Gavin Rabinowitz

A deserted factory in the industrial area of Ofakim, once a thriving manufacturing hub, in Israel’s Negev desert. (Photo: David Buimovitch, AFP)

End of an Era as Globalization Guts Israel’s Desert Factories

Ofakim. Israel’s founding father had a dream of making the Negev desert bloom, a vision clouded today by the harsh reality of industrial wastelands, chronic unemployment and fading hopes.

David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, settled thousands of people in the desert in an attempt to transform it into a flourishing center of the newly established Jewish state.

But in recent years that Zionist dream has crumbled before globalization, as factory after factory, set up to provide work for the desert pioneers, has shut, moving east in search of cheap labor.

When textile maker Century Miracle laid off its 40 workers in October and moved its production line to China, it marked the end of an era in the Negev, where such factories once employed a fifth of area residents.

“In the past, manufacturing was a mainstay of the Negev, but we have a real problem now competing with the low wages of China, the Far East and our Arab neighbors,” said Meir Babayouf, head of the Negev Labor Federation. “Unfortunately this is the price the Negev is paying due to the global economy.”

Ben Gurion saw the vast, largely empty southern desert that makes up a majority of Israel’s territory, as the country’s future, somewhere with room to prosper beyond the narrow, crowded coastal strip where most major cities are located.

To set an example he retired to a kibbutz, or collective farm, deep in the desert, but not everyone came by choice.

Many new immigrants who were poor and with little education ended up in small communities, known as development towns, dotting the Negev.

One of those towns is Ofakim, 20 kilometers west of the region’s largest city, Beersheva. Once the home of optimistically named Century Miracle Textiles, Ofakim is a stark victim of globalization, with its industrial zone that once offered work for the town’s 25,000 residents now largely in ruins.

Long rows of empty factories are overgrown with weeds, their windows shattered. Birds swoop through the tile-less roofs to nests in the rafters. Warehouses stand like skeletons, their corrugated iron walls swinging and creaking in the winter wind.

Giant tumbleweeds bounce down the empty roads, propelled by the winds of a winter storm that churn the desert sand into the air, rendering the sky an apocalyptic orange — a harbinger of the desolation that could return.

For residents the future looks equally bleak.

Avi Abutbul, 56, has been unemployed for more than a year since the garment factory where he had worked for more than two decades shut down. No new factories are coming in to replace the lost jobs and he cannot afford to leave. “We are trapped, like fish in a bowl,” he said, bitterly. “There is no future.”

Worst hit was the textile industry, once so associated with manufacturing in the Negev that Israel’s secretive nuclear reactor near Dimona, another development town deep in the desert, was known colloquially as “the textile factory.”

In the late 1990s, textiles accounted for nearly 20 percent of the industrial jobs in the Negev, according to a recent study from Ben Gurion University in Beersheva. That figure is now zero.

“Wages were low, but it provided work for the people,” said professor Yehuda Grados who wrote the study on industry in the Negev.

“The moment they destroyed the textile industry, people were left unemployed. There was nothing that came to replace it.”

Unemployment rates in the Negev hover around 15 percent, more than twice the national average, government figures show.

But the government insists it has not forsaken the region.

The Ministry for the Development of the Negev and the Galilee says it has earmarked 30 million shekels ($7.94 million) to rehabilitate industrial zones and invest in modern technology and another 10 million shekels for retraining laid-off workers.

“We can’t let the crisis deter us. We have to look at the Negev as an engine for growth,” Vice Prime Minister Silvan Shalom said. “We are looking forward — to strengthen those who are already there, to support them and create thousands of new jobs in the Negev and to encourage new people to settle in the Negev,” said Shalom, the ministry head.

But critics say the government is not serious, comparing the paltry sums invested in the Negev with the tens of billions of dollars poured by successive governments into settlements to strengthen Israel’s hold on the occupied West Bank.

“The Negev has to be a national priority,” said the labor federation’s Babayouf. “All they care about is building stupid settlements on hills in the West Bank. They just pay lip service to the idea of developing the Negev.”

Much hope has been put in plans to draw high-tech companies and their accompanying human resources, away from central Israel and into the desert. These companies have been instrumental in helping Israel weather the global economic crisis.

But efforts so far to attract workers with high-tech skills have largely failed and are unlikely to succeed in the future, Grados said. “It’s far for them and there are no sushi restaurants,” he said.

Agence France-Presse

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