Many Tel-Avivians like to regard themselves as detached from other parts of the country, as a kind of citizens of a state within a state. According to this narrative that they construct, Israel is a state built on expulsion, theft and blood, but Tel Aviv is a city built on pure and empty dunes, a city of openness, cosmopolitanism and sane secularism.
Sharon Rotbard’s excellent book reveals the many lies hiding behind this narrative and behind the Myth of the “White City” that had emerged from the dunes and built according the “Bauhaus Style”. The first half of the book unfold the layers of the white paint that covers the dark history of Tel Aviv. The other half writes the erased history of the “Black City” – Jaffa and the southern and eastern quarters of Tel Aviv.
“White City, Black City” is not a book about architecture. It is a political text written in a beautiful clear language, under the cover of a book on architecture. After all, architecture is the outline of the space that surrounds us, and therefore it is not possible to detach it from the culture and the politics of this space.
Rotbard, who is an architect, shows how the narrative of the white city served to establish the moral alibi of the Zionist settlement in Tel Aviv and to strengthen the white monopoly on the Israeli identity. The white city from the legends became the capital of “Good Old Eretz-Israel”, a city that washes its hands, in contrast to the conquering dirty state of Israel. As with a hammer, Rotbard smashes the weak foundations of the Tel Avivian urban legend.
In the first part, he reveals the lies behind the Bauhaus story that the city inhabitants treasure so much – this story brought UNESCO to the decision to include Tel Aviv in the World Heritage Sites list. But the more important part of the book is the second, that tells the erased history of Jaffa and the southern neighborhoods of Tel Aviv - the Black City, dismantled systematically. In early texts that Rotbard published he called this process “An Anatomy of Urbicide”. The Black City is everything that the White City’s citizens do not wish to be. The borderline between the two cities is marked in many ways: urban agendas, investments in infrastructure, gardening and cleaning, the trajectory of landing in the Ben-Gurion airport, etc.
To the Black City is directed all the things that the citizens of the White City do not wish to see: sewage pipes, garbage dumps, central bus stations, industry, brothels, casinos, and any kind of marginal human existence – immigrants, homeless people, drug addicts.
Rotbard claims that in fact, the Black City is the most colorful, diverse and cosmopolitan city in Israel. Rotbard tells the expulsion of the Jaffa inhabitants and the destruction of the city in the following years – and shows how this repeats itself with the expulsion of work immigrants from Neve Shaanan district and the destruction of Rafah in the "Rainbow" operation. The white myth of Tel Aviv tries to make us forget that Tel Aviv had violently exterminated the flourishing Jaffa in order to establish itself; that the White City shaped Jaffa as a Black City of crime, dirt and violence.
It is this forgetting that Rotbard’s book tries to combat, by claiming that the reparation of the injustices caused by Zionism and the stop of the occupation should first be implemented in Jaffa.
This is one of the most radical texts published in Hebrew in recent years.
