Haifa’s Arabic speakers say municipality is targeting ‘all forms of Palestinian expression’
The Haifa branch of Jafra Express after the Haifa municipality ordered the business to remove its Arabic-English signage in mid-March 2026
Nagham Zbeedat reports in Haaretz on 14 May 2026:
In a now-viral exchange during a May 5 city council meeting in Haifa, Sally Abed leans toward the microphone and begins speaking in Arabic.
“Haifa spoke Arabic for centuries,” says Abed, a former Standing Together movement leader who now heads a local joint Jewish-Arab party. “Haifa is our civilizational, cultural, historical and political compass.”
The speech lasts less than a minute before the shouting begins. “Go to Gaza,” members of the coalition right-wing coalition yell across the room. Others remind her that she is “in a Jewish city.” Abed tries to continue. “You can go to Gaza unfortunately, but I can’t,” she replies. “You are in Gaza more than us.”
Then she turns toward Mayor Yona Yahav. “Do you understand why I did this?” she asks him. “Because speaking Arabic has become provocative.”
The exchange – which lasted only a few minutes in total – may look like a one-off moment of chaos in Haifa, a city long marketed by the state as a hub of coexistence between its Palestinian and Israeli residents. But Abed, rights groups and local activists say the municipality’s hostility to Arabic is an ongoing pattern.
“We no longer have linguistic space, political space, cultural space,” as Palestinians in Haifa, Abed tells Haaretz. “When you try to strengthen Arabic in places they don’t see as legitimate, it becomes provocative,” she says. “The message becomes: Speak Arabic at home.” She says activists affiliated with her Haifa Majority party have been repeatedly barred from attending city council meetings, despite regulations requiring the sessions to remain open to the public.
“The law says every person from the public is allowed to enter municipal meetings,” she says. “And we saw it happen again and again and again – they prevented our activists, residents of Haifa, from entering the municipality. “We see them shutting off my microphone. … We see them removing me from committees where I was working against cuts to welfare budgets. It’s illegal. I go to the legal adviser, and she doesn’t respond.
This discrimination extends beyond the chambers of city hall. Over the past two years, a series of confrontations across the city have deepened a growing sense among many Palestinian residents that the boundaries of what can be publicly said, shown and expressed in Haifa are narrowing.
In December 2025, the municipality asked the Haifa-based feminist group Woman to Woman to prove that it did not support terrorism, incite racism or deny “the existence of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state” as part of a review of its municipal funding triggered by pressure from the right-wing organization Btsalmo. Representatives of Woman to Woman described the move at the time as political persecution, stating: “We will not allow anti-democratic actors to silence us.”
Educational and cultural events that center Palestinian narratives are increasingly scrutinized. Arab-owned businesses have faced pressure over storefront signs written in Arabic and English; journalists say municipal inspectors repeatedly obstructed wartime broadcasts despite approval from police and military authorities; anti-war protests have been heavily policed and received fines over loudspeakers and signs.
“This is part of the normalization of a culture of censorship – part of the disappearance of democratic values,” she says. “We are seeing one big pattern of democratic collapse in front of our eyes. I don’t want to sound dramatic, but this is what is happening.”
We are seeing one big pattern of democratic collapse in front of our eyes. I don’t want to sound dramatic, but this is what is happening.
Sally Abed
‘Taking authorities it doesn’t have’
Hadeel Abu Salih, a lawyer with Adalah – The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel – has represented journalists and protestors in proceedings against the Haifa municipality. She argues the incidents are part of a wider policy that intensified after the October 7 attacks. This is a systematic policy,” Abu Salih says. “The municipality is taking measures to restrict all forms of Palestinian expression.”
According to Abu Salih, Adalah documented multiple cases since 2024 in which municipal inspectors intervened during anti-war demonstrations alongside police officers, issuing fines and attempting to restrict protest activity through municipal bylaws rather than criminal law. “There was clear cooperation between the municipality and the police to suppress demonstrations,” Abu Salih says.
Among the incidents documented by Adalah were fines issued over loudspeakers used during protests, citations related to signs and banners, and attempts to restrict demonstrations through sanitation and licensing regulations. “One protester received a fine for ‘dumping waste’ because protest signs were briefly placed on the ground,” Abu Salih says.
In another case, activists say municipal inspectors attempted to confiscate Palestinian flags displayed during demonstrations in Haifa, while organizers were repeatedly warned over the use of amplifiers and public sound equipment. “The municipality allowed itself to take authorities it simply does not have,” Abu Salih says. She argues that many of the measures relied on vaguely defined claims related to “public order” or municipal regulations rather than clear legal violations.
“Today there is far more freedom for Israeli authorities to expand the space of repression and use the tools given to them as tools of suppression against Palestinians,” Abu Salih says. “Before, it may have been more concealed. But if the system was not rooted in racist considerations from the beginning, we would not have reached a point where all these authorities are expanding their powers in this way and using them as punitive tools.”
Double standards
When Mutasem Hamza installed a new banner outside his restaurant, Jafra Express, earlier this year, the sign looked much like the branding already used at the restaurant’s other branches in northern Israel, with its name in Arabic and English..
Two weeks later, a Hebrew-language Facebook post criticizing the sign spread online. Within hours, Hamza told Haaretz at the time, municipal inspectors arrived demanding the signage be removed by the next morning; otherwise, the eatery would face fines and forced removal at the owner’s expense. Municipal officials cited a bylaw requiring Hebrew to appear on storefront signage.
His brother and co-founder, Montaser Hamza, 28, tells Haaretz that the municipal bylaw cited was frozen the same day that Jafra changed its sign. “No one from the municipality later contacted us with an explanation, justification or compensation over the original removal order,” Monaster told Haaretz this week.
The controversy quickly spread beyond one restaurant. Palestinian activists and residents began documenting other storefronts across Haifa whose signs did not include Hebrew, arguing that the regulation was being enforced selectively against Arab-owned businesses. A similar dispute in August 2025 centered around Malal, a Palestinian-owned café and music venue whose Arabic sign was also removed by the municipality.
“Next to [Malal] there’s a Russian-owned restaurant allowed to put tables and chairs outside, while this place is constantly facing restrictions. Why?” says Samir Abdelhade, a Haifa-based journalist from al-Fredis, a coastal Arab town. “McDonald’s signs are in English. Burger Ranch signs are in English. Why is nobody talking about them?’Acting like a gang’
Abdelhade had his own run-in with municipal inspectors in early March, during the first days of the U.S.-Israeli war in Iran. A videographer for Turkey’s Anadolu Agency, he joined other foreign news crews to shoot footage from the rooftop of a restaurant on the slopes of Mount Carmel, overlooking Haifa’s port and coastline. According to Abdelhade, police officers and military censorship officials initially inspected the broadcast positions and confirmed there was no violation.
“We showed them the filming angle,” Abdelhade says. “We put the camera there and showed them exactly what appeared in the frame. We even showed them on the phone because during live broadcasts, you can rewind and check the footage.” Municipal inspectors arrived anyway. According to Abdelhade, the inspectors repeatedly demanded that the journalists stop broadcasting and leave the area, despite police objections and prior military approval. “I told them, ‘I don’t understand what the problem is. There’s no violation. The filming angle is correct. It doesn’t expose any security site or any sensitive area.'”
At one point, Abdelhade says, municipal officials threatened the restaurant owner hosting the journalists, warning that the business itself could face repercussions if the broadcasts continued. Several crews decided to leave to avoid further confrontation; Abdelhade continued filming without further incident.
Days later, he returned to the same spot at night with a crew from the Jordanian outlet Al Ghad. “We turned on lights for the live broadcast, and the municipality crews immediately arrived again,” he says. Eventually, Abdelhade says, municipal officials informed him that journalists could continue filming from Haifa – but not from elevated locations such as Stella Maris overlooking the bay “because it exposes sensitive locations.'”
The incidents Abdelhade describes became central to legal challenges filed by Adalah against the municipality, arguing that municipal inspectors were imposing restrictions without legal authority while, at times, undermining the very security rationale they invoked.
“The only body authorized to determine these issues is the military censorship,” says Abu Salih, who represented journalists in proceedings against the municipality. “The municipality has no legal authority to act this way.”
The Haifa Municipality did not return requests for comment for this article.
This article is reproduced in its entirety