The unexpected assault on Beersheba

Until the Grad rockets started crashing last week, the only ‘boom’ being talked about was the economic boom. Now, there's serious concern that the city will become another Sderot.

By LARRY DERFNER
Iron Dome outside Beersheba 311 (R) (photo credit: Reuters)
Iron Dome outside Beersheba 311 (R)
(photo credit: Reuters)
At the start of this week, Itzik Duek, head of Anglo-Saxon Realty in Beersheba, said three people looking to buy homes in the city had scheduled to come into his office, but all had canceled their appointments after the rockets started falling the previous Thursday.
“One of them lives in Arad, two of them live in the Center, and they all said they want to wait until things calm down,” said the realtor.
Housing prices in “the capital of the Negev” have gone up over 50 percent in just the last two years, said Duek.
“There’s been great momentum in the market, but in these last few days there’s a lot of uncertainty. Everybody’s waiting to see if the quiet returns.”
Prof. Rivka Carmi, president of Ben- Gurion University of the Negev, which was ordered closed temporarily by the Home Front Command after the rockets fell in the city, said, “This is what I’ve been thinking about – are we entering a new reality? Is Beersheba going to become a front-line city? I’m confident that we – the university, the Negev, the country – can deal with the challenges ahead, but we have to think seriously about the different possibilities, because we don’t know what the future security situation for the South is going to be.”
Until the heavy Grad rockets started crashing last week, the only “boom” being talked about in Beersheba was the economic boom. Led by the IDF’s NIS 10 billion “Training Base City,” due to start construction near Ramat Hovav next year, the region is finally, genuinely taking off. Training Base City will employ some 13,000 army officers, and the cities of the South are just waiting for this population to move in.
Nearby will be the Advanced Technology Park, where some 200 firms will be located, and the Grand Canyon Mall, to be the country’s largest.
“[Industrialist Nochi] Dankner is building a commercial project on 300 dunams [30 hectares] in the South, Teva is moving some of its facilities down here. The Negev is crowded with new projects,” says Duek.
After a half century during which official Israel dutifully repeated, then apparently forgot, the pledge to realize David Ben-Gurion’s vision to develop the Negev, it’s actually happening, and there’s much more to come.
And now this.
From interviews in Beersheba and neighboring Omer, site of Stef Wertheimer’s industrial park, the impression I got was that the scores of rockets that struck southern cities, principally Beersheba (killing one man, wounding several people and hitting a thankfully empty school) have given people pause. The attacks didn’t spook them – people are not talking about leaving – but they realize that if the rockets become a recurrent thing, it will probably put a severe crimp in the plans to keep young people from moving to the Center, and to attract ambitious, talented, prosperous people and their projects to the region.
Except for one or two stray rockets that reached the city, there had been no attacks from Gaza on Beersheba since Operation Cast Lead nearly three years ago, and none at all before. So the state of emergency in the city, closed businesses, all-but-empty streets, sirens and all-encompassing anxiety was a sudden, unfamiliar, unexpected jolt to the system.
“The rockets during Operation Cast Lead came as a huge surprise. Until then the Negev was presented as one of the safest places in Israel. But then came Cast Lead, and while many people said it was just the first round, naturally people gradually put that out of their minds and got used to the quiet that ensued. Then suddenly it came again,” said Carmi.
On Sunday night, Beersheba didn’t look exactly like a ghost town, but traffic was very light and all but a few cafes were closed. At 9 p.m. the cease-fire with the Gazan groups was announced, yet somehow this didn’t produce an outpouring of celebrants into the streets.
AT THE popular Cafe Joe and Dani on Herzl Street, though, about 20 people were sitting at the tables on the sidewalk, about half of them cops.
“I just came out of my security room two hours ago. There’s a cease-fire now,” said Ilan Alloush, a 56-year-old contractor, as two friends sitting with him looked skeptical.
The men said they fully expected the Grads to return from time to time, but that this wouldn’t drive them out of the city.
“Sooner or later they’ll get to Tel Aviv, too, it’s just a matter of time,” said Yehiel Illouz, employed at a security firm. “But when they get to Tel Aviv,” said Alloush, “the government will put a stop to them.”
Asked if a return of the rockets would cause young people to leave the region, the men said young people tended to leave the Negev anyway for the job opportunities in the Center.
“I’ve got two grown children living in the Center, he’s got two,” said Alloush, pointing to Illouz. The third man at the table, Shalom Abucassis, 50 and unemployed, said his children were still in town.
For all their pessimism, though, they believed the Negev would improve no matter what did or didn’t come out of Gaza. “When they build the Training Base City, a lot of army officers are going to move here, and that’s going to help,” said Alloush.
Beersheba is trying to grow out of its outdated image as a big backwater, an overgrown development town dotted with tenement slums. The rockets seemed to accentuate how these neighborhoods near the city’s main entrance, the Dalet quarter being the best known, don’t fit into Beersheba’s plans for the future. While the more prosperous residents living in modern homes were safe in their security rooms, residents of the old tenements, whose apartments don’t have security rooms, were forced to race to the community shelters at the sound of the siren, and stay inside these concrete blocks for hours on end if they wanted to be truly safe.
“The rockets have already hurt the real-estate market for old apartments,” said Anglo-Saxon’s Duek. “Apartments built before 1990 don’t have security rooms, and when people call up about apartments for sale, right away they want to know if it has a security room.”
On Sunday night, some of the refugees from Dalet and the adjoining tenement neighborhoods were camped out on the lawn across the boulevard from Ben-Gurion University and Soroka Medical Center. Some 100 families had pitched tents there as part of the nationwide “social justice” protests that began July 14; on Sunday night, about a dozen or so campers were still there, sitting on couches under a makeshift awning; which was all that separated them from whatever might fall out of the sky.
“Most of our people went to stay with relatives after the rockets started falling, but we’re still here,” said Gadi Peretz, 53, a youth counselor.
“One of them fell about two kilometers away, and people stopped their cars right here, they hit the ground, women were crying, they ran in here, they didn’t know where the rocket hit,” recalled Roni Cohen, 46, an employee at a Negev chemical company.
The tent-dwellers were generally skeptical about the prospects for Beersheba’s economic recovery, rockets or no rockets. “Things have been rough in Beersheba for 60 years because of the economic situation, or lack of it,” said Peretz, allowing, though, that Training Base City would likely bring an infusion of high earners.
“I just hope they move here to Beersheba, not to [nearby suburbs] Omer and Lehavim with the rest of the rich people,” said Cohen.
AT BGU, some students were volunteering to go to the bomb shelters and help out.
“I go into some of the online forums to see what people are talking about, and nobody’s talking about leaving the university,” said Carmi. “And I haven’t heard of any incoming student canceling his or her registration. I have tremendous faith in this generation, which is being proven out in the social justice protests and all the volunteer work they’re doing now, and just coming here to build the Negev. But again, I’m thinking about the possibilities for the future – I think it’s the duty of everyone in authority, here and especially in Jerusalem, to look squarely at the issue.”
The possibility of Beersheba turning into “another Sderot” seems impossible.
“This is a city of 250,000 people. It has major strategic value,” Carmi noted.
“But the possibility of the Grads becoming something that happens from time to time, one or two every month or two, would likely have a profound psychological effect on the population, and especially on those considering moving to the region,” she said. “It would have a very unsettling effect – knowing that in the near future you would be hearing the sirens again, but you don’t know when, and that even one rocket would be falling somewhere nearby, but you don’t know how close – this is something people here haven’t experienced.”
She stressed that “people in the South are very resilient, very strong, and I know they will stand up to whatever comes, but to say that such a scenario, God forbid, will have no effect on life in the Negev? Or that it will have no effect on how the rest of the country sees the region? Or that it will make no difference to the student thinking about coming to study here? I can’t say that.”
She noted that the rockets had fallen at a crucial juncture for the ATP hitech park, with which the university is involved. “We have two companies already up and working, EMC and Deutsche Telekom Labs, but there’s a whole park yet to build and another 200 or so companies we need to attract.”
Roy Zwebner, head of marketing for ATP, said he’s had discussions with representatives of potential tenants at the park since the rockets began falling.
“The rockets didn’t even come up as an issue that might prevent them from coming in,” he said. “So far it’s had no effect on our situation. If such attacks occur again, obviously it wouldn’t be good for the park; there are no marketing tools for dealing with such a situation.
But at this point I’d say [that while] the issue of security is a concern, at the same time there’s a level of hope that’s based on experience in Israel, and confidence that development in the Negev will go ahead whatever the challenges, like it always has in the South, and as it has in the North as well.”
Omer, where many of BGU’s professors live, lies 6 km. northeast of Beersheba.
None of the rockets fell there, but a local resident said, “The booms were so loud, they sounded so close, that we thought there was a wedding taking place at Tel Sheva [the neighboring Beduin town] and we went up on the roof to watch.”
At Omer’s shiny Industry and Science Park, no more than 100 meters from Beersheba’s eastern edge, the mood on Sunday was business as usual.
“People have been talking about the rockets, of course. A couple of times we all had to go into the shelter when the sirens went off. One of the women said she couldn’t sleep at night, but still, nobody’s talking about leaving.
My wife and kids were anxious, I was anxious, but it passed,” said “Tal,” a software engineer in his late 30s who came to Omer with his family several years ago from one of Tel Aviv’s prosperous northern suburbs.
“If Beersheba were to become like Sderot was, then I don’t think we would stay here, but for the moment I’m not thinking in those terms,” he added.
Ilya, 39, a Russian-born computer programmer who lives in Omer with his wife and two children, said rocket attacks were “something you learn how to live with.”
And if they become more than a rarity, will he stay in Omer? “Absolutely,” he said. “Wherever you go in this country, you’re going to be exposed. If something isn’t done to deal with this problem, the rockets will get to Tel Aviv in a year or two anyway, so what’s the point of running?”