CITY IN DESERT

Hokitika Guardian, 10 November 1934, Page 6

CITY IN DESERT

“A HOME FOR JEWS”

UNCROWNED “KING’S” ACTION

After placing orders worth thousands of pounds, with British firms — Dizengoff, the “mad” Jew who founded a city in the desert—left London for Brussels on September 8. Although his nominal title is Mayor, Dizengoff has been the uncrowned king of the strangest city in the world for thirty years. A penniless pedlar from Russia, he found himself without a home, and decided to build liis own city for his own people. The site lie dhosie 'was the Darren sand wastes outside 1 Jaffa, Palestine. The experts thought lie was mad, “No town can live without a hinterland,” they said. At first they seemed right. The first few miserable shacks that made their appearance were swept away during the war. The dream of the “mad” Jew had vanished. So they thought. But after the Armistice, Dizengoff returned to the wreckage with renewed vigour. He took ten friends with him. Each of them contributed a thousand gold francs. Then the miracle happened ! With amazing speed the wastes were transformed. Broad streets and stately homes sprang from the dust of centuries. Tel-Aviv, the City of Spring, the only purely Jewish, township in the world, was horn.

To-day, Tel-Aviv is a roaring, per-fectly-planned modern township. Land values are soaring; the desert hamlet has grown from a few wooden shacks to a population of 100,000 people. Dizengoff a brown dynamic little figure, told the Sunday Chronicle recently, the story of how liis dream came true. “Tel-Aviv is the only town in the world/that the Jews can rightly call their .own,” he said. “There will never he a national home for the Jews in the ancient cities of Palestine, for this reason—-those cities are no longer ours. They belong to Christianity.

“Perhaps, in the future, Palestine will b-> internationally administered. But the Jews must find new homes for themselves. Such a homo is Tel-Aviv. Here -we can live and die in peace, among our own people, in a town where every brick and stone belongs to the Jewish race. Here, for tlm first time in our lives, we can watch our own children, not foreign ones, playing in the streets.”