Violence and Resistance in the Making of a Settler Colonial City

The history of Tel Aviv is usually told as a story of a peaceful evolution from a Jewish suburb of Jaffa into a modern, western “Hebrew city.” The everyday violence involved in shaping an exclusive Jewish urbanity is usually silenced in historical accounts on the formation of Tel Aviv. Following Trouillot’s call to uncover the silences that operate in the formation of historical narratives we seek to “unsilence” the everyday violence constitutive of the formation of Tel Aviv as a modern, western, and exclusively Jewish sphere, through the case study of the municipal struggle against illegal hawking in the 1940s. Hawkers—both Jewish and Arab—were a vital part of Tel Aviv’s cityscape from early on. Some hawkers held a municipal license, but numerous others—mostly Arabs and Middle Eastern Jews—hawked without a license. Hawking was a juncture of many municipal, commercial, and public concerns, as well as a site of social tensions, along class, ethnic and religious lines. Yet conflicts over hawking, as Jonathan Shapiro Anjaria argues, are not just about power—they are no less about ideas and imaginaries of the city. This lecture will focus on the municipal struggle against illegal hawking and city residents' responses, both to the hawkers and to the municipal efforts to displace them. As a new city and a Jewish enclave, Tel Aviv was a focus of settler imaginaries of ethno-national purity and progress, which municipal authorities tried to enforce in the public space. Yet implementing this vision of Western modernity and Jewish exclusivity in the heterogeneous space of the city was conflict-ridden, contentious and often violent. As we will show, the very escalation of the municipal treatment of unlicensed hawkers sparked growing public expressions of solidarity with the hawkers and resistance to municipal inspectors.