Fureidis or Freidis is an Arab local council in the Haifa District. Founded in 1880, it received local council status in 1952. Its name is probably derived from the Arabic (firdawis), meaning little Garden of Eden, which itself is borrowed from the Persian paradise.
Fureidis and Jisr al-Zarqa are the only survivors of many pre-1948 Palestinian villages along the Mediterranean shore of what is now Israel, all other sea-shore villages having been depopulated and destroyed in the course of the 1948 war. Fureidis residents are known as Arab citizens of Israel on good terms with the State since the beginning; specifically, they were on good terms with neighboring Jewish communities whose inhabitants intervened to to spare this village the fate of its neighbors. In recent years, inhabitants of Fureidis complained of discriminatory attitudes by state authorities and of low living standards and crime problems in the village.
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