Sharon Rotbard’s White City Black City begins and ends with the visit of Unesco monitors to Tel Aviv in the early 2000s. They were in the process of bestowing world heritage site status on something called the White City, a set of more than a thousand modernist buildings of the 1930s, built in what was called the Bauhaus style. At the end of the book, after tracing the emergence of this city and the things that had to happen to its neighbours in the process, Rotbard finds the Unesco staff toasting the successful listing in May 2004, only a few miles from the mass deportation of Palestinians in nearby Jaffa. “As the ‘White City’ Unesco afterparty raged, the streets of the ‘Black City’ were being ‘swept clean’.” Clean enough for the White City to stay whiter than white.
According to Rotbard, an Israeli historian and architect, architecture, like war, is politics by other means. White City Black City charts how Tel Aviv, founded in the early 20th century and developed in the interwar years by Jewish settlers in tandem with the British mandate’s colonial administrators, grew out of and then consumed its parent, the ancient city of Jaffa. Rotbard’s account begins with what appears at first to be a triumph of modern town planning and architecture, and then pans out to the area around it, and the clean lines and smooth surfaces begin to look more and more like a hurried facade placed over a scene of devastation. This scene, he argues, is the truth of modernism; “the best place to examine modern architecture remains outside Europe, in urban spaces that developed under colonial regimes”, where the real violence supporting the “visual and stylised violence inherent in modern architecture” can be seen clearly and ambiguously at work.
Whether or not that wider point is tenable, as an architectural and political history of Tel Aviv and Jaffa, this book is a truly comprehensive demolition job. Myths are knocked down one by one in the first part, focusing on the White City itself. According to the story given official benediction by Unesco, German-Jewish architects trained at the Bauhaus school in Dessau fled the Nazi suppression of modern architecture in 1933 and built a city according to their ideals in mandatory Palestine. In reality, Rotbard notes, only four Bauhaus students ever emigrated to Palestine, only one of whom left a major architectural legacy: Aryeh Sharon, who designed workers’ settlements in Tel Aviv and kibbutzes elsewhere. On being asked about the Tel Aviv Bauhaus style, Sharon was dismissive: “The Bauhaus is neither a concept nor a uniform institution.” Rather than Sharon’s anti-aesthetic communes, what the White City really entailed was speculative low-rise apartment buildings designed by French- and Belgian-trained eastern European architects, on a street plan by the influential Scottish town-planner Patrick Geddes, stopping off between his projects in Edinburgh Old Town and Mumbai (in Haifa, the service was provided by future planner of London and Plymouth, Patrick Abercrombie). Bauhaus became just a brand name.
The emergence of the idea of the White City is traced to the 1980s, as a reaction against a turn in Israeli politics that favoured a Levantine, traditionalist (and Likud-voting) identity whose emblematic city was Jerusalem, rather than a central European, modernist (and Labour-voting) identity centred on Tel Aviv. The White City endeavour, popularised in Ha’aretz columns and preservation movements, was partly a rediscovery of a humane modern architecture against the gigantic postmodernist developments of 80s Israel, but also involved rediscovering a better Zionism, without colonialism or zealotry. Rotbard is sympathetic to the former, but considers the latter a pipe dream, instead making the case that Tel Aviv’s very emergence encapsulated the dispossession and, eventually, expulsion of the Palestinians.
Rejecting the Orientalist styles favoured by early emigrants as “a combination of Baghdad and Berdichev”, Tel Aviv architects’ preference for a whitewashed modernism entailed a rejection of anything eastern European or Middle Eastern in favour of a purely Ashkenazi identity. Planned by Geddes to circumvent and cut off Jaffa, then the largest city in Palestine, it would essentially wipe this largely Arab city – which was designated a Palestinian enclave in the partition plan of 1947 – off the map in the war of 1948, and then annex it to Tel Aviv as an impoverished suburb, blanked or left off the city’s actual maps. The book’s second part traces what happened to Jaffa next. Its centre was first demolished, then reconstructed in the early 60s as a heritage district, with residence restricted to artists (how prescient!). The greatest insult of all was the Etzel Museum, a Mies van der Rohe-esque glass box “nailed to the ruins” of a Palestinian house, intended to “freeze the special moment and time of day when Jaffa was liberated”, described sharply here as “Tel Aviv’s poor allegory of itself”. Yet in becoming the place where all things not whiter than white were dumped, Jaffa became a complex, multicultural city, and that becomes the only hopeful aspect of a grim, bloody story.
White City Black City is a superbly researched and exemplary architectural study. However, Rotbard occasionally spoils his case with an unnecessarily nostalgic reading of the area’s pre‑20th-century history (traditional cultures are always welcoming and considerate of their neighbours, we’re told) and a rather too sweeping condemnation of modern architecture as being necessarily colonial. This isn’t helped by some inexact architectural comparisons. Showing a picture of art deco apartment blocks in Dakar and Algiers alongside the more confident modernist work in Tel Aviv does not, as he believes, show their formal and political similarity as belonging to a colonial international style: they don’t look remotely similar. Rotbard inadvertently downplays the possibility of a Palestinian modernity – he claims that Jaffa actually built more international-style buildings than Tel Aviv in the interwar years, but tells us nothing about them, not giving a single example, something which impoverishes his account of the Black City. The many and varied modernisms that emerged across formerly colonised countries between the 1950s and 80s have no place in this blanket narrative.
The ethnic cleansing and “urbicide” of Jaffa is not, perhaps, as unique as Rotbard makes out, as similar things happened at the same time in Breslau, Königsberg, Wilno or Lwów; but then none of these cities were destroyed by a specially built neighbouring city. Also, given the centrality of the British empire to the creation of Tel Aviv and the erasure of Jaffa, it would be intriguing to follow the parallels in how the same town planners reworked Plymouth, Hull, Alexandria or Mumbai as well as the cities of mandate Palestine; certainly, in Tel Aviv’s Dizengoff Square you can see traces of the new town precincts of the 1950s, and in the bypasses that severed it from Jaffa, you can see embryonic versions of the cordons sanitaires that enclose most British town centres from their inner cities. Yet these absences don’t affect the book’s main argument, and if you want an explanation of the roots of the Israel-Palestine conflict – and of just how deep they go, right into the very foundations of the buildings – this book gives one of the most unusual and convincing accounts.
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