Tel Aviv

• 1. Introduction

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  Tel Aviv was founded on a desolate sand dune on the 11th of April 1909, when 66 Jewish families gathered to parcel out land by lottery using seashells. A boy drew names from one box and a girl drew plot numbers from the second. A photographer named Abraham Soskin, born in Russia in 1881, documented the moment. What those families set in motion that morning would become the most expensive city on earth, a global high-tech hub, and a place that has been bombed, shelled, and rocketed from multiple directions across nearly a century of conflict. How does a modest housing estate on the outskirts of an ancient port city grow into a metropolis receiving more than two and a half million international visitors a year? And what does it mean to build a modern city from scratch on land that carries thousands of years of civilizational memory?

• 2. A Name from Scripture

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  Nahum Sokolow borrowed the city's name from a passage in the Book of Ezekiel, describing a Mesopotamian site near Babylon where exiled Israelites had settled. When Sokolow translated Theodor Herzl's 1902 novel Altneuland into Hebrew, he chose "Tel Aviv" as his title. The name was adopted for the settlement on the 21st of May 1910, selected from several proposals that included "Herzliya". The two Hebrew roots carry their own symbolism. Aviv means spring, invoking renewal. Tel describes an artificial mound built up by successive layers of human civilization over centuries. The name was chosen precisely because it held both meanings at once: something ancient and something new pressing upward from beneath it. The original settlement had been called Ahuzat Bayit, or "Homestead", after the Jewish association that organized its construction outside Jaffa, which was then part of the Mutasarrifate of Jerusalem within the Ottoman Empire. Marketing pamphlets from that era spelled out the founders' vision in concrete terms: streets with roads, sidewalks and electric lights; water flowing through pipes to every house; sewerage installed for public health. The city was to be inspired by the European cities of Warsaw and Odesa.

• 3. Jaffa and What Came Before

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  Archaeological evidence places human settlement at Jaffa as far back as roughly 7,500 BC, and the city was established as an urban centre around 1,800 BC at the latest. Its natural harbour has been in use since the Bronze Age. By the time Tel Aviv's founders were parceling land with seashells in 1909, the ancient port had already passed through the hands of the Canaanites, Egyptians, Philistines, Israelites, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Phoenicians, Ptolemies, Seleucids, Hasmoneans, Romans, Byzantines, early Islamic caliphates, Crusaders, Ayyubids, and Mamluks, before the Ottomans took it in 1515. Other ancient sites on what is now Tel Aviv's territory include Tell Qasile, Tel Gerisa, Abattoir Hill, Tel Hashash, and Tell Qudadi. Jewish neighborhoods outside Jaffa began appearing during the First Aliyah in the 1880s. The earliest was Neve Tzedek, founded in 1887 by Mizrahi Jews on land owned by Aharon Chelouche. Neve Shalom followed in 1890, then Yafa Nof in 1896, Achva in 1899, Ohel Moshe in 1904, and Kerem HaTeimanim in 1906. The first 60 plots of what would become Tel Aviv were purchased in Kerem Djebali by Jacobus Kann, a Dutch citizen who registered them in his own name to circumvent Turkish restrictions on Jewish land acquisition.

• 4. War, Expulsion, Independence

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  In 1915, a census of Tel Aviv recorded a population of 2,679 people. Two years later, Ottoman authorities expelled the residents of both Jaffa and Tel Aviv as a wartime measure. A report published by United States Consul Garrels in Alexandria described the deportations of early April 1917 as aimed chiefly at the Jewish population. Jews were permitted to return when the British took control of Palestine at the end of World War I. The population recovered quickly: a British Mandate census in 1922 counted 15,185 residents, and by 1925 the number had grown to around 34,000. Violence erupted on the 1st of May 1921, when the Jaffa riots killed 48 Arabs and 47 Jews and injured more than 200 others. Many Jews left Jaffa for Tel Aviv in the aftermath. On the 9th of September 1940, Italian airstrikes hit Tel Aviv, killing 137 people. During World War II, the Jewish insurgency against British rule brought guerrilla attacks by Irgun and Lehi fighters throughout the city. Following the King David Hotel bombing in 1946, the British launched Operation Shark, placing the entire city under curfew and questioning most of its residents. Israel declared independence on the 14th of May 1948, and Tel Aviv became the temporary government center of the new state. Egyptian warplanes bombed the city repeatedly, and Egyptian warships shelled it during the War of Independence, killing around 150 people. On the 3rd of June 1948, Israeli fighter pilot Modi Alon shot down two Egyptian bombers over Tel Aviv in the Israeli Air Force's first aerial victory. The Israeli government relocated to Jerusalem in December 1949, though most foreign embassies remained in Tel Aviv due to the international dispute over Jerusalem's status.

• 5. The White City's Origins

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  In 1925, Scottish biologist, sociologist and town planner Patrick Geddes drew up a master plan for Tel Aviv that would shape the city for decades. His plan rested on four features: a hierarchical grid of streets, large blocks of small-scale domestic buildings, those blocks arranged around central open spaces, and cultural institutions concentrated to form a civic center. Geddes built on the garden city ideas of Ebenezer Howard. The influx of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany in the 1930s changed the scale of building, necessitating taller apartment blocks on larger footprints. Many of the architects arriving from Germany had trained at the Bauhaus. Some, like Arieh Sharon, came to Palestine and adapted that school's modernist principles to local conditions. What emerged across the area around Rothschild Boulevard was the world's largest concentration of buildings in the International Style, now known as the White City. Some 3,000 buildings were constructed in this style between 1931 and 1939 alone. Construction in the style continued into the 1950s, though many of the buildings were later neglected to the point of ruin before legislation moved to protect them. UNESCO designated the White City a World Heritage Site in 2003. The cornerstone of the Herzliya Hebrew High School, the first Hebrew high school in the region, had been laid on Herzl Street on the 28th of July 1909, just months after the lottery on the dunes. That school was later controversially demolished in the 1960s to make way for the Shalom Meir Tower, which stood as Israel's tallest building from 1965 until 1999.

• 6. Decline, Renewal, Attacks

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  Tel Aviv's population peaked in the early 1960s at around 390,000, representing 16 percent of the country's total. By the early 1970s it had begun to fall as high property prices pushed families toward neighboring cities like Petah Tikva and Rehovot. In the late 1980s, the city had an aging population of 317,000. A 1980 newspaper article asked directly, "Is Tel Aviv Dying?" By 1989, however, a shift was underway. Mayor Shlomo Lahat partnered with urban planners to remove offices that had spread through residential neighborhoods, concentrating business along the Ayalon Highway corridor. The city acquired the nickname "Nonstop City" that year, reflecting a growing nightlife culture. Dizengoff Center, Israel's first shopping mall, had opened in 1983. The 1990s brought a different kind of transformation. Tel Aviv absorbed 42,000 immigrants from the former Soviet Union, many of them trained in scientific and technical fields. The number of engineers in the city doubled in this period. By 1993, Tel Aviv was classified as a world city. In 1998, however, the city was described as on the verge of bankruptcy. The first suicide bombing in Tel Aviv occurred on the 19th of October 1994, on the Line 5 bus, killing 22 civilians and injuring 50 in a Hamas attack. On the 6th of March 1996, a Hamas bomber killed 13 people, many of them children, at Dizengoff Center. On the 4th of November 1995, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated at a rally in the city in support of the Oslo peace accord. The outdoor plaza where he was shot, formerly called Kikar Malchei Yisrael, was renamed Rabin Square. During the Gulf War in 1991, Iraqi Scud missiles struck Tel Aviv and other Israeli cities. A total of 74 Israelis died from those attacks, mostly from suffocation and heart attacks; approximately 230 were injured and around 4,000 left homeless.

• 7. Global Hub, Highest Cost

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  By 2012-28 percent of Tel Aviv's population was aged between 20 and 34. Between 2007 and 2012, the city's population grew at an average of 6.29 percent per year, and by 2012 it was running a budget surplus with a credit rating of AAA+. In December 2012, the city was ranked second globally as a place to found a high-tech startup, behind only Silicon Valley. In 2013, Tel Aviv counted more than 700 startup companies and research and development centers. The Kiryat Atidim high-tech zone had opened as far back as 1972, and the broader metropolitan area, sometimes called Silicon Wadi, grew into Israel's center for high-tech industry. In 2021, Tel Aviv became the most expensive city in the world to live in according to the Economist Intelligence Unit. Tel Aviv University, the country's largest university with more than 30,000 students, is known internationally for its physics, computer science, chemistry and linguistics departments. Plácido Domingo served as house tenor at the Tel Aviv Performing Arts Center between 1962 and 1965. Yarkon Park draws 16 million visitors annually, making it the most visited urban park in Israel. The Eurovision Song Contest 2019 was held at Expo Tel Aviv, the first Israeli-hosted Eurovision held outside of Jerusalem, following Israel's victory the year before. A master plan approved by the Tel Aviv District Planning and Building Committee in 2025 projects the city's population will reach 600,000 by 2035.