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Walking Tours

Tour | 01

Life in Pink: Haifa's Queer History

 

Imagining Israel's queer past, it is common to think of Tel-Aviv. Based on several years of research, this tour unearths Haifa's secret queer history. Walking through the neighbourhood of Hadar HaCarmel, this tour tells stories about love, murder, public gardens, police harassment, politicization, struggle, and pride, whose protagonists are lesbians, feminists, homosexuals, trans* people, Jews, and Palestinians.

Tour | 02

Mixed City: Jewish-Arab relations in Haifa
 
Haifa takes pride in being a mixed city, where Jews and Arabs maintain a peaceful coexistence.
Walking through the neighbourhoods of Hadar HaCarmel, Wadi Salib and Downtown, this tour complicates a bit this premise. Instead, it tells the story of intricate relationships, starting in the middle of the nineteenth century, including mixed neighbourhoods, shared labour unions, war, and limited coexistence.​

Tour | 03

Red Haifa: A History of A Workers' City
 
The city wasn't nicknamed "Red Haifa" for nothing: its history throughout the 20th century brims with Socialist and Communist activity.
This tour follows the dreams for equality, freedom, peace, and justice, dreamed by the Jewish and Arab dwellers of Haifa.​ We will meet different political parties, several generations of labour unions, and a few social struggles that occurred on the backdrop of Haifa, but rattled the whole country.​

Tour | 04

Hadar HaCarmel
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Many things could be written about Hadar: it is the historic heart of modern Haifa and the city's first Hebrew neighbourhood, but first and foremost it is a microcosm of the Israeli society. It hosts a mixed population of Jews and Arabs, immigrants and locals, in the entire spectrum of religious observance.

This tour tells the neighbourhood's story, from its establishment in the 1920's, trough its rise in the state's early decades, its fall in the 1980's, and up to the current urban renewal process, that brings up hopes together with questions.

Tour | 05

Downtown
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Haifa al-Jadida ("New Haifa") was established ​in 1761 by Zahir al-Umar az-Zaydani, the ruler of northern Palestine, and formed the seed from which downtown Haifa - and modern Haifa in general - will grow.
This tour explores the remnants of  different rulers of the neighbourhood: the Ottomans, who connected Haifa to Istanbul and Mecca via the Hijazi rail line; the British Mandate that inaugurated the modern harbour and oil refineries; and the stated of Israel, whose "Operation Shiqmona" obliterated much of the old city to make room for a new one. Through these remnants we will look at historical narratives, Jewish-Arab relations, and urban development.

Tour | 06

Wadi Salib
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Wadi Salib is a visible scar on the city's skin, a mark of past struggles that haven't healed properly yet. On this tour we will navigate between deserted buildings and renewing streets and tell stories about war, political upheaval, and refugeehood.​
We will talk about the neighbourhood's Palestinian past, the Arab Jews who lived in it, the 1948 war, the 1959 Mizrahi protest - first of its kind in the Israel, the neighbourhood's abandonment that followed, and the different attempts for renewal since the 1980's.