In Haifa, artists document the war on the city’s walls

You can tell a lot by a city by how it treats its public spaces. Sometimes, especially in Europe, streets of a city are pristine, trapped in amber from when the place was at its finest, a tribute to a long-crumbled empire. Israel, where Jewish history spans some 35 centuries, is mostly a new place and as a result, its major cities feel alive, humming with creativity, constantly changing.

Nowhere is this truer than Haifa, Israel’s third city and its largest mixed religion urban area. Its history dates back before the century BCE and since then Haifa has been controlled by several civilizations, including the Canaanites, Israelites, Persians, Romans, Byzantines, Muslims, Crusaders, Kurds, the Mamluks, the Ottoman Turks and the British. Each one has left its mark, but a decidedly new development is Haifa’s rich art scene – writ large on the walls of the city itself.

Artist Shimda at work[Missing Credit]

Politically charged graffiti[Missing Credit]

This street art began, as it does in most cities, underground. In the Nineties, a group of renegade artists started tagging buildings around Haifa’s port, a then derelict district of the city, that has been thoroughly gentrified in the intervening years. Some of the earliest prominent artists, who went on to found the globally famous art collective Broken Fingaz, started creating huge murals, fighting the city’s authorities and prosecution to make their art. But in the last decade, they’ve been embraced by the same public officials, and Haifa’s art scene has flourished for it.