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Desert bloom still a dream
DAVID NEWNUM THE JERUSALEM POST
It was Israel's first prime minister, David Ben- Gurion, who insisted that Israel capture the Negev during the War of Independence. He argued that it was essential for the new state to have a large, relatively undeveloped area which would provide the land for future immigrant absorption and economic development.
Mr. Ben-Gurion later retired to his desert retreat at Sdeh Boker, believing that his personal example would cause the masses to follow him. The notion of making the desert bloom, changing its color fix)m brown to green (which, had it happened, would have been an eco ogical disaster), became an essential part of the state building process and of Zionist mythology.
Fifty years down the road and the Negev remains undeveloped. The latest edition of the Negev statistical yearbook, published by the Negev Centre for Regional Development at Ben Gurion University, shows a sorry state of affairs.
The Negev, covering over 60 per cent of the country's land surface, accounts for little more than seven p(>r cent of the population. Despite the demogiaph-ic incTCase experienced as a it>sult of the Russian inimigiation, the past two years have once again been chanicteinzed by a negative population balance.
More residents are leaving the region, for the attractions of the metropolitjui contie, than are arriving.
Tlie unemployment figuros mv even more deprcssing. While the national average hovei-s around nine to 10 per cent, the respective figure for Tel Aviv is jast over four per cent, for Beei-sheba 7.6 pei-cent, increasing to double figures in the surrounding development towns. Factories have closed down as their owners have found it more profitable to relocate to areas in the center of the country. After all, if a factory is offered the same financial incentives to set up in Ariel, located in the geographic centre of the country and close to the mtuor markets and oonunerdal offices, why, indeed, would they choose to remain in a remote, distant, development town in the Negev?
There are two approaches as to how this region can best be
developed, neither of which is exclusive. One is for the government to invest national resources into developing an employment and cultural infi-astructure which will persuade people to stay in the region rather than seek greener pastiu^s elsewhere. TTus policy of preferential regional development has been tried, on and off, during the past 50 years but has not met with great success.
It is always much easier to provide the bricks and mortar for emergency housing for new immigrants than it is to provide the long-term sources of employment which are a necessary prerequisite if people are to remain in
the region, let alone attract new residents from elsewhere.
The alternative approach is to improve the transportation infrastructure linking the Beer-sheba region to Tel Aviv and the m^jor employment centres, recognizing the fact that Israel is increasingly becoming a city state, with Tel Aviv at its center and the rest of the country as its suburban hinterland. Residents would be able to improve their living standards by purchasing cheaper land and housing at lower densities in and around the Beersheba region, without having to give up their job opportunities in the metropolitan centre.
This not only requires better road links but also a renewed rail service which could bring residents of the Beersheba periphery into the heart of Tel Aviv within 60-90 minutes travelling time.
Of course, for the Negev to really undergo development, it requires the region to have political clout within decision making circles. The Negev is totally under- represented in the Knesset. Israel's national, rather than constituency based, electoral system works against the interests of the peripheral regions.
And despite the fact that the m^ority of the votes for both David Levy's Gesher faction in the Likud and Natan Sharansky's Yisrael B'aliyah party came from the burgeoning development towns of the Negev and Galilee, these politicians contin-
ue to support policies which divert resourcesto other regions, notiibly the middle-class, mostly Ashkenazi, settlements in the West Bank.
For the moment lien-Gurion's dream is buried with him in his grave at Sdeh Boker. The Negev remains underdeveloped, while the gap between this region and the country's centre is increasing. It requires a powerful regional lobby, the promotion of local candidates in the party primaries and a change in national priorities if the Negev is to improve its standing in the national stakes. <J
David Newman Ls Professor of Political Geography and Director of the Humphivy. Institute for Stxial research at Ben Gurion University of the Negev.
children survived
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[of the spocauBt on
tographsab^^^^^^ desperation born of hunger, eKtrame poverty, even defiance, lliese searing images often reflect only the child's reaction to the confiJising adult worid around him. He or she is no longer a mere child but a budding adult in that baffling world. They smuggled food, contributed to
thftir familiftg* fina^ysna^ wtiwrt far.
younger siblingB after their parents were gone, and participated in underground activities.
But what (rf'thdr inner worid? What can be shown about the response of a child when his life suddenly turned upside down -in his terms? In an exhibition that opened last week at Yad Vashem, an attempt is ipade to see that other world: the world of play, of toys and ganias, of
Tin
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a big btqr and he plays like a baby,' 'Such a big girl and she stOlplayB^ddk'What matters is not what one plays, with but rather how and what one thinks and feels while playing.."
n^exhibitiim shows the finta-sy, creativity and play of children chnii^ the Holocaust^ and how play became a fiirm of resistance, oun-fbrtandconsolatioa
The displays begin in that twilight era just before the war, when their worid was still normal: a picture of two haredi boys in Poland, perhaps 10 years old, playing chess, one studying the board with his hand to his forehead looking for all the worid as thoui^ he is studying a page of Talmud; a picture of Anne Frank in Amsterdam in 1936, smiling with two iriends.
The Holocaust period is divided hito sections: "Before the War," "In the Shadow of War," the Ghettos," 'Theresien-stadt|'Tamp«.'"DeathCamp^ «^9Ihe AAenquM^'^lSiprB are ~ ' mcbfldrenXhonaes ~ ; . wMro"
But are these children really playing There is an excerpt on the wfiu from Story of a Secret State by Jan Karski, served as a courier for the Polish government in exile during the war. He tells of how he had been smuggled into the Warsaw Ghetto solw could rq[>art bade to London on the condition of the Jews: "We passed a miserable repUca of a park - the little square of comparatively clear ground in which a half-dozen nearly leafless trees and a patch of grass had somehow managed to survive. It was fearfully crowded.
"Mothers huddled close together on benches nursing withered infants.
"Children, every bone in theu-skeletons showing through their taut skm, played in heaps and swanns."
"Ihey play before they die,' I heard my companion on the left say, his voice breaking
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..... ...
their drcumstanoes or location, including Auschwitz.
One video is of Zoiia Ztgczyk-Rusner describing the story of her doU in the Warsaw Ghetto; she describes how she had left it behind inadvertently and then forced a teenager smuggling her out to go back to retrieve it The doll sits encased below the video.
It was hard for many sur-\'ivors, as we can only imagine, to part even temporarily with these items, the only tangible connection from their life in that other world. One survivor donated his precious keepsake to the exhibition, saying, This teddy bear has a duty here to tell the story."
Books, too, were available in the children's section set up at Auschwitz, including H.G. Wells's The OiUline of History, Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams, a geometry textbook, an atlas and a Bible.
In the poetwar section, there's a famous photograph of Chief Rabbi Yisrael Metr lieni, age seven, at Haifti port in 1946. after falllihaRptiaiiihmi Quchenwald; imtmrtiit(^^ in the DP tol946.
waamoontad Wald-azkd