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Mark A. LeVine

Mark A. LeVine (UC Irvine History Professor)

100 Years of Solitude: Tel Aviv's Anniversary

“Hyper-modern,” “cybaritic,” “secular,” “normal.” In the 100 years since its creation on April 11, 1909, Tel Aviv has been described in many ways. But rarely if ever has Arab been among them.

The city's identity has been profoundly Jewish and Zionist since its creation in 1909. The name Tel Aviv was taken from the Hebrew title of Theodor Herzl's 1902 novel, Altneuland (“Old-New Land,” or “Hill of Spring” in English). Designed initially as a garden suburb of the rapidly developing town of Jaffa, Tel Aviv was from its establishment the preeminent symbol of the rebirth of a modern, secular Jewish nation in Palestine.

Specifically, Tel Aviv's leaders sought to create a space that was “modern, Jewish, urban... [and] European,” one where Jews “would not follow the ways of the goyim [non-Jews].” Towards that end, the bylaws forbid the sale of property to non-Jews. Both the neighborhood—and within a few years after World War I, city—and the “new Jews” who would live there were conceived of as the antithesis of the traditional and religiously grounded Judaism of Jerusalem, and of the still overwhelmingly Arab character of Palestine as a whole.

A City Born out of the Sands?

Given the need to separate physically, politically and culturally from Jaffa, Tel Aviv was described, in poetry, art and journalistic and literary works, as having emerged like a “reed inserted into a sea of sand,” of as having been built in “the Sahara desert.” So powerful has this imagery of being born “out of the sands” remained that when it celebrated Israel's 50th Anniversary, the Economist described Tel Aviv as “having hardly any Arabs... it was built by Jews, for Jews, on top of sand dunes, not on top of anybody else’s home.”

In conceiving of Tel Aviv emerging out of the sands the editors of the Economist likely had in their mind the iconic photograph of the groundbreaking ceremony for Tel Aviv, which took place on April 11, 1909. The image, featured in most every book on Tel Aviv, showed the sixty families who had purchased the first plots of land standing amidst dunes, with nary a sign of life around them.

But if we move a bit outside the frame a different picture emerges, one in which Tel Aviv, while founded on a sandy region near the shore, was part of a complex ecosystem that included citrus orchards and farms, Jaffa and its famous port, mills, bedouin encampments, and six Palestinian villages. The remnants of one village, Summel (formally annexed by Tel Aviv in the last decade of the Mandate period) are still visible along Ibn Givrol Street, not far from where Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was murdered, while the former home of the Sheikh of Sheikh Muwannis has long been used as the faculty club of Tel Aviv University.

It's not just that Tel Aviv emerged in an ecologically rich and largely Palestinian Arab environment. The town was also deeply connected to Jaffa, which had a growing Jewish community in the early twentieth century whose 10,000 members constituted twenty percent of the population by 1914 and reached over 30,000, or 30 percent of the city's total population, by the 1940s (several of the Jaffa's earliest Jewish neighborhoods, such as a Neve Tzedek and Neve Shalom, are today among Tel Aviv's most desirable places to live).

Indeed, while Tel Aviv's name owes, at least in part, to Theodor Herzl's novel, the character of the fictional utopia and the real city are strikingly at odds. Herzl's imagined society was a Jewish-owned Palestine, but it was one in which Jews and Palestinians lived as fully equal citizens. The “new society” that Zionism brought to Palestine had become, in Herzl's (no doubt naïve) vision, “our New Society” for Palestinians, as the novel's main Arab protagonist, Reschid Bey, described it, affirming his full participation within it.

The vision of Jewish and Arab Palestine's growing together was pursued by the famed Scottish urban planner Patric Geddes when he was hired to design a new city plan in 1925 for Tel Aviv. His proposal called for Tel Aviv and the surrounding towns and agricultural communities to cooperate for the good of “Greater Jaffa.” He also suggested that Tel Aviv's architecture move away from its Northern European style to a more appropriately “Oriental” aesthetic that would be more in harmony with its Levantine surroundings.

Not surprisingly, his vision was dismissed by Tel Aviv's leadership, who by the 1920s was embroiled in an increasingly zero-sum conflict over territory and resources with Palestinian-controlled Jaffa and its agricultural hinterland.

But Geddes did not mean that Tel Aviv should grow to benefit only Arab Jaffa. Rather, he saw the two cities and their populations as part of a larger system which could only function properly if the peoples and spaces interacted harmoniously—a vision that was decades (so far eight) ahead of his time.

This was not to be. By the 1930s this competition would be reflected in the rapid spread of uncompromisingly modernist International Style architecture, inspired in good measure by the German Bauhaus movement. Yet while many of the most important architects working in this style were Jewish emigres from Hitler's Germany, the International Style which came to define Tel Aviv was also present in Jaffa as well, which remains home to some of the most striking exemplars of the style. Despite this, when UNESCO designated Tel Aviv a “world heritage site” in honor of the treasure trove of International Style buildings located in the city, Jaffa was ignored.

While Tel Aviv's leadership used both town-planning and architecture to separate their town from the surrounding Palestinian environment, by the 1920s Jaffa's leaders increasingly, and justifiably, saw Tel Aviv as a threat. Their fear grew as the town's boundaries grew and Jaffa and its neighboring villages were surrounded by Jewish settlements. In fact, this threat already lead one of the city's last Ottoman rulers, Hassan Bek, to build a mosque well north of Jaffa's Old City in order to block Tel Aviv's spread to the south. The tension generated by the competition between the two towns also influenced the outbreak of both the 1921 and 1936 “revolts” (in Zionist and British terminology, “riots”) in the border zones connecting the two towns.

By 1937 so strong was the official sense that Jaffa and Tel Aviv were irredeemably different from and opposed to each other that the Peel Partition Plan literally drew a fence along the proposed border between Jaffa and Tel Aviv, and through them the proposed Jewish and Palestinian states. For their part, the increasingly beleaguered Palestinian residents of the surrounding villages, whose lands were increasingly being annexed by Tel Aviv (in a process that is repeated today with Jewish settlements), complained that the supposed modernization and improvements of the land spoken of by Tel Aviv's leaders were in fact “improving us off our land.”

As both intercommunal conflict and the Jewish population of Jaffa increased, Zionist leaders debated fiercely whether it was better to gradually “assimilate” Jaffa into Tel Aviv, by increasing the Jewish population of the city even further, or to annex the Jewish neighborhoods Tel Aviv as part of a plan of separation and ultimately conquest. Such was the fear of cross-cultural contamination that in 1940 Tel Aviv's mayor threatened the British District Commissioner that he would “blow up with bombs” a new market opened on the mutual border with Jaffa because it would lead to greater movement of goods and people back and forth.

Yet however strong the notion of spatial and communal separation had become, the reality was not only that tens of thousands of Jews lived in Jaffa, but that Palestinians were a constant presence in Tel Aviv—working, shopping and living there; going to the beach, taking in a movie, or even visiting prostitutes and clandestinely sell Arab-owned land to Jewish land brokers (the latter two preoccupations helped earn Tel Aviv a very negative reputation in Palestinian nationalist discourse, as a place of corruption and ruin for Palestinians who dared to spend time there).

This intercommunal contact, however ambivalent and conflictual, ended with the war of 1948, which brought about Jaffa's “totally collapse.” Only 5,000 of the more than 70,000 Palestinian Arabs who had lived in the city remained by the end of June. Prime Minister Ben Gurion saw the exodus as a near miracle, and declared that “Jaffa will be a Jewish city... War is war.” Two years later Jaffa was formally annexed to Tel Aviv; the discursive erasure of the region's Palestinian presence, from the start a core component of Tel Aviv's—and Zionism's—identity, was now complemented by the physical erasure of the city's Palestinian Arab population, and with it its independent existence and its history.

The tens of thousands of Jaffans who'd fled to the hills of the West Bank could see the lights along the sea shore grow brighter each year. Many assumed that Jaffa's Jewish conquerors were continuing to build the city, perhaps along the lines of a well-received 1945 plan by the chief planner of Cairo which sought to reshape Jaffa's landscape into that of a major seaside resort town. However, when they finally had the chance to visit after Israel's capture of the West Bank in 1967, they came to understand that the lights belonged to Tel Aviv, not their“Bride of the Sea,” Jaffa.

Indeed, in the four decades after 1948 Jaffa became a backwater, while Tel Aviv grew into one of the premier “world cities” of the emerging age of globalization. Tel Aviv never stopped tearing down and building upon itself. In the words of novelist Ya'akov Shabtai, the process of “destruction was as inevitable as the change in the population of the town.”

By the 1980s the incessant development began to drive the emerging class of Israeli Jewish yuppies to search for a quieter and more “authentic” existence in Jaffa, which began a process of gentrification that continues to this day, and not surprisingly, has seen increasing pressure on the remaining Palestinian Arab population, which has struggled against what the Dutch architect Peter Kook described as the “Disneyification” of the Palestinian town-turned mixed neighborhood. The often faux-“Oriental” facades of the numerous projects dotting the shoreline in Jaffa are in marked contrast to what he has labeled as the “paranoid” and “fortress” style of architecture that has come to dominate the contemporary aesthetic of building in Tel Aviv.

That paranoia stems from a continued sense of unsettledness and unsure roots that still characterize Zionist identity a century after the founding of its premier city. Many writers have commented how one can sit in Tel Aviv's innumerable cafes and forget about the Occupation, and sometimes war, that continue only miles away, in Tulkarm or Gaza. But the reality is that they haunt the city, its identity and its people.

Ari Forman's critically acclaimed 2008 film Waltz With Bashir begins with a friend of the director recounting a dream in which a pack of wild dogs, their eyes glowing orange, chasing him through Tel Aviv's nightscape. The dogs don't represent merely the ghosts of the dead Palestinians and Lebanese from the 1982 Israeli invasion and Sabra and Shatila massacre. They also symbolize—whether consciously or not for Forman—the ghosts of the tens of thousands of Palestinians exiled from the Jaffa-Tel Aviv region in 1948, whose removal from the landscape was part of a process of dislocation inexorably led to the wars, invasions and intifadas of 1967, 1982, 1987, 2000, 2006 and now 2008-09.

It's unlikely that most of the ghosts of 1948, never mind their living descendants, will ever be welcome back to Jaffa, Tel Aviv, or anywhere else in present-day Israel. But unless their existence, and the historical reality of Tel Aviv's Palestinian past, can be acknowledged and appreciated, it's hard to imagine how the next generation of Tel Aviv's soldiers will sleep in peace.