Zionist Architecture and Town Planning. Nathan Harpaz

      In May of 1920, Levy proposed another plan to the Builder Company in London to work together on the foundation of a quarry, a cement factory, a wood workshop, and machinery shops to assist with the building of 1000 small dwellings per year. This plan was also rejected. In the same year Levy continued to promote his ideas and to recruit architects to the Association of the Builders of the Land of Israel, and in Berlin he published a 56-page book entitled Building and Housing in New Palestine.

The preface to this book, “Palestine as a Living Space,” was written by Zionist leader Otto Warburg.⁵ In his opening statement Warburg asserts that the desire to turn Palestine into the homeland of the Jewish people would depend on the establishment of a consolidated Jewish community. The connection to the land would be achieved only if the Jewish immigrants owned their homes, which should be modest in size, livable, and built in consideration of the local climate.⁶

Warburg acknowledges that the massive influx of Jewish settlers in Palestine had yet to really begin, primarily because of World War I, but points out that there was nevertheless an outcry for housing within major cities. The Jewish section of Jaffa, for example, had no housing available at all. Many Jews, especially in eastern Europe, were waiting to immigrate to Palestine, and when immigration was permitted (by the British), it would be unsustainable if measures were not taken to prevent housing shortages.⁷

Warburg raises three questions: What should be built? From where would the resources for building come? and Who would finance it? He leaves the last question to the financiers and the settlers, and with regard to the other two questions recommends that engineers and artists provide the answers. He also points out that the problem was related not only to cost control, but also to finding a method of construction to accommodate the climate of Palestine. His recommendation for design urges the inclination toward the local oriental style.⁸

Warburg notes that a manual of housing options was needed to guide the new immigrants and reduce their anxiety. People who did not believe in the realization of a Jewish homeland in Palestine could examine building activities before the war, such as the public construction of the High School in Jaffa⁹ or the Technical School in Haifa.¹⁰ In addition to residential housing, new development would be needed in the cities to build facilities, not only for businesses, but also factories and workshops, as well as public buildings such as synagogues, schools, hospitals, meeting houses, administration offices, courthouses, public baths, and universities. The cities would be surrounded by gardens and affluent suburbs, and “the place … buzzing with construction activity.”¹¹

Shortage of building materials would not slow down the building as at the beginning, wood, iron, or even cement and bricks could be imported, but later local natural resources such as limestone, clay, sand, or lime could be used to produce plaster, cement, or bricks. “If our engineers, contractors, and architects manage to deal with aforementioned problems in an adequate and in such artistic manner,” assesses Warburg, “in a few decades we will be able to admire the Jewish homeland on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea, a homeland to rival all others.”¹²

      In his introduction to Building and Housing in New Palestine, Alexander Levy supports Warburg’s assumption that the imminent massive Jewish immigration to Palestine called for prolific construction activity. Before World War I the land was populated by 600,000 Arabs and 100,000 Jews, and there was no surplus of housing; therefore, any influx of immigration should initiate intense construction activity.

Levy’s plan is based on five principles: Mass production of new homes for a large number of poor immigrants from eastern Europe, commissioned by the settlement’s authority; production of residential units for the more affluent immigrants; creation of larger scale developments of settlements, such as colonies, garden cities, villages, and cities, based upon a pre-approved plan, most likely for many cooperatives or groups of immigrants that have planned their immigration as a collective (such as Ahuzoth¹³); construction of public buildings: schools, administrative buildings, religious buildings, and mass transit infrastructure, including roads, trains, port construction (in Jaffa and Haifa), sewage, irrigation, and water dams; construction of buildings for industrial use, as large investments in such projects already had been made in countries such as Russia, England, America, and Palestine: factories; mines; power stations; weaving and spinning mills; oil, soap, glass, sugar, and chemical factories; vegetable and other canned food factories; jam factories; vintners; publishing houses; hotels and spa resorts (Lake Tiberias, foothills of Mount Carmel, Jaffa, coast resort of Haifa, among others); and ultimately, shopping, office, and business centers.¹⁴

The Association of the Builders of the Land of Israel was founded by a number of architects and businessmen after years of preparatory work. Its main goal was to initiate the construction of housing for new immigrants in Palestine as soon as immigration resumed. In the meantime, the association conducted preparations, research, and advertising and signed contracts with groups of local people who were planning immigration to Palestine. The association enabled these groups of immigrants to educate themselves about the field of building. The start of the operation in Palestine would be administrated by local trained specialists, who would work on the economic and scientific aspects of the project, including advertising, purchasing, and, after arrival, construction.¹⁵

The historical rationale for Levy’s plan was in the new political arena that emerged after World War I: the end of the Ottoman occupation of Palestine and the beginning of the British Mandate. In the book, Levy and Warburg expressed their hope that in the near future the British administration would permit a large number of Jewish immigrants to settle in Palestine, in which case a detailed and practical plan would be needed to construct mass housing. This prediction of a mass Jewish immigration to Palestine was triggered by the Balfour Declaration of 1917, where the British government recognized the rights of the Jewish people to establish their homeland in Palestine, and it was intensified later when the British governed the region after the war. Levy’s plan was part of post war group of publications that dealt with the expectations of a “New Palestine.” Arthur Ruppin wrote his book, The Structure of the Land of Israel, in 1919.¹⁶ In the same year Davis Trietsch published the magazine Volk und Land and his books Palestine and the Jews: Facts and Figures¹⁷ and Palestine Guide.¹⁸

      Levy estimated that in the first few years tens of thousands of Jewish immigrants would arrive, and later, with the development of agriculture and industry, their numbers could increase to hundred of thousands. Levy combined the opinions of Arthur Ruppin and Davis Trietsch about the assessment of the number of Jewish immigrants who would settle in Palestine. He supported Trietsch’s estimation and believed that his mass housing plan would deal with constructing accommodations for tens of thousands of immigrants in the first few years and for a hundred thousand settlers per year later on. On the other hand, he followed Ruppin’s view that lack of economic development might derail the process and decrease the number of future immigrants. Major obstacles might surface if the pace of construction did not keep up with the rate of immigration because of undeveloped transportation, lack of local building materials, and work-related