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Contradiction On The Mediterranean
From dunes to metropolis: Early settlers participate in a land lottery on the sand dunes north of Jaffa, in 1909, left. Above, an aerial view of Tel Aviv from Jaffa, downtown Tel Aviv today, where skyscrapers and cafés coexist. DUNES CREDIT: Avraham Soskin • DOWNTOWN CREDIT: Joshua Mitnick by Joshua mitnick Undaunted by the hubbub, locals encamped in sidewalk cafés leisurely sip coffee and read newspapers in the shade of the boulevard’s many trees. Just a century ago, almost on the same spot, dozens of Jewish families from Jaffa gathered in the sand dunes for a lottery of residential plots in what they hoped would be the birth of the first modern Jewish city. Today, the Rothschild District is a microcosm of Tel Aviv’s various identities. Its turn-of-the-20th-century mansions are a reminder of the founders who sought to build 
Then there are the modern skyscrapers with offices and luxury residences symbolizing Tel Aviv’s recent arrival as a world-class city, and the rising real estate prices that are making it a harder reach for average Israelis. It’s a realization of the vision of Akiva Ariyeh Weiss, who spearheaded the planning of Tel Aviv’s original neighborhood, Ahuzat Bayit, from the day he arrived in Jaffa in 1906 with his family from Poland. “In time, it will become the New York of the Land of Israel,” wrote Weiss, a devotee of Zionist founding father Theodore Herzl. “Tel Aviv has always been the true capital of the Zionist movement,” said Israeli historian Tom Segev, a longtime resident of Jerusalem. “Tel Aviv is the center of the ‘real’ Israel.” But Rothschild Boulevard also embodies the inherent tension created by Tel Aviv’s many faces. It is both the state’s unofficial capital and an enclave that sees itself as an open, global city at odds with the rest of the country that is more religiously and culturally conservative. At 16 Rothschild, tourist groups file into Israel’s Independence Hall, the former art museum and residence of Tel Aviv’s first mayor, where David Ben-Gurion declared the establishment of the state. Today, the musty exhibition hall seems as if it hasn’t changed in decades. Visitors listen to stories about how organizers of the May 1948 Declaration of Independence ceremony had to borrow seats from nearby cafés to accommodate hundreds of Tel Avivians who packed the hall for Israel’s founding moment. “I remember that the Arabs in the mosque used to fire on us going to kindergarten,” said Ze’ev Caspi, a 67-year-old city native. “I also remember the tanks parading on Israel’s first Independence Day, and Ben-Gurion speaking from [Independence Hall’s] rooftop.” Caspi sits with friends a few blocks down Rothschild Boulevard at the outdoor café Coffee Spot. Located at the corner of Mazeh Street, there is almost a permanent gathering at the tables and benches arrayed around the snack bar. It’s one of a handful of kiosks that have been renovated, breathing new life into Tel Aviv’s boulevards in the last decade. The café draws Tel Avivians who work in media and design, and the occasional celebrity. They are known as the “brancha,” or the connected crowd, and many of them become bored of the soap opera that is Israeli politics. The indifference is one element that has given Tel Aviv an image as aloof and cut off from the rest of the county. Many call it the “bubble,” but those in the know call it “ha’bitzah” — the swamp. “This is the heart of the swamp,” joked café owner Gil Nissim, who opened Coffee Spot 14 years ago, when the boulevard’s traffic island was a neglected stretch of sand. “But I don’t like to call it that. This is the heart of the city.” Yoni, a young freelance television producer explained what is meant by the swamp: “It means a place which is sticky, where everyone is in each other’s business. I’m talking about media people, cultural people and business people, but a small circle.” In 2006, when residents of northern Israel were sitting in bomb shelters during the Lebanon war, the media derided Tel Avivians for continuing to socialize in cafes as if everything was business as usual. Just last month, the cover of the daily newspaper Yediot Achronot showed bathers on the Tel Aviv beach during Holocaust Remembrance Day. Hanoch Marmary, a former editor at the Haaretz newspaper, said the general population of Israel has a love-hate relationship with its perception of Tel Aviv. “Tel Aviv is an icon, a dream, a concept. It symbolizes success, an open life, and hedonism,” Marmary said. “But it also raises feelings of jealously. On the one hand, you want to be part of it, and on the other, there’s condescension, fear, a recoiling, and jeering” of Tel Aviv. Even so, the vast majority of Israel’s professional class — except for government employees — has been drawn into Tel Aviv and a greater metropolis that comprises 2.5 million Israelis. Some 53 percent of Israeli college graduates and scientists are based in Tel Aviv and its suburbs. Nearly one in three physcians in specialized fields live in the city. Among artists, the figures are similar. While only 5 percent of the general population lives in the city proper (about 380,000), a third of the country’s architectural firms are in Tel Aviv. Of Israel’s super-rich — individuals worth more than $100 million — about 20 percent live in municipal Tel Aviv and 50 percent in the metropolitan area, according to Forbes magazine. “Today there is a tendency to refer to Tel Aviv as the bubble, as if it is not the real Israel,” said Segev. “Jerusalem is a city of words and ideas, and Tel Aviv is real life and action.” Of course there is an underside to Tel Aviv’s success. In the southern part of the city near the new central bus station, there’s a ghetto of tens of thousands of migrant workers; many of them work illegally in hard labor, cleaning, or as caregivers. Though the city has offered them some municipal services and their children study in Tel Aviv schools, they have only limited rights, live amid drugs, crime and prostitution, and face the threat of deportation. There’s also a gap between the affluent Ashkenazi neighborhoods in the north and the working-class districts in the south, which are populated by Middle Eastern Jews and Arabs. Last fall, Dov Khenin, a parliament member from the Israeli Communist party, made a strong challenge to Mayor Ron Huldai. Khenin argued that the city relies too heavily on private automobiles instead of mass transit. He also attacked the city’s failure to control rising rental prices. “Tel Aviv is becoming a turbo capitalist city,” he told Channel 10 in an interview during the election. “Young people can’t continue to live in the city. The apartments that are being built in the city are luxury apartments. Already there are more luxury apartments than there are rich people in Israel.” In the 1930s, the painter and author Nahum Gutman correctly predicted that Tel Aviv would become the entertainment capital of the country. About 50 years later Tel Aviv branded itself as “the city that never stops.” Today, a beehive of clubs, restaurants, art galleries, and theaters has gained it international attention. The culture and nightlife was resilient enough to outlast the spate of bombing attacks at the height of the recent Palestinian intifada — which was about the time that Time Out, the popular weekly arts and culture guide, launched a Tel Aviv edition in Hebrew. Today, Time Out’s offices are located on Ahad Ha’am Street, just a block from Rothschild Boulevard. Time Out’s editor, Itay Valdman, said that one of the critical elements that has shaped its identity is Israel’s small size. “We are a small country and we only have one major city,” he said. “That is what makes it so bohemian,” Valdman said. “All of the creative power of Israel comes here, not like in the U.S. where New York is the capital of the music scene, Los Angeles for film, and San Francisco is the gay center.” Valdman notes the irony that, despite the city’s dominant role creating pop culture and Israeli television shows, it doesn’t represent the rest of the country. “Tel Aviv is the only place in Israel that people aspire to live a life of normalcy,” he said. “Most Israelis hate Tel Aviv. They say, ‘Why are they partying all the time. Don’t they see what is happening around them?’ Tel Avivians shouldn’t need to apologize that we enjoy life or because we want peace. If you’re a right-wing extremist, you’re the one living in a bubble.”
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