Tel Aviv: White City & Ancient Jaffa

Tel Aviv was founded in nineteen oh nine. Not by accident, not by gradual growth — by intention, by vote, by lottery. In April of that year, sixty-six Jewish families who had been living in the overcrowded port city of Jaffa, just to the south of where you are now, gathered on a sand dune north of the old city and drew lots to divide plots of land. Each family received their plot by chance, chosen by distributing shells. They were going to build a new city. A Hebrew city. They named it Tel Aviv, a name taken from the Hebrew title of Theodor Herzl's utopian Zionist novel Altneuland — Old New Land. The name means hill of spring, or hill of renewal. Tel Aviv became the first modern Jewish city in what was then Ottoman Palestine.

The boulevard you are standing on, named for the Rothschild banking family who helped finance early Zionist settlement, was laid out in the very first years of the city. It runs for two kilometres with a wide promenade down its centre shaded by ficus trees, with benches and cafés and the occasional kiosk selling fresh-squeezed pomegranate juice, which is Tel Aviv's unofficial civic drink. On weekend mornings it fills with joggers, cyclists, parents with prams, and old men playing backgammon. On weekday afternoons it belongs to the startup crowd — programmers and designers spilling out of the offices that now occupy many of the historic buildings.

Look at the buildings around you. You are in the heart of the White City, Tel Aviv's UNESCO-designated Bauhaus district. Between nineteen thirty and nineteen fifty, over four thousand buildings were constructed in the International Style here by architects — many of them Jewish refugees from Europe — who had trained at the Bauhaus school in Germany or studied under its teachers. In two thousand and three, UNESCO recognised the White City as a World Heritage Site, calling it the largest concentration of Bauhaus and International Style buildings in the world.

The style is immediately recognisable: flat roofs, smooth white or pale plaster facades, horizontal ribbon windows, curved balconies that wrap around corners, and deep overhanging balconies designed to create shade in the hot Mediterranean sun. Some architects adapted the European Bauhaus aesthetic to the local climate by adding deep shade awnings and redirecting windows away from the direct afternoon sun — a version sometimes called International Style with Levantine modifications. The buildings were radical and modern when they were built. Many were constructed in a hurry as waves of Jewish immigrants arrived from Germany and Central Europe in the nineteen thirties, fleeing the rise of National Socialism.

Walk south along the central promenade. Feel the shade of the trees. On a hot day, which is most days from May to October, this shade is everything.

In two thousand and eighteen the square was lowered back to street level, returning it to something closer to its original form. The fountain — the famous Fire and Water Fountain, designed by the artist Yaacov Agam in nineteen eighty-six — was restored and reinstalled. The fountain runs on a timer and at night it lights up in bright Kinetic Art colours, red and blue and orange flames appearing to burn above water jets. Agam was a leading figure in Op Art and Kinetic Art, and the fountain is the most famous piece of public art in Tel Aviv. On Friday evenings it draws a crowd.

The streets radiating out from this square are Dizengoff Street itself, the city's historic shopping street. In the nineteen fifties and sixties, Dizengoff Street was the centre of Tel Aviv's café culture — the street where writers, artists, and intellectuals gathered at outdoor tables to argue, read, and watch the world pass. The café culture has migrated since then to other neighbourhoods, particularly Florentin and the Carmel Market area to the south, but Dizengoff Street still has independent bookshops, galleries, and clothing boutiques mixed among the international chains.

The district around you, the Bauhaus buildings of Dizengoff and Gordon Streets, represents one of the densest concentrations of International Style architecture in the White City. The Building Society for the Development of Tel Aviv, which organised the construction of much of this district, required that buildings be white — or at least pale — to reflect the Mediterranean sun. The roofs are flat. The balconies are deep. The street corners are curved. The shade is intentional.

Looking around you now, you might notice that Tel Aviv has a particular quality of light — intense and flat and very white around midday, shifting to a golden Mediterranean amber in the late afternoon. This is the light of the Levantine coast, the same light that fell on the Crusader castles and the Ottoman walls of Jaffa and the sand dunes that once covered all of this ground. The new city was built on sand, literally. The dunes ran north from Jaffa all the way to what is now Tel Aviv's northern suburbs. Building on sand required specific foundations and techniques that some early builders got wrong. A few of the first structures simply sank.

The immigrants who built this city arrived in waves, in what Zionism calls aliyah, meaning ascent. The first aliyah came in the eighteen eighties. The second, which included Ben-Gurion himself, arrived between nineteen oh four and nineteen fourteen. The third and fourth aliyot brought tens of thousands more, particularly from Eastern Europe, through the nineteen twenties. And then in the nineteen thirties came the wave of German and Central European Jewish refugees, the architects among them bringing Bauhaus directly from its source.

The food of this market is the food of Israeli Jewish culture, which is to say it is the food of every country Jewish immigrants came from, compressed and adapted into something specific to this place. You'll find Yemeni cuisine here — malawach, a layered fried flatbread served with a grated tomato dip and hard-boiled egg that is one of the great breakfasts on earth; jachnun, a slow-cooked rolled pastry that has been cooking overnight and arrives at the stall still steaming. You'll find Moroccan-Jewish food — spiced lamb, preserved lemon, harissa, sweet and savoury combinations that reflect eight centuries of Jewish life in North Africa. You'll find Ashkenazi Jewish food from Eastern Europe — pickled herring, chopped liver, borscht sold in cups. You'll find Israeli Persian food and Kurdish food and Iraqi-Jewish food, which is its own rich tradition distinct from Arab Iraqi cuisine.

And you'll find the universal Israeli street food: the falafel. Small round chickpea balls, deep-fried to order, stuffed into a pita with hummus, tahini, shredded cabbage, pickled turnips, tomato, and amba — a ferky, tangy pickled mango sauce brought from Iraq that is now so fundamental to Israeli street food that most people have forgotten it has a name or an origin. The falafel here costs almost nothing and it is extraordinary.

The Jewish communities whose cuisines converge in this market came to Israel in distinct waves, from distinct places, for distinct reasons. The Yemeni Jewish community arrived largely in nineteen forty-nine and nineteen fifty in a secret Israeli airlift called Operation Magic Carpet, which transported nearly the entire Jewish community of Yemen — around fifty thousand people — to Israel in the immediate aftermath of independence. The Moroccan Jewish community, one of the largest in Israel, arrived primarily in the nineteen fifties and sixties as decolonisation and rising Arab nationalism made Jewish life in North Africa increasingly dangerous. The Russian and Ukrainian Jews came in enormous numbers after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early nineteen nineties — over a million immigrants arrived in a decade, transforming Israeli culture, cuisine, and politics.

The Ethiopian Jewish community, known as Beta Israel, arrived primarily in two airlifts — Operation Moses in nineteen eighty-four and Operation Solomon in nineteen ninety-one. Operation Solomon was extraordinary: in thirty-six hours, thirty-four Israeli aircraft made forty-one flights and transported fourteen thousand three hundred and twenty-four Ethiopian Jews from Addis Ababa to Tel Aviv. It remains one of the largest single-day airlifts in history.

Walk through the market. Buy something. Try the jachnun if it's morning, the falafel if it's afternoon.

The neighbourhood you're walking through now reflects none of this founding history in any architectural purity — it has been renovated, gentrified, and decorated into one of the most expensive and desirable postcodes in Israel. Low stone houses on narrow streets, painted in washed shades of cream and terracotta and pale blue, with bougainvillea overflowing garden walls and small restaurants and design boutiques and galleries occupying what were once modest workshops and storerooms. The streets are narrow enough that two cars cannot comfortably pass, and in the afternoon they fill with long shadows that make the light feel almost European.

The transformation of Neve Tzedek from a working neighbourhood into an upmarket cultural district happened largely in the nineteen nineties. The catalyst was the Suzanne Dellal Centre, which we will reach in a few minutes, and its decision in nineteen eighty-nine to restore the derelict school buildings at the heart of the neighbourhood as a home for contemporary dance. Around the centre, restaurants and cafés followed. Galleries followed the restaurants. Boutiques followed the galleries. Property prices followed everything.

Some of the original neighbourhood is preserved. The Rokach House, on Shimon Rokach Street, is a museum occupying the home of Shimon Rokach, one of Neve Tzedek's founders, and it has been restored to show what middle-class Jewish domestic life looked like here in the late nineteenth century. The furniture is spare and elegant. The rooms are cool. The garden has an old lemon tree that may have been there when the house was first built.

One of Neve Tzedek's most significant residents was the Hebrew writer S. Y. Agnon, who lived here as a young man in the early nineteen hundreds before emigrating to Germany and eventually returning to Palestine. Agnon went on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in nineteen sixty-six — the first Hebrew-language writer to receive it. He accepted the prize with a speech that began: 'As a result of the historic catastrophe in which Titus of Rome destroyed Jerusalem and Israel was exiled from its land, I was born in one of the cities of the Exile.' The speech was delivered in Hebrew, which, for many in the Nobel committee, was the first time they had heard that ancient language spoken as the living tongue of a modern writer.

Today the Suzanne Dellal Centre is home to the Bat Sheva Dance Company, the Bat Sheva Ensemble, the Inbal Dance Company, and several smaller companies and studios. Bat Sheva is one of the most internationally respected contemporary dance companies in the world. It was founded in nineteen sixty-four by the Baroness Batsheva de Rothschild, an American-Israeli heiress and patron of the arts who had trained under Martha Graham in New York, and it invited Martha Graham herself to become its first artistic director. The company's current artistic philosophy descends from that tradition.

The Israeli contemporary dance scene, which centres on this building and its surrounding neighbourhood, has a quality that observers from other countries often notice: an intensity, a physicality, and a willingness to deal directly with difficult political and historical material that is rare in Western European or American dance. The body memory of a society that has lived through war, migration, loss, and the constant psychic weight of conflict finds its way into the movement. This is not universal — much of what happens here is purely formalist contemporary dance with no political content at all — but when it is present, it is unmistakable.

Sit for a moment in the orange-tree courtyard if it is not too hot. Listen for music from a rehearsal room. The smell of orange blossoms when the trees are in flower, in spring, is something specific to this place — sweet and slightly medicinal, drifting through the warm air above the old school walls. The Mediterranean is less than two kilometres to the west of here. You can sometimes feel it as a dampening of the air even when you cannot see or smell it.

When you are ready, continue walking south and slightly west. You are leaving Tel Aviv now and approaching Jaffa — yafo in Hebrew, Yafa in Arabic. The boundary between them is not marked by any wall or gate; the two cities were officially merged into a single municipality in nineteen fifty. But you will feel the change. The streets narrow. The architecture shifts from Bauhaus and European modernism to Ottoman and older. The languages you hear shift. The population shifts. The history gets considerably older and considerably more complicated.

The square around the clock tower is the civic centre of old Jaffa, and it has been a civic centre of one kind or another for a very long time. Jaffa appears in ancient Egyptian records from the fifteenth century before the common era. It is mentioned in the Hebrew Bible as the port from which the prophet Jonah sailed when he was trying to flee from God — the port from which Jonah boarded the ship in which he was eventually thrown into the sea and swallowed by a large fish. Jaffa is also mentioned in the Second Book of Chronicles as the port through which cedar logs from Lebanon were floated from Tyre for the construction of the Temple in Jerusalem, in the tenth century before the common era. These are among the oldest urban references in the Hebrew Bible to a named port city.

The Crusaders captured Jaffa in the twelfth century and held it intermittently for about a hundred years. Napoleon Bonaparte captured it in eighteen ninety-nine on his way north toward Acre, and the aftermath of that siege was one of the more brutal episodes of his campaign. The British, under General Allenby, took Jaffa in November nineteen seventeen during the First World War, and the British Mandate period that followed would eventually produce the conditions for everything that came after.

At the time of the founding of Tel Aviv in nineteen oh nine, Jaffa was a city of about forty thousand people — a mixed population of Arab Muslims, Arab Christians, and Jewish residents living in close and sometimes tense proximity. By nineteen forty-eight, Jaffa was predominantly Arab, with a population of around sixty to seventy thousand. In the spring of nineteen forty-eight, during the fighting of the War of Independence, most of Jaffa's Arab population fled or was expelled — the precise combination of these two things is among the most disputed questions in the history of the conflict. The population of Jaffa dropped from around sixty thousand to a few thousand almost overnight. The empty houses were subsequently settled by Jewish immigrants, many of them newly arrived from Arab countries.

Today Jaffa is a mixed city, with Jewish, Arab Muslim, and Arab Christian residents living in close proximity, and a significant artist and bohemian population drawn by the low rents and the atmosphere of the old stone streets. It is a working model of coexistence — imperfect, sometimes tense, with deep structural inequalities and unresolved historical grievances, but also genuinely mixed in a way that almost nowhere else in Israel or the Palestinian territories is. The restaurants here serve both hummus and shakshuka with equal authority.

The market has changed significantly in the last fifteen years. What was once a genuinely chaotic collection of second-hand dealers and junk vendors has been partially gentrified — there are now design boutiques and upmarket antique dealers and restaurants interspersed among the traditional stalls. The rents in the surrounding streets have risen dramatically as the neighbourhood has become fashionable. On Friday mornings and Saturday evenings the market draws a very mixed crowd: Arab families, Orthodox Jewish browsers, secular Tel Avivians in fashionable clothing, tourists with backpacks, elderly men who have been coming here for forty years and remember when everything cost a fraction of what it does now.

What remains from the older market is the density and the unpredictability. You can still walk through a corridor of stalls and suddenly find yourself confronted with an object of genuine beauty or mystery — a carved wooden screen from a demolished Arab house, a brass Hanukkiah from Iraq, an embroidered dress from Yemen, a pile of Hebrew books printed in Warsaw before the war, a photograph of a family whose name nobody knows standing in front of a house that may no longer exist.

The streets immediately around the market are among the oldest in Jaffa. The stone buildings — thick-walled, with arched doorways and deep window reveals — date mostly from the Ottoman period, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, though some are built on foundations considerably older. The stone is the honey-coloured limestone of the local hills, the same stone used to build Jerusalem, and in the afternoon light it turns the colour of bread.

This neighbourhood is where you start to understand what Jaffa is and what it has been. It is a port city, a trading city, a city that has absorbed and transmitted cultures for four thousand years. Every empire that has moved through this coast — Egyptian, Canaanite, Israelite, Assyrian, Persian, Greek, Roman, Arab, Crusader, Mamluk, Ottoman, British — has passed through Jaffa. Some of them left stones. Some left words. All of them left some genetic and cultural trace in the people who lived here.

Walk north out of the market and up the hill. You are climbing toward the oldest part of Jaffa, the ancient tell, the mound of layered civilisations that sits on a promontory above the sea.

The church has a connection to one of the most important episodes in early Christian history, according to the Acts of the Apostles. Just up the hill from here, in the first century of the common era, the Apostle Peter stayed with a tanner named Simon. It was in Jaffa, according to the New Testament, that Peter had the vision in which God showed him a sheet let down from heaven containing all manner of animals both clean and unclean, and instructed him to eat. Peter's response — 'Not so, Lord, for I have never eaten anything common or unclean' — and God's reply — 'What God has cleansed, do not call common' — is interpreted by Christian tradition as the moment when the early church understood that gentiles, non-Jews, could also receive the gospel. It is, in other words, one of the theological turning points that made Christianity a world religion rather than a Jewish sect. The traditional site of Simon's house is on the seafront promenade just below you.

After the Islamic conquest of Jaffa in the seventh century, the church here was converted to a mosque. During the Crusader period it became a church again. After Saladin's reconquest in the twelfth century it reverted to a mosque. The current building, rebuilt by the Franciscans under Ottoman rule in the seventeenth century, is a church, and has remained one under four subsequent governments — Ottoman, British, Jordanian, and Israeli — which is itself a small miracle of institutional continuity.

Napoleon Bonaparte attended Mass in this church in eighteen ninety-nine, during his Egyptian campaign, after his forces captured Jaffa. The siege of Jaffa was followed by the execution of several thousand prisoners by French forces — one of the more troubling episodes of his campaign, over which historians continue to argue regarding the circumstances and justification.

Step inside if the church is open. The interior is cool and quiet. The vaulted ceiling, the simple Baroque altar, the coloured floor tiles — it has the particular quality of calm that very old religious buildings accumulate over centuries of prayer. Pilgrims have been coming here for centuries. Their accumulated silence is still in the walls.

Excavations beneath and around Kedumim Square have revealed remains from the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, the Persian period, the Hellenistic period, the Roman period, the Byzantine period, and the Arab-Crusader-Mamluk-Ottoman sequence that brought Jaffa into the modern era. A small underground museum, the Ilana Goor Museum complex and the archaeological display beneath the square, presents finds from the excavations — pottery sherds, coins, architectural fragments, objects of daily life — spanning three millennia. It is worth a few minutes of your time.

The view from up here is the other reason to come. Turn north. The line of coast stretches away from you, and rising from it, impossibly white against the blue sky, is the tower of the hotels and apartment blocks of modern Tel Aviv — the Azrieli Towers, the beachfront skyline, the dense fabric of the city spreading inland. It is disorienting in the best possible way: you are standing on four thousand years of history, looking at a city that is less than one hundred and twenty years old.

Turn west and look at the Mediterranean. The sea is a deep and particular blue that changes with the hour and the season — cobalt at midday, slate grey in winter, sometimes almost turquoise in the shallow water near the rocks. The prevailing winds come from the west and northwest, from the open sea, and they are almost always present on this hilltop. They carry the smell of salt and open water.

This is the port that Jonah sailed from, according to the Book of Jonah, fleeing the instruction to go to Nineveh and preach. This is the port where the cedar logs of Lebanon arrived for Solomon's Temple. This is the port the Crusaders fought over repeatedly. This is the port Napoleon bombarded. This is the port where waves of Jewish immigrants arrived by ship through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, before the deep-water port at Haifa superseded it.

The story of this place is the story of everyone who has needed to cross the eastern end of the Mediterranean and found, here at this particular point of the coast, a usable harbour. It is one of the oldest continuously active ports in the history of navigation.

That improbable modesty is part of what makes Jaffa remarkable. This small harbour, this curve of rocks in the eastern Mediterranean, has been in continuous use as a port for approximately four thousand years. It appears in records from the eighteenth dynasty of ancient Egypt — roughly fourteen hundred years before the common era. It was already old when the ancient Israelite kingdoms existed. It was old when the Greeks arrived. It was old when Rome was a republic. It was old when the Crusaders built their walls. It was old when Napoleon stood here. It was old when the first Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe arrived here by steamship in the eighteen eighties, carrying their trunks and their ambitions and their absolute conviction that they were coming home.

Sit here for a moment. Watch the sea. The water is clear enough in the shallows that you can see the rocks and the occasional shoal of small fish. In summer, local teenagers swim here, launching themselves from the rocks. In winter, the waves can be large and violent, crashing against the base of the hill and sending spray all the way up to the promenade.

The people walking past you represent the full complexity of what this place is and what it has become. You may see ultra-Orthodox Jewish families in their Shabbat clothes. Arab families from Jaffa's mixed neighbourhoods. Israeli tourists from other cities. International visitors of every kind. Artists who have studios in the renovated buildings on the hill above. Fishermen who go out before dawn and return by mid-morning. Old men who have been coming to this waterfront for fifty years. Young couples sharing a plate of hummus at one of the restaurants behind you.

Israel and Palestine are among the most contested names and concepts on earth, and the history you have walked through today is inseparable from that ongoing contest. The founding of Tel Aviv was an act of Zionist will that changed the character of this coastline permanently. The War of Independence that Ben-Gurion declared on Rothschild Boulevard produced the state of Israel and the Palestinian diaspora simultaneously. These two facts are not in tension with each other — they are the same fact. Jaffa's mixed present is built on a traumatic and unresolved past, and acknowledging that honestly is part of understanding what you are seeing.

What the walk also shows you is that this place has been absorbing and transforming human ambition for four thousand years. Empires came. Empires left. The stones remained. The port remained. The sea remained. And generation after generation, people arrived here by water — pilgrims, traders, soldiers, refugees, dreamers — looked up at the hill and its ancient walls, and decided that whatever came before, they were going to build something here.

You have walked from a city that is one hundred and seventeen years old to a port that is four thousand years old, in four kilometres and one hour and forty-five minutes. Sit with that for a moment. Then, if you are hungry, the hummus restaurants on the promenade behind you are among the finest in Israel. Order the hummus with whole chickpeas and a soft-boiled egg. Eat it with fresh pita straight from the oven. Watch the sea.

Welcome to Jaffa. Welcome to Tel Aviv.