The Israeli War of Independence caused far-reaching changes in the cultural landscape of Palestine, which necessitate many geographical studies to complete our understanding of the history of the period. The boundaries of Israel were determined by this war, but the main effect was the alteration in the composition and aspect of the population. The major change resulted from the mass abandonment of the country by most of the Arab population (who fled or were deliberately forced out), and the entry of hundreds of thousands of Jewish immigrants, all in a short time-span. The changes in the cultural landscape thus affected the rural space, the transport and highway network, the open country, and the urban landscape at the close of the British Mandate period. A fascinating chapter in these processes of change was recorded by the towns inhabited by Jews and Arabs jointly, and the war entirely altered their form, their population composition, and their characteristic urban texture of mandatory times. The special nature of the big mixed cities in the Mandate period was evinced in the demographic composition of their population and its spatial distribution. Cities of this sort were Haifa, Jaffa and Jerusalem; Safed and Tiberias developed similarly, but on a smaller scale. Most of these cities were divided into two defined parts, one inhabited by a Jewish population, the other by an Arab population, together with a range of minority groups.' In Haifa, a city known specially for the sound relations between its Arab and Jewish citizens in the time of the Mandate, urban society usually operated as a single whole, mainly in the economic and municipal sphere. Separation between Arabs and Jews usually was evident at times of outbreaks of intercommunal violence, which in the conventional terminology of the time were called by the Jewish Yishuv (settlement) 'the riots'. At those times everyone became keenly aware of the existence of an urban borderline, creating a schematic divide between the two sides. This separation seemed still more marked owing to the topography of the urban spatial design. Prior