Haifa, Palestine: A City Between the Mountain and the Sea

Pre-1948 Haifa (حيفا) rose in three tiers from the Mediterranean to the top of Mount Carmel. At the foot, the port and the Arab working-class neighborhoods. In the middle, Wadi Nisnas, the old Palestinian souks, cafes, and bookshops. At the summit, the Carmel neighborhoods where the summer heat broke into breeze. On a clear night, the lights of the port flickered below, the call to prayer carried up the slope, and church bells from the Maronite and Greek Catholic quarters answered.

This is the story of the three-tier city, its cosmopolitan century, and what happened in April 1948. At FALASTIN, the cooler mountain evenings on Carmel are part of why the Palestinian Hoodies collection exists: heritage worn in the climates where Palestinian cities lived.

Before the Mandate: Ancient and Medieval Haifa

The city's history reaches far deeper than the Ottoman and British eras that most histories begin with. Tell Abu Hawam, an archaeological site on the southern bank of the Kishon River, reveals Haifa's role as a major Mediterranean trading center during the Late Bronze Age, roughly 1550 to 1200 BCE. Excavations at the site yielded pottery, tools, and storage vessels demonstrating active exchange with Egyptian, Phoenician, and Greek traders. The Kishon River mouth offered a natural anchorage; ships from across the eastern Mediterranean landed goods and returned with the products of inland Canaan. Tell Abu Hawam was not a peripheral settlement. It was a node in a trading world that connected Palestine to Cyprus, the Aegean, and the Nile Delta.

Haifa continued through the centuries under successive powers: Byzantine, Arab, Crusader, Mamluk, and Ottoman. The medieval city was modest compared with nearby Acre, which dominated northern Palestine's commercial life for much of the middle ages. Under the Ottomans, Haifa grew gradually, its fortunes tied to the fertility of the Jezreel Valley behind it and the seasonal passage of pilgrims and merchants along the coastal road. By the eighteenth century, Daher al-Omar, the autonomous Palestinian ruler who rebuilt Acre and Tiberias, had incorporated Haifa into his orbit. By the nineteenth century, the German Templers arrived, built their Colony, and began transforming the physical character of the lower city.

It was the arrival of the railway in the early twentieth century, and then the deepening of the harbor under the British Mandate, that finally propelled Haifa from a regional town into a major port and industrial center. The Bronze Age trading village at Tell Abu Hawam and the early twentieth-century oil refinery on the same waterfront mark two ends of a very long arc of Palestinian coastal commerce.

The Three-Tier City

Haifa's geography produced its culture. The port, built up through the 1920s and 1930s under the Mandate, drew dock workers, rail workers, and factory workers, mostly Palestinian and largely Muslim, who settled in the flats around the lower city. Above them, in the curving streets of Wadi Nisnas, Palestinian Christian families ran bakeries, print shops, and coffee roasters, and sent their children to the Frères school run by French monks. Further up the mountain, the German Colony, the Templer quarter, and the British neighborhoods housed foreign merchants and officials.

The layers spoke to each other. Every morning, workers poured down the slope from the Arab villages around Carmel into the port. Every afternoon, the same workers climbed back.

The Industrial Capital of Mandate Palestine

By the 1930s, Haifa was the busiest industrial city between Alexandria and Beirut. The oil refinery built by the Iraq Petroleum Company in 1939 turned Palestine into a regional refining hub. The Palestine Railways ran north to Beirut and Damascus, east to Samakh on Lake Tiberias, and south to Cairo through Kantara. The port handled British military cargo, Palestinian citrus exports from the Mediterranean orchards south of Jaffa (told in full in The Palestinian Orange), and passenger ships carrying pilgrims, immigrants, and tourists.

The railway infrastructure in Haifa traced back to the Hejaz Railway, whose Haifa branch opened in 1905 and counted among the oldest rail lines in Palestine. The Haifa station served as a junction between the Damascus-Medina line and the coastal route, making the city a pivot point for freight and passengers moving across the entire eastern Mediterranean region.

With industry came a labor movement. Palestinian Arab workers organized the Palestine Arab Workers' Society in 1925, one of the earliest Arab trade unions in the Mandate.

A Community of Communities

Pre-1948 Haifa was one of the most mixed cities in the Arab world. Palestinian Muslims, Palestinian Christians of every denomination, Arabic-speaking Jews whose families had lived in the city for generations, Armenians who had arrived as refugees from the Ottoman massacres, Druze from Mount Carmel villages, and a growing European Jewish population all lived within walking distance. They had separate schools, separate newspapers in four languages, separate clubs, but they shared souks, a port, a waterfront promenade, and the annual Holy Fire procession down from Stella Maris.

One of the city's most distinctive communities chose Haifa as its world center in the late nineteenth century. The Bahai World Center on Mount Carmel, established after the Bahai leader Baha'u'llah was exiled by the Ottomans to Acre and later permitted to live near Haifa, became one of the faith's holiest sites. The center includes the gold-domed Shrine of the Bab and 19 terraced gardens descending toward the Mediterranean. The gardens were inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2008 and draw visitors from around the world. The Bahai presence added a further layer to the already plural character of a city where Arabic, Hebrew, German, Aramaic, and Persian could be heard in the same market week.

The city had multiple Arabic cinemas and two Arabic newspapers, Al-Karmil and Al-Ittihad, both published in Haifa.

April 1948

On April 21 and 22, 1948, the Haganah launched Operation Bi'ur Hametz, a coordinated assault on Palestinian Haifa from three directions at once. Mortar fire rained on Wadi Nisnas. Panic took the port. Thousands of Palestinian families, caught without warning, ran to the harbor. Fishing boats overloaded with women and children pushed off toward Acre, toward Lebanon. Families who had lived in Haifa for centuries left with what they could carry.

The Palestinian population of Haifa dropped from roughly 70,000 to around 3,500 within days. The rest scattered along the coast and deeper into exile. Entire neighborhoods stood empty within a week.

Haifa Today

Wadi Nisnas remains. A Palestinian community, smaller but alive, still runs the old souk. The bookshops of Wadi Nisnas still sell Arabic poetry. The German Colony has been renovated and filled with cafes that mostly ignore the city's earlier layer. The port moves oil and container freight. Stella Maris looks down on the bay as it always has.

Farther south, the neighboring cities carry their own stories. Jaffa fell within weeks of Haifa's collapse. Inland, Nablus remained under Jordanian administration after 1948 and carries a different kind of continuity. For a full archive of Haifa's Palestinian life before the Nakba, see the Palestine Remembered Haifa collection.

Before 1948, the Carmel slopes above Haifa held ancient olive presses, some worked across many generations, and the groves on those hillsides fed families and supplied local markets through the seasonal harvest. The olive tree and its yield were woven into daily life across Palestine, and Haifa sat at the meeting point of the coastal plain and the wooded heights where that cultivation thrived. That bond with the land, like the groves themselves, was part of the Palestinian heritage the city carried before displacement severed those links. The connection did not vanish: it followed the people into exile, into the refugee camps, and into the diaspora communities where Palestinian heritage has been kept alive, imperfectly, at a distance from the land that shaped it.

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