Fresh calls for Hackney to sever ties with Israeli city amid confusion over medical exchange

Pro-Palestine protesters outside Hackney Town Hall last Wednesday. Photograph: courtesy Hackney PSC

Pro-Palestine campaigners have renewed their calls for the council to cut ties with a city in Israel amid doubts over the future of a medical exchange programme.

Earlier this month, the Hackney Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) declared a “victory for supporters of Palestinian rights” after it emerged that a controversial relationship between Homerton Hospital and Rambam hospital in Haifa was inactive.

Hackney Council previously described the exchange of medical staff and nurses between the two facilities as a “major focus” of the Hackney-Haifa twinning arrangement.

But a Freedom of Information (FoI) request to the Homerton revealed the relationship had been dormant “for several years”, with “no current plans to reactivate”.

A spokesperson for the hospital added that there had been no contact, “formal or informal”, between Rambam and the Homerton for a number of years, “and that will remain the case for the present”.

The spokesperson did not comment on whether the relationship should or should not be reactivated in the future.

Campaigners say this is a signal that the official relationship effectively does not exist, but the Hackney Anglo-Israel Friendship Association (HAIFA) group, which facilitates the programme, has rejected that claim.

Martin Sugarman, chair of HAIFA, said: “There is no agreement to suspend the twinning and the only reasons we have had no exchanges is due to the Covid recovery from backlogs of work, and now the war being waged against Israel.

“These together mean that the Rambam is unable to send medical team exchange groups due to intense pressure on the staff, followed by the bombardment of Haifa and the north.

“Furthermore, the current war would endanger Homerton staff going to Haifa.”

Sugarman told the Citizen that he and others had met with the now-CEO of Homerton “about 18 months ago”, when they agreed to wait “until things settled down in the Middle East” before resuming the exchanges.

He dismissed the FoI response as “over the top”.

“There are plans [to reactivate the scheme], but we must await the decisions of the two hospitals for the right time,” said Sugarman.

Matt Rowland Hill, a Hackney PSC member, said: “It’s good that Homerton has admitted there has been no contact with Rambam for years now, and that it is not planning any future medical exchanges.

“It’s completely unthinkable that Hackney workers should be sent to visit a hospital in Israel where Palestinian staff are banned from speaking their own language – a hospital run by the same government that in the last year has decimated Gaza’s healthcare system.

“Hackney and Homerton both know this. So they should come clean now and admit the truth: that this ‘relationship’ no longer exists.”

The Town Hall declined to comment on the status of the relationship between both the hospitals and Hackney and Haifa more generally.

The municipal link between the borough and the Israeli city was formed in 1968, and is Hackney’s second-oldest twinning agreement, following the 1962 pairing with Suresnes in France.

The council has described the arrangement as “non-political, non-sectarian and multi-faith”, but in the wake of the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza and wider conflict in the region, there have been persistent calls to detwin from Haifa and instead forge municipal ties to a Palestinian town.

However, the council has also stated that it does not actively manage the links, which it says are “self-sustaining based on the community connections that have built up over many years”.

Last week, PSC protestors demonstrated on the steps of the Town Hall, calling on the council to divest its pension fund from companies linked to human rights abuses in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and the ongoing Israel-Hamas war.

Along with Amnesty International, the group maintains that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians amounts to apartheid.

The PSC argues that Haifa was ethnically cleansed of most of its Palestinian inhabitants when Israel was founded in 1948, and that remaining Palestinian residents have since been living as second-class citizens, facing racism and discrimination.

A letter from an anonymous Palestinian doctor at Rambam, sent to Hackney PSC and seen by the Citizen, described “institutional racism” both within the hospital and Israeli society at large.

“Our right to speak in our own language, Arabic, is denied,” the letter states. “We face reprisals if we express our opinions about Israel’s occupation and wars.

“We are tolerated only if we remain loyal, silent employees of a state and a system that suppresses our rights and those of our people.”

In 2018, the Knesset – Israel’s parliament – passed a highly controversial “nation-state” law that removed Arabic as one of the country’s official languages.

Arab-Israeli politicians have denounced this as a policy of “apartheid” which condemns Arabs to forever be “second-class citizens”.

The non-partisan Israel Democracy Institute described the law as “jingoistic and divisive” and an “unnecessary embarrassment to Israel”.

Today, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his former defence minister Yoav Gallant, and Hamas leader Mohammed Deif over alleged war crimes.

In May, the ICC’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, said there were reasonable grounds to believe that Netanyahu and Gallant bore “criminal responsibility” for mass starvation in the Gaza strip, constituting war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The court said there are reasonable grounds to believe the Hamas leader was responsible for crimes against humanity and war crimes including rape, torture, hostage-taking and murder.

A petition calling for the Hackney Council to end the twinning arrangement with Haifa is due to be debated at the next full council meeting on Wednesday 27 November.

Further protests are expected to take place outside the Town Hall that evening.