Israeli Town a Metaphor for Have-Nots

Every so often, a whiff of hope blows into this grim town in southern Israel, circling its bygone textile mills and sending crowds of desperate people hurrying to the office of Moti Zohar.

There, Zohar, the hard-pressed director of Ofakim’s employment center, gently breaks the news that only a relative few will get the welding, construction and other generally low-paying jobs that have been advertised. The rest, as usual in Ofakim, will be out of luck.

“It hurts that Ofakim is now known as poor and miserable throughout Israel,” said Zohar, who has lived here for most of his life. “But it is. We cannot escape this reality.”

For many Israelis, this increasingly restive town of 22,000 has become a metaphor for the profound economic and social problems affecting thousands of people shut out of the nation’s recent economic boom.

As a privileged upper echelon of Israelis enjoys luxuries new to this society, from designer clothes to flashy cars, more and more residents of Ofakim and other remote “development towns” established in the state’s early years have found themselves out of work--and short on faith that the intractable problems of their communities can ever be solved.

Frustration boiled over in Ofakim late last year when unpaid municipal workers joined hundreds of the unemployed in angry riots that shut down the town for several hours. The spark was the release of national jobless figures, which again showed Ofakim topping the list with an official rate of 14.3%, although many here say it is closer to 22%. The national rate is 8%.

Residents burned tires, fought with police and shouted their demands for “bread and work.” A week later, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu traveled to Ofakim and promised that 300 new jobs would soon follow. But so far most of the positions exist only on paper, and officials and residents doubt that they will materialize.

Ofakim’s troubles, and those of similar towns dotting the huge Negev desert, go well beyond the immediate shortage of jobs. They include ethnic grievances, social alienation and educational and infrastructure needs so great that many say they will never be met.

“This situation is a red light blinking, and it should really wake up the government,” said Dan Propper, a leading industrialist who heads the Manufacturers’ Assn. of Israel. He and other experts warn that, unless the government takes sweeping action, investing millions of dollars in infrastructure, education and business incentives, the towns are destined to remain behind the rest of Israel.

In Israel, as in the United States and other countries, the gap between rich and poor is steadily growing. A new class of successful entrepreneurs, many of them involved in Israel’s fast-growing high-tech companies, is on the winning end of the societal shift; on the losing side are thousands of people stuck in the dead end of the development towns.

Former Foreign Minister David Levy drew attention to the widening economic and social gulfs in Israel when he resigned early last month and accused the Netanyahu government of ignoring the plight of the poor and unemployed. Levy, a Moroccan immigrant whose political base is made up largely of working-class Sephardic Jews from North Africa and the Middle East, said he could not stay in a government that had allowed the peace process with the Palestinians to deteriorate and had broken its promises to needy Israelis.

Problems Began After Nation’s Birth

The development towns’ problems, however, began long before the current administration. They are rooted in government decisions in the 1950s to build the communities for thousands of Jewish immigrants flooding into the young state soon after its birth. Israel’s leaders, including its first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, believed that a Jewish presence on what was seen as Israel’s periphery would help secure borders, lay claim to large chunks of the land and ease crowding in the central cities.

The immigrants were primarily Sephardic. They were lured to the desolate new communities with promises of jobs, cheap housing, fresh air and lives better than the ones they had left. Even the names of some of the new towns spoke of hope and expectations; Ofakim, founded in 1955, means “broad horizons.”

The Israeli philosophy, then as it is today, was that all Jews were needed to help build the Jewish state. Far from sneaking across the borders, immigrants--as long as they could prove they had at least one Jewish grandparent--were welcomed to Israel, granted automatic citizenship, given heavily subsidized housing and showered with hope for a better future.

The newcomers too were flush with the Zionist spirit. They had left their homelands not only to gain the freedom to practice their religion openly but also to use their muscles and minds to develop a state for Jews. Israel, they believed, would become a model not only of democracy but of economic and social opportunity for all its residents.

They willingly acceded to the government’s vision of a desert in full bloom with factories and vibrant, growing communities. But many now say all that was a mistake.

“This was a wrong decision taken by the founding fathers,” said Shlomo Ben-Ami, a historian and member of parliament from the opposition Labor Party, the successor of Ben-Gurion’s Mapai. “There was no economic rationale to it then, just as there isn’t now. The only rationale was this heroic Zionist belief that you should settle every part of the country. It didn’t work out.”

Others, like Arie Caspi, a columnist for the liberal Haaretz newspaper, go even further, calling the establishment of the desert communities one of the gravest errors in the state’s history. Today, beset by troubles, the towns are simply a “lost cause,” Caspi wrote in a December column.

Most historians and other experts say they do not believe that Israel’s founders intentionally discriminated against the Sephardic immigrants, although a few do question why they, and not earlier waves of European newcomers, were chosen to populate the remote region. Most believe that Israel’s early leaders viewed the development towns as a step forward in immigrant housing, a marked improvement over the tent camps used for earlier arrivals.

After the towns were built, however, they were all but forgotten by the government, according to sociologist Shlomo Swirski, who was one of the first to study the communities. “That’s when the feeling of discrimination grew,” Swirski said.

The problem was that Ofakim and the other towns had no economic base and never really developed one. For a while, labor-intensive industries such as textile manufacturers took advantage of government incentives and established factories in the towns. But then they moved on, attracted by even lower labor costs elsewhere, including Southeast Asia.

Peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan also allowed Israeli textile companies to move their plants there, where they could pay a fraction of the wages required by Israeli workers. Textile workers in Israel earn about $850 a month, plus benefits that boost the cost per worker to about $1,200, while Jordanians average about $150 a month and Egyptians less than $100 for the same work, said Propper, the industrialist.

Workers in Ofakim could not compete. Starting in the mid-1980s, the town’s textile mills, one by one, shut down. The last, the Ouman sweater factory, a name that had become synonymous with the town, closed its doors in 1995.

A few new plants have moved in, including the ECI electronics factory, which set up operations in Ofakim in 1996. But other companies have looked the town over and gone elsewhere; Ofakim, with few city services and a labor force made up mainly of unskilled or semiskilled workers, cannot support their kinds of industry.

Competition for Jobs

To make matters worse, in the early 1990s the government sent Ofakim more than 7,000 new residents, the struggling town’s “share” of the thousands of Jewish immigrants then pouring into Israel from the former Soviet Union. The government provided the Russians with heavily subsidized housing but no jobs, creating competition and tensions between Ofakim’s predominantly Sephardic population and the new immigrants, who were Ashkenazi Jews, meaning those of European descent. Ashkenazi Jews dominate political, social and economic life in Israel.

Resentment over the ability of the often better-educated Russians to get the few jobs available has fueled existing feelings of discrimination among many residents.

Dorit Asraf, a 25-year-old high school dropout who is struggling to find work in Ofakim, counts herself among them.

Asraf, who has worked at times as a baby sitter and hairdresser’s assistant, says she has been out of a job for about six months. She came to the employment office on a recent day hoping to land a position with ECI, which advertised 60 new jobs in the wake of the riots.

But given the hundreds who crowded into Zohar’s dreary employment office alongside her, Asraf said she was not optimistic, despite her stated willingness to take even the most menial of jobs.

“They’ll probably give it to a Russian,” she said, her quiet voice tinged with bitterness. “All the jobs go to the Russians, and we are left with nothing. We have no jobs and no place to go.”

Ofakim, with its row after row of gray apartment blocks exuding a deadening sameness, has none of the niceties that attract people to the Mediterranean seacoast and lively Tel Aviv. There are no theaters, no malls, no bars or coffeehouses. Asraf and other young people say they dream of seeing the lights of Tel Aviv but have trouble mustering even the $3.40 it costs for the 20-minute bus ride east to Beersheba, the biggest city in the Negev.

Just up the street from the employment office, a group of men, most of them out of work, recently sat and smoked on a low wall near a cluster of shops selling cigarettes, beer and soft drinks.

Charlie Mayan, an unshaven 36-year-old with deep circles under his eyes, said he worked part time as a city garbage collector but that nearly everyone else he knows is out of a job.

“Do you know how many families that is, and most of them with five or six children?” he asked, jabbing his finger in the air for angry emphasis. While no one is without food, with most getting by on unemployment benefits, people are growing increasingly desperate, he said.

The government simply must do more for Ofakim, Mayan said as his companions nodded in agreement. “Netanyahu comes here and promises 300 places for workers, but we have thousands out of work,” he concluded. “It’s not enough.”

‘The Government Has to Help Us’

It’s a phrase that sounds again and again throughout the dusty, pitted streets of Ofakim, echoing from the unemployed sitting aimlessly in public squares to the office of the town’s harried mayor, Micha Herman.

Herman, who in mid-January had just met his December payroll, said Ofakim needs hundreds more jobs, a new sewage system, public buildings, roads connecting it to major centers and an emergency grant of about $8 million to pull it out of a yawning municipal deficit.

Without these things, he said, his town will continue to founder, spawning increasing social unrest. And he will spend more of his time trying to convince desperate people that something will change.

“I cannot solve the problem of unemployment alone,” Herman said. “I can give one of the lowest tax rates in Israel to businesses that want to come here, and I do [at about 60 cents a square yard], but I cannot do more than that. The government has to help us.”

Propper, the head of the manufacturers’ organization, said he and other industrialists generally agree. But he said one of the main reasons for the rising unemployment in Ofakim and elsewhere is the government’s tight monetary policy, which has kept inflation at 7%--the lowest rate in 29 years--but which many blame for helping create Israel’s current economic slowdown and rising unemployment.

The government, Propper said, must take immediate measures to ease the pain of development towns, including lowering interest rates and making long-term investments in education and in highway and rail projects that would shorten the distances to major population centers.

“These people are suffering,” he said. “They moved to these places because that’s where the government told them to move. It may take a generation to change things there, but we have to begin.”

Swirski, the sociologist who has researched the development towns, argues that the government has little to lose by ignoring their plight.

“People don’t really give a damn,” said Swirski, a co-founder of Tel Aviv’s Adva Center, which studies social and economic inequities in Israel. “There is no society-wide empathy with Ofakim; the economic situation is tightening for everyone right now.

“Worse than that, the people of Ofakim are now replaceable,” he said. “We have an unending variety of cheap laborers, from Palestinians to Romanians to Thais. If the people in Ofakim don’t want to work for nothing, Israelis feel that we can bring in plenty of others who do.”

Charlie Alfasi, an unemployed garbage collector who helped lead the December protests, said he and others in Ofakim plan to continue agitating until the government is forced to offer more comprehensive solutions.

“We will not be second- or third-class citizens. We will be first-class citizens, like everyone else,” he said. “And we will do everything to keep ourselves at the top of the national agenda so that we are not forgotten again.”

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Batsheva Sobelman of The Times’ Jerusalem Bureau contributed to this report.