By a Hackney North and Stoke Newington CLP member

In May’s borough elections, the Green Party captured Hackney’s executive mayoralty with Green candidate Zoë Garbett winning more than 47% of the vote, nearly 7,000 ahead of Labour incumbent Caroline Woodley. The Greens also gained an absolute majority of Council seats, 42 of 57, with Labour reduced to just nine. Among the Green manifesto pledges was a commitment to bring an end to a long-standing, but dormant twinning relationship with Israel’s third largest city and principal naval port, Haifa. 

Mayor Garbett moved swiftly to honour her pledge. On 28^th July the first regular meeting of Hackney Council under the new administration included a report proposing a review of the London borough’s twinning relationships and the start of a process to conclude the Haifa twinning. The process would include the creation of a cross-party working group, an online public consultation and an Equality Impact Assessment to comply with potential implications under Section 149 of the Equality Act 2010. 

The Debate 

The original Hackney-Haifa twinning agreement dates from 1968, an initiative of then Lord Mayor Stanley Clinton-Davis, later a local MP and eventually a member of the Blair government from a seat in the Lords. There has been no evidence to suggest any formal engagement has taken place between Hackney and Haifa since a 2019 Town Hall reception involving staff from Haifa’s Rambam medical centre and Hackney’s Homerton hospital. Even so, Labour councillor Ben Lucas claimed that the twinning sprang from “a spirit of working-class solidarity” and claimed that ending the relationship would be “punishing people for the actions of a government.” 

Some 20 minutes of debate followed the introduction of the report with further opposition coming from the Tory group leader, Simche Steinberger, who spoke twice, and from Labour group leader Anntoinette Bramble as well Councillor Lucas. Green councillor Manal Massalha, whose grandparents were displaced during the Nakba of the late 1940s, spoke online. She noted that more than 1,100 Palestinian civilians, among them 282 children, had died at the hands of Israeli forces since the start of the so-called ceasefire in Gaza. She concluded: “Detwinning is not about opposing a people, a religion or a culture. It’s about ensuring that our institutional relationships reflect those values… Justice for Palestine is justice for all.” 

The other Green intervention came from Cabinet member Florence Schechter, who described herself as “proudly Jewish.” In a very personal speech, Schechter declared that “What the Israeli state is doing to the Palestinian people — killing innocent people — is against Jewish law.” 

Given the overwhelming Green majority, the vote to accept the report was never really in doubt. Whether Labour will participate in a cross-party working group remains to be seen, while the Conservatives are likely to boycott it. During the Woodley administration, the ruling Labour group had rejected a call from a Hackney Palestine Solidarity Campaign deputation to end the Haifa twinning and a year later voted down a motion with a similar demand from Green and Independent Socialist councillors. Even so, Labour’s own motion at the October 2025 included the sentence: “The Council will not engage in any twinning activity where conflict is ongoing, including Hackney’s twinning arrangements with Haifa, which is currently inactive.” 

Labour’s Position 

And yet the drastically diminished Labour group stubbornly clings to defence of this inactive twinning. Hackney certainly has a comparatively large Jewish population including what is the largest Charedi Jewish community in Europe, centred around Stamford Hill and approaching a total of 30,000 by some estimates. But that community is hardly a monolithic bloc regarding the state of Israel, including both vehement pro and anti-Zionist voices, and there have long been Jewish non/anti-Zionist advocates from other traditions in local constituency parties. 

There certainly don’t appear to be any electoral benefits accruing to Labour by its insistence on maintaining the relationship with Haifa. An Opinium poll of 700 previous Labour voters conducted in June suggested that for a majority who had switched to other parties the Government’s stance on Gaza was a key factor. This was especially true for those who had gone over to the Greens. Locally, an internal analysis of the 7^th May results indicated that Labour’s vote had slumped most sharply in areas with larger numbers of Muslim residents and higher concentrations of income deprivation. 

Perhaps Labour councillors genuinely believe in the notion that Haifa is an island of peaceful coexistence between Palestinians and Jewish Israelis and remain ignorant of the city’s history and current realities. While the situation in Israel’s third largest city certainly does differ in atmosphere from Tel Aviv or West Jerusalem, Haifa remains the home of Israel’s navy, the principal entry point for weapon imports and the headquarters of Elbit, the state’s largest military contractor. It is also a city in a state where Palestinian Israelis are officially second-class citizens since the passage in 2018 of the so-called Basic Law and where an explicitly racist death penalty act is now on the statute books. 

Of course, there is also a possibility that Luke Akehurst, former Hackney councillor, now Labour MP and a key figure on the hard right of the party’s national executive, who ran the “We Believe in Israel” lobbying group, still exerts influence in his former home borough. Akehurst certainly wasted no time before attacking the Greens for what he branded “a performative and spiteful gesture” on social media, a remark recycled locally. 

There may even be a fear of attracting flak from the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism or UK Lawyers for Israel, which both seem to have ties with the Hackney Anglo-Israeli Friendship Association (HAIFA). That acronym is presumably intentional. Emails disclosed by Hackney Council in response to a Freedom of Information request suggest that supporters of this organisation had ready access to the then Labour chair of Hackney’s Pensions Committee in sharp contrast to pro-Palestinian campaigners demanding pension fund divestment, who were frozen out. 

The Backlash 

Inevitably, there has been considerable outrage on social media at the Council’s decision to pursue an end to the Haifa twinning. An unfortunate bureaucratic error led to documents concerning the public consultation and a letter to Haifa mayor Yona Yanav referring to a closing date of 7^th October for the consultation exercise. Needless to say, this stoked further anger. The Evening Standard website ran the story and LBC’s Lewis Goodall was “demanding answers,” despite a swift and unequivocal apology from Mayor Garbett. The Telegraph, now the Israeli state’s most vociferous cheerleader in mainstream media, published a lengthy article on the Council’s decision and the threat of a judicial review along with an editorial slamming the Green administration’s stance. 

Amid an avalanche of emails there have been overt threats to the Mayor, while Councillor Schechter is currently facing an anonymous complaint in connection with her speech in the detwinning debate. Labour councillors seemed keen to accuse people of a “lack of civility” at the 28^th July meeting. Will there be any solidarity from them towards Green councillors now under vitriolic attack for honouring a manifesto pledge? 

The Greens should have the backing not only of Palestinian solidarity activists, but of the rest of the labour movement in Hackney and beyond for their stance. Hopefully, they will display similar commitment in implementing their pledge to divest the Council’s pension fund from companies complicit in genocide and human rights abuses. 

Image: London Borough of Hackney https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hackney_UK_locator_map.svg Source: Greater London UK district map (blank).svg. Author: Greater London UK district map (blank).svg: Nilfanion, created using Ordnance Survey data derivative work: Renly (talk), licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.