personal memories revolutionary states and indian ocean migrations

adopted the modernist discursive
strategy vis-à-vis Jaffa of Jewish
cleanliness versus native urban squalor,
even though many of them were more
cognizant of the presence of (and the
need to cooperate with) Palestinians in
Palestine than agriculturalist Zionists.
Chapter Four analyses the
relations between Arabs, both Muslims
and Christians, and Jews through everintensifying
labor disputes during the
Mandate period and ends, somewhat
achronologically, with the fateful May
1921 clashes between a group of
rampant Jewish Marxists and Jaffan
residents. The deaths of forty Jews and
the looted shops in the mixed, well-todo
neighborhoods of Manshiyya, Neve
Shalom and `Ajami led to the
administrative segregation of the two
towns. Manshiyya in particular became
both the connecting piece and the
Green Line along which, sporadically,
violence flared up between Palestinians
and Zionists. This northern most part
of Jaffa had already been identified as a
strategic urban location by a late
Ottoman governor. The Hassan Bey
Waqf/Mosque, in the words of Jaffa’s
last mayor, Yusuf Heykal, was an
effective bulwark against Tel Aviv’s
southward expansion. (73-4)
These early chapters are based
on a wide variety of archival sources
including Israeli state, university, and
Tel Aviv municipal archives; Hebrew
and Arabic newspapers; Jaffa shari`a
court records; and memoirs as well as
French and British consular
correspondence (not, however, as
suggested, Ottoman archives). In
Chapter Five LeVine returns to the
foundational myth of Tel Aviv built on
sand. He does so in a systematic
reading of literary sources on Jaffa and
Tel Aviv which brings out the emotional
attachment to the capitals of the two
competing nationalist movements. Far
from a level playing field, Arabic
literature about Jaffa – newspaper
articles, cartoons and poetry – is about
disappearance and loss, while Tel Aviv,
http://web.mit.edu/cis/www/mitejmes/
97
“the White City,” is about the triumph
of Jewish culture over Palestinian
nature.
Chapter Six is very much the
centerpiece of the book and deals with
the complex intersections between
urban planning, architectural aesthetics,
and national identity. Early Zionist
planning discourse was ideologically
modernist and drew self-perception
from its difference to Jaffa’s “traditional”
urban fabric even as Jewish architects
used local designs and construction
techniques, and even though Jaffan
patricians themselves built modernist
residences at the same time. LeVine
identifies two more “cracks” in the
Zionist edifice of architectural ideology:
Tel Aviv emerged not just as the
negation of Jaffa but also its thriving
Jewish neighborhoods, and – in the
words of Arthur Ruppin – it would
“present the most important step
toward the economic conquest of Jaffa
by the Jews.” (p. 157). Long before
Jaffa was forcibly annexed by the Tel
Aviv municipality in 1948, then, the two
cities constituted a single, but dual city
tied together by colonial appropriations.
Chapter Seven is the most
significant contribution of this book to
the debate of Zionism as colonialism,
perhaps because it leaves the
representational and discursive level to
examine the impact of Zionism’s
ideological commitment to conquer
Jaffa on Palestinian land tenure.
Conventional wisdom in Israel is that
Palestinian land was either purchased
from absentee landlords and peasants
above the market price, or it was rural
wasteland inherited from Ottoman
times. LeVine shows that invidious
manipulations of the existing land laws
by the British Mandate authority
facilitated the urban expansion of Tel
Aviv long before Israeli “transfer-asethnic-cleansing”
during and after the
1948 War. 1 Ottoman land definitions
1 For a recent reflection on Israeli transferas-ethnic-cleansing
policies, see Robert