state should serve all its citizens, including its Arab minority.

Mr Wertheimer is one of a number of Israeli entrepreneurs who have come to Nazareth in the hope of narrowing divisions between Jews and their much poorer Arab compatriots. State enterprises in Israel, from the electricity company to the main banks, are almost exclusively run by Jews. The industrial park linked to Upper Nazareth, a small Jewish-run town of 40,000 people adjoining the ancient Arab one, is bigger than all the industrial parks in Israel’s Arab towns put together.

However, the government has named Nazareth a national priority area, entitling firms who relocate there to tax breaks. Smadar Nehab runs a training centre based in Nazareth that seeks to integrate Arabs into Israel’s high-tech world. “There is huge potential for transforming Arab lives in the Nazareth metropolitan area,” she says.