Haifa, a city of “beautiful” struggle

By Logan Crews

I admit, I was a little surprised to learn we would be traveling to Haifa for one day of our delegation. The pretty, seaside city with palm trees and hip establishments that I see in propagandized social media posts to show off the “civilized,” Western oases of Israeli cities in the Middle East—why were we going there? 

I was humbled over and over again that day as we learned about the experience of Palestinian citizens of Israel who live in Haifa. Who have always lived in Haifa. These are people I often leave behind in my prayers and advocacy. I was angered and shaken that the Zionist project had done its job keeping the Palestinian identity of this place from my American view.

The Haifa we saw on January 16 wasn’t the rubble of demolished homes and brandished assault rifles and military checkpoints we saw throughout the West Bank and Jerusalem. But the more we swept the dust from the surface of the city, as one of our guides put it, the more I could sense the claws of ethnic cleansing and occupation just underneath.
    
“Persecution has many faces and many ways.”

As we traveled around Haifa, I wondered how many of the older homes and businesses I saw belonged to someone who is still waiting for the day they can return. I also saw new high-rise apartment buildings and office complexes and wondered what had stood there before. (To learn more about how the demolition of Palestinian homes to build luxury buildings is part of a plan to turn Haifa into the “Barcelona of the Middle East,” I recommend this Mondoweiss article by Jaclynn Ashly.)This is what Eli told us, a Palestinian citizen of Israel whose family lived in Haifa 280 years prior to the Israeli establishment of the city. His grandfather’s house is in Haifa but belongs to the State of Israel under the Absentees’ Property Law which was put in place after the Nakba of 1948 to take possession of homes belonging to Palestinians who were forcibly displaced. It also allowed the government to steal the homes of Palestinians who remained but were simply not home at the time that surveyors came to their neighborhoods. Eli can’t take his grandpa’s house back from the government. Even if he was able to buy the right to the house, he would not be allowed to sell it or give it to his children.

Other Palestinians whose homes were taken often have difficulty locating them or proving their rightful ownership with old documents because the Haifa municipality has purposefully scrambled house numbers and “Zionized” street names, both messing with families attempting to track down their homes and erasing the Palestinian character of the city.

An Ottoman clocktower, one of seven originally built throughout Palestine, is now overshadowed by the Sail Tower, completed in 2002. The Sail Tower stands where the Ottoman Saraya (government building and center of public life) once stood that was destroyed in the demolition of the Old City of Haifa in 1949. The Sail Tower was struck by an Iranian missile last June and is still under reconstruction.

As we traveled around Haifa, I wondered how many of the older homes and businesses I saw belonged to someone who is still waiting for the day they can return. I also saw new high-rise apartment buildings and office complexes and wondered what had stood there before. (To learn more about how the demolition of Palestinian homes to build luxury buildings is part of a plan to turn Haifa into the “Barcelona of the Middle East,” I recommend this Mondoweiss article by Jaclynn Ashly.)

In Haifa, I began to realize two things: the world’s rightful focus on the genocide in Gaza as the current “Palestinian experience” had given me a tunnel vision the last two years that left out other parts of the Palestinian story, and that what I was seeing in Haifa was a city under the same occupation I saw in cities in the West Bank, perhaps just further down Israel’s timeline. Our hosts from the Social Development Committee (SDC) in the Arab neighborhood of Wadi Nisnas and Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, urged us to resist looking at Palestine through a lens of hierarchical suffering. There is no hierarchy of suffering. There is just suffering. The experience of all Palestinians—citizen or resident of Israel or stateless, in the land or in the diaspora, urban or rural—are connected. To see them as separate is to fall for Israel’s ultimate strategy of “divide and conquer”—if Palestinians are cut off from each other, it becomes more difficult to resist oppression.
Palestinian citizens of Haifa live along lines of apartheid. Haifa is one of Israel’s “mixed cities,” where the population is made up of both Jews and Arabs. But we learned that “mixed” does not mean “shared.” The differences of Palestinian and Jewish experiences here reminded me of American cities in many ways: the infrastructure in Arab neighborhoods is worse than in Jewish ones, there is an achievement gap within education, etc. But I was most struck by how precarious everything felt in Haifa; even in times of calm between all the residents, there is real fear among Palestinians to speak the truth about the Israeli government, Palestinian history and culture, or even to call themselves “Palestinian.” The entire time we were in Haifa, I felt uneasy, as if the facade of the progressive city could collapse in one second. When we went to look over the sea (my first ever glimpse of the Mediterranean), I could only think about Gaza’s beaches that were a mere 2.5 hour drive down the coast. That Palestine is this Palestine, too.

It was amazing to hear about the SDC’s projects to support the Arab population of Haifa through education initiatives and the creation of an Arab map of the city that includes past and present sites in an attempt to preserve Palestinian history. Adalah, although situated in Haifa, is constantly representing communities across Palestine, like the 37 unrecognized Bedouin communities in the Naqab who are threatened with displacement, Palestinian students who are disciplined for showing even an ounce of empathy for the people of Gaza, and most of the Freedom Flotilla participants, to name just a few. We also visited the church that houses House of Grace, an organization dedicated to supporting vulnerable groups such as the recently imprisoned. 

I left Haifa feeling disturbed, honestly. I learned so much that I could never relay in one blog post. It feels so bad to see the “clean” results of apartheid and ethnic cleansing right in front of you, in the middle of a trip spent witnessing these systems at different stages. But I was and am so grateful to have witnessed for even one day the resilience of the Palestinians in this city, many of whom survived the Nakba by hiding in churches and convents and remained to resist the erasure of Haifa as a Palestinian city. I continue to pray for their safety in a city where they are still not free to organize and speak out or from random attacks from settlers who infiltrate their neighborhoods, for their ability to find peace under the sharp watch and control of the Haifa municipality, and for non-Palestinians like myself to remember them, always. In mixed cities like Haifa, the criss-crossing lines of oppression throughout the land of Palestine all connect in a way that makes twisted sense and tied my own stomach up in a knot. The liberation of Palestine will never be complete without the liberation of these cities, too. Of Haifa.