Jewish Haifa denies its Arab past

Social Services in Ethnically Mixed Cities: Street-Level Bureaucracy at the Crossroads of Ethno-National Conflict

“…Haifa is Israel’s third largest city, with 279,600 residents, 89% of whom are Jews and Others (non-Arab) and 11% are Arabs (Haifa Municipality, 2018). Although in 1946, almost half of Haifa’s residents were Arabs, after the 1947 war that ended in the birth of the State of Israel, only 3,500 Arabs remained in the city (Leibovitz, 2007; Margalit, 2014). From the 1950s to the 1980s many Jewish immigrants were settled in Haifa.…”

Privatizing the production of settler colonial landscapes: ‘Authenticity’ and imaginative geography in Wadi Al-Salib, Haifa

“…Palestinians would never be equal to the task of properly maintaining and developing it (Weiss, 2011). Although the plans of the ‘Haifa Committee’ were never adopted by the British, only two months after the 1948 war, David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister and minister of defense issued an order to demolish Old Haifa (Margalit, 2014: 232). A few decades later, the vast modernist governmental buildings built on its remains, including the district courts building, loom large above the few Palestinian houses that were spared.…”

“…In this respect, Wadi Al-Salib is a vestige of Palestinian Haifa that survives to this day. However, along the years, buildings that survived demolitions became the focus of some Israeli politicians and architects who proposed incorporating Palestinian heritage into a new landscape, an urban ‘fusion’ that would match the ‘new order’ (e.g., Kolodney & Kallus, 2008; Margalit, 2014). These attitudes, as it will be shown in the following examples, rejected physical demolition as the principle activity of urbicide, and sought to eliminate only the Palestinian history of these buildings through an extensive recontextualization effort.…”

“…In other similar cases, scholars described the discourse revolving around Palestinian heritage as orientalist, a ‘romantic mystification of a seemingly timeless Arab material culture’ (Margalit, 2014:234). Yacobi (2008: 114) goes further, arguing that in such places: ‘the Palestinian landscape is a subject of mimicry through which symbolic indigenization of the settlers takes place’.…”