conquest through town planning: the case of tel aviv, 1921-48

Conquest Through Town Planning: The Case of Tel Aviv, 1921-48Author(s): Mark LeVineSource: Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 27, No. 4 (Summer, 1998), pp. 36-52Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the Institute for Palestine StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2538129 .

Accessed: 05/12/2014 07:35

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

University of California Press and Institute for Palestine Studies are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize,preserve and extend access to Journal of Palestine Studies.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 128.235.251.161 on Fri, 5 Dec 2014 07:35:48 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ucal

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=palstud

http://www.jstor.org/stable/2538129?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


CONQUEST THROUGH TowN N PLANNING: THE CASE OF

TEL AVIV, 1921-48

MARK LEVINE

The role of the discourses of town planning and development played an important role in the Zionist leadership's attempts to expand its urban territorial base, nowhere more obviously than in TelAviv. This article examines the land and town planning legislation introduced by the Mandate, how the rapidly growing Municipality of Tel Aviv used this legislation to annex lands from the surrounding Arab villages, and the local Palestinian population's understanding of and resistance to the Zionist-inspired urbanization of the region.

IF THE PAST FIFTEEN YEARS HAVE WITNESSED A REVOLUTION in the historiography of modern Palestine/Israel, the dynamics of urbanization during the pre- 1948 period, particularly in the region of Jaffa and Tel Aviv, have remained a neglected area of scholarship.1 This article attempts to address this lacuna. Specifically, it examines the role played by the discourse of town planning and development in the drive by Zionist/Tel Aviv leaders to expand the territorial limits of the city-a discourse which the Jewish leadership and the Brit- ish Mandatory government continued to share despite increasing political differences and in which Jaffa and its Arab population had little hope of par- ticipating other than as the object of development. It is my contention that the discursive "disappearance" of Jaffa and the half dozen Arab villages to its east and north into the "sands" out of which Tel Aviv was born helped bring about the very real disappearance of these places and their populations during the 1948 war.

LAND TENURE IN LATE OTTOMAN AND MANDATE PALESTINE

Underlying both the Zionist and British discourses on development in Palestine was the modernizing view shared by all colonial-national projects-a view that frequently entailed developing the local population off their land.2 The importance of this shared Zionist-British discourse is clearly evident in the ability of the Tel Aviv leadership to use British land and town planning legislation to gain control of large swaths of land from neighboring Arab villages.

MARK LEVINE is a dean's dissertation fellow at the Department of Middle Eastern Studies and the International Center for Advanced Studies at New York University.

Journal of Palestine Studies XKVII, no. 4 (Summer 1998), pp. 36-52.



CONQUEST THROUGH TOwN PLANNING 37

British land law in Palestine was based on the Ottoman Land Law of 1858, which enumerated six classes of land-mulk, miri, waqf, mawat, mahlul, and matruka.3 The latter three land categories are of particular importance for this essay because they referred to land that was unused or empty, and thus most easily convertible into urban land, which was more easily purchased and developed by Jews.

Mawat lands were marginal agricultural lands not held by title deed and situated far from inhabited areas. As Stein points out, prior to the Mawat Land Ordinance of 1921, it was possible to cultivate and gain title to mawat lands by paying a tax on the unimproved value of the land. Many Arab cultivators took advantage of this provision during the Ottoman period, and numerous towns and villages were extended and enlarged in this way. However, the British wanted to retain full control of as much state land as possible, and the Mawat Land Ordinance made it an offense to cultivate mawat land.4 The new understanding of mawat land as being "waste" or "barren" instead of the traditional emphasis on its unclaimed status and distance from built-up areas created the perfect tabula rasa on which to build a modern European city such as envisioned by the founders of Tel Aviv, for whom the legend of Tel Aviv's "birth out of the sands" attained the level of Ur-myth. The fact that under the new legislation, such "vacant land .. . cannot be possessed except by allocation from the State"5 made it all the easier to transfer it to those thought capable of "developing" it.

Mahlul or state land was land that reverted to government control if left uncultivated for three years. Similar to mawat land, mahlul land could be redeemed (until 1921) by the holder of usufruct rights upon payment of a tax. But here, too, the British reinterpreted the law so that the high commissioner could declare mahlul land to be "Public Land" and thus permanently at the disposal of the state to allocate as it deemed appropriate.

Matruka land, or public or communal lands such as roads or pastures, were especially important in the Jaffa-Tel Aviv region, where at least three villages had semisedentary bedouin populations. It was prohibited for anyone other than the village to which the land belonged to encroach on, cultivate, or plow matruka land, and ownership was not transferable during the Ottoman period.6 During the Mandate period there were several struggles to make the law unambiguous with regard to the high commissioner's power to change the categorization of matruka land; in 1935, for example, Zionists stated that the law as it stood "cause[d] great inconvenience and is an ob- struction to the proper development of the country."7 The Arabs, on the other hand, lobbied against the high commissioner's having such power because they knew that Arab cultivators in most cases would not have the funds to develop the matruka land that could be made thus available for "reclamation," the assumption being that "the Jews would be allowed to buy up and develop land which is impossible for them to obtain under the present law."8



38 JOURNAL OF PALESTINE STUDIES

Thus, under British rule, the categories of mawat, mahlul, and matruka were brought under tighter control, becoming de facto, if not de jure, state land. The old system whereby villages would bring marginal land into use when needed and leave it fallow during other times was lost in the rigid new interpretation of land "reclamation."9 What makes these transformations so important is that traditionally "all land situated within the boundaries of towns and villages [was] treated as mulk [private] . . . it matters not whether the land is cultivated or not."10 While only the high commissioner had the power11 to convert urban state land into mulk land, the author of the semiof- ficial Land Law in Palestine describes the process as usually being "auto- matic" with the extension of urban boundaries.12

In sum, while the British sought to give Ottoman Land Law the appear- ance of being a body of immutable rules and procedures, land law during the Mandate period was in actuality "a contested domain, continually being created and re-created pending the requirements and assertions of the par- ticipants in particular historical situations."13 In fact, British officials often had trouble finding copies of the original Ottoman laws, especially in Eng- lish, and until the late 1920s no one had the knowledge needed to compose an authoritative English digest of Ottoman Land Law. Thus the very founda- tion of Mandate Land Law was literally copies of copies, or translations of translations,14 of Ottoman laws.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF TowN PLANNING LEGISLATION AND THE

GROWTH OF TEL Aviv

Along with the "codification" of the country's land tenure system, the town planning legislation enacted under the Mandate had a significant im- pact on the development of the Jaffa-Tel Aviv region. During the first three years of their rule, tlle British prohibited all transfers of immovable property. Then, in 1920, they enacted a Land Transfer Ordinance, with two main objectives: (1) to stimulate the economic growth and capital investment that accompanied land "development" and (2) to regulate the purchase of land so as to prevent speculation and to protect small landowners and tenants from eviction. The ordinance's restrictions that were to assure the latter aim, however, were removed, one by one, during the following decade.15

In 1928, a Land Settlement Ordinance was enacted, and in 1930 existing town planning ordinances were consolidated so as to deal with the increasing importance of the "land question" in the wake of the 1929 violence. Vari- ous commissions of inquiry found Arab discontent arising from Jewish land purchases and Arab displacement from the lands they had tilled to be a ma- jor cause of the violence, and the four resulting documents-the Shaw Com- mission report, the Passfield White Paper of 1930, and the Hope-Simpson and the French reports of 1931-all recommended severely limiting future Jewish immigration and land purchases to address the problem.



CONQUEST THROUGH TowN PLANNING 39

In particular, the French report called for five steps to limit Jewish land purchases, including the acceleration of surveying and settling title to lands, the speedy partition of the collectively owned musha'a lands, and government control of lands and water resources in areas slated for "development."16 But while these measures were intended to protect the fellahin from displacement, Zionist leaders and planners in Tel Aviv were able to use the mechanisms to gain control of yet more Arab land, even in the wake of the restrictions on land purchases instituted by the 1939 White Paper. As for the recommendation of government control of "developable" land and water resources, according to one senior British official the idea was so "distasteful to the Jewish Agency"17 that the secretary of state for the colonies suggested that anyone "too closely connected with actual development work" not be appointed to committees dealing with land settlement.18 The result was that development and planning were henceforth guided largely by ideological and political considerations.

The importance of "Land Settlement"-which under the 1928 ordinance involved determining boundaries, categorizing, and registering plots of land-cannot be overstated, particularly because the cadastral survey and newly established land registiy offices mandated by the law facilitated land purchase at a time when recession was making it harder for the often debt- ridden Palestinian smallholders to resist the speculative prices offered for their lands.19 The British considered such settlement of title to land the fun- damental ingredient to land improvement and development,20 but in prac- tice it inevitably "encouraged fragmentation and dispossession of landholdings as well as social dislocation and disaffection.",21 And while the government's official Survey of Palestine emphasized that land settlement "must not be confused with the settlement ofpeople on the land,"22 in fact it often was. Thus the director of lands explained to Jewish officials that the proper settlement of rights to land was "the only way to made lands available for the Jews without political complications."23

As important to the Zionist town planning endeavors as the legal frame- work was the administrative structure of land development consolidated during this period. The high commissioner and Central Town Planning Com- mission at the national level assumed the exclusive powers to designate town planning areas and regulate planning and development-powers that until then were under the purview of the municipal councils such as the Jaffa municipality, which had enacted its own town planning legislation as early as 1923.24 The high commissioner was also empowered to grant public bodies (such as municipal corporations) and private individuals or bodies (such as Zionist land purchasing organizations or concessionary bodies) the power to expropriate land, as long as it was designated for "public use." Meanwhile, the powers of the district and local town planning commissions

While these measures were intended to protect the

fellahin from displacement, Zionist planners were able to use the mechanisms to gain control of yet more

Arab land.




included the right to tear down and reconstruct overcrowded areas and to expropriate lands within the town planning area for the construction of new houses and roads. Significantly, representatives of garden associations and similar organizations involved in local development-bodies that were likely to be Jewish-could be invited to join the town planning commissions.

With all these mechanisms in place, it is not surprising that Tel Aviv's leaders saw land law reform as closely related to their aims of increasing the power of the city's town planning committee and the size of its town planning area. Thus, for example, Tel Aviv's municipal engineer declared that the dearth of open space in Tel Aviv was due both to "inadequate municipal town-planning area" and the "system of land ownership."25 In describing the region around Tel Aviv, he explained that "unlike other cities which are surrounded by large unbuilt-on areas and have wide town development pos- sibilities, Tel Aviv is bounded on the west by the sea, on the south by Jaffa, on the north by the river and to the east by [the village of] Sarona."26 Inter- estingly, he makes no mention of the six other villages that also surrounded Tel Aviv, at the time targeted by the municipality and several of which would soon see large parts of their lands annexed to the city. Such lacunae typified the process of the discursive "erasure" that preceded actual physical disappearance.

Even before the establishment of Tel Aviv in 1909, Zionists had boasted of creating a "state within a state in Jaffa."27 During its first twelve years, when Tel Aviv was still only a neighborhood of Jaffa with no separate legal status or autonomy, its leadership attempted to make it "completely independent"28 through, among other things, specific town planning regulations dif- ferentiating it from Jaffa's Arab quarters. These regulations, which included a prohibition against selling land to Arabs, were put into place between 1909 and 1921, when several nearby Jewish neighborhoods joined the new quar- ter, and demonstrate how town planning was already an important compo- nent of Tel Aviv's identity. The goal, as stated by Arthur Ruppin as early as 1913, was to "conquer Jaffa economically."29

Central to the achievement of both autonomy and "conquest" was the expansion of the town's territory. According to Kark, "Tel Aviv had intentions of expanding from the very beginning."30 During the last years of Turkish rule, it was hoped that further land acquisitions would make it possible to bypass the Arab Jaffan neighborhood of Manshiyya in order to link up with the sea, which the Tel Aviv leadership believed was a precondition for its survival and development insofar as it would block Jaffa's northward expansion.31 The Zionist plans were clearly understood by the Turkish governor of Jaffa, Hasan Bey, appointed in 1914, who tried to thwart them by initiating projects to develop Jaffa northward. Among other things, he created a new main street into Manshiyya lined with trees and new sidewalks and erected a mosque in an unbuilt area to block the anticipated Jewish advance. While a later mayor of Jaffa credits Hasan Bey's initiatives with preventing the south- ward expansion of Tel Aviv,32 the success was in fact more modest, merely



CONQUEST THROUGH TOWN PLANNING 41

pushing Tel Aviv's encirclement of Manshiyya, and hence the boundary of Jaffa, slightly to the north.

In June 1921, the high commissioner granted Tel Aviv municipal autonomy as a local council,33 enabling it to impose taxes, raise loans, enter into contracts, and pass bylaws to secure order. The expansion of the city in the decade that followed was driven by two factors. At the political level, Zionist strategy sought to secure possession of as much as possible of the coast of Palestine, believed to hold a "key to the country's economic future while strategically dividing Arab-controlled regions." At the more mundane level was the rapid increase in population and the speculatory rise in land prices in both Tel Aviv and Jaffa that it fueled.34

Thus members of the town council described how the need to build houses for workers and immigrants (many of whom where living in cramped tent and barrack compounds scattered throughout the city) caused a "hunger for land" that led the municipality to begin serious if "chaotic" efforts to purchase small parcels to the city's north (up to the Auja River) and east (the village of Salama). While the purchase and parcelization of such land was facilitated by the region's town plan drawn up by the British town planner Patrick Geddes, the presence of Arab orchards east of Tel Aviv created "legal-official difficulties" that hampered land purchases in Salama, for example.35 Nonetheless, most of the conflicts with the local Arab sellers during this period were over money, not over purchases per se, as the landowners and Jewish brokers sometimes increased the sale price after contracts had been entered into.

In 1927 and again in 1934, ordinances were enacted, first separating Tel Aviv from Jaffa and then constituting it as an "independent local authority no longer in any relation of subordination to the Municipality of Jaffa."36 The latter ordinance came into force one year after a new municipal law was enacted, which gave municipalities greater powers to expand their borders, a right "so important that it [wa]s almost a question of the life of Tel Aviv."37

It was during this period that Tel Aviv ran out of uncontested land on which to expand. Even within the municipal boundaries, much of the sandy land in the north was still owned by Arabs and was becoming more difficult to purchase because the increase in land prices led owners and land brokers to maximize their profits by selling smaller parcels.38 The subsequent "war"39 over the expansion of Tel Aviv's borders was such that the mayor, Yitzhak Rokach, wrote that "the history of the borders of Tel Aviv is the history of the city and its birth-pangs."40 The Arab Revolt, which began in Jaffa in 1936, led to closer cooperation between the British and Zionists than had existed since the 1929 uprising, and the shared focus on town planning and "security" issues-the citrus groves of the surrounding villages were frequently the staging ground of attacks on Jews-facilitated the annexation of village lands during the remainder of the Mandate, especially after the 1939 White Paper limited the ability of Jews to purchase agricultural land. In fact, the Palestine government provided an excellent example of the conflation of




security and planning when they destroyed large swaths of the old city of Jaffa in June 1936 in retaliation for the Arab Revolt, but justified their ac- tions-much to the chagrin of the military, who wanted the Arab population to understand that the demolitions were punishment for the continued rebel- lion-as an act of town planning, "renewal," and "improvement" of the old city.41

THE ANNEXATION OF VILLAGE LANDS IN THE 1930s AND 1940s

The Tel Aviv municipality's drive to gain control of the lands directly to its east during the 1930s included parts of Manshiyya, even though it still had an Arab majority. The justification offered for such expansion was that Jews in these areas, whatever their means of livelihood, "depend[ed] economically upon the development of Tel Aviv, and their material condition depends on the improvements that the Township introduces."42

Summayl, just northeast of Tel Aviv, was one of the villages whose lands were sought during this period. As early as 1930, and despite the fact that the village economy was based on citrus production, the Central Land Settle- ment Office reported that the part of Summayl situated within the Urban Property Tax Area of Jaffa/Tel Aviv was not "settled" in terms of boundaries and registration, and the local land office was "accordingly authorized to ef- fect dispositions respecting lands within that area without reference to me [i.e., the land commissioner]."43 The way was thus cleared for using the land for the development of Tel Aviv.

In September 1933, the town planner of Tel Aviv presented a plan to the district commissioner of Jaffa for developing the lands east of Tel Aviv on the grounds that the "existing population north of Sarona [i.e., Summayl] is very sparse" and that their land "presents the only possibility of expansion of these urban areas."44 Summayl in particular was to be reserved "for commer- cial development . .. lending additional value to the property to attract investment in its reconstruction."45 Here we see how the terms "settled"/ "unsettled" were understood simultaneously as involving the "rights" to and population density of a piece of land, thus creating previously nonexistent distinctions within the lands of a village making possible its reclamation and urbanization by Jews. In fact, in a 1937 meeting of the Boundaries Commis- sion, set up to settle the border between the two cities, Tel Aviv Mayor Rokach pressed for the annexation of Manshiyya, Summayl, and the adjoin- ing part of Arab al-Jammasin al-Gharbi northeast of Tel Aviv, which had also been targeted in the above-mentioned 1933 plan as well as in a 1934 proposal for enlarging Tel Aviv's municipal boundaries.46 At the 1937 meeting, the mayor explained that Tel Aviv would offer municipal privileges to all owners of the lands he sought to annex and that some owners had already asked for pipelines. When the mayor of Jaffa argued that "the wishes of the owners should be ascertained" and that "in the case of inclusion within the Munici- pal area of Tel Aviv, the burden of taxation on Arab owners of lands will be



CONQUEST THROUGH TOWN PLANNING 43

Jaffa-Tel Aviv Region

N Shaykh Muwannis

1943

e Av TelJAvivris

jB / ~~~~~Sarona /

Jaffa Port /, rt

/~~~~~~~~~~~umy 1949L:5

v? 1951 Jaffa X t l

D2 Indicates Built-up Area of Village in late 1940s

D Original Area of Tel Aviv, 1909

Jaffa-TelAviv Border

1926,1937,1943... Indicates Year Region was.Annexed to TelAviv

Map by Mark LeVine




so high that they will be forced to sell,"47 Mayor Rokach replied that the lands, while still rural, had already "acquired an urban value."48

During this period, and in order to buttress their claims to the land, Tel Aviv's leaders began advocating the formation of "some kind of county authority" that would coordinate planning and development for the larger region of Tel Aviv, the surrounding villages, and neighboring Jewish satellite towns such as Ramat Gan, next to Summayl.49 Indeed, the struggle to control lands of Summayl, Jammasin al-Gharbi, Jarisha, and other villages continued until the end of the Mandate. Such lands were still considered "practically undeveloped," and it was thought vital to bring them under "complete municipal authority" because only the "legal and administrative machinery of a municipal corporation" would have the power to draw up a "creative or pos- itive machinery of development." Such machinery, it was thought, would help Tel Aviv "redeem some of these defects which have deformed and stunted its past growth and to prepare for a better planned and more spa- cious urban future."50

Because of its size and location on the banks of the Auja River directly north of Tel Aviv's built-up area, Shaykh Muwannis village was also a prime target for annexation by the Tel Aviv municipality, particularly as of the 1930s when numerous "workers neighborhoods" began to be built north of the city.51 In 1925 and again in 1929,52 the government had attempted in the name of urban planning to gain title to the sandy lands lying west of Shaykh Muwannis to the seashore, in the first case claiming that the land was mahlul and in the second rimali (sandy)-in both cases, "waste and uncultivated." The residents of the village promptly sued to prevent the expropriation on the grounds that the lands had been under cultivation, and while it is impossible to determine whether this was true,53 there is no question that the government reinterpreted, if not misinterpreted, the Ottoman Land Law when it stated in its defense against the villagers' suit that "nobody has a right to waste or uncultivated land."54 It is nearly impossible definitively to fix the status of sandy land or coastal dunes not only because of the continuous change but also because such lands could, when needed, easily be used for planting vegetables or even citrus groves.55 That the British were aware that "sand does not make [land] mawat," that is, "dead," as one Shaykh Ragheb pointed out before the Palestine Supreme Court,56 is clear from numerous cases in the Tabu and Land files. When the land constituted "a very valuable site for urban development purposes,"57 however, the government could permanently fix its status, as in the case of Shaykh Muwannis, based on its present condition in order to facilitate Jewish land purchases and urbanization.

By 1937, Jews controlled 2,050 of Shaykh Muwannis' 19,175 dunams and were trying to get representation on the local council.58 However much the local Arab population might have wanted to continue developing or re- claiming the lands around Tel Aviv, by 1943, as a result of the "expension of great efforts" by Tel Aviv's Mayor Israel Rokach, the municipality succeeded




in having large parts of Shaykh Muwannis incorporated into its town planning area, "a great victory for Tel Aviv," as it was described in the city's Offi- cial Gazette.59 Ironically, the Jewish Agency touted the "complete transformation" of Shaykh Muwannis as a model for the benefits of Zionist- inspired development of the country, claiming that the modernization of the village's irrigation system, improved agricultural production, and the market- ing of produce in Tel Aviv and other Jewish towns60 eliminated unemploy- ment, as "those without land were steadily employed as laborers."61 Why these villagers were without land was not addressed. Meanwhile, the city's expansion continued: even with the increase of Tel Aviv's town planning area from about 9,000 to 14,000 dunams following Shaykh Muwannis's in- corporation, "Tel Aviv was not satisfied and continued in its demand for additional extension." Several months later, in July 1943, the city was awarded another 9,000 dunams, bringing the new total to approximately 22,000 dunams.62

It should be noted that the British authorities were not of one mind when it came to annexing Arab lands for the expansion of Tel Aviv. A case in point is the British response to the Tel Aviv municipality's 1944 request for permission to annex land from Salama and Sarona for the erection of cheap dwellings to relieve the housing shortage in Tel Aviv. In considering this request, the Colonial Office in London was "not quite clear" as to whether the land in question was required for what properly could be considered "public purposes"63 and suggested that the scheme be carried out instead on undeveloped land within the existing municipal boundary in the north of the city. Locally, however, town planning and British officials argued that this would "completely spoil the whole layout of the area which is intended for residen- tial houses of a more expensive type." Another official minuted that "there may well be some Arab outcry and press comment, but on the whole I feel that the transaction is justified in the interests of the good administration of the country and that any such outcry will not be of true substance."64

A similar divergence occurred several years later, in 1947, when the Tel Aviv municipality again tried to get government permission to expropriate from Sarona 717 dunams to be leased to various industrial concerns. The district commissioner of Lydda supported the move on the grounds that "it was in the public interest to concentrate industry in surroundings where there is room to give the persons employed proper facilities," while the more skeptical solicitor general saw "very greatest objection to taking land compulsorily from one man in order to give it to another for the purpose of making a profit, which is what this scheme ultimately amounts to. The only public benefit that may accrue is the concentration of industry, but this can and should be secured by zoning under a town planning scheme, and not by the much more heavy-handed method of compulsory acquisition."65 The attorney general agreed, while the district commissioner, in a later note to the chief secretary, reiterated his belief that the acquisition by Tel Aviv should be approved, because even if "the concentration of industry in a suitable place




[is] the only public benefit which will accrue, this benefit is of the greatest importance both to Tel Aviv and to Palestine as a whole." In keeping with his equation of the good of Tel Aviv and the good of "Palestine as a whole," the district commissioner continued that as town planning and zoning regulations would probably not suffice to create the industrial zone, he was "in favour of 'the much more heavy-handed method of compulsory acquisition' as it is difficult to obtain benefits for the public in any other way in so far as the urban areas of this District are concerned."66

ARAB RESPONSES

In his Land Question in Palestine, Kenneth Stein argues that "the fellah- een were terrified of Land Registry offices and courts, and they were not cognizant of their legal rights and status before the law."67 An examination of the court records, however, shows that the villagers were familiar with the Ottoman and British land codes and used them to change or protect the status of their lands in the battle for control of territory. It is also clear from the records that they had begun to improve their lands during Ottoman times and that they subsequently worked with the Mandatory government to that end, especially to drain swamps. In fact, from the very beginning of the Man- date, villagers petitioned the government to "reclaim and cultivate" mawat lands. By 1930, as Tel Aviv and the government began encroaching on their lands, the residents of the villages felt that their traditional grazing lands were in jeopardy and wrote petitions to the government asking it not to al- low the land to be sold to anyone, realizing that such an eventuality would inevitably lead to their being alienated from it.68

British attempts to "codify" the land system in Palestine met from the beginning of their rule with protests by Palestinian Arabs, who well understood

how the changes to the Ottoman land system aimed at extending British control over the land and the country as a whole.69 Indeed, the 1920 Land Transfer Ordinance was cited by the Haycroft Commission as one of the causes of the May 1921 revolt.70

Palestinian awareness of Tel Aviv's techniques was well exemplified in a statement by an attorney repre- senting families threatened with expropriation of their lands in the village of Salama. He explains that "there are in the vicinity other plain and bare lands which do not yield any income but which are not being acquisitioned for the simple reason that they

are Jewish lands, and that the whole object of this formality is to expropriate Arab lands and convert them into Jewish property. [While] it may look as though it were an innocent expropriation for purposes of housing ex-service men, it is in fact not so because the endeavors exerted by the Jews to obtain this orange grove from my clients dates back a number of years. Finding that

British attempts to "codify" the land system met from the beginning with protests by Palestinian Arabs, who well understood how the changes to the Ottoman land system aimed at

extending British control over the land and the country as a whole.




they were unable to obtain the [land] ... they resorted to another measure, i.e., they filed an action in the Magistrates Court of Tel Aviv for sale of the property at auction on the ground that the property was not capable of partition [the Jewish and Arab shares couldn't be divided into parcels].",71 When this too failed, the idea of expropriating the land under town planning ordinances was conceived of and executed.

The local Arab press is rife with articles demonstrating knowledge of the intricacies of town planning regulations. When the Tel Aviv municipality attempted to build a road on Arab land, it was immediately recalled that the consolidated town planning regulations of 1930 gave local town planning commissions the right to build roads as a first step toward executing a town plan. It was thus that the Jaffa-based religious daily al-Jami'at al-Islamiyya editorialized that "the plan in the Town-Planning Commission now including Shaykh Muwannis is not really a 'plan,' but rather a scheme to take the land out of the hands of the owners. We have farmed land north of the Auja for a long time and then Jews came and wanted to buy it because it is close to Tel Aviv. When we refused they tried to get it through various means, including using the government to push a plan to open a road through our farmland. '72

Numerous petitions were sent to the authorities throughout the Mandate period by villagers protesting moves designed to facilitate expropriation of their lands. In the Shaykh Muwannis road project cited above, for example, the villagers' petition to the Lydda town planning commission states that "the essential wisdom in constructing a road is to shorten distances, with the least possible inconvenience to property owners, thus helping to serve the inhabitants in the best and most economic manner. There is at present a road . . . which has and still continues to serve the inhabitants .. . in the best manner possible, while none of the projected roads pass by the village."73 After commenting that "if the intention underlying the projected roads is to serve our neighbours, then we will readily declare that charity begins at home and such neighbours should serve themselves out of their own and not at the expense of others,"74 the villagers went on to attack the zoning aspects of the scheme. Shaykh Muwannis, the petition declared, "is not a CITY but just a VILLAGE in the true and real sense. To make it imperative that every building plot must have a minimum area of 1000 m2 is, to say the least, an unwarranted extravagancy and waste of land." The petition con- cludes that "For the Tel Aviv Municipality to seek and get those facilities under the guise of a Town-Planning Scheme amounts to an unlawful and most uncommendable attempt that should never be allowed."75 Nor were the Shaykh Muwannis residents alone in their efforts to resist the annexation: contemporary Hebrew and Arabic newspapers report "joint action" on behalf of Shaykh Muwannis by residents of the surrounding villages.76

The Shaykh Muwannis case illustrates another element in the Palestinian response to the Zionist land projects: the role of self-interest. Thus, while the villagers strongly opposed the road scheme, the owners of the targeted land



48 JOURNAL OF PALESTINE SrUDIES

supported it, according to Mandate officials, "on the understanding that the financial aspect would be dealt with by the District Town Planning Commis- sion to whom they referred it."77 In other words, the wealthier land owners did not mind having the land expropriated because they knew they would receive adequate compensation, while the poorer residents of the village knew they would receive nothing. Indeed, a number of Jaffa notables (including two mayors) were involved in land sales-though for the most part not in the Jaffa district-at the same time that they publicly criticized British support of Jewish land purchases.78

The Jaffa municipality was more attentive when it came to protecting the sand dunes south of the city. Realizing that the dunes "were the only outlet left to it for expansion" and that the attempts by non-Arab companies to purchase land was an attempt to "complete the encirclement of Jaffa and choke it out of existence,"79 the municipality in 1944 requested that the lands be annexed to the city. In support of this request, a petition from twenty-six "Jaffan notables" declared that "the Government have agreed to the annexation of pure Arab villages [Summayl, Shaykh Muwannis, Jarisha, and Jammasin] to the Tel Aviv town planning area despite the fact that the land of these villages is purely agricultural and is the main source of suste- nance to the people of these villages. The strong protest of the villages to their annexation was completely ignored. It is only fair therefore that the Government should acceded to the request of the Jaffa Municipality in annexing these sand dunes to its area."80 The government did not comply, however, and before the Mandate was over the dunes had become the Jew- ish towns of Bat Yam and Holon.

The contest for lands of the villages surrounding Jaffa and Tel Aviv continued until the end of the Mandate. In 1947, the Supreme Muslim Council and the Department of Awqaf in Jaffa wrote to the high commissioner asking him to disallow the inclusion of certain waqf lands in Tel Aviv's town planning scheme, since, as noted earlier, such inclusion facilitated expropriation. The letter explained that despite government assurances to the contrary, "the annexation of the waqf land . . . involves the government's support for the realization of the ambitions of those who wish to acquire the land and who have become very skillful in creating justifications and paving the way for achieving their ends. "81

THE BORDERS OF THE ABSURD

In a 1940 discussion between a Zionist official and the chief secretary, the latter, taking an "absurd case," posed the following question: "Might it not happen that the Jews would acquire and occupy so much land of Jaffa that, if the whole of the Jewish area were to go over to Tel Aviv, the rest of the municipal area would not be able to run its municipal affairs on its reduced income?" The Zionist official replied that "from the practical point of view there was no such likelihood. Jaffa was a town of some 40,000 Arab inhabit-



CONQUEST THROUGH TOwN PLANNING 49

ants and there was no question of Jews acquiring such vast areas in Jaffa as to leave that town without the means of running a municipality on its own."82

While the chief secretary's specific scenario did not play out, it was far from "absurd." Above and beyond the attempts to annex lands from the surrounding Arab villages, the national and local Zionist leadership also en- gaged in successful efforts, beginning during the last years of Turkish rule, to control the Auja River (through the 1921 Rutenberg Concession), to establish a "Jewish" port (built in the wake of the 1936 Revolt), and to gain control over or annex Jaffa's Jewish neighborhoods (about 30 percent of the city's area and population) and mixed border neighborhoods such as Manshiyya.83

The evidence presented here demonstrates that the discourse of town planning, development, and modernization were indispensable tools in the "wars" over the land, port, and river of Jaffa. In fact, the preeminent Jewish town planner Richard Kauffmann once began an essay on "town planning of Jewish Settlements in Palestine" by pointing out that the subject of town planning of Jewish settlements in Palestine cannot be understood without understanding the character and objects of the Zionist movement and its goals of "settling" and "renewing" the Jewish people.84 What happened in Tel Aviv and its surroundings confirms Kauffmann's belief, although most likely not in the manner he intended.

NOTES

1. These include Ruth Kark's Jaffa: A City in Evolution and related articles, Yosi Katz's The Business of Settlement, Private Entrepreneurship in the Jewish Settlement of Palestine, 1900-1914 and related articles, and articles and dissertation's by Ilan Troen, Gidon Biger, Iris Gracier, Iris Agmon, and Andre Mazawi. While there have been a fair number of studies of architecture in Tel Aviv, most have not looked at its relationship to the larger discourse of town planning or Zi- onist identity in a critical way, and only two (Tzafrir and Mazawi) have looked at architecture in Jaffa.

2. For a more detailed analysis of this phenomena, see Mark LeVine, "The Dis- courses of Development in Mandate Pal- estine," Arab Studies Quarterly 17, nos. 1-2 (Winter-Spring 1995), pp. 95-121.

3. Mulk lands, which were confined mostly to urban areas, were privately owned land which could be disposed of as the owner saw fit. Miri land was state- owned land which occupiers had permanent usufruct rights as long as they culti-

vated it and paid the tithe. Until 1913, miri owners had to get special permission from the state to use miri land for industrial purposes, or even for vineyards or orchards or dwellings, as the state believed (mistak- enly) that these restrictions would keep the largest amount of land available for agriculture [Kenneth Stein, The Land Question in Palestine, 1917-39 (Chapel Hill: Uni- versity of North Carolina Press, 1984), p. 11]. Waqf lands were dedicated to religious or charitable purposes.

In addition to the six official categories of land, another important classifica- tion in use in Palestine was the musha' system, which essentially meant collective village ownership or tenure of a plot of land, with the land being redistributed on a periodic basis so that all members of the community had equal access to the best land. Musha' came under more criticism by the British and Zionists than perhaps any other form of tenure in Pal- estine, as they believed that collective ownership prevented the capitalization of land that was the prerequisite for priva-




tization and modernization of the agricultural sector.

4. Stein, The Land Question in Pales- tine, 1917-39, p. 13.

5. Survey of Palestine (1946-1947; reprint, Washington: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1991), pp. 226, 233.

6. In Ottoman times land was designated as matruka by an imperial decree, or firman.

7. Israeli State Archives [ISA], M56/ 236/D119 and M34/34/L280/299.

8. The high commissioner's Executive Council noted in September 1935 that "the proposal to grant a general power to change the category of Metrouke land would give rise to popular suspicion as to the use to be made of that power. It was likely to excite fear among Arabs that the power would be employed for the purpose of bringing Arab common land into Jewish hands" (memo to Chief Secretary, 16 September 1935, ISA, M56/236/D119 and M34/34/L280/299).

9. In a case heard at the Jaffa Land Court in 1926, the presiding judge declared that "cultivation . . . must be effec- tive and 'maintained.' Operations must be carried out which result in a permanent and definite change in the quality of the land. The wilderness must be made to blossom" [Frederic M. Goadby and Moses J. Doukhan The Land Law of Palestine (jerusalem: 1935), pp. 48-49]. Emphasis added.

10. Goadby and Doukhan, Land Law of Palestine, pp. 38-39.

11. By the Palestine (Amendment) Or- der in Council 1933, article 16A.

12. Moses J. Doukhan, "Land Tenure," in Said Himadeh, ed., The Economic Or- ganization of Palestine (Beirut: American University of Beirut, 1938), p. 79.

13. Martin Bunton, "The Role of Pri- vate Property in the British Administration of Palestine" (D.Phil. diss., Oxford Univer- sity, 1997), pp. 26, 75.

14. Often from Turkish to French to English.

15. This began as early as the next year with the Amended Land Transfer Or- dinance in 1921 [Barbara Smith, The Roots of Separatism in Palestine (Syra- cuse: Syracuse University Press, 1993), p. 92].

16. Minute to Secretary of State for the Colonies by the High Commissioner

Wauchope (2 January 1932), Public Rec- ord Office [PRO] Colonial Office [CO] 733/214/87402.

17. "Development Scheme and Report of Mr. French," by 0. G. R. Williams (14 January 1932), PRO CO 733/214/97049.

18. Letter to High Commissioner Wauchope from the Secretary of State for the Colonies (29 January 1932), PRO CO 733/214.

19. Roger Owen, "The Role of Musha'a (Co-Ownership) in the Politico- Legal History of Mandatory Palestine," SSRC Workshop on Law, Property, and State Power, Buyukada, September 1991, p. 7.

20. Bunton, "The Role of Private Prop- erty" p. 9.

21. Scott Atran, "The Surrogate Coloni- zation of Palestine, 1917-1939," American Ethnologist 16, no. 14 (1989), p. 737.

22. Survey of Palestine, p. 234. Em- phasis in original.

23. Quoted in Atran, "The Surrogate Colonization," p. 725.

24. Town-Planning Handbook of Pal- estine, 1930 (New York Public Library, SERA), p. 5. See Falastin (27 February 1923), p. 3, for article on the new land ownership law enacted by the Jaffa municipality.

25. Y. Shiffman, "Tel Aviv: Today and Tomorrow," Palestine and Near East (September 1942), p. 167.

26. Ibid. 27. As Tel Aviv's first and most fa-

mous mayor, Meir Dizengoff, later described it [Meir Dizengoff, To the Friends of My Youth (Tel Aviv: 1931), pp. 6-7 (in Hebrew)].

28. Undated memo in Hebrew on the history of Tel Aviv's borders and development, Tel Aviv Municipal Archive [TAMA], 4/2667b.

29. Quoted in A. Droyanov, Sefer Tel Aviv (Tel Aviv: Sefer Tel Aviv Society, 1935), p. 77. See also Arthur Ruppin, Memoirs, Diaries, Letters (London: Wiedenfeld and Nicolson, 1971), p. 121.

30. Ruth Kark, Jaffa, A City in Evolu- tion, 1799-1917 (Jerusalem: Yad Ben Tzvi Press, 1990), p. 124.

31. Yosi Katz, The Business of Settle- ment, Private Entrepreneurship in the Jewish Settlement of Palestine, 1900-1914 (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1993), p. 287.




32. Yusef Heykal, Days of Juvenility (Amman: Dar al-Galil Press, 1988), p. 77 [in Arabic].

33. The high commissioner had the authority to constitute a council in a quar- ter distinguished by its needs and character from the rest of the municipal area. In a 15 December 1920 dispatch, the commissioner of lands suggested Tel Aviv "immediately" be declared "a town as dis- tinct from Jaffa" in order to fight land speculation and ensure development according to a well-ordered plan. TAMA 1/164.

34. The population of Tel Aviv more than doubled, from 16,000 to 38,000 between 1923 and 1926, while land prices increased 250-fold from the city's origins to the mid-1920s. Between 1923 and 1939 the city area increased ninefold, with land purchases concentrated in the north and east of the city and south of Jaffa [Abra- ham Granott, Land Policy in Palestine (1937; reprint, Westport, CT: Hyperion Press, 1940), p. 79].

35. Yediot Tel Aviv, nos. 6-7 (1928), p. 49.

36. Despatch from H. C. Luke, Acting Officer Administering the Government, dated 9 August 1928, to the Secretary of State for the Colonies, PRO CO 733/158/7.

37. Yediot Tel Aviv, nos. 6-7, (1934), p. 252.

38. Cf. Iris Graitzer, "Workers Neigh- borhoods: Attempts at Shaping an Urban Landscape through Social Ideologies in Eretz Israel during the Mandate Period" (Ph.D. diss., Hebrew University, 1982), p. 138.

39. Milhama, the Hebrew word for "war," was the term used to describe the struggle to expand the city's borders (Cf. Central Zionist Archives [CZA], S25/ 5936).

40. Yediot Tel Aviv, no. 12, (1943), p. 154.

41. "Military Lessons of the Arab Re- bellion in Palestine," PRO, Government of Palestine Air Force (AIR) 5/1244/43820.

42. Memo on proposed changes of boundaries between Jaffa and Tel Aviv, undated but probably 1934, TAMA, 4/2667b.

43. Letter to Registrar of Lands, Jaffa (24 December 1930), TAMA, 4/2667a.

44. Explanatory notes in connection with the proposed skeleton town plan-

ning scheme for the land situated east of Tel Aviv, TAMA, 4/2662b.

45. Ibid., 3, emphasis added. (Worded as if the region had once been "con- structed" but because of Arab backward- ness, fell into disuse or dilapidation.)

46. TAMA, 4/2667b. 47. Minutes of Meeting dated 13 July

1937, TAMA, 4/2667b. 48. Ibid. 49. Shiffman, "Tel Aviv: Today and To-

morrow," p. 178. 50. Interview with Y. Shiffman, Pales-

tine and Near East magazine, January 1943, p. 12.

51. Cf. Iris Graitzer, "Workers Neighborhoods."

52. Cf. ISA, M/18/LD8/3411, letters from 1929.

53. The villagers' counsel "[did] not deny that the area is bounded by Sand Dunes, but they do not cover all the land we claim. It has not been planted with trees but vegetables and there are two wells now covered by sand." ISA, M/18/ LD8/3411, letters from 1929.

54. Barbara Smith writes that "Not only did British officials misread the pre- vious land laws, but they failed fully to understand local agricultural practices and appreciate the unusual post-war conditions" [Smith, The Roots of Separatism, p. 99].

55. The Survey of Western Palestine of 1878 noted that only a few feet under the sands was very fertile soil, while Kallner and Rosenau wrote that "almost every- where the coastal plain has sufficient un- derground water at moderate depths" [D. H. Kallner and E. Rosenau, "The Geo- graphical Regions of Palestine," The Geo- graphical Review 29 (1939), p. 63].

56. ISA, M/48/G184/3529 (16 May 1927), Land Appeal No. 171/26.

57. Letter from the Director of Lands to the Department of Agriculture dated 7 February 1928, ISA, M/18/LD8/3411.

58. Note that one dunam equals four acres. Archive of the Labor Movement, IV/219/B/292.


60. At a meeting of representatives of Tel Aviv municipality, Vad Leumi, Jewish Agency, and residents of Jaffa's Jewish neighborhoods, Mayor Rokach confessed that he told the district commissioner that he wished he could "blow up" a planned




Jewish market that would sell Arab produce (16 May 1940), CZA, S25/5936.

61. "Jewish Agency Observations on the French Report," PRO CO 733/230.


63. ISA, M/44/89/L/308; cf. ISA, 2/183/ 37.

64. Unsigned note dated 21 June 1945, ISA, M/44/89/L/308.

65. Note by Solicitor General dated 4 March 1947, ISA, M/46/L176316.

66. Ibid., note dated 6 June 1947. 67. Stein, The Land Question, pp.

212-13. He goes on to say that "the Arabs' primary experience was of survival against nature, and they had little experience in confronting the bureaucratic and legislative machinery introduced by the Ottomans and the British."

68. One such petition by villagers whose lands lay in the Jammasin (al- Sharqi) village between Jarisha and Petakh Tikva declared that "whereas [our] cattle have, since time immemorial, been grazing in the said lands and whereas they have no other grazing land for [our] cattle and whereas almost all the inhabitants of the said village live on the milk and butter they raise from their cattle . . . therefore the grazing lands are indispensable and necessary for them." Petition dated 13 April 1930, on letterhead of the Jaffa Waqf Administration, ISA, M/ 46/L176316.

69. Bunton, "The Role of Private Prop- erty," p. 33.

70. Stein suggests that it was the small notable landowning and land-benefiting class whose livelihoods were threatened by the British management of the land market who were most vocal during the 1921 revolt (Stein, The Land Question, p. 49).

71. ISA, M/44/89/L/308. 72. al-Jami' at al-Islamiyya, 21 De-

cember 1937, p. 3.

73. The eleven roads projected under the plan literally carve up the lands of Shaykh Muwannis for the benefit of Tel Aviv residents, while at the same time creating an industrial zone in what was an agricultural village.

74. Petition signed by "villagers of Shaykh Muwannis" to Lydda Town Plan- ning Commission (10 November 1939), ISA, Z/183/37.

75. Ibid. 76. The clippings were collected in a

Haganah report, "Yediot me-Yafo" (5 March 1944), Haganah Archive, [HHA], 105/204.

77. Letter dated 6 December 1930, ISA, Z/183/37.

78. Stein, The Land Question, p. 178. The list included mayors Es-Said, Alfred Rok, and 'Omar al-Baytar; the latter's brother, 'Abdul Raouf; Abu-Khadra; Ya- qub Dallal; and others. According to Stein, no lands in the Jaffa subdistrict in the early 1930s belonged to absentee landlords, and except for one parcel by Es-Said, the lands sold by the Jaffa notables were not in the Jaffa area.

79. Review of Palestine Press (4 Au- gust 1944), ISA, M/12/1/46 DEM/122.

80. Ibid., Telegram to the High Com- missioner from 26 Jaffa Notables, undated.

81. Letter to High Commissioner dated 20 March 1947, ISA, M/RG2/564/18.

82. Minutes of meeting between Dis- trict Commissioner Macpherson and un- identified Zionist official dated 5 February 1940, CZA, S25/5936.

83. For an in-depth discussion of the struggles over the Auja River, the Jaffa and Tel Aviv ports, and Jaffa's Jewish neighborhoods, see an earlier draft of this article appearing on the official Jaffa web site, http.//www.yafa.org.

84. Undated essay by Kauffmann, part of his private papers collection, CZA, A175/96C.



conquest through town planning: the case of tel aviv, 1921-48

Documents