Israel’s Final Frontier:
Settling the Undeveloped Negev
By Uriel Heilman
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In a densely packed
country with 500 residents per square mile, the road from the Negev’s main city
of Beersheva to the tiny town of Merhav Am is a seemingly
endless expanse of desert, interrupted only by shrubbery and the occasional
roadside Bedouin tent.
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Here, the crippling
traffic jams that are a hallmark of daily life in central Israel,
where more than 70 percent of the country’s 7.2 million people live, are
virtually unknown. Cars on these roads slow down only when a Bedouin shepherd
steers his flock across the highway or a herd of wild camels wanders onto the
asphalt.The people who live
in the Negev are more familiar with the weekly
livestock market and shopping bazaar held at Beersheva’s outskirts every
Thursday than with the fashion boutiques that line Tel Aviv’s upscale
boulevards.
In the small desert
communities scattered around this region, homeowners don’t lock their doors at
night, young children play outdoors unsupervised, and nightly desert winds lull
residents to sleep.
This is partly what
brought Elli and Dalia Rosenberg to the Negev
six years ago, when they were looking for a place to start their family.
However, it wasn’t just the lifestyle that drew Elli, the eldest son of
Canadian immigrants, and Dalia, the daughter of an Israeli
father and a Brooklyn-born mother, to the rural Negev.
It was Zionism.
“We wanted to
live in a place where just living has meaning,” says Elli, 33, who grew up in
the Tel Aviv suburb of Petach Tikvah. “The Negev
in our day and age is a place that answers that requirement. Just living here
has significance.”
Having spent
part of his army service in the Negev and some time studying in a yeshiva in
the development town of Yeruham, about 30 miles from Beersheva, Elli saw his
future in this largely rural, little-developed part of the country.
He enrolled in
medical school at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and, when he and Dalia—a
native of Beersheva who was in law school in Jerusalem—decided
to marry, they became founding members of a new religious Negev
community where they believed they could live out their ideals.
Situated on a
bluff southeast of Beersheva, a few miles from Kibbutz Sde Boker (where Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion,
lived out his last 20 years), Merhav Am (originally called Halukim) started
with just a handful of families living in prefabricated homes powered by
generators, with water hauled in by tractor.
Elli and Dalia
were the 10th couple to move in.
“My parents made aliyah, and they gave up a
very comfortable life in North America because they believed in coming to Israel
and making aliyah; in a sense, I wanted to
continue that,” Elli tells B’nai B’rith Magazine. “My mother asked me
why I was moving here and I told her, ‘Ima [mother], just like you were a
Zionist by coming to Israel,
I am a Zionist by going to the Negev.”
In an age when Israel’s agrarian roots are a distant memory, life in the rural Negev is a throwback.
It’s a place where pioneers can establish new settlements untainted by the politicized conflict with the Palestinians; where young families can live out Ben-Gurion’s dream of making the desert bloom; and where people still talk about building communities rather than fortunes.
“The Negev and the Galilee [in Israel’s north] are the future of Israel,” says Roni Flamer, founder of an organization called the Or (Hebrew for “light”) Movement that tries to entice new residents to the country’s underdeveloped areas. “The Negev and Galilee represent 75 percent of the land of Israel and only 30 percent of the population. But it’s 100 percent the future of Israel. This is our motto.”
With central Israel becoming ever-more-densely populated, anchored by metropolitan Tel Aviv and sprawling Jerusalem, a movement is afoot to bring more Jews to the country’s periphery—the Negev in the south and the Galilee in the north.
Families like the Rosenbergs and activists like Flamer and Or Movement co-founder Ofir Fisher believe the Negev can be a viable alternative to central Israel. They represent an effort that the Israeli government, American Jewish organizations, and Israeli industry all are keen on seeing succeed.
These are passionate young Jews—eager to actualize the Zionist ideals of building the state, greening the desert, and creating communities infused with Zionist values—who see in the Negev an opportunity to create the kind of societies Israel’s founders envisioned.
In southern Israel, far from the strip malls of Tel Aviv’s suburbs, the Negev is the closest thing to the clean slate many of Israel’s pre-state pioneers found when they first came to the Holy Land. It’s what brought Flamer to the Negev with three friends in 1999, to start a new town on a barren desert hilltop.
“We discovered that, for 20 years, no new communities were established and no fresh blood had come to the Negev with idealism and motivation to start a new initiative for the coming generation,” says Flamer, 32. “We found this fantastic place to live and suddenly a few crazy guys at the age of 22 were coming to fulfill a dream. Nobody knew what to do with us.”
Israel’s infrastructure minister at the time, Ariel Sharon, met with the boys, and he was enthusiastic and encouraging, Flamer says. Sharon helped them establish the town, called Sansana.
“We were like real pioneers,” says Flamer, who still lives in Sansana. “Since then, lots of people came to see the miracle that there is still idealism and passion in Israel. The Negev and the Galilee are the tools that create a [bright] light at the end of the tunnel. It is hope for Israel.”
The government has several reasons for developing the Negev. It wants to bring jobs to rural Israel, more evenly distribute the country’s population, and tip the Arab-Jewish demographic balance in the Negev and Galilee regions—where there are heavy concentrations of Israeli Arabs—more solidly in favor of Jews.
In the Galilee, the government-run Galilee Development Authority and the Jewish Agency for Israel launched a campaign in 2004 to try to draw new Jewish residents to northern Israel by offering discounts on land, infrastructure support for new buildings, and tax breaks. The success of the initiative has been mixed, however.
Arab population growth has continued to outpace Jewish population growth in the Galilee, and the 2006 Lebanon War—during which northern Israel came under attack from Hezbollah’s Katyusha rocket fire—slowed the influx of new residents to the region.
While the Negev is roughly 60 percent Jewish, the Arabs who live there—most of them Bedouin—also have much higher birthrates. The government has tried to shore up the Jewish population by encouraging new immigrants to move there.
As early as the 1950s, Israel established development towns. But these communities, including Yeruham, Dimona, and Sderot, were not successful. They failed to attract much industry or generate a sizeable middle class, and most residents remained mired in poverty and largely cut off from the rest of Israel.
Rather than serving as centers where new immigrants could develop into Israelis, gradually integrating into the rest of Israel and finding upwardly mobile paths, the development towns were neglected and their residents left segregated from the rest of the country.
Now, Israel is making a concerted effort to invigorate the Negev. With the help of American-Jewish and grassroots organizations, the government is investing in infrastructure, industry, and communities.
New upscale neighborhoods are going up in Beersheva; train service to the city has been upgraded and accelerated; and the southern portion of the Trans-Israel Highway, which will link the area to the rest of the country, is almost complete. Government-provided incentives are attracting new businesses and hundreds of white-collar jobs. Corporations like Amdocs and Intel are building facilities.
The Jewish National Fund (JNF) is heavily investing over 10 years in Blueprint Negev, a plan to build new communities; improve Beersheva’s infrastructure; invest in the city’s hospital, university, and cultural institutions; and increase employment opportunities. “The whole revitalization of the Negev is to help the whole community and each demographic that lives there,” says Jodi Bodner, JNF’s director of communications.
The Jewish Agency for Israel, and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee run programs for new immigrants, the elderly, and disadvantaged youth. The formerly nomadic Bedouin also are recipients of state aid and assistance from nonprofits.
This massive effort, however, would be nothing without people like the Rosenbergs. When Dalia and Elli first moved to Merhav Am, in 2002, it felt like a dream come true. “It was heaven at the beginning,” Dalia says. “People would do anything for you and for each other. It was very diverse, even though we were all religious families.”
There were some challenges.
In summer, cold water was hard to come by because the punishing desert sun would heat the water running through the town’s above-ground pipes. During winter, flash floods would sometimes obstruct the road connecting the tiny town to the highway. When residents needed to buy groceries, the closest store was more than five miles away.
But the benefits of living in Merhav Am seemed to far outweigh the disadvantages.
“On the one hand, you had your privacy—it didn’t have the [structure] of a kibbutz, but you always had friends to turn to,” Dalia says. “If you were late from work, your friend could pick up your kid from daycare. People would call you to see if you were okay if they heard you were sick. It was the small things we loved.”
As an exclusively religious yishuv, or community—the Negev’s only one between Beersheva and Eilat—Merhav Am provided the traditional Jewish environment the Rosenbergs sought while being hands off enough to contrast starkly with the religious fundamentalism of more politically charged religious settlements, like those of the
West Bank.
“It fit our ideal,” Elli says. “There are lots of yishuvim in the Negev that were very well-developed—Omer, Meital, and Lehavim, satellite towns for Beersheva—but we believed that, by starting a new yishuv, it could spark new interest and bring more people to the Negev.”
Merhav Am grew steadily in its first five years. Trees were planted, pipes were laid underground, the town was hooked up to the nation’s electricity grid, and the postal service finally agreed to make a mail stop there.
With outside help, Merhav Am built a daycare center, kindergarten, synagogue, playground, and mikvah.
After a little more than a year, Dalia gave birth to a daughter, Tal, and, two years later, the couple had a son, Ido. Both children were born at Beersheva’s Soroka Hospital, where Elli, now a doctor, was getting his M.D.-Ph.D. Dalia worked at a small law practice in Beersheva.
It was, in many ways, an idyllic life. “It was very exciting,” Elli says. “There was a sense of something new, something special.”
As professionals, idealists, and Jews committed to the future of the Negev, the Rosenbergs look like the poster couple for the kind of people the Negev champions. But people like the Rosenbergs are the exception.
Of Elli’s medical school class at Beersheva’s Ben-Gurion University, only 10 out of 60 graduates stayed in the Negev, he says. In 1999, Intel opened up a $1.6-billion research-and-development facility in Kiryat Gat, a city about halfway between Beersheva and Tel Aviv. But 90 percent of the plant’s white-collar workers chose to commute from metropolitan Tel Aviv and elsewhere, rather than live in the Negev.
“Part of the problem is that people who have opportunities to offer in the Negev think there is nobody to work for them there, and people who want to live there think there are no jobs to be had,” says the JNF’s Bodner.
It’s a chicken-and-egg problem. Policy planners and grassroots activists agree that the key to development is attracting professionals to the region, but, for that, there needs to be an infrastructure that will appeal to young professionals: everything from schools to transportation to jobs to arts and culture.
In this long-neglected part of the country, the revival is under way.
In late 2004, the Israeli government announced a multi-year $4.7-billion plan to develop the Negev.
Since 1999, the Or Movement has established five new rural towns in the region—one of them is Merhav Am—and has plans to bring 60 groups of pioneers to 60 existing Negev communities. The idea is for the groups—each comprised of 15 or so couples or families—to commit to some kind of community-building project in the Negev, from establishing a business to providing education for special-needs kids to expanding a town’s cultural offerings.
“Each group has its own idea to strengthen the community,” Flamer says. “It gives great energy to the entire enterprise of developing the Negev.”
In Beersheva, the JNF is building a 1,700-acre park along an old riverbed that was a toxic waste site until a few years ago. Where nearby buildings once were constructed to face away from the polluted river, new structures now face the rehabilitated waterway that runs between newly built promenades on either side and culminates in a modest lake. The water comes from recycled sewage and runoff from
wintertime flash floods. The JNF is also building an amphitheater, a sports complex, and playgrounds in the city.
Outside Beersheva, the government and private groups are teaming up on revitalization projects in the mostly neglected 1950s development towns like Yerucham, Ofakim, and Dimona. They’re putting in parks, running after-school programs for at-risk youth, and, near Ofakim, building a state-of-the-art residential village for special-needs children.
JNF and Or also are collaborating on a unique project to attract North American Jews to the Negev. Slated to open in 2011, a town, called Carmit, is supposed to be a religiously pluralistic upscale community comprised mostly of English-speakers who are Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox. Unlike most start-up Negev towns, Carmit will launch with permanent housing, rather than mobile homes, and the houses will have central air conditioning and Western amenities.
“It will be a symbol all over Israel,” Flamer gushes. “The impact will be unbelievable.”
Rabbi Asher Lopatin of Chicago is among those who already have signed on to live in the town.
“I had been planning to make aliyah, I was looking for possibilities, and this idea of Carmit looked very exciting,” says Lopatin, spiritual leader of Anshe Sholom B’nai Israel, a modern Orthodox synagogue in the Lakeview neighborhood of Chicago.
“I really would love to be involved in a pluralistic community in Israel and also to be a community rabbi. This is an opportunity for starting a fresh new community with fresh new attitudes. Carmit is the future of Israel.”
Lopatin has formed a nonprofit organization, the Chicago Israel Philanthropic Fund, whose mission is to take 100 families from the United States to Carmit. The group is working with the Or Movement on a website and marketing packet.
Elli Rosenberg says the Negev already has the key elements in place to attract newcomers—it’s just a question of marketing.
“I think the major problem of the Negev is its image,” he says. “I think, if you’d poll the center of the country, they’d associate the Negev with ‘desert, barren, yellow, empty.’”
Flamer agrees, which is why he’s on a mission to spread the word that the Negev is changing. The Or Movement hosts information centers around the country to recruit Israelis considering relocating, highlighting different options for newly discharged soldiers, students, environmentalists, ultra-Orthodox groups, and new immigrants. The centers function as one-stop shops that help with everything from finding employment and housing to choosing a community.
Ultimately, revitalizing the Negev will hinge on whether the movement can succeed in attracting not only highly motivated Israelis like the Rosenbergs, but also those not necessarily predisposed to life in the Negev. People like Lopatin, who acknowledges the Negev isn’t necessarily his ideal locale for a home in Israel, will represent test cases for the Negev revitalization movement.
Will the elements that drew them to the desert—in Lopatin’s case, a uniquely pluralistic community—be enough to keep them there?
In Merhav Am, the question of whether the community ultimately will be a success remains open.
Seven years after the town’s founding, permanent housing has yet to replace prefabricated dwellings, and the community has dwindled from its peak of 37 families. In a town designed to house 200 families, so far there are 31, according to the JNF. Though a few new families have moved in, many of the town’s founding members have left.
The Rosenbergs are among them.
It’s not that they gave up on their dream of living in the Negev—the Rosenbergs moved just 10 miles down the road, to the development town of Yeruham, population 9,000—but, they say, Merhav Am changed in ways they didn’t like.
The Rosenbergs had hoped the town would open up and become a mixed religious-secular community, but community members voted down an initiative to welcome secular families.
The sense of unity the couple felt in the town’s early years dissipated as many of their like-minded friends left, the style of prayer at the synagogue changed, and the town even changed its name.
Originally called Halukim after a nearby hill, community members elected to change the name to Merhav Am in memory of Rehavam Ze’evi, the Israeli tourism minister and right-wing ideologue who was assassinated by Palestinian gunmen in 2001.
The name change was emblematic of the transformation in the town’s character, Elli says.
“We didn’t expect it to turn into a place that was intolerant,” he says. “I’m not sure where the root of the problem was: the withdrawal from Gaza, a general swing to the religious right. People’s views became more extreme after the disengagement [Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza in the summer of 2005].”
“Those new, extreme views were part of why the yishuv transformed to the extent that we didn’t see ourselves living there anymore.”
Whereas once Elli hardly could bear to be away from his beloved community, by 2007 Merhav Am had become a place he wanted to leave. That summer, just before the start of the new school year, the Rosenbergs found a home in Yeruham for rent. Within a week, they had packed up their things and left Merhav Am.
In some ways, the Rosenbergs’ move is a sign of the Negev’s viability: Unhappy in one place, they were able to find another community in the Negev that suited them.
Yeruham has the religious diversity the couple was looking for, there is a multiplicity of synagogues to choose from, and the town is, by comparison, more cosmopolitan. There are good schools for the kids, and there’s plenty of community-building work to do. And, as five-year-old Tal boasts, now the family’s house has two bathrooms.
But it wasn’t easy giving up on the dream of living in a frontier community in the middle of the desert. Dalia, now nursing her third child, daughter Yael, born in early 2008, still gets teary-eyed when she talks of Merhav Am.
“When you ask me what I wish today, I wish one day we could go back,” she says, choking back tears. “It was hard to leave. Maybe one day.”
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