‘Come and see Haifa’: academics challenge Hackney over plan to cut 58-year ties

In Haifa, coexistence is less a slogan than something encountered on a university campus, in a hospital corridor or walking through the streets.

Arabic and Hebrew are heard across Israel’s northern port city. Jewish and Arab students study together at two major universities. Muslims, Christians, Druze and Jews work in the same hospitals, while the gold-domed Baha’i shrine overlooking the Mediterranean is one of the city’s defining landmarks.

It is not a city without division. The Hamas attacks of 7 October 2023 and the war in Gaza badly strained relations between Jewish and Arab residents, and those working to bring communities together say some of that damage remains.

But as Hackney Council moves towards ending its 58-year twinning with Haifa, two senior academics in the city say councillors are overlooking precisely the kind of place that should be engaged with rather than cut off.

The Green-led council voted last week in principle to terminate the relationship, established in 1968, as part of a review of its international links.

The Greens have cited the war in Gaza, Israeli policy in the West Bank and their commitment to human rights in making the case for ending the partnership.

The link is currently inactive and has effectively been dormant since the Covid pandemic, according to Hackney Council. Historically, however, it supported community connections including medical exchanges between Homerton Hospital in east London and Rambam Health Care Campus in Haifa.

A final decision has not yet been taken.

Dr Reda Mansour, Senior Director of Global Resource Development at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, believes choosing Haifa to make a political statement about Israel ignores the character of the city itself.

“Haifa is really the model of coexistence for us in Israel,” Mansour, a retired Israeli diplomat, author and historian, who is Druze, told Jewish News.

“Living together, working together, studying together, is something that is so normal that nobody really speaks in terms of integration or diversity.”

Haifa had around 295,700 residents at the beginning of 2025, according to the municipality. Some 72.3 percent were Jewish, seven percent Arab Muslim and 7.7 percent Arab Christian, with the remainder of other religious backgrounds or with no religious classification.

Its mixed character has deep roots. Haifa developed into a cosmopolitan port during the 19th century, attracting merchants and different religious communities from across the region.

Today, Mansour describes it as an important centre for Israel’s Arab middle class, drawing doctors, academics and other professionals from towns and villages across northern Israel.

Living together, working together, studying together, is something that is so normal that nobody really speaks in terms of integration or diversity.

The Technion is one place where that story plays out.

One of Israel’s leading science and technology universities, it has around 15,000 students and has played a major role in the development of the country’s technology sector.

Mansour said around 23 percent of Technion students are Arab, while one third of its students are the first generation in their families to enter higher education.

For students from families with no previous experience of university, he said, admission can open a route into highly paid technology careers and dramatically change their economic prospects.

He gave the example of a young Arab woman from a northern village studying computer science before potentially being recruited by companies such as Google, Apple, Microsoft or Intel.

“You change the life course of your family,” he said.

It is one reason Mansour believes attempts to isolate institutions in Haifa in support of Palestinians can have consequences their advocates may not have considered.

“These are students; some of them identify as Palestinian Israelis,” he said. “So, you are going to boycott this Palestinian community, supposedly, to protect another Palestinian community? It doesn’t make sense.”

Such measures, he argued, also fail to distinguish between the Israeli government and the people and institutions affected by them.

“I’m going to boycott you just for being Israeli,” he said. “They’re missing the point here.”

Haifa’s influence also extends well beyond its mixed population.

The Technion was home to the development of the Lempel-Ziv data-compression algorithm, which became the basis for the technology used in formats including ZIP, GIF and PNG.

Professors Aaron Ciechanover and Avram Hershko shared the 2004 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for research into how cells break down unwanted proteins, while Technion scientist Dan Shechtman won the same prize in 2011 for his discovery of quasicrystals.

Mansour described Haifa as “Israel’s Silicon Valley”, pointing to the concentration of international technology companies in and around the city.

Professor Uriel Simonsohn, a historian at the University of Haifa whose work focuses on religious communities and shared society, is careful not to present Haifa as an uncomplicated success story.

“It’s not without tension,” he told Jewish News.

But its long history as a mixed city, he said, has made interaction between communities an ordinary part of life.

“People do not consider living with one another here as something that is exceptional.”

That was severely tested after 7 October.

Simonsohn described the months following the Hamas attacks as a period when communities turned inwards. Jewish residents felt increasingly insecure and suspicion towards Arabs grew, while Arab Israelis feared being treated as disloyal or associated with the attackers.

“It was a very tense time,” he said.

The resulting rift, he said, has not entirely disappeared.

Yet Jewish-Arab projects have continued during the war.

Simonsohn’s own work includes bringing members of different religious communities onto campus for academic study and training in interfaith dialogue, before supporting them to establish projects in their communities.

He said attempts overseas to isolate Israeli institutions can sometimes land on the very people trying to bridge divisions inside the country.

An interfaith centre in the United States had invited students and alumni from one of his programmes to spend ten days receiving further training and working with local communities, he said.

The visit was later abandoned after two members of the organisation’s board objected to collaboration with an Israeli academic institution.

“Those who become victims of this kind of attitude are the very ones who are trying to serve the purpose of nonviolent communication and reaching understanding,” Simonsohn said.

“There are still forces here in Israel that are very much committed to peace, to shared society, to human dignity, to liberal values, democracy.”

“I fail to see the point of ostracising us.”

The Hackney controversy intensified when the council initially gave Haifa until 7 October 2026 – the third anniversary of the Hamas attacks – to respond to the proposed ending of the twinning.

Mayor Zoë Garbett subsequently apologised and moved the deadline to 14 October, describing the original date as a “deeply regretful oversight”.

Simonsohn described the choice as “quite astonishing”.

Come over. Meet with us, see what we’re doing, see what people think.

Mansour acknowledged that town twinning can be largely symbolic if cities do not actively use the relationship, but said it can also provide a route for exchanging expertise and learning from one another.

“You can use it to advance cooperation and develop your city,” he said.

He suggested that rather than cutting ties, Hackney – itself home to sizeable Jewish and Muslim communities – should send representatives to Haifa to visit its universities, hospitals and coexistence projects.

“They might have a lot of things to learn from Haifa,” he said.

Simonsohn’s challenge to councillors was equally direct.

“Not to take the easy decision,” he said.

Maintaining Jewish-Arab relationships, particularly since 7 October, takes sustained work, he argued.

“It takes a lot of energy, a lot of work, and this is sort of like a slap in the face.”

Instead, he urged representatives to visit Haifa before reaching their final decision.

“Come over. Meet with us, see what we’re doing, see what people think. Ask them, go to the street, speak with people.”

“You’ll come out of it with a very different impression from the one you currently hold.”