Negotiating a Jewish maritime approach in Tel Aviv’s urban laboratory

ABSTRACT This article seeks to examine different stages, symbolic and material, of using the sea in Zionist thought and practice of statehood. What happens after a metaphorical space – which was used to imagine ways of establishing statehood – turns into reality? During this process, the city of Tel Aviv becomes the center of discussing the connection to the sea, for the city itself and for the Yishuv as a whole. Different expressions of an extending Jewish maritime development are affected through the simultaneity of interacting with the sea while negotiating its role for the Yishuv’s society during the 1930s.