Rahat by Bike

The southbound train from Tel Aviv always stops at "Lehavim-Rahat" before pulling into Beer Sheva. For the past year, I have wondered what might be found at that stop, and on Monday I finally satisfied my curiosity.

Rahat, pop. 42,000, is the only Bedouin city in Israel, established in 1972 to settle the former nomads who had adopted a sedentary lifestyle. It is consistently ranked as one of the most impoverished cities in Israel as well as one of the least desirable to live in. A city for Bedouins is an oxymoron, and I wanted to go to understand what that meant. Here's the skyline:


There is only one bus a day from Beer Sheva to Rahat. On the other hand, most buses going north make a stop at or near Lehavim, the upscale Jewish bedroom community that shares the train station. To solve the issue, a friend and I pushed a pair of bicycles into the Lehavim bus luggage compartment and then biked the four kilometers along a paved road to the entrance of Rahat. The bus ride was 15 minutes long and cost 11 shekels, including a surcharge and disgruntled driver for the bikes.

As we entered town, there were billboards in Arabic for health care and for political candidates (local elections were two weeks ago). Our bikes made us a curiosity as we rode up and down asphalted hills. Having no map and no contacts, we headed toward the industrial zone in search of the Rahat olive oil press.

First, we found a slaughterhouse where 10,000 chickens are dispatched each day. One of the workers there, Khaled, showed me around the factory where the chickens are hung on hooks by the legs, killed, cleaned, plucked, and packaged in cardboard. It was 1 pm and the day's animals had already been processed.



Then Khaled and some of the other factory workers invited us to drink coffee with them. They pulled out a thick loaf of white bread and a plastic bowl of the thickest olive oil I have ever seen and insisted we eat. We spoke about whether or not Barack Obama is a Muslim, with Khaled navigating the Hebrew-Arabic divide.

From there we found the olive press, where the owner, Fuad, showed us how olives are processed.
Local farmers bring their crop to him and pay a fee per kilogram of olives pressed.

When we were there, a Bedouin named Moussa was waiting for his yellow plastic jugs to fill up, while a Jewish man from a farm in the desert was standing around waiting for his turn.


As we left the factory, we came across a building with white plastic sacks of flour stacked high and asked the workers if we could come inside. They were eating lunch and hurriedly cleared space for us on the thin mattresses they were using as chairs. We ate pita with labane and spicy tomato salad with them. Two of the workers were Rahat residents; two others were from the southern West Bank and get permits every three months to enter Israel.



Then the factory manager Farid agreed to give us the flour tour. He processes white flour, which Jewish Israelis like, and "baladi" flour, which is coarser and which Bedouins use. As we spoke, he turned the machines on and we watched as they shuddered and churned out fluffy white powder. He said he lives in an unrecognized Bedouin village, and that his 12 children are so well behaved that they make less noise than two Jewish ones. He said he has built a house without a permit that may be demolished, but that he doesn't want to move out of his village. One of his daughters, in eleventh grade, is in a med school preparatory program.


We had seen enough of industrial Rahat and headed toward town to get some sweets and coffee. We rode through one of the main thoroughfare to the central market, which for the most part was closed with a few stores selling cheap-looking trinkets. A shady character lurked around us for a while, giving us "a tour" of the closed shopping avenues until we shook him off by jumping into a pastry shop, Nazareth Sweets.

Since it was empty, the owner, Eid, 28, and his two workers, both named Mohammad, let us go into the kitchen and watch the baking. At Nazereth, the kenafe was made by squirting a line of cheese down a strip of dough made of hair-thin threads, then tightly rolling the dough around the cheese on the diagonal to make a long rope. Here's Mohammad:

We asked to roll knafe ourselves, and Eid snapped photos while we each rolled a rope out, to the amusement of the people who actually knew what they were doing.

Eid said the store fills up completely toward the weekend. He is from Nazareth; he said the shop is a chain with 60 outlets across Israel, mostly in Arab towns. We asked him about the mosques in Rahat. He said they were only open to men, which made me lose some interest in visiting one.

At this point it was about 4 and dusk was coming. We unlocked our bikes and the shady tour operator from earlier half heartedly tried to get us to pay him 20 shekels for watching them. Good thing we didn't pay up, because my bike basket took a beating under his care and the seat was at a funny angle.

As we rode away from Rahat, we passed a scrap yard with cars piled incomprehensibly high one atop the other. The road had a very narrow shoulder and cars were whizzing by, so we rode along a dirt track parallel to it. Unfortunately, this is an informal dump and strange smells accompanied even stranger sights - dead chickens, the corpse of a cat, animal legs torn from their bodies. We hurried along, eventually reaching the main highway, exhausted, and from there the bus back to Beer Sheva.