Patrick Wolfe’s well-worn claim that settler colonialism is a “structure not an event” ushered in thinking of the ongoing two-fold structural logic of indigenous dispossession and expanding territorial control in settler colonial projects. Whereas scholars have approached the structural logic by focusing on property ownership, policing, and academic disciplinary knowledge, this paper focuses on the use of architectural history as a method for consolidating spatial control in Tel Aviv. This paper explores the question: how do architectural preservationists in Tel Aviv use the history of modernist architectural as a tool to reinforce Wolfe’s “structure” of settler colonialism through the built environment? I argue architectural preservationists in Tel Aviv weave together Israeli national mythology and the histories of modernist architecture to both further the project of Palestinian dispossession and to expand administrative control. I advance this argument by drawing on semi-structured interviews with preservationists in Tel Aviv, the analysis of UNESCO World Heritage List materials, promotional materials from the White City Center in Tel Aviv, and architectural history texts on the White City. The argument proceeds in three parts. I show how Israeli architectural historians blended Israeli national mythology and the histories of modernist architecture as a narrative strategy to counter the ascendance of revisionist Zionism in Israeli politics and exercises of military power in Lebanon, West Bank, and Gaza Strip in the 1980s. These narratives on Tel Aviv were validated by the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2003 with the addition of White City Tel Aviv. I then show how this validation contributed to the proliferation these narratives in architectural history texts and architectural tourism in Tel Aviv. The paper concludes that there is a need to interrogate both the forms of knowledge and the wider institutions that promulgate these narratives forms, because the reproduction of settler colonial logics in Tel Aviv find resonance throughout the MENA region, in settler states like the United States and Australia, and in urban space around the world.