Tel Aviv & Jaffa

Jaffa is one of the oldest port cities in the world. Egyptian pharaohs garrisoned it, the cedars of Lebanon for Solomon’s Temple were floated ashore here, Jonah boarded his ship here, and on a rooftop by the sea Peter had the vision that opened Christianity to the Gentiles. Napoleon stormed its walls, Mark Twain found it unimpressive, and in 1950 it was merged with the young city that had grown up on the dunes to its north.

That city began in 1909, when sixty-six families drew lots with seashells for plots on the empty sand. Within a generation Tel Aviv was the first Hebrew city in two thousand years; in the 1930s architects fleeing Europe built more than 4,000 Bauhaus buildings, today the UNESCO-listed White City; and on May 14, 1948, Ben-Gurion declared the State of Israel in a modest hall on Rothschild Boulevard. Today it is the country’s cultural and economic heart, with fourteen kilometers of beaches, markets, cafes and a food scene among the most exciting anywhere, a city of the present tense.