Forward

REPORTER'S NOTEBOOK: Haifa, a Model of Arab-Jewish Coexistence, Now a Target
By Ori NirJuly 21, 2006

Lutfi Mash’ur, the late editor of Israel’s largest Arabic weekly newspaper, al-Sinara, used to say that in the face of Jewish-Arab enmity and violence, he would look to Haifa for hope. It’s hard to know what he would have said this week, as Hezbollah rockets reigned down on Israel’s third largest city, a place where Jews and Arabs live more harmoniously than almost anywhere else in Israel.

Haifa has a history of partnership between the two communities, and a mayor who champions equality and works to transform multiculturalism into an asset. As a result, the city has become a model for how Jews and Arabs can come as close as possible to living in “mundane harmony,” to borrow a phrase from Mash’ur, who died last month and was mourned by both Arabs and Jews.

Unlike other mixed towns in Israel, Jews and Arabs in Haifa do live together in the same apartment buildings. They work together at the port, at the city’s Rambam hospital and at Haifa University. Some even socialize and celebrate their living together — a rare phenomenon in a country so bitterly divided along Arab-Jewish lines. This week they were huddling together in bomb shelters across town.

“The rockets don’t discriminate between Jews and Arabs,” said Dani Neuman, executive director of the Haifa Foundation. Shortly before he spoke with the Forward from his Haifa home, two brothers — both Israeli Arab citizens, the younger 3, the other 7 — were killed by a Hezbollah rocket in the neighboring town of Nazareth.

Haifa’s Arabs make up less than 10% of the town’s 250,000 population, but the city has been attracting many young professional Arab citizens in recent years. It is becoming the hip cultural center of the Arab population living in the Galilee

The majority (52%) of the 1.16 million residents living north of Haifa are Arabs. And on summer nights — when Hezbollah isn’t showering northern Israel with rockets — the Galilee’s young Arab elite, in fancy cars and trendy clothes, shmooze on Haifa’s David Ben-Gurion Boulevard. At the foot of the Bahai gardens, which ripple from the top of Mount Carmel like cascading Hawaiian leis, Arabs and Jews socialize together, enjoying good food, good company and a gorgeous view.

But coexistence in Haifa runs much deeper than the nightlife. The city’s mayor, Yonah Yahav, insists on involving Arab parents in his push to provide excellent public education for their kids (70% of Arab parents still send their children to private schools). He is trying to involve Arabs in city planning, and he celebrates their contribution to the city’s multicultural ethos.Last year, I asked Yahav to explain Haifa’s secret. Without much thought, he replied, “Hasan Shukri.”
The legacy of the city’s legendary Arab mayor, who between 1914 and 1920 ruled Haifa as the CEO of a successful Arab-Jewish joint venture, is a tradition of mutual tolerance and mutual respect. In 1948, when thousands of Haifa’s Arabs packed up to flee as the war erupted, members of the city’s Jewish labor federation — the strongest community organization in town — handed out leaflets pleading with their Arab neighbors to stay. Yahav keeps one of those leaflets in his drawer. “There is a history of coexistence, and there is almost no history of trauma here,” Yahav said. “There were no religious wars here. It’s no more than a fishermen’s village that has evolved into a thriving town. That’s all.”

But that’s not all.
What the government of Israel doesn’t do on the national level, Yahav does locally. Take affirmative action: At the request of Arab parents, the mayor recently opened a democratic school for Arab students. And, his administration is investing more, per capita, in Arab students than in Jewish students. Why? To lure them away from private church-run schools, some of them outside Haifa, and into local public schools. “For me, it’s give and take: Give equality and respect and you’ll receive loyalty,” Yahav said.

None of this is to deny that tension between Arabs and Jews runs deep here. Militant anti-Israeli graffiti appears in Arabic every now and then in predominantly Arab neighborhoods, and hate crimes against Arabs have occurred. But these tensions don’t run as deep here as they do in other parts of Israel. It is true that on July 13, a day into the current hostilities, dozens of Arab residents — and a handful of Jews — demonstrated in downtown Haifa against Israel’s attack in Lebanon, to the fury of many Haifa Jews. But when the first rockets hit Haifa, the demonstrators ran for cover in bomb shelters along with everyone else.

For the most part, “there is coexistence here, there is integration and practical cooperation in a normal and natural fashion,” said Fathi Marshood, an Arab who directs the Haifa office of the New Israel Fund’s training and empowerment center, Shatil. “It is a place where Jews and Arabs really can work together, argue, have a dialogue of equals and work toward joint interests as equals.”

Not many Arabs in Israel can say this about their community relations with their Jewish neighbors.

Whether Hezbollah’s rockets will bring Jews and Arabs closer together remains to be seen. On the one hand, both Jews and Arabs suffer casualties, anxiety and material loss. On the other, this crisis feeds into the conflicting national narratives of the two communities. Many Israeli Arabs have relatives in Lebanon. Many of them blame Israel — as much, if not more — than Hezbollah for the suffering on both sides of the border.

“This could go both ways,” Neuman of the Haifa Foundation said. And it probably will, simultaneously, as the schizophrenic relations between Arab and Jewish citizens of Israel always do.

In Haifa, however, when Jews and Arabs return to Ben-Gurion Boulevard, Neuman said, “I expect relations to return to what they have always been. They are resilient enough.”