Hackney moves to end six-decade twinning with Haifa amid antisemitism row
A controversial partnership between Hackney Council and an Israeli city could soon come to an end after almost six decades.
The Green-led Hackney Council is taking the first step towards formally severing ties with Haifa.
Hackney Council entered into a ‘twinning’ arrangement with Haifa in Israel in 1968 to “encourage friendly contacts and exchanges between the ordinary citizens”.
Following the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war in 2023, calls to end the ‘sister cities’ partnership have grown increasingly loud.
After several organisations including Amnesty International alleged that Israel has committed war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide in the Gaza Strip, the Green party pledged to cease the arrangement if they were to win power in Hackney at the recent May elections.
Now, after the Greens’ decisive victory, the new administration has begun the process of formally ending the arrangement.
But the move has sparked an immediate backlash amid claims that it will stoke division and be seen as “hostile” towards the Jewish community.
‘Absolutely disgraceful’
Figures from the Hackney Anglo-Israel Friendship Association (HAIFA) and a former speaker of Hackney, Linda Kelly, have called the published proposals to de-twin “absolutely disgraceful”.
“It’s a pity the new councillors don’t spend more time on education and SEND funding, policing, NHS and housing in the borough instead of trying to politicise something that isn’t, and has never been, political,” they said.
Resident Asher Eisen, meanwhile, said de-twinning would be “a real kick in the teeth for the progressive forces in Israel”.
Martin Sugarman, chair of HAIFA, said: “The de-twinning will create huge social dis-cohesion [sic] and be seen for what it really is: an incitement to hate Jews and Zionists and Israelis, an invitation to daub our streets with Jew hate slogans and posters, and incite violent individuals to attack Jews whenever they can and whenever they wish.”
Cross-party working group
At the next full council meeting on Tuesday 28 July, the council will be asked to approve plans to “engage with the municipality of Haifa and other interested parties” and carry out an equalities impact assessment.
The council is proposing to establish a cross-party working group, chaired by a senior councillor, to review the borough’s twinning policy with a view to terminating the formal Haifa relationship.
Published council documents state that the group is expected to meet three times and present their recommendations to the full council to vote on at a future date.
Dormant since Covid
According to the council, in recent years the connection between Haifa and Hackney has been largely limited to hospital exchanges between Homerton Hospital and Rambam Medical Centre, stretching back roughly three decades.
This relationship has lain dormant since the swaps were paused amid the Covid-19 pandemic.
The Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC), however, argues that any and all civic ties between the two municipalities must be severed in protest against the “racist domination” faced by Palestinians in the city and Israel’s military campaign and occupation.
The group adds that Israel’s alleged flouting of international law is further enabled by arms manufacturer Elbit Systems, which has its global headquarters in Haifa.
Pension fund divestment
Since October 7, 2023, the PSC, the Greens and other activist groups have put sustained pressure on the previous Labour administration in Hackney to end the twinning and divest the council’s pension fund from firms linked to Israel’s military activity and occupation.
Former Mayor Caroline Woodley twice refused to do either, on the grounds that it would inflame community tensions, and because it was not in the council’s power to divest, she claimed.
After the Greens took office in May, the new mayor Zoë Garbett met with the PSC and has since committed to begin divesting the council’s pension fund by excluding companies “complicit in territorial human rights violations”.
The Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS) approached the Green party and the Labour party for comment. Both the Labour Group and Hackney Council declined to comment until a decision has been reached by the full council.
In the meantime, the immediate proposal for Mayor Garbett to write to the Mayor of Haifa and “seek their views on the proposed termination of the twinning” will be put to the full council for a vote on Tuesday 28 July.
No reason why the hospitals can’t continue their link. Why do councils need to have twinning arrangements with anybody anyway? They haven’t any benefit for most residents and senior officers and councillors can always fall back on the tried and tested fact finding mission.
Excellent news, this is what Hackney expects and what we voted for. It’s outrageous that it has continued for so long. Sugarman has been given far too much airtime in Hackney and has deluded views. We can all see what support for Zionism means in the years long genocide in Gaza and invasion of Lebanon and Syria.
Well done Hackney!
Echoes what David White said.
I fully agree with what David White said. I really appreciate the current Hackney Green administration on this important humanitarian matter.
Thank you Hackney Greens and well done!
These are the true ‘colours’ of the Green party and its leaders and supporters quoted here. Sheer Jew hatred ; not a word on the murder of the 1200 Israeli men, women and children slaughtered, and 1200 Israeli soldiers killed and 250 hostages, many murdered later – which all started the war against Hamas in Gaza, who began this war as Iran’s proxy, in the first place!
Exactly the dark, sinister side of the Greens we knew. Appauled and disgusted about this.
A real kick in the teeth for Hackney’s Jewish community, many of whom have been part of building the borough into what it is today. If the concern is about controversial international links, why single out Haifa while leaving other twinning arrangements with places linked to human rights concerns untouched? Decisions like this risk looking selective rather than principled, and that only deepens division instead of bringing communities together.
When making the decision about the end of the twinning relationship between Hackney & Haifa please consider that our partners in Haifa are a progressive & diverse authority with policies to match our own and with a proud tradition of equality in all areas.
The de-twinning will be a real kick in the teeth for the progressive forces in Israel and a loss of a valuable professional relationship between the hospitals. The twinning is also incredibly valuable to the Hackney Jewish community and the step will be seen as a hostile
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When making the decision about the end of the twinning relationship between Hackney & Haifa please consider that our partners in Haifa are a progressive & diverse authority with policies to match our own and with a proud tradition of equality in all areas.
The de-twinning will be a real kick in the teeth for the progressive forces in Israel and a loss of a valuable professional relationship between the hospitals. The twinning is also incredibly valuable to the Hackney Jewish community and the step will be seen as a hostile
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The greens are all about Palestine / trans rights, what really need is someone to sort out the problems at the council like fellows court and repairs for council tenants, seems like the greens love smoke screen being back labour.
if this wasn’t about Jew hatred why can’t the twinning remain in place?
Whatever ones views are about Benjamin Netanyahu, this twinning arrangement doesn’t involve him nor his policies.
The reason for the twinning made over 60 years ago stands true for today too.
Politicising this is ugly and reeks badly of Jew hatred and this does only serves the interest of those who support Hamas and glorify and applaud the terrible atrocities they committed on October 7th.
This entire de-twinning is an agenda of Hamas supporters, to whom the Greens pander,.
Nothing less than shameful.
breaking a deal with a city famous for its inter-religion and joint community.
“racist domination” faced by Palestinians in the city – strange as no Palestinians living in the city would have any idea what you are talking about… maybe some grandchild of someone who was expelled from their own community due to the violence they started, who has continued in their grandparents ways might claim that they can’t return due to this “racist domination” – maybe…
this is purely an antisemitic dession with absolutely no connection to facts or reality – and is only the next step which quickly leads, as it has many times before in Hackney to Programs and explosion or in Eroupe to Death camps.
We have been here before.
Are their already swastika flags and marches on the streets, or are you waiting for this decision to pass first?
Hackney – first they came for the Jews and you said nothing….
Excellent decision. We can’t normalise what Israel is doing otherwise whey will just continue massacring civilians. We have to keep up the pressure. Also UEFA must block teams of Israel as they did against Russians.
If we dont do anything we are complicit.
Shame that we needed to wait for greens for this.
One reason why the hospital twinning should stop is because Palestinian Israeli staff are not treated equally with Jewish Israeli staff in Rambam hospital. I used to be very pro twinning arrangements, as a way to learn from other cultures. But surely 60 years is a long enough period for lessons to have been passed on – and if they haven’t, continuing the arrangement appears as a reward for the status quo, which is wrong.
Being twinned with a city in a country continuing to commit genocide is shameful. The hundred thousand dead in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon & Iran – to maintain a criminal Prime Minister in Israel should not have Hackney support by twinning with Haifa. Please support any decision to detwin!
Haifa is the military port town for the IDF’s armaments to enter for them to continue genocide. The twinning has long been a disgrace for Hackney, and it is great that the new council is supporting human rights by ending it.
How unsurprising to see overt Zionism dominating so many comments on here. Also how unoriginal. The same bullying into silence typical of Zionism, here put to use against a whole axx council. The nerve you peeps have to cry “coexistence” about Haifa while your racist ideology of choice is currently implementing ramped-up ethnic cleansing through violent settlers backed by IDF in West Bank. Equally disgusting and again, typical, how you weaponise Jewish community, using identity as a shield for a brutal political ideology without anti-Zionist Jewish people’s consent. De-twinning isn’t “hostile”! It’s basic solidarity against APARTHEID. Hackney’s Green council needs to show real accountability, cut these toxic ties, and push through full pension fund divestment from companies profiting off this genocide. We voted Green to stop our public money from being complicit in blood, and we expect nothing less. Cut the ties, divest the funds now!
Here are a few words for Martin Sugarman …
“Hannibal Directive” and “Sword of Damocles operation”.
As confirmed by Yoav Gallant & Israeli newspapers, so no counter accusations of conspiracy theory possible.
Ask Tomo Godo’s family.
Although the United Nations were barred from entering or providing medical assistance, one investigation found that at least “hundreds” of Israelis were killed by Israeli carpet bombing.
Haifa is the main naval base of the Israel Defense Forces. It was where the boats that blocked the Global Sumud Flotilla sailed from.
To paraphrase Golda Meir, “Israel can forgive the Palestinians for killing their people. But it cannot forgive them for forcing the IDF to kill their own people.”
Hackney has to draw the line.
What will be interesting is to watch how the Friends of Israel in the UK respond, and whether they will go “Full Jeremy Corbyn” on the Green Party & its leaders now. I can imagine that their army of little helpers are already trawling through decades of social media posts, hacking accounts, and employing NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware to look for dirt as we type.
I hope the Greens have good security advisors.
It’s good to see the Greens beginning the process of untwinning. Our council should not be giving legitimacy to an apartheid genocidal regime.
100% the right decision. Glad to see Hackney standing on the right side of history.
It’s about time we untwined from a city in a country committing genocide. Anyone who is horrified by the Israeli treatment of Palestinians will be supporting this decision to untwin, including all those ‘progressive’ residents of Haifa.
Great news. This is what Labour Party never dared to do!
Well done Zoe
Over the past three years Palestinian civilians in Gaza in their tens of thousands have been violently killed by Israeli bombs and missiles, bullets, tanks and drones. They have been deliberately starved. They have had their homes destroyed.
They have been repeatedly displaced. Their relatives have been killed. They have been maimed.
They have been deprived of the basics of life. They have been deprived of health care because the hospitals have been deliberately targeted and destroyed. Medics have been targeted and killed. Journalists have been targeted and killed. Aid workers have been targeted and killed. There are no schools in Gaza, there is no educational provision. Drones deliberately target children. There is a new category for children classified by aid workers in Gaza as WCNSF – wounded child no surviving family, thanks to the IDF.
Elsewhere in Palestine land is stolen routinely, weekly, by settlers with the support of the Israeli government and military. Palestinians are attacked, their property destroyed, they are captured, imprisoned without trial, tortured. All of this amazingly, has actually been reported in mainstream media.
Yet Josef Steen chooses to characterise this genocide as a war between two presumably equal forces – Israel and Hamas. And Zionists pile in here proclaiming Haifa – the very port city that receives the bombs and weapons used to kill Palestinian civilians- as ‘progressive’.
I am so proud that Hackney knows better, that we elected a council that knows better, that we refuse to be complicit in these atrocities. I look forward to celebrating the day Hackney Council detwins from Haifa and divests from the Israeli killing machine.
The new Council were elected on this pledge. this and divestment were front and central to the Green Party campaign and manifesto. it is literally what they were elected to carry out.
how can there now be any debate or prevarication about carrying this out?
it’s like saying yes you were elected to do this you won but now you can’t do it.
twin with a non genocidal entity please.
Penny Wrout is typical of Hard Left liars who accuse – the Rambam Hospital in this case – of not treating Arab Israeli staff equally . She produces not a shred of evidence and just swallows then regurgitates the lies she gets from extremist Palestinian news outlets and propaganda sources. Dame Jenny Tongue used to do the same in the House of Lords, when she accused Israeli Rescue and Medical teams who attended disaster locations world wide eg Haiti and Turkish earthquake events – of only going to help in order to steal organs for transplants in Israel! What a blood libel, which harks back to medieval lies about Jews for centuries. When Tongue was pressed about her source, she admitted it was a Palestinian ‘reporter’ who lived in Jerusalem and never been out of the country! She was later expelled form the House. If Wrout is typical of our Concillors ,we are in for deep trouble in Hackney
An disgraceful and racist move supported by disgraceful racists.
The greens are just a big group of racists. RIP Hackney.
Those who oppose this move and the divestment of the Hackney pension fund from suppliers of arms and equipment to a genocidal state are the equivalent of those who followed Thatcher in the 1980s in opposing the Boycott of apartheid South Africa on the grounds that tlMandela and the ANC were terrorists. Those brave enough in Israel who oppose the barbariries of settlers rampant in the West Bank will welcome this move.
The Hackney Greens are quickly incurring the wrath and anger of thousands of people world wide as word of their attempt to cut the Haifa-Hackney link has spread as an act of naive ignorance and childish gesture politics which has nothing to do with local democracy or affairs. They are being bombarded by e mails and social media protests at this racist blow against Jews and non-Jews who are proud Zionists who utterly respect Israel’s right to self-defence self determination and liberation, and utterly condemn the anti-Semitism that is anti-Zionism. Most if not all Greens have never been to Haifa let alone Israel, and spoken to local people.
Our Association is now hard at work preparng our usual multi-racial/ethnic medical exchange with an Israeli hospital close to Haifa – watch this space. All that the Greens have done is awaken a sleeeping giant.
“Every pillar of the genocide accusation against Israel has crumbled. The institutions that built it have suddenly lost their voices.”
Andrew Fox, Analyst, former british paratrooper
The lies the ignorant bigots amongst the red-fascist left and Islamo-fascist right expose them as the complicit antisemites and outright Jew haters that they are. This de-twinning is just another ethnically discriminatory racist hate-incitement from extremists and morally bankrupt lefties that have drunk from the poison chalice of genocidal HAMAS, FATAH and other Iranian IS proxy propaganda. the mayor and green party should be brought before whatever committees and legal bodies handle incitement to racial/ethnic hatred, along with all their fellow racist supporters on here.
We voted overwhelmingly for the Green Party’s anti-apartheid antiracist policies. The majority of people in Hackney want the council to divest from genocidal Israel.
Take the night of all you complicit antisemites and Jew haters. Put your feet up and enjoy Boy Georges latest. No doubt you will try to get him cancelled but give it tomorrow before you get to work on that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8OVEI0FfWU
Read this by Fiyaz Mughal, the founder of Faith Matters, Tell MAMA and Muslims Against Antisemitism. And then you will understand the truth.
If Hackney’s Greens cared about peace, they wouldn’t cut ties with Haifa – Israel’s city of coexistence
Shunning even a model of Jewish-Arab cooperation as morally tainted raises an uncomfortable question: has political activism crossed into antisemitic exclusion?
The Green-led Hackney Council is preparing to begin the process of formally ending its twinning arrangement with Haifa in northern Israel. A report going before the council on 28 July recommends agreeing, in principle, to terminate the relationship, subject to consultation and an equalities impact assessment.
The twinning arrangement dates back to 1968 and was intended to encourage friendship and exchanges between the citizens of both cities. Indeed, Hackney Council’s own report acknowledges that Haifa was originally chosen because of its “harmonious multicultural, multi-faith populations and good records in community relations”. There is, therefore, a glaring contradiction at the heart of the council’s position.
The local Green manifesto gives away the political thinking behind the proposal. It states: “In Haifa, Palestinian people live under occupation and apartheid by the Israeli state; this is not a city that reflects Hackney’s values.”
This is not a serious or accurate description of the complex reality of Haifa. The city is within Israel, not the West Bank or Gaza, and its Arab residents are principally citizens of Israel who participate in its civic, educational and economic life. One may legitimately debate discrimination, inequality and the treatment of Arab citizens, but collapsing all these issues into the language of “occupation” is political sloganeering rather than informed policy.
I have just returned from Haifa, where I attended a conference at the University of Haifa on contemporary antisemitism. It is a city that I have visited more than a dozen times and which I have come to know well. I have laughed and cried there, walked through the Bahá’í Gardens, eaten in Arab restaurants along the Templar-era German Colony and enjoyed more cups of Aroma coffee than I care to count. More importantly, it is the city where I feel most grounded and at ease when I am in Israel. That comes from its everyday atmosphere of coexistence and the determination of most people to get on with their lives.
Haifa is not some perfect social utopia, and it has problems involving housing, poverty and inequality, just like other major Western cities. Yet its reality is very different from the crude picture painted by Hackney Greens. Haifa’s municipal statistics record around 40,000 Arab residents, representing approximately 13 per cent of the city’s population. Jewish and Arab citizens meet through universities, hospitals, shops, businesses, restaurants, cultural institutions and the ordinary rhythms of daily life. Coexistence does not mean the absence of disagreement or discrimination; it means that people continue to study, work and build lives alongside one another despite those difficulties.
The University of Haifa provides one of the clearest examples of this. The university says that approximately 40 per cent of its student body is Palestinian-Israeli, making it one of the most diverse universities in the country. As I walked around the campus, I was struck by the number of young Arab women studying there and preparing for their futures. I saw Muslim and Christian Arab students talking over coffee, reading course books and moving between lectures alongside their Jewish peers. Some women wore the hijab, many did not, while Christian Arab students wore crosses that openly expressed their identity.
Israel’s healthcare system provides an even more powerful challenge to the claim that Jewish and Arab lives in Haifa exist entirely apart. A peer-reviewed study using Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics and Ministry of Health data found that, in 2023, Arab citizens and permanent residents, about 20 per cent of the country’s population, constituted approximately 25 per cent of Israel’s doctors, 27 per cent of its nurses and 49 per cent of its pharmacists. These are not token numbers designed to produce a glossy image of diversity. Arab healthcare professionals are essential to the functioning of Israeli medicine and provide care to Jewish, Muslim, Christian and Druze patients alike. The healthcare system offers a model of cooperation from which other parts of Israeli society could learn.
This is particularly visible at Rambam Health Care Campus in Haifa, where a senior hospital official said in 2023 that Arab staff constituted around one-third of its caregivers. Rambam employs approximately 1,100 doctors and 1,600 nurses, who treat hundreds of thousands of patients every year. Dr Suheir Assady, an Israeli Muslim physician, remains the director of Rambam’s Department of Nephrology and Hypertension and was the first Muslim woman in Israel to lead a major hospital department. Bnai Zion Medical Centre similarly describes itself as an example of the coexistence and multiculturalism that characterise Haifa, while Jewish and Arab professionals also work together across Carmel Medical Centre and the city’s wider health services. These institutions are not free of tensions, but they demonstrate every day that cooperation is real, practical and life-saving.
Even more remarkably, Hackney Council’s own report states that, for roughly 30 years, the Haifa twinning relationship was centred on links between Homerton University Hospital and Rambam. The last recorded civic event was a 2019 reception for a visiting delegation of Rambam nurses. In other words, the relationship produced precisely the kind of professional and human exchange that twinning arrangements were created to encourage. At a time when Jewish-Muslim relations are under enormous pressure, why would any responsible council dismantle such a bridge? Gesture politics may produce applause from Green activists, but it does nothing to bring people together.
As a British Muslim, I have always believed in strengthening relations between Muslims and Jews. Israel is a complex, resilient and fascinating country, and I will continue to visit it, engage with its people and defend its right to exist.
That does not mean that I support every decision taken by an Israeli government; I have strongly disagreed with the scale of the destruction in Gaza and the appalling loss of Palestinian civilian life. Supporting Israel’s existence does not require silence over the actions of its government, just as supporting Palestinian rights does not require the demonisation or dismantling of Israel. Israeli and Palestinian lives have equal value, and my moral framework cannot change according to the identity of the victims.
For Hackney Greens to single out Haifa is therefore not only perverse but deeply revealing. If they were genuinely interested in peacebuilding, they would strengthen the connection with Haifa and use it to expand exchanges between Jewish and Arab students, doctors, nurses, pharmacists and community organisations.
Twinning should create conversations across conflict, rather than become a weapon for punishing an entire city because it is Israeli. When one of Israel’s most mixed cities is treated as morally contaminated despite abundant evidence of Jewish-Arab cooperation, it is legitimate to ask whether anti-Israel politics have crossed into antisemitic exclusion. Hackney should be building bridges with Haifa, not tearing them down.
Good on them, any and all Israeli institutions, from Tel Aviv to Haifa, from Standing Together to Breaking the Silence, should be economically and culturally boycotted, even the ones which are “not so bad” or a “pillar of co-existence”
You don’t just get to commit genocide, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, infinity war crimes, and still be treated like a normal nation state.
End the occupation, end the apartheid, end the genocide, and prosecute the genocidaires in chief, then you can be treated like a normal nation state.
Martin Sugarman is a Zionist activist. He does not follow the Torah. He is a Zionist who speaks for Zionism, not for us Jewish people. His advocacy do not represent religious Jews or Jewish values.
Stop thinking he represents us Jews. Many Jews voted and and support the very reasonable motion
https://hackney.moderngov.co.uk/documents/s99274/202607%20Full%20Council%20report%20-Twinning.pdf
Martin and Linda suggest all is perfect in Haifa- they are lying
https://archive.is/ZfHiD#selection-549.0-560.0
By Diana Buttu
^^ The ignorant, racist Islamo-fascist speaks ^^.
Hackney, nor indeed Britain, should have anything to do with this murderous country. Zionists always intended to dominate Palestine and, after 1947, embarked on a program of ethnic cleansing that is still going on on the West Bank.
Israel has defied dozens of UN resolutions. The only way Palestinians will get justice is if the West withdraws their support for their oppressors
‘The Arabs who are superficially clever and quickwitted worship one thing, and one thing only – power and success….the British authorities knowing as they do the treacherous nature of the Arab, they have to watch carefully and constantly that nothing should happen which might give the Arabs the slightest grievance or ground for complaint….lest they should stab the army in the back. The Arab, quick as he is to gauge such a situation, tries to make the most of it. he screams as often as he can and blackmails as much as he can.’ Chaim Weizmann the first president of Israel writing in 1918
Anyone who reads his letters will see dozens of comments like that. Not a single one favours any rapprochement with the Arabs whose land he coveted
Well done the Green Party. Now make membership of the IDF illegal for British residents
Majority of posters are completely missing the point, ostensibly.
If the mission of twinning is to foster goodness and cohesion, than pray say how does the de-twinning achieve this goal?
Fact is, Haifa has Arab residents and always will have. For better or for worse this is the reality.
If Hackney Council was seriously looking to do good work by promoting better relationships , peace building between the Arabs in Haifa, you can be sure they wouldn’t be punishing these very same Israeli Arabs of Haifa, by de-twinning them.
So it is obvious that Hackney Council does not care enough about them. They care more about pandering to senseless Hamas Sympathisers and Jew haters than actually doing anything meaningful and tangible for the Arabs in Haifa.
Any allegations of genocide, has absolutely nothing to do with Haifa and it’s Arab residents. And anyone who even remotely thinks otherwise, probably has a very low IQ, that of a 3 year old.
Aren’t the Greens meant to be focusing on Hackney issues, rather than Middle East student politics?
James spot on
The fact that Green Zoe chose October 7th as the end date for the Haifa Mayor to respond, tells you everything you need to know about her true colours, agenda and what and whom she really cares about.
This date was NOT chosen as a careless mistake. This was deliberate and with intention.
Mark, there is a very unhealthy and strange obsession when it comes to Israel. There are and have been awful things happening around the world, including war, genocide, murder, ethnic cleansing, executions etc and there is and has been either silence or very minimal talk about them.
Just to name a few, Iran , Ukraine , Sudan , North Korea , Myanmar , Syria , Iraq Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Did anyone arrange weekly marches to protest their outrage?
Did any local Council pledge to do anything about it?
This fascination and obsession only when it concerns Israel, is pure hatred directed at Jews. Nothing else. Period.