First Impressions of Beer Sheva

The good news: university strikes aren't happening this year, and classes began on schedule on Sunday. The bad news: Beer Sheva's urban design. Let me explain.

Last year, I heard a great line: "Tel Aviv would be such a great city, if only it weren't in Israel."

That thought kept popping into my head last Thursday night, as a friend drove me and the last of my possessions from Tel Aviv down to Beer Sheva, where I am getting a Master's in Geography at Ben Gurion University. As the physical and cultural center of the country, Tel Aviv is a vibrant city full of beautiful people and well-planned parks and boulevards. Elegant skyscrapers, cozy coffee shops and trendy bars light up the streets at night.

By contrast, as you leave the center for the desert this organization deteriorates into wide expanses of empty land broken up by isolated towns and small cities, each carrying its own gas station and monstrosity of a shopping mall done up in neon light that breaks up the serenity you would expect from open space.

After crawling out of Tel Aviv's heavy traffic, we drove past Ashkelon, a coastal city in the Western Negev desert in the part of the country known as "Otef Aza" (Wraps around Gaza) but which some people have dubbed "Khotef Aza" (Catches [Kassam rockets from] Gaza). An acrid smokey pall hung over the road, and infused the car as we traveled to nearby Netivot. This city's entrance is marked by tall modular apartment buildings and jarringly bringt signs tacked onto shopping centers. One meaning of Netivot is traffic lanes; I commented that the only Netivot I would want to see in the town of Netivot are the ones going out.

At this point we turned on the radio to find out that as we drove, Kassams had fallen near both Ashkelon and Netivot. Perhaps this was the source of the smell. We rode on, happy to be moving away from the source of the rockets.

As we reached the outskirts of Beer Sheva, the highway turned into one of the main avenues of the city, Rager Street. And yet, little seemed different. Yes, the road was lined with apartment blocks, but they were wide three-story impersonal and identical buildings that look like traincars on either side. These eyesores are part of the legacy of towns like Beer Sheva, which were developed hastily in the 1950s to absorb massive numbers of immigrants from the Arab world. Although the imperative to quickly house a large crowd has disappeared, the bland buildings live on. Few bars, restaurants or cafes occupy the lower stories, lending the street a bleak and empty character bereft of any urban fabric. And woe to the bikers who ride on Rager. They choose between riding on the edges of a road where cars are traveling at highway speed, or steering their bikes on unpaved "sidewalks" which are really three-feet-wide strips of packed-down sand and gravel.

One of the few places where this sprawling nothingness lets up in Beer Sheva is the old city, which I rode my bicycle to today. Built by the Ottomans, the old city is a series of narrow streets planned on a grid where business are open on the ground floor with apartments going up a few stories above them. Besides the university campus, the old city is one of the few places in Beer Sheva where walking around doesn't involve crossing four- and six-lane highways. And yet...few brand name national chains have stores downtown, preferring to open in the giant sterile shopping mall a few blocks away. The shops that do open in the old city reminded me of business districts I have seen in Amman, Jordan. They advertise heavily with graphics, as in a hair salon will have a picture of a finely coiffed woman on its illuminated sign. Most of the clothes, belts, suitcases and other goods sold in the shops are cheap looking. The few decent restaurants are far outnumbered by felafel joints and hummus restaurants.

Beer Sheva's rent is so cheap that I pay only half of what I would in Tel Aviv. But you get what you pay for. More than a million people live in the metropolitan area of Israel's glossy, European Tel Aviv. Beer Sheva is how so many of the other 5 million people in this country live - in poorly planned cities filled with soulless apartment buildings, ugly clothes and too many cars.