Haifa is one of those rare places where a city feels like a conversation.

Stand on the slopes of Mount Carmel and look down: the sea stretching out in front of you, the port to your left, the German Colony unfurling at your feet – and rising above it all, in perfect symmetry, the Bahá’í Gardens, nineteen terraces of manicured green and pale stone, cascading down the mountain like a suspended hymn.

Drive a short while up the same mountain and the picture changes again: stone houses, narrow lanes, the smell of coffee and spices, the sound of Arabic mingled with Hebrew. You’ve reached the Druze villages of Daliyat al-Karmel and Isfiya – communities that have been part of this landscape for centuries and part of the State of Israel since its birth.

Between these two – the Bahá’í and the Druze – you glimpse something essential about Israel, and about Haifa in particular: a stubborn, unfashionable commitment to coexistence in a region that has not made it easy.

The Bahá’í: Terraces of Quiet Universality

The Bahá’í World Centre in Haifa and nearby ‘Akko is the spiritual and administrative heart of a religion that preaches the oneness of humanity, the equality of men and women, and the harmony of science and faith. It is not here by accident. Bahá’u’lláh, the founder of the Bahá’í Faith, was exiled by the Ottomans to this corner of the world; his followers later built their holiest sites here as a testament not only to his life, but to the idea that out of persecution one might still choose universality instead of revenge.

The Shrine of the Báb, with its golden dome and surrounding gardens, sits at the centre of the Haifa terraces – nineteen levels of paths, lawns and flower beds, meticulously tended by volunteers from across the globe who come on special visas simply to care for this place. It is, remarkably, a sanctuary that belongs to everyone and no one: the Bahá’í keep out of local politics; they do not proselytise in Israel; they simply maintain their holy places and quietly welcome visitors of every background who walk through the gates.

There is something almost disarming in that modesty. In an age when every square metre of this region is said to be “contested”, here is a world religion whose holiest site in Haifa has been allowed – and helped – to flourish, framed by a thoroughly modern, thoroughly mixed city. Jews, Muslims, Christians, Druze, atheists, tourists and locals wander the same terraces, peer over the same railings, pose for the same photographs. No one is asked for a creed at the entrance.

For a country so lazily described as “segregated”, it is an awkward fact: a universalist faith chose to anchor its world centre in Israel and found the space to do so in Haifa.

The Druze: Loyalty, Tradition and Open Doors

Travel further up the Carmel and symmetry gives way to bustle. Daliyat al-Karmel, Israel’s largest Druze town, and neighbouring Isfiya are home to a community at once fiercely particular and remarkably open.

The Druze faith is a tightly held, esoteric tradition that branched from Isma‘ili Islam in the 11th century. It does not seek converts; its religious texts are studied only by an initiated few. And yet Druze society in Israel is known above all for its hospitality – strong coffee, generous tables, and an easy willingness to welcome strangers into the rhythms of village life.

Walk the streets of Daliyat al-Karmel and you find a living tapestry of that identity: older men in traditional black garments and white caps; women in white veils; teenagers in jeans and hoodies; market stalls piled high with spices, olives and fresh produce from the surrounding hills. The story the community tells about itself is unusual for this region: it has, quite consciously, bound its fate to the Jewish state – taking up compulsory military service, sending sons to the IDF, serving in the police and border units, while maintaining its own religion, language and customs.

Here, pluralism is not a slogan on a poster; it is a contract lived day to day. Druze citizens sit in the Knesset, command military units, run municipalities, teach in universities and hospitals, and return on weekends to villages where the hilweh (house of worship) and the family guest room remain the beating heart of community life.

Haifa: A Reproach to the “Apartheid” Lie

Put these strands together – the Bahá’í terraces, the Druze villages, the mixed Jewish-Arab neighbourhoods of Haifa itself – and the city begins to look less like a “case study” and more like a quiet rebuke to the fashionable accusation of “apartheid”.

Apartheid, in its real historical meaning, was a system of enforced racial separation: separate benches, separate buses, separate laws, bans on mixed neighbourhoods, bars on minority participation in the army, government, universities and courts.

Haifa, by contrast, operates on an entirely different script. Jews and Arabs share buses, pavements, classrooms, hospital wards and lecture halls. Arab doctors operate on Jewish patients and vice versa in the city’s major hospitals. The university on the hill teaches in Hebrew and Arabic; its staff and student body are Jewish, Muslim, Christian and Druze. Mixed teams of Jewish and Arab firefighters, paramedics and engineers keep the city functioning. Municipal politics are fought with all the usual pettiness – and with candidates and councillors from every community.

On one slope of Mount Carmel, a global faith anchors its world centre, tends its gardens, and opens its gates to anyone who wishes to visit. On another, a local minority preserves a centuries-old secret tradition while sending its children to the same universities and army bases as their Jewish neighbours. Between them lies a port city where Arabic and Hebrew ring out over the same cafés and markets, where synagogues, mosques, churches and the Bahá’í shrine all share the same skyline.

None of this erases conflict, discrimination, or grievance. No honest person would claim that life in Haifa – or anywhere else in Israel – is a utopia of perfect equality. But it does complicate, in the most concrete way, the crude picture painted by the word “apartheid”. A state that allows, and in many ways encourages, Bahá’í guardianship of a world centre, Druze integration into its armed forces and institutions, and mixed cities that actually function, is not operating a regime of racial separation. It is wrestling, imperfectly and noisily, with the far more difficult task of making shared space work.

To speak honestly about Haifa, one must account not only for its sorrows and its struggles, but also for its astonishing capacity to hold difference – to make room for a Bahá’í world centre and Druze strongholds on the same mountain, under the same flag; to allow a golden dome, a minaret, a church spire and a synagogue roof to share the same horizon without one demanding the erasure of the others.

In that sense, Haifa is less a city and more a suggestion: that even here, especially here, coexistence is not a slogan for foreign consumption but a daily practice – fragile, flawed, but undeniably real.