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This article explores the role of space in facilitating forms of political power, as shown in the destruction of landscape in the center of Israel by the Hiriya landfill. That failed infrastructure wrecked the delicate legacies of mankind and nature, thus sealing the area's fate as a city's repellent dumping ground that attracted all kinds of liminal activities. After the 1948 war, which resulted in the establishment of the state of Israel, the destruction of hundreds of Palestinian towns and villages and the erasure of their people's legacy, Tel Aviv begun dumping its household waste near an Arab village, the residents of which had been expelled during the conflict. The authorities promised the local inhabitants — Jewish newcomers and refugees in the nearby transit camp, as well as local city dwellers — a new and modern compost plant, but the plant's opening was repeatedly postponed. This article reveals the rapid changes that occurred in the early 1950s in the Hiriya area, and how insistence on a modern, technologically based solution to waste treatment, suffused with Zionist ideology, resulted in the creation of an infamous site that became a symbol for environmental, infrastructural, social and health hazards. Drawing from diverse unexplored textual and visual archival sources, including aerial photographs, historical maps, printed texts and interviews, we argue that this combined method of landscape reading is crucial for understanding such a tragedy of landscape. Our study of the Hiriya landfill points to the challenges posed by infrastructure, and contributes to future research into post-industrial sites, including landfills, quarries, airfields, mines and factories. • Hiriya landfill exacerbrated the destruction of a typical Arab landscape. • Insisting on a technological modern solution caused infrastructural dysfunction. • The landscape destruction turned the environment hostile to humans and nature. • A combined landscape reading is crucial for understanding a tragedy of landscape. • Hiriya landfill contributes to understanding post-industrial sites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the Arab Fair that took place in Jerusalem in 1933 and in 1934 from the economic and political perspectives. It foregrounds the reasons and results of the absence of a continuously held international trade fair by Arabs in Palestine within the schema of Mandatory Palestine in particular and of the post-Ottoman Balkans and Middle East in general. Although it was successful in bringing businesspeople from various parts of the Arab World together, the lack of official support, broad participation, international recognition, and promotional efforts abroad, as well as strong Zionist propaganda campaigns against it, adversely affected the progress of the Arab Fair, and it did not take place after 1934. Unlike most other post-Ottoman states where collaboration between business groups and political elites gave rise to international fairs in the interwar period, Palestinian Arabs could not enjoy any official endorsement from the British to organize and sustain such a business gathering. In contrast with the Arab Fair, the Levant Fair in Tel Aviv in the same period grew in size and popularity and evolved into an international spectacle thanks to the contribution of Zionist leaders, enterprises, business associations, and journalists in and outside Palestine and the considerable support of the British and other colonial governments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the founding of Tel Aviv adjacent to the Arab city of Jaffa, a new and unique reality arose in Palestine in the form of neighborly relations between a Hebrew city and an Arab city. A deep rift in these relations resulted from the riots of 1921 and 1929, and in Zionist historiography it is argued that from the 1921 riots onward, the ties between them weakened and deteriorated constantly. This article aims to shed new light on the question, and to show that there was, in fact, a clear tendency of continuous improvement in the relationship from the first half of the 1920s until the outbreak of the 1936 riots. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the formation of the animal collection at the Tel Aviv zoological garden. Using Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, the article analyzes the images and practices of animal importation. It shows that in spite of the importance of Zionist enthusiasm in driving the establishment of the Tel Aviv zoo, and the attribution of Zionist vocabulary to animals living in it, its significance cannot be reduced to Zionist ideology and practice. The zoo’s animal collection was the product of the specific historical, colonial-imperial circumstances formed under the British Mandate. The gathering of the animals reflects the indispensable British contribution to the development of cultural endeavors in Palestine, and the coexistence of British and Zionist aspirations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the struggle for gender-segregated sea bathing in Tel Aviv from the first calls for gender segregation in the 1920s until 1966, when the city of Tel Aviv established a beach for men and women to swim separately. The most effective demands for gender segregation were framed in a civic and not religious discourse. Rather than claiming that gender-segregated swimming was against Jewish values, the ultra-Orthodox party Agudat Yisrael effectively argued that a lack of separate swimming violated their rights as taxpayers who had the right to bathe in the sea just as any other Israeli citizen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Garden City Movement is recognized as a dominant forerunner of modern urban planning. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate the broad popularity and selective adoption of Garden City concepts in Zionist circles and the Jewish Yishuv (Community) in Palestine, to document their implementation in Jewish urban settlement in Palestine, and to follow their local evolution into the creation of a unique urban fabric. We show how the Garden City ideology and its implementation in England and Germany influenced the Zionist movement, its leaders, and settlers in Ottoman and British Mandatory Palestine, and led them to adopt and adapt concepts of the Garden City model as the ‘national paradigm’ of the new Jewish urban planning in Palestine. The planning was influenced by Garden City ideas, with modifications to Ebenezer Howard's original model made to suit local traditions, public demand, and Zionist goals. The application of the message of the Garden City movement to the physical model beginning unintentionally with the building of Ahuzat Bayit (Tel Aviv) in 1909, created a guiding principle for Jewish urban development in Palestine from 1905 until 1945, and continues to exert its influence on current planning. In conclusion, the article adds a dimension to the emerging picture of early twentieth-century Zionist settlement in Palestine as a laboratory for implementing novel planning ideas of international importance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article investigates the intersection of space, culture and the moving body in Tel Aviv during the British Mandate of Palestine. Established in 1909 as a garden suburb of Jaffa, by the 1920s Tel Aviv had become the dynamic cultural and economic center of the Jewish community in Palestine. The culture of Tel Aviv was highly influenced by its natural setting but, as the ‘first Hebrew city’, it was also impacted by the processes of urbanization. Through analysis of a variety of developments in the physical culture arena, this article uncovers how the burgeoning metropolis both drew from and shaped the physical environment. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article offers information on the history of the newspaper "Falastin" during the first decade of the British Mandate and Zionist movement in 1921-1931. It states that during 1921, the newspaper's publication was banned by the mandatory government due to its criticism on government policy and to prevent the circulation of issues in Jaffa, Israel. Furthermore, the newspaper frequently covers topics on Zionism and that it never lacked an instance to expose Zionist policy and practice.

Since the late nineteenth century, the Zionist movement emphasized ruralism not only for the pastoral areas of Palestine, but also for its urban centres. This paper explores the emergence of Tel Aviv, the first Hebrew town, in the light of the Zionist rural/pastoral ideology and within the late nineteenth century discourse on city planning. It discusses early Tel Aviv's rural images and the various means that were implemented by local and international planners, Zionist cultural agents, volunteer organizations and residents in order to materialize the green vision for the first Hebrew town. This paper argues that till the mid-1930s, the development of Tel Aviv discarded the common modern dichotomy of nature/culture or pastoral/urban, proving that the development of the rural, agricultural landscape and the construction of the urban metropolis were complementary facets of the Zionist dream. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the Jewish community of Palestine was an extremely family-oriented society and the institute of the family played a major role in the establishment of the new Zionist nationhood, the historiography has henceforth paid little attention to its role, images, and functions. This article will examine the diverse and often contradictory perceptions and influences that have shaped the Zionist discourse regarding the family in the Jewish settlement of Palestine during the British mandate period. Traditional Jewish perceptions intertwined with modern, bourgeois, and revolutionary notions of the family, whether national or socialist. These contradictory perceptions were manifested in the contested professional and public discourse regarding the many dysfunctional urban families in Tel Aviv, who were treated by welfare authorities and mental health specialists during the 1930s and 1940s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through ethnographic and archival research centered in Jaffa, this article analyzes how the image of the Jewish-Arab mixed city has been represented and (re)produced in the Zionist historical imagination since the establishment of the state of Israel to the present. Vacillating between romantic historicity and political violence, the image of Jaffa poses a political and hermeneutic challenge to the territorial project of urban Judaization, which ultimately failed to define and establish the national-cum-cultural identity of this “New-Old” city. This failure, I argue, results in a persistent pattern of semiotic ambivalence which, from the Jewish-Israeli point of view, positions Jaffa both as a source of identity and longing (in the distant past) as well as a symbol of alterity and enmity (in the recent past)— an object of desire and fear alike. As such, Jaffa and other ethnically mixed towns (including Ramle, Lydda, Haifa, and Acre) occupy a problematic place in Israeli and Palestinian political and cultural imagination. A bi-national borderland in which Arabs and Jews live de facto together, these cities bring to the fore, on the one hand, the paradox of Palestinian citizens in a fundamentally Jewish state, while simultaneously suggesting, by the very spatial and social realization of “mixed-ness,” the potential imaginary of its solution. Unfolding through four distinct historical modalities of urban Orientalism, this article historicizes the highly politicized image of the Jewish-Arab city and the discourse on its future. These discursive formations reconfigured the public space that enabled, paradoxically since the October 2000 events, new political claims for equal citizenship, bi-national cooperation, and Palestinian presence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay approaches the 1925 master plan for Tel-Aviv by the biologist and town planner Patrick Geddes by asking which aspects of his concept of the modern city attracted representatives of the Zionist movement. While the idea of the region-city was applicable to Palestine at large, Geddes's conviction that the modern city had to grow from history was particularly relevant for the resettlement of the ancient Jewish homeland. Geddes planned modern Tel-Aviv as both a part of Palestine and a logical extension of the ancient city of Jaffa. Geddes borrowed decisive features of his plan from his earlier plan for Balrampur, India, and from the historic plan of Edinburgh, Scotland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Geography textbooks, like other cultural artifacts, are usually left as unexploited—raw. Ever since its founding, Tel-Aviv has been represented in geography textbooks in a very positive light—the "European oasis in the East". The dominant line in presenting the city remains—a created artifact that testifies to the vitality and power of Zionism, the center of the State of Israel, the very heart of its economy, culture, and society. It is integrated into the processes of globalization, the contemporary symbols of "world cities" apply to it as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores three successive anniversary celebrations of Tel- Aviv—1929, 1934, and 1959—as an aspect of the cultural and political history of the city. The three anniversaries examined in this paper were celebrated in the "First Hebrew City" phase of the cultural history of Tel-Aviv and, accordingly, their major theme was Tel-Aviv as a Zionist success story. The historical analysis of three successive anniversaries affords an opportunity to discern continuities in the form of festive patterns and recurrent ideological themes. It also highlights period-specific concerns and political contingencies underlying particular anniversary celebrations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Tel Aviv Purim carnival was the largest public event in Mandatory Palestine. However, due to its capitalistic character, the carnival has been ignored in the scholarship on the Zionist civil religion, which was regarded as having been created by the Zionist socialist/agricultural ethos alone. This article employs an anthropological methodology, analyzing the carnival as a pilgrimage event and revealing its ideological nationalist contents, which positioned Tel Aviv as a symbolic center of the Yishuv and thus powerfully presented the emerging nation in a visible manner. By exploring some common values shared by capitalism and nationalism, the analysis uncovers the ideological world of urban Zionism, which had far more impact on the sociocultural than on the political-institutional level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the development of Zionist views of Jerusalem among Zionists before 1948. Topics include the views of Zionist leader Theodore Herzl, the opening of the Zionist Office in Jerusalem - the Palestine Office, directed by Arthur Ruppin in Jaffa in 1908, and the Zionist view of Jerusalem versus the Zionist view of Tel Aviv.

The article focuses on the Scottish planner Patrick Geddes's town plan for Tel Aviv, Israel in 1925. The article explores Geddes's ignorance about Zionism. Particular attention is given to how Geddes's plans were amended and to his preference for organicism. The author discusses how historians interpret the situation.

Jerusalem and Tel Aviv are the two large and important cities of Israel.1 Jerusalem, situated on the crest of the Judea mountains is the religiously sanctified and official capital of the state of Israel. Tel Aviv, situated on the shore of the Mediterranean, is the business and social metropolitan hub of Israeli society. The two cities are perceived in Israeli culture as representing two opposing political–cultural principles: Jerusalem is historical and holy—a probable prescription for cultural intolerance and political violence; Tel Aviv is contemporaneous and profane—a possible recipe for a thriving and hedonistic civil society. Such a perception will inform the first part of the essay. In its second part, a critical look at this perception will be offered. Critics contest the common depiction of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv as two antidotal poles and consider it disingenuous if not deceiving. They contend that the two cities are more alike than the common perception would lead one to believe, and that they form in fact a common Israeli system, with just a slight division of labor among them. The third part of the essay will expand beyond Jerusalem and Tel Aviv as such and will consider the larger context of Israeli political culture and especially the bifurcation between post-Zionism and neo-Zionism. The fourth part will offer concluding reflections on the role of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv as two perspectives or orientations in contemporary Israel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the distinctions between the different Zionist ideologies embedded in the architectural production of the 1930s by emphasizing the work of German Jewish architect Erich Mendelsohn in Palestine and on the Tel Aviv Chug in Israel. The author has contrasted the architectural position of Mendelsohn to that of the Tel Aviv Chug. She has emphasized that Chug succeeded in combining its initial plurality into a clear architectural message. The purpose of Mendelsohn to inform his architecture with Orientalist inspirations was part of the challenged posed to the leaders of the Yishuv by intellectuals of German origin. The author has suggested that these opposing positions originated from the early conceptual split between cultural and political Zionism.

The Israeli art field has been negotiating with the definition of Israeli-ness since its beginnings and more even today, as "transnationalism" has become not only a lived daily experience among migrants or an ideological approach toward identity but also a challenge to the Zionist-Hebrew identity that is imposed on "repatriated" Jews. Young artists who reached Israel from the Former Soviet Union (FSU) as children in the 1990s not only retained their mother tongue but also developed a hyphenated first-generation immigrant identity and a transnational state of mind that have found artistic expression in projects and exhibitions in recent years, such as Odessa–Tel Aviv (2017), Dreamland Never Found (2017), Pravda (2018), and others. Nicolas Bourriaud's botanical metaphor of the radicant, which insinuates successive or even "simultaneous en-rooting", seems to be close to the 1.5-generation experience. Following the transnational perspective and the intersectional approach (the "inter" being of ethnicity, gender, and class), the article examines, among others, photographic works of three women artists: Angelika Sher (born 1969 in Vilnius, Lithuania), Vera Vladimirsky (born 1984 in Kharkiv, Ukraine), and Sarah Kaminker (born 1987 in Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine). All three reached Israel in the 1990s, attended Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, and currently live and work in Tel Aviv or (in Kaminker's case) Haifa. The Zionist-oriented Israeli-ness of the Israeli art field is questioned in their works. Regardless of the different and peculiar themes and approaches that characterize each of these artists, their oeuvres touch on the senses of radicantity, strangeness, and displacement and show that, in the globalization discourse and routine transnational moving around, anonymous, generic, or hybrid likenesses become characteristics of what is called "home," "national identity," or "promised land." Therefore, it seems that under the influence of this young generation, the local field of art is moving toward a re-framing of its Israeli national identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]