Haifa

• 1. Introduction

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  Haifa sits at the foot of Mount Carmel, its streets descending in tiers toward the Mediterranean, and at its heart stands a golden-domed shrine that draws pilgrims from every corner of the world. This city is Israel's third-largest, a port where oil tankers once carried crude from Iraq, where two Nobel Prize winners in chemistry grew up on the same streets, and where the subway system holds a Guinness World Record as the shortest metro line on the planet. More than three thousand years of habitation have left layer upon layer beneath these hills: Canaanites, Phoenicians, Crusaders, Ottomans, and British forces each passed through and left their marks. What made Haifa the place it is? How did a fishing village famous for purple dye become a hub of global high technology? And what happened here in April 1948 that changed the city's character forever? Those are the threads this documentary will follow.

• 2. Three Thousand Years of Conquest

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  Tell Abu Hawam, a small port and fishing village established in the fourteenth century BCE, is the earliest known settlement in the area now called Haifa. Its harbor eventually silted up, and the city moved, and moved again, cycling through the hands of every major power of the ancient and medieval worlds: Israelites, Phoenicians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Hasmoneans, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Crusaders, and Ottomans each took their turn.

  By about the third century CE, the Talmud records Haifa as a Jewish fishing village, home to Rabbi Avdimi and other scholars. Fishermen there caught Murex sea snails, whose secretions yielded the purple dye used to make Jewish prayer shawls, and the trade stretched all the way to the Ladder of the Tyrians along the coast. The Talmud mentions Haifa more than a hundred times.

  In 1100 or 1101, shortly after the First Crusade ended, European Christian forces besieged the city, fighting a fierce battle against its Jewish inhabitants and its Fatimid garrison. Jews comprised the majority of the population at that time. The Crusaders reduced Haifa to a small fortified coastal stronghold within the Principality of Galilee inside the Kingdom of Jerusalem. Saladin's Ayyubid army recaptured it in mid-July 1187, destroying the Crusader fortress; then Richard the Lionheart took it back in 1191.

  In 1265 the Mamluk sultan Baibars captured the city and tore down its fortifications, which King Louis IX of France had rebuilt. He demolished most of the city's homes to prevent the Crusaders from returning. For two centuries afterward, Haifa was little more than a small, unfortified village, sometimes barely inhabited at all, while pilgrims still climbed Mount Carmel to pray at the Cave of Elijah.

• 3. The City Reinvented

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  In the 1760s, Daher al-Umar, the Arab ruler of Acre and the Galilee, demolished the old settlement known today as Haifa el-Atika and rebuilt the town in a new location to the east, surrounding it with a protective wall. That act is marked as the beginning of Haifa's modern era. The new settlement was initially called al-imara al-jadida in Arabic, or "New Haifa," before residents simply began calling it Haifa.

  When the French diplomat Laurent d'Arvieux visited in the 1650s and 1660s, before the relocation, he described a small, poor, undefended town whose Muslims, Jews, and Christians lived surrounded by extensive ruins of a former castle and two ruined churches. By 1742, the Jewish community consisted mainly of immigrants from Morocco and Algeria and had its own synagogue. The population stood at 250 in 1764-5.

  In 1799, Napoleon Bonaparte captured Haifa during his attempt to take Palestine and Syria from the Ottomans, but he was soon forced to withdraw. In his campaign's final proclamation he claimed credit for having razed the fortifications of "Kaiffa." After Napoleon's departure, the Egyptian viceroy Muhammad Ali governed the city between 1831 and 1840, after his son Ibrahim Pasha wrested it from the Ottomans. When Egyptian occupation ended and the nearby port of Acre declined, Haifa's importance rose in proportion.

  The most catalytic moment in nineteenth-century Haifa came in 1868, when German messianics known as Templers arrived and settled in what is now the German Colony. They built a steam-powered station, opened factories, and inaugurated carriage services to Acre, Nazareth, and Tiberias. Their presence helped pull Haifa toward a modern, industrial identity. A branch railway known as the Jezreel Valley Railway was then built between 1903 and 1905, bringing foreign merchants and workers pouring into the city.

• 4. Sacred Ground on Mount Carmel

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  In 1909, Haifa acquired a distinction that set it apart from every other city in the Middle East. The remains of the Bab, founder of the Babi Faith and forerunner of Baha'u'llah in the Bahai Faith, were moved from Acre to Haifa and interred in a shrine on Mount Carmel. Bahais consider the shrine their second holiest place on Earth, after the Shrine of Baha'u'llah in Acre.

  The precise location on the mountain had been shown by Baha'u'llah himself to his eldest son, Abdu'l-Baha, in 1891. Abdu'l-Baha planned the structure. His grandson Shoghi Effendi designed and completed it several years later. In a separate room of the same shrine, the remains of Abdu'l-Baha were buried in November 1921. In 2008, the Bahai gardens surrounding the shrine were designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and the complex draws pilgrims from around the world.

  Mount Carmel holds older sacred associations as well. A grotto at the mountain's peak is known as the Cave of Elijah, traditionally linked to the prophet Elijah and his apprentice Elisha. In Arabic, the highest peak of the Carmel range is called the Muhraka, meaning "place of burning," a reference to the burnt offerings made there in Canaanite and early Israelite times. The Carmelite monastic order traces its origins to twelfth-century hermits who settled in Mount Carmel's caves; the Stella Maris Monastery, restored in the nineteenth century, stands on the same mountain today, and the altar of its church stands over a cave associated with the prophet Elijah.

  Between 2005 and 2006, more than 86,000 people visited the Shrine of the Bab alone, making it the city's principal tourist draw.

• 5. April 1948

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  On the 30th of December 1947, members of the Irgun, a Jewish underground militia, threw bombs into a crowd of Arabs outside the gates of the Consolidated Refineries in Haifa, killing six and injuring 42. Arab employees of the refinery killed 39 Jewish employees in retaliation, in what became known as the Haifa Oil Refinery massacre. The Jewish Haganah militia then raided the Arab village of Balad al-Shaykh in a counter-attack.

  By April 1948, the city had reached its breaking point. British forces redeployed on the 21st of April, pulling back from most of the city while retaining control of the port. That same day, the Carmeli Brigade of the Haganah, commanded by Moshe Carmel, launched Operation Bi'ur Hametz, assaulting the Arab downtown with a combination of local and foreign Arab irregulars opposing them. Arab neighborhoods were struck with mortars and gunfire. According to historian Ilan Pappe, the attack on a Palestinian crowd in the old marketplace used three-inch mortars on the 22nd of April 1948.

  Palestinian Arab municipal leader Rashid al-Haj Ibrahim left an eyewitness account of what followed: "Thousands of women, children and men hurried to the port district in a state of chaos and terror without precedent in the history of the Arab nation. They fled their houses to the coast, barefoot and naked, to wait for their turn to travel to Lebanon."

  Historian Walid Khalidi described the mass exodus as "the spontaneous reaction to the ruthless combination of terror and psychological warfare tactics adopted by the Haganah during the attack." According to The Economist at the time, only 5,000-6,000 of the city's 62,000 Arabs remained by the 2nd of October 1948. The Old City was subsequently demolished. On the 14th of May 1948, with the declaration of Israeli statehood, Haifa became part of the new country.

• 6. A City of Workers and Ideas

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  An Israeli saying captures Haifa's identity in a single sentence: "Haifa works, Jerusalem prays, and Tel Aviv plays." The city earned that reputation through its port, its refineries, and its universities. The Haifa oil refinery processes 9 million tons of crude oil a year. Its twin cooling towers, each 80 meters high and built in the 1930s, were the tallest structures raised in the British Mandate period.

  The Technion, Israel's leading technical university, was founded in 1912 and became the first higher education institution in the world to teach in Hebrew. Its campus now includes 18 faculties and 42 research institutes. The University of Haifa, founded in 1963, was designed by Oscar Niemeyer, the architect of Brasilia and the United Nations Headquarters in New York City; the 30-story Eshkol Tower gives a panoramic view of northern Israel from its top floor. Among Israeli universities, Haifa has the largest percentage of Arab-Israeli students at 41%.

  The Matam high-tech park, which opened in the 1970s as the first dedicated high-tech park in Israel, hosts manufacturing and research facilities for companies including Apple, Intel, Microsoft, Google, and IBM. In 2010, Monocle magazine identified Haifa as having the most promising business potential of any city in the world, noting that the municipality had spent more than $350 million on roads and infrastructure, and that building permits had risen 83% in the previous two years.

  The Hebrew Reali School, founded in 1913, is the largest K-12 school in Israel, with 4,000 students across seven branches. Among the city's notable alumni are two Nobel laureates in chemistry, Aaron Ciechanover and Avram Hershko, as well as mathematician Avi Wigderson, who received the 2021 Abel Prize.

• 7. A City of Many Lives

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  Haifa is officially one of Israel's mixed cities, with an Arab-Israeli population of roughly 10%, concentrated mainly in neighborhoods such as Wadi Nisnas, Abbas, and Khalisa. Arab residents of Haifa tend to be wealthier and better educated than Arabs elsewhere in Israel. The city is home to the second-largest Arab Christian community in Israel, with the Melkite Greek Catholic Archeparchy of Akka based there.

  Immigrants from the former Soviet Union constitute 25% of Haifa's population, making Russian one of the three main spoken languages alongside Hebrew and Arabic. In 1959, a group of Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews, mostly Moroccan, rioted in the Wadi Salib neighborhood, claiming discrimination by the state and demanding "bread and work." That protest became one of the landmark social ruptures in early Israeli history.

  The city's political tradition has been left-leaning. Haifa's reputation as a Labor stronghold and a hub for dock workers and trade unions earned it the nickname "Red Haifa." Several prominent Arab members of the Israeli Communist Party, among them Emile Habibi and Tawfik Toubi, came from the city. In 2006, Kadima received about 28.9% of Haifa's vote in the legislative elections, with Labor receiving 16.9%.

  In 2006, Hezbollah fired 93 rockets into Haifa during the Second Lebanon War, killing 11 civilians and driving half the city's population to leave during the first week of the conflict. Rambam Medical Center, the largest hospital in the city with 900 beds, came under direct fire and moved entire wings of patients into underground shelters. The Rakavlit cable car, which opened in April 2022 as a 4.4-kilometre commuter line linking the central bus station to the Technion and the University of Haifa, represents a quieter chapter in the city's ongoing reinvention of itself.