Ir levanah, ir shehorah (White city, black city), by Sharon Rotbard, Tel Aviv: Babel
Press, 2005
Tel Aviv ha-ir ha-(a)mitit: Mitografiyah historit (Tel Aviv – the real city: A historicalmythography), by Maoz Azaryahu, Sde Boker: Ben-Gurion Research Center, 2005,
A review in Journal of Israeli History, 27:1, 87 – 93, Routledge, 2008
These two books, by Sharon Rotbard and Maoz Azaryahu are, in many respects, very similar. Both address the broad area of research into place, both real and imaginary: one in an architectural context, the other from a cultural-geographical perspective. Both consider Tel Aviv through the developing academic point of view of local history. Both discuss the relationship between the tangible, living, breathing city, the terrestrial, earthly Tel Aviv, and the – no less living – image of the “celestial Tel Aviv,” a` la “celestial Jerusalem.” Both authors attach great importance to discourse. Thus Azaryahu makes the point that “although Tel Aviv was built of bricks and concrete blocks, it was created out of words”(Azaryahu, p. 336), while Rotbard points out that it is the only city to have been named after a book (Theodor Herzl’s Altneuland was translated into Hebrew as Tel Aviv, literally “hill of spring”). In some chapters they present a similar critical analysis of the same sites, especially the “White City” project which, enjoying international auspices and legitimacy, has preserved Bauhaus buildings. However, there is no need for an in-depth reading to realize that, while focusing on the same subject, these are two very different books. The difference is both substantive and principled in nature, and speaks volumes of the fault lines cutting through contemporary Israeli social sciences.
Rotbard’s book focuses on two interconnected narratives. One is an analysis of the process by which the image of the White City was created – a fabricated, invented image, intended to tie in with a narrative that attaches national meaning to the city’s existence and to reinforce it. While the “White City,” an expression much used to describe Tel Aviv, has been associated with the central emblem of the Bauhaus buildings, for Rotbard it holds a broader and more fundamental meaning, indicative of how a dark past was consigned to oblivion. The second story is the wiping out of the Arab city of Jaffa and the inclusion of its wretched remnants within the borders of the Hebrew city.
The white Tel Aviv exists in those places where the black Jaffa does not, and vice versa. Painting Tel Aviv white involves painting Jaffa black. The book is a harsh indictment of the destruction and obliteration process which, according to Rotbard, made possible the establishment of the first Hebrew city. It is critical of the lack of awareness and the denial that go hand in hand with this process. Underlying its approach is also criticism of Zionism’s alienation from the locality to which it brought the Jews from Europe, and mainly of the architects who implemented and conferred legitimacy on this process of destruction.
Maoz Azaryahu’s book is of an altogether different breed. Azaryahu, a cultural historian and geographer, is primarily interested in issues of symbolic space. An amused ethnographer, he strolls around the city examining how the city’s streets and squares fluctuate in symbolic importance, as they acquire and lose significance in turn. Apart from discussing Tel Aviv’s image in general, he documents sites which are concomitantly actual and symbolic, such as Dizengoff Street, Sheinkin Street, the seashore and the city’s public spaces, which jointly construct the overall myth of the city. While Rotbard concentrates on the hidden backyards, as uncovering the essence of the Hebrew city, Azaryahu focuses on facades, the celebrated way by which the city presents itself. Therefore, although both books discuss the city’s mythology, it is hardly surprising that the products are completely different.
This fundamental difference of perspectives – metaphorically the difference between black and white, between night and day – is tightly connected to a myriad of other differences between the two authors, some principled and some technical in nature. Rotbard’s book examines the process by which Tel Aviv became “white” as it set itself apart from Arab Jaffa, symbolically “cleansing” itself of the Orient. The change in the relative symbolic importance of the streets – a change on which Azaryahu’s narrative focuses – is claimed to be insignificant, a passing fad which can only be addressed after the elimination of the main threat, that Tel Aviv will no longer be Hebrew (even though this threat can never be entirely eliminated, and so must be tackled and eliminated over and over, each time anew). Whoever considers the development of Hebrew Tel Aviv in isolation from the exclusion, not to say the elimination and destruction of Arab Jaffa, together with the expulsion of most of its inhabitants, accepts and reproduces the victor’s narrative. In contrast, if one assumes Azaryahu’s perspective, Rotbard’s research has a banal feel to it: victorious Zionism ousted the Arab, as has been recounted time and time again. Is not Rotbard in turn replicating the threadbare critical discourse of victor/vanquished, expeller/expellee, white/black? Why is it illegitimate to place Tel Aviv’s existence in a different historical context?
In both books, Tel Aviv is presented as confronting the “Other.” Rotbard defines one particular, principled “otherness,” which constitutes the focus of his book. In one of the many dramatic passages in his book, he writes: It is far more a condition than a place. In point of fact, a “white city” is the only reason why a “black city” is black. A “black city” is an invisible city, it is everything that is hidden by the deep shadow of the white city, everything that Tel Aviv does not see and does not want to see. . . Wherever there is no “white city,” there is a “black city,” its antithesis: a “black city” is the complete “other” of Tel Aviv in its “white city” guise. It is the black background that Tel Aviv needs in order to continue to look white. In many senses it is also the black flag ("no swimming, dangerous sea”) flying above Tel Aviv. (Rotbard, p. 122)
This contrast, of course, was not ignored by Azaryahu’s detailed, in-depth study. He also writes about the contrast between Tel Aviv and Jaffa, about the attempt to bring about a “European oasis in the midst of the Asian desert” (Azaryahu, pp. 61–62). For him, this is just one of the contrasts responsible for the myth of Tel Aviv. No less important is the contrast between Tel Aviv and the other Jewish options in Eretz Israel, such as the pioneering collective and cooperative agricultural settlements – the kibbutzim and the moshavim, the moshavot with their privately owned farms, the settlements beyond the Green Line, and of course Haifa and Jerusalem. For him, Dizengoff and Sheinkin Streets typify mainly internal Jewish contradictions.
Azaryahu quotes Menachem Ussishkin, head of the Jewish National Fund, comparing Jerusalem and Haifa in 1924. As he saw it, Jerusalem would be the government and cultural center, and Haifa the industrial and commercial center, while Tel Aviv was destined to be the window on Europe and the western world (Azaryahu, p. 251). These three cities, together with other localities where Jews could come to live, resulted in a “division of labor” that enabled Zionist Jews to make their own private choices within the national Zionist undertaking. These different strands in the Jewish collective generated a spectrum of opportunities and distinctions, and in turn enable inexhaustible research options. On the other hand, they also contrast greatly with each other. Much has been written about the major contrast, not to say confrontation, between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, the eternal city versus the city of the present, the city of weightiness and wisdom versus the city of lightheartedness and frivolity, the Jewish city versus the city of Israeli normality. Azaryahu presents this contrast in the following terms:
Tel Aviv underscored what makes it unique – a city that never stops – in terms of distinguishing it from everything that it saw as threatening its ideological/ideal view of itself as representing Israeli enlightenment, formulated in terms of secularism, liberalism, and political moderation. According to this view, Tel Aviv is an island of sanity and normality in the midst of a sea of ignorance and fanaticism engulfing Israel. . . . In the mythical view, Tel Aviv has become an enclave of modern, secular and enlightened Israeliness beset and threatened by the forces of darkness. (Azaryahu, pp. 339–40)
In contrast, Rotbard highlights Tel Aviv’s conformity, as the standard bearer of mainstream Zionism involved primarily in Hebraizing or “whitening” the country.
The contrast with Jerusalem, and even more so with the moshavim and the kibbutzim, is a pseudo-contrast which camouflages the profound underlying similarity. Writing about the image of Tel Aviv, he observes:
The White City of Tel Aviv is not only the least problematic part of the Zionist project: it is also its intellectual core, its moral nucleus and its goal; because Zionism’s most important idea was the normalization of the Jewish people, the real Zion is not Jerusalem but Tel Aviv, the White City. It was born as a tabula rasa in the drawing of lots of Ahuzat Bayit on the sand dunes, there was nothing there before it, it did not come about at anybody’s expense, and all it did was to make the desert bloom. It was built, not by Arab laborers, but by students of medicine, law, and philosophy, who had in any case been expelled from Europe. (Rotbard, p. 85)
Rotbard’s research, drawing as it does on primary sources, is essentially deductive in nature. Tel Aviv’s destiny is the necessary conclusion emerging from its fundamental essence, while that of Jaffa is doomed due to its dangerous proximity to the city which grew out of it and is committed to the ethno-national undertaking. The pivotal historical moment was the murder of Jews who lived or happened to be in an Arab environment in the 1921 riots. It was at this point that the option of long-term coexistence came to an abrupt end, and the segregation between the peoples, between the white and the black, began its work which continues down to the present.
Rotbard’s description is deductive and determinist: the continued existence of the White City requires the obliteration of the Black City. He exemplifies using an examination of the painter Nahum Gutman’s books, showing how the eliminatory violence that negates the Other makes its way even into his naı¨ve children’s drawings. In his 1930s illustrations, the Arab Manshiya neighborhood, which was physically located between Tel Aviv and the sea, between it and Jaffa, and whose houses could be seen from many Tel Aviv windows, is not where it should be. In its stead is an expanse of sand dunes stretching to the seashore. This is something of a prophecy about the future, a self fulfilling prophecy. Tel Aviv’s symbolic “whiteness,” the removing of the Arab from its midst and its surroundings, was already writ large at the time in the Hebrew, Zionist and Judaizing essence of the city. The book merely details how this essence was fulfilled, namely the concrete way in which the whitening and blackening processes were implemented.
The particular charm of Azaryahu’s book lies precisely in its inductive nature; in its examination – on the basis of archival material and press clippings – of how space was shaped and how its images developed, images which seem to most Israelis to be autonomous of time and context. While Rotbard’s work has a closed, determinist feel to it, Azaryahu’s research is open, flowing wherever the material takes him. This is local history at its best. True, in the “contrastive scheme” that I have established between the two books, Rotbard occupies the “new” or “critical” slot, but this is unfair to Azaryahu’s book. His work presents innovative research, and in terms of social, historical, and cultural geography in Israel, he may even be said to be revolutionary, insofar as he provides a new perspective for examining Israeli spatial identity. It is not that long ago that research into “Dizengoff” or “Sheinkin” as concepts was viewed as lacking in legitimacy and “not serious.” In the Israeli historiographical context, Azaryahu’s book is a trailblazer. Both these writers can be related to the writing traditions connected with the key motifs in Walter Benjamin’s writings. Rotbard writes counterhistory, subversive history, which contradicts the official story of the White City that grew and flourished among the sand dunes. As Benjamin puts it, “he brushes history against the grain.” What Benjamin means in this expression is that the critical historian uses existing materials, those produced by the victors, and finds out how to salvage from them the hidden history of the vanquished. Azaryahu simply finds a different “pelt” to brush. Above all, he demonstrates an affinity with the “Benjaminite” wanderer, a subversive figure, challenging the consumer order by savoring experiences in “passages,” covered shopping arcades, at his own leisurely pace, contrary to the standard goal, which is to make purchases in a fiercely time-efficient fashion. A wandering and acutely discerning researcher like Azaryahu, who stings instead of goring, is a paradoxical, not to say ironic reaction to the overblown symbolism of the city that never stops.
The action in the two books is propelled forward by a variety of agents. In Rotbard’s book, history was shaped by the logic of the “whitening” nationhood. In Azaryahu’s book, the equivalent was the vibrant life of the city. Both books, however, identify a number of agents who helped history on its way. Rotbard attaches great weight to the architects striving to shape the city according to ideological outlooks. Their complex task includes both building the new and destroying the old, shaping both physical space and – for him, more importantly – the talk about place. They are followed by other cultural agents, such as Hebrew poets, who enshrine in sugary romantic lines the discourse that obliterates the Black City, like “There is nothing like Jaffa at night” or: “This is Jaffa, lass, this is Jaffa / It stirs your blood like wine,” and “There is something strange and unknown / There is something wonderful about this city.” Azaryahu also ascribes importance to cultural agents, although the deconstruction he proposes is nowhere near as subversive as Rotbard’s. For the former, when poet Natan Alterman opposes Jerusalem to Tel Aviv in his famous refrain “And yet it has something,” he is both formulating and reflecting images, and perhaps contributing to a kind of competition between the two cities. But according to Azaryahu’s formulation, Alterman’s refrain should not be interpreted as a violent, nationalist act of obliteration. As opposed to Rotbard’s radical writing, in Azaryahu the songs that have helped to shape the Israelis’ world retain their enchanted and legitimate status.
Although both books have been meticulously and beautifully produced, there is a fundamental difference between their aesthetics. Rotbard’s book is replete with pictures, maps, documents, photographs of the covers of the books to which it refers, and lengthy footnotes. Apparently because of the radical nature of his arguments, he sees himself as having to provide a wealth of visual evidence, even though this tends to have something of an “overkill” effect. Basically, the book contains the archive used by the author to prove his arguments. Although this point is not made explicitly, it is nevertheless cardinal. Because Arab Jaffa has been obliterated from history, the combination of pictures and documents about it in a historical book is a much-needed redemptive undertaking. As a result, the book is at one and the same time a work of history as well as a memorial to the city which once was and is no more, of which there remain only remnants subsumed in its victorious neighbor as a tourist attraction.
Rotbard uses the book cover as well to put over his message. The cover shows the Etzel Museum, named after Amihai “Gidi” Feiglin, a member of Etzel who led his forces in conquering Jaffa in the War of Independence. The building, a modern glass structure erected over the ruins of an earlier construction, is a metaphor for what the Jewish city did with the ruins of the Arab city. The front cover has a photograph of the building seen from Jaffa looking toward Tel Aviv, while the photograph on the back cover shows it as viewed from Tel Aviv looking toward Jaffa. Rotbard’s book is midway between Tel Aviv and Jaffa, between the white and the black, and the entire book – text, pictures, and cover – is involved in shaping the message of redeeming Jaffa from the black and extricating Tel Aviv from the white.
Azaryahu’s book is far more conventional. However, Azaryahu uses the opportunities offered by his subject in full, and provides pages of spectacularly beautiful pictures, reproducing postcards, cartoons, and photographs. Both of these books show how profound the revolution of recent years has been, in which the history book, in addition to its traditional role, has also become a consumer item where everything, including the book jacket, its external appearance and the photographs inside it, is designed to attract the reader to its content.
Following a key tenet of critical thinking, academic writing itself is now a political praxis. Thus Rotbard’s book is a self-declared political work which deals in depth with the attempts of Zionism and the State of Israel to “whiten,” to obliterate others, to gain control over space. The way in which Feiglin waged war in Jaffa (breaking down the walls of adjoining houses) is reminiscent of the Israeli military’s modus operandi in Palestinian cities; and the expulsions of migrant workers from Tel Aviv are a follow-up to the city’s unfinished “whitening” business.
Azaryahu’s book can be used to illustrate Rotbard’s arguments. Because academic writing involves the shaping of relations of power and control, and the most important thing about the city is its story, Azaryahu’s account is part of the whitening of Tel Aviv, albeit in a more sophisticated form than that used by other “whiteners.” The detailed description of how Tel Aviv – its streets, its very fabric – developed helps contribute to the oblivion that has been imposed on the original crime, through which they became possible in the first place. From Rotbard’s critical perspective, Azaryahu’s alleged objectivity can be defined as quintessentially national-political, as the researcher’s collusion with the other storytellers in camouflaging the city’s basic repressive nature. Azaryahu, with his ironic and inquisitive outsider’s view of the city and its development, would even perhaps be willing to accept such an argument before dismissing it as conventional. His stance is critical in its own way, one that recounts the story “as it is.” Incorrectly defined as apolitical, this is a quintessentially political position. It establishes the researcher as a powerful figure, who cannot be enlisted by either side, with a commitment to a truth arising from meticulous research and a privileged perspective from above. Critical research, with its postmodern narrative approaches, has not yet managed to undermine this strong ethos, which still shapes most research in the social sciences and humanities in Israel.
Ironically, Azaryahu’s “open” research makes possible critical thinking in places where Rotbard’s closes them off. White Tel Aviv is constantly subverting itself. An example is the fact that it has a firmly established gay-lesbian community with flourishing institutions, which threatens the hegemonic components of Zionist discourse. The oft-changing city that Azaryahu describes is what makes this subversion possible. The 1999 Love Parade celebration in Tel Aviv flaunted the city’s subversive potential in the face of earlier Jewish and Israeli traditions. Azaryahu cites the following newspaper report:
Last Friday, something remarkable happened in Tel Aviv: a love parade became a new, unchallengeable social icon, a new festival in the panoply of Israeli festivals, for which over200,000 people voted with their dancing feet. . . . The Love Parade, in such symbolic proximity to the anachronistic Jerusalem Parade, has put Tel Aviv on the map together with the major European cities such as Berlin, Paris or Zurich. For the first time, Tel Aviv presented itself as it is – a cosmopolitan, open city, with an on-line connection to what’s happening in the world. (Azaryahu, p. 174)
In addition, Tel Aviv, as a global, world-class city, has become home to migrant workers ("foreign workers” in standard Israeli jargon), who at one point made up about a quarter of its population. Rotbard notes their expulsion, which he considers more significant than their actual presence in Tel Aviv. But whether voluntarily or because it had no alternative,
Tel Aviv developed important municipal institutions to deal with migrant workers, including the chance to study at its schools, receive medical care, legal advice, and religious services. Perhaps what happened was that the State of Israel, with its segregationist and “whitening” principles, “overpowered” the subversive Tel Aviv and threw out those workers who failed to fit in with its ethnocratic principles. Such an analysis is more suited to Azaryahu’s perception, of a city in constant development, sometimes opposing itself to “others” and at other times in concert with them, and containing elements that work against the process of its own whitening.
Both authors would probably agree that Tel Aviv, over and beyond the straightforward geographical sense, is part of the Zionist enterprise that created it, and that it is one of the components that make up the State of Israel. The disagreement between them is over the extent to which national logic dictates urban logic. Rotbard devotes considerable space to the national logic, including its orientalist components, which penetrates and structures all areas of urban life. His Tel Aviv is not subversive: rather, it is a completely conformist representative of Zionist logic, in its entirety. In contrast, Azaryahu gives the city autonomy and shows how it is developing, including in directions that run counter to the logic or rationale that led to its establishment.
In June 1998, Israel won the Eurovision Song Contest for the third time. Its representative was the transsexual singer Dana International, and following her success many members of the Israeli gay-lesbian community went out to dance in Rabin Square (formerly Malkhei Yisrael – “Kings of Israel” – Square). Maoz Azaryahu refers to this event in a chapter about the square’s history (Azaryahu, p. 327). What he fails to mention, however, is that on the same day, the national soccer championship was won in Tel Aviv by Beitar Jerusalem, whose supporters also flooded onto the same square at exactly the same time. These two celebrations by two diametrically differing communities met and mingled in the square. For one magic, utopian moment, as if the Messiah had finally arrived, the most stereotypical representatives of loutish xenophobia, themselves the object of constant “blackening” at the hands of the Israeli media, celebrated together with the stereotypical representatives of Israel’s new “otherness.” There was a melding of the White City and the Black City, not to mention the Pink City. The global city is typified by its heterotopia – a term coined by Michel Foucault, meaning a place that functions as an arena for the meeting of many different types of places, and therefore where innovative, not to say revolutionary, encounters can occur. Naturally, not all encounters produce significant results, whether because of the state’s normalizing power or because from the outset the encounter was not a meaningful one. Although there was no follow-up (as far as I am aware) to the heartwarming encounter between the gay-lesbian community and the Beitar Jerusalem fans, it is indicative of the subversive and dialectical option created by the whitening dynamic. Rotbard’s book, more subversive than other books about Tel Aviv, does not come to grips with this possibility.
Having delved in some detail into the differences between the books, it is now time to return to the similarity between them, which is perhaps more significant than the differences. The two books are new history, subversive, provocative, asking new questions and proposing ways of analysis previously untried. They look at Tel Aviv in a way in which it has rarely been observed until now, and this is what makes them noteworthy. One begins where the second ends (and vice versa). They come from related disciplines, but there is no real dialogue between them. For some scholars, especially those known as "critical", Rotbard’s book will be an example of engagé academic writing. For others, Azaryahu’s book will be an outstanding example of local, cultural, and social history, exposing the development of the Israeli myth. Perhaps given the polarization that characterizes Israeli academe I will be alone in arguing this, but in my opinion both of these contrasting books – the white and the black alike (and it is up to the reader to decide which is which) – make a highly significant contribution to the thinking about Israeli place that has developed in recent years.
(Translated from Hebrew by Ruth Morris)
Note
This article was originally published in Hebrew in Israel, no. 9 (2006): 237–44.
Notes on contributor:
Michael Feige is a senior lecturer at the Ben-Gurion Research Center, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He is a sociologist and anthropologist. His book One Space, Two Places: Gush Emunim, Peace Now and the Construction of Israeli Space was published in Hebrew by Magnes Press in 2002
