Surroundings / Esther Zandberg - Sea of change

"This great sea is considered our country's western border," wrote David Ben-Gurion in 1932. That is a bad mistake, which we must uproot. From the settlement, economic and political points of view, the Mediterranean should not be considered our country's border, but its continuation." Ben-Gurion's vision and other fantasies of conquering the sea and redeeming the land are the subject of the fascinating article "La Isla Bonita," written by the architects Vera Treitel and Yael Allweil for the catalog of the "Back to the Sea" exhibition, which concerns the coastline of Tel Aviv-Jaffa. The exhibition is now on display in the Israeli Pavillion of the International Architecture Biennale in Venice.

The Tel Aviv coastline - a microcosm of the Israeli coastline in general, as one learns from the article and from Ben-Gurion's words - was never thought of in the Zionist vision as a stable and final border. Rather, it was and is a target for never-ending change and modification, a window of opportunity for expansion, reclamation and conquest, and the object of perpetual negotiation with nature.

For the first time, the article presents the entire repertoire of plans to conquer the sea, and the fantasy they have provided to engineers, planners, architects and politicians, "about the rosy future of Tel Aviv and the State of Israel ... which, it seems, could not be realized on the existing land.

"The dream of redeeming land from the sea has, almost since its foundation, accompanied the city of Tel Aviv," write Allweil and Treitel. "During the last 70 years, a casino, an Olympic village, luxury apartments, hotel towers, marina cities, airports, infrastructural installations and a variety of other projects have been planned on drained land or on artificial islands ..."

The high point of all of the plans is without doubt the fantasy of building artificial islands opposite the city's shore, a plan that has been on Tel Aviv's drawing boards for many years, as "a childhood dream or nightmare" - as the authors ask. They wonder about the secret of the fantasy, and why it has not yet been realized.

Island of utopia

"At first glance it seems that entrepreneurs, architects and the authorities have different motivations for erecting artificial islands," the authors write. "The authorities promote the idea for infrastructural reasons, to solve the land shortage problem in the Tel Aviv area. Entrepreneurs imagine the profits they would make on such a project, and architects promote it in the interest of the innovative design they could offer. But, on further examination, it is clear that all participants, throughout the years, have been driven by the same fantasy - to build on new land devoid of the chains of complex history. `Israeli' land that no nation claims, and that represents a new horizon, more efficient and better than what has been created so far.

"The more complex and less promising the present situation is - dreams of artificial islands multiply," claim Allweil and Treitel. "The escapism inherent in the option of artificial islands is evident also in their location: each time the subject rises, the planned island drifts further and further from the shore ... It is possible that the increasing distance from the shore is based upon relevant considerations that serve to meet public criticism. But it is also possible that the ambition expressed in artificial islands represents an aspiration of detachment from existing reality and, the wish to create an alternative, a utopia ..."

Yet the exhibition in the Israeli Pavillion itself seems to be captivated by the charms of the artificial islands and of disengagement, and devotes nearly half the exhibit to them: the Neuland Project, curated by the architects Ganit Mayslits Kassif and Udi Kassif, which replicates the existing Tel Aviv in the form of an artificial island in the sea; and the "Island of the Day After" exhibition, curated by David Palterer and Norberto Medardi. It presents futuristic-utopian islands that were planned by an international group of radical architects.

The Allweil-Treitel article is one of an enlightening collection of articles in the catalog, which furnishes a dimension of historical and critical depth to the exhibition. Among them is an article by the geographer Maoz Azaryahu, "The Most Beautiful Place in Tel Aviv: The Beach," which joyously shatters one of the most entrenched Tel Aviv myths, "With their backs to the sea." While the city's first mayor, Meir Dizengoff, declared, "Jews have no interest at all in bathing in the sea," and the city was abandoned and polluted for years, Azaryahu asserts that there is no truth to the cliche that the city turned its back to the sea.

Thrown to the sea

"The beach in particular and the sea in general," says Azaryahu, "figured prominently in Tel Aviv's geography of popular culture and contributed substantially to the image of Tel Aviv as a city of leisure and worldly pleasures. In this sense the beach, overcrowded on Sabbaths and religious holidays during the bathing season, augmented the secular character of Tel Aviv." It is symbolic and ironic that the new Tel Aviv promenade, which symbolized the return to the sea after a protracted decline, was dedicated at the height of the Lebanon War and has become an Israeli version of the "Jounieh Syndrome," named for the Lebanese vacation city that at the time enjoyed a hedonistic, serene lifestyle light years removed from the Israeli shelling of Beirut.

The coastline and sea that seemingly supply Tel Aviv with an alibi of cool Mediterranean normalization, in the face of the sweaty, conflict-ridden Middle Eastern reality, are not truly free of political and national sentiment, claims architect Zvi Elhyani in another article in the catalog, "Sea Front Holdings."

The article focuses on the Manshiya area, on the seam line between Tel Aviv and Jaffa, and recounts its evolution from a Muslim suburb of Jaffa in the 19th century, to its bombing by the underground Etzel movement in 1948 and its conversion into a poor Jewish neighborhood in the `50s, and continues with the ambitious super-plan to construct Tel Aviv's "City" on its ruins in the `60s. The City in Manshiya plan is a fantasy, unlike the Manshiya Towers - practically the only indication of Jaffa's existence in the catalog.

Other articles in the catalog, designed with clean, accessible simplicity, are about the public expanse on the coastline, Atarim Square, the appearance of the sea in Israeli poetry, etc. The catalog is part of an impressive collection of three catalogs that accompany the Biennale exhibition, which were curated by landscape architect Yael Moria-Klain and culture researcher Sigal Barnir. The fact that the catalogs were published only in English and are not distributed in Israel is perhaps evidence of the artificial island on which the exhibition exists, far from the beach and from the painful problems of the mainland.

	The Tel Aviv coastline. Cool normalization in the face of the conflict-ridden reality.
	Photo by: