The camouflage of war: planned destruction in Jaffa and Tel Aviv, 1948

The massive destruction of historic city centres during the Second World War was used, first in Britain and then in the rest of Europe, by contemporary architects and planners for justifying a modernist ‘clean slate’ approach to urban reconstruction; for them, war was ‘a blessing in disguise’ that could be exploited for adopting revolutionary planning concepts. In 1948 Tel Aviv, similar justifications were used for the total demolition of Manshiya, a centrally located ‘slum’ neighbourhood which allegedly suffered extensive and irrecoverable war damages during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. This article argues that contrary to common perceptions, the 1948 Manshiya demolitions were not a ‘complementary’ act obligated by the destruction of war, but rather a deliberate exploitation of wartime confusion and misinformation in order to launch an ambitious (and illegal) ‘modernization’ project for the whole area of southern Tel Aviv. Unlike European post-war urban reconstruction, in Manshiya, war was deliberately used by Tel Aviv’s leadership as a camouflage for a large-scale planned ‘civilian’ destruction that realized town planning ideals in their most radical form. This made the events exceptional not only in the backdrop of the 1948 War, but also in the local history of urban planning as a whole.