Barnet's Conservative councillors reject Hackney's anticipated decision to terminate its 58-year twinning relationship with the city of Haifa in Israel.
The actions of Hackney's new Green administration are a stain on the reputation of the council. Elected in May with 42 of the council's 57 seats, Hackney's Greens voted in July to end the link in principle.
"You've not spoken to any of the six Jewish councillors about it," Conservative Councillor Simche Steinberger told the chamber. The Board of Deputies, the London Jewish Forum and other Jewish groups went further, accusing the council of predetermining the outcome of its own review.
Then came the letter. Mayor Zoë Garbett's formal notice to Haifa asked for a response by October 7, the third anniversary of the Hamas-led massacre in southern Israel. It took a backlash before she apologised, calling the choice "a deeply regretful oversight", and moved the date to October 14. By then she had already told Hackney council that Haifa was a "military port city".
Anyone who knows Haifa will recognise how thin that description is. It is one of Israel's most diverse cities, with roughly one in ten residents Arab, and it is home to the Bahá'í World Centre, the spiritual and administrative heart of a faith that found refuge there after persecution elsewhere in the region. A port, certainly. A great deal more besides.
Hackney's actions will not change a single thing in the Middle East. What it will end is a link whose most concrete result was medical exchange between Homerton Hospital and Haifa's Rambam Health Care Campus, where Jewish and Arab clinicians work side by side. That programme has been dormant since the pandemic, and the obvious answer is to revive it. A council's job is to serve its residents, not to run a foreign policy of its own. We question how these actions serve Jewish residents at a time when antisemitic attacks across London are rising sharply.
Barnet is different. We have the largest Jewish population of any local authority in England and Wales, alongside large Christian and Muslim communities. Many of our residents have family, faith or business ties to Israel. When a London borough treats those connections as something to be cut, Barnet can say plainly that it sees them differently.
A twinning with Haifa would be the clearest way of saying so. We would encourage Barnet General Hospital to take up the clinical exchange that Hackney has let lapse. The University of Haifa and the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology are among the region's leading research institutions, and we would seek to develop links with them.
Done properly, twinning gives a council a framework for real collaboration, and right now there are people on the political fringes who would rather divide communities and turn international relationships into tools of boycott. Barnet can try something different.
That is why my Conservative colleagues and I will put a motion to the next full council meeting to explore a twinning partnership between the London Borough of Barnet and the City of Haifa. I hope members from every party will support it.
Raffy Lachter is a Conservative Councillor for Mill Hill, Barnet
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