david ben gurion's attitude toward tel aviv

Journal of Levantine Studies

“May Your Sons Settle [the Land]”: David Ben-Gurion’s Attitude toward Tel Aviv as Reflected in the Press

Eran EldarThe Open University of Israel

Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, a resident of Tel Aviv, resigned on December 7, 1953, and left the city on December 14 to live in a cabin in Sde Boker, in the Negev.1 That day, the daily Maariv’s headline read: “Goodbye, Tel Aviv, May Your Sons Settle [the Land].”2 The quotation, with its unequivocal command, was attributed to Ben-Gurion. Israel’s founding father, who was then 67, reportedly spoke those words while en route to the south, and his message was clear. In the ensuing years, when he returned to the government, he would repeat this message more forcefully, and he would even be accused of trying to disperse the population of Tel Aviv.

Ben-Gurion’s abandonment of Tel Aviv was marked by an unofficial but highly significant ceremony. Near the entrance to his Tel Aviv home, at eight fifteen in the morning, he publicly bade farewell to his daughter Renana and his friends from the Mapai Party. Journalists crowded around the house and reported the events there in the evening papers. According to their reports Ben-Gurion approached the unit that had kept guard at the entrance to his house for years, shook the hand of each police officer, and inquired about the future of each. Dressed in a blue suit, a blue tie with white circles, and a brown coat, Ben-Gurion smiled at the crowd, which included local schoolchildren with their satchels on their backs. When the convoy headed by a military police jeep set out, many residents doffed their hats and waved to the prime minister. “Tears streamed from the neighbors’ eyes,” the newspapers reported.3

Whether this departure from the city for the kibbutz in the periphery exemplifies Ben-Gurion’s attitude toward Tel Aviv in particular and also, perhaps, toward the

Vol. 4, No. 1, Summer 2014, pp. 9-40

10 David Ben-Gurion's Attitude toward Tel Aviv as Reflected in the Press

general processes of urbanization in the young State of Israel is at the heart of this article, which attempts to define and analyze, through the prism of Tel Aviv, Ben-Gurion’s ambivalent attitude toward Israeli urbanization. This paper draws on the press articles of the time and archival materials. The institutional struggle between the “civil circles” (the General Zionists), who controlled Tel Aviv until 1959, and the central Mapai government headed by Ben-Gurion greatly influenced the urban development of Tel Aviv.4 Following the establishment of the state and the reduction of the power and political status that the municipality had enjoyed during the Mandate, from which it drew its great degree of autonomy, the struggle between the national government and the municipal government took place openly. This struggle was also reported in all the Hebrew newspapers, some of which were, at the time, partisan publications.

Urban-Rural Relations and the Settlement Strategy between

the Mandate Period and the Establishment of the State

To understand Ben-Gurion’s attitude toward urbanization in the State of Israel in general and in Tel Aviv in particular, one must examine two things: the underlying attitude of the Yishuv leadership, and later that of the state, toward cities as opposed to rural areas, and the settlement strategy during the Mandate period and the early years of the state. It would have been impossible to develop the new Jewish Yishuv in Eretz Israel without a city able to fulfill all the key functions of an urban, mercantile, industrial, and cultural center. Tel Aviv, the first Hebrew city, provided that vital center, though not always with the full blessing of the leaders of the Zionist movement and the Yishuv.5

From 1921, when Tel Aviv attained the status of a municipal council (township), until 1959, the civil circles were virtually its undisputed rulers.6 During the Yishuv period at least some of the civil circles saw the municipal government as an alternative locus of power. This led to friction between them and the national institutions, which sometimes ignored the local government. The civil bloc—headed by General Zionists such as Israel Rokach, the mayor of Tel Aviv from 1936 until the beginning of 1953—and the workers’ parties mistrusted each other. The workers’ parties saw the members of the civil circles as bourgeoisie who had brought their way of life in the Diaspora, mainly Poland, to Eretz Israel and who, instead of helping to meet the needs of settlement and rebellion against the British government, tended to collaborate with the British and monitor the Haganah. On the other hand, the workers’ movements could not ignore that Tel Aviv was the source of employment for members of Ha-histadrut ha-klalit shel ha-ovdim be-

11Journal of Levantine Studies

Eretz Yisrael (General organization of workers in the Land of Israel, usually referred to as the Histadrut), and they concluded that it was correct to support the expansion of the city’s economic base in those manufacturing sectors that would ensure jobs for Hebrew workers.7

However, the sources of the tension between the urban and rural areas go back further. Throughout the history of the Eretz Israel settlement, very little importance was ascribed to urban settlement.8 For many years Zionist settlement ideology ignored the need to establish cities in Eretz Israel to populate the country.9 Zionism was based on a pragmatic ideology whose aim was to establish a new Jewish society in Eretz Israel. To achieve that aim it needed cultural and material tools, and these were found in the ideology that emphasized the return to the land and the grounding of society on the working and farming class, thus replacing the Jews’ traditional occupations in trades and services with agriculture.

Most of the founders of Zionism by whom David Ben-Gurion was influenced did not preach the establishment of cities in Eretz Israel.10 As part of this ideological heritage, the pioneering Zionist leadership in the prestate period put its efforts into limiting urban growth, in terms of both numbers and geography, because it feared urban growth would come at the expense of resources needed for agricultural development. Consequently, the problems of the city were ignored, and urban engineers and planners were paid little attention. Thus, for example, Tel Aviv’s urban problems multiplied, while the Mapai government’s attempts to prevent its growth and increase in power failed.

From the start Tel Aviv’s development aroused amazement among both the Jews in Eretz Israel and visitors from abroad, and the pace of its growth was indeed impressive, even in comparison with that of new cities in the modern, urbanized world. The fact that it developed with no intervention or assistance from any central-government body was even more amazing. But there was also criticism, and during the 1920s some viewed Tel Aviv as a city that was growing unrestrainedly and suffering from many of the ills of modern cities. The change in its physical landscape was the subject of some criticism that was mainly directed at its social makeup and at the change from a neighborhood of homes and well-to-do professionals into a city with a growing population of tenants and workers who lacked property and housing. In 1924 the following appeared in Ha-poel ha-tsair, the bulletin of the Ha-poel ha-tsair party founded in 1907: “Although Tel Aviv does not excel in economic and material advantages, which could guarantee a more or less desirable future or good living conditions in the present, nevertheless it continues to advance and develop unceasingly


and to increase its population and assets to a greater extent than the rest of Eretz Israel.”11

In the 1930s, regarding the spread of the city and the doubling of its population, David Ben-Gurion opined that “we are again building a city-state and are becoming here a nation-city.”12 He feared that the process of urbanization would harm the Zionist enterprise. By the term “city-state,” Ben-Gurion meant that as a result of Tel Aviv’s rapid development during the high tide of the Fifth Aliyah, one-third of the Jewish population in Eretz Israel was concentrated in and around the city. In his view this undermined the Zionist settlement enterprise, that is, agricultural settlement and the even distribution of the population throughout the land, as well as what he considered the desired character of Jewish society in Eretz Israel.

The social ideology of the members of the Second and Third Aliyahs emphasized the importance of communal agricultural settlement. The negative view of the city as representing the old world was a basic tenet among those who argued that healing society was a central aspect of the Zionist revolution. Aaron David Gordon’s phrasing of his fundamental opposition to the city was influenced by Tolstoy and in turn greatly influenced the views of many, including the ideology of Ha-poel ha-

Aerial view of Tel Aviv, March 30, 1947. Photographer : Zoltan K luger, Government Press Off ice ( Israel) .


tsair and the Zionist Labor movement.13 Gordon explained that the national revival required a move from the city to the country. In his view only in rural areas could one avoid the destructive influence of commerce and money, which characterizes urban culture, and achieve total immersion in nature. He wrote: “We seek what urban culture cannot give, we seek to fill the empty space, which is in our soul’s lung; as long as we are not filled with content, we feel a terrible emptiness.”14 In contrast, on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the founding of Tel Aviv, Zeev Jabotinsky, the Revisionist, wrote that the development of Tel Aviv was proof that there was a need and a proper place for urban settlement, thus arguing against the view that urban settlement was something artificial, a mere appendage to the settlement enterprise.15

A gathering convened by the youth center of the Histadrut in Ben-Shemen in August 1934, under the motto “To the Country,” manifested this urban-rural tension. The aim of the gathering was to show Jewish youth in Eretz Israel the great danger that concentration of Jewish immigration in a city held for the Zionist ideal and that without a true return to the land, agriculture, and physical work there would be no revival or renewal.16

In opposition to this ideology, by the beginning of the 1920s, the workers’ movements recognized the advantages of Tel Aviv, understood its centrality to the economy and organizational structure of the Jewish Yishuv in Eretz Israel, and were based there.17 Tel Aviv provided them an economic and organizational focus that was in opposition to the main commitment of those movements, which was not to urban development but to settlement throughout the country, especially in border areas. The main institutions and economic organizations of the workers’ movements were concentrated in Tel Aviv during the Mandate period and even after the establishment of the state, and this fact led to the strengthening of Tel Aviv’s centrality. Thus the workers’ movements enhanced Tel Aviv’s standing as a national center.

This was expressed in the daily press and in the editorial of Davar, the daily paper of Poalei Eretz Israel and the organ of the Histadrut, on May 2, 1934, on the occasion of the city’s semi-jubilee:

Tel Aviv is the city of the nation, and this means a city that knows how to provide those who come to it with national-folk values: the values of Hebrew language and culture [and] simple Jewish folk customs.18

The editorial opined that “Hebrew city” meant a working Hebrew city, “the city of the Hebrew workers,” a city being built by the Hebrew worker. On the same day, it was written in Haaretz that


since time immemorial the people of Jerusalem have gone down to see Tel Aviv, so they could have something to visit. And the people of Haifa will come to see so that there will be something to copy, and the people of the Sharon and Judea and Galilee will come to see so there will be something to tell. Because this is the center of the Yishuv.19

In Ha-poel ha-tsair, the ideological mouthpiece of the Zionist workers’ movement in Eretz Israel, the editor, Yitzhak Lufban, described the establishment of the city as an act of creation and sharply rejected the argument that free initiative alone—“private initiative,” as he put it—enabled the establishment of the city. He also complained that the role of the Hebrew worker had been forgotten in the semi-jubilee celebrations. “Another fundamental thing was forgotten: Who built this city? Not who opened stores in it and not who bought plots in it, speculated with them and with the apartments he built on them, but rather, who built it really, with his hands, with his body, with his sweat, and with his blood?” Lufban concluded by saying, “We love Tel Aviv, which we have nurtured and have almost cradled in our arms, from the day of its foundation to this point.”20

Moshe Smilansky of Rehovot, the editor of Bustanai, the mouthpiece of Hitahdut ha-ikarim be-Eretz Yisrael (The farmers’ association in Eretz Israel), openly expressed his fear of what he called “Tel Avivism.” In his view Tel Aviv represented a threat to the Zionist settlement enterprise in Eretz Israel. In his editorial he wrote that “Tel Aviv is today the economic center of the Yishuv. . . . Its demands are necessarily greater and its expenses are greater.” On the other hand, he protested that “people who are experts and experienced say that the price of a lot in Tel Aviv is higher than it is in the center of London, and a house on Rothschild Boulevard is more expensive than a house on the boulevards of Paris.” He also complained that “in Tel Aviv almost half of the Yishuv lives . . . and dozens of other cities in the country lack even a single Hebrew person.”21

Tel Aviv of the civil circles was a municipal authority that the workers’ parties sought to conquer even during the Mandate period. The newspaper Ha-Yarden described this well in 1934, before the municipal elections: “Mapai knows well the value of governing Tel Aviv, and it is interested in having in its hands the decisive opinion on distributing the city’s resources. And it also evaluates well the political importance of governing the Hebrew city with the decisive portion of Jews in Eretz Israel.”22

The negative image of urban society was reinforced even more during the period of the Fourth Aliyah, when Tel Aviv was seen as a contradiction of the ideal of the return to the land. It was also described as a copy of Diaspora life and as the “dark side” of Zionist settlement and of the new life in Eretz Israel. Tel Aviv was


compared by its critics in the workers’ parties to a place that was nourished and controlled by the illusion of free market forces. Haim Arlozorov, one of the heads of the Labor movement, wrote regarding the Fourth Aliyah that it was a distinctly urban immigration that was causing the “excessive and abnormal” development of the city and of urban life.23 Only in the first decades of the state did the antiurban rhetoric of the workers’ parties fade, and only then did they recognize the central role of the city in the development of the Yishuv. They directed their criticism mainly at the “bourgeois municipality” that, in their view, “weakened the Jewish Yishuv instead of supporting it.”24

The first decades of the state were critical for the development and construction that had not been possible during the Mandate period. The 1950s and 1960s saw a large acceleration in the construction of cities in Israel, and perhaps foremost among them was Tel Aviv, which after the War of Independence annexed huge tracts of land on all sides, including Jaffa and neighborhoods north of the Yarkon River. The city’s population doubled as a result of the great immigration following the establishment of the state. This period was also characterized by the establishment of development towns in the country’s periphery, which reflected the aims and needs of the period. Their establishment in the beginning of the 1960s had three aims: to change the polarized urban makeup of large cities by adding midsized urban centers and creating a continuous gradation between village and city; to disperse the population throughout the entire state; and to close empty spaces on the state map by means of centers of industry, services, and administration that could fulfill regional functions.25 The idea of establishing new towns and dispersing the population was realized against a background of conflict between the Zionist pioneering ideology, which preached rural settlement, and the new reality created in Israel by massive immigration. This reality required the dismantling of the polarized urban structure that had come into being during the British Mandate, the reduction of the relative portion of the population on the coastal plain, the building of new centers in undeveloped regions, and the absorption of immigrants in new towns.

Meanwhile, during these decades the leftist government remained in power, with Mapai, headed by Ben-Gurion until 1963, governing fearlessly and unchallenged. In Tel Aviv, however, the civil circles governed continuously from the days of Meir Dizengoff until 1959, when Mordechai Namir of Mapai was elected mayor, replacing Haim Levanon of the General Zionists, who had held the office since 1953. The tension that had existed between the Tel Aviv municipality and the national government until 1959, mainly between Levanon and Ben-Gurion, deeply affected the urban development of the city.26


The State of Israel vs. Tel Aviv : A New Spatial Organization

after the Establishment of the State

The establishment of the state in 1948 reduced Tel Aviv’s status, political power, and autonomy. In the prestate years Tel Aviv was the center of the Yishuv, and many of the institutions of the state in the making were developed there. After the establishment of the state, Tel Aviv was but one of many cities subservient to the state and the national government and thus was deprived of its relative independence. Beyond the erosion of its political status, the city also had to contend with the aggressive antiurban (and particularly anti-Tel Aviv) line of the chief ideologues of the ruling party, Mapai, who were headed by Ben-Gurion.

Israel Rokach was the mayor of Tel Aviv from 1936, the year in which Meir Dizengoff died, until 1953, when he was appointed minister of the interior. He was replaced by Levanon, also of the General Zionists. Levanon was the mayor of Tel Aviv during the early years of the state, while Mapai was consolidating its power and aiming to establish a new spatial organization of the state and of the city of Tel Aviv. This situation led to a series of disputes that influenced the urban development of the city through the end of the 1950s. In the years following the establishment of the state, Mapai tried to take control of Tel Aviv, and in 1955 it even put Minister of Labor Golda Meir at the head of its list in the Tel Aviv election. Meir, who was a strong opponent to the incumbent Levanon, lost and returned to the Ministry of Labor.27

The establishment of the state and the departure of the Arab population after the War of Independence, as well as the removal of constraints on establishing Jewish settlements, gave the Jewish population both sovereignty and a geographical space in which it was possible to distribute the Jewish population and settle hundreds of thousands of immigrants. Suddenly, previously unavailable settlement opportunities opened up, and settlement was supported by legislation and appropriation of financial resources by the national government.28

The basic principles of the first government’s plan, presented to the Knesset on March 8, 1949, and approved on March 11, 1949, state:

The government will decide on a four-year plan for development and absorption that will aim to double settlement in the state by means of mass immigration and intensive development of the country, on the basis of a planned economy whose aim is the rapid and balanced population of the underpopulated areas of the state and the prevention of excessive concentration in the cities.29


The government was clearly aiming to reduce Tel Aviv’s power and limit its growth, and it succeeded in doing so in the early years of the state. The relative size of metropolitan Tel Aviv’s population decreased, and the city’s growth was obstructed. During the early years of the state’s development, the settlement map was shaped, and extensive settlement took place in both cities and rural areas. Immediately after the formation of the first government, Ben-Gurion directed A. L. Grinbaum of the Ministry of the Interior’s department of economic research to create an economic plan for absorbing three-quarters of a million people within four years and for developing agriculture, industry, and other sectors. The plan was eventually published as the Aryeh Sharon Plan for the Dispersal of the Population.

Ben-Gurion, together with Levi Eshkol, who was head of the settlement department and later the treasurer of the Jewish Agency and the prime minister, were the most influential figures in the agricultural settlement enterprise of the state’s first decade. Tens of thousands of soldiers were sent for training in methods of agriculture and settlement, in accordance with the Defense Service Law of 1950, which determined that after a brief period of boot camp, the soldier’s first year of service would be devoted to agricultural training. However, the attempt to enlist demobilized soldiers in agricultural settlement was only partly successful. Ben-Gurion knew that many of the new immigrants arriving after the establishment of the state were not suited to rural life and agricultural work, but he believed that the national emergency required that they be directed to settlement even if they were unsuited for or uninterested in it. “There is no greater mitzvah than that of a Jew settling on his land and working it. If we do that—that will suffice for now; the rest will come,” he said at the Ramle Convention of the Moshav Movement in February 1949.30 Ben-Gurion’s view also derived from cold political considerations; he understood that spreading the immigrants throughout the land would ensure their dependence on Mapai, the ruling party.

In the official discourse, Tel Aviv, which continued to attract most of the immigrants, was constructed as the enemy of the border settlements and as hindering attempts to green the wasteland. To the antiurban bias of the Zionist movement’s pioneering-agricultural discourse, which existed from the start, were now added the state mechanisms to realize this worldview, at the center of which was the paradigm of population dispersal throughout the country, particularly in border areas.

While Tel Aviv’s status declined as a center of independent political power, the municipality repeatedly complained about the government’s policy, and a great deal of tension developed between the municipality’s heads and the various government ministries, particularly as a result of the prime minister’s policy. The


city complained that it was deprived of both budgets and status and demanded that the official relations between the local and central governments be rearranged. The many disputes between Tel Aviv and the national government involved, among other things, the annexation of Jaffa and outlying neighborhoods, annual budgets, education, health, transportation, and municipal boundaries.

At the end of the 1950s, the municipality understood that its problems were intentionally created by the government. A striking example of this is the claim of mayor Levanon in the council meeting on January 5, 1958, that the Ministry of the Interior’s aim was to reduce the city’s boundaries. Levanon explained that planners in the Ministry of the Interior’s planning committee had made “very strange” proposals regarding zoning in Tel Aviv. As an example, he mentioned the claims of some of the planners, who had concluded that Tel Aviv had allotted too much of its area to industry, whereas other planners had argued that a certain amount of land in the north of the city should be zoned for agriculture, even though according to the city plan the land was zoned as residential. “I have never heard of any place in the world that urban land must be zoned for agriculture,” the mayor complained. Levanon

Ben-Gurion tours Tel Aviv, June 1951. Photographer : Teddy Brauner, Government Press Off ice ( Israel) .


added that the municipality of Tel Aviv was the most crowded local authority in Israel, although, he said, he had told the prime minister, the minister of the interior, and other ministers dozens of times that “we do not draw people by force to Tel Aviv.” Levanon was not a national-level politician, and he knew his limitations. Nevertheless, as mayor of the largest city in Israel, he sought to express solidarity with the state’s new efforts at spatial organization. Levanon explained that he too was a citizen of the state and was interested in seeing the development of the Negev and Galilee, “but I can’t put an electrified fence around Tel Aviv.” He concluded by saying that “it doesn’t make sense to choke a city” and that reducing the boundaries of the city was tantamount to choking it.31 Moshe Amiaz, the city engineer, agreed with the mayor that there was an intention to reduce the development of the city and to limit its growth. “Because Tel Aviv will not grow any more in its area, it is limited by these boundaries. . . . Tel Aviv will not be able to swallow neighboring areas. Therefore, I see the reduction of its area as a very grave injury,” he said.32

At the end of the 1950s, the city complained repeatedly about the budgetary deprivation by the government, the harm to its status, and even the reduction of its importance in the eyes of foreigners. On June 30, 1958, Deputy Mayor Avraham Boyer complained to Prime Minister Ben-Gurion that Tel Aviv was not on the itinerary of the visiting French defense minister, Maurice Bourgès Maunoury. “The Ministry of Foreign Affairs saw fit to delete Tel Aviv-Jaffa—the most important municipality in Israel—from the itinerary of the honorable guest, Mr. Bourgès Maunoury, while Safed and Haifa enjoyed a visit from him,” Boyer complained. The deputy mayor told the prime minister that this fact was very distressing, because “as you know, our city has factories that serve as clear symbols of friendship with France and the French people.” 33

On June 14, 1959, Levanon made an official complaint to Ben-Gurion that the government ministries were bypassing Tel Aviv when planning visits and itineraries of high-ranking visitors from abroad. At this point the tension between the mayor and the prime minister reached new heights. On June 21, Ben-Gurion responded to Levanon that his complaint was unjustified. “I assume that you agree with me that Jerusalem is no less important than Tel Aviv in that respect, and I have never heard a complaint from the mayors of Jerusalem that visits to the Jerusalem Municipality are not arranged for high-ranking visitors,” Ben-Gurion wrote.34 The prime minister concluded by saying that he was not of the opinion that the government had to compel visitors from abroad to visit municipalities; consequently, the prime minister said, he could not accept the mayor’s claim of a fault, and there was no need to correct a fault that did not exist.


Present-Absent: Ben-Gurion and His Absence from the Jubilee Exhibit ion

The tension between Ben-Gurion and Levanon, and the settlement policies they represented, were particularly apparent in the daily press, which covered their frequent disputes. Ben-Gurion tried throughout his term as prime minister to use various forms of leverage with the newspapers.35 His varying degrees of success depended not only on his political goals and his political and media skills but also on the nature of the communications arena and how the various newspapers operated. In those days, before television and in the early days of radio in Israel, the main arena for discourse and discussion of political, diplomatic, economic, and social matters was the press. One of the striking characteristics of the press of that period was the large proportion of newspapers founded and financed by political parties. This fact shaped the public space as an arena of many voices.36 The print media presented the various views and opinions with which Ben-Gurion had to contend, and the coverage of some of these newspapers was influenced by their partisan bias.

Davar, was seen as the mouthpiece of Mapai, and indeed it supported Mapai’s political line and views. On the other hand, the daily was not always a submissive organ that reflected the views of the party and its leaders, and Mapai did have difficulty controlling the paper. A striking example of this was Golda Meir’s accusation that, on the eve of the 1955 Knesset elections, “while all the press was against us,” Davar’s employees joined “the chorus of denouncers.”37 Al ha-mishmar, the paper of Mapam, followed a line that was critical of Ben-Gurion on a variety of topics. La-merkhav, the paper of Akhdut ha-avoda, was also among the critics of the government and exposed controversial defense issues. Ha-tsofe, the daily of the World Mizrachi Movement; Ha-boker, the paper of the General Zionists; and Herut, the daily of the Herut Movement all toed a consistent line of opposition. This was particularly true of Herut, in which one of the bitterest battles was against the German reparations agreement. Maariv and Yedioth ahronoth were the two papers without a consistent political line of any kind.

One of the incidents that revealed Ben-Gurion’s attitude toward Tel Aviv was his absence from the city’s jubilee celebrations in 1959. By that time there was already a consensus that it was a large and modern city. This image was not the result of its area or number of inhabitants but rather of the innovations that highlighted its urban maturity: the first supermarket, which had opened the year before on Ben-Yehuda Street; the first department store, which opened the same year; and the preparations for the construction of the Shalom Tower, the city’s first skyscraper, which was built on the ruins of the Herzliya Gymnasium (high


school), the symbol of old Tel Aviv. The very fact that all these were the first of their kind in Israel strengthened Tel Aviv’s self-image as the main Israeli metropolis. The government too saw how Tel Aviv was becoming a large, modern city while other parts of the country, in the south, the north, and particularly in the border areas, remained scarcely populated.

In the spring of 1959, the city was busy with preparations for the celebration of the jubilee, and in city hall official ceremonies were being decided on. The press in its entirety gave broad coverage to the city’s many preparations. They also covered the prime minister’s absence from the celebrations at length, and almost all of them took a stand, each in keeping with its own ideology. To mark the historic date, Levanon and the city council had planned several events with which they hoped to create a national occasion that would include the central government’s elite. However, the city complained of discrimination by the government regarding the main event, the Jubilee Exhibition of the City of Tel Aviv, in March 1959. On February 9, 1959, Levanon wrote to Ben-Gurion that the celebrations would officially begin on March 11 with a festive event, and he invited him to it. “It would be a very great honor if His Honor would agree to bring the government’s greeting to this festive event,” Levanon wrote to the prime minister.38

On March 11, Ben-Gurion sent the mayor his apologies for not being able to honor the occasion with his presence because of a prior obligation: “A commitment I made before I received your invitation and which I am not free to cancel prevents me, to my great sorrow, from being with you this evening at the festive opening of the jubilee of the first Hebrew city and first large city in Israel.”39 In his letter the prime minister pointed out Tel Aviv’s importance, but at the end he added his praise for the city’s young inhabitants “who gathered their courage and after their service in the IDF and in Nahal, left city life and volunteered to establish border settlements in the north, in the south, and in the east, and who have reached the far edge of the Negev.”40

The press gave massive coverage to the prime minister’s intention to be absent from the jubilee gathering. On March 8, Yedioth ahronoth, which had no political agenda, wrote that Ben-Gurion “will try to come to the Tel Aviv celebration—if he has the time [to do so].”41 The item also mentioned that the prime minister’s close associates “rejected as a libel and as propaganda” the hints in the press regarding the prime minister’s intention to boycott the celebrations. They explained that if the prime minister did not participate, it would be only because of a lack of time, and as an example of his crowded schedule, they noted that at the end of the week he was supposed to deliver two lectures to IDF officers.


On March 8, Maariv, which like Yedioth ahronoth had no official political agenda, wrote that the city “is getting all dressed up for the jubilee celebrations,” and that it had begun that morning to decorate the main streets and squares for the celebrations that would begin two days later. Mayor Levanon had called on the city’s residents to decorate their balconies with festive lights, symbols of the city, flowers, and national flags. A subheading in the article asked: “Will Ben-Gurion participate?” The paper reported that “it has been learned that the prime minister, Mr. D. Ben-Gurion, is reconsidering the possibility of participating in the opening ceremony of the celebrations on Wednesday evening.”42 The prime minister’s secretary had informed the mayor that the prime minister would not be able to participate in this event because he was busy that evening. According to the newspaper, however, it appeared that in response to the public’s negative reaction, it was now claimed that there had been a certain misunderstanding and that the prime minister thought he had been invited to attend opening events of the celebrations that would go on for three days.

The following day the newspaper ran a long item about the affair of the prime minister’s invitation to the jubilee celebrations. Under the headline “Levanon Reveals the Affair of the Absence of B-G from the Jubilee Celebration,” the Maariv reporter presented the mayor’s main arguments. Levanon said that the invitation had been sent to Ben-Gurion two and a half weeks before the event itself and that in light of other requests [for Ben-Gurion’s time], a negative response had been received. Levanon said:

Yesterday Ben-Gurion told me that he was busy that evening with an important matter that had been set long ago. I do not want to look for reasons for his nonparticipation in the opening of the jubilee celebrations. I assume that Ben-Gurion thinks that the other appointments that were made for that evening were more important and more urgent than the opening of the city’s celebrations.43

He added that at the request of the jubilee committee he had phoned the prime minister the previous day to invite him again to the opening of the celebrations, to remove any “misunderstanding,” but Ben-Gurion had told him that he would be absent from the event and would send a letter of greeting. He even asked whether there was another event related to the jubilee celebrations that he could take part in.

Herut reported that the prime minister had made a final decision not to participate in the rally and that, the paper explained sarcastically, Ben-Gurion “had made a date” for the evening of the jubilee rally.44 The paper lampooned the prime


minister and determined that the celebrations would open “with the annoying absence of the prime minister, in the presence of the president and ministers.”45

Ha-tsofe reported that the prime minister had cited “urgent matters that he would be occupied with that evening” as an explanation for his negative response.46 The paper also tried to give a political spin to the events, explaining that the prime minister’s refusal to participate in the opening rally had given rise to various conjectures “and that everyone sees it as his avoiding participating in the holiday of a city run by the elected candidate of a particular party.”47 A day later the paper’s editorial tried to figure out what the “urgent and mysterious matter” was that the prime minister had to deal with precisely on the opening evening of the rally. The editorial argued that without great expertise in the matters troubling the prime minister it was difficult to understand what could be so urgent. “A meeting with a political figure, consultation with the Mossad, preparation of a speech or an article, a visit to the Bible quiz in some locality—are they worth postponing greeting the largest city in Israel? Certainly not,” the editorial stated.48 And from this it deduced that “the important and urgent meeting would obviously have been postponed if the urban government of Tel Aviv had been headed by a Mapai person. Because the government of Tel Aviv is in the hands of other camps, participation in its jubilee rally is shunted aside by other matters.” The editorial stated emphatically that this was “deliberate, politically motivated contempt” and that the chief aim of Mapai was control of Tel Aviv, and having failed to achieve that goal, “it is angry.” The truculent editorial even lampooned the ruling party by stating that “Tel Aviv is smiling at this provincial behavior . . . and its celebrations will not be dulled even if the prime minister’s greeting is not heard at the rally.” Ha-tsofe summed it up thus: “But Tel Aviv will remember this treatment on the day of judgment. It will remember and will express its protest by protecting the city from a Mapai takeover.”49

The worker-oriented Al ha-mishmar emphasized the achievements of the Hebrew worker in Tel Aviv. The paper reported that the jubilee celebrations were dear to the hearts of the workers “because this population and the Histadrut in general have had a large part in the building of the first Hebrew city and its development.”50 The paper criticized the “bourgeois-religious” municipal coalition for trying to suppress this fact and take sole credit for what had been achieved in Tel Aviv from its inception. The paper reported that a representative of the workers’ council would not speak at the festive meeting because the municipality did not see fit for that to happen, but it also reported that the workers’ council called on workers in the city to take part in the jubilee celebrations. The paper stated that


the prime minister’s refusal had aroused great anger in city hall, which claimed that “it was proof of the government’s contempt for Tel Aviv.”51 Another article in the newspaper on the same day, signed by Mark Geffen, stated:

The city of Tel Aviv was built by the workers and the simple folk. . . . No matter which government there is, the workers are always the builders. . . . Tel Aviv has brought together a very large echelon of the bourgeoisie. . . . Indeed, in this city there is no visible sign of the workers’ character. But in fact, the external glint is only temporarily blinding, and anyone who tries to penetrate to the deeper layer will find the workers’ way of life.52

The article ended with the author’s hope that “[Tel Aviv] will soon have a government that is more devoted and loyal to the interests of the majority of the residents, and then we will be able to take part in the city’s festivities with total joy, without having to accompany them with critical comments.”53

Under the headline “The Tel Aviv Celebrations Begin This Evening,” on March 10, Davar reported that “the achievements of the workers of Tel Aviv were noted in a proclamation from the workers’ council.” Davar also reported that at the meeting of the secretariat of the Tel Aviv Workers’ Council on March 9, Eliezer Schechter, the council’s secretary, had appealed to the workers of Tel Aviv to participate “willingly in the jubilee celebrations of the first Hebrew city.” The council said that “the first Hebrew city’s jubilee holiday is also the great holiday of the working class that is organized in the Histadrut and comprises some 50 percent of the city’s population.” In the same proclamation the council explained that since the city’s founding, a small group of workers from Jaffa had joined in building and shaping it and that the diggers of the first well, the wheelbarrow pushers, the sand levelers, and the builders of the Herzliya Gymnasium were Hebrew workers. The proclamation went on to say that “with their sacred motto of the Hebrew workers’ camp—‘conquering the work’—even in the city and while struggling against the cheap labor of Haurans, bedouin, and Egyptians who at the time flooded Tel Aviv, they laid the foundations for the construction of a Hebrew city.”54 The item quoted the proclamation in its entirety, in which it was argued, among other things, that the struggle of the workers’ council to ensure a fitting way of life for the masses of workers contributed to the stability of the working person in the city and that the urban struggle of the workers’ representatives for thirty-eight years had made an important contribution to the development of the city. The item included a report about the opening ceremony of the jubilee celebrations in the presence of the president, but it did not mention the anticipated absence of Ben-Gurion.


An article by Isaac Ramba, the editor of Herut, was particularly biting and critical. He accused the prime minister of “hatred,” adding that even many of the prime minister’s “friends” felt that his demonstrative absence would harm him and his party more than it would harm Tel Aviv and that having received the invitation twenty days in advance, he could have postponed his “other engagement.” Ramba explained that “we are not now in a time of war, and not even an emergency meeting with the army chief of staff was necessary.” He stated that there was no vital reason to boycott Tel Aviv and that it was a mistake to think that Ben-Gurion avoided visiting the city, because he himself had been a resident and had lived in it longer than he had lived in Sde Boker. He came to the city for Habima theater performances and even brought his family with him. “Unfortunately for him, Tel Aviv is not toeing the line,” Ramba wrote cynically. He pointed out that Haifa had always been a footstool of Mapai and that even Jerusalem “had submitted and accepted the authority of Mapai . . . and one after the other, Netanya, Petakh Tikva, Rishon LeZion, and other cities had fallen like sheaves behind the reaper. . . . Only Tel Aviv remained standing in rebellion throughout the years, and Mapai could not impose its authority on the city.” He argued that if Mapai had been the ruling party in the city, the prime minister would have come to speak at the rally, and that now that the city was in the hands of the civil circles, “the hatred toward its ‘reactionary-Fascist-bourgeois’ directorate is like a fire burning in his bones.”55

Ramba’s interpretation was correct. The hostility and rivalry between Ben-Gurion, of Mapai, and Levanon, the representative of the civil camp in the General Zionists, was overt. An almost accidental meeting between the two men highlights the antipathy between them. On March 7, a few days before the jubilee rally, the Progressive Party’s convention began at Habima Theater in Tel Aviv, and both Ben-Gurion and Levanon were asked to speak. The two wrangled from the speaker’s dais, and the headline in Yedioth ahronoth was, “Duel between Ben-Gurion and Levanon at the Heart of the Progressives’ Convention.”56

Ben-Gurion’s speech was about diplomatic matters. First, he reviewed the international situation, saying that despite the threat that the Cold War could touch off a physical war, he did not fear a third world war because of his certainty that the United States and Europe not would rush to attack the Soviet Union and that the East would not declare war on the West. He said that Israel, as a democratic regime that could serve as an example to the peoples of Africa and Asia, must break through its wall of international isolation. Levanon, who spoke after Ben-Gurion, insulted the prime minister. One day later the press reported that Levanon “unhesitatingly stuck two knives in [Ben-Gurion’s] back.” “I will take you down from the moon


and the sun and the neighboring continents and I will return you to the place and time of this convention,” he was quoted as saying.57 And he added, before citing a passage from the Hebrew Bible: “I do not read the Hebrew Bible only during Bible quizzes.” The newspaper commented that “there was no need to say more.” At the end of his speech Levanon pointed out the pioneering and Zionism of Tel Aviv in its jubilee and his words, according to Yedioth ahronoth, were “of necessity” interpreted as if he had said to Ben-Gurion, “I suggest that you show some respect for Tel Aviv on its holiday!”58 Al ha-mishmar also reported Ben-Gurion’s speech at length, but it completely ignored both the Tel Aviv mayor’s speech and its outspoken criticism.

At the festive meeting of the city council at the Tel Aviv Museum, Levanon spoke in defense of his city. Thus Yedioth ahronoth reported, saying that “whereas every child knows that the country was established thanks to the agricultural settlements, thanks to the kibbutzim and the defense force that grew out of them, only a very few know about Tel Aviv’s part in the establishment of the state.”59 And later he added, “It was right that we had the privilege of the state’s having being declared here in Dizengoff House.” He added that

Tel Aviv gave of its economic might to the state, brought up a generation of fighters, instituted compulsory education many years before it was instituted [elsewhere] in the country, absorbed 200,000 immigrants after the establishment of the state, and served as a school for self-government in the days that preceded the state’s independence. The ministers [Mordechai] Namir, [Peretz] Naftali, and [Pinchas] Rosen learned a chapter of political behavior while they were members of the city council. Here the late Yosef Sprintzak learned the foundations of his parliamentary doctrine.60

Another dispute arose between the Tel Aviv municipality and the management of Kol Israel because of the radio station’s refusal to broadcast the festive jubilee meeting from the museum. Kol Israel argued that it had been agreed with the municipality from the outset that it would broadcast only the speeches of the prime minister and of Eliezer Schechter, the head of the opposition, if he spoke, for a total of thirty minutes. But Tel Aviv had demanded more time. Kol Israel refused, and as a result there was no live broadcast from the meeting.

A few days after the ceremony in Tel Aviv, in an interview with Maariv, Levanon was asked whether he had anticipated the possibility of the prime minister’s not coming to the opening ceremony. He answered, “Not only did I not anticipate it, I would have been willing to agree that there had been a misunderstanding regarding the date of the prime minister’s coming. I even contacted his office, and again the


refusal came!” Immediately after that, in answer to another question, the mayor said, “I would like the city council to be less political and to discuss matters with a purely administrative-economic approach. Sometimes a partisan dispute [in the council] takes on truly absurd forms.” 61

In the same interview Levanon added, “There are certain circles in the country that have attempted to postpone, reduce, and even prevent the celebrations.” He gave two reasons, saying that, unfortunately, there were still those “who had not yet liberated themselves . . . from the idea that Zionism was only Hebrew rural settlement.” His second argument was against the call to disperse the population of Tel Aviv. Levanon agreed that too many people were concentrated in the cities and that there was a need to disperse the population, “but is that a reason for Tel Aviv’s inhabitants not to be citizens with equal rights in the state? . . . If people come to Tel Aviv, what should be done with them? Shut the door?” Levanon added:

I’ll be open [with you]. There is also a political reason, because this city has generally been run by people who do not share the political views of those who ran the state! Nevertheless, I would like to emphasize, there is cooperation between the civil circles and the workers. And where are they building their centers, if not in Tel Aviv?62

On March 12, Davar reported on the rally that had taken place the previous evening. Without mentioning a word about the reason for the prime minister’s absence from the gathering, it reported that the government’s greeting was delivered by the minister of the interior, Yisrael Bar-Yehuda, who noted that half of the state was still not settled. In a separate item on an inside page, however, the paper printed Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion’s entire greeting, which had been sent to Tel Aviv’s mayor. It began as a hymn of praise to the city but concluded with an official command. Ben-Gurion stuck to his stubborn view that the city’s size and status should be reduced in favor of other parts of the country. At the beginning of his message, Ben-Gurion expressed regret for his absence from the event because of a previous commitment and noted that

among the marvels of creativity and renewal that preceded the establishment of the state, Tel Aviv takes one of the first places, and knowing as I do each of the first founders, I know that in those days not one of them dreamed of the enormous dimensions attained by this neighborhood, which was established in a Jewish suburb of non-Jewish Jaffa.


However, the prime minister went on to note that he could not conclude his letter without pointing out a last merit of Tel Aviv—albeit a merit that not many enjoy—namely, that several of its young sons gathered up their courage and after their service in the IDF and Nahal, left city life and volunteered to establish border settlements in the north and in the south and in the east, reaching to the far edge of the Negev. . . . And my sincere wish for the first Hebrew city is that it should see thousands of its sons and daughters volunteering to green the wasteland and to establish, together with masses of new immigrants, dozens and hundreds of new settlements in the empty spaces of Galilee and the Negev. Tel Aviv will strengthen and increase Israel’s security and independence—if it spreads not only to the banks of the Yarkon, but first and foremost on the banks of the Jordan, the Dead Sea, the Gulf of Eilat, and the reaches of the Negev.63

War on the Concentration of Population: Ben-Gurion and the Dispersal of Tel Aviv

On November 3, 1959, Tel Aviv held its ninth municipal elections, in which Levanon was opposed by Mapai’s Mordechai Namir, the minister of labor. Mapai won 36.1 percent of the vote, and the General Zionists received only 19.5 percent.64 After years of rule by the civil bloc, Mapai had succeeded in achieving its aim of “conquering the bourgeois fortress” of Tel Aviv and “refuting the myth of the bourgeois city.”65 Mapai described the political reversal as a historic victory in which the city’s government was transferred “to the workers and the people” and added that it would “awaken Tel Aviv from its stagnation.” The change of government created the basis for cooperation between the ruling party of the country and the party that headed the municipal coalition. The city’s new priorities included correction of the budgetary system, development of physical infrastructure, and improvement of the socioeconomic situation. But although the reversal improved both Tel Aviv’s status in relation to the national government and their mutual cooperation, the city’s special status as a metropolis—a large, modern, developing city—generated constant tension between them, even through the 1960s.

In the beginning of 1960, there was another furor in city hall following Ben-Gurion’s remarks regarding the city’s status and the policy of population dispersal.66 It seemed that the prime minister was continuing to fight the first Hebrew city and its demographic growth with full force, despite the political reversal. Mayor Namir was deeply embarrassed. At the ninth convention of the Agricultural Union, in Petah Tikva on January 20, 1960, Ben-Gurion surprised his listeners by saying,

Until three months ago I could not voice an opinion, but now, with the handover of Tel Aviv to a Labor government, I will ensure the reduction of the city as masses of


youngsters move to development settlements, and if I could, I would also transfer all its 400,000 residents to development settlements. I will also reduce all the industry in this city and also in Haifa and move most of it to the development settlements.67

This agricultural workers’ convention would probably have been back-page news if not for these forceful statements that filled the newspapers the following day and quickly reached the city council meeting. At the fourth city council meeting, council member Avraham Schechterman quoted the words spoken by the prime minister at the convention. Schechterman claimed that the prime minister had said,

Only now that a Labor government has come, only now can I start fighting against the concentration [of population] in Tel Aviv and against the building of factories in Tel Aviv. They all need to be built in desolate areas or development areas. . . . If it were up to me I would disperse all of Tel Aviv’s residents in hundreds of settlements of 4,000 people each. . . . Now it will be easier to teach the Tel Aviv public not to tell us that this is against the General Zionists [and] Herut. Now there is a Labor

Ben-Gurion dispersing Tel Aviv. From Maariv , Januar y 27, 1960. I l lustration by “Dosh“ (Kar iel Gardosh). Courtesy of Michael Gardosh.


government and we will demand that it lend a shoulder to the transfer of people to empty settlements.68

Council member Yosef Tamir added, “We do not believe that the Negev should be built on the ruins of Tel Aviv.”69

Namir, who squirmed in his seat as he heard Schechterman quoting Ben-Gurion, commented that the prime minister had prefaced his remarks by saying that he was speaking as a private person and not in the name of any institution. “This was not the first time that the prime minister had expressed his opinion that the urban population on the coastal plain should not be enlarged artificially. This basic idea was common to all the streams in the country and the Zionist movement,” Namir said, adding, to soften the matter and to attempt to enhance the power of the municipality, “The council approved ten clauses of lines of action for its term, and there is no doubt that this is a magnificent plan that will add prosperity and development to Tel Aviv.”70

News of this speech also reached the Knesset plenum, where the prime minister was asked to clarify his position. In the Knesset session of January 26, 1960, MK Peretz Bernstein (General Zionists) presented a parliamentary question to Ben-Gurion regarding his remarks at the convention. Bernstein said that the prime minister’s words had aroused resentment and concern among large groups of Tel Aviv residents. “In their view, the negative attitude toward Tel Aviv expressed at the agricultural convention is identical to the prime minister’s proposal at the time, to erase the name Tel Aviv and to leave Tel Aviv-Jaffa with just the name Jaffa,” said the MK, adding, “The prime minister’s words remind us of the prime minister’s boycotting of the Tel Aviv jubilee celebrations.”71

Bernstein asked the prime minister to clarify whether there was truth in the newspaper reports regarding his desire to disperse the population of Tel Aviv, whether he had expressed his intentions in the name of the government, and which law he intended to use to force the inhabitants of Tel Aviv to leave the city and settle in places determined by the prime minister or the government.

Ben-Gurion responded to Bernstein that he had spoken at the Agricultural Workers’ Union convention, to which he had been invited in his capacity as prime minister, not in the name of the government and not as a member of the government “but rather as one who was an agricultural worker fifty years ago.”72 The prime minister explained that the headline in Ha-boker that said “B.G.: Now I Will Make Sure to Shrink Tel Aviv” was the invention of one of the paper’s editors and that he had been misquoted.


Immediately after that, the prime minister presented his doctrine with regard to Tel Aviv. He explained that when he presented the elected government to the Knesset at the beginning of March 1949, he announced that the first clause in the government’s development project was “rapid and balanced population of the areas of the country that were population poor and prevention of excessive concentration in the cities.”73

Ben-Gurion reminded his listeners that “more than once I have spoken in the Knesset and outside the Knesset of the danger of concentrating the people on the narrow strip along the sea coast between Tel Aviv and its offspring and Haifa, both the security danger and the diplomatic danger and also the distortion of the essence of our revival in the homeland.” Ben-Gurion said he did not see any need to enlarge existing cities, except for Jerusalem. He explained that “the country takes precedence over any single place in it, and the future of the people is more important than the ambitions of any mayor who wants all the immigration and all the institutions and all the factories to be concentrated only in his city.”74 He also noted that he had never spoken of forced dispersal.

Regarding Bernstein’s two other claims, the first pertaining to Jaffa and the second to Tel Aviv’s jubilee celebrations, the prime minister answered that he still firmly believed that an ancient, biblical name was preferable to a “fictional, Diaspora name,” and that he did not see any connection between the matter of the city’s name and population dispersal. Regarding the jubilee celebrations, which he did not attend, Ben-Gurion said, “Tel Aviv’s jubilee is my holiday no less than it is MK Bernstein’s holiday, but I determine the time of my participation in the celebrations—in keeping with the needs of my work.”75

Moshe Goldstein, the then deputy mayor of Tel Aviv, said on January 28, 1960, that

the government ministries are acting in a way that is diametrically opposite to the prime minister’s view. . . . Most of the lands belong to private people, and the available lands are publicly owned lands around Tel Aviv, beyond the Yarkon, that should have served first and foremost for rehabilitation of the existing population, elimination of poverty-stricken habitations, and not for new population coming from outside.76

This matter too resonated in the daily press. La-merkhav, the organ of Akhdut ha-avoda–Poalei Zion, wrote with open scorn:

Following the prime minister’s words at the agricultural convention last week there was an almost panicky outburst by some Tel Aviv “patriots,” as if the whip


of immediate dispersal had been raised over “God’s great city.” . . . No danger is foreseen, heaven forbid, that one rainy morning Tel Aviv will find itself “dispersed” throughout the country.77

In Davar the criticism was muted: “Although this is a vital problem, no real steps have been taken in the past to stop the rush to urban centers.”78 Even Herut, whose line was generally clearly in opposition to Mapai, had a similar argument: “The artificial reduction . . . of Tel Aviv, which Ben-Gurion so much as declared a few weeks ago, actually existed a long time ago, but it has been thwarted by reality until now.”79 Yedioth ahronoth quickly tried to calm things down, stating:

But if the fathers of the municipality object to this trend—they can relax; they have nothing to fear. Apart from developing the port of Ashdod (and even that at a tortoise’s pace) nothing has been done in the way of Mr. Ben-Gurion’s declarations. . . . The construction of residential housing in Tel Aviv and its environs has not stopped; rather, it has spread.80

Ha-tsofe also sounded an all-clear siren: “And as for shrinking Tel Aviv—even before the last declaration we see that 25,000 people have left the country recently, most of them from Tel Aviv, and thus in any case there is no reason to worry about a practical shrinking of the city.”81

On August 11, 1964, Mayor Namir wrote to Ben-Gurion, who had resigned his position as prime minister the previous year, that he would like to clarify several points with him regarding the population dispersal plan and the city of Tel Aviv. Namir claimed that “the municipality, as long as I have been mayor, acted and is acting in accordance with the government’s declared policy of preferring to populate the Negev and Galilee.”82 He reminded Ben-Gurion of his response to MK Bernstein in 1960 and said that in fact Tel Aviv was the only city in the country in which, up to that time, “the order to disperse the population” had been carried out. Namir added that when he became mayor four and a half years previously, the city had nearly 400,000 inhabitants and that this number had remained almost unchanged until 1964. He said that the government had carried out its population-dispersal policy only in regard to Tel Aviv, whereas in the Dan Region, outside Tel Aviv, the government was building a large number of new residential buildings and was filling them quickly. Namir complained that after the government’s announcement of a building freeze in the entire coastal area, from Nahariya to Ashkelon, Haifa was completely removed from the freeze. He explained that since the freeze, land prices in Tel Aviv had increased substantially, apartments had become more expensive, and


at the same time there had been a slowdown in the “in any case unsatisfactory effort to eradicate poverty-stricken neighborhoods, which included nearly half the poor neighborhoods in the country.”83 Namir stated that thus “a fatal socioeconomic outcome is achieved,” and one of the outcomes was the exodus of young couples and of workers from the city to localities around it in which the government was building massively, instead of to the Negev or Galilee. Apparently he received no answer to this letter.

On February 16, 1965, the tenth Mapai convention opened in Tel Aviv in the presence of President Zalman Shazar, Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, cabinet members, diplomatic representatives of many countries, including the ambassador of the Soviet Union, and representatives of the workers’ parties, the National-Religious Party, and the Liberal Party. Ben-Gurion, who was then on the verge of leaving Mapai and founding Rafi, believed that this important convention of the ruling party should take place in Jerusalem, to which he ascribed supreme moral importance, rather than in Tel Aviv, and that the next convention should be held in Jerusalem. Reuven Barkat, Mapai’s secretary, explained to him that that had indeed been the intention but that no suitable hall had been found in Jerusalem. To that Ben-Gurion responded, and his words were quoted in the daily press, that “no one ever said there isn’t enough room in Jerusalem.”84

Conclusion

On the one hand, Ben-Gurion was influenced by the founding fathers of Zionism who spoke in favor of settlement and against the city and its ills. On the other hand, he understood that the process of urbanization was inevitable and even vital for the State of Israel, but he recognized the value of balancing the distribution of the population and saw that as inevitable. His abandonment of Tel Aviv for the cabin in Sde Boker as an example to others demonstrates the matter well. The way in which he related to Tel Aviv, the biggest and most modern city in Israel from its inception, was ambivalent. On the one hand, he saw it as a “miracle of creation” that was one of the components of Israel’s revival. On the other hand, he sought to reduce its power and status and, primarily, to motivate the population to move to the periphery and to the development towns that were built in the 1950s and 1960s. This process, also called “population dispersal,” had only minor success. The fact that the civil circles ruled Tel Aviv until 1959 limited the cooperation between the national government and the municipality, which eyed each other with suspicion. This tension led to stagnation in Tel Aviv’s urban development. The sources of tension between the urban and rural areas, which originated during the


Yishuv period, influenced the government’s settlement strategy when the state was established—a strategy of settling the periphery, on the one hand, and reducing the power of the large city in the center of the country, on the other. Consequently, the dominant trend in the state planning authorities in the early years of the state was to prevent further growth of the city and to reduce its population by dispersing its inhabitants throughout the country, particularly to the more distant places. There was also an attempt to establish new small and midsize urban centers to serve as intermediate zones between the rural areas and the big city. Despite the policy of population dispersal, Mayor Rokach said, “Even after the establishment of the state, the declaration of Jerusalem as the capital, and the population dispersal throughout the country, the city of Tel Aviv-Jaffa continues to be a metropolis, a city with a large population, and the center of the country economically, politically, socially, and culturally.”85 The first problems the government faced in the transition from the Yishuv to the state included broadening the authority of the central government with regard to population groups and political streams. This was essential for attending to matters that the Yishuv did not have to deal with in the past, such as internal municipal issues. Thus, local government became more dependent on the central government, and this dependence generated tension between Tel Aviv, which was controlled by the civil circles, and the government of Israel, headed by Ben-Gurion, the leader of Mapai.

An examination of contemporary newspapers, from the end of the Mandate period through the first decades of the state, reveals a clear, consistent tendency of papers aligned with workers’ parties to reduce the importance of Tel Aviv in contrast with the urgent need to spread agricultural settlement throughout the country. There was an overt, consistent ideology that saw the rural areas as more important than the city, yet Tel Aviv’s happenings were covered, perhaps more than those of any other city in the country, by all the newspapers. Even if the newspapers were aligned with the Labor ideology regarding urbanization as opposed to agricultural settlement, they still raised Tel Aviv’s status by reporting what happened there, and they intensified the old urban-rural conflict. In contrast, after the establishment of the state, the newspapers aligned with the civil parties tended to criticize the government and its aim of constraining Tel Aviv. The uproar over the absence of Prime Minister Ben-Gurion from the opening ceremony of Tel Aviv’s jubilee celebrations was the pinnacle of this criticism, and it intensified the fundamental argument over the state’s settlement strategy in its first decades.

In the first years of the state, all streams of the Israeli press saw themselves as partners in the national effort to establish the young state and ensure its physical


existence.86 Because of that, the newspapers and many journalists willingly accepted a series of constraints when the government presented them as essential—primarily for preserving the security of the state, but also for ensuring immigration, supporting government policy regarding settlement throughout the country, and fostering a strong economic infrastructure. Therefore, neither the newspapers nor the journalists saw their main role as criticizing the functioning of the government. The press, which must be objective to fulfill its traditional role, was often influenced by partisan ideology. The newspapers gave wide coverage to the hostility between Tel Aviv’s mayors and the ruling party, Mapai, but most of them were careful to mute the strident voices, and most of them tried to stick to the facts and not draw hasty conclusions. However, in times of crisis they could be critical—as most of them, including Davar, were when they all noted the prime minister’s absence from the ceremony marking Tel Aviv’s jubilee. Whereas in the pro-worker papers the criticism was muted, in others he was castigated for his spitefulness in staying away from a ceremony that was so important, not only for the city but for the entire state. On the other hand, as other studies have also found, relations between Ben-Gurion and the private newspapers that rose to prominence in those years were characterized by the fact that Ben-Gurion had only limited control over them.

Notes

1 He resumed the position of prime minister on December 3, 1955.

2 M. Shmaryahu, “Shalom lah Tel Aviv, she-yilkhu bineyh le-hityashvut” [Goodbye, Tel Aviv, may

your sons settle the land], Maariv, December 14, 1953.

3 Ibid.

4 The “civil circles” were situated on the political map of the Yishuv, and later of the state, by

a process of elimination: somewhere between right and left. This definition reflected their

diffuse organizational and ideological character and hinted at their political weakness. They

were groupings of the so-called middle class, including property owners, farmers, merchants,

industrialists, tradespeople, professionals, and individuals of high public rank. They left their

mark mainly on the economy: they made a decisive contribution to the creation of the Jewish

economy in Eretz Israel, but their economic power did not translate into political power.

5 Tel Aviv was often described as an “artificial creation,” not because it created a new settlement

phenomenon in the landscape of Eretz Israel but rather because its development derived in the

main from private enterprise and was made possible by the import of capital from abroad. The

preferred channel of investment was the purchase of land and real estate, although there was no

sizable natural resource within its boundaries and no large factories nearby.


6 With the exception of the years 1926–1928 when, after the resignation of Meir Dizengoff,

David Bloch, the head of the workers’ faction, became a permanent deputy mayor and then the

acting mayor.

7 Shalom Reichman, “Hithavut mapat ha-Yishuv bi-mei ha-Mandat,” [The development of the

settlement map during the Mandate period] in Toldot ha-Yishuv ha-Yehudi be-Eretz Yisrael me-az

ha-Aliya ha-Rishona: Tkufat ha-Mandat ha-Briti [History of the Jewish Yishuv in Eretz Israel,

from the First Aliyah: The British Mandate], Part 3, ed. Moshe Lissak, (Jerusalem: Mossad Bialik,

2007/2008), 201.

8 On the sociohistorical sources of the city in Zionist ideology see Erik Cohen, “The City in Zionist

Ideology,” Jerusalem Quarterly 4 (Summer 1977): 124–126.

9 Although from the beginning of the twentieth century, agricultural settlement was geographically

centered around four cities that had a Jewish population: Jaffa, Haifa, Tiberias, and Safed.

10 Some, however, did envision a Jewish city. In Theodor Herzl’s vision of the Jewish state, the

Hebrew city of Haifa was to be a modern Jewish city based on the port and on industry. The

Biluim, nineteenth-century pioneers, also tended toward urban settlement, or at least an urban

way of life. The settlements they built, for example, the moshavot (rural settlements) resembled

small towns in Europe. They did not succeed in establishing cities, because they lacked the means

and the capital necessary for establishing a modern city, and in Eretz Israel there was no public

body that was able to finance such an urban experiment.

11 Ha-poel ha-tsair, March 13, 1924.

12 Yaakov Shavit and Gideon Biger, Ha-historia shel Tel Aviv: Me’ir medina le’ir bimdina (1936–1952) [The

history of Tel Aviv: From a city-state to a city in a state (1936–1952)] (Tel Aviv: Ramot, 2007), 14.

13 Maoz Azaryahu, Tel Aviv: ha’ir ha-amitit, mitografia historit [Tel Aviv: The real city, historical

mythography (Sde Boker: Ben-Gurion Institute and Ben-Gurion University Press, 2005), 1:466.

14 A. D. Gordon, “Al ha-moetsa ha-haklait” [On the agricultural council], in A. D. Gordon, Ha-

uma ve-ha-avoda (Tel Aviv: Moetset poalei Haifa, 1957), 1:466.

15 Azaryahu, Tel Aviv: ha’ir ha-amitit, 39.

16 Haaretz, August 20, 1934.

17 Amiram Gonen, “Keitsad hayta Tel Aviv-Yaffo la-merkaz ha’ironi ha-rashi be-Eretz Yisrael” [How

Tel Aviv-Jaffa became the main urban center of the Land of Israel], in Tel Aviv-Yaffo, mea ha-shanim

ha-rishonot [Tel Aviv-Jaffa, the first hundred years], ed. Baruch Kipnis (Haifa: Pardes, 2009), 164.

18 Editorial, “Dvar ha-yom” [News of the day], Davar, May 2, 1934.

19 Baruch Krupnik, “Kav le-kav: Od be-proza lichvod Tel Aviv” [Line to line: More prose in honor

of Tel Aviv], Haaretz, May 2, 1934, 4.

20 Yitshak Lufban, “Tel Aviv le-hatsi yovla” [Tel Aviv on its semi-jubilee], Ha-po’el ha-tsa’ir, issue

29, in Tel Aviv—hatsi yovel [Tel Aviv—The semi-jubilee], ed. Maoz Azaryahu, Arnon Golan,

Aminadav Dykman (Jerusalem: Carmel, 2009), 56.


21 Moshe Smilansky, “Tel Aviviyut” [Tel Avivism], Bustanai, Issue 11, June 27, 1934, 1.

22 Ha-Yarden, December 23, 1934.

23 On Haim Arlozorov’s attitude toward Tel Aviv, see Yaakov Shavit and Gideon Biger, Ha-historia

shel Tel Aviv: mi-shkhunot oni le’ir [The history of Tel Aviv: From poor neighborhoods to a city]

(Tel Aviv: Ramot, 2001), 30.

24 Yaakov Shavit and Gideon Biger, Ha-historia shel Tel Aviv: Me-ir medina, 14.

25 Elisha Efrat, “Ayarot ha-pituah be-Yisrael” [Development towns in Israel], in Ayarot ha-pituah

[The development towns], ed. Tsvi Tsameret, Aviva Halamish, and Esther Meir-Glitsenstein

(Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi, 2009), 38.

26 The difficulty of seeing Ben-Gurion as a leader with a civil-political view, like the one that held

sway in the Tel Aviv municipality until 1959, derives from the fact that the term “citizenship” was

seen in the early politics of the Yishuv and of the state as being identified with the “civil” right

and not with the left, to which Ben-Gurion belonged. According to the accepted view, the left

emphasized the values of pioneering and the contribution of the individual to the entire group.

Ben-Gurion demanded that the individual enlist to help achieve the general Zionist principles,

and the “pioneering” that he demanded of Israeli society consisted mainly of the traditional

tasks of the Zionist pioneer: settlement and work. But in practice Ben-Gurion broadened the

term “pioneering” greatly and included in it every activity on behalf of the collective. This “state

pioneering” was aimed at all citizens of the state and members of the political community. Ben-

Gurion opined that pioneering was the most sublime expression of the idea of statehood. This

conception of pioneering did not include urban development. Urbanization was a process that

was foreign and even contrary to the values of the left, and this view had historical roots.

27 On this affair, see Eran Eldar, “Hadarat nashim rishona be-Yisrael: Golda Meir mul ha-si’ot ha-

datiyot be-’iriyat Tel Aviv” [The first exclusion of women in Israel: Golda Meir versus the religious

factions in the Tel Aviv municipality], Kivunim hadashim 26 (June 2012): 256–267.

28 Iris Greitser and Amiram Gonen, “Itsuv ha-mapa ha-Yishuvit shel ha-medina be-reshita” [The

shaping of the settlement map in the beginning of the state], in Toldot ha-Yishuv ha-Yehudi be-

Eretz Yisrael me-az ha-Aliya ha-Sheniya, Medinat Yisrael, ha-’assor ha-rishon [The history of the

Jewish Yishuv in Eretz Israel since the Second Aliyah, the State of Israel, the first decade], ed.

Moshe Lissak (Jerusalem: Mossad Bialik, 2009), 239.

29 From the basic principles of the government plan, State Archive, Government Yearbook 1949/50,

27.

30 Yitshak Koren, Kibbuts ha-galuyot be-hitnahluto [The ingathering of the exiles and their settlement]

(Tel Aviv: Am oved, 1964), 37.

31 All quotations in the paragraph are from Tel Aviv Municipal Archive, Protokol yeshivat mo’etset

ha’iriya ha-sheminit [Minutes of the meeting of the eighth city council], January 5, 1958.

32 Ibid.


33 All quotations in this paragraph are from Israel State Archives, Gimmel-3/5430.

34 Ibid.

35 On the relations between Ben-Gurion and the press, see Rafi Mann, Ha-manhig ve-ha-tikshoret:

David Ben-Gurion ve-ha-maavak al ha-merhav ha-tsibburi 1948–1963 [The leader and the

media: Ben-Gurion and the struggle for the public space 1948–1963] (Tel Aviv: Am oved,

2012), 38.

36 Ibid., 39.

37 Ibid., 48.

38 Israel State Archives, Gimmel-3/5430.

39 Ibid.

40 Ibid.

41 “B.G. yishtadel lavo la-hagigot T.A.—im yihiye lo pnai” [B.G. will try to attend the celebrations

in T.A.—if he has the time], Yedioth ahronoth, March 8, 1959.

42 “Tel Aviv mitkashetet likrat hagigot ha-yovel” [Tel Aviv is adorning itself in advance of the jubilee

celebrations], Maariv, March 8, 1959.

43 “Levanon megolel parashat he’ader B.G. me-hagigat ha-yovel” [Levanon reveals the affair of

B.G.’s absence from the jubilee celebrations], Maariv, March 9, 1959, 1.

44 M. Nakdimon, “Ben Gurion: Hihlateti lo lehofi’a” [Ben Gurion: I decided not to show up],

Herut, March 9, 1959.

45 Moshe Shai, “Hagigot yovel ha-50 shel Tel Aviv yiptathu mahar” [Tel Aviv’s jubilee celebrations

begin tomorrow], Herut, March 9, 1959

46 “Hagigot yovel T.A. mathilot ha’erev” [Tel Aviv’s jubilee celebrations begin this evening], Ha-tsofe,

March 10, 1959.

47 Ibid.

48 Editorial, “Zilzul mekhuvan” [Intentional contempt], Ha-tsofe, March 11, 1959.

49 Ibid.

50 “Lamrot hitnakrut ha’iriya po’alei T.A. yishtatfu ba-yovel” [Despite being ignored by city hall, Tel

Aviv’s workers will participate in the jubilee], Al ha-mishmar, March 10, 1959.

51 Ibid.

52 “Hag mahul be-etsev” [A holiday tinged with sadness], Mark Gefen, Al ha-mishmar, March 10,

1959.

53 Ibid.

54 All quotations in this paragraph are from “Hagigot Tel Aviv niftahot ha’erev” [The Tel Aviv

celebrations begin this evening], Davar, March 10, 1959.

55 All quotations in this paragraph are from Isaac Ramba, “Libo ha-gadol shel Ben-Gurion” [Ben-

Gurion’s large heart], Herut, March 12, 1959.


56 Y. Ben-Porat. “Du krav bein Ben-Gurion–Levanon be-merkaz ve’idat ha-progressivim” [Duel

between Ben-Gurion and Levanon at the heart of the Progressives’ convention], Yedioth ahronot,

March 8, 1959.

57 Ibid.

58 Ibid.

59 Yonatan Lahav, “Gam le-Tel Aviv helek ba-hakamat ha-medina” [Tel Aviv also has a part in

establishing the state], Yedioth ahronoth, March 11, 1959.

60 Ibid.

61 Rafael Bashan, “Ra’ayon ha-shavua im Haim Levanon” [Weekly interview with Haim Levanon],

Maariv, March 13, 1959, 10.

62 Ibid.

63 David Ben-Gurion, “Tel Aviv—ba-gdolim be-fil’ei ha-yetsira ve-ha-hithadshut” [Tel Aviv—one

of the greatest wonders of creativity and renewal], Davar, March 12, 1959.

64 Yaakov Shavit and Gideon Biger, Ha-historia shel Tel Aviv: Ir mithadeshet [The history of Tel Aviv:

A city renewing itself ], (Tel Aviv: Ramot, 2013), 44.

65 Ibid. On the political reversal in Tel Aviv, see Z. Yoeli, “Mahapekha o shipurim be-Tel Aviv”

[Revolution or improvements in Tel Aviv], Davar, January 25, 1960.

66 The view regarding population dispersal became, as early as the establishment of the state, one of

the principles of the planning branch and was adopted by the political echelon. By the end of the

1950s, four plans for population dispersal in Israel had been formulated. On the demographic

trends in the State of Israel, see Eran Eldar, Be-kohoteha ha’atsmiim [By its own efforts] (Tel Aviv:

Resling, 2013), 73–86.

67 M.H., “Tel Aviv ke-sa’ir la’azazel” [Tel Aviv as a scapegoat], Ha-boker, January 21, 1960.

68 Tel Aviv Municipal Archive, Protokol yeshivat mo’etset ha’iriya ha-teshiit [Protocol of the meeting of

the ninth city council], January 24, 1960.

69 Ibid.

70 Ibid.

71 Israel State Archives, Knesset Records, First Session of the Fourth Knesset, Meeting 38, January

26, 1960.

72 Ibid.

73 Ibid.

74 Ibid.

75 Ibid.

76 Moshe Goldstein, “Pizur ha-ukhlusiya” [Population dispersal], Haaretz, January 28, 1960.

77 Editorial, “Tel Aviv—ve-pizur ha-ukhlusiya” [Tel Aviv and population dispersal], La-merkhav,

January 27, 1960.


78 Aharon Weinberg, “Pizur ha-ukhlusiya” [Population dispersal], Davar, February 7, 1960.

79 A. Shamai, “Be-metsi’ut shel Medinat Yisrael” [In the reality of the State of Israel], Herut, February

5, 1960.

80 Eliezer Livne, “Ben-Gurion veha’ir Tel Aviv” [Ben-Gurion and the city of Tel Aviv], Yedioth

ahronoth, January 29, 1960.

81 S. Kurts, “Al haktanat Tel Aviv” [On reducing Tel Aviv’s size], Ha-tsofe, January 28, 1960.

82 Israel State Archives, Gimmel-21/6305.

83 Ibid.

84 Z. Yoeli, “Yoman ha-ve’ida” [Convention diary], Davar, February 17, 1965.

85 Yediot Iriyat Tel Aviv [Tel Aviv Municipality news], Year 22, Booklets 1–3, June–August 1952, 2.

86 Yehiel Limor and Rafi Man, Itona’ut [Journalism], (Tel Aviv: Ha-universita ha-petukha, 1997),

47.

david ben gurion's attitude toward tel aviv

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