Boarding the Bus: Beersheba to Mitzpe Ramon

August 17, 2011 -- After two and a half weeks working at Kibbutz Lahav I finished washing my last dish and dodging my last grad rocket and decided to head south via bus from Beersheba to Israel's Grand Canyon -- the small town of Mitzpe Ramon overlooking the massive Ramon Crater/Makhtesh.

The bus traveled through the heart of the Negev desert of southern Israel, stopping at Kibbutz Sde Boker and Midreshet Ben-Gurion along the way. This area is where the graves of founding Prime Minister of Israel David Ben-Gurion and his wife Paula are located. It was Ben-Gurion's dream for Jews to settle the arid Negev, writing:

The desert provides us with the best opportunity to begin again. This is a vital element of our renaissance in Israel. For it is in mastering nature that man learns to control himself. It is in this sense, more practical than mystic, that I define our Redemption on this land. Israel must continue to cultivate its nationality and to represent the Jewish people without renouncing its glorious past. It must earn this – which is no small task – a right that can only be acquired in the desert.


When I looked out my window today and saw a tree standing before me, the sight awoke in me a greater sense of beauty and personal satisfaction than all the forests that I have crossed in Switzerland and Scandinavia. For we planted each tree in this place and watered them with the water we provided at the cost of numerous efforts. Why does a mother love her children so? Because they are her creation. Why does the Jew feel an affinity with Israel? Because everything here must still be accomplished. It depends only on him to participate in this privileged act of creation. The trees at Sde Boker speak to me differently than do the trees planted elsewhere. Not only because I participated in their planting and in their maintenance, but also because they are a gift of man to nature and a gift of the Jews to the compost of their culture.

Midreshet Ben-Gurion is also home to the Ben-Gurion National Solar Energy Center, which is operated by the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev's Jacob Blaustein Institutes for Desert Research.

Riding the bus through the isolated desert, I really started to understand how much Israelis of all backgrounds rely on the buses to get to their destinations. Along the way we picked up college students, kibbutzniks, IDF soldiers, Bedouin villagers and military prison guards. Sadly only a couple of days later the very same bus route I took from Beersheba to Mitzpe Ramon was ambushed by terrorists near Eilat. Eight innocent people were murdered and over 30 were wounded in the attacks.

In Israel a cowardly act of terrorism does not stop citizens from engaging in simple acts such as boarding a bus. I would recommend Israel's excellent intercity bus system to any visitor traveling within the country. Boarding the bus is just one of many quiet acts of defiance that define this great country.

Here is video of the bus ride from Beersheba to Mitzpe Ramon.



Here are photos of the bus ride from Beersheba to Mitzpe Ramon. Click here for the Flickr set.

Green Traveler: Beersheba, Israel

August 7 and 11, 2011 -- Water is a precious resource in the Middle East. Israelis are well aware of the water shortage in the region and are taking steps to reduce, reuse and recycle. Nowhere is the scarcity of water felt more than in the Negev desert of southern Israel. In Beersheba the nahal (river) is but a trickle most of the time and the riverfront district has been neglected for years.

But in Israel turning a barren desert into a green oasis has been a national mandate since its founding. So it should come as no surprise then that The Beer Sheva River Park is currently undergoing a major reconstruction project thanks to the Jewish National Fund's Blueprint Negev initiative. This project will create a 1,700 acre riverfront district that will be the catalyst for the revitalization of the "Capital of the Negev."

Here are some highlights of the restoration project taken directly from the JNF website:

• "JNF has succeeded in cleaning up the river that had been used as a dumping ground for decades, and has completed half of the planned 8 kilometers of landscaped promenade on each shore. Engineers responsible for the success of the San Antonio River Walk are partnering with JNF to send water through the river bed year-round. 

• JNF plans to use its expertise in water rehabilitation to recycle the city’s water and transport it to a 15-acre lake for boating.

• Plans include gardens showcasing desert flora and fauna, bicycle paths, recreation areas, an 12,000 seat amphitheater and 750 acres of new parks with 40,000 new trees."

When I walked across the street from Abraham's Well I saw a new promenade called the J. Lew Schepps Recognition Center, a newly paved walkway and a bridge under construction that leads to a park and bicycle paths on the other side of the river. So the restoration project is well underway.

If the Beer Sheva River Park restoration project is successful it could become a model for other cities attempting to find creative solutions to water conservation and economic development. 

Click here for more observations of Beersheba on my travel blog.

Here are more photos from The Beer Sheva River Park.

Photos: Israel Tent City Protests

This Friday I passed by the growing Occupy D.C. demonstration encampment at McPherson Square in downtown Washington and was amazed to see that since last weekend the park has been transformed from a few sleeping bags into a tent city. It is amazing how similar it looks to the tent cities I saw across Israel this past summer.

The Israeli Summer has turned into the American Autumn and while some of the issues being addressed by the demonstrators might be different (unemployment in the United States versus the high cost of living in Israel), there is a strong thread running through these movements, and it has to do with government being accountable to the people and not corporations and the richest 1%. The demonstrators on the East Coast and Middle East want to ensure that, as Abraham Lincoln so eloquently stated in his Gettysburg Address, "government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

Click here for a link to photos I took last weekend of the Occupy D.C. demonstration (before the tents were pitched).

And here are photos I snapped this past summer of the demonstrations around Israel.

TEL AVIV

BEERSHEBA

MITZPE RAMON

JERUSALEM