Hackney Greens disgrace themselves by cutting ties with multicultural Haifa

The newly-elected Green Party mayor of Hackney’s plan to cut the borough’s historic ties with Haifa is regrettable, but unsurprising.

Haifa is a mixed city in Israel, with municipal leadership drawn from all three Abrahamic faiths and home to a sizeable Druze community and the Baháʼí World Centre, the spiritual and administrative headquarters of one of the world’s most persecuted minority faiths.

In fact, one of reasons the places are twinned is the multiculturalism then Hackney Mayor Stanley Clinton-Davis identified as existing in Haifa and Hackney.

Nearly three years after 7 October 2023, the deadliest pogrom against Jews since the Holocaust, Britain has watched in horror as war in the region devastated Gaza.

In Israel’s fighting against Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah and the industrial weapons of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, thousands of civilians, including far too many children, have been killed. Much can be said about Israel’s conduct in a defensive war on three fronts, but few would deny the horrendous rhetoric of Israeli ministers who have cheered on destruction in Gaza.

That is why they have been sanctioned by the UK government, why so many British Jews find themselves at odds with the Israeli government, and why opposition parties could beat Netanyahu’s coalition at this year’s elections.

The British Labour government called for a ceasefire in Gaza, recognised a Palestinian state and has sanctioned Israeli settlers in the West Bank. Where peaceful levers exist, Britain has pulled them. Hackney’s decision does nothing to bring about peace, it is a local gesture that weakens the very kind of relationship civic leaders should be protecting.

Hackney’s relationship with Haifa has nothing to do with UK-Israel relations. The London borough’s relationship with the Israeli port city was never an endorsement of any Israeli government, it was a local bond between two places shaped by migration, civic pluralism and the daily work of coexistence.

Hackney’s twinning with Haifa dates back to 1968, barely two decades after the foundation of the Israeli state. Haifa’s Jewish and Arab communities suffered in the 1948 war but, remarkably, both went on making the city their home. Over the following decades they built something unusual: one of Israel’s mixed cities, a rarity in the entire Middle East. Londoners have the luxury of taking multiracial and multi-faith liberal democracy for granted. Such coexistence is precious in the Middle East, and it is one of the reasons Hackney’s 1968 politicians sought to form a bond that has lasted almost 60 years.

I spent four years working for Hackney Council. This is a borough shaped by the Windrush generation, who arrived from the Caribbean making many of the same demands Moroccan Jews were making in Haifa in the 1950s: for work, for fair treatment, for an end to being treated as outsiders. By 1968, two places forged by immigration and by that same fight for dignity found common ground and built a relationship that volunteers on both sides have kept going ever since, through wars, terror attacks and, recently, the looming threat of having it severed. It endures because a city and its government aren’t the same thing. Someone living in Haifa isn’t an extension of decisions made in Jerusalem any more than a Hackney resident is of Westminster. People are entitled to be judged on their own terms, not folded into their government’s actions.

City twinning is largely symbolic, but its positive effects can stretch further. The relationship with Haifa is most tangible in the medical exchange between Homerton Hospital and Rambam, one of Israel’s leading teaching hospitals. The idea for the programme was conceived in the 1980s and marked 25 years of formal exchanges in 2019 with a reception hosted by the Hackney Speaker. Staff have travelled both ways to shadow counterparts, compare techniques and learn from each other’s practice. For an ordinary Hackney resident, that meant the doctors and nurses treating them could benefit from direct exposure to one of the world’s most respected teaching hospitals.

During the pandemic, Hackney council officers used relationships built through twinning to help inform the borough’s sizeable Charedi community about social distancing ahead of the High Holy Days. The campaign won an award in 2020, and I remember my colleagues’ pride in using the council’s contacts in Israeli media to help prevent more deaths in Hackney’s Jewish community. Hackney’s leadership at the time held the twinning relationship in high esteem and encouraged officers to make the most of the council’s various partnerships. Staff had the initiative to utilise this to prevent the Covid-19 devastation that had hit the American Charedi Jewish community in New York.

We take diversity for granted in London, but mixed cities are not the norm everywhere. In parts of the Middle East, where ethnicity and religion can define public life, a city in which sizeable minorities live side by side and take part in governance is rare and valuable. If English towns only twinned with places that perfectly mirrored their own values, much of the globe would be closed to twinning. You can burn bridges with imperfect parts of the world, or you can make contact, engage dialogue and create the chance to build understanding where it is most needed.

None of these ties, or any, should be severed for the sake of making a political statement. Local authorities have limited power and influence, but community cohesion is a big responsibility in multi-ethnic and multi-religious Britain. To add insult to injury, Hackney’s mayor Zoe Garbett demanded a response from the mayor of Haifa by 7 October, on what will be the third anniversary of the devastating Hamas attacks which began the war in Gaza.

Following a backlash, the date has been quietly changed. The cowardice is only further amplified when compared with the brave interventions made by the council’s opposition groups, from which speeches by councillors Simche Steinberger, Ben Lucas and Anntoinette Bramble made clear this decision was not in Hackney’s interest but instead served to make a cheap and offensive political point.

Much like having a pen pal in your youth, city twinning ismore personal diplomacy than international relations. You would not stop writing because your pen pal’s country was at war; you would write more, with wishes for safety and peace. Hackney’s leaders could have used the borough’s relationship with Haifa to promote dialogue, perhaps by inviting Haifa councillors like Palestinian activist Sally Abed, to discuss peace building, or by connecting Druze and Baháʼí communities with Hackney’s own minority fath groups. They could even have offered refuge or at the very least extended visiting invitations to the children whose primary school in a Haifa suburb was bombed by Hezbollah. Instead, Hackney’s Green Party is seeking to burn bridges and encourage division among its communities.

This is the antithesis of municipal leadership.

But honestly, why would anybody in Haifa want anything to do with Hackney Council now? Hackney’s Greens are intent on cutting ties and sowing dissent.

The mayor of Haifa will have better things to do than to reply to that disgrace of a letter.

• Joshua is a former officer at Hackney Council, a former Labour councillor in neighbouring Newham and currently the International Officer for the Jewish Labour Movement .