ON THE SUMMER EVENING OF JULY 9, 1959, CRIME SQUAD SERGEANT Yisra’el Walk was on a routine patrol in the Haifa area, accompanied by the driver of the police van, Said Abu-Sa’ada, from the village of Usfia.¹ Their patrol began at Shemen Beach and on their way back, toward ten at night, they paid a routine call at Ya’akov and Shalom Shitrit’s coffee bar at 85 Shivat Zion Street, known as the Aviv Café. In the midst of an exchange of words with Shalom Shitrit regarding the running of the business and particularly on the matter of the brothers’ application...

IN FORGING, AT THE END OF THE 1950S, A LINK BETWEEN WADI Nisnas, the Palestinian neighborhood of Haifa, and Wadi Salib, a former Muslim neighborhood and currently a residential area housing poor Jewish immigrants, Uri Avnery was alluding to the Israeli political milieu in general. Haifa served as a parable for him of the linkage and reciprocal ties between intra-Jewish ethnic tension and the Jewish-Palestinian conflict. When different normative systems exist side by side in a state, he warned, civil rights cannot be guaranteed. Israel, in which a section of its citizens—the Palestinians, to be precise—lives under military...

ALL THAT DAVID BEN-HARUSH HAD WANTED TO DO WAS TO OPEN a modest café. He was thirty-five years old. During his eleven years in the country, after immigrating from Morocco by way of Algeria and the transit camp in Cyprus, he hadn’t managed to establish a footing for himself. The café would, he hoped, put an end to his ongoing economic hardship.¹ To this end he had sold his small dwelling, bought a one-room apartment for himself and his family, and invested the proceeds in a new café. “I wanted to set up a café and snack bar in our...

THE MOROCCAN IMMIGRANTS SETTLED IN THE ABANDONED ARAB properties of Wadi Salib in two waves. The first reached the neighborhood directly from the immigrant camps toward the end of 1948. This was in part a spontaneous initiative by the immigrants themselves. Reacting to the severe hardships in the immigrant camps, they went in search of improvised housing solutions with the support of the authorities. Neighborhoods similar to Wadi Salib were settled at the time, such as the “large area” in Jaffa, the Sahneh in Lod, and the Salameh neighborhood near Tel Aviv.¹ The second wave arrived in a roundabout manner...

IN THE AUTUMN OF 1895 THE BERLIN ZIONIST WILLY BAMBUS made his way from Zikhron Ya’akov to Haifa by horse-drawn coach. As he surveyed the spectacular vista of Haifa Bay, with Acre emerging in the background, it occurred to him that this exhilarating piece of nature was no less beautiful than the Bay of Naples. But it was just this topographic resemblance that brought into relief the tremendous difference. How could Haifa and Acre compete with Naples and Portici? The natural beauty, he felt, did not find its full expression, since it lacked “the enlivening element of human activity,” of...

IN EXILE IN BEIRUT, THE PALESTINIAN AUTHOR GHASSAN KANAFANI wrote a fantastic story about return. He sat his protagonists Said and Safiyya in a gray Fiat bearing white Jordanian license plates and sent them on their way from Ramallah, the city in which they resided, to Haifa, the city of their youth. This was the end of June 1967, and Said and Safiyya had been given the opportunity of visiting their city. The purpose of the visit is clear, and they refrain from discussing it. In the midst of the expulsion and the panic of the flight in April 1948,...