Summary
The early Tel-Avivian building on Yarkon Street that housed the local workers’ council, became the Haganah headquarters towards the end of 1947, and was the place where, in The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, the final touches were put to Dalet Plan on 10 March 1948. It no longer exists, razed for a car park next to the new Sheraton Hotel.
Details
- A typical early Tel-Avivian building, the pride of the Jewish builders and craftsmen of the 1920s, designed to house the head office of the local workers’ council, near the sea on Yarkon Street in the northern part of Tel-Aviv, fusing Bauhaus motifs with native Palestinian architecture in the admixture called Levantine; its name came either from the workers’ movement association or from a pinkish tinge at sunset; in the 1970s it became the main office for Israel’s kibbutzim movement (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.14-15).
- “In this building, on a cold Wednesday afternoon, 10 March 1948, a group of eleven men, veteran Zionist leaders together with young military Jewish officers, put the final touches to a plan for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.” That same evening military orders were dispatched to the units on the ground (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.15).
- The Village Files cartographic department, with its film laboratory, was moved to the Red House in 1947 (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.43).
- Consultancy meetings were held partly here — some convened on Wednesdays within the official weekly meeting of the High Command, the Matkal — and partly in David Ben-Gurion’s house in Tel-Aviv (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.63-64).
- It is plate 5 in the book’s list of illustrations: “The Red House in Tel-Aviv, headquarters of the Hagana” (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.10).
Related pages
The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Consultancy, Dalet Plan, Haganah, Village Files