Frontier Metropolises: Tulsa, Indian Territory & Tel Aviv, Palestine

Tel Aviv, established 1909, and Tulsa, incorporated 1898, were the centers of Western-style settlement in Palestine and Indian Territory before these areas became today’s Israel and Oklahoma. The ideologies of Zionism and Manifest Destiny played a huge role in justifying the European-Jewish takeover of land in Palestine and American control of the interior of North America. Tel Aviv and Tulsa’s self-consciously: Modern style – e.g. Bauhaus buildings, skyscrapers, streets laid out on a grid system - was the physical manifestation of their founders’ desire to proclaim the success of their settlement projects to the rest of the world.

Benjamin A Lawson (Ph.D. The University of Iowa) is a native of Oklahoma and researched Tel Aviv as part of his dissertation. He currently teaches at Bacone College in Muskogee, OK.