Decolonizing Haifa: Urban Transformation and the Politics of Return

Late in the summer of 2024, one of the authors of this introduction (EM) boarded a bus from the neighborhood of Bat Galim to Hadar HaCarmel in Haifa. Sitting across from her was an elderly Jewish woman who, clearly seeking conversation, began complaining about changes to the bus’s schedule, her neighborhood, and the city in general. “It’s all Arabs here now,” she said without reservation, “we always lived with them. I grew up with the Arabs who live by Saint George’s church, but now . . . now they are everywhere.” She linked Palestinian growing presence to the loss of the city’s Jewish character, pointing to loud music played on Shabbat and disregard for Yom Kippur observances. It was nighttime. The bus climbed through old Stanton Road, now called Shivat Tsion (literally: Zion’s Return). The road was built during the British Mandate to connect Palestinian downtown with the Jewish settlement up the mountain. “Look!” the woman gestured out the window, “Here was the mayor’s house, and we lived down there.” The mayor’s house belonged to Abed Al-Rahman Al Haj, Palestinian mayor of Haifa between 1920 and 1929. Today, it is one of the only remaining structures of Palestinian Wadi Salib and was recently sold to Jewish speculators. “You know, Arabs bought all the houses up here, and even in the Carmel,” the woman continued. “This is dangerous since, you know, Haifa used to be Arab.”This brief encounter, mundane as it is unsettling, highlights significant changes unfolding in Haifa over recent decades. A historically diverse city, from which almost all of the Palestinian population was expelled in 1948 (Manna 2022; Morris 2004), Haifa is slowly regaining a prominent Palestinian presence. This is evident in the growing number of Palestinian residents in many of the city’s neighborhoods, in the growing power of Palestinian capital in processes of urban development, and, perhaps most importantly, in growing Palestinian claims on urban space, history, and identity. For the Jewish woman cited earlier, these changes appear threatening, as they upend longstanding power dynamics between ethnonational collectives. What worries her, it seems, is less the mere fact of having Palestinian neighbors, and more the changing relations between rulers and ruled, “homeowners” and “guests,” or, indeed, between settlers and natives. Hence, her assessment that “Arabs bought all the houses here,” which, if not entirely false, is certainly exaggerated, and hence her concerns about the growing influence of Palestinians over the city’s public character. Yet, what is particularly troubling to her is how contemporary changes conjure up historical specters, as they recover a city that “used to be Arab” before the ethnic cleansing of 1948. She clearly identifies Palestinian life in Haifa with a kind of collective return, a prospect she views as dangerous and tangible. Perhaps this is because she, like many others raised on colonial dread, fears that the Palestinians will do to the Zionists what they did to them.We begin this special issue on decolonizing Haifa with this vignette because it captures the complex intertwinement of potentiality and danger shaping contemporary urban realities. In Haifa, like in many parts of Palestine/Israel, settler colonial projects of dispossession and displacement are challenged by steadfast Palestinian presence, and dreams of racial purity or ethnonational separation are met with realities of integration and economic interdependence. Here, as in other parts of the country, a binational reality is reemerging, recovering the conditions that prevailed in the city, and in broader Palestine, before 1948 (Sorek and Ghanim 2024). These processes are, as evident from the vignette, truly unsettling, as they radically reshape relationships between colonizers and colonized, settlers and natives. This clearly explains why they ignite such dread among Jews accustomed to supremacy, and why they are met, everywhere, with reinvigorated campaigns of elimination. However, the situation in Haifa is also distinct and more hopeful than in other places. Here, reactionary currents, while no doubt present, are subdued and even countered by forces of integration. Here, growing groups of residents, civil society activists, businesspersons, and public servants—both Palestinian and Jewish-Israelis—acknowledge their interdependence and are even sometimes working to reshape, reform, and reimagine a more equitable urban reality.In Haifa, like in other parts of Palestine/Israel, settler colonial projects of dispossession and displacement are increasingly challenged by emerging urban realities. A small postindustrial city on the slopes of Mount Carmel, Haifa has been recently gathering growing interest among researchers, activists, and urban entrepreneurs, both Palestinians and Jewish-Israelis. This does not imply that the city means the same thing for members of both national collectives and to all its 300,000 residents. To the contrary, the city has different meanings, which endure, as it were, in parallel. For Palestinians, Haifa is a preeminent metropolitan center, a historical symbol of urban modernity, as well as an important site of national and cultural restoration (Seikaly 2015; Karkabi 2018; Hassan 2022). For Jewish-Israelis, Haifa is an urban alternative to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, which have become either impossibly expensive or extremely conservative (Bennenson 2019). Over recent decades, Haifa also absorbed a large population of Russian-speaking settlers, which comprises some 30% of the population today. This strengthens the city’s longstanding secular character, which persists alongside the existence of many Christian, Muslim, and Jewish communities (and a small Baha’i community, which contributed to the city its trademark gardens and mausoleum).In Zionist mythology, Haifa has long been called “the city of coexistence”—a slogan rightly criticized for its erasure of ethnic cleansing and persisting structural discrimination against the city’s Palestinian residents (Mansour et al. 2007; Weiss and Yazbak 2011; Nathanson 2017). In recent times, however, the notion of “coexistence” as well as the similarly problematic notion of “mixed city” (Monterescu and Rabinowitz 2007; Karlinsky 2021) are being replaced with the idea of a “shared city” and “urban partnership.” These terminological changes reflect material transformations, namely, the growing role of Palestinians in Haifa’s urban development. As we will explain more elaborately later, Haifa’s outstanding modus vivendi has been shaped by the conjunctural combination of economic, political, and spatial processes during the neoliberal era. Here, urban decline in the Jewish sector, shaped by the demise of legacies of modernist planning, deindustrialization, and diminishing public investments have increased the city’s reliance on Palestinians as workers, consumers, and investors. While the city historically emerged as an important metropolitan center for the entire Galilee region, which is populated by a Palestinian majority, it also became home to rising Palestinian middle classes who are increasingly influential in urban life, economics, and politics. These developments contributed to residential desegregation and to greater “mixing” in leisure and public spaces.This said, we do not idealize the situation. Despite significant changes in recent decades, Haifa is still characterized by high levels of inequality and ethnosocial segregation, and Palestinian society in Haifa suffers, as in all parts of the country, from historical discrimination rooted in state and municipal structures (Monterescu 2015; Yacobi 2016; Diab et al. 2022). Moreover, the changes of recent decades are obviously causing tensions. However, one of the central indications that change in Haifa is indeed underway is, paradoxically, intensified attempts by right-wing activists and institutions to thwart this process. This is evident in growing attacks on Palestinian political activism and cultural venues as well as on shared Jewish-Palestinian initiatives that center equity. These attacks highlight the urgent need to conceptualize the opportunities and limits of change and defend the city’s potential as a site of decolonial transformation.Our discussion of Haifa in this introduction is situated at the intersection of urban studies and the critique of settler colonialism. Like many others, we understand settler colonialism as a project designed to establish singular or multiethnic sovereignty for settlers at the expense of the indigenous communities (Veracini 2010; Wolfe 2016). Settler colonialism, as a process and structure, involves an ongoing effort to erase indigenous presence and transfer indigenous resources, and primarily land, to the hands of settlers (Wolfe 2006). In recent years, urban researchers have highlighted how settler colonization participates in the production of urban space, through urban ethnic cleansing, urban apartheid, socio-spatial segregation, and efforts to erase indigenous histories and physical markers from urban landscapes and narratives (Hugill 2017; Tomiak 2017).Critics of settler colonial urbanism have highlighted the city as a key site for constructing the settler colonial nation, thus revealing the ideological function of the city as a symbol of modernity, progress, economic, and technological supremacy (Porter and Yiftachel 2019). The destruction of Palestinian cities, from 1948 into the ongoing present, is central not only to Zionist material dispossession but also to ongoing denial of Palestinian modernity or even existence (Hassan 2022). The recent unprecedented level of genocidal devastation in the Gaza Strip, ushered by Israeli threats “to return it to the Stone Age,” echoes and reiterates this sentiment. It also highlights the intersection of settler colonial eliminatory violence with racial capitalism, rendering indigenous populations “superfluous” to the process of accumulation (Clarno 2017).The neoliberal era has therefore occasioned new forms of urban dispossession, affected through ethnonational gentrification and the privatization of urban spaces (Monterescu 2015; Sa’di-Ibraheem 2021; Shmaryahu-Yeshurun 2022). Several scholars have described how colonial missions, emerging from West Bank or the dismantled Gaza settlements, combined with real-estate developers to expel Palestinians from their homes in Yaffa (Monterescu 2015; Sa’di-Ibraheem 2022), Lyd (Yacobi 2016), Acre (Shmaryahu-Yeshurun and Ben-Porat 2021; Luz 2022), and Jerusalem (Swed 2020; Zaban 2020). At the same time, research has documented urban resistance and resurgence, illustrating how settler cities are quietly “indigenized” through daily urban practices and appropriations (Blatman and Sabbagh-Khoury 2022). In turn, these processes are made possible because processes of urbanization are also integrative in nature, producing contradictory processes and cracks for native reclaiming.Building on these insights, we draw inspiration from resurgent interest in binationalism as a framework for thinking about decolonization (Maoz and Karkabi 2024). Although binationalism has a long history in Palestine/Israel (Ghanem 2002; Hermann 2005), it is making a “comeback” in the context of the one-state reality (Lustick 2019; Farsakh 2021). As a program of decolonization, binationalism begins from acknowledging the existence of two national collectives in Palestine/Israel, resulting from the encroachment of Zionist settler colonialism on indigenous space and ongoing processes of national-identity formation. Without posing false symmetry between settlers and natives, binationalism accepts the right of both ethnonational collectives for self-determination. It emphasizes the shared fate of both peoples and their interdependency, while rejecting claims to ethnoreligious purity and racial homogeneity (Bashir and Busbridge 2019).Following Raif Zreik (2016), we understand that the categories “settler” and “native” are not ontological essences, but mutually constituted identities. Decolonization, in this view, is a process of overcoming the settler–native binary (cf. Mamdani 2020). As a political process, decolonization requires two parallel, though asymmetrical, shifts in understanding. Jews must recognize that the Zionist project, as incessant settlement expansion, is unjust, destructive, and must be immediately arrested. This should be followed by abolishing mechanisms of repression, correcting historical injustices, and giving up the privileges of Jewish supremacy. At the same time, Palestinians will accept decolonization as the end of Jewish privileges, rather than the eviction of Jews from Palestine altogether. This means both collectives should recognize that they are bound to live together and overcome destructive intentions of elimination.While this conceptualization of decolonization offers a broad framework for transforming settler–native relations at the national level, its practical implementation requires careful attention to how these dynamics manifest at different scales and localities (Handel and Ram 2024). The urban scale, in particular, provides a crucial lens for examining how settler colonial relations materialize in everyday life and how decolonization might be pursued in concrete terms. Cities, as dense sites of interaction and contested spaces of belonging, offer both unique challenges and opportunities for reimagining settler–native as the of decolonization be and through in the built and decolonization on an urban does not imply that processes in Haifa be from the national we the urban as a and national forces unique with different and These of settler colonial relations in of and space, shaping what decolonization means and how it be pursued among Haifa, Palestinian and Jewish residents complex everyday structural and contested a for examining the and of binational urban life ongoing settler combination of historical and developments explain Haifa’s unique urban and what we as its To begin Haifa, other historical cities, is a rather city, by of of history begins with Al of the who from Acre to Haifa to Haifa grew the British its Palestinian and Jewish population between and The city became an important center of both national and like other “mixed growing ethnonational the Yet, in other Palestinians and Jews in Haifa to in and urban the in 1948. life in the city, as well as public spaces like and In this Jewish and Palestinians not only settlers and and indeed were, residents of diverse many from other who have a together (Mansour et al. 2007; Weiss and Yazbak municipal and even did not ethnic in Zionist Palestinian and the of of the Palestinian The change was a city almost shared by Palestinians and Jewish residents, the Palestinian was to a over Palestinians not to The Palestinian old city was in while homes and to Jewish The now the of Zionist its through the of and and Yet, in the of dispossession, the small Palestinian community, by the and the began cultural and political for urban from Haifa slowly as a settler colonial It its role as an center and, in the investments The city also from which to the into in the Galilee and the and, in the it was affected by of colonial modernist planning, which the city from its and increased decline in the decades. neoliberal the of capital in center and of Jewish residents an of Haifa’s decline during the neoliberal era the to what be called that in the of of space and into different and (cf. and the of settlers, from the in the the city’s It the of and Haifa’s and secular character. the same time, Haifa became to Palestinians who for in an urban from that have been into Haifa from growing violence and opportunities in and Although such to Haifa for decades, the of a Palestinian middle conditions for the of Palestinian urbanism of which Haifa became a This urban entrepreneurs, civil society political diverse and a growing presence of and of Karkabi 2018; et al. this of urban Palestinians became increasingly to urban development. the Palestinian became central to important urban projects in the and Palestinian consumers, and became an important and at from to and economic contributed to increased political Palestinian members of all municipal that was in increased for Palestinian residents and Palestinian workers, and in the and in shaping the and the of civil in Haifa are shaped by the intersection of ethnonational and The growing power of Palestinian middle through and should not to that in Haifa, as in other “mixed Palestinians ongoing dispossession and structural Palestinians among the of the and from planning, of public and Haifa unique of that it from other cities in Here, Palestinians increasingly into middle Jewish neighborhoods, residential A process which, at thus has not significant we growing among Jews that the of Palestinian residents the city in general. This of the growing of over ethnonational Yet, it is not to the middle In Haifa’s neighborhoods, Palestinians and Jews have long lived by we daily together to in the urban space, such as the of the of or the of other overcome the of and and by in and Haifa’s residents do not have to to of and to accept the fact of which their lived and everyday also tensions. the of for these many binational cities unprecedented ethnonational violence among Jewish and Palestinian residents, and resulting in Haifa was not entirely as settler by to Palestinian and met with and Yet, in Haifa, because interest in institutions on both to tensions. the Palestinian and Jewish municipal workers, activists, and in the of the and mechanisms that might in the Haifa become a city that Palestinian and it to such as of against ongoing state by Haifa’s mayor are not particularly as the in Palestinian against the genocidal in that are namely, not Haifa residents and in the Yet, a different was by Jewish who in the criticized the for downtown with Palestinians, and space and 2024). In these are not only but also political and in the on shared that Palestinians are always at the and an urban of and of decolonizing Haifa requires of historical particularly the of who expelled from Haifa and are not to Moreover, the city’s be from broader national What is the of Haifa other Gaza and the West As a space the Israeli Haifa’s Palestinian and Jewish residents must with their in to Palestinians the violence of and This complex about how decolonial initiatives in Haifa might either or the of Palestinian and It also of how in Haifa to or broader Palestinian particularly the between conditions in Haifa and in the West and across the it is to decolonization as an prospect the Haifa and challenges for and activists working in the urban of material and political These challenges manifest in concrete urban discrimination and the erasure of Palestinian and from the urban of municipal and and from they also to of how to urban institutions and practices that have been shaped by decades of settler colonial In its more the Haifa of is as a for a new urban on and However, this must with the reality that of or structural violence and The is to of shared urban life while the colonial structures that decolonization of urban space, and of decolonization across political, economic, and cultural requires concrete to of power as well as new urban of For this special we scholars from different and to of Haifa’s binational reality and of urban in this these through political and historical from a with political the limits of on the urban While Haifa’s is as a the how the of to not only Zionist colonial and national but also Palestinian middle and who to their economic among other how Palestinian national in Haifa, that of are to the that they attempts to and structural are in a historical on spaces of encounter, which did not offer a into and not while also pointing at the challenges and of these historical and to the in Palestine to the of an Jewish in Haifa. from and at the in Haifa and at the for in the how members of this became of the Haifa’s cultural as and by the of the Jewish in Palestine and the Zionist how the a of that to native Palestinians, with they shared the same cultural and in Haifa’s during the British the of of modernity, how the of national cultural venues did not in spaces of and during of tensions. The of relations during what is sometimes Haifa’s Yet, what in it also to the political limits of everyday about a more recent history, a of of Jews by Palestinian who out to have been in a with them. to the the offers an that and these attention between at public in and and on the dangerous communities in the city that reflect different cultural and power relations rising from economic and colonial two the of cultural production in Haifa in the These two attention to the cultural with colonial spaces to recover native and the of settler and on the different practices and at the of Palestinian cultural and in the from the settler colonial destruction of the Palestinian the how initiatives spaces while Palestine and to the at such as Haifa and others, how they from the for a decolonial while being by and with in the ongoing offers an of a by the at Haifa’s in as a the Haifa’s of in by and and by in and the The as to decolonization by the of colonial that and It also the of a municipal to reflect on its colonial the to more we with an with an who on and the of As a from Haifa, the of a For her, loss across of life and as the material of land, and space are with of cultural and also her of her for the of being at home and out of insights, both rooted and linked to her with Palestinian the understand the of decolonization for who out of the city and the right to in this of decolonization not as a with the but as a process that settler colonial decline growing political and economic power of who by these offer both and urban decolonization while remaining about the and that such a project must