That is simply wrong, asserts architect Sharon
Rotbard from the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem, in a
challenging book that deserves to be read and argued over ("White
City , Black City," Babel Publishers; in Hebrew). Tel Aviv
emerged from Jaffa and then destroyed it; its first neighborhoods
were built on orchards that were purchased from their Arab owners, he
writes. The "white city" is a myth that blossomed in the
wake of the Likud's rise to power in 1977 and was intended to protect
the Ashkenazi elite.
Amid this, the myth of the central place of the
Bauhaus in the city's architecture was invented out of thin air. The
truth is that there is far less Bauhaus in Tel Aviv than is usually
said, Rotbard writes, and disparages an array of artists, poets and
writers who fostered the myth, in part under the auspices of the Tel
Aviv weekly Ha'ir.
There aren't many myths in Israel, because most of
them have already been shattered, and Rotbard here slaughters an
especially sacred cow: Tel Avivness. "What underlies the story
of the white city is not just the praise of plain good architecture,"
he writes, "but also the aspiration to isolate Tel Aviv from its
surroundings, to transform it into an aristocratic European region,
to sever it from Jaffa, to preserve it as a hygienic, even sterile
area.
"The white city is the cultural embodiment of
the idea of the separation, the disconnection, the disengagement. And
the implications of this idea for the Tel Aviv consciousness are
clear: Tel Aviv is out of it, Yesha [referring to the territories] is
there, they are there and we are here. Far from the God-crazed types
of Jerusalem and Gaza, on the right side of the Green Line, on the
right bank of the Yarkon, utterly bemused by ourselves, totally
alone, and totally innocently, in the construction of white
buildings, beautiful and just, on the sand."
There are many books on architecture and even more
books about history and politics: this book intertwines the two; it
is well written.
