Mayor Zoë Garbett’s letter to the Mayor of Haifa (click here to read) should concern everyone who believes public office demands fairness, honesty and sound judgement.
The National Jewish Assembly sent Mayor Garbett a letter last week.
Unsurprisingly, Mayor Garbett has chosen not to engage to date with any of the points our letter raised. Click here to read that letter.
The NJA fully recognises that elected administrations are entitled to pursue the policies on which they were elected. The proposal to review Hackney’s longstanding relationship with Haifa is ultimately a political decision for Hackney Council. What Mayor Garbett is not entitled to do is to present contested legal allegations as though they have already been judicially established. A political proposal should be justified by a fair and accurate presentation of the facts and of the applicable legal position.
Rather than writing as the mayor of one of Britain’s most diverse boroughs, she seems to have written as a Green Party activist, parroting one of the most politically contentious narratives surrounding the Israel-Hamas conflict while presenting it as settled fact.
But before we delve into that, perhaps most astonishing is her disgraceful decision to set 7th October as the deadline for representations from the Mayor of Haifa. Whether born of indifference or staggering insensitivity (the two are not mutually exclusive), choosing the anniversary of the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust as the closing date for consultation on ending ties with an Israeli city displays a profound lack of judgement and respect for Hackney’s Jewish community. In fact, it lays bare the mayor’s and the Green Party’s contempt for Israel. However, it transpired earlier today, 30th July 2026, that Mayor Garbett has issued a further letter to Mayor Yahav of Haifa, apologising for what she describes as a “deeply regretful oversight”.
You can read the letter by clicking here and draw your own conclusions.
Her justification for dismantling nearly sixty years of friendship between Hackney and Haifa rests upon a breathtaking distortion of international law.
Garbett cites the findings of the UN Commission of Inquiry as though they constitute proof that Israel has committed genocide. They do not. The International Court of Justice, the only international court capable of determining state responsibility under the Genocide Convention, has reached no such conclusion. That case remains before the Court. A Commission of Inquiry is not a judicial body and its reports are not judgments. One could reasonably expect a mayor to understand such distinctions, but when the Green Party’s own leader repeatedly fails to grasp them, it is no wonder this Green Party Mayor cant either.
Even more astonishing is Mayor Garbett’s decision to place such unquestioning faith in a Commission whose impartiality has itself been the subject of widespread and global criticism. Its open-ended mandate has been condemned as uniquely one-sided and the Commission’s creation was opposed by 22 democratic countries, including the United Kingdom. Public statements of its commissioners have repeatedly raised serious questions about impartiality, with one in particular being formally condemned by countries including the United Kingdom. Yet this is apparently sufficient for Hackney’s Mayor to sever a civic relationship that has existed since 1968.
This is not evidence-based decision making. It is ideological activism dressed up as municipal governance.
Mayor Garbett claims to champion anti-racism yet singles out the Middle East’s only Jewish state while remaining conspicuously silent on countless regimes responsible for genuine and judicially established atrocities around the world. Such selective outrage does not strengthen the fight against racism. It diminishes it.
The Green Party’s obsessive fixation with Israel has once again trumped common sense.
Haifa is one of Israel’s most diverse cities. Jews, Muslims, Christians, Druze and Bahá’ís live, work and serve together. Haifa’s hospitals, like all Israeli hospitals, treat patients from every ethnicity , equally, side by side. For decades, Hackney’s relationship with Haifa has been a civic partnership built upon healthcare, dialogue and coexistence. The Mayor has chosen to discard all of that in pursuit of a divisive political gesture.
Perhaps most revealing is that, while inviting Haifa to submit its views, the Mayor Garbett simultaneously declares that her administration is already “seeking to conclude this chapter of our civic history.” If the outcome has effectively been decided before the consultation has concluded, one is entitled to ask whether this exercise is a genuine consultation or simply political theatre with more than a hint of the contempt that she has chosen to display by setting the deadline date as 7th October, the contempt that runs so clearly throughout the Green party.
The greatest tragedy is that town twinning exists precisely to build bridges during difficult times.
Mayor Garbett is choosing to use her Office to burn one instead.
She is not strengthening community relations.
She is fracturing them.
She not advancing peace and coexistence.
She is sowing division.
She is not upholding facts.
She is misrepresenting them.
Against this backdrop, history will not remember this as moral leadership. It will remember it as a triumph of prejudice over principle, symbolism over substance, and political dogma over the very dialogue that town twinning was created to promote.
