Israel is touting a hollow coexistence in Haifa. The real story is much more inspiring

Illustration entitled ‘Haifa’. Credit Ido Back

Jonathan Shamir writes in Haaretz on 24 April 2023:

When I moved to Haifa in 2019, I was surprised to find that it takes barely a light stretch of the hamstring to find yourself in a different country.  It’s not the hard, blood-marked borders of Bratislava or Beirut neighborhoods. Neither is it demarcated neatly, or visible to the undiscerning eye.

But it is clear to anybody who leads the double life of an Arab Palestinian citizen of Israel, or anybody who moves between both cultures. There are two imbricating, but ultimately separate realities in the same space, revealing an unspoken, unsavoury truth: the jewel in the crown of Israel’s “coexistence” is no more than a trinket.

It was on a trip from Haifa to Ramallah that this disorientation first struck me. On the journey, we stopped at Israel’s flagship café chain, Aroma, and I was given its classic complementary chocolate with my coffee.  The outstretched hand from the waitress and a few words of Hebrew punctured the present and took me back to my childhood – where I always anticipated the opportunity to take my coffee-guzzling family’s little wrapped gift.

I suddenly realized I really had been living in the same country of my parents, childhood visits and my mother tongue. This was my home away from home in England – however sullied it had become to me as I learnt more about it. For the past six months, I had been living in Israel.

Except I hadn’t.

I was speaking English and listening to Arabic, drinking cardamom coffee and beers in Palestinian-owned establishments. Beyond the odd squeak of administrative Hebrew at the post office or government ministries, I was living in a liberal Arab island where you can forget where you are – even if a parallel reality is only half-a-street away.  The city that was once envisioned by Theodor Herzl as the economic heart of the Zionist project has been neglected into a post-industrial wasteland, and it is Arab Palestinian citizens who have taken back this space to create an unofficial “cultural capital” – one of the very few developments that are cause for optimism in Israel-Palestine in recent years.

It is not by coincidence that this is where such a space emerged. Before Israel was established, Haifa was the only genuinely mixed city – with a roughly even split of Jews and Arabs on the eve of the 1948 war and an open economic and cultural milieu.  Yet the segregation took shape very much by design. In vying for a national home, the Zionist movement set up its own separate neighborhoods, institutions and ultimately logic that has largely persisted until today.

After the Israeli forces took control of the city, they corralled the remaining Palestinians into the neighborhood of Wadi Nisnas. Now, its winding streets and bustling market are the centerpiece of the untouched Arab Haifa that is marketed to Jews.

Living between the two worlds, it is impossible for me to unsee how the contemporary narrative of “coexistence” sanitizes the enduring legacy of 1948.  It is etched in the terrain – if you choose to look. A dilapidated mosque in the middle of a car par, weeds sprouting from its stones, is one of the last ruins of the Old City that David Ben-Gurion ordered to destroy.  The unrestrained forces of the market join the scavenge with gentrification, turning the once-beating heart of Palestinian Haifa of Wadi Salib into a strip of wine bars and Asian eateries.

Haifa seen from the sea.

But this legacy extends far beyond nostalgia for a lost Palestinian homeland.  The untouched feel of Wadi Nisnas is guaranteed by the stifling building restrictions and the low ownership rates – with around half of the homes appropriated and now manged by the state via the Absentee Property Law.

The police are nowhere to be seen when it comes to the 13 homicides in the Arab community in Haifa since 2019, but they appear with heavy-handed haste any time a Palestinian flag is raised.

The beauty of Haifa, though, is that the Arab Palestinian citizens are not merely victims.  Haifa’s burgeoning Arab middle class has a strength and independence that has allowed them to remake the city, and in doing, started to messily unravel segregation on their own terms.

While educational, cultural and even social lives remain largely separate, the upward mobility has propelled the Arab Palestinian community through the city’s two universities (Haifa University and the Technion) into prominence in the medical and business sectors, and up the steep ascent of the Mount Carmel into traditionally Jewish neighbourhoods.

They open their own NGOs, news sites and night clubs, and suddenly the tables turn: You become the guest and recalibrate your Israeliness – a distorted mirror of the way that Palestinians recalibrate their identity every day in front of the Jewish majority in Israel.

In their own environment, they are not pressured to present the palatable positions that tokenized Arab figures – compliant or dissenting – labor to tell on Israel’s hostile television and radio stations.  Challenging the tenets of the Zionist narrative that are taken for truisms, the sentiments enter the ear jaggedly and linger like tinnitus. And however uncomfortable, they chart a different course forward for a better future for everybody.

I only realized how unique Haifa was as a space for Palestinians once I moved through other Palestinian spaces whether inside Israel, occupied East Jerusalem or the West Bank.

At first glance, Jaffa seems the most similar to Haifa. Both were preeminent port cities that lost some 95 percent of their Palestinian population, and those that remained were enclosed in regional military zones that even Jewish officials at the time referred to as ghettoes. But the destinies of the two cities later diverged.

Jaffa – at the doorstep of ever-sprawling urban center of Tel Aviv – feels gentrification and policing more violently. The Arabic is peppered with Hebrew. It is hard to aspire to lofty goals such as cultural autonomy when you are more acutely beset by rudimentary problems such as poverty, housing and personal safety. Much more than Haifa, the community is hobbled by confessionalism and collaborators.

The gutting of Jaffa’s elite and institutions never recovered in the same way that Haifa did. In Haifa it was replenished by the populous Galilee and the Communist party, the only permissible non-Zionist political party, which used its Haifa headquarters to conduct its activities that extended into newspapers, cultural clubs and youth activities across the country and to foster new leadership including Emile Habibi, Mahmoud Darwish and Tawfiq Ziyad.

This proximity to the Galilee is critical to understanding Haifa’s success, historian Johnny Mansour explains.

Even before 1948, many Palestinians migrated to Haifa from the surrounding villages to work in the railways, refineries, and the port. Other mixed cities in the country’s center “were left as an island,” Mansour says, referring to their isolation from other Palestinian communities. But after the overwhelming majority of the Palestinian population were displaced, the need for workers – and for votes – sharpened. Many from the Galilee were distributed Israeli ID cards just in time for the first Knesset election in 1949.

The historical influx from the Galilee buoyed the sinking community – and also connected them to other injustices facing Palestinians in the area – the ethnic cleansing and land theft in the Galilee, as well as the military rule against Arab localities that persisted until 1966. Their politicization through these experiences led to the (eventually outlawed) Al-Ard movement and culminated in Land Day, Mansour explains

The surge from the Galilee only accelerated after the blanket restriction on free movement during the military regime – and continues apace today with the promise of a liberal, independent life for young Palestinian citizens of Israel, away from the watchful eye of the tight-knit, more conservative community of the towns.

Fattoush Bar

What Tel Aviv is to Jewish Israelis, Haifa is to the local Arab Palestinians.

When the chic bar Fattoush almost went under during the coronavirus pandemic, the community banded together with a crowdfunding campaign; when allegations of sexual harassment surfaced within the community, a grassroots feminist movement rocked the streets; when acclaimed dancer Ayman Safiah was swept out to sea, locals refused to wait for an inactive police force and organized their own search efforts. And after then-Culture Minister Miri Regev slashed state funding to Al-Midan Theatre over a play about a Palestinian political prisoner, the community instead started their own venture, the Khashabi Theatre.

All these efforts have flourished in spite of, as much as because of, the fabled framework of the municipality and its flagship “co-existence” organizations.

“If Palestinians don’t do it themselves, nobody else will do it for them,” the founder of the first self-defined Palestinian art gallery in Haifa since 1948, Souad Nasr-Makhoul, says.  Not only did she not get any financial support or even a reduction on municipal taxes, she was instead met with an unofficial “boycott” from Haifa’s established galleries and the culinary tours that come to marvel at the authentic Wadi Nisnas.

The Jews who did decide to come into the stone gallery set off on diatribes about her choice to call the place “Palestinian” rather than “Arab,” or raised a haughty eyebrow that her life drawings are permissible in the Arab community.  Looking back, the municipality’s relationship to the Arab community was schizophrenic from the start. The cornerstone of the city’s coexistence origin story – Mayor Shabtai Levi’s plea to Palestinians not to leave during the hostilities in 1948, as Israeli forces closed in on the community before confining them to the vagaries of the sea – is very much symbolic of this approach: Another cry for warm neighbourly relations while the palms are callousing from clinging to the gun.

The volta came at the end of the eighties – and even then the accelerated integration of Arab Palestinian citizens into the city’s municipal politics and story was driven more by necessity than any magnanimity after the Labor Party lost its majority, says anthropologist Nadeem Karkabi.

As a result, Arab parties joined the governing alliance in the municipality without having to compromise on their politics or identity, Karkabi explains. Since then, they have been over-represented in the municipality and traditionally hold the deputy mayorship.

Yet a politics that venerates “representation” as panacea will never overcome a stubborn structure that systematically privileges one group over another.

As the sleepy city suffers from net emigration among Jewish residents, the basic needs of the burgeoning Arab community are not met.  It seems, for example, to be a matter of de-facto policy to not build public schools for the growing Arab population, forcing them to study in private institutions. Once they fork out the fees to study privately, they face discrimination.  Out of Haifa municipality’s 555,000 shekels ($172,000) budget designated to equip state-recognized private schools in Haifa, the Arab community doesn’t see a cent, and likewise for a similar budget to cover transportation for schoolchildren.Still, Haifa remains the best that Israel-Palestine has to offer. It has always been a mosaic spanning from German Templars to the Bahais – and has proven more resilient to the worst excesses of racism and violence.

Shabbat buses drive past the city’s pockets of ultra-Orthodox without friction. On the side of the same street, you’ll see the stubborn survivors of Israel’s “melting pot” – an animated Russian and an attentive Ethiopian – discussing a get-rich-quick scheme. Some of them might even be working for Arabs, something you rarely see in other “mixed cities.”

Even the Arab population itself is a mix of the original residents, internally displaced Palestinians and migrants from the neighbouring areas. Although you’re much more likely to find an original Haifawi in Lebanon than in Israel nowadays, the city itself is becoming a modern, makeshift reinvention of ‘Palestine’ – one that is able to speak to Israelis from a position that is close enough to eye-level for any semblance of real co-existence to emerge.

Haifa decorated for the holidays, with a Christmas tree, Hanukkah Menorah (in Peace Dove form), Muslim Crescent and the Bahai shrine

What has been created is welcoming and beautiful for those who are willing to look and make the reciprocal eye contact. There is nowhere I felt more at home in this country than in this Palestine, or Israel, or maybe it’s best to just to reflect on its own singularity: Haifa.

It may be a special city, but the “co-existence” that Israel has been touting is neither a reality nor an ideal.

It is high time to see Palestinians in the city for who they are and what they have been through – rather than our convenient projections of what we want them to be. And this entails a recognition and redress of past wrongs. Haifa, at very least, has a positive mythology. But if we are to believe in a myth, then we can at least dream and work for one based on real equality and justice.

Jonathan Shamir is the deputy editor of Haaretz.com.

This article is reproduced in its entirety