On the fast track?

The opening of the railway to Netivot will bring the sleepy southern town closer to the Center.

By EYAL LEVY
The new railway line in Netivot (photo credit: ARIEL BESOR)
The new railway line in Netivot
(photo credit: ARIEL BESOR)
Shimon Amar stood outside the new railway station in Netivot and looked up at the oversized clock hanging on the wall. At exactly 11:12 a.m., the train will leave the station and pass through Tel Aviv on its journey to Hod Hasharon.
“Why does everyone want to live in the congested center of the country?” Amar asks and then sighs slowly.
“People should live and work in the Negev. But everyone wants to live in greater Tel Aviv, and as a result we’ve ended up abandoning the south to the Beduin and the Galilee to the Arabs. There’s nothing we can do now. A city is like a person – it needs to continue growing and developing.”
The railway station that was inaugurated last month in Netivot looks like a picture in a magazine. Everything has been built according to the architectural plans and looks just like the computer simulation; the plastic sheeting is still covering the brand-new plastic panels.
There is even a bike path from the town that leads right up into the station.
Amar is a retired Netivot municipality employee who made aliya from Morocco when he was 10. His family was one of the first to arrive here in 1956, when Netivot was still known as Azata.
“There were maybe eight tin sheds here,” Amar recalls with a faraway look in his eyes. “Here, where the railway station now sits, there were abandoned Arab villages. We used to play in the empty houses. The state never gave us anything - we were treated like third-rate citizens. They dumped us here and told us, ‘Go learn a profession.’ That’s how I came to study metal working and so did my son. We’re Sephardi and so we make less money. If you live in Netivot, you have no chance of ever making money. So why should I be interested in what’s going on in Tel Aviv?” But it’s so much easier to reach the center of the country now, with hourly trains, I point out.
“Yeah, they built a railway that reaches all the way to Tel Aviv just like in the American Wild West, where they built tracks to cross the entire state of Texas. And I must say – it is a mighty fine-looking station.”
Did he ever dream that one day there’d be a railway station like this here in Netivot? “Did people ever dream that one day there’d be a State of Israel?” Not far from where Amar and I are standing, a line of taxis waiting for customers has formed. Apparently, people are still hesitant to take advantage of the railway; not many passengers disembark. Some of the local residents insist that we give people time to get used to the idea of taking the train to Tel Aviv.
One young woman who has just arrived in Netivot approaches Prosper Balmas, the first taxi driver on line, and asks him how much it would cost her to get to the center city. “Twenty shekels,” he replies. The woman raises her eyebrows and says, “What? Has the price gone up?” So Balmas explains to her that now that there’s a railway station, Netivot is not so small anymore. Itzik Biton, a veteran Netivot resident, offers the young woman his own advice: “Save your money and just walk.”
Netivot has developed nicely over the years. The tin sheds from Amar’s childhood memories are long gone.
In their place now stand thousands of apartments and fancy shopping centers full of brand names just like you’ll find in Herzliya. The cafés are bursting with clientele.
Some nights they’re so full it’s hard to find an available table.
“You can’t compare the Netivot of today with the Netivot of 15 years ago,” says Yigal Sarser, one of the taxi drivers waiting for a fare. “Nowadays, there are highclass restaurants where there used to be only falafel stands. People from all the moshavim and kibbutzim in the area stream into Netivot to go shopping. And there is lots of new building construction going on, too. Do you know why things are going so well in Netivot, whereas our neighbor Sderot is having such a hard time? All the tzadikim – righteous people – live here and this has brought us good luck,” he says with a big smile.
But if you look underneath the layer of fresh paint on the shopping centers and the new station, you can still catch a glimpse of the difficult lives most Netivot residents experience day after day living out here in the periphery.
Shimon Alkovi, who prides himself as being the very first taxi driver in Netivot, says, “Take a deep breath – where else can you find such crisp, clean air? What did Mayor Yehiel Zohar’s bumper sticker say: ‘The city speaks for itself.’ So we live well and eat well, which you can clearly see I do. But we don’t have much money.”
My new taxi driver friends explain to me that, unfortunately, there aren’t many factories in the area. And although Tara opened up a new plant two years ago, one factory just isn’t enough to provide jobs for everyone. They insist that the government must launch substantial industrial ventures, not just small businesses from which one person can just scrape by.
“A bunch of the high-end clothing chains have opened up stores in Netivot, but they take advantage of the high unemployment rate and pay extremely low wages,” Balmas complains. “There’s not much competition – that’s just how it is in a small city.”
But then Amar adds his two cents, saying, “If I could, I’d find the person who came up with that cockamamie minimum wage idea and make him try to live off such a low salary. Maybe then things would be different.”
As usual, the discussion quickly turns to politics. In the previous elections, an overwhelming 44%, or 5,809 Netivot residents, voted for Shas. Likud-Beytenu came in second place with 27% and Labor garnered only a meager 1 percent of the vote – 187 people – fewer than the number of votes Michael Ben-Ari of the Otzma Leyisrael party received.
Since this discussion took place a few weeks before the most recent elections, when the outcome was still far from certain, the heated discussion at the train station takes on a surprising turn that hints at the possibility for change. “All of us here are Likud supporters at heart, but I want to vote for politicians who are willing to pass legislation that’s good for everyone, such as Shelly Yacimovich and Buji [Isaac] Herzog,” Alkovi says with vigor. “They actually care about us. Benjamin Netanyahu might be tough on security, but if we don’t have a strong economy, then what good is security going to do us?” Balmas tells me that he still hasn’t decided who he would vote for. “I’m having quite a hard time making up my mind,” he admits. “The Left is great with respect to the economy, and so I’m leaning that way. But I think I’ll probably make up my mind only on the actual election day.” Biton, a sworn Likudnik, who could never imagine voting any other way, sighs and says resignedly, “He’s going to end up voting for Meretz.”
But Balmas is not about to apologize. Instead, he counters, saying “Do you know what your problem is? You’re all so stuck in your long-time support of Likud – you’d keep voting for them even if they trampled all over you.” And then Biton replies, his voice all choked up with emotion, saying, “So you want that man and woman to be prime minister – that’s your Left? My entire life I’ve voted Likud and for me there’s nothing else. There’s no alternative.”
It’ll be interesting to see how Netivot residents vote this time around, especially since one of the city’s most prominent rabbis, Rabbi Yoram Abergel, publicly announced that he was supporting Eli Yishai’s new Yahad party. Sarser said that he respects the rabbi, but that wouldn’t influence him to stop voting for Bibi. “What is all this talk about the Left being good for the economy?” he asks his friends heatedly. “The Left is not going to hand us a big wad of money. The security situation is the most dire situation we need to deal with. Only after that can we let ourselves think about money. Do you really think that if the left comes to power that they’ll stop the Kassam rockets from falling down on our heads? Who knows – maybe we’ll even be bombed with an atomic bomb. Well, I for one don’t want to take the chance. My children’s lives are too important to me.”
Alkovi looks up again at the clock on the wall and sees that it’s only 10:45. Time just drags on when you don’t have any work to do. Manny Biton, the station manager, pipes in that as soon as people get used to the new form of transportation, the station will become a great source of income for a variety of businesses – including taxis.
Biton has been working for Israel Railways for 10 years. Before being sent to Netivot, he managed the Sderot station, which opened in 2013 to great fanfare and people came from near and far to view the wonderful new station with their own eyes. The opening of the Netivot station, in contrast, has been accompanied by little excitement, Biton comments.
“Not only does this new railway line make traveling to central Israel quicker and easier, it also sets ways of thinking in motion,” Biton says passionately. “Everyone’s always saying that the train will bring the periphery closer to central Israel. But I say that it will bring the people of Israel closer to the periphery. New factories will be built, entrepreneurs will invest in businesses and then hopefully Israelis will move here to Netivot for job opportunities. I believe that the railway will change the cultural life of Netivot residents, too. Now people will be able to go see soccer games in Haifa or shopping in the Azrieli mall in Tel Aviv. People will start changing their daily patterns – it’ll just take a little time, that’s all.”
The first train in the morning leaves Netivot at 5:12 a.m. On its way to Tel Aviv, it passes through Sderot and Ashkelon and will drop off and pick up passengers in Bat Yam before it reaches the big city. If you wanted to, you could work in a business area in central Israel, and then after work go out for dinner and a movie and still be able to catch a train back to Netivot, getting home at 1:16 a.m. Who would ever have thought that the sleepy little southern town of Netivot could be transformed into a “city that doesn’t sleep”? Now the time is 11:12 a.m. and the train to Tel Aviv is revving its engine, getting ready to leave the station. The ticket costs NIS 27, but Israel Railways decided to make the trip free for Netivot residents for the first three months so people can get used to the train’s amazing benefits.
As Amar stepped into the train car, he was followed by a young woman kibbutz member, a few soldiers and a couple who had come to check out the new station and then spontaneously bought tickets to nearby Ashkelon. And there was a religious teenager named Avi who was busy checking the timetable for return trains to Netivot. “Everyone’s talking about how convenient traveling on the train is,” Avi says. “But many people here have large families, and very low income, so the distance from Netivot to Tel Aviv isn’t really as close as you might think.”
Translated by Hannah Hochner.