In its centenary year, Adam LeBor traces how a city founded on a beach has become a 24/7 phenomenon of hyperactive Mediterranean style

Here's the answer to the Arab-Israeli conflict. Not two but three states: Israel, Palestine, and Tel Aviv. Tel Aviv is already a world of its own. Nowhere else in Israel—in the entire Middle East—has such a hedonistic lifestyle, tolerant mentality, and spirited gay and lesbian community. No wonder its nickname, half self-ironic jest, half jealous sneer, is Ha-Buah, The Bubble. I have been visiting Tel Aviv for thirty years, since I was a teenager, and something always draws me back. Part of it is the sheer sense of wonder that this city founded on the sands in 1909, by meshuga (crazy) Zionist pioneers, not only still exists a hundred years later but crackles with energy twenty-four hours a day. In a century it's grown from nothing to a sophisticated metropolis, home to about 390,000 people. It has an internationally renowned university, a stock exchange, a vibrant media and music scene, numerous museums and art galleries, electric nightlife, and world-class restaurants. Its inhabitants are engagingly friendly and often extremely beautiful, and love to party. Phones don't start ringing for the night's action until ten at the earliest, and it lasts until dawn.

That said, Israelis appreciate straight talk. The Hebrew conditional must be the world's most underused tense. So they won't be offended when I say that despite Tel Aviv's many virtues, on first impression the city is hard to fall in love with. Israel's cultural and business capital is the epicenter of an urban sprawl stretching up the coast, much of which is not beautiful. The tower-block hotels strung out along Tel Aviv's seafront look like downtown Frankfurt. Drab parking lots punctuate the spaces between the buildings. A four-lane road, choked with traffic, runs parallel to the Tayelet, the seafront promenade. Even the city's name is a misnomer. Tel Aviv means "Hill of Spring," yet the city is almost completely flat, and there is no spring. Cold, wet winters jump directly to hot, humid summers.

But effort is rewarded. To turn off Allenby Street into Bialik Street, named for Israel's national poet, is to enter a time capsule of elegant 1920s and 1930s apartment houses, merging Bauhaus and Art Deco with Mediterranean influences to make Tel Aviv's own International Style, and ending in a tranquil circular park. The beach is a stretch of golden sand sloping gently into an azure sea. And even at midnight the Tayelet is packed. The cool sea breeze carries conversations in Hebrew and Russian, Amharic and English. The revelers run every shade of color from pink, sunburned Anglos to mahogany-hued Ethiopians. Teenagers zip by on skates and bicycles; a jeweler sells intricate silverwork; a couple canoodle on the sand, illuminated by the hotel lights.

Passionate ambivalence about Tel Aviv, I later discover, is a common reaction. Ever since it was founded, the city has been simultaneously entrancing and infuriating visitors. Arthur Koestler, the Hungarian author of Darkness at Noon, lived in Tel Aviv in the 1920s, when it was still surrounded by sand dunes and Arab villages. Every statement about Tel Aviv, he wrote in his autobiography, Arrow in the Blue, was true, and its opposite equally true. It looked like both Monte Carlo and Whitechapel, a drab suburb of East London. "It was a frantic, maddening city which gripped the traveller by the buttonhole as soon as he entered it, tugged and dragged him around like a whirlpool and left him after a few days faint and limp, not knowing whether he should laugh or cry, love it or hate it."