Rabbi Bentsion Gagula stands outside his synagogue in Haifa's German Colony neighborhood on Dec. 31, 2024. Photo by Canaan Lidor.
Rabbi Bentsion Gagula stands outside his synagogue in Haifa's German Colony neighborhood on Dec. 31, 2024. Photo by Canaan Lidor.
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Haifa touts coexistence as some rue rise of ‘Palestinian’ nationalism

Often seen as a model for tolerance, the northern city has a growing extremism problem that's making some Jewish residents uneasy.

After repeated instances of antisemitic vandalism, Rabbi Bentsion Gagula has moved his synagogue’s mezuzah to the inside of its doorframe, as is being done today by many Jewish residents to their homes and business establishments in Western Europe.

Gagula’s synagogue, however, is not in Europe. It’s in the heart of Haifa, Israel’s third-largest city, near Ben-Gurion Square in the German Colony neighborhood.

The municipality has turned the square into the focus of an annual festival that celebrates what the city advertises as a tradition of religious coexistence and tolerance.

Each December, the square outside the synagogue is adorned with a giant Christmas tree, Chanukah menorah and Ramadan lantern for the “Holiday of Holidays”—the name of a series of events dedicated to promoting and celebrating coexistence.

This juxtaposition, according to Gagula and others, encapsulates the gap between Haifa’s reputation as a tolerant haven and an increasingly oppressive reality affected by rising Arab Palestinian nationalism that authorities rarely confront.

“In Haifa, Arab Palestinian nationalism has already become physical. Left unchecked, it will become dangerous and deadly, of this I am sure,” Gagula, 40, told JNS last month. During Sukkot, his synagogue’s sukkah was destroyed overnight. A father of three, he says he doesn’t feel safe to have his wife and children visit him at his synagogue.

The mezuzah on the inside of the doorframe at the Mishkan Shalom synagogue in Haifa, Dec. 31, 2024. Photo by Canaan Lidor.

“All this coexistence festivity, it’s all fake,” said Gagula, gesturing at the square display, whose sparkling features merge at night with the iconic Bahai temple farther up Mount Carmel.

A Haifa Municipality spokesman told JNS that the city government “is not aware of the events described in the query, which paint a picture that is the opposite of what exists in the city in reality.” The harassment described by Gagula is due to “weeds” who don’t justify “painting Haifa as nationalistic,” he added.

A thin veneer

Gagula is just one of several interviewees who told JNS that despite its reputation as a model of peaceful coexistence, Haifa has become a hub for the Palestinian nationalist sentiment that is proliferating among Israeli Arabs nationwide. This sentiment is manifesting in violence, including during the 2021 eruption of riots, vehicle burnings and more that rocked Israel’s mixed cities.

A Christmas tree next to a Ramadan lantern and Chanukah menorah against the backdrop of the Bahai Temple in Haifa on Dec. 24, 2024. Photo by Canaan Lidor.

“Haifa has become the intellectual capital of Palestinian nationalism inside Israel,” said Shai Glick, the CEO of the B’Tsalmo human rights group. Amid growing Arab-Jewish tensions over Israel’s war with Hamas, “we are at a tipping point where this intellectual agitation is leading to violence, with too little pushback,” Glick warned.

On Jan. 6, police arrested a local man in his 30s for allegedly stabbing a Jewish woman, 56, at a supermarket frequented by haredi shoppers. Witnesses said he shouted “Allahu Akbar!” during the attack. Police are still determining whether the stabbing was a terrorist attack, according to Ynet.

Last January, an Israeli soldier was seriously wounded in a terrorist attack near a naval base in Haifa. The perpetrator reportedly rammed his vehicle into the victim, then got out of the car and attacked him with an ax.

Such attacks are relatively rare in Haifa, where Arabs constitute about 15% of a population of some 286,000 people, but some locals say the atmosphere in the city is changing for the worse in smaller ways that rarely make the national news.

For instance, graffiti reading “Death to Zionism” appeared on a bus stop in Haifa near the Technion–Israel Institute of Technology on Jan. 2. (In recent months, alleged Iranian agents have been arrested in Israel for various sabotage and psychological warfare actions, including spraying anti-Israeli graffiti.)

On Dec. 24, Arab youths threw bottles at JNS from atop a construction site during the filming of the Holiday of Holiday events. No officers showed up following the report of the incident to the police and the municipality.

The northern Israeli city of Haifa, Sept. 22, 2024. Photo by Chaim Goldberg/Flash90.

Furthermore, “Muslim Arabs stage noisy and dangerous joyrides in the area regularly to disrupt the Christian and Jewish holiday celebrations,” said Gagula, who is raising funds for security at his synagogue.

(A municipality spokesman told JNS that reckless driving is an “ugly phenomenon that unfortunately exists throughout the country and is being dealt with severely in Haifa by the police.”)

Pendants featuring a map of Israel in the color of the PLO flag have also become a common sight on the necks of Arab men in Haifa, and so have T-shirts emblazoned with drawings of AK-47 assault rifles.

“This is not ‘your land,’ this is also my land. I’m a citizen here. You call it one thing, I call it another,” one Arab man in his 20s, who studies at the University of Haifa, told this reporter in answer to a question about the PLO pendant he wore to a gathering of “peace activists” in Haifa on Nov. 6, 2023. The man agreed to be identified only by his first name, Naser.

Palestinian nationalism is on full display in the predominately Arab neighborhood of Wadi Nisnas. One of its streets features a car-sized metal statue of Handala, an iconic cartoon character that is the official symbol of the BDS movement against Israel. The character is writing “Return first” on a wall, referring to the desire of many Palestinians to undo Israel’s existence as a Jewish state.

A car-sized, metal statue of Handala, the mascot of the movement to boycott Israel, in Haifa on April 13, 2023. Photo by Canaan Lidor.

Keys, the most common graphic representation of the so-called right of return, are a common theme in Wadi Nisnas.

One school in the neighborhood, Ahva, whose name in Hebrew means “fraternity,” features portraits of the late Mahmoud Darwish, a poet widely considered the Palestinian national bard. Critics interpret some of his poems as calls for ethnic cleansing and violence, including one in which he wrote he would like to “eat the flesh of the occupier.”

The aftermath of 2021

The city has several groups whose stated goal is to promote Jewish-Arab coexistence, including Hand in Hand, which focuses on education, and Rov Ha’Ir, a political movement established after 2021. In May of that year, across Israel’s mixed cities, thousands of Arabs turned on their Jewish neighbors during the previous round of hostilities with Hamas in Gaza, known as “Operation Guardian of the Walls.” The rioters burned down businesses and synagogues, killing one Jewish man in Lod.

Rov Ha’Ir “bypasses the whole partisan divide by focusing on cooperation by Arabs and Jews on the immediate issues in their common spaces,” Hila Asia, an activist for the group, told JNS. “Communal gardens. Broken sidewalks. A neighborhood party. Activities like that, which nurture togetherness.”

She said she was not aware of any expressions of Palestinian nationalism in the city.

Instead, some “right-wing clowns are trying to foment resentment” among Jews in Haifa, she said.

Another coexistence activist, Tzameret Hershco, 54, also said she was unaware of any rising Arab nationalism but added that she doesn’t speak Arabic and is therefore “less exposed to that content.” Hershco added: “There is no part of Haifa where I’m afraid to walk.”

Both Jewish and Arab-Palestinian nationalism is “relatively low in Haifa. The city has a tradition of tolerance, which creates initiatives that strive to preserve it,” she added. She had not heard of the vandalism at Gagula’s synagogue, she said. “But a synagogue in the German Colony [neighborhood] smells like something different to me. Though I don’t know the specifics,” she added.

Asked about violent expressions of Palestinian nationalism in Haifa, Noam Levy, a father of three children who attend Haifa’s bilingual school run by Hand in Hand, told JNS: “I suppose there is some. I personally have never seen it.”

Out of 616 indictments filed in connection with the 2021 riots nationwide, about 20% were over assaults by Arabs in the Haifa region. The riots prompted smaller-scale counter-actions by Jews against Arabs. Only a handful of the defendants were Jewish.

The hostilities subsided but have continued to reverberate. Many locals were shocked by unprecedented occurrences in the riots’ wake, including a gang assault in 2023 by baseball-wielding Arab teenagers who were looking for Jews to attack on public transportation.

In July 2023, Arab Christian men assaulted Jews who had showed up to pray outside a Haifa church that they said was built atop the grave of the biblical prophet Elisha. Police detained several Jews in connection with the incident and local media largely dismissed them as provocateurs, though they denied this.

Despite repeated requests by JNS, the police and municipality refused to divulge statistics on nationalist crime in Haifa or even indicate whether they possessed such data.

Dror Meir Ohana, a lawyer and right-wing activist from Haifa, was not able to obtain any official statistics from authorities either. He has anecdotally collected anonymous testimonies from three Haifa residents who say they had suffered intimidation or violence by Arab nationalists in 2024, Ohana told JNS.

One of them, who lives on Hashomer Street, wrote to Ohana: “The street has been taken over by Muslims. They opened a mosque, wave Palestinian flags in the street. The Jews are leaving. Synagogues closed down. The Arabs paint graffiti on the synagogues in Arabic.”

Jewish departure, Arab arrival

One woman who recently moved to Atlit told JNS on the condition of anonymity that Arab nationalism and a deterioration in her sense of safety were part of why she left.

“The streets of Haifa started feeling a lot less safe for me. I now have the possibility of an Arab lynch mob in the back of my mind,” said the former Haifa resident, whose first name is Adi.

“I feel like Haifa is being taken over,” said Adi, referencing these trends.

Gagula’s synagogue, which does outreach to non-Jews seeking to follow the Noahide Laws (a set of seven commandments considered binding on all people, according to rabbinic tradition) is now the only one in the neighborhood. It rarely has a minyan—a quorum of 10 men required for some Orthodox Jewish prayers recited publicly.

The University of Haifa, which thousands of Arab students attend, “is part of the reason for the resurgence of Palestinian nationalism in the city, and part of the reason that more than at any time in the past, Arab Israelis in Haifa are increasingly adopting openly a Palestinian national identity that is detrimental to coexistence,” said B’Tsalmo CEO Glick.

Expressions of anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian nationalism have long been on display at the university, including during a sit-in that Arab students staged in 2022 during the playing of the Israeli national anthem.

An Israeli Air Force helicopter flies over Haifa during Israel’s 75th Independence Day, April 26, 2023. Credit: Flash90.

Conference on ‘Palestinian identity’

In 2022, Beit HaGefen, a left-leaning nongovernmental organization that co-organizes the Holiday of Holidays event with the municipality, put on a show called “Borders in Palestinian Culture,” which, according to Haaretz, “examines Haifa as an arena for a sovereign Palestinian cultural arena.”

Also in 2022, a municipally funded theater festival hosted at a city museum a conference on “Palestinian identity” that was held in Arabic. “It’s part of the statement, that we talk about Palestinian culture in its own language,” Raja Za’atara, a member of the city council for the Joint List, told Channel 11 at the time.

In an interview with JNS, Za’atara defended his self-definition as a “Palestinian Arab citizen of Israel,” as he phrased it. “This is the identity I was born with. It’s not ideological. Why do you need to feel that it’s a threat to you?” he demanded.

During the interview, Za’atara, who in 2019 told a Hezbollah-affiliated television channel in Lebanon that Israel was “the enemy of all peoples,” equated the PLO pendants popular among Arabs to pendants featuring the Star of David. Any ultranationalist tendencies among Arabs in Haifa, he said, were “a reaction to the racist policies of [Israeli National Security Minister Itamar] Ben-Gvir,” the government and “exclusionary belligerent sentiments in society” toward Arabs.

In its response to JNS, the municipality wrote: “We are very proud of the special character of the city of Haifa, and of the city’s residents, who live together out of mutual respect, consideration and brotherhood.”

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