Haifa

Haifa is the family city of Shmuel Ash and the setting of a decisive historical contrast: memories of ordinary Jewish-Arab contact give way to violence, mass flight, and an enduring question about whether the rupture was inevitable. Through Shmuel’s childhood memories and later reflections, the city becomes more than a place of origin; it is where familiar social ties and political catastrophe meet.

Family and Early Life

When Shmuel was two, his family moved to Hadar HaCarmel in Haifa. His father first worked for the Government Mapping Office, then established a private mapping and aerial-photography business with Laszlo Vermesh, a Hungarian partner. The family lived in a small apartment of two narrow rooms and a kitchen. When Shmuel’s sister Miri turned twelve, he was moved out of their shared bedroom and his bed was placed in the passageway. The cramped home, and the passage where he spent hours alone, form part of his recollection of growing up with few friends.

Haifa also remained the home of Shmuel’s parents after he left to study in Jerusalem. His family had supported him with a monthly allowance while he studied history and the history of religions, but his father’s business dispute ended in a lost appeal, and the allowance stopped. That financial change helped bring Shmuel’s student life to an end. In conversation, he identifies his parents as living in Haifa, in Hadar HaCarmel, while his sister is in Italy. The city thus remains a point of family connection even as he becomes increasingly separated from the household.

Work, Neighbourhood, and Social Contact

The family’s mapping office, Gaviota Ltd., brought Arab clients into Shmuel’s childhood world. He remembers land merchants visiting his father and his partner, welcomed with drinks and desserts and engaged in extended conversation in English or French. Some visitors invited the family to their homes on Allenby Street, where hosts served coffee or Arabic tea, nuts, and sweets. The adults shared a conviction that politics brought misfortune and that life could be peaceful without it. These encounters are recalled not as abstract proof of harmony, but as specific social habits: business, hospitality, conversation, and family visits.

Shmuel’s memory of those relationships sits uneasily beside the events that followed. He recalls that attacks on Jewish buses and retaliatory raids in nearby villages shattered the earlier atmosphere. Jewish and Arab snipers took positions on rooftops behind sandbags, and fortified checkpoints appeared between neighbourhoods. The city’s streets and districts became part of a conflict experienced by residents, not merely by armies. In Shmuel’s account, the change makes the earlier conviviality neither unreal nor sufficient to prevent violence.

Haifa in the 1948 War

In April 1948, about a month before the British withdrawal, tens of thousands of Arab residents of Haifa fled by boat and fishing vessel to Lebanon. Shmuel says Jewish leaders in the city issued appeals asking residents to stay, but the appeals did not stop the exodus. He also acknowledges a wider and darker record: in Lod and elsewhere, Arabs were not asked to remain but were killed or expelled. His account therefore distinguishes the appeals made in Haifa from actions taken in other places without treating that distinction as an answer to the larger question of displacement.

Fear was central to the flight. Shmuel recounts that rumours circulated among Arab residents that Jews intended to exterminate them, as they were believed to have done at Deir Yassin, across the hill from the house where he later speaks. The city was left without most of its Arab population. In his reflection, this outcome is not detached from the reciprocal violence and terror that preceded it: Haifa’s depopulation follows a rapid escalation in which neighbourhoods, houses, and streets had become front lines.

Memory and Political Meaning

As an adult, Shmuel sometimes walks through Haifa’s Arab neighbourhoods. Some are now filled with Jewish immigrants; thousands of Arabs who chose to remain still live in the city. Passing through those streets, he wonders whether what happened had to happen. The question marks a change in his political outlook. At thirteen, he had believed his own side was just and a minority, while the Arabs were malicious and numerous, bent on driving the Jews out. His remembered childhood visits and the city’s wartime transformation make that certainty harder to maintain.

Shmuel’s father offers a contrasting interpretation: he insists there was no escape from a total war in which two populations, rather than only two armies, confronted one another. He compares the resulting population transfers to those between Greece and Turkey, India and Pakistan, Poland and Germany, and other divided societies. Shmuel’s mother assigns responsibility to the British, who, in her view, promised the land twice and encouraged conflict between its peoples. These accounts do not settle the argument; they show how Haifa’s history is refracted through competing explanations of responsibility and necessity.

The city’s significance also connects Shmuel’s memories to the political disagreement surrounding Shaltiel Abravanel. Abravanel believed a Jewish home in the land should be shared with Arabs, and opposed both the United Nations partition plan and Israel’s independence when he voiced his dissent in 1947. Shmuel later hears that Abravanel’s position was dismissed as betrayal, while his own reflection on Haifa leads him to doubt the certainty of inherited political narratives. The remembered city gives that doubt its human scale: a family office, visits across social lines, divided neighbourhoods, and the departure of most of a population. Haifa becomes the place where Shmuel’s childhood evidence of coexistence and his adult knowledge of displacement remain together, unresolved.