South African Know-How and Israeli Facts of Life: the Planning of Afridar

Planning Perspectives

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South African ‘know-how’ and Israeli ‘facts of life’: the planning of Afridar, Ashkelon, 1949–1956

Ayala Levin

To cite this article: Ayala Levin (2017): South African ‘know-how’ and Israeli ‘facts of life’: the planning of Afridar, Ashkelon, 1949–1956, Planning Perspectives, DOI: 10.1080/02665433.2017.1389657 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/02665433.2017.1389657

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South African ‘know-how’ and Israeli ‘facts of life’: the planning of Afridar, Ashkelon, 1949–1956 Ayala Levin Department of Art History, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS In 1949, in the newly founded state of Israel, South African architects Norman Garden suburb; Hanson and Roy Kantorowich planned the city of Ashkelon and, within it, the neighbourhood unit; south- exclusive neighbourhood unit Afridar. Managed by the South African Jewish south transnational planning; Appeal, which initiated and funded the project, Afridar presented a radical model town; native township; apartheid exception to Israel’s centralized planning approach during that period. An early example of a semi-private settlement initiative for an ethnic and class- based enclave reserved for ‘Anglo-Saxon’ Jewish immigrants, it functioned as a ‘model town’ for the immigrant population from the Middle East and North Africa, which was housed by the government in the rest of the city of Ashkelon. Afridar’s enclave reproduced planning practices from South Africa, which had been coloured by race since the 1920s. Despite its exclusive image, it was modelled after progressive experiments in the design of Native Townships. Their main objective of such experiments was to improve the standards of housing of racially discriminated populations yet, in practice, they served as a tool to implement apartheid policies. This paper interrogates this ambivalence of social aspirations and complicity with state segregation practices through examining the translation of apartheid’s planning practices to the Israeli context, and the negotiations and conflicts this translation entailed.

Why not use South African know-how and patterns of thought in creating new cities, instead of building monotonous, repetitive and unattractive towns such as Lydda, Ramleh or the former Migdal.1 Philip Gillon (1956)

Apartheid’ should not be the essential feature of Israeli Planning.2‘ Roy Kantorowich (1956) On arrival in the city of Ashkelon on the southern coast of Israel, 14.5 kilometres north of the border with Gaza, the traveller who proceeds to the neighbourhood of Afridar is greeted by an unusual architectural ensemble in the Israeli urban landscape: a grouping of low-rise porticoed buildings, reminiscent of both an Italian piazza and a late nineteenth century colonial farmstead (Figure 1). These structures are embellished with rustic stone, on the one hand, and modern precast concrete, on the other. This is Afridar’s civic and commercial centre, situated at the edge of a green

CONTACT Ayala Levin [email protected] 1Philip Gillon, “Why Ashkelon?” The Zionist Record, February 10, 1956, 2, South Africa Rochlin Archives of the South Africa Jewish Board of Deputies (thereafter SARA) ARCH 503.1/2B. 2Kantorowich to Glikson, June 3, 1956, SARA ARCH 503.1/3/3. © 2017 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. 2 A. LEVIN

Figure 1. Dov Karmi and Jack Barnett, Afridar Civic and Commercial Centre, view of the portico and clock tower, 1954. Courtesy of Dov and Ram Karmi Archive. suburban neighbourhood. The neighbourhood’s detached and semi-detached houses are punctu- ated by window boxes and roofed with tiles. This eclectic ensemble was commissioned and con- structed in the early 1950s, as a ‘model town’ and the intended nucleus of the city of Ashkelon (Figure 2). An inscription in Afrikaans, English, and Hebrew, dating from 1961, reminds the visitor of the origins of this suburban enclave as a gift to the young state from the South African Jewish Appeal (Figures 3 and 4). Planned in the early 1950s by prominent South African architects Roy Kantorowich and Norman Hanson together with the younger Jack Barnett, the neighbourhood

Figure 2. Jack Barnett, Afridar Civic and Commercial Centre, perspective drawing, c. 1950. Courtesy of Adam Barnett. PLANNING PERSPECTIVES 3

Figure 3. Inscription in Afrikaans, Afridar Civic and Commercial Centre, contemporary view, photograph taken by the author. stood out in contrast to the predominant cheap pre-fabricated government construction of the time, and unsettled the almost exclusive preference for the modernist functionalist aesthetic in both housing and public buildings. Despite the South African planners’ ambition to create a ‘model town’ that would facilitate integration rather than segregation, this article argues that their planning techniques and cultural biases radically undermined this goal, not least because of the interests of the Israeli government. Among radical international circles, and in recent boycott campaigns, it has become commonplace to denounce Israel as an apartheid state. Political geographer Oren Yiftachel has coined the term ‘creeping apartheid’ to describe the ethno-spatial politics of the Israeli regime both within and outside the Green Line.3 However, alongside these structural analogies, the two regimes whose birthdates coincided in 1948 – Israel’s declaration of statehood came in the same year as the rise to power of the National Party in South Africa – were also entangled in concrete historical ways, partly due to South Africa’s large Jewish population. As is well known, Israel notoriously maintained diplomatic

3Yiftachel, “Between Colonialism and Ethnocracy.” 4 A. LEVIN

Figure 4. Inscription in English, Afridar Civic and Commercial Centre, contemporary view, photograph taken by the author. and commercial relations with South Africa during the apartheid regime: ones revolving mainly around nuclear cooperation.4 While that case of ‘knowledge transfer’ remains covert, this paper focuses on another earlier instance of direct transfer of expertise between the two countries at the pregnant moment of their consolidation – that is to say, knowledge transfer in the field of city planning. Although a unique phenomenon in the histories of Israel and South Africa, the planning history of Afridar offers a localized, microscopic view of the often-contradictory dynamics of the global circulation of segregationist practices.5 The transfer of ‘know-how’ evoked in the epigraph is characteristic of this period, when North- South importation of technical knowledge, including in the field of urban planning, was a normative component of decolonization and ‘development’. The opening of the development market, which up to this point had been controlled by the colonial powers, enabled new directions for the travel of knowledge and expertise beyond the North-South or core-periphery trajectory. Yet neither Israel, ‘a post-colonial colony’, to use intellectual historian Joseph Massad’s succinct definition, nor

4Polakow-Suransky, The Unspoken Alliance. 5Nightingale, Segregation, 10 and 14. PLANNING PERSPECTIVES 5

South Africa, a ‘colony of a special kind’, fit neatly into the North-South post-colonial divide.6 Orig- inating in settler-colonial societies, the planners of both states had already gained expertise in adapt- ing ‘Northern’ models to ‘Southern’ locales. The Jewish Appeal’s aid to Israel – framed in national terms as ‘South African know-how and patterns of thought’–can therefore be viewed as a case of South-South exchange, albeit of ‘a special kind’. This article argues that it is necessary to examine the exportation of urban planning techniques from South Africa to Israel within a framework that gives precedence to the unique local experiences that shaped these techniques in their ‘Southern’ settler-colonial context. While both the Israeli planners and their South Africa counterparts enjoyed similar access, although of varying degrees, to the post-war hegemonic centres of the discipline, that is, Britain and the USA, the planning concepts they shared were charged with particular social, economic, political, and ethnic or racial meanings. It is this tacit knowledge – a form of ‘embodied expertise’–that was translated from one context to another.7 One of these planning concepts was Clarence Perry’s neighbourhood unit, which by the mid-century had already gained considerable mileage in Abercrombie’s plan for London, where it functioned as the organizing planning unit, as well as in its application to non-western locales, such as Addis Ababa (1956) by Abercrombie himself, or by Albert Mayer and Otto Koenigsberger in India.8 As planning historians now emphasize, the exportation of urban models should be viewed simultaneously as importation, underscoring the local agency involved in this exchange as urban models were modified and adapted to new contexts.9 It is also agreed that some of these models, predominantly the garden city but also the neighbourhood unit, were useful in implementing racial and economic segregation both in the colonies and in their countries of origin, England and the USA, respectively.10 Taking place as it did between one peripheral node and another, the case of Afridar marks a new phase in this exchange, given that it was twice removed from the centre of knowledge production. This was therefore not an application of an ostensibly neutral technical model by North- ern ‘experts’ to ‘messy’ Southern realities, but a transfer from one ‘messy reality’ to another. Since no planning models are ever neutral, this case helps highlight their embeddedness in ‘messy realities’ in Northern as well as Southern contexts. Literary and cultural theorist Louise Bethlehem has recently proposed that apartheid may be recast ‘as an apparatus of transnational cultural production’, by tra- cing how ‘the movement of cultural agents, products or formations central to imaginaries within apartheid South Africa produces significant historiographic purchase over other geopolitically differentiated sites’.11 Using Afridar as a site of such ‘thick convergence’,12 I am interested in the (mis)- recognition of difference and sameness involved in this disciplinary translation, when the South African planners applied their expertise to the Israeli context. As a ‘model town’, Afridar encapsulates the tension between segregation and reform as practiced in garden suburbs in South Africa and Jewish colonization in Palestine from the early twentieth century onward. In both cases, in typical settler-colonial fashion, urban and residential welfare was promoted at the cost of unequal distribution of services and disparity in standards of living. Under Jewish colonization these initiatives catered exclusively to Jewish settlers, while in South Africa

6Massad, “The ‘Post-Colonial’ Colony.” 7Levin, “Beyond Global vs. Local.” 8Vidyarthi, “Reimagining the American Neighborhood Unit for India.” 9Nasr and Volait, “Introduction: Transporting Planning?” and Bigon, “Introduction: Garden Cities and Colonial Planning.” 10Vidyarthi, “Reimagining the American Neighborhood Unit for India,” 78–9 and Bigon, “Introduction: Garden Cities and Colonial Plan- ning,” 16–19. 11Bethlehem, “Apartheid – The Global Itinerary.” 12Ibid. 6 A. LEVIN they were extended to black urban poor, continuing earlier missionary attempts at reform.13 In 1938, the experiment in ‘Native Housing’ was adopted by a group of socialist-minded architecture stu- dents, including Roy Kantorowich, whose critical positions were endorsed by the older Norman Hanson. The concern with the betterment of black South Africans’ lives was part of the reformist climate of the 1940s, in response to social upheaval that swept the country.14 As Derek Japha has argued, ironically it was these socially conscious architectural and planning experiments that pre- pared the ground for the implementation of the apartheid regime’s policies of urban displacement of racialized populations.15 This article explores ‘South African know-how and patterns of thought’, as applied in Afridar, Ash- kelon, in the context of the discourse on town planning and housing during the years leading up to apartheid. Using the South African Jewish Appeal’s archives, it investigates the planning history of Afridar and the town of Ashkelon from the point of view of its South African commissioners and planners, hereby adding an important perspective to a subject formerly only treated from the point of view of the Israeli administration and planning institutions.16 This article articulates Afridar’s vision as conceived by the Jewish Appeal, its planners, and the Afridar Corporation’s managing director Henry (Yehezkel) Sonnabend, who would become Ashkelon’s first mayor. Their visions are examined vis-à-vis the interests of the Israeli state in respect to the site chosen, the projected character of the neighbourhood and its intended population, and its relationship with Greater Ashkelon, of which it was to form an exemplary part. As this article demonstrates, the main point of contention was the status of the occupied Arab town Majdal within the plan for Greater Ashkelon. Renamed Migdal-Gad and repopulated with Jewish immigrants who were predominantly from Middle Eastern countries, its growth presented a threat to the ‘model town’ as imagined by the South African planners.

A garden suburb or a development town? The history of Afridar began in 1949, when the South African Jewish Appeal decided to allocate a million pounds for the construction of immigrant housing in Israel, to help facilitate holocaust survivors’ integration into the young country’s social and economic life.17 Since housing was the Israeli government’s top priority, this initiative was duly welcomed by the Israeli state. To this end, the Appeal set up the Afridar Corporation in partnership with the housing company Amidar, which was established the same year by the Israeli government. The Appeal initially envisioned its contribution as a suburb on the outskirts of Haifa or Tel Aviv, both already well developed urban centres on the Israeli coast. The Jewish National Fund, the organization of world Jewry responsible for the management of land in Israel, first suggested that the initiative be implemented in Sarona, a former German colony in Tel Aviv. However, Minister of Labour Golda Meir reoriented the scheme propos- ing former Palestinian territories instead: the Palestinian village of Beit Mazmil (today’s Kiryat HaYovel) in west Jerusalem, and the Palestinian town of Majdal, located at a major crossroad near the border of Gaza.18 This reorientation away from existing urban centres was well aligned with the orientation of the government’s Planning Department, which sought to create new middle-sized towns that would

13Coetzer, Building Apartheid, 181–212 and Minkley, “Corpses Behind Screens.” 14Dubow, Apartheid, 1948–1994,11–12. 15Japha, “The Social Programme of the South African Modern Movement.” 16Golan, “From Majdal to Ashkelon” and Sharon, “To Build and Be Built,” 113–39. 17Sonnabend to Spitz, February 27, 1948, SARA, ARCH 503.1/1/1. 18General memorandum, June 28, 1954, SARA, ARCH 503.1/1/2. PLANNING PERSPECTIVES 7 direct incoming population away from existing urban centres to the rural hinterland.19 However, the first ‘new’ towns, which soon became known as development towns, were not created from scratch: many of them were founded upon Palestinian or mixed Palestinian-Jewish towns. This was also the case of Majdal, which appeared in the Department’s first published physical plan in its Hebraicized name Migdal-Gad (Figure 5). When the South African planners began working on the Afridar plan in 1949, Migdal-Gad consisted of 2400 Palestinians and 1000 Jews. After the 1948 war, under military rule, about 180 individuals belonging to Majdal’s remaining Palestinian population were forced out of their homes and concentrated in ‘the ghetto’, a territory fenced in by barbed-wire, before being transplanted en masse to Gaza. According to sociologist Smadar Sharon, the negotiations with the Jewish Appeal over the construction of a ‘model town’ may have been the deciding factor in the unusual decision to remove the remaining Palestinian population and transfer it outside of the Israeli borders.20 The government then resettled the now vacant structures with Jewish settlers, whose numbers increased to 3000 by January 1950.21 In the initial understanding of the South African planners, they were to plan the town of Ashkelon adjacent to Migdal-Gad.22 As Arieh Sharon, the prominent Bauhaus graduate who headed the Planning Department in its formative years, noted in the 1951 Physical Plan, Migdal-Gad’s location was favourable due to its rich agricultural resources, specifically its abundance of water, and the existing railroad that connected it to the north, south, and centre of the country.23 In addition to these economic advantages that contributed to the town’s relative prosperity under Ottoman rule, the South African delegation appreciated the green seashore landscape, which they compared to the landscape back home.24 Along with agriculture, the Appeal wished to develop a tourist industry based on the attractive beach and antiquities found nearby, as well as a large industrial zone. The prospect of constructing a fully planned ‘model town’ presented the Appeal with the opportunity to leave an indelible mark: living testimony to South African Jewry’s contribution to the building of the Jewish state. Accordingly, the Appeal made the initiative conditional upon appointing South African consultants chosen by the Appeal to undertake the town planning. Fortuitously, Nor- man Hanson, one of South Africa’s leading architects, known for his involvement in the Transvaal Group that introduced architectural modernism to 1930s Johannesburg, was a member of the Appeal’s board. Hanson brought in Roy Kantorowich, a younger architect, already well known as a town planner, and whom Hanson knew personally from the School of Architecture at the Univer- sity of the Witwatersrand. The two oversaw the planning, while other South African Jewish architects were involved in various stages of the project’s detailing. These included Harold Le Roith in Johannesburg, who reworked the housing schemes based on plans drawn by the Jewish Agency and Amidar in Israel; Avraham (Axel) Axelrod, who reworked these plans in an Afridar office attached to Amidar; Malkiel (Meilach) Kotlowitz, who had immigrated to Israel and worked in the office of the renowned modernist architect Dov Karmi; Jack Barnett, a young architect who, soon after joining Kantorowich’s office in Cape Town moved with his wife to Afridar as a resident architect, while working on its civic-commercial centre in Dov Karmi’s office; and Manfred Hermer, a Johannesburg-based architect who was involved in the design of a regional hospital in Ashkelon in collaboration with David Anatole Brutzkus, then the architect of the Israeli Ministry of Health.

19Sharon, Physical Planning in Israel. 20Sharon, “To Build and Be Built,” 121. 21Golan, “From Majdal to Ashkelon,” 170 and Cohen, “The Arabs of Majdal.” 22SARA, ARCH 503.1/1/1. 23Sharon, Physical Planning in Israel, 56. 24Groag and Berger, “What the Place Remembers,” 14. 8 A. LEVIN

Figure 5. Arieh Sharon, Map of Israel with projected New Towns, 1951, with marking by the author. Source: Sharon, Arieh. Physical Planning in Israel. Jerusalem: Government Printer, 1951 [in Hebrew]. PLANNING PERSPECTIVES 9

Another prominent Israeli architect and planner closely involved with the project was Hainz Rau, first as a planner in the government’s Planning Department, and later privately as Kantorowich’s local representative. Prior to the involvement of these professionals, the Appeal had negotiated with Amidar over the character of the suburb in question. While Amidar’s initial proposal for a suburb in Haifa or Tel Aviv was based on large apartment blocks of single room units, deliberations within the Appeal tended toward a variegated plan, consisting of both apartment buildings and detached houses. Some in the Appeal expressed concern that apartment buildings would rapidly deteriorate into slums while the Chairman of the Appeal confided his vision of an intervention having more of ‘a permanent nature than a utility scheme’. Even before the Jewish Appeal appointed Hanson and Kantoro- wich as Afridar-Ashkelon’s planning consultants, it was clear that the South African contribution would be a cohesive ensemble with a differentiated image (‘Kiryat Drom Afrika’) rather than a few scattered buildings; that the standard of housing would be exemplary, or at least far exceeding the construction standards practiced at the time in Israel; and that it would consist mainly of single- story detached or semi-detached houses as opposed to the general governmental preference for apartment buildings.25 The Women’s Section of the Appeal laid out a comprehensive list of rec- ommendations for the project from the size and external appearance of the houses, including attractive colours, window boxes and venetian blinds, to such specifications as built-in furniture, kitchen requirements, a central laundry facility, playground, kindergarten, day school and crèche, a coopera- tive store, communal hall, schools, the teaching of domestic science, workshops, a clinic, proper pavements, a hot water system, and provisions for parking and a tennis court, as well as stipulating that no laundry was to be hung out on balconies and that tenants would be obliged to keep their gardens in order.26 This list reveals the influence of interwar modernist housing reforms in Europe, as well as of a longstanding South African association of the aesthetics and etiquette identified with ‘Englishness’ and the colonial ‘civilizing mission’.27 These were especially influential in housing reforms in South Africa, for both white and non-white urban poor, and dictated the taste for detached housing and gardens as necessary for conducting a healthy family life. The preliminary plan, drawn up in 1949, prior to the planners’ first visit to the site, was informed by a similar aesthetic. Envisioning the appropriate site ‘in proximity to a river, forest or lakes’, the description discloses the planners utter lack of familiarity with the geographic and climatic features of the region.28 Despite this gap, the South African planners found a shared middle ground between their tastes and prerequisites, and the planning establishment in Israel. Choosing to implement the Anglo-American concept of the neighbourhood unit, the South African planners could accommodate many of the amenities outlined by the Appeal’s Women’s Section, while conforming to the Israeli government Planning Department’s preferred model for new towns. Envisioned originally by American planner Clarence Perry for ‘family life community’, the neighbourhood unit organized residential areas around community facilities such as schools, shops, and recreational facilities acces- sible to pedestrians.29 The Hanson-Kantorowich plan initially offered 3000–4000 housing units diversified according to income and separated into two neighbourhood units. The Plan eventually expanded to propose a city – Greater Ashkelon ‒ containing five such neighbourhood units, each housing 2500 people, with centrally located shopping centres and schools, and major transportation

25Housing Scheme in Israel, February 17, 1949, SARA ARCH 503.1/1/1. 26Housing Scheme in Israel, May 6, 1949, SARA ARCH 503.1/1/1. 27de Kock, Civilising Barbarians. 28Housing Unit for 3000–4000, SARA ARCH 503.1/1/1. 29Patricios, “The Neighborhood Concept.” 10 A. LEVIN

Figure 6. Arieh Sharon, Plan for Migdal-Gad - Ashkelon, 1951, with added key by the author. Source: Sharon, Arieh. Physical Planning in Israel. Jerusalem: Government Printer, 1951 [in Hebrew]. routes and greenbelts separating the units (Figures 6 and 7). By the time Sharon’s Physical Plan was published in 1951, the town was earmarked at 30,000 inhabitants. The change of scale across the different stages of the plan’s development is one indication of the process whereby the plan, ultimately, was conceived as part of a negotiation between the Jewish Appeal’s members, the South Afri- can planners, and the Israeli planning and housing institutions. The South African planners located the Afridar neighbourhood between the northern neighbourhood of Barne’a and the southern Antiquity Hill (renamed Shimshon), parallel to the coastal sand dunes to the west. Executed by the Afridar Cooperation, this neighbourhood was to be the apex of the Appeal’s philanthropic contribution and the one that would bear its stamp. Ultimately, this was also the only neighbourhood whose construction would fully adhere to the original South African plans, consisting of a hierarchical street system with internal roads and pedestrian paths enclosed by a ring road named South Africa Avenue (Figure 8). At the heart of the neighbourhood was a spa- cious park stretching from north to south, with shorter sections from east and west that connected the entire neighbourhood. Public institutions were located in the centre, adjacent to the park, while shops were located outside the ring road, where the neighbourhood met the connecting artery to the east and the road leading to the beach in the west. The first development phase included 223 semi- detached units, 24 two-storey buildings, and three three-storey apartment buildings, with a total capacity of 612 families. However, since only a small number of apartment buildings were ever PLANNING PERSPECTIVES 11

Figure 7. Roy Kantorowich and Norman Hanson, Plan for Greater Ashkelon, c. 1950. Courtesy of the Rochlin Archives of the South Africa Jewish Board of Deputies. built, and since they were relegated to the periphery, the overwhelming majority of detached or semi- detached housing determined the suburban character of the neighbourhood. Although the Israeli planners widely employed the neighbourhood unit, the unit in their con- ception consisted mainly of rationally laid low-rise apartment blocks, revealing the equally strong influence of central European modernism on their professional formation. Sharing their characteristics of low density, curvilinear layout, mixed housing types, access to public services, and a strict separation of uses, Afridar nonetheless differed in its emphasis on detached or semi-detached housing, which derived from the Appeal’s bias against apartment buildings, and its considerably smaller size compared to the government-planned neighbourhood units of 6000–10,000 residents.30 Another striking feature of the first development phase plan that set it apart from the neighbourhood units designed by the Israeli government’s Planning Department was the abundant green space that was to define the neighbourhood. If private plots ranging between 200 and 500 square metres constituted 48.5% of the neighbourhood, an extra 34% was reserved for green public space. As the planning unfolded, no less than 48% of the land was reserved for green public and private spaces, as

30Wilkof, “New Towns, New Nation,” 216–17. 12 A. LEVIN

Figure 8. Roy Kantorowich and Norman Hanson, Plan for Afridar, early 1950s. Courtesy of the Rochlin Archives of the South Africa Jewish Board of Deputies. compared to the mere 10% dedicated to it in Clarence Perry’s plans.31 This proportion of green space exceeded any other garden suburb then existent in Israel, or proposed for the new development towns. The insistence on low-density detached and semi-detached housing amidst ample greenery presented a luxurious suburban model unparalleled in contemporary public housing schemes in Israel.

Housing reform and town planning in apartheid South Africa The Jewish Appeal’s ambition to create a ‘model town’ should be considered in relation to two local precedents: the Jewish ‘model suburbs’ in Palestine, and the projects designed and built in South Africa for the ‘Native’ population and defined as ‘model locations’ or ‘model townships’, respectively. Both practices are reminiscent of colonial planning techniques that used hygienic considerations as a pretext for racial or ethnic segregation.32 The first was an exclusionary model for urban reform, where Jewish bourgeoisie backed by Zionist institutions established garden suburbs on the outskirts of existing Palestinian towns, gradually supplanting the function of the existing Palestinian cities and

31Ibid., 72. 32Bigon, “Introduction: Garden Cities and Colonial Planning,” 16–19 and King, “Exporting Planning,” 209–12. PLANNING PERSPECTIVES 13 marginalizing their populations.33 The South African ‘model townships’ were a paternalistic attempt to better the lives of racialized populations, and was premised on their displacement from desirable urban real estate. Growing out of experiments in urban reform for the white poor, until the National Party came to power in 1948and legislated the Group Areas Act in 1950, these attempts were implemented only sporadically by local authorities and industrial entrepreneurs.34 Afridar marks the uneasy transition from these private initiatives to centralized state planning in Israel and South Africa. In South Africa, this period is characterized by architects’ professional predicament, as the premium sphere where apartheid policies were implemented fell under their pur- view in the field of town planning. Although segregation was practiced as the norm long before the rise of apartheid, few, if any, of the architects and town planners could have predicted in the early 1950s its future consequences, both legally and spatially. Ironically, those architects who sought to influence social matters in the years leading to apartheid found a sympathetic ear with the apartheid government that supported their research into ‘native housing’, with the objective of making segregation cheaper.35 Roy Kantorowich and Norman Hanson who became unwitting accomplices of the apartheid regime exemplify the ambivalent position of socially minded South African architects. By the late 1930s, the South African debate over the betterment of living conditions of racialized populations took place within the most radical circles of the architectural profession in the country.36 Stimulated at Wits University in 1937by a student group project, the debate over ‘native’ housing and townships gained momentum with a conference on town planning organized by the Marxist student Kurt Jonas, a year later. Roy Kantorowich was a member of this group, and actively participated in this conference. By the beginning of the 1940s, mass housing and ‘native model townships’ headed the agenda of a newly politicized architectural circle. These architects rejected their predecessors’‒ the Transvaal Group – preoccupation with form and aesthetics. While acknowledging the constraints of existing material conditions, and of uncontested norms such as ‘native housing’, they called for architects to work relentlessly to amend these rather than to produce idealistic models that would do nothing but mask the underlying social problems.37 Endorsing this political turn, Norman Hanson, one of the Transvaal Group’s leading architects, mediated between the old and new guards, and facilitated continuity between the reform years and the formative years of apartheid by serving at various national committees which addressed these issues between 1944and 1963, including the National Housing Council, the National Housing and Planning Commission, and the National Building Research Institute.38 Kantorowich who was less involved in these public institutions, continued to act as consultant in South Africa even after taking a position in 1961, alongside Hanson, at the University of Manchester, England. Growing out of the discourses on social reform, the prevailing attitude among South African architects by the beginning of the 1950s was that architecture could serve as a panacea for South Afri- ca’s social ills, and alleviate the need for a violent revolution.39 Ample green spaces, single storey detached or semi-detached houses with private gardens, and even tennis and cricket courts – thus were black townships imagined well into the beginning of the 1950s. The values of Englishness,

33Zaidman and Kark, “Garden Cities in the Jewish Yishuv.” 34Mabin, “Comprehensive Segregation.” 35Davie, Poverty Knowledge in South Africa, 144–9. 36Japha, “The Social Programme of the South African Modern Movement,” 424–7 and le Roux, “The Congress as Architecture.” 37Jonas, “Introduction”; Jonas, “The Architect in the Social System”; Jonas, (no title; 1938); Kantorowich, “A Model Native Township for 20,000 Inhabitants” and Kantorowich, “The Modern Theorists of Planning.” 38Japha, “The Social Programme of the South African Modern Movement,” 427–31. 39For example, Colderwood, “Native Housing in South Africa” and Spence, “Experiment in Johannesburg.” 14 A. LEVIN as expressed in the Jewish Appeal’s Women’s Section’s expectation that Afridar’s residents would tend their gardens, was also a component of the civilizing mission in these reformist schemes. As is well known, a gaping chasm lay between this middle-class fantasy of ‘native’ suburbia as depicted in governmental publications and the reality of South African townships.40 Despite the architects’ best intentions, these townships were reduced to ‘labour reservoirs’ with only the most rudimentary provisions. They were deprived of the lively commercial, cultural, and social activity that had characterized mixed-race and mixed-use neighbourhoods such as Sophiatown in Johannesburg and Dis- trict Six in Cape Town.41 The planning of native townships thus embodied the professional impasse of socially minded South African architects in apartheid’s formative years. Kantorowich and Hanson were conscious of the dangers of segregation in the planning of Ash- kelon, and repeatedly warned against the possibility that Afridar would become an exclusive enclave:

It should not e.g. Do [sic] anything through the creation of physical barriers to hinder social intermin- gling and co-operation of the various ‘classes’. It should rather of its very form assist in breaking down any barriers that might exist. The township must be planned in such a way that the development of real communal life and of a civic consciousness becomes possible.42 By placing the word class in quotation marks, the planners revealed the ways in which they camou- ﬂaged ethnicity as economic disadvantage, as well as the challenges in translating their South African social-economic categories to Israel. In a less formal exchange, Kantorowich did not hesitate to explicitly condemn as apartheid Israeli architect Arthur Glikson’s plan to house immigrants in separate blocks according to the country of origin in the southern neighbourhood Shimshon.43 To Kantor- owich – by no means a Zionist as his fellow classmate Jonas was – the establishment of Israel presented an opportunity to plan a just society on a land ostensibly conceived of as a tabula rasa free from the discriminatory policies he met back home.

Model town; model citizens For the task of leading this ideal community, the Appeal appointed Henry Sonnabend, one of the originators of the initiative, as Afridar’s managing director. Sonnabend was a professor of sociology at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. He saw the building of a model town in Israel as both a utopian project and as a social experiment. In the preface to his book About Myself and Others, published shortly before his immigration to Israel, he wrote: ‘…the Jew is basically an optimist and sees on the far-off horizon the City Beautiful. Without this Messianic Idea [sic] his newly-won national existence in Israel would have little meaning’.44 During the Second World War Sonnabend specialized in psychological warfare, and he carried this knowledge into cultural- educational experiments he conducted at the Zonderwater camp for Italian prisoners of war in South Africa, and subsequently at the World Ort Foundation that provided technical training for Jews in the Diaspora.45 African tribes, Italian prisoners of war, and Jews – all were subject, albeit to varying degrees, to his ethnographic gaze and his ideas about social reform. From its inception, Sonnabend promoted a vibrant cultural and social life in the Afridar neighbourhood. This was reminiscent of the educational and cultural programme he devised in

40Housing, Clive Chipkin Collection, Witwatersrand University Architectural Library, Johannesburg. 41Chipkin, Johannesburg Transition, 128. 42Housing Unit for 3000–4000, SARA ARCH 503.1/1/1 43Kantorowich to Glikson, June 3, 1956, SARA ARCH 503.1/3/3. 44Sonnabend, About Myself and Others, preface. 45SARA Sonnabend 199. PLANNING PERSPECTIVES 15

Zonderwater, where he successfully led a literacy project, theatrical and operatic productions, and arts and crafts workshops. As he explained, ‘[o]ur work in Zonderwater was welfare in the true sense of the word, i.e. an organized attempt to foster self-help and promote self-confidence’.46 Simi- larly, he envisioned Afridar as a space that could facilitate the integration of holocaust survivors into Israeli society as productive members. However, the conditions at a military camp and the building of an actual city were completely different. While ‘the keynote life behind the barbed-wire of Zonder- water was to escape the cold and perilous present and return to the warmth and security of Paradise Lost’,47 in Afridar such an enclosure would contradict the planners’ aspiration to integrate the neighbourhood into the city for which it was intended to serve as a nucleus. While it is uncertain how many of Afridars’ first residents were holocaust survivors, there was a clear preference for populating Afridar with Jews of European descent. As a kind of unwritten rule, the government directed populations of European descent to Afridar, where they had to be approved by a selection committee. North African and Middle Eastern Jews were generally dis- patched en masse to Migdal-Gad and later to the southern neighbourhoods.48 Although modest in size, Afridar’s housing was considered high quality as compared to government housing. The 468 units were built according to one of three housing models, ranging in size from 48 to 56 square metres, on half dunam or one dunam plots. They were considerably larger than government public housing units whose median size was 35 square metres, but smaller than the median 70 square metres in private developments. Unlike the neighbouring Barne’a to the north, which was developed privately as a centre for the film industry, Afridar’s housing was subsidized, costing 2700–3000 Israeli Lira initially and reaching 4000 IL in 1952.49 Nonetheless, the limited number of houses and the selection process fostered an image of exclusivity, which was not always flatter- ing. In light of the clear preference for Anglo-Saxons, who in 1952 comprised about a third of Afridar’s population (though the majority of immigrants from English-speaking countries were not South African), some critical voices began accusing the project of creating an aristocracy within Israeli society.50 Despite his concerns over Afridar’s public image, Sonnabend continued to work with the Jewish Agency’s Anglo-Saxon department, to ‘strengthen the Anglo-Saxon nucleus of the community’.51 The government supported this ethnic exclusivity, as it saw Afridar as a means to attract human capital from the ‘developed countries’. If the problem in attracting immigrants from the English-speaking world was the low standards of living in Israel as compared to their countries of origin, then in Afridar they would find an approximate stand-in, with ample greenery, tennis and cricket courts, a theatre, and concert hall. The most important community feature Sonnabend envisioned for Afridar was the civic-commercial centre designed by Jack Barnett, a young architect hired by Kantorowich in Cape Town. Barnett introduced a double courtyard plan – one enclosed and the other open – as a new model for civic-commercial complexes in Israeli development towns (Figure 9). Simultaneously open and closed, the community centre faced the Afridar neighbourhood, but was not within it. Functioning as a transitional space between the rest of the town and the introverted neighbourhood, it was designed to host Afridar’s primary cultural and community activities, with the high school, clinic and synagogue located along the neighbourhood’s perimeter. While this location at the periphery

46Sonnabend, About Myself and Others, 113. 47Ibid., 110. 48Sharon, “To Build and Be Built,” 123–34 and Mann, “People’s House in Afridar,” 11. 49Sharon, “To Build and Be Built,” 121; Groag and Berger, “What the Place Remembers,” 15; Kallus and Law-Yone, “National Home/ Per- sonal Home,” 163 and Kark, “Hollywood in Ashkelon,” 263–77. 50Sonnabend, Report: October 20–25, 1952, SARA ARCH 503.1/2A/1. 51Ibid. 16 A. LEVIN

Figure 9. Dov Karmi and Jack Barnett, Afridar Civic and Commercial Centre, Plan, 1953. Courtesy of Dov and Ram Karmi Archive. was common in the planning of neighbourhood units, in this context, the civic-commercial double status being of Afridar but outside of it served a social-educational purpose. It functioned as a meeting point between Afridar’s residents and those of the rest of the city, similar to the commercial centre Kantorowich planned in the 1940s for the new town Vanderbijlpark in South Africa, which he conceived as a meeting point between races.52 This ambiguous position encapsulates the role Afridar’s community was supposed to play as the model society for the entire city. Ostensibly open to all other residents of Ashkelon to partici- pate in its community and cultural activities, the civic-commercial centre’s scale, orientation, and proximity to Afridar betrayed its social exclusiveness. If the houses, and their gardens, provided a standard of living, the civic-commercial centre afforded the desired cultural habitus of Afridar’s residents. Through their festivals, sports activities, and dances Afridar’s residents provided a public performance of the role of Afridar as a social model for the rest of Ashkelon’s population. Framed by the Roman and Byzantine antiquities of Ashkelon that were incorporated into the design of the centre, these performances were grounded firmly in the traditions of western civi- lization (Figure 10).

52Kantorowich, “Town Planning in South Africa,” 58. PLANNING PERSPECTIVES 17

Migdal-Gad: cesspool or lebensraum Despite Afridar’s planners’ firm disavowal of any form of exclusion, Afridar’s introverted plan, with its elevated standard of housing and public facilities suggested otherwise. As many have argued, from its very inception, the plan demarcated a clear class hierarchy, still very much in place today, between Afridar and Barne’a to its north, and the rest of the town. The two southern neighbourhoods of Anti- quity Hill (Shimshon) and Southern Hills (Shikun Darom, renamed Givat Zion) consisted of public housing for the poor immigrant population, predominantly from North African and Middle Eastern countries, many of them relocated from the ma’abarot (transit camps) the government established at the outskirts of Migdal-Gad in the early 1950s. However, the South African planners identified Ash- kelon’s problems of social and economic integration not in the social and economic disparities between the planned new neighbourhoods, but in the existing town of Migdal-Gad, which they perceived as the primary obstacle in the planning of Greater Ashkelon. The neighbouring units of Migdal-Gad and Afridar represent the two extremes of the Israeli city: the Levantine city and the modern western one.53 These two extremes encapsulate what architectural critic Sharon Rotbard has defined as the ‘White’ versus ‘Black’ city divisions that constitute the historical, as well as the present, social and economic geography of Tel Aviv.54 Yet the conditions for their formations differed greatly: while pre-state Tel Aviv grew piecemeal in as a Jewish antithesis to the neighbouring Jaffa, in the 1950s planners were forced to deal with the constraints of mass immigration and state-building tasks, and the challenge of concurrent planning and implementation.55 The urgency of housing the mass influx of immigrants demanded immediate actions that were not always synchronized with long-term plans. For this reason, Palestinian land, houses, shops, and infrastructure were reused to accommodate immigrants while long-term plans were being drafted.56 In effect, Majdal and other former Palestinian towns were not completely eliminated from Israeli space, and this precluded the possibility of erasing non-Jewish presence, past or present, from its urban landscape.57 Even neighbourhoods completely planned from scratch, such as Afridar, were not free from the scars of this recent history. Sited on the expropriated property of the village Al Jura, Afridar’s residents first enjoyed water from the wells dug by Palestinian peasants. When construction began in Afridar in December 1950, the supervising clerk was housed in one of the village houses.58 Even South Africa Avenue, the ring road that demarcated Afridar’s boundary, was paved with the stones from the village.59 ‘What is so sacred about the decaying bones of that collection of Arab junk?’ Kantorowich retorted following government planners’ decision to proceed in the development of Migdal- Gad.60 When the government ran out of Palestinian housing for the masses of immigrants, it con- structed temporary ones, the ma’abarot, on the outskirts of Migdal-Gad. As a matter of expediency, they were located near the existing infrastructure of Migdal-Gad. These decisions may have followed a development plan for Migdal-Gad-Ashkelon devised in the summer of 1949 by the Planning Department in parallel with the Jewish Appeal’s early involvement.61 Migdal-Gad’s rapid population growth led to its further expansion, while Afridar’s development, with its attention to high standards

53Groag and Berger, “What the Place Remembers,” 25. 54Rotbard, White City, Black City. 55Sharon, “Planners, the State, and the Shaping of National Space in the 1950s.” 56Allweil, “Israeli Housing and Nation Building,” 54–8. 57Leshem, “Taking Place.” 58Spitz, Memorandum, January 13, 1954, SARA ARCH 503.1/1/2. 59Mann, “People’s House in Afridar,” 66 and Groag and Berger, “What the Place Remembers,” 21. 60Kantorowich to Osrin, October 21, 1952, SARA ARCH 503.1/2A/1. 61Golan, “From Majdal to Ashkelon,” 173. 18 A. LEVIN

Figure 10. Dov Karmi and Jack Barnett, Afridar Civic and Commercial Centre, view of a woman framed by a dec- orative pool, Corinthian capital, and clock tower, 1954. Courtesy of Dov and Ram Karmi Archive. in construction and landscaping, lagged behind. In response to the population growth of Migdal- Gad, which Kantorowich reported grew from 1000 Jews and 1000–2000 Arabs in 1949 to approxi- mately 11,000 Jews in 1954,62 government planners drew up plans for more public housing, for the development of Migdal-Gad’s main commercial street, and located Ashkelon’s inter-city bus term- inal at its centre. All these developments pulled at the centre of gravity of Greater Ashkelon, whose commercial centre the South African planners located at a meeting point between Afridar, Migdal- Gad, and the southern neighbourhoods (Figure 7). Kantorowich saw the growing vitality of Migdal-Gad as sabotaging his plans for Greater Ashke- lon. For him the two were incompatible. His staunch rejection of the re-use of existing structures could not be further from the ‘realism’ he advocated in his polemic essay of 1942 on Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright’s planning utopias. Accusing Le Corbusier of ignoring the ‘objective social, economic and technical conditions existing in the U.S.S.R’ in his urban plan proposal for Moscow, Kantorowich argued emphatically that what was needed was a plan that took advantage of existing structures of the old regime.63 Given this resolute stance regarding the pre-revolutionary structures of Moscow, which he impassionedly promoted as incipient monuments to the people’s struggle, it seems strange that he adamantly rejected the reuse of existing structures in Migdal-Gad. This was not merely a case of discrepancy between theory and practice. The concrete historical contexts addressed by Kantorowich in these two cases reveal that he too was subject to ideological biases,

62Addenda to the Report of the Delegation to Israel, July 30, 1954, SARA 503.1/1/2. 63Kantorowich, “The Modern Theorists of Planning,” 12. PLANNING PERSPECTIVES 19 no less than the architects he criticized. He was unable to apply the same reasoning in Israel as in Moscow, not only because its remaining structures represented a nationalist rather than a socialist struggle – but also because the social transformation it entailed was invested in a different model of ideal subjecthood, that is, a Western-liberal model rather than a Middle Eastern one. Kantorowich refused to recognize Migdal as a ‘reality’: ‘Thinking of the matter again, I am ever less and less impressed of the “reality” of Migdal. The reality is not Migdal at all but only the population of Migdal ‒ a vastly different thing’.64 Similar to South African discourse, where the urban poor, usually black, were found responsible for the meagre conditions of their living, Kantorowich identified Migdal-Gad’s inhabitants as the problem.65 While Kantorowich never explicitly mentioned their cultural background or ethnicity as the cause, this can be inferred from the words of Philip Gillon, Afridar’s public relations officer, who linked the immigrants and black South Africans in a defence of refugee camps in Gaza: ‘The refugee camps are surprisingly clean, by no means as depressing as propaganda had made us expect. They are no worse – and no better – than our ma’a- barot or the African “locations” in South Africa’.66 Kantorowich resented the growth of Migdal- Gad’s population in numbers, which amounted to 6000 in 1952, compared to 100 families in Afridar, and their growing political power.67 He refused to recognize Migdal-Gad as a form of Israeli ‘third space’ composed of the relics of Palestinian urbanity and inhabited by Jews from North Africa and the Middle East.68 Migdal-Gad was not Moscow, where the socialist-minded planner could imagine the Soviet people as revolutionary subjects to whom the structures of the old regime posed no ideological threat. In Migdal-Gad the dangerous attachment, and resulting metonymy, between the inhabitants and ‘that collection of Arab junk’ was at stake. The Jewish immigrants felt too comfor- table, to Kantorowich’s dismay, in their Middle Eastern urban setting. An ‘[i]ll begotten offspring of an Arab cesspool’, is how Kantorowich depicted Migdal-Gad in one of the numerous incensed letters he sent to Israel.69 Once a thriving urban centre, it refused to die out naturally, as the South African planners had hoped, even after the last of its Palestinian population were forced to vacate and leave to Gaza in late 1950 (Figure 11).70 Despite the Israeli authorities’ intention Migdal-Gad did not become an ethnically purified space.71 On the contrary, the physical remains of the Palestinian town continued to thrive with the government-directed influx of Jewish immigrants who populated its expropriated structures and infused new life into its main market street. A ‘living reality’ in need of lebensraum (living space), as the Israeli planners put it, the life the population of Migdal-Gad breathed into the Palestinian town’s ‘decaying bones’ threatened to empty out the life out of the Greater Ashkelon. While the Palestinians could be removed from Greater Ashkelon’s territory, the ‘Arabness’ of the North African and Middle Eastern Jewish population could not be eradicated. According to Gillon, it was specifically this ‘Arabness’ that the South African planners offered to remedy. As he explained in 1956 to a Jewish South African audience:

And so the idea was first evolved to create a model township, to do away with some of the evils of many a place in Israel where streets are not zoned for commercial, industrial and residential purposes; where

64Kantorowich, Report to Afridar Board, Jan 2, 1954, SARA ARCH 503.1/2A/1. 65Minkley, “Corpses Behind Screens,” 204–6. 66Philip Gillon, “Ashkelon Diary: Everyone is Happy in Gaza,” The Zionist Record, 1956, SARA ARCH 503.1/2B. 67Sonnabend, Report August 31–September 6, 1952, SARA ARCH 503.1/2A/1. 68Yiftachel and Tzfadia, “Between Periphery and ‘Third Space’.” 69Kantorowich to Osrin, October 17, 1952, SARA ARCH 503.1/2/1. 70Cohen, “The Arabs of Majdal,” 191. 71Sharon, “To Build and Be Built,” 120. 20 A. LEVIN

Figure 11. Majdal market and view of the mosque, nitrate negative, photograph taken between 1934 and 1939, (original title: ‘Majdel village & its primitive weaving. Majdel market showing town mosque’). Source: American Colony (Jerusalem) Photo Department, G. Eric and Edith Matson Photograph Collection, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Online Catalogue, http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/mpc2010005353/PP/, accessed October 31, 2016.

peanuts and monkey-nut stalls, plus the display of all kinds of smelly eastern delicacies, adjoin city halls, synagogue and theatre buildings.72 Painting Israeli towns with a typical Orientalist gaze, he speciﬁcally mentioned the former Palesti- nian towns of Lydda, Ramleh, and Majdal. Gillon suggested employing ‘South African know-how and patterns of thought’ to counter their ‘monotonous, repetitive and unattractive’ character.73 Importantly, these former Palestinian towns were re-populated by Jewish immigrants who, with the exception of Migdal-Gad, shared them with the remaining Palestinian population. Rather than pursuing blunt authoritative acts such as the forced removal and ‘slum clearance’ exercised by the South African government, the planners attempted to take the life out of Majdal’s ‘decaying bones’ gradually, using professional planning techniques:

Ashkelon is one of the planned new towns in Israel. Migdal is a derelict Arab slum. All agree that Ash- kelon, not Migdal, is the town of the future, but there is apparently a feeling that the present appease- ment of Migdal’s desire for ‘lebensraum’ will not affect Ashkelon’s future. We cannot accept this viewpoint and state with conviction that the proposals now made (sic) for the enlargement, entrench- ment and revitalizing of Migdal will strangle Ashkelon as conceived by S.A. Jewry.74

72Philip Gillon, “Why Ashkelon?” The Zionist Record, February 10, 1956, 2, SARA ARCH 503.1/2B. 73Philip Gillon, “Letter to the Editor,” The South African Jewish Times, July 1956, SARA ARCH 503.1/2B. 74Hanson, Delimitation Proposal, September 15, 1952, SARA ARCH 503.1/3/1. PLANNING PERSPECTIVES 21

In this zero-sum game, the question was who would ‘strangle’ whom ﬁrst. The planning technique chosen for the task was encircling Migdal-Gad in a broad greenbelt that was supposed to limit its growth. While the greenbelt is one of the deﬁning characteristics of the neighbourhood unit, the one encircling Migdal-Gad was exceedingly disproportional in relation to the other neighbourhood units, whose green areas were spread more evenly within and around built areas, and become slightly wider only in proximity to hazards such as main transportation routes or industrial zones. Furthermore, unlike these green spaces, Migdal-Gad’s green area was not designated for recreational use, but for agriculture, and was even mis-categorized as a village in Sharon’s 1951 Physical Plan (see Figure 6). At the heart of the conflict between the South African planners and their Israeli government counterparts, or the ‘facts-of-life specialists’ as Kantorowich sardonically called them, was the very definition of this greenbelt as lebensraum. A highly charged term, remembered all too well as a key tenet of the Nationalist Socialist ideology of German expansion, lebensraum was also evoked in South African critical circles to condemn apartheid’s policies.75 In the Israeli context, the use of the term discloses the deep-seated ethnocentric logic embedded in Israeli planning institutions, whose objective was the Judaification of the territory.76 Hanson and Kantorowich responded by re-appropriating the term and applying it to the Greater Ashkelon plan:

The present condition of Migdal, physically, economically and socially cannot be looked upon as fixed and permanent and as a nucleus for the new town of Greater Ashkelon. Therefore ‘Lebensraum’ is not required for Migdal. The ‘Lebensraum’ is Greater Ashkelon, which will be developed in a planned way.77 For them, Migdal-Gad’s greenbelt represented a fixed boundary. In this they drew not only from professional standards, where its fixity was meant to prevent the effects of urban congestion and uncontrolled speculation, but also from its application in South Africa, where health and hygiene served as pretext for racial segregation, and the greenbelt functioned in practice as a ‘machine- gun belt’.78 The Israeli planners, on the other hand, interpreted the greenbelt as a frontier for building expansion following patterns of Jewish urban territorial expansion in the pre-state years, where the Jewish garden suburbs development via the speculative annexation of agricultural land was practiced as a norm.79 If in the pre-state period this practice was performed by private groups of Jewish bourgeoisie, after the establishment of the state, official planning institutions continued this practice on the expropriated Palestinian land.80 Following this pattern, it was assumed that the modern public housing provided by the government to immigrants would eradicate their ‘Arabness’ and ‘contain’ the remains of Majdal.81

Conclusion Cutting off Migdal-Gad from Greater Ashkelon would have resulted in two rival towns, and Migdal- Gad would have come out with the upper hand in this rivalry.82 Afridar’s management knew all too well that without Migdal-Gad’s strength in numbers as workers and consumers, Ashkelon would

75Nightingale, Segregation, 372 and 379. 76Golan, “Central Place Theory and Israeli Geography.” 77Hanson, Delimitation Proposal, September 15, 1952, SARA ARCH 503.1/3/1. 78Minkley, “Corpses Behind Screens,” 205–7; Bigon, “Introduction: Garden Cities and Colonial Planning,” 18–20; Japha, “The Social Pro- gramme of the South African Modern Movement,” 430 and Nightingale, Segregation, 378. 79Zaidman and Kark, “Garden Cities in the Jewish Yishuv of Palestine,” 60–2 and 74. 80Kallus and Law-Yone, “National Home/ Personal Home,” 166. 81Ibid., 161–5 and Leshem, “Taking Place,” 136–50. 82Kantorowich to Osrin, October 21, 1952, SARA ARCH 503.1/2A/1. 22 A. LEVIN become no more than a bedroom community, and would be separated from its economic base. When the Israeli government entertained the idea of separating the municipalities and allocating Migdal-Gad a large portion of the industrial zone, Afridar’s planners objected vehemently for the same reasons.83 Just in time for the planned unification of the municipalities in 1955, Afridar’s management completed the construction of 100 housing units in apartment blocks for Yuval-Gad (a cement pipe factory) workers, who were moved there from the ma’abarot to bolster Afridar’s strength in number.84 It also laid out a plan for the development of a fine mechanics industry in its vicinity, in order to attract highly skilled manpower. Concurrently, the government Housing Department began the construction of another 110 family units for purchase by veteran citizens, of which 16 were allocated for ‘experts from Western countries’, per the Minister of Housing’s request.85 As it soon turned out, the new construction exerted pressure on the water supply and sew- age system of Afridar. The hoped-for growth in numbers threatened to turn Afridar, literally, into a cesspool.86 True integration, the essence of the ideal community as programmed by Sonnabend and the planners, meant the sharing of resources. If the prime symbol of Afridar was its private and public gardens, these became a liability with integration and growth. As the architect Kotlowitz had forewarned at the planning stage, sustaining such landscaping was unfeasible in the local climate.87 Expenditures on the upkeep of these green spaces far exceeded the taxes collected from the residents.88 Yet adher- ence to the landscaping concepts was so strict that in 1954 between 8000 and 10,000 trees were planted.89 If gardening was initially perceived as a civic responsibility, with unification, Afridar tenants had to perform their civic duty by adhering to water restrictions. The price of integration was sharing with Israeli society its social, economic, and environmental challenges. Afridar planners and residents went from enjoying the abundance of wells previously owned by the Palestinians, while imagining an ideal society in a virgin land, to the harsh realities of accommodating to Israel’s limited resources. Afridar embodies the South African planners’ professional predicament: it was both a product of their reformist yet segregationist practices prior to the rise of apartheid, and a reaction to how these practices were instrumentalized by the apartheid state to congeal segregation, rather than to amelio- rate it. Their plan was informed simultaneously by their cultural biases, and by a fear of repeating apartheid’s spatial practices. They soon found out, however, that Israel could not offer a clean slate, even at the cost of the displacement of the Palestinian population from Migdal-Gad. Nor did it offer an easy way to bypass ethnic stereotypes, since these were promoted by the Israeli government itself. The government benefitted from the construction of a high standard neighbourhood for a designated ethnic population by an external agency. By directing Middle Eastern and North African Jews to Migdal-Gad and the southern neighbourhoods, Israel cemented this ethnic differen- tiation in concrete blocks, and clinched the town’s widening socio-economic gaps. While the state provided cheap mass housing for the majority of immigrants, it expected Afridar to function like the pre-state ‘model’ garden suburbs that gradually transformed their surroundings. Afridar’s impasse resulted from this assigned dual function – it served as an elevated ‘model’ for emulation,

83Ashkelon Report December 10–17, 1954; General Memorandum, 28 June 1954, SARA ARCH 503.1/1/2 and Sharon, “To Build and Be Built,” 138. 84Kantorowich, Report of Ashkelon to Afridar Board, January 2, 1954, SARA ARCH 503.1/1/2. 85Lurie, Report from the Ashkelon Council, March 16, 1956, SARA ARCH 503.1/3/3. 86SARA ARCH 503.1/3/3. 87Groag and Berger, “What the Place Remembers,” 15. 88Infeld, Memorandum on Ashkelon Project, 17/9/56 − 2/11/56, SARA ARCH 503.1/3/3. 89Ashkelon Council Press Release, September 22, 1955, SARA ARCH 503.1/1/2. PLANNING PERSPECTIVES 23 and yet was meant to integrate with the rest of the city. With the unification there were increasing attempts at integration, for example, by hosting children from Migdal-Gad in Afridar’s theatrical performances, or hosting families for dinner, which only resulted in the affirmation of Afridar’s ‘model’ status.90 Following Sonnabend’s premature death in 1956, Afridar’s control over the post-unification municipality did not endure. Facing the excessive costs of Ashkelon’s development, the Jewish Appeal began taking steps towards the dissolution of the Afridar Corporation. Philip Gillon, its public relations officer, reported to the concerned South African Jews that there was no reason to worry about the fate of this endeavour after unification, since Ashkelon’s inhabitants, ‘particularly the masses in the Ma’abarot’ wanted the ‘great sociological experiment’ to continue.91 However, he and his family moved out to Jerusalem shortly thereafter.92 It seems that the South African representative signed up only for the ‘model’ part of the experiment, leaving ‘integration’ to others.

Acknowledgements I am grateful to Naomi Naomi Musiker of the South African Rochlin Archives of the South Africa Jewish Board of Deputies in Johannesburg, and Janie Johnson of the Wits architectural library for helping me navigating their collections. I am indebted to Rivka Karmi, Ofer Idan, Edith Mann, Shmuel Groag, Smadar Sharon, Eitan Karol, and Giora Shafir for generously sharing their unpublished manuscripts or collections. I am especially grateful to Louise Bethlehem’s enthusiastic and relentless support throughout this research, and to her and Karin Berkman’s editorial assistance.

Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Funding The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007-2013)/ERC Grant Agreement no. 615564.

Notes on contributor Ayala Levin’s research is concerned with north-south and south-south architectural knowledge exchange. She is currently completing a book manuscript on the export of Israeli architectural and planning models to Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Ethiopia, and the Ivory Coast in the 1960–1970s.

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