IN JULY 2003 Unesco put the White City of Tel Aviv on its list of World Heritage Sites. It took almost 20 years of incessant campaigning by the state of Israel to secure this recommendation that, de facto, “legitimised” far-reaching aspects of zionist ideology.

But was there any merit to the Tel Aviv case in the first place? Unesco said at the time that “the [influences of the] Modern movement in architecture … were adapted to the cultural and climatic conditions of the place, as well as being integrated with local traditions.”

In fact the building of Tel Aviv began adjacently to Jaffa — one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities of the world — only from around 1909.

More importantly, from the beginning it segregated itself from Jaffa — the “Black City” — and its predominantly Palestinian inhabitants. Hardly “integrating with local traditions,” as Unesco claimed.

As Sharon Rotbard points out in this imprtant book, the overriding objective of writing “the victors’” history by the zionists was precisely to detach the White City from Jaffa — the Black City — and attach its architectural umbilical cord exclusively to the Bauhaus tradition, despite a total lack of any serious academic comparative studies supporting such a claim.

One salient contradiction is that the building of exclusive “petty bourgeois three-storey apartment buildings” was driven by private enterprise and free market criteria. That entirely contradicts — in spirit , if not design — the Bauhaus principles of social housing developed by Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe.

Today, as housing prices rocket, the predatory White City eyes its ultimate prey — the Black City — and displacement and selective gentrification have already begun. Not very Bauhaus either.

A highly revelatory read.

Review by Michal Boncza