BEERSHEBA, ISRAEL

Beersheba, courtesy IsraelCities.com

The city of Beersheba is the largest city in the southern Negev region of Israel, with a population of over 200,000. It has acted as the “capital” of the Negev for decades. Awarded to the prospective Arab state in 1947, it was recaptured by Israel following attacks from there by local Arabs as well as the Arab army of Egypt.

The history of Beersheba goes back to pre-Hebraic times but written records are first mentioned in Biblical sources. In the Book of Genesis, the site of Beersheba was recorded as being under the control of the Philistines. It was here that Abraham dug a well that was later violently taken away by the servants of Abimelech, king of the Philistines. Promised protection, Abraham and Abimelech made an oath with seven ewe lambs and the name of the place was henceforth called “Beersheba” (well of seven). Abraham’s son Isaac renewed the oath. For a time, it was the dwelling place of Isaac’s son Jacob, before his sojourn in Egypt.

After the conquest of Canaan by Joshua, Beersheba was allotted to the tribe of Shimon. It was the southernmost city settled by the Israelites, hence the expression "from Dan to Beersheba" which described the whole of Israelite territory from north to south.

The sons of the priest-judge Samuel were judges here.

Saul, Israel's first king, built a fort here for his campaign against the Amalekites.

During the period of the divided kingdom when Ahab ruled in the north and Asa ruled in the south, Beersheba was considered the gateway to the desert. The prophet Elijah, while escaping the wrath of Queen Jezebel, wife of King Ahab, took refuge in Beersheba before continuing on his journey to Mt. Horeb.

Under the Roman occupation, the native Israelites slowly abandoned the city and Christians, and later the Byzantine Christians, gradually took over. Then during the Muslim conquest in the 7^th century, Beersheba was totally abandoned and destroyed. It remained abandoned until the late 19th/early 20^th centuries when the modern city was built by the Ottoman Turks for the Bedouin of the area, acquiring the nickname as "the first Bedouin city." By 1914, Beersheba had a population of 1000, made up mostly of Bedouin and non-Bedouin Arabs from the Hebron and Gaza areas, as well as a small number of Jews one of whom, ran a flour mill.

In World War I, Turkish fortifications were laid out around the town and more settlers, including Jews, came and provided services to the Turkish army. In 1920, now under British rule, a few Jewish laborers planted a tree nursery and eucalyptus grove there and experimented with cultivating vegetables and other crops. In 1922, the population reached 2,356, among whom were 98 Jews. Due to the Arab riots in 1929 when many Jews were ethnically cleansed from various parts of Palestine including Beersheba, the number of Beersheba Jews decreased to 11. These last Jews were, as well, ethnically cleansed during the 1936–39 riots. In spite of this, efforts were intensified to purchase land for Jewish settlement in the Negev.

Following the conclusion of the War of Independence, the 1949 Armistice Agreements formally granted Beersheba to Israel. After a few months, the town's war-damaged houses were repaired. As a post-independence wave of Jewish immigration to Israel began, Beersheba experienced a population boom as thousands of immigrants moved in. They came mainly from North Africa, Iraq, India, Romania, Poland, Hungary, and South America. The city rapidly expanded beyond its core, which became known as the "Old City" as new neighborhoods were built around it, complete with various housing projects such as apartment buildings and houses with auxiliary farms, as well as shopping centers and schools. The Old City was turned into a city center, with shops, restaurants, and government and utility offices. An industrial area and one of the largest cinemas in Israel were also built in the city. It was also a communication center linking to the Lod-Kiryat Gat and Dimonah-Oron highways. A pumping station of the Eilat-Haifa oil pipeline was located there. Its largest industries (ceramics, sanitary ware, fire-resistant bricks, pesticides and other chemicals, and bromide compounds) exploited Negev minerals. There was also a large textile factory, flour mill, machine garage, and smaller plants for building materials, diamonds, metals, and other industries. The city had several academic, scientific, and cultural institutions. Among the first was the Municipal Museum. In 1957, the Negev Institute for Arid Zone Research was established, experimenting in water desalination by electrodialysis, exploitation of solar energy, cloud seeding, adaptation of plants to aridity, hydroponics, and human behavior under desert conditions. Other endeavors were: Soroka Hospital (opened in 1960), Ben Gurion University (originally the Institute for Higher Education which opened in 1965, becoming the University of the Negev in 1970, and finally its present name in 1973), the Beersheba Theater and the Symphony Orchestra (both 1973), Shamoon College of Engineering (1995), and the city's tallest building, Rambam Square 2, a 32-story apartment building (2003). The city also serves as a market center for the Negev's tens of thousands of Bedouin. The traditional Thursday, Bedouin market day, is a noted tourist attraction.

Other tourist attractions are the many sites of ancient remains including those at Tell el-Sheba, the most ancient site of Beersheba. In addition, a park, to be called Beit Eshel Park, will be established around the nearby Biblical town of Beit Eshel at the official entrance to the river park.

As with the rest of Israel, Beersheba has also seen its fair share of terrorist incidents. 1998: sixty four people were wounded in a grenade attack; 2004: sixteen people were killed in two suicide bombings on commuter buses in Beersheba for which Hamas claimed responsibility; 2005: another suicide bomber attacked the central bus station, seriously injuring two security guards and 45 bystanders; 12/27/2008-1/18/2009: During Operation Cast Lead, Hamas fired over 2000 rockets and mortars from Gaza into southern Israel, including Beersheba; 2010: an Arab attacked and injured two people with an axe; 2012: a Palestinian from Jenin was stopped before a stabbing attack in a "safe house"; 2015: a lone gunman shot and killed a soldier guarding the Beersheva bus station before being gunned down by police; 2016: the Shin Bet thwarted a Palestinian Islamic Jihad terror attack at a wedding hall.

BASHAN / GOLAN HEIGHTS

southern Golan Heights, courtesy Wikipedia

In Biblical times, the ancient territory of Bashan, which lies to the east of the Jordan, formed the bulk of the eastern half of the Israelite tribal territory of Menasheh. Today, about half of the territory consists of Israel’s Golan Heights with its “capital” being the revived ancient town of Qatzrin, and the other half in, what is today, the southern half of Arab-occupied Syria but with a large Druze population.

After the Biblical period, this area continued to contain an ancient Jewish community. In the 7^th century, while various Arab clans migrated here, the indigenous Jews were joined by Jewish refugees from Khaibar in Arabia, who were expelled by Mohammed, especially the tribes of Kainuka and Wuld Ali, who settled among the native Jews in Edrei, which became a rabbinic center in the Middle Ages. Today, Edrei is known as Deraa, an Arab-occupied town in Arab-occupied southern Syria.

Around the same time, Bashan became home to groups a Druze and Circassians, who came in peace. In time, the Druze became the majority and several settlements including that of Majdal Shams, the ancient Migdal Shemesh, became their main population centers. During the 11^th century, there was also a relatively large Jewish community in Banias. They were referred to a Baniasites who were frequently mentioned in the documents of the Cairo Geniza. Eventually, Babylonian Jews as well as a number of Karaites had also settled in Banias, causing the community to divide into Palestinians, Babylonians, and Karaites, who differed in their version of prayers. During the period of Crusader rule, in the early 12^th century, the famous proselyte Obadiah the Norman passed through the town and wrote of a Karaite pseudo-messiah Solomon haKohen who would preach of the coming redemption. But in c. 1170, Benjamin of Tudela mentions no Jews at all and it is possible that the community ceased to exist by then. Later however, Banias was re-inhabited by Jews as were some of the other villages in the Bashan area.

By the early 14^th century, Jews inhabited three main areas in Bashan – Banias, Edrei, and Salkhad, and questions arose as to whether these areas, as well as others immediately to the east of the Jordan, were halachically part of the Land of Israel. After constant debate, which lasted for over two centuries, during which time, the Jews of Edrei were forced to leave due to Arab depredations, it was decided in the affirmative, and the area was officially recognized as part of the Land of Israel. During the early Ottoman period, Banias still had a Jewish population as attested by a document from 1624 which mentions the murder of a Jewish physician, Elijah haKohen, by an Arab sheikh. During the 18^th and 19^th centuries, Druze tribes from Lebanon migrated to the eastern part of Bashan and mainly concentrated in and around the mountain which eventually became known as Djebel Druze. It remains their stronghold til today.

By the 19^th century, there were, once again, no Jews left in all of Bashan. It was in fact only sparsely inhabited and the land was largely uncultivated. In 1880, Laurence Oliphant published “Eretz haGilad” (The Land of Gilead), which described a plan for large-scale Jewish settlement in the Golan, but the Turks snubbed the scheme. In 1886, native born Jews from Safed formed the Bnei Yehuda Society and purchased 14,000 dunams of land near the Circassian village of Ramthaniya in the central Golan on which, they attempted to establish the village of Golan b’Bashan. But due to financial hardships and the long wait for a kushan (Ottoman land deed), the village was abandoned after a year. Soon afterwards, the Society regrouped and purchased land next to the Bedouin village of Bir Shaqum in the southern Golan. And thus, the village of Bnei Yehuda was established. Between 1891 and 1894, Baron Edmond James de Rothschild purchase nearly 30 sq. miles of land consisting of 16 villages in the eastern Bashan for Jewish settlement. Most of the land straddled both sides of the Nahr el Allan. Today, this land lies just a few miles from the 1967 lines, inside Syria where Jews are forbidden to live. Also in the 1890s, the Russian Agudat Achim Association acquired land in several locations in the districts of Fiq and Deraa and at Jillin where a farm was built and extensive eucalyptus groves were planted. Other tracts of land were acquired by Jewish organizations based in Romania, Bulgaria, the United States, and England, but Jewish settlement in the area remained slow and tenuous. Meanwhile, Jews had managed to build a road stretching from Lake Huleh to Muzayrib and by the mid-1890s most of the Golan had become owned and cultivated by a variety of peoples. A Jewish village called Tiferet Binyamin was set up on lands at Saham el-Jolan by the Shavei Zion Association based in New York, but the project was abandoned after a year when the Turks issued an edict in 1896 evicting the residents on the grounds that they were not Ottoman citizens. A later attempt to resettle the land with Syrian Jews who were Ottoman citizens also failed.

In 1899, the pasha of Damascus expelled the Jews from all of the Rothschild’s estates. Between 1904 and 1908, a group of Crimean Jews settled in the Bethsaida Valley, initially as tenants of a Kurdish proprietor with the prospects of purchasing the land, but the arrangement faltered and most of the Jewish settlements in the region were abandoned over time either due to Arab hostility and Turkish bureaucracy, diseases, or economic difficulties. Bnei Yehuda was the sole exception.

1920 witnessed the first of a series of Arab pogroms which raged throughout the country resulting the massacres and expulsions of Palestinian Jews whether they were immigrants or not. Bnei Yehuda was one such victim community following an Arab attack. But the land itself was still owned by Jews. Meanwhile, the Palestine Jewish Colonization Association obtained the deeds to the Rothschild lands and continued to manage it, collecting rents from the Arab peasants living there. In the 1920s, the British, who now occupied Palestine succeeding the Ottoman Empire after World War I, began a policy of dividing Palestine among Arab groups. In 1922, the Golan Heights were given over to the newly-formed Arab country of Syria, under French rule, and the rest of eastern Palestine was created into the Hashemite Arab Kingdom of Transjordan, under British rule. Western Palestine became more difficult to divide. Meanwhile, along the eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee, which remained part of western Palestine, Ein Gev and Shaar Hagolan were established in 1937. In 1947, the (largely Arab) Syrian Land Settlement Campaign refused to recognize the PJCA as the legal owner of any land in Syria, and the Syrian government confiscated it without compensation on the grounds that “it was contrary to Syrian policy to allow Jews to own land in Syria.”

In the late 1950s, the PJCA transferred the Golan/Syrian landholding to the Jewish National Fund. Today, the JNF still lay claim to the land. In the period between Israel’s War of Independence in 1948 and the Six Day War in 1967, Syria occupied the Golan Heights and Syrian Arabs constantly harassed Israeli border communities by firing artillery shells from their dominant positions there. In October 1966 Israel brought the matter up before the United Nations. Five nations sponsored a resolution criticizing Syria for its actions but it failed to pass due to a Soviet veto. Aside from this little charade, the Israeli government refused to do anything about the situation. One of the laziest and pathetic of Israel’s officials, Golda Meir, summed up life in Israel’s border communities:

The Syrians seemed bent on an escalation of the conflict; they kept up an endless bombardment of Israeli settlements below the Golan Heights, and Israeli fishermen and farmers faced what was sometimes virtually daily attacks by snipers. I used to visit the settlements occasionally and watch the settlers go about their work as though there’s nothing at all unusual in plowing with a military escort or putting children to sleep – every single night – in underground air raid shelters.

In 1967, Israel uncharacteristically finally decided to do something. After the Six Day War broke out in June, Syria’s shelling greatly intensified. The war on the northern front ended when the Israeli army managed to reunite the Golan with the rest of Israel. Jewish re-settlement in the Golan began soon after the war with the establishment of Merom Golan the following month. By 1970 there were 12 such communities. Today, the area is well developed and consists of many sites: Mount Hermon, the highest point in Israel at around 9000 feet, its Ski Resort and Nature Reserve, the Hermon Stream Nature Reserve, the ruins of Gamla known as the Masada of the north, and its ancient synagogue, the Odem Forest, Nimrod Fortress National Park, the Banias Waterfalls, Hermonit Mountain Reserve, Avital Mountain Reserve, Qatzrin Forest and Park including an ancient synagogue, Nahal Mehsushim Nature Reserve, Betzaida Zachi Reserve, Jordan Park, Magrase Nature Reserve, Yarmouk Nature Reserve (today located in the Kingdom of Jordan) and the River of the same name which forms part of the border between Israel and Jordan, the ancient town of Hamat Gader and its ancient synagogue, al Quneitra (today in the demilitarized zone between Israel and Syria but under Syrian Arab control), and the ancient synagogues of En Nashut, Dabura, Dabiyye, Assaliyye, Zumeimira, Dikkeh, Kanaf, and Qanatir.