Hotel design in Zionist Palestine: Modernism, tourism, and nationalism, 1917--1948

The Zionist Hotel, built in British Mandate Palestine, was born in an age of burgeoning nationalism, blooming tourism, expansion, and ideological immigration. While mitigated modernism was utilized in interwar Palestine as an agent of cultural and national representation of Jewish identity and as the main tool in creating the Jewish national home, the Zionist hotel was the outcome of this ideology. With modern, up-to-date program, nationalistic aspirations, and progressive design, Zionist hotels, built by the pioneers of Israel's hotel industry, and designed by European-trained architects, conversant with the ideology of the modern movement, link modernist design, modern tourism, and the image of Jewish national identity. Established for Jewish tourists, the Zionist hotel was manifested in a variety of eclectic modes of modernism, representing the most ambitious body of progressive architecture built in the country. It played a central role in the uprising national tourism movement that flourished in Palestine during the age of the formation of the Zionist project. Zionist tourism proposed a new and modern experience that shifted the notion of travel from the traditional pilgrimage to national modernized tourism. As tourism was considered one of Palestine's most important industries, it was taken over by Zionist organizations as means of upbuilding of the Jewish Homeland, but also as a sophisticated device of national propaganda. Zionist hotels were an expression of identity, offering comfort and hygiene that were otherwise unavailable to tourists traveling to this part of the world. The concepts employed in their interior decor originated in the domestic sphere of Central Europe, which originated in an affirmation of comfort and freedom, adopted as a repudiation of the notion that modernism excluded any overt reference from the past. They showcased the national project, affecting the built fabric, and shaping the perception of tourists by ensuring that Jewish tourists carried a favorable impression of the secular culture that the Zionist enterprise proposed. This significant, yet neglected material culture of twentieth-century design, including both architecture and interiors, is the subject of this dissertation. Based on historical and structural analysis, ephemeral material, archival documentation, and oral history, as well as insights of literature on tourism, nationalism, and historical studies of the Zionist project, this dissertation offers the first study account of hotel design in British Mandate Palestine.