Introduction
This article examines the histories of two Jewish neighbourhoods established during the British Mandate for Palestine (1920–48): Bat Galim in Haifa and HaTikvah near Tel Aviv and Jaffa. Both neighbourhoods were integral parts of the urban peripheries surrounding the two primary modern urban centres and port cities that emerged on the coastal plain of Palestine during the late nineteenth century. Haifa and Jaffa, from which Tel Aviv initially emerged as a neighbourhood before establishing itself as a separate Jewish city, developed under British rule into what the Mandate authorities classified as ‘mixed cities’, areas where both Jews and Arabs resided.Footnote 1 In both locations, new neighbourhoods created a distinct Jewish space from their surrounding urban areas, both physically and symbolically.Footnote 2
Numerous studies have examined the formation of Jewish–Zionist culture and society in Haifa and, in particular, in Tel Aviv, ‘the first Hebrew city’.Footnote 3 Alongside these Zionist-focused studies, other scholars explore the dynamics of confrontation, separation and co-existence between Jews and Arabs, with some works critically addressing the term ‘mixed cities’. These studies emphasize that Jewish and Arab societies in these cities often developed as distinct and separate in many respects.Footnote 4 Nonetheless, from the 1990s onwards, researchers examining the relationships between Jews and Arabs through labour relations and workplace interactions – particularly prominent in Haifa – developed the understanding that analysing political and social processes in Palestine requires focusing on the dynamics between these groups.Footnote 5 Later research expanded to examine social mixing in other contexts, suggesting that during the Mandate period, the urban margins between Jaffa and Tel Aviv, as well as Haifa’s ‘Lower City’ area, facilitated the crossing of national boundaries and the mingling of diverse social groups.Footnote 6
Moreover, current scholarship integrates Jewish ethnicity into the analysis of mixed cities, thereby presenting their history as encompassing three social groups: Oriental Jews,Footnote 7 European JewsFootnote 8 and Palestinian Arabs. The first group, which had some members integrated into the local imperial elite by the late Ottoman period, established connections and trading networks with it.Footnote 9 However, during the Mandate period, the Jewish society in Palestine, known as the Yishuv, was becoming predominantly European, due to immigration, while Oriental communities transitioned into a minority.Footnote 10
This article builds upon this respective scholarly effort, both those focusing on Jewish society and those examining the relations between Jews and Arabs, seeking to synthesize them by using the smaller scale of the neighbourhood, rather than the city as a whole. By focusing on the neighbourhood level, the article demonstrates how the formation of a European Jewish–Zionist urban society, on the one hand, and the dynamics of Jewish–Arab relations, on the other, intertwined to shape the social fabric and daily life of these communities.
Moreover, the neighbourhoods examined not only challenge the city-wide perspective by emphasizing the neighbourhood level but also redirect attention to the urban periphery. In doing so, the proposed analysis aligns with the concept of ‘peripheral centralities’ depicting urban dynamics.Footnote 11 Within the Israeli context, the term ‘periphery’ typically refers to the geographic and social margins of the state that emerged during the 1950s; however, discussions about urban peripheries are far less common.Footnote 12 Since the 1990s, discussions about the urban periphery have emerged in urban sociology, proposing that the periphery, rather than the city centre, holds the key to understanding the formation of cities.Footnote 13 Considering the names attributed to it and the lifestyles shaped within it, the urban periphery can simultaneously refer to middle-class suburban neighbourhoods (particularly those that emerged in North America and Europe after World War II), impoverished neighbourhoods lacking infrastructure and planning (more typical of the Global South), in addition to commercial and industrial zones.Footnote 14 The analysis in this article examines the two aforementioned types of neighbourhood that emerge in the urban periphery.
Presupposing that urban core and periphery are entwined in a symbiotic relationship, and that the urban periphery emerges as a key focus for, and a container of, social relations and development processes,Footnote 15 this study aims to demonstrate that urban peripheries simultaneously introduced both separatism and closeness, which characterized the social processes in Mandatory Palestine. On the one hand, these peripheries facilitated differentiation among various groups within Jewish society and between Jewish and Arab communities. On the other hand, they fostered social closeness, evident in the formation of cohesive local communities, interactions between Jews and their Arab neighbours and even proximity to British residents and Mandate authorities.
Through the examination of the two cases, the article highlights that the urban periphery served as fertile ground for the formation of local neighbourhood communities, arising from the heterogeneity within the Jewish community in Palestine, alongside the development of two national communities – Jewish and Arab. Although the two examined neighbourhoods differed in their origins and socio-economic composition, they shared a key similarity: both were, first and foremost, geographically and topographically distant from their respective cities’ urban core. Bat Galim was built along the seashore near the area where Haifa al Atiqa had existed until 1761. It was separated from the Jewish residential area atop Mount Carmel and close to the lower city, which was predominantly commercial, as well as by Arab residential areas. HaTikvah was positioned east of Wadi Musrara (Ayalon Creek), which isolated it from the nearby cities of Tel Aviv and Jaffa, particularly during the winter floods.Footnote 16
The neighbourhood Bat Galim (meaning ‘daughter of the waves’, in Hebrew, indicating its location on the seashore) was founded in 1923 on Haifa’s seashore. On 6 March 1922, the Mandate government sanctioned the regulations of the Bat Galim Association, which was formed with the primary objective of acquiring land to establish a residential neighbourhood.Footnote 17 The founders envisioned Bat Galim as the inaugural example of numerous garden cities and villages intended for association members. Central to its founding principles, as articulated in its regulatory documents, was not only the procurement of land and construction of housing but also the cultivation of conducive economic and social environments. The association took responsibility for local industries, tourism and hospitality, aiming to foster an integrated urban–rural lifestyle similar to other Jewish communities emerging in the region of Mount Carmel during the early 1920s.
Inspired by Ebenezer Howard’s concept of the garden city, which had gained popularity across Palestine, Europe and colonial territories in the early twentieth century, Bat Galim exemplified a deliberate effort to blend urban amenities with rural tranquillity.Footnote 18 The founding association, endowed with legal capacities, sought guidance from the International Federation of Garden Cities and Town Planning in London, seeking to align its endeavours with established principles of garden city development.Footnote 19 In its nascent stages, Bat Galim epitomized a suburban ethos, characterized by spacious private residences often subdivided into multiple units, accommodating property owners and tenants in a communal setting.Footnote 20
Unlike Bat Galim, which was established by an association, the HaTikvah (meaning ‘the hope’, in Hebrew, and perhaps alluding to the hymn of the Zionist movement) was founded by a Jewish land purchase and settlement company, ‘HaMoshav’. The company leased the land on which the neighbourhood was built from a prominent Arab family from Jaffa in the mid-1930s.Footnote 21 The HaTikvah neighbourhood was located on the coastal plain of Palestine, near the new Jewish city of Tel Aviv and in the rural hinterland of the predominantly Arab city of Jaffa.Footnote 22 While located near the Arab villages of Salameh and Yazur, it was designed not as a rural settlement, but as a satellite neighbourhood whose residents depended on a city for its livelihood and services.Footnote 23 The neighbourhood, comprising one-storey houses and built in a grid-like structure with narrow streets and almost no public areas, soon became crowded. This configuration contradicted the endeavours of the Mandate authorities and Zionist leaders to eliminate unplanned impoverished residential areas and replace them with modern dwellings and infrastructure, aligning with development aspirations in other urban colonial spaces.Footnote 24
The history of each neighbourhood is distinct, shaped by differences in their construction, the socio-economic status of their residents and the adjacent cities. Nonetheless, comparing them reveals the urban periphery in Mandate Palestine as a dynamic arena that, despite these differences, shares similar characteristics. Furthermore, exploring these neighbourhoods’ history may provide fresh insights into the formation of urban peripheries under British colonial rule.
Building on a diverse array of archival sources from the Mandate administration, the municipalities of Haifa and Tel Aviv, the Haifa History Society and Zionist institutions, alongside contemporary Hebrew press materials, this study investigates dynamics of proximity and hostility in these urban peripheries while investigating the formation of distinct local communities isolated from the broader city and depicting inter-communal relations. Despite the challenges in accessing primary materials directly from residents, this article reconstructs their perspectives by utilizing letters they wrote to the authorities (in the case of HaTikvah) and interviews conducted with them (in the case of Bat Galim). It also incorporates the views of external observers, including bureaucrats, experts and journalists.
The following sections of this article will analyse these urban peripheries from multiple perspectives. First, I will contextualize these neighbourhoods within the broader framework of the adjacent cities. Then, I will explore the formation of local communities, the agency of residents in shaping their neighbourhoods and their interactions with various institutions. The final section will examine inter-communal relations among Jews, Arabs and the British, highlighting the tensions between co-operation and confrontation that characterized these interactions.
The neighbourhoods and their cities
The Bat Galim neighbourhood was rooted in the dynamics that shaped modern Haifa. The significant developmental leap that Haifa experienced during the years of British rule was built upon the construction boom the city witnessed in the late Ottoman period. In the mid-eighteenth century, Haifa received a significant boost from Daher al-Omar al-Zidani, who demolished the pre-existing city and established what became known as ‘Haifa al-Jadida’ (New Haifa).Footnote 25 By the early nineteenth century, new residential areas, factories and commercial leisure sights were built in the city. In the early years of the Mandate, with the increase in Jewish immigration to Palestine, Haifa’s mountain area (the Carmel), which until then was scarcely inhabited, became a distinct Jewish living space, separate from the Arab part of the city.Footnote 26
The Mandate authorities defined Haifa as a ‘mixed city’. From 1918, Arabs and Jews served together in the municipality, and until 1942 it was led by an Arab mayor.Footnote 27 Alongside the mixed municipality, the Jewish Community Committee operated from 1928, representing the entire Jewish community in the city: the veteran Sephardi–Oriental population, and the growing European immigrant population.Footnote 28 In parallel with the Community Committee, other local Jewish organizations operated in the city, including the Haifa Workers’ Council, the Court of Hebrew Law and the committees of various Jewish neighbourhoods, of which the committee of the Hadar HaCarmel neighbourhood was the most prominent.
Bat Galim was built approximately two kilometres west of the German Templar colony, established in 1868, and in the 1930s, the Arab neighbourhood of Wadi Jamal was constructed about three kilometres south of Bat Galim. The construction style of Wadi Jamal resembled that of Bat Galim, characterized by private houses (Figure 1). The neighbourhood was physically distant from the consolidating Jewish–Zionist community in Haifa during the Mandate period, remaining relatively isolated from the Jewish population on Carmel Mountain; however, it was also close to the developing ‘downtown’, or ‘lower city’, the main commercial area near the port and train station.
Figure 1. A street in the Bat Galim neighbourhood. Donor: Ami Yuval from the digital collections Younes & Soraya Nazarian Library, University of Haifa.
The location and features of Bat Galim attracted businessmen, professionals and administrators, who worked in the lower city and preferred to walk to and from their place of residence in Bat Galim and their place of work on the plain, rather than climb to the Carmel area. The founders of the neighbourhood were mostly men, born during the 1880s.Footnote 29 Most were immigrants from Eastern Europe who arrived in Palestine in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, others were members of the Sephardi–Oriental merchant community formed in Haifa in the late nineteenth century. They were freelancers – lawyers, doctors, veterinarians and teachers. By the 1920s, they had accumulated the means to join the growing middle class of the Jewish community in Palestine, the Yishuv. This class, which began to emerge at the end of the Ottoman period, developed and expanded under British rule and with increased Jewish immigration, and was distinctly urban.Footnote 30 Many of the neighbourhood’s builders spent formative years experiencing Eastern and Western European urban life during their higher education, and they had international social and professional networks. The first core group was identified with the Yishuv’s ‘old elite’. Many came from the early Jewish colonies (Moshavot), established in Haifa’s area in the last decades of the nineteenth century.
The profile of the neighbourhood’s population changed following the arrival of new residents during the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. The initial nucleus of the residents was joined in 1929 by Jews who left the downtown and moved to Bat Galim following the clashes between Arabs and Jews in the summer of that year. These new residents were of a lower economic status than the neighbourhood’s founders. In the second half of the 1930s, German and Central European Jews fleeing the Nazi regime moved into Bat Galim (as well as to other neighbourhoods in the city). During World War II, Jewish workers employed at nearby British army camps settled in. After the war, several complexes of housing for Jewish ex-soldiers serving in the British army were added to the neighbourhood. Despite its diverse population, Bat Galim retained a reputation as the bourgeois old elite within Haifa’s growing Zionist community. This label carried negative connotations for many Jews in Haifa who aligned with the Zionist labour movement, the Histadrut, which emerged as the dominant force in the Yishuv during the 1930s, with Haifa as its urban hub.Footnote 31
The HaTikvah neighbourhood was rooted in the development of another modern urban space on the coastal plain of Palestine – that of Jaffa and later Tel Aviv. The development of modern Jaffa, an ancient city with a history spanning from the end of the second millennium BC, is often attributed to the onset of the Napoleonic invasion in 1779, marking the beginning of significant transformations within the city. Under the leadership of Mohamat Abu Nabut and later Ibrahim Pasha, the city saw the expansion of its built-up area, the development of various infrastructures and the construction of new neighbourhoods beyond the confines of the Old City walls. Throughout the nineteenth century, Jaffa evolved into a focal point for Arab immigrants from across the Middle East and Europe.Footnote 32 Towards the end of the century, the city experienced a surge in economic activity, particularly in the citrus industry. Simultaneously, the Jewish population in Jaffa increased, with the initial arrival of Zionist immigrants to the region.Footnote 33 This trend led in 1909 to the establishment of the Ahuzat Bayit Garden City neighbourhood, which later evolved into Tel Aviv. Its leadership harboured ambitions of transforming it into a modern, European-style bourgeois living environment, in contrast to their image of dilapidated and crowded Arab Jaffa.Footnote 34
During the Mandate period, Tel Aviv, known as ‘the first Hebrew city’, expanded with approximately 60,000 Jewish immigrants arriving in the city. The settlement was declared a local council in 1921 and a town in 1934. Several of the Jewish neighbourhoods built on the outskirts of Jaffa in the late nineteenth century were annexed to Tel Aviv.Footnote 35 Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, new Jewish neighbourhoods emerged along the boundary between Tel Aviv and Jaffa, in areas that fell under the jurisdiction of the Jaffa municipality. Following the Arab Revolt (1936–39), a movement gained momentum to have these neighbourhoods, whose residents often conducted their daily lives in Tel Aviv, annexed to the city.Footnote 36
The population residing along the seamline between the two cities was primarily composed of Jews of Oriental origin. In HaTikvah, ethnic marginalization was coupled with a considerable physical distance from the city and economic hardship. Most residents were Jews of Oriental descent and unskilled labourers, who made their living through impermanent jobs in Tel Aviv as street cleaners (some were employed at the municipal cleaning department), housekeepers and peddlers.
Creating a local community
In both neighbourhoods, a close-knit local community emerged, isolated and distinct from the Jewish community in the nearby city. This section explores internal neighbourly relations and the agency of the residents, demonstrating that the unique location and social standing of these neighbourhoods necessitated self-organization. While self-organization of residents and activity of Neighbourhood Committees characterized many Jewish neighbourhoods during this period, the geographic isolation of the two neighbourhoods examined, along with their location outside official municipal boundaries, intensified the need for local organization. Local committee members assumed responsibility for addressing community needs and enhancing living conditions in these neighbourhoods.
The first evidence of local committee activities in Bat Galim dates to the second half of the 1920s. This committee maintained communication with the Haifa municipality, the Jewish Community Committee and other Jewish Neighbourhood Committees in the city, as well as with the government, the Zionist executive and various companies. The committee worked to secure loans for infrastructure development and the establishment of institutions, while also fulfilling the requirements set by municipal and government building committees. The board’s expenditure report from 1925 highlights the wide range of administrative areas in which the committee was active. In addition to public works such as street regulation, land preparation, street lighting, lantern maintenance and upkeep of the bathing area, an examination of the budget details reveals that the neighbourhood was designed from its inception to promote modern and bourgeois lifestyles. Funds were allocated to educational institutions, the Culture Committee, evening classes and gardening work.Footnote 37
In the spirit of the Zionist cultural revolution, the spread of Hebrew was marked as one of the main goals of the local cultural activity. This involved lectures, and morning and evening classes in Hebrew for beginners and the advanced. Yet the ongoing efforts to ensure the use of the language within the neighbourhood were unsuccessful. In practice, communication was through a range of languages.Footnote 38 In 1943, the neighbourhood’s general assembly regretted the poor uptake of Hebrew and pointed to the importance of evening language classes for residents.Footnote 39 Additionally, residents debated the ideal of strict loyalty to Hebrew. A dispute developed between those advocating the teaching of Hebrew to the new German immigrants and those who thought they would never learn the language, and thus German should be spoken to them.Footnote 40 The public library, established in 1945, also reflects the lack of Hebrew exclusivity, with 300 of the 750 books being in languages other than Hebrew. Moreover, the local leisure culture was influenced by the recreational practices prevalent in European and Middle Eastern cities, including watching imported foreign films at the local outdoor cinema and frequenting the local cafés.
The beach at Bat Galim played a pivotal role in shaping both the neighbourhood’s local culture and Haifa’s broader urban culture. Maoz Azaryahu has highlighted the beach’s significance in the development of Zionist leisure culture, while Maayan Hillel has emphasized its role in cultivating leisure culture within Haifa’s Arab society.Footnote 41 Additionally, Deborah Bernstein has demonstrated that the beaches of Tel Aviv and Jaffa functioned as shared social spaces, facilitating interactions between Jews and Arabs.Footnote 42
The beach in Bat Galim encapsulated all these aspects, bringing them together in one place. A survey from 1944 on the development of Bat Galim described that the founders came to live by the sea to be in close contact with nature.Footnote 43 In a pamphlet published in honour of the 25th anniversary of the neighbourhood, the German architect and urban planner Adolf Rading, who was also involved in developing Bat Galim in the 1940s, wrote: ‘the first settlers in Bat Galim laid the sea as a lodestone in their settlement plan. They have foreseen that the Jews are no longer mountain dwellers, rather sailors who shall dwell on the seashore.’Footnote 44
For those who lived in the neighbourhood, spending time at the seashore was a daily affair. Some residents adopted the custom of ‘winter bathing’ in the sea. The children would swim in the sea water and pool from an early age. Those who grew up in the neighbourhood described their deep love of the sea, saying, ‘The youth in the neighbourhood knew how to swim before they could walk’,Footnote 45 or ‘As children we were at sea more than at home.’Footnote 46 The children and teens also came up with various inventions, like building and sailing large tin boats or experimenting with constructing a small submarine.
Thus, the small community of Bat Galim was reflected in the local committee, which worked extensively to improve living conditions in the area. Community life was organized around both national and international values. The physical and geographical space of the neighbourhood, located near the sea, shaped the culture of leisure and local identity. As will be demonstrated later, it also played a role in positioning the community in relation to the city and its neighbours.
While in Bat Galim the local committee was a clear product of the neighbourhood’s establishment by the association, in HaTikvah, a key endeavour of the residents was to secure recognition for a representative body, which facilitated direct and ongoing communication with the Mandate authorities. From the early 1940s, the residents attempted to elect a representative committee for official recognition by the Mandate authorities. They established an election commission, composed an electoral constitution which they sent to the district officer and then the neighbourhood’s men voted and elected the committee.Footnote 47 Simultaneously, various groups approached the district officer requesting to be ascribed as the residents’ representatives.
The residents’ demand for representation, coupled with disagreements over the identity of the representatives, led the district officer to appoint a mukhtar responsible for managing the neighbourhood.Footnote 48 A mukhtar was an administrative status that the Mandate authorities adopted from the Ottoman local government system and adjusted to their governmental needs. The mukhtar oversaw the management of the internal affairs of a settlement (a village, neighbourhood or colony) and mediated between the authorities and the residents.Footnote 49 Mukhtars also served in other neighbourhoods in Tel Aviv and beyond, such as Kerem HaTeimanim, where the mukhtar played a significant role as a mediator between Jews and Arabs.Footnote 50
The decision to appoint a mukhtar for HaTikvah triggered an additional wave of requests from the residents.Footnote 51 The Neighbourhood Committee recommended some candidates and in November 1941 the position was entrusted to Israel Yeshayahu, an early resident of the neighbourhood.Footnote 52 Alongside the mukhtar, the district officer accredited a committee of seven people that was responsible for managing public affairs to serve as an urban planning committee and rent tribunal.Footnote 53
In addition to their initiative to establish a representative body, during the 1940s, the residents employed various civic strategies, including appealing to the Mandate authorities, the Tel Aviv municipality and Zionist entities, organizing demonstrations and drafting petitions, urging them to address issues such as sanitation, sewage services and water supply.Footnote 54 The residents’ numerous appeals to different institutions testify that in the absence of affiliation with a municipal authority, the residents engaged in self-governance and self-advocacy. The issue of education, particularly, highlights how the neighbourhood’s municipal–geographic and ethnic–socio-economic position compelled the residents to organize collectively versus Zionist institutions.
From the end of World War I until the end of the British Mandate, education in the Yishuv was perceived as one of the main means of shaping national identity and establishing social cohesion; it was an area in which various movements and parties struggled.Footnote 55 The majority of schools in the Yishuv operated under the auspices of the education department of the National Committee, the British-recognized governing authority of the Yishuv, and received funding from the World Zionist Organization, the Mandate government and students’ parents.Footnote 56 However, differences in the education of Oriental and European children characterized the entire Yishuv and were particularly prominent in Jerusalem.Footnote 57 Most young children of the Oriental communities in the diaspora and Palestine studied in the traditional elementary schools for Jewish boys, teaching basic Judaism and Hebrew, known as talmud torah (in Hebrew), or kutab or madras (among Oriental Jews).Footnote 58
Several such institutes had been in the HaTikvah neighbourhood since its early days. By 1939, the number of schoolchildren in the neighbourhood exceeded 200.Footnote 59 Most boys were enrolled at a local small talmud torah for Yemenites, while the girls studied at the Zrubavel, a girls’ school in Tel Aviv.Footnote 60 The education department of the National Committee held the view that establishing local schools within the neighbourhood was unnecessary. Instead, they believed that children should commute to study in Tel Aviv at properly regulated institutions.Footnote 61 However, due to financial constraints, the parents were unable to drive or accompany their children to Tel Aviv daily, leaving the children to travel by bus to the city unaccompanied (Figures 2 and 3). To cut costs, some children chose to walk to school on the dangerous not clearly defined sidewalks leading to the city, or opted to skip school altogether.Footnote 62
Figure 2. Children of the HaTikvah neighbourhood, 1946/47. Israel State Archives, Beno Rothenberg collection.
Figure 3. Children of the HaTikvah neighbourhood, 1946/47. Israel State Archives, Beno Rothenberg collection.
The residents did not remain indifferent to the state of education in their neighbourhood. In the summer of 1942, they formed an Education Committee aimed at establishing a talmud torah and a school.Footnote 63 During a general meeting of the residents of HaTikvah and Ezra, the barracks neighbourhood located adjacent to HaTikvah, the residents of both areas joined forces to voice their demands for the establishment of a school and kindergarten in their locality.Footnote 64 Their efforts were rewarded when in the autumn of that year an ultra-orthodox club for the children of the neighbourhood was inaugurated, and a talmud torah belonging to the ‘Talmud Education Network’ was opened.Footnote 65 The 117 pupils at the talmud torah studied in overcrowded classrooms with insufficient equipment, where three students had to share two chairs.Footnote 66
Towards the end of the Mandate period, some 5,000 residents of the neighbourhood had submitted a petition to the National Committee, demanding the establishment of a school for the neighbourhood’s children.Footnote 67 While the residents took varied actions to cultivate education in their neighbourhood, various institutions and entities involved with the neighbourhood often perceived its children and youth as posing a potential threat to the city.Footnote 68
Despite the geographical and socio-economic differences between the two neighbourhoods, in both the collective actions of their residents fostered a sense of unity. These actions were manifested in negotiating with core issues in the consolidation of Jewish society in Palestine, including the creation of Hebrew culture, language and education. Examining these efforts reveals the ambivalence, lack of loyalty and at times hostility that the residents of both neighbourhoods felt towards the Zionist ideals, institutions and society in the city they lived next to.
Tensions and collaborations: inter-communal relations between Jews, Arabs and British at the urban periphery
In both Bat Galim and HaTikvah, the physical distance from the city and the socio-political remoteness from the emerging Jewish society in the adjacent city significantly influenced the dynamics of the local communities. This distance fostered closer ties with groups outside Jewish society in Palestine, particularly with Arabs and, to some extent, the British. This section will explore the relationships that developed between these neighbourhoods and their non-Jewish neighbours, characterized by alternating co-operation and confrontation. Ultimately, the intensification of the national conflict also gave rise to a novel form of imagined closeness between these peripheral neighbourhoods and their bordering cities.
Daniel Monterescu and Dan Rabinowitz describe the urban configuration of cities such as Haifa and Jaffa and Tel Aviv as the ‘bifurcated national capitalist “mixed” town’ which characterized the Mandate period. They describe it as a period marked by an intensifying ethno-territorial conflict when urban space was deliberately divided along national lines. Paradoxically, it was also a time when the boundaries promoted by national ideologies faced constant challenges from more co-operative spirits and practices.Footnote 69 Intercommunal relations, trade activities, residential patterns and social ties created a mixture wherein both exclusionary nationalism and economic and political collaborative actions by Jews and Arabs were simultaneously at play.Footnote 70 The duality of conflict and co-operation in mixed cities, as demonstrated by Monterescu, Rabinowitz and other scholars, was particularly evident on the urban margins.
The area surrounding the Bat Galim neighbourhood was multiethnic, including the German Templar colony and the Arab neighbourhood of Wadi Jamal. It was close to the railway workshops, which employed both Jews and Arabs, the British military camp established south of the neighbourhood in 1933 and the government hospital inaugurated in late 1938. Residents interacted daily with their neighbours, with Germans selling goods, Arabs working and enjoying leisure sites and British soldiers shopping and seeking entertainment. In 1947, the residents of Bat Galim’s requests for evening English and Arabic classes alongside Hebrew classes indicated a desire for communication beyond their national community.Footnote 71
Most of all, the location of Bat Galim on the seashore provided it with the potential to attract guests and vacationers from Haifa and its surrounding area and turn the beach into a place of urban entertainment. Initially, the rocky shore posed significant challenges for direct access to the water, necessitating engineering intervention. In 1932, an entrepreneur started building sea baths and a casino but left Palestine before finishing due to financial issues.Footnote 72 Two years later, the government approved the Bat Galim Association’s plan to develop a complex with a swimming pool, baths, and a ‘casino’ on the leased land.Footnote 73 The swimming pool was used for the Maccabiah Sports Games of 1935, and until the end of the Mandate, the Bat Galim pool and beach served as a hub for sports activities for British soldiers and policemen.
The ‘casino’ was the prominent representation of the neighbourhood as a multicultural and multiethnic space, as will be further explored. It emerged as a symbol of co-existence and interaction among the various communities in Haifa. While the company operating the facilities on the beach tried to promote Bat Galim as ‘the Jewish beach of Haifa’, the ‘casino’ attracted a diverse mix of Jews, Arabs, British and other European and Middle Eastern visitors. Designed in the Art Deco style popular across Europe during the 1920s and 1930s, the building featured a unique design, with half of its structure elevated on pillars over the water (Figure 4). This innovative feature echoed the aesthetic of contemporary dance halls in Britain, Europe and the United States. The casino’s grand opening in April 1936 was a notable event. Advertisements in Hebrew promised visitors relaxing chairs, motorboats, sailing boats, ping-pong and billiards, oil showers for sunburn and post-bathing Eau de Cologne showers, affordable buffets, dances with the ‘Casino’ Orchestra, swimming lessons and a daily children’s summer camp with gymnastics classes.Footnote 74
Figure 4. The casino 1936. Donor: Otniel Margalit, Bitmuna, from the digital collections Younes & Soraya Nazarian Library, University of Haifa.
The ground floor offered a dance floor and a terrace with a sea view. The second floor provided an overlook of the dance floor below. The building included two bars – one on the lower floor and the other on the upper terrace. Ada Carmi observed that the building’s shape and location made it both an entrance to the city from the sea and a corridor to the sea from the city.Footnote 75
The cosmopolitan nature of the site was evident in its diverse visitors. Influenced by the leisure culture that flourished among Haifa’s Arab society, they were a key element reflecting its modernization. In addition to local urbanities, affluent Syrians and Lebanese also came to enjoy performances featuring a live orchestra and dancers.Footnote 76 The casino’s entertainment programme featured performers with international backgrounds, such as the Dorsey sisters, the Jen Gin sisters and Little Keller.Footnote 77
In 1938, a performance included dancers from Europe, combined with a Blackface-style show performed by Jewish film actor and singer Al Jolson. Jolson, known for his roles as African Americans and his Blackface performances, was a prominent figure in American cinema.Footnote 78 The casino also hosted the African American singer and actress Josephine Baker, who became a symbol of both exoticism and the fight against fascism and Nazism.Footnote 79 Her performance in October 1943 signified French–British solidarity. Notable figures including the Haifa district commissioner, the mayor, senior army officers and Haifa-based Arab businessman Victor Khayat attended.
Residents of the Bat Galim neighbourhood often visited the casino and socialized with Allied soldiers during World War II. British officers also frequented local cafés and restaurants, which adapted to their presence.Footnote 80 For instance, a local bar called ‘Ideal’ regularly advertised in English in the Palestine Post and wished customers a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.Footnote 81 However, these interactions were marked by tensions and conflicts, reflecting broader local, national and imperial dynamics. A local who spent his childhood in the neighbourhood mentioned that every Sunday in the summer, large groups of Arabs would come and fill the pool, which was quite intimidating, and the locals were generally opposed to this.Footnote 82
In 1929, during the outbreak of violent clashes between Jews and Arabs across Palestine, residents of the nearby village of Tira attempted to attack the neighbourhood.Footnote 83 During 1936–39, there were incidents of shots fired and stones thrown at buses travelling from Bat Galim to Haifa.Footnote 84 In the early 1940s, neighbourhood youths prevented German bread sellers from operating in the area and promoted the ‘buy Jewish local goods’ initiative.Footnote 85 Additionally, the sale of Jewish homes to non-Jews caused resentment among residents.Footnote 86 During World War II, residents of the German colony were declared Alien Enemy Subjects, leading to their imprisonment and expulsion by the British. The presence of drunk soldiers from the nearby military camp also contributed to some residents staying indoors at night.Footnote 87
During the 1948 war, residents established a ‘people’s guard’ with checkpoints, preventing a car bomb from entering the neighbourhood in March 1948. The local Emergency Committee organized a fundraiser for weapons and a telephone line to keep in touch with relatives.Footnote 88 The exodus of Arab residents of Haifa peaked in April 1948, and after the battle of Haifa, Jewish military brigades took over the nearby Wadi Jamal neighbourhood. By June 1948, the last remaining British forces left Haifa as the Mandate over Palestine officially ended.
Like in Bat Galim, the residents of the HaTikvah neighbourhood developed a unique local relationship with their Arab neighbours. This relationship stemmed from physical proximity but was also based on needs and interests. The Arab village Salameh next to HaTikvah was one of the largest Arab villages in the southern coastal plain of Palestine due to significant growth during the Mandate period. According to 1931 and 1944 census figures, the village had 3,691 and 6,730 residents, respectively, the vast majority of whom were Muslims. The village had two elementary schools, a football team, many shops and five cafés. Most inhabitants made their living from agriculture, while some engaged in commerce or clerical work.Footnote 89 It seems that the establishment of HaTikvah brought about a shift in the patterns of encounters between Jews and Arabs in the area, which were previously sporadic.Footnote 90
Dynamics of co-operation and conflict between Jews and Arabs were particularly evident in the context of Oriental Jews. Hillel Cohen argued that during the Mandate period, Oriental Jews gradually adopted their religious identity as their national identity, distancing themselves from Arab nationalism – a process that culminated in the events of 1929. However, in everyday life and within the cultural sphere, regular contacts, meetings and collaborations between Jews, Muslims and Christian Arabs continued to occur.Footnote 91 Abigail Jacobson and Moshe Naor found that the close relationships between Oriental Jews and Arabs were based on geographical, cultural and linguistic proximity, but sometimes these connections also led to increased friction between the groups.Footnote 92
HaTikvah was built shortly before the Arab Revolt of 1936–39. Like other regions along the border between Jaffa and Tel Aviv, the area became a hotspot for tension and conflict between Jews and Arabs. This made the neighbourhood a fertile ground for the activities of paramilitary Jewish organizations. These included the Haganah, aligned with the Yishuv leadership, as well as the Irgun and Lehi, which were more on the fringes, right-wing and militant. They operated on the outskirts of the urban area and often attracted militants from among Oriental Jews.Footnote 93
Nonetheless, the shared language of certain residents facilitated contact with nearby Salameh villagers.Footnote 94 And economic necessities led to day-to-day contact based primarily on trade. Salameh’s residents sold agricultural produce, sesame and dairy products and supplied flour grinding services. In HaTikvah, economic co-operation primarily took place between the lower classes of Jewish and Arab society. Conversely, in Bat Galim, affluent Jewish landlords employed Arab maids,Footnote 95 while middle- and upper-class urban Arabs visited the neighbourhood for leisure.
In both neighbourhoods, the local economic and commercial activities, as well as local needs and connections, often transcended national concerns. In Bat Galim, this was reflected in an international leisure culture, while in HaTikvah, it was evident concerning Zionist campaigns promoting the employment of Jewish workers (‘Hebrew labour’) and the consumption of goods produced by Jews (‘Hebrew products’). The connections between the Jewish residents of HaTikvah and their Arab neighbours disregarded these national directives.Footnote 96 An article published in the spring of 1947 emphasized that the ‘political boycott’ of Palestine’s Arab goods was not very noticeable in the neighbourhood, as Arab sellers were present in it every day.Footnote 97
Trade persisted and even expanded after the outbreak of the national conflict in 1947, following the United Nations resolution to end the British Mandate for Palestine and approve a partition for Palestine plan, which proposed separate Jewish and Arab states. The resolution led to attempts by both communities to diminish mutual trade relations. The declared boycott of Arab–Palestinian livestock merchants meant that the Jewish community, who were regular consumers of meat, had to forgo one of their main sources of animals for slaughter.Footnote 98 However, in practice, the meat trade between Jews and Arabs continued even during the first months of warfare and despite attempts by the Zionist leadership to regulate consumption.Footnote 99 HaTikvah, and the urban periphery in general, was used for the transfer of meat to the residents of Tel Aviv. Local butchers continued to supply meat despite the imposed ban. City inspectors and policemen patrolled the neighbourhood, seeking meat for confiscation. This often led to clashes and fights between residents and representatives of the establishment.Footnote 100 The struggle against the traffickers and raids by the authorities did not seem to impair meat trading practices.Footnote 101
Nonetheless, the emergence of a distinct Zionist national identity among Oriental Jews and the intensification of the Jewish–Arab conflict, as emphasized by Cohen, Jacobson and Naor, became prominent in HaTikvah, particularly during the 1948 war when the neighbourhood transformed into the urban front of Tel Aviv. On the night between 7 and 8 December 1947, the neighbourhood became the first Jewish urban space against which an organized Arab–Palestinian attack was orchestrated. Hundreds of irregular fighters arriving from several Arab cities stormed the neighbourhood.Footnote 102 Some houses in the southern part were occupied and looted; 2,500 residents fled their homes, and 123 houses were burned.Footnote 103 The British army occupied the area between HaTikvah and Salameh on the following day. Residents who fled the neighbourhood joined the stream of Jewish refugees who went to Tel Aviv from the neighbourhoods bordering Jaffa. Yet, within a few days, numerous HaTikvah families opted to return home. This decision followed a proclamation by HaTikvah’s Security Committee, which conveyed the possibility of residents returning.Footnote 104 In the following months, from December 1947 to April 1948, many security incidents took place in the area. The Haganah erected a barbed wire fence between HaTikvah and Salameh, created checkpoints between the Jewish and Arab areas and routinely conducted security patrols in the neighbourhood.Footnote 105 According to Arnon Golan, the Haganah expelled the residents of Salameh in April 1948 in Operation Hametz.Footnote 106
Conclusion
The establishment of the State of Israel and the Palestinian Nakba drastically reshaped urban spaces, fundamentally altering the dynamics of communities that had previously existed under colonial rule.Footnote 107 This transformation profoundly impacted relations between ethnic and national groups within urban areas.
Building on previous research, this article demonstrates that while Jewish society was in the process of forming a national identity with defined borders during the Mandate period, daily life on the urban peripheries reveals a history of heterogeneous Jewish urban society, blurred boundaries and connections between Jewish and Arab communities. Moreover, the periphery served as a space where intra-Jewish social tensions intersected with tensions between Jews and Arabs, shaping the dynamics of everyday life.
An examination of two Jewish neighbourhoods – Bat Galim in Haifa and HaTikvah near Tel Aviv and Jaffa – established during the Mandate period reveals that the urban periphery fostered strong internal social cohesion within the neighbourhood. At the same time, these local communities both responded to and, at times, confronted the broader Zionist ideals and Zionist society in the adjacent cities.
Despite the differences between the two cities and the socio-economic disparities between the two neighbourhoods, the relatively isolated localities were pivotal in fostering cohesive and engaged communities in both areas. In Bat Galim, a vibrant cultural life emerged, blending Zionist culture with international influences. Meanwhile, in HaTikvah, residents who successfully established representation before the Mandate authorities continued to address pressing quality-of-life issues, especially in education, where economic and ethnic marginalization was particularly stark.
Investigating Jewish–Arab relations in these urban peripheries reveals the dual spatial separation and engagement processes between the two groups. Bat Galim’s entertainment venues, especially the casino, became symbols of multicultural leisure, attracting a diverse array of visitors, including middle- and upper-class Arabs from Haifa and elsewhere, as well as Britons. In HaTikvah, commercial ties were established with the nearby village of Salameh. However, geographical proximity also served as a basis for tensions and conflicts, further exacerbated during the 1948 war. While this study focuses primarily on the Jewish perspective, future research may seek to reconstruct the experiences and perspectives of Arab residents in these shared spaces.
The social history of these peripheral neighbourhoods highlights a dual dynamic characterized by simultaneous co-operation and conflict. This dynamic was evident in interactions with governmental, municipal and Zionist institutions, internal community relations and everyday encounters between Jewish urban dwellers and their Arab neighbours. This article explores the symbiotic relationship between the urban core and periphery, emphasizing the urban periphery as both a focal point and a container of social relations. Using the concept of peripheral centralities, it examines the interconnected development of the urban centre and periphery from a socio-neighbourhood perspective. The study of two neighbourhoods located at the geographic and social margins reveals processes of proximity and connection and hostility and separation – both within Jewish society and between Jewish and Arab communities – that played a central role in shaping urban space, society and culture in British Mandate Palestine.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Avner Ofrath and Norman Aselmeyer for organizing the workshop from which this article emerged and for their valuable comments that contributed to its development. I am also grateful to the editors of Urban History and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful feedback.
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