PALESTINE

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 2, Issue 388, 24 November 1932, Page 3

PALESTINE

VIVID CONTRASTS BETWEEN PROGRESS OF TWO CITIES. BEAUTIFUL TEL AVIR.

Palestine is erammed full with vivid contrasts and startling ineongruities, of which perhaps the most typical is the contrast between Jaffa, squalid, oppressive, and sullen, symbol of the old, backwarcl Palestine living on reflections of her glorious past . . . and Tel Aviv, the beautiful symbol of j modern Palestine, glorifying her an- I cient history and building on it a sane j and healthy future. Tel Aviv is the first attempt of the j Jews to build a city since the Exile. | Jews who lived in a ghetto 25 years | ago now live in a metrop'olis whose | beauty and astonishing growth are a source of wonder to the most sceptical. Its buildings, roads, theatres, pow- { er station, scliools and opera houses all have been built by technically unskilled Jewish men and women. One thing they did not build and are getting along splendidly without, and that is a prison. Tel Aviv, with its broad, tree-lined streets, excellently kept roads and wonderful unspoiled seacoast, is indeed a dream city comparable with the wonder cities of the Arabian Nights. At the top of the spacious Allenby 1 Street tower into the intensely blue j Mediterranean sky the graceful ! heights of the Mograbi Opera House. ' To the left, the fine white Herzlia High School rears its proud head. On the Jaffa side of the seene, the new power station stands out as if to intensify the contrast between the two extremes . . . Everywhere, newness, based on the ancient, retaining the best it can offer and adding to it the best the Western world can give. That is what Tel Aviv, the city in Jewry, stands for. That is what modern Palestine is striving after.