Envisioning The Negev Anew Through Equality and Partnership

“October 7 physically and metaphorically shattered our homes into pieces that cannot be reassembled.”
—Noam Stahl, Kfar Aza resident

As NIF prepares to launch the new Equality and Partnership in the Negev project, staff members visited Kibbutz Kfar Aza, the site of one of the bloodiest massacres on October 7th. The visit gave them the opportunity to hear the perspectives of western Negev residents on the region’s rehabilitation as they build and implement the project.

One year after the October 7th massacre, with 101 hostages still in Gaza — five of whom are from Kfar Aza — and the war continuing at full force, the kibbutz remains a closed military zone with almost all residents evacuated for the foreseeable future. Many of the thousands of southern evacuees who could return to their war-torn communities are simply too afraid and traumatized to go back.

As the NIF group walked through Kfar Aza’s bullet-scarred, burnt-out buildings where signs calling for the immediate release of the hostages hung, Chen Kotler, one of the few Kfar Aza residents who has returned home, shared her thoughts about rehabilitation: “What’s really important here is that local residents be involved in the decision-making processes.”

Voices such as Kotler’s are being incorporated into Equality and Partnership in the Negev, a new strategic project aiming to build Jewish and Bedouin partnership. It seeks to do so by strengthening and cultivating local liberal forces which can develop, lead, and generate “inclusive rehabilitation” that benefits all Negev residents, including the weakest populations that often fall through the cracks.

This also requires addressing the Negev’s long history of inequalities. Even prior to October 7th, almost 30% of Negev residents fell below the poverty line, compared to a 10% poverty rate amongst residents of Israel’s centre region. What’s more, Bedouin citizens from unrecognized villages still live without connections to water, sanitation systems, and electricity and they lack safe rooms, warning sirens, and protection from the Iron Dome missile defense system.

Meanwhile, the government’s $400 million program to rehabilitate the Western Negev addresses communities up to seven kilometres from the Gaza border, meaning that Bedouin and Jewish communities further from the border (that were among the hardest hit) are excluded. Also, a growing right-wing presence in the Negev, along with the government’s interest in repopulating vacated communities with right-wing settlements, has made strengthening progressive voices there urgent. Finally, the absence of a concrete government plan for the “day after” the war has stunted the region’s recovery.

The New Israel Fund and Shatil aim to address these challenges by establishing an incubator to jump-start local initiatives with a combination of Shatil capacity-building and NIF grants. The work of NIFC’s long-time partner, Bimkom: Planners for Planning Rights, will be instrumental for mapping and proposing reconstruction that benefits all communities in the region. Shatil will facilitate an Arab-Jewish leadership course as well as seminars on promoting legislation and policies that will ensure regional peace and security building. On the emotional side, the goal is to also provide ways of commemorating what happened on October 7th that are inclusive, and that will honour the trauma, losses, and heroism of all Negev residents. The project will incorporate Shatil and NIF’s longstanding work of promoting recognition and providing basic services for unrecognized Bedouin communities. NIF will additionally support the Kibbutz Movement and HeChalutz in growing progressive-minded communities in the Negev and establishing educational frameworks for youth there.

Shatil project coordinator Galit Yahiya Tzfadia said: “For years, Negev policies have been made in Jerusalem government offices. One of Shatil’s main goals is to connect and mobilize Negev rural, urban, wealthy, poor, Jewish, and Bedouin communities, and a wide range of local initiatives and activists to promote the policies that will serve everyone in the Negev.” Galit sees this crisis as an opportunity for renewal, given that “there are so many people who have suffered so much destruction and are still willing to work toward a better future.”

Kfar Aza member Noam Stahl, whose wife was murdered on October 7th, is one of them. He acknowledges a “big fracture” in the lives of Negev residents; but he also looks toward a comprehensive rehabilitation: “We need to invest in public buildings, in rehabilitation for families and individuals, and in liberal value-based education for newcomers to the Negev.”