Hiking through Jaffa and Tel Aviv - Part 1

The ancient city of Haifa and the modern city of Tel Aviv form a spectacular metropolitan area. While Jaffa goes back many centuries - it was the city from which Jonah began his ill-fated attempt to sail to Tarshish and avoid preaching in Ninevah - the trip which ended up in the belly of a great fish - and Tel Aviv was a collection of sand dunes until a little more than a century ago, they come together to join very old architecture with the most modern.   The photo below shows the contrasts:

Many of its streets are named after people who are among the founders of the State of Israel.  The sign below shows the intersection of streets named for Baron Rothschild, who donated an important part of his fortune to buy the land of Tel Aviv under the laws of the Ottoman Empire, and Theodore Herzl, whose writing and leadership began the Zionist movement which eventually led to the creation of the state of Israel.   While Herzl died before realizing his dream, it was carried on by many others. Tel Aviv was founded by 66 families who built homes on the land purchased.  While wealthier families had larger plots of land, everyone's house was built to be the same size to emphasize the joint effort of all of these people.  The third picture shows a monument to these founding families.  The middle picture shows a kiosk - currently a small coffee shop - that was the first commercial establishment in this settlement which originally contained only homes and a school.

The next pictures show Israel's Independence Hall.  As many readers know, the British Mandate in Palestine ended in 1948 with a United Resolutions approving partition of the land into Jewish and Arab sections.  This was completely rejected by the Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and other Arab countries, who determined to invade the new Jewish state as soon as the British flag was lowered.  The leaders of the fledgling Jewish state, led by David Ben Gurion, recognized the importance of establishing the state before the British left.  At that time, the city of Jerusalem was under siege by nearby Arab groups, and so the event was moved to the Art Museum of Tel Aviv - a building from one of the most prominent of the founding 66 families.  This building is now known as Israel's Independence Hall, and Israel's Declaration of Independence was signed there by Ben Gurion and many others.
  

A fascinating feature of Independence Hall is the reminder that it was an art museum (prior to that, it was the home of the first mayor of Tel Aviv, who opened art museum as a memorial to his deceased wife, died with no surviving children, and bequeathed the home and museum to the city of Tel Aviv.
The picture below is a painting by Marc Chagall (today, only replicas are in the hall.  But the originals were there in 1948)