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.

Fencing in Rahme

The nice thing about Beer Sheva is it's a great place to start trips to places in the South of Israel. As a bonus, these places are in worse condition than Beer Sheva, and so it's heartening to return home.

On Saturday, I went to Rahme, a Bedouin community in the Negev, to help build a fence around a new kindergarten. The main organization involved was the Forum for Coexistence in the Negev, which tries to get Jews and Arabs in the region involved in projects together to build cooperation and trust.

Rahme, pop. 1,200, is near Yeruham, a Jewish town of 9,400. The two names in Hebrew look alike and the Bedouins say the Jews who came in 1951 incorporated the Arabic name into the Hebrew one. They share the R, H, and M and so sound quite similar.

Bedouins are former nomads who have settled into mostly sedentary communities in Israel. However, the nature of where they settle is a thorny issue. Just over half of the 160,000 Bedouins live in seven government-recognized townships, where they get basic services like water and electricity and can plan and build. However, the remainder live in 45 unrecognized villages, which don't get any of these services. Although Bedouins comprise 25% of the Negev's people, they occupy 2% of the land, and Israeli policy points to a desire to keep things that way. To that end, unrecognized village residents have difficulty getting permits to build permanent houses or other structures. If they build without permits, the IDF can destroy their homes. Rahma is an unrecognized village.

Chaya, a middle-aged woman who is one of the main organizers of the Forum drove me, along with a Bedouin university student named Ibrahim, and another middle-aged Israeli woman. We did not go into the residential part of Rahme, which from a distance was a collection of corrugated tin houses. Instead, we pulled off the two-lane road ribboning through the nearly empty desert and took a gravelly track up to a modest white building, built with corrugated metal sides and roofing that loudly rippled in the wind. The school was quite a distance from any homes. Apparently this is the second time the school has been built. The first time, when it was built more centrally, the IDF knocked it down because it was not built with any permits.

Our task was to plant stakes in the ground, wrap wire around them, and then tie metal fencing onto the stakes and wires to make a fence for the school kids. It took us about a half hour to get started because only one person knew what he was doing, as he had recently built a cage for chickens in his backyard.


The rest of us bumbled along, sharing about ten pairs of pliers among the 20 of us. At any given time, there was a handful of earnest volunteers kneeling near the fence and wrapping wires. The rest were wandering off, chatting with each other, snapping photos on digital SLRs, or lurking inside the school waiting for food. Full disclosure: I took all the pictures here while wandering around with a Canon Rebel XtI. Toward the end, some of the Bedouin kids from Rahme came and started helping. They were embarrassingly faster than all of us with the pliers and wire.


Eventually, the fence was up if a bit overstretched in some points and saggy in others. We went inside the school, where the Rahme residents brought over trays heaped with yellow rice and chicken, covered in thin, warm pita bread.


While we ate, we heard from some of the leaders of the community about their issues. The speeches were sad. One man in his 50s, in a long robe and a colorful headscarf, said that even though he had served in the Israeli army, his Jewish friends didn't want to keep in touch after his service was over. Another said that the government was confiscating his land and asked us to come to his court hearing in Beer Sheva two days hence (i.e., today). Another said the kids of Rahme often don't go to school because the closest one is 25 kilometers away.

On the drive back home, the people I rode with commented on badly the State of Israel has bungled its relationship with the Bedouin. These Israeli citizens are so willing to be a part of the state that they voluntarily join the IDF. And yet, Israel has found no real solution for as many as half the Negev Bedouin that will give them a secure and dignified place to live in the land they have been in for centuries.

The Israeli University System

It was thirty minutes into a seminar on Critical Theory on Planning when I realized with relief that I was not the only one drowning in the Hebrew discussion on relative and absolute space. Another student raised her hand and flat out told the professor, "Excuse me, please slow down. I have no idea what you're saying."

But there was no such sense of sympathy in the school supply store.

The Academon is in the basement of the student union and is filled with the usual paraphernalia for studying - stationery, pens, pencil cases...and then loads of computer goods, an entire corner devoted to backpacks, and racks of toiletries. Really, Ben Gurion U. students? You can't find shampoo at your corner grocery?

What confounded me was how I would organize my papers in the land of no Five-Star notebooks with multiple subject areas and convenient built-in pockets. How to deal with A4 paper, which is narrower and longer than my old mainstay, A3? What to do with a standard filing system of two holes to a sheet, instead of one? Or with the national love for "nylons" - transparent plastic pockets with two holes designed to be placed in binders to hold onto the non-punched sheets.

I stared at the wall of binders and nylons, bewildered at the prospect of re-thinking the way I take notes. After ten agonizing minutes, I bought pre-holepunched loose leaf paper (which comes bound on one end, so it can be easily used in a clipboard) and two binders. I also picked up colorful pens to get excited about writing reams of Hebrew which may be indecipherable to me when I look at them later. I think I'll wind up taking notes on a clipboard, ripping the sheets off at home and filing them away in the two binders, which I'll divide into subjects using nylons.

This information may not be Earth-shattering, but it is just one more way in which I am realizing that studying in another country has many consequences beyond just the language. Foreign students everywhere, I salute you.

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.

Miriam Makeba and Nigeria's Ambassador to Israel

On Saturday night, as I gorged myself on Nigerian and Ethiopian food in the backyard of the home of the Nigerian ambassador to Israel, the song Pata Pata came over the speakers. I love Pata Pata, by the South African Miriam Makeba, and I took it as an augur of a great party.

The occasion was a fundraiser to benefit Darfur refugees in Israel; a 50 shekel cover meant all you can eat and drink, and bartenders were pouring Bailey's as though it were chocolate milk. The music continued to be phenomenal, and by the end of the night I had danced with the ambassador's daughter.


I was dismayed to find out the next day that one of Africa's most prominent singers is no longer with us. Makeba was born in a Johannesburg ghetto in 1932, worked as a maid to wealthy white families, got pregnant at 17 and later married a man who beat her. But after a cameo in the film "Come Back, Africa," she became well known in Europe and sought-after by American producers.

Makeba's upbeat and catchy tunes, ribbed with African flavor, gave her a fame she used to agitate against apartheid at home and racism elsewhere in the world. She was exiled from South Africa for 30 years because of the political nature of her music, and only welcomed back with the fall of apartheid. Her music gives off a feeling of sheer happiness at being alive and able to dance. It's absolutely worth a listen, which you can do here. Miriam Makeba was 76 and she died after giving a concert in Italy. Rest in peace.

Tel Aviv Politics

I spent the morning tracking down where to vote tomorrow for the next mayor of Tel Aviv, so I am in an electoral mood. It's a very exciting time to be both American and Israeli, and to see the reverberations of America's elections abroad.

For anyone living in Israel and trying to vote tomorrow, you can either call the Ministry of Interior automated hotline at 1-800300059 and give them your ID number, or punch it in to the City for All Web site. This gives you your polling place and the other figures you need to get in and out quickly.

Tel Aviv's elections are shaping up to be a localized version of America's campaign for change. A while ago I mentioned the Communist party parliamentarian Dov Khenin as a contender for mayor. Since then, Khenin has clawed his way to second-place standing in the polls, right behind incumbent Ron Huldai. Khenin's party, Ir Lekulanu, or City for All, is pushing a revitalized bus system, more transparency in city government, and affordable housing solutions for young singles and couples being pushed out of Tel Aviv by exclusive, luxury towers springing up all around the city, including in quaint older neighborhoods where they are an eyesore. Here he is in English:



Huldai counters that Khenin is a newcomer without his record for improvement - he points to the city's investment in renovating the port in Yafo, in redoing a large park along the waterfront in the southern section of the city, and for opening new schools.

But the City for All movement is electrifying, as you can see even if you don't understand Hebrew from this news piece on the two candidates. The interviews with Huldai are on the beach promenade in Tel Aviv's clean, affluent North. Huldai stands on a pristine stretch of boardwalk, leaning over the rails with the waves behind him. On the other hand, Khenin walks through the open-air market in the Hatikva neighborhood, one of Tel Aviv's most impoverished. He shakes hands with the vendors, tells them they have nice vegetables, and runs into a crusty Likud party member who says "I know Khenin. His mother was my kindergarten teacher!"



Khenin's campaign also put out the most viral Internet-ready video of any local election, with well-known Israeli TV personalities wearing the "I Dov Tel Aviv" shirt. If you want to buy your own shirt, you can get it for 20 shekels at the ColorTouch print shop, and it comes with three witty bumper stickers that say things like "I Dov Bicycles" and "I Dov Breathing."

Meanwhile, Huldai has come under fire from the other parties challenging him, including the Greens, who put out this video about how Huldai has been having a party at the expense of our asses:



Many of the people supporting Khenin cite his similarities to Obama in being an outsider, a fresh face and a voice that resonates with young people who have been turning out in droves to paper the streets. His party includes former members of the right-wing Likud, the religious party Shas, and leaders from the green movement.

Those who oppose Khenin cite his political background, which is extreme left, as being anti-Zionist. Polls show that he has a strong chance of winning enough votes to necessitate a run-off election, in which case all the other green and left parties would likely throw in their support for him.

Obama in Israel

Although I have moved to Beer Sheva, I went up to Tel Aviv to watch election results with two American friends, and it was one of the first times since moving to Israel that I felt proud to be an American and aware that there are certain events that you must share with people who come from the same country as you.

The first polls closed at 2 AM Israeli time, and the only American news station we could get was FOX News. We anxiously watched as McCain at first seemed to be in the lead, with eight electoral college votes to Obama's three, and as Florida, Ohio, Missouri and others remained undecided. The three of us dozed off, waking up periodically, as Obama took Pennsylvania, Colorado...and broke through 300 electoral college votes. At 6 we drowsily woke up to Obama's acceptance speech.

It was so exciting to watch this happen at home, in Grant Park where I went while studying at Northwestern, and to see the crowd flowing between Chicago's skyscrapers as though it were an anti-Communist rally in Eastern Europe. Sky News showed Kenyans dancing in the streets, the Fox broadcasters seemed sad, and the three of us kept saying how proud we were of our country, and how excited we were about the Obama family dog.

In the morning I wore a grey Obama t-shirt around Tel Aviv. It felt like the day after you finally get together with someone you have been hoping to be with for months and you want the whole world to know. Every few minutes I would remind myself that Obama was the president-elect, and smile, and stand up on my bike so the t-shirt would be more easily visible.

It's strange, but I really cannot remember feeling this proud of neither America nor Israel, ever. Is this how it was to be an American in the 1940s, when we helped sink Germany and Japan, or in Israel when the Six-Day War was won? So unusual and pleasant to feel that my country makes me feel good about myself, privileged to be a part of it and excited to see what happens next.

...

Today, as I walked around Beer Sheva with a friend, we wandered into the tourist office (which was empty) for the city (which is nearly empty) and chatted with the two middle-aged women who worked there. They said they like Obama, especially because he has a doctoral degree and is an intellectual. Then they added that maybe because Obama is only 47, it will make people in Beer Sheva feel ok about voting for the youngest mayoral candidate for the city, which goes to the polls this Wednesday. Then they accidentally called Obama Mubarak.