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By Root 895 0

more people to the Negev necessitates the finding of new sources by any means creative intelligence can devise. Investigators are testing methods of inducing artificial rainfall; of using unpotable brackish water for irrigating salt-resistant crops; of enforcing water-saving by metering water; of reducing evaporation in reservoirs by coating the surface with a fatty substance. But the ultimate answer for populating the Negev must be desalinization of seawater. A joint Israeli-American study is now under way for a future plant which, one is confidently told, will be ready by 1971. Powered by a nuclear reactor, it is expected to produce more than thirty billion gallons a year at reasonable cost. On the other hand, a recent report of the Weizmann Institute states that while it is possible by desalinization to provide fresh water in limited amounts for users “not sensitive” to the cost, “it is still an open question whether methods suitable for large-scale and cheap production of fresh water will ever be found.”

Beersheba, once a dusty market town with an Arab population of 3,000 (who decamped in the war of 1948), began with a Jewish population of zero. Two hundred families came in 1949. As a result of the opening of the Negev by road and railroad, the development of chemical industries in the Dead Sea area, and a mass influx of immigrants, Beersheba has so exploded that a harried municipal councilor hastily scribbled new figures on a fact sheet before handing it to me. The population is, or was last spring, 72,000, of whom eighty-five percent are immigrants, half Orientals and half from Europe and South America. The city still serves as a center for some 16,000 Bedouin citizens of Israel who live in the desert in their long black goat-hair tents. Everyone rushes, everyone is harried (except the Bedouin and the inevitable “tourist” camel who waits inappropriately in front of a filling station). Trash flies about in the wind, streets are half paved, rubble and debris of building construction lie around, tattered posters advertise the city’s seven movie houses, and the shell of an empty, circular, concrete building with a crenelated top, looking something like a child’s cardboard crown, excites one’s curiosity. “It’s the synagogue,” I am told with an impatient shrug. “The funds ran out. There are other things more important.”

Schools, for instance. Beersheba has thirty-two elementary schools, each with a kindergarten, two high schools, and three trade schools, as well as a training school for teachers and one for nurses, an ulpan for immigrant adults, a yeshiva, and a music school. In order to keep students in the area, it has even last year started a university. Not degree-granting yet, it operates without a campus or faculty of its own but with visiting professors lent by other institutions. Courses in the humanities and social sciences, one in biology, and a postgraduate course in engineering are offered to 260 students—a figure which, according to the regular Israeli refrain, “will be doubled next year.” Nevertheless a problem remains: There are not enough high schools in the Negev to fill up a university.

Beersheba is a microcosm—or it might be called a hothouse—of the nation’s immigration problem, which cannot be envisaged without a few figures. In three and a half years from May 1948 to the end of 1951, while the new state was struggling to its feet under a new government, 685,000 persons entered Israel, or slightly more than the population existing at the time the state was proclaimed. In 1950 the Knesset (parliament) enacted the Law of Return, confirming the right of every Jew to enter the country unless he has been guilty of offenses against the Jewish people or is a danger to public health or security. (The law was soon to raise interesting questions of what is a Jew, as in the case of Brother Daniel, a monk who demanded the right of entry, claiming that though converted to Christianity he was a Jew under the rabbinical definition—that is, a person born of a Jewish mother. The court rejected his claim, a decision