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"When my book came out it was a great shock for people who thought they were not part of it," he told me. "Tel Aviv preferred to write itself an architectural history that excludes certain political facts. So a lot of young people read the book and were astonished that their park was once a Palestinian neighborhood." This realization was an uncomfortable one for Israelis who had no desire to be complicit in dispossession. "Some people living in gentrified Jaffa or the White City in Tel Aviv told me that they had to change their apartment. That happened about ten times."After leaving the cafe, we walked around the area that inspired much of the book, taking in just a few of the places left out by the city's official architectural narrative from crumbling wells that once served to water Jaffa's orchards to the land where the oranges were once grown.If these stories are easy to forget in favor of the White City myth, others are not. Just across the road from Rotbard's house, we paused outside a kindergarten recently used by the children of African refugees. From 2006 to 2012, tens of thousands of asylum seekers flooded across the Sinai desert looking for a better life in Israel—many of them ending up in South Tel Aviv. To counter what they saw as a threat to the Jewish character of the city, a group of West Bank settlers moved into the area in what ultimately lead to anti-African riots and an attack on the school.If anything good has come from this, it has—according to Rotbard—become harder than ever to see Tel Aviv existing in a political vacuum. The "White City" narrative has been punctured somewhat, but there's still much work to be done. Before we parted, I asked him to recommend a building that encapsulates everything he had told me. He pointed me towards the waterfront of what was once the Northern tip of Jaffa, to a museum dedicated to the Jewish paramilitary organization that conquered the area.Inserted into the shell of an old Palestinian house, in a neighborhood now completely wiped out, the museum offers a shockingly one-sided history of how Tel Aviv came into being, celebrating the militias that destroyed the area instead of commemorating what was lost. It's a reminder of how powerful and pervasive the narrative of the White City can be and a reminder, as Rotbard says in his beginning of his book, that "cities and histories" are all constructed in the same way: "always by the victor, always for the victor, and always according to the victor's record."Follow Philip Kleinfeld on Twitter.Over on Noisey: We Asked Deep Philosophical Questions to People at Stone Circle