Herzliya, Israel: History, Population and How the City Is Laid Out
Herzliya sits on Israel's central coast, about 15 kilometres north of central Tel Aviv, and most people who know the name know it for one of three things. The beaches and hotels of Herzliya Pituach. The high-tech offices along Abba Eban Boulevard. Or the Herzliya Conference, where Israeli prime ministers and army chiefs have made policy speeches for a quarter of a century.
All three sit in the same small city. Herzliya covers about 21.6 square kilometres and had 110,884 residents at the end of 2024, according to the Central Bureau of Statistics. That's a mid-sized Israeli city with a coastline, a marina, a private university and one of the richest neighbourhoods in the country.
A farming village named after Herzl
The town began on Sunday, 23 November 1924, when seven young pioneers from the Hechalutz movement put up a hut on a hill where the Weizmann school stands today. The land had been bought from neighbouring villages a few years earlier and sold on to Jewish buyers abroad through the American Zion Commonwealth. The settlement was named after Theodor Herzl, the founder of political Zionism.
It was a moshava, a farming village, and it grew citrus. The first school opened in 1926. The 1931 census counted about 1,200 people. When the Second World War cut off citrus exports, farmers switched to other crops and small industry started to appear.
The big change came after 1948. The municipal area was enlarged towards the sea, immigrants arrived in large numbers, and the population passed 12,000. By 1960 it had reached about 26,000, and Herzliya was declared a city.
East and west of Highway 2
The easiest way to read a map of Herzliya is to find Highway 2, the coastal road, which runs north to south through the city.
West of it is Herzliya Pituach. The name means "Herzliya Development", and it started in 1925 on empty sand dunes as an outlying neighbourhood. Today it holds the villa streets, many of the ambassadors' residences, the beach hotels, the marina and the business district where the tech companies have their offices. Nof Yam sits to its north, near the Crusader ruins at Apollonia.
East of the highway is the older town: the original moshava around Sokolov Street, the municipality on Ben Gurion Boulevard, the railway station in the median of the Ayalon highway, and the residential neighbourhoods around them. This side of the city is more mixed, with older apartment blocks, new towers going up under urban renewal schemes, and working-class districts such as Yad HaTisha, Neve Yisrael and Neve Amal.
The contrast is sharp. Pituach has some of the highest household incomes in Israel. Parts of the east side are ordinary suburban Israel, with corner groceries and four-storey walk-ups.
Who runs it
The mayor is Yariv Fisher, in office since 2024. The municipality publishes an English-language section of its website with pages for new immigrants, schools, parking permits and the Arnona property tax, which is unusual for an Israeli city of this size and says something about how many foreign residents, diplomats and returning Israelis live here.
What the city is known for now
Herzliya Pituach's business park is one of the anchors of what Israelis call Silicon Wadi, the cluster of technology companies along the coastal plain from Tel Aviv northwards. Reichman University, founded in 1994 as the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya, became Israel's only private university in 2021 and hosts the annual Herzliya Conference on national security.
The coast has its own pull. A string of lifeguarded beaches runs from the marina up to the cliffs at Apollonia National Park, where the ruins of a Crusader fortress sit on the edge of the sandstone ridge above the sea.
It's a city of about a hundred thousand people that punches well above its size in business, policy and tourism. The posts on this site take each of those in turn.