Tel Aviv

 

Balza siblings and spouses

A video of this trip is available on youtube. 

This is a unique trip for us, we’re traveling with my brothers, my sister, and our spouses. Our first foreign trip together thanks to our parents whose inheritance we are spending. We booked this trip 3 years ago and then Covid happened. We’re headed to Israel, Egypt, and Jordan. Scattered across the U.S. we all met in Chicago for our flight to Tel Aviv. We arrived at 4 PM the next day. We had just enough time to get our bags in our room at the Royal Beach Tel Aviv Hotel before heading out to a nearby restaurant, Baba Yaga, for a delicious, but expensive meal.

The next morning, we began our tour walking the Neve Tzedek neighborhood, created in 1887 by Sephardic Jews (expelled from Spain) outside the port of Jaffa. The area was soon filled with orange trees. The first public buildings erected were a boys and girls schools. The first high rise erected in Tel Aviv was on the site of the former boys school. Now when a high rise is built, they must restore one of the old buildings. Just north of this area is where German Jews settled in the 1930s, building in the Bauhaus style with white curved buildings.

Founding Fathers of Neve Tzedek

A video of this trip is available on youtube.

Tel Aviv, (Hill of Spring in English) is where Ben Gurion declared the new independent State of Israel on May 14th,  1948 after the November 29^th, 1947 vote by the U.N vote to create a Jewish state from portions of Palestine and the end of the British mandate. A day later, the surrounding Arab countries attacked.

In the afternoon, we toured the Yitzhak Rabin Center. Rabin became Israel’s first prime Minister who had been born in Israel. Born in 1922, he graduated from the Kadoori Agricultural School in 1941. He had planned to study in Berkeley, but instead joined the Israeli Defense Forces under the British protectorate. This force then fought against the Arab countries in the War for Independence. One percent of the Jewish population died in the War for Independence. While the Jews were vastly outnumbered, they won the war largely because of better technology, and the financing provided by Jews throughout the world. They gained most of the British mandate except for the West Bank and Giza. Over 700,000 Arabs fled or were expelled.

Changes after War of Independence

With the Jewish state established, Jews immigrated from throughout the world, tripling the Jewish population to 3 million by 1950. The immediate task became providing food, shelter, and jobs the people in what was largely barren country. And assimilate these people with a common Hebrew language. In 1967, Nassar, Egypt’s leader started threatening Israel with a second Holocaust by invading from Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. Rabin, now head of the defense forces proposed attacking first. They eventually did by an air attack, destroying all three air forces while they were still on the ground. This began the Six Day War, where Israel took over the Sanai, Gaza, the Golan Heights, and Jerusalem. Rabin went on to become Israel’s ambassador to the U.S. The Egypt-Israel peace treaty in 1979 returned the Sanai Peninsula to Egypt. Rabin later became Prime Minister, best known for signing the Oslo accord with Yasser Arafat in 1993. Because of his military background, he was trusted by many to negotiate with the Arabs for peace. Unfortunately, he was assassinated in 1995 by a Jewish radical. The mid-East lost an opportunity for a more permanent peace. The Israeli’s still occupy significant portions of the West Bank.

Oslo Accord