Replanning the settler city: Nadeem Karkabi, Eilat Maoz, ‘Decolonizing Haifa: Urban Transformation and the Politics of Return’, Palestine/Israel Review, 2025 | settler colonial studies blog

Replanning the settler city: Nadeem Karkabi, Eilat Maoz, ‘Decolonizing Haifa: Urban Transformation and the Politics of Return’, Palestine/Israel Review, 2025

10May25

Excerpt: Late in the summer of 2024, one of the authors of this introduction (EM) boarded a bus from the neighborhood of Bat Galim to Hadar HaCarmel in Haifa. Sitting across from her was an elderly Jewish woman who, clearly seeking conversation, began complaining about changes to the bus’s schedule, her neighborhood, and the city in general. “It’s all Arabs here now,” she said without reservation, “we always lived with them. I grew up with the Arabs who live by Saint George’s church, but now . . . now they are everywhere.” She linked Palestinian growing presence to the loss of the city’s Jewish character, pointing to loud music played on Shabbat and disregard for Yom Kippur observances. It was nighttime. The bus climbed through old Stanton Road, now called Shivat Tsion (literally: Zion’s Return). The road was built during the British Mandate to connect Palestinian downtown with the Jewish settlement up the mountain. “Look!” the woman gestured out the window, “Here was the mayor’s house, and we lived down there.” The mayor’s house belonged to Abed Al-Rahman Al Haj, Palestinian mayor of Haifa between 1920 and 1929. Today, it is one of the only remaining structures of Palestinian Wadi Salib and was recently sold to Jewish speculators. “You know, Arabs bought all the houses up here, and even in the Carmel,” the woman continued. “This is dangerous since, you know, Haifa used to be Arab”. This brief encounter, mundane as it is unsettling, highlights significant changes unfolding in Haifa over recent decades. A historically diverse city, from which almost all of the Palestinian population was expelled in 1948 (Manna 2022; Morris 2004), Haifa is slowly regaining a prominent Palestinian presence. This is evident in the growing number of Palestinian residents in many of the city’s neighborhoods, in the growing power of Palestinian capital in processes of urban development, and, perhaps most importantly, in growing Palestinian claims on urban space, history, and identity. For the Jewish woman cited earlier, these changes appear threatening, as they upend longstanding power dynamics between ethnonational collectives. What worries her, it seems, is less the mere fact of having Palestinian neighbors, and more the changing relations between rulers and ruled, “homeowners” and “guests,” or, indeed, between settlers and natives. Hence, her assessment that “Arabs bought all the houses here,” which, if not entirely false, is certainly exaggerated, and hence her concerns about the growing influence of Palestinians over the city’s public character. Yet, what is particularly troubling to her is how contemporary changes conjure up historical specters, as they recover a city that “used to be Arab” before the ethnic cleansing of 1948. She clearly identifies Palestinian life in Haifa with a kind of collective return, a prospect she views as dangerous and tangible. Perhaps this is because she, like many others raised on colonial dread, fears that the Palestinians will do to the Zionists what they did to them.

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