WHITE CITY, BLACK CITY: Architecture and War in Tel Aviv and Jaffa: Ron Slate / on White City Black City (April 2015, On the Seawall: A Literary Website)

Monday, April 13, 2015

Ron Slate / on White City Black City (April 2015, On the Seawall: A Literary Website)

Israeli architects are a contentious lot. In July 2002, the Israeli Association of United Architects canceled its participation at the World Congress of Architecture in Berlin after the Israeli leadership rejected its own catalog for presenting a hostile view of settlements in the West Bank. The catalog was titled A Civilian Occupation: The Politics of Israeli Architecture. “But the Association is apolitical,” said its president. “Imagine if we did an exhibition praising the settlements.” Some 4,150 copies of the catalog were sequestered after 850 of them were spirited off by Eyal Eeizman, one of the two young architects who edited the banished catalog.
But the catalog was published soon after by Sharon Rotbard’s Tel Aviv-based Babel Publishers. The architect Zvi Efrat writes there that after 1948, Israel “put into practice one of the most comprehensive, controlled and efficient architectural experiments in the modern era … The pressing national task was providing temporary housing for the masses of new Jewish immigrants and settling the country’s borderlands, in order to stabilize the 1948 cease-fire lines, prevent territorial concessions and inhibit the return of Palestinian war refugees.”
Rotbard, also an architect and a university lecturer in Israel and India, continued sparring with the establishment by publishing White City Black City in 2005. It is an unsparing and taut critique of the Israeli use of space – and a blunt and bracing history of Jaffa and Tel Aviv. Ten years old and now available in Orit Gat’s brisk translation, it has lost none of its edge and relevance.
Rotbard begins with events that occurred a year after the Berlin debacle. In July 2003, UNESCO’s World Heritage Commission recommended Tel Aviv for its list of World Heritage Sites. Nine months later, the “White City” celebrated its new honor with a series of events and exhibits. Having established a corporate hub, Tel Aviv could claim globally significant assets and innovation — but what of its “heritage”? The city answered: consider our Bauhaus personality.
The White City has now swallowed up its shadow, the Black City of Jaffa just to the south. The two were once a hyphenated city, Tel Aviv-Jaffa. But according to Rotbard, Tel Aviv “conquered and subjugated Jaffa, emptied it of its population, liquidated whole neighborhoods and expunged public offices. One city turned the other upside down. And in doing so, Tel Aviv also laid war on Jaffa’s memory. This is a war which did not cease with the requisition of Jaffa or the exile of its Arab population in May 1948; it is one which continues unabated to this day.” The “Jaffa orange” may be Israel’s most recognizable product — but the Jaffa groves are gone. Oranges are grown everywhere but in Jaffa.
“It was written with anger,” he says of his book, “and the urge to bring justice to the city and to many of its people … to change the city just by telling the story in a different manner.” Where some see urban renewal, he sees confiscation and a deliberate erasure of cultural history. When the city’s tour guides describe the purity of the Bauhaus “style,” Rotbard finds a highly dubious architectural pedigree rooted in the belief of occidental superiority over the oriental. By detailing how Tel Aviv now uses Jaffa space, he persuasively suggests that its “blackness” is Israel’s own repressed psyche, “its dialectical negation.” His reasoning: only the one who isn’t white would so stubbornly try to prove that he is.
In a speech entitled “The Burden of Wilderness” delivered at the Jewish National Fund Conference of 1943, David Ben-Gurion named the two essential goals of Zionism. First, “the ingathering of the exiles” would provide safe harbor in a land considered to be the ancestral home of the Jews. Second, the future prime minister said Israelis would “rebuild the rubble of a ruined, abandoned country … that has remained in desolation for two thousand years.”
Five years later in 1948, it took the Irgun just a month to turn Jaffa into rubble and to send more than 100,000 Palestinians into exile, most fleeing south to Gaza. Having watched the Haganah take Haifa, the Irgun mortared the center of Jaffa and fought house to house against militias in Manshieh, the ancient Muslim neighborhood on the Mediterranean coast. According to Benny Morris’ account of the fighting in his book 1948, Ben-Gurion arrived in Jaffa two days after the city’s surrender to write in his diary, “I couldn’t understand: Why did the inhabitants leave?”
The first Jewish enclave of Jaffa, Neve Tzedek, was founded in 1887 through land purchase, though the Ottoman authorities restricted Jewish acquisition and even deported the Jews from Jaffa at the outset of the First World War. After the British eliminated those restrictions, Tel Aviv’s population grew from 2,100 in 1920 to more than 42,000 by the end of the decade. Meanwhile, the British themselves leveled a swath of land right down the middle of Jaffa, granted a separate township to Tel Aviv, and built basic infrastructure that ultimately served as a foundation for the new state of Israel. One of Zionisms most cherished tenets is that, unlike European colonialists, it sought to colonize the land, not the population. But in Rotbard's version, the Israelis merely completed the work and policies of British colonialists.
Rotbard’s narrative bristles with a Barthes-like sensitivity to signs; he specializes in the “punctum”that opens the visible to fresh perspective. For instance, a survey of the area shows that the Black City is actually the only area of greater Tel Aviv that evinces the internationalism claimed by the White City. Still, Jaffa (“a mute, deaf, and amnesiac city”) takes the brunt of Tel Aviv’s wrath:
“Everything unwanted in the White City is relegated to the Black City: all the inconveniences of metropolitan infrastructure, such as garbage dumps, sewage pipes, high voltage transformers, towing lots and overcrowded central bus stations; noise and air polluting factories and small industries; illegal establishments like brothels, casinos, and sex shops; unwelcoming and intimidating public institutions such as the police headquarters, jails, pathological institutes and methadone clinics; and finally, a complete ragtag cast of municipal outcasts and social pariahs — new immigrant, foreign workers, drug addicts and the homeless.”
Rotbard looks warily as well at other urban projects in the world such as the "wild urbanism" occurring in China. For him, the principle of equality of rights ("isonomy") entails the preservation of memory within the city since identity discovers itself in those places. When "modern utopias and ancient beliefs ... boil together with no precautions," tensions ramp up. As I write this, Vladimir Putin is leveling the city of Grozny as part of his "anti-terrorism" campaign.
In 1998, Artforum International devoted an issue to “The White Stuff” — featuring an essay by Homi Bhabha titled “The Political Aspects of Whiteness.” The director of Harvard’s Humanities Center, Bhabha writes, “The subversive move is to reveal within the very integuments on ‘whiteness’ the agonistic elements that make it true unsettled, disturbed form of authority that it is — the incommensurable ‘differences’ that it must surmount; the histories of trauma and terror it is must perpetrate and from which it must protect itself; the amnesia it imposes on itself; the violence it inflicts in the process of becoming a transparent and transcendent force of authority.”
This “move to reveal” is the passionate gesture at the uneasy heart of White City Black City.

http://www.ronslate.com/white_city_black_city_sharon_rotbard_mit_press_and_letters_palestine_vijay_prashad_ed_verso

"The history of Tel Aviv, presented for a moment as an architectural history, can be seen as a part of a wider process in which the physical shaping of Tel Aviv and its political and cultural construction are intertwined, and plays a decisive role in the construction of the case, the alibi, and the apologetics of the Jewish settlement across the country."
—White City, Black City

In 2004, the city of Tel Aviv was declared by UNESCO a World Heritage Site, an exemplar of modernism in architecture and town planning. Today, the Hebrew city of Tel Aviv gleams white against the desert sky, its Bauhaus-inspired architecture betraying few traces of what came before it: the Arab city of Jaffa.

In White City, Black City, the Israeli architect and author Sharon Rotbard offers two intertwining narratives, that of colonized and colonizer. It is also a story of a decades-long campaign of architectural and cultural historical revision that cast Tel Aviv as a modernist “white city” emerging fully formed from the dunes while ignoring its real foundation—the obliteration of Jaffa.

Rotbard shows that Tel Aviv was not, as a famous poem has it, built “from sea foam and clouds” but born in Jaffa and shaped according to its relation to Jaffa.
His account is not only about architecture but also about war, destruction, Zionist agendas, erasure, and the erasure of the erasure.

Rotbard tells how Tel Aviv has seen Jaffa as an inverted reflection of itself—not shining and white but nocturnal, criminal, dirty: a “black city.” Jaffa lost its language, its history, and its architecture; Tel Aviv constructed its creation myth. White City, Black City—hailed upon its publication in Israel as ”path-breaking,” “brilliant,” and “a masterpiece”—promises to become the central text on Tel Aviv.

Praises

"This is an important and fascinating expose through architecture, geography and history, of the rise of the Jewish city of Tel Aviv, the fabled ‘white city,’ and the degradation of its Arab neighbor, Jaffa, once the bride of the sea, into a chaotic, degenerated urban backwater. A sad but revealing history of how myths are forged and histories corrupted."

(Raja Shehadeh, author of Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape and winner of the Orwell Prize)

"Mr Rotbard chips away at the façade of his birthplace. He describes how Tel Aviv supplanted Jaffa’s Arab-owned orange groves, and goes on to explain how, in the violent birth of Israel in 1947-48, Jewish paramilitary fighters overpowered and subsequently largely levelled the city from which it had sprung. His tale of Tel Aviv’s growth from a Jaffa suburb founded in 1909 to a metropolis whose population grew 20-fold in the 1920s is gripping."

(The Economist)

"A superbly researched and exemplary architectural study ... If you want an explanation of the roots of the Israel-Palestine conflict – and of just how deep they go, right into the very foundations of the buildings – this book gives one of the most unusual and convincing accounts."

(Owen Hatherley, Guardian)

"Rotbard, ultimately, is neither impartial observer nor objective researcher. His writing is impassioned and emotive. He makes no secret of the fact that he is deeply invested in the subjects he writes about, particularly the neighborhoods of south Tel Aviv, where he lives. 'Whoever wants to change a city must first change its story,' he writes. And that is precisely what White City, Black City sets out to do."

(Jesse Fox, Haaretz)

"a path breaking and brilliant analysis that combines architecture, urban design, military strategy and general culture into an exhilarating war of streets and homes. If every city should have a book – one book -- this should be that of Tel Aviv, sitting on the same shelve as Koolhaas’ Delirious New York, Patrick kieller’s London and AbdouMaliq Simone’s Duala."

(Eyal Weizman, author of A Civilian Occupation: The Politics of Israeli Architecture, Hollow Land: Israel's Architecture of Occupation, FORENSIS)

"a challenging book that deserves to be read and argued over… Rotbard here slaughters an especially sacred cow: Tel Avivness… There are many books on architecture and even more books about history and politics: this book intertwines the two; it is well written"

(Tom Segev, Haaretz)

"a fundamental, fascinating and clever book on architecture in the service of politics".

(Adam Baruch, Maariv)

"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… one of the most radical texts published in Hebrew in recent years."

(Joanna Gonen, Time Out)

"a responsible, sharp, critical project, in which Rotbard reads the Zionist representations of Tel Aviv… written with a political and esthetical responsibility: not only in relation to his discoveries, but also in relation to the censored political story of the Tel Avivian landscape, that its false signs are freedom, secularism and progress. Rotbard demonstrates how the cultural imagination marks its narrative on the place, and more important from this, he draws a straight line between the fiction of 'the flourishing of wilderness' and the actual contemporary violence that is supported upon it."

(Omri Herzog, Haaretz)

"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'.”

(Michael Feige, Journal of Israeli History)

"Rotbard’s book is a masterpiece of critical essay writing. The book analyses the 'White City' discourse that has attended the city since the 1980s shaping both the city and its local and international image. Rotbard examines the political, urban, cultural and social contexts that gave rise to this image, and exposes its removal from reality.

Rotbard’s fascinating move transcends the narrow architectural discourse, offering a comprehensive cultural analysis of the ways in which communities produce a likeness of their city. Rotbard uncovers the various ‘black’ layers that Tel Aviv arose from, virtually all of which contradict the image of the white city rising from the sands. He deconstructs the conventional local cultural dichotomies regarding the Primitive Arab style vs the Modernist Judeo-European, and general cultural dichotomies between the Establishment and the counterculture."

(Ariella Azoulay, author of Death's Showcase: the power of image in contemporary democracy, The Civil Contract of Photography, From Palestine to Israel: A Photographic Record of Destruction and State Formation, 1947-1950, Civil Imagination: The Political Ontology of Photography)

"It is very easy to live somewhere and to assume that what one sees is what had always been. Especially in a place which so to speak lacks apparent history like Tel Aviv (in opposed to Jerusalem for example). Sharon Rotbard's book White City, Black City, looks at the white paint of Tel Aviv's buildings not as an esthetic artefact but as a covering and a concealing layer. One may compare this book to the scratch of a nail upon a white wall. It is spine-tingling as it may sound. What is exposed is a Pandora box of expropriation, expulsion, blackening of a city, urbicide. The dissapearance of Jaffa in Nahum Gutman's drawings; propaganda pop songs about Jaffa’s "the big zone"; architectural conservation projects; a museum which is half an Arabic house, half a modernist glass box; the "empty" dunes enabling to imagine a clean start; open lawns once a Jewish-Arabic neighborhood; the book slowly unveils a mosaic of stories that so many Tel Avivians would not want to hear but are so interesting to know. It is hard to imagine a home in Tel Aviv in which this book is not to be found, even if its mere existence would shake a bit its walls."

(Dror Burstein, Novelist, Ynet)