The demarcation of Tel Aviv-Jaffa’s municipal boundaries following the 1948 war: Political conflicts and spatial outcome

The State of Israel was established during the first Arab-Israeli war in 1948. The post-colonial war transformed the settlement structure of British-controlled Palestine. Over 600 000 Palestinian Arabs became refugees and were settled in refugee camps. They left behind them tens of thousands of built structures in urban and rural settlements and hundreds of thousands of acres of urban and rural lands. During and following the war the newly born Israeli state had to rehabilitate tens of thousands of Jewish war refugees and to absorb an influx of almost 700 000 Jewish immigrants, Holocaust survivors and members of Jewish communities from North Africa and the Middle East. Some of these war refugees and immigrants were settled in abandoned Arab structures, as in the ex-Arab city of Jaffa, that with adjacent Jewish Tel Aviv formed the main metropolitan area of Palestine. In 1950, consequent upon the repopulation of Jaffa, both cities were united to form the Israeli metropolis of Tel Aviv-Jaffa. The demarcation of the boundaries of the united city reflects the political, economic and social problems concerning the unification and is essential to the understanding of the city’s recent urban development.