Chapter 7 Tel Aviv-Jaffa
1 Introduction
Tel Aviv-Jaffa is the second city of Israel, located on the Mediterranean coast- line. It is the nation’s financial center and technology hub; it is also the third- largest urban economy in the Middle East after Abu Dhabi and Kuwait City (Brookings Institution 2014). The city receives around three million tourists and visitors annually. It has been a long way since Tel Aviv was founded in 1909 by a few dozens of Jewish immigrants on the outskirts of the ancient port city of Jaffa, then mostly populated by Arabs. The first neighborhoods had been established in 1886 (Elkayam 1990) and new quarters made their appearance outside Jaffa in the following years. On 11 April 1909, 66 Jewish families gathered on a sand dune to parcel out the land. This was the official date of the establishment of Tel Aviv. By 1914, Tel Aviv had grown to more than one square kilometer. The town rapidly became an attraction for newcomers. These were the years of the British Mandate and the number of those immigrants – from Poland and Ger- many mainly – increased all along the 1930s, propelled by the world economic crisis of 1929 and the rise to power of Nazism in Germany in 1993. As a conse- quence, frictions intensified between Arabs and Jews in Palestine1 but did little to prevent Tel Aviv from growing (Glass 2002). In 1923, Tel Aviv was the first town to be wired to electricity in the country, and it was granted municipal status in 1934. By 1937 it had grown to 150,000 inhabitants, compared to Jaffa’s 69,000 residents. New tensions during the 1936–1939 Arab Revolt led to the building of a harbor on the shore of Tel Aviv.
1 The 1936–1939 Arab revolt was an uprising by Palestinian Arabs against the British admin- istration of the Mandate, demanding Arab independence and the end of the policy of free Jewish immigration and land purchases aiming at the establishing of a Jewish National Home, in accordance with the declared goal of the Mandate (Kelly 2017). The dissent initi- ated by the call of Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the Jerusalem Grand Mufti, on May 16 1996, for a general strike in reaction to the growing Jewish economic development and the increas- ing Jewish immigration. The strike lasted from April to October 1936. For one year, the revolt consisted of political protest. The second year was marked by violence and the ex- pansion of a resistance movement against British forces. At this phase, the rebellion was met with robust moves of the British Army and the Police Force. The Arab revolt was fi- nally defeated and its leader was forced into exile and eventually to join Berlin and the Nazi regime.
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German Jewish architects, followers of the Bauhaus school, came to Pales- tine at that epoch and adapted their models to local conditions. When Israel declared its independence on 14 May 1948, the city’s population was more than 200,000. The city hosted the temporary government of the State until it relocat- ed to Jerusalem in December 1949. After the government unified Jaffa’s neigh- borhoods with Tel Aviv, it renamed the city Tel Aviv-Jaffa – though the use of the names of Tel Aviv and Jaffa remained current practice to designate the different areas. In the 1960s, the country's first high-rises were erected, while gentrification began to expand into old neighborhoods of southern Tel Aviv. Ever since, skyscrapers and high-tech office buildings have multiplied across the city and surrounding towns (Ramat Gan, Herzliya and others). In 2013, Tel Aviv-Jaffa’s population numbered 432,892 but Greater Tel Aviv – that is, when including surrounding towns and settlements – has a population of about one million and a half (icbs 2013). Today it is a world-city of culture, media, technology and science (Azaryahu and Troen 2012). It is also a popular tourist destination, renowned for its beachfront and nightlife. The large major- ity of the inhabitants are Israeli-born Jews but their origins are numberless (Weill-Rochant 2008). Muslim and Christian Arabs reside mainly in the old city of Jaffa that is now a part of Tel Aviv-Jaffa, and in nearby villages. Moreover, thousands of migrant workers from many origins found lodgings in Southern Tel Aviv and Jaffa (Kipnis 2001).2
2 Since 2009 Tel Aviv-Jaffa’s population has grown at an annual rate of 0.5 percent (icbs 2009). According to some estimates, about 50,000 unregistered African and Asian foreign workers live in the city (Migration News 2017). The average income in the city is 20% above the na- tional average. Tel Aviv-Jaffa has 544 active synagogues and several mosques in the southern part of the city (Jaffa proper). In 2008, a center for secular Jewish studies and a secular ye- shiva (academy for the study of the Holy Scriptures) opened in the city (Baruch 2009). The number of churches has grown to accommodate the religious needs of diplomats and foreign workers. The Jewish population consists of the descendants of immigrants from all parts of the world, including Ashkenazi Jews from Europe, North America, South America, Australia and South Africa, as well as Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews from Southern Europe, North Africa, India, Central Asia, West Asia, and the Arabian Peninsula. There are also sizable numbers of Ethiopian Jews. Jews of all backgrounds form 92% of the population, and Muslims and Arab Christians make up 4 percent; the remainder belong to other groups. In addition to Muslim and Arab Christian minorities, several hundred Armenian Christians reside in the city as well as some Christian newcomers from the former Soviet Union who immigrated to Israel with Jewish spouses and relatives. In recent years, Tel Aviv-Jaffa has received many non-Jewish migrants from Asia and Africa, students, foreign workers (documented and undocumented) and refugees. There are many economic migrants and refugees from African countries, pri- marily Eritrea and Sudan (Mitnick 2012). From the viewpoint of its economy, Tel Aviv-Jaffa has been ranked as the twenty-fifth most important financial center in the world (Sedghi 2015). It was built on sand dunes in an area unsuitable for farming. Today, it constitutes a hub of businesses and scientific research. Economic activities account for 17 percent of the gdp