The Green-led Hackney Council is preparing to begin the process of formally ending its twinning arrangement with Haifa in northern Israel. A report going before the council on 28 July recommends agreeing, in principle, to terminate the relationship, subject to consultation and an equalities impact assessment.
The twinning arrangement dates back to 1968 and was intended to encourage friendship and exchanges between the citizens of both cities. Indeed, Hackney Council’s own report acknowledges that Haifa was originally chosen because of its “harmonious multicultural, multi-faith populations and good records in community relations”. There is, therefore, a glaring contradiction at the heart of the council’s position.
The local Green manifesto gives away the political thinking behind the proposal. It states: “In Haifa, Palestinian people live under occupation and apartheid by the Israeli state; this is not a city that reflects Hackney’s values.”
This is not a serious or accurate description of the complex reality of Haifa. The city is within Israel, not the West Bank or Gaza, and its Arab residents are principally citizens of Israel who participate in its civic, educational and economic life. One may legitimately debate discrimination, inequality and the treatment of Arab citizens, but collapsing all these issues into the language of “occupation” is political sloganeering rather than informed policy.
I have just returned from Haifa, where I attended a conference at the University of Haifa on contemporary antisemitism. It is a city that I have visited more than a dozen times and which I have come to know well. I have laughed and cried there, walked through the Bahá’í Gardens, eaten in Arab restaurants along the Templar-era German Colony and enjoyed more cups of Aroma coffee than I care to count. More importantly, it is the city where I feel most grounded and at ease when I am in Israel. That comes from its everyday atmosphere of coexistence and the determination of most people to get on with their lives.
Haifa is not some perfect social utopia, and it has problems involving housing, poverty and inequality, just like other major Western cities. Yet its reality is very different from the crude picture painted by Hackney Greens. Haifa’s municipal statistics record around 40,000 Arab residents, representing approximately 13 per cent of the city’s population. Jewish and Arab citizens meet through universities, hospitals, shops, businesses, restaurants, cultural institutions and the ordinary rhythms of daily life. Coexistence does not mean the absence of disagreement or discrimination; it means that people continue to study, work and build lives alongside one another despite those difficulties.
The University of Haifa provides one of the clearest examples of this. The university says that approximately 40 per cent of its student body is Palestinian-Israeli, making it one of the most diverse universities in the country. As I walked around the campus, I was struck by the number of young Arab women studying there and preparing for their futures. I saw Muslim and Christian Arab students talking over coffee, reading course books and moving between lectures alongside their Jewish peers. Some women wore the hijab, many did not, while Christian Arab students wore crosses that openly expressed their identity.
Israel’s healthcare system provides an even more powerful challenge to the claim that Jewish and Arab lives in Haifa exist entirely apart. A peer-reviewed study using Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics and Ministry of Health data found that, in 2023, Arab citizens and permanent residents, about 20 per cent of the country's population, constituted approximately 25 per cent of Israel’s doctors, 27 per cent of its nurses and 49 per cent of its pharmacists. These are not token numbers designed to produce a glossy image of diversity. Arab healthcare professionals are essential to the functioning of Israeli medicine and provide care to Jewish, Muslim, Christian and Druze patients alike. The healthcare system offers a model of cooperation from which other parts of Israeli society could learn.
This is particularly visible at Rambam Health Care Campus in Haifa, where a senior hospital official said in 2023 that Arab staff constituted around one-third of its caregivers. Rambam employs approximately 1,100 doctors and 1,600 nurses, who treat hundreds of thousands of patients every year. Dr Suheir Assady, an Israeli Muslim physician, remains the director of Rambam’s Department of Nephrology and Hypertension and was the first Muslim woman in Israel to lead a major hospital department. Bnai Zion Medical Centre similarly describes itself as an example of the coexistence and multiculturalism that characterise Haifa, while Jewish and Arab professionals also work together across Carmel Medical Centre and the city’s wider health services. These institutions are not free of tensions, but they demonstrate every day that cooperation is real, practical and life-saving.
Even more remarkably, Hackney Council’s own report states that, for roughly 30 years, the Haifa twinning relationship was centred on links between Homerton University Hospital and Rambam. The last recorded civic event was a 2019 reception for a visiting delegation of Rambam nurses. In other words, the relationship produced precisely the kind of professional and human exchange that twinning arrangements were created to encourage. At a time when Jewish-Muslim relations are under enormous pressure, why would any responsible council dismantle such a bridge? Gesture politics may produce applause from Green activists, but it does nothing to bring people together.
As a British Muslim, I have always believed in strengthening relations between Muslims and Jews. Israel is a complex, resilient and fascinating country, and I will continue to visit it, engage with its people and defend its right to exist.
That does not mean that I support every decision taken by an Israeli government; I have strongly disagreed with the scale of the destruction in Gaza and the appalling loss of Palestinian civilian life. Supporting Israel’s existence does not require silence over the actions of its government, just as supporting Palestinian rights does not require the demonisation or dismantling of Israel. Israeli and Palestinian lives have equal value, and my moral framework cannot change according to the identity of the victims.
For Hackney Greens to single out Haifa is therefore not only perverse but deeply revealing. If they were genuinely interested in peacebuilding, they would strengthen the connection with Haifa and use it to expand exchanges between Jewish and Arab students, doctors, nurses, pharmacists and community organisations.
Twinning should create conversations across conflict, rather than become a weapon for punishing an entire city because it is Israeli. When one of Israel’s most mixed cities is treated as morally contaminated despite abundant evidence of Jewish-Arab cooperation, it is legitimate to ask whether anti-Israel politics have crossed into antisemitic exclusion. Hackney should be building bridges with Haifa, not tearing them down.
Fiyaz Mughal is the founder of Faith Matters, Tell MAMA and Muslims Against Antisemitism
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