The South is on red alert again — in a good way

On August 6, in the middle of one of the ceasefires towards the end of Operation Protective Edge, former IDF Chief of Staff Benny Gantz stood on the border with Gaza and urged the residents of southern Israel to return to their homes. “Indeed, there was a hot summer here,” Gantz told a knot of reporters at a press briefing. “[But] autumn will come after. Rain will wash away the dust upon the tanks. The fields will turn green, and the south will redden. Red in the positive sense of the word — anemones, flowers and stability will be here, and they will be here for very many years to come.”

Six months after the fighting ended, the south is indeed red again. The tanks are gone, as is the “pudra” or dust that covered every surface in the Gaza periphery. The explosions stopped and the quiet returned. The rain, a pounding rain, came early this year. In November, parts of the northern Negev received 150 ml, half of their yearly rainfall, in a 48-hour period.

And the red anemones, or kalaniyot in Hebrew, bloomed with almost violent force, thanks to these early rains, transforming the fields filled with tanks into fields covered with a carpet of red flowers.

The Darom Adom (Scarlet South) Festival, which this year started January 30, is the biggest tourism event for the northern Negev. The hikes, bike rides, picnics, music, and activities at local farms attract 200,000-300,000 people each year. This year marks the 10th anniversary of the festival, and it has taken on renewed importance following the difficult events of the summer. Usually running for three weeks, this year’s festival has been extended to include the February 27-28 weekend.

“We are recovering slowly,” said Yair Farjun, the mayor of the Hof Ashkelon Regional Council, as he visited the kalaniyot with his family on Tuesday afternoon. “The government has promised money but we haven’t gotten it yet. We’re already six months afterwards, and for the businesses we need it to keep working.”

“But there is no doubt that the tens of thousands of people who come from the center of the country to this area, after so many businesses are failing, there is no doubt they really help the small businesses during these three weeks [of Darom Adom],” he added.

Darom Adom is an important economic engine, because it is the event that draws the most people to the northern Negev. The hope is that the kalaniyot visit inspires visitors to return on days when flower-hungry hoards are not snarling traffic on the small rural roads.

“The summer really hurt this area, but now both the businesses and the flowers are blossoming,” said Livnat Ginzbourg, the tourism coordinator for the Northern Negev Regional Councils, who was one of the founders of Darom Adom 10 years ago.

“People are discovering the area, and you can see the impact of Darom Adom also comes afterwards, during March, and the Passover and Shavuot holidays. People come and discover how much there is to do here, and then they come back. After such a difficult summer, they are like an oxygen tube that helps the area. You feel their solidarity, like you’re getting a hug from residents across the country,” she said.

Ginzbourg estimates that the Northern Negev area lost at least NIS 5 million ($1.3 million) in direct cancellations over the summer, as tourists obviously did not come to the area during the war. However, summer is not the high season for tourism businesses in this area because it is simply too hot. Most Israelis flee to the North’s green hills rather than the hot desert sun.

NIS 5 million for the tourism sector is a significant amount, but it was much worse among non-tourism small businesses in the area, like restaurants and stores, which struggled even more.

The vigorous kalaniyot

Kalaniyot are a naturally growing wildflower in the Negev. In the northern part of Israel, kalaniyot come in white and yellow varieties, but the desert kind is only red.

More than 15 years ago, the Jewish National Fund began looking for an environmentally friendly way to reduce the amount of underbrush in the area, which dries out in the summer and increases the risk of brush fires, especially due to the mortar threat from Gaza. The JNF decided to give permits to shepherds to allow sheep to graze in the parks, which was a positive development for the local Bedouin shepherds as well as the fire safety of the area. But kalaniyot are poisonous if eaten, so the sheep leave them alone. And since the 20,000 sheep who graze in the area remove all of the competing plants, the kalaniyot explode each spring with renewed vigor.

Ginzbourg, along with a number of local volunteers, realized they could convert this semi-natural phenomenon into a tourist event. The festival, which usually runs from the end of January, grows every year. This year, there are nature workshops in cooperation with Sapir College of Sderot, and big-name music acts like Idan Raichel and Red Band with evening concerts to encourage visitors to stay overnight in the area. There’s also a bike race, a running race, and activities organized for children.

“But there’s a lot of things with this festival which are very important where we have no control,” Ginzbourg said. “The weather, the peak blossom time, and security situation are all things that we have absolutely no control over.” And unfortunately, with Darom Adom, the weather, the peak blossom time, and the security situation are the three most important things.

This year, due to heavy November rains, the kalaniyot bloomed in the beginning of January, earlier than usual. The peak blossoming was in the end of January and early February, though the slightly wilting kalaniyot that are currently visible are still impressive.

What Americans think about when they think about Israel

Darom Adom concentrates on internal tourism: encouraging Israelis to visit lesser-known parts of the country. The vast majority of the 300,000 visitors come from the center of the country, since the kalaniyot are only an hour’s drive south of Tel Aviv.

The Salad Trail, a pick-your-own vegetable experience located at Telmei Yosef moshav near the Rafiah Crossing, is one of the popular recommendations for big groups touring Darom Adom. But Uri Alon, the agronomist and tour guide who runs the business with his wife Shuli, is also heavily dependent on international tourists.

“This is what Americans think about when they think about Israel – strawberries growing in the air and making the desert bloom,” explained Alon, who grows strawberries in raised beds hanging from the ceiling of one of his greenhouses. “When I came here this was all sand, and now it’s a blooming garden.”

In the pick-your-own section, he grows 15 types of cherry tomatoes in all different colors, and two rows of habanero peppers that are brightly labeled: “Eating these peppers is the sole responsibility of the visitor.”

The Salad Trail hosts about 45,000 visitors per year, and 30,000 come from abroad, including 60% of all Birthright busses, said Alon. “Regular [internal] tourism in the region was not hurt by Operation Protective Edge because that’s not our season,” he said. “But for us, the climax of our season is in July and August. We had 160 buses booked and every single one canceled.”

However, he noted that many Israeli tourists, including businesses sending their employees on a yearly trip, have purposefully altered their plans to visit the southern part of the country in order to strengthen the Negev following Operation Protective Edge. On Tuesday afternoon he flitted between a group of retired Bank Discount workers and Egged drivers from Hadera, as both companies decided to bring their annual trip to the south for this reason.

El HaYaen Ostrich Farm, located next to Eshkol Park, is another popular recommendation for Israeli Darom Adom visitors. Tsophia Van Grevenbroek, and her husband, Mike, from Holland, converted their ostrich farm into a tourism attraction after a 2012 law made it illegal to raise ostriches for slaughter. They are open on the weekends from Rosh Hashanah (in the fall) to Shavuot (in the early summer). The Van Grevenbroeks have a restaurant and run activities for families, including decorating an ostrich egg and feeding the ostriches.

They are closed in the summer except for private events, so did not experience large financial loss during the war, though the ostriches stopped laying eggs due to the stress from the explosions.

“Our issue in the Negev is that people only come for Darom Adom,” said Tsophia Van Grevenbroek. “But now, people tell us that they came here after Operation Protective Edge, and people really came out in force, they said we want to buy products and support the South,” she said. “People come here, and they discover the quiet. They say, ‘Hey, this is amazing!’ You feel like you’re the king of the world. We just need to get people down here so they see for themselves.”

Gidi Vidal, a farmer from nearby Sde Avraham, approached the Van Grevenbroeks this year with a new proposal: to host a farmer’s market on their property. The idea was twofold: provide additional support for local farmers, and harness the desire of Israelis who want to buy products from the South to support these farmers. Vidal buys products from 30 local farmers, including varieties of cherry tomatoes, pumpkins, potatoes, and seedless sweet peppers that are only grown locally. He also sells cookies, honey, olive oil, fresh juices, and a local beer from ISIS brewery (whose owners, he joked, plan to sue ISIS rebels for copyright infringement).

Vidal said he’s always dreamed of starting a farmer’s market, and this year was even more important to do so. He hopes the “Pashuk” market (which stands for ‘pashut shuk’ or ‘simply market’) will continue in future years, not just after wartime.

Echoes of the summer

The weather, however, has put a damper on visitors to Darom Adom, imperiling the plan to get as many people down south so they will continue visiting during the rest of the year.

“We’re farmers, so this is the first time we’re asking for the rains to stop, at least on Friday and Saturday,” Vidal laughed. Vidal has cancelled the market for Friday, February 20 due to expected inclement weather.

Rafi Babayan is one of the local volunteers who makes Darom Adom possible. In between his patrols as the security coordinator for Kibbutz Alumim, one of his volunteer duties is to take internationally renowned photographers off of the beaten path, to places where the kalaniyot grow so thickly and the red is so bright that it hurts to look directly at them. He loves this part of the country, where he’s lived for 30 years, and during the springtime the flowers and the dances of the migrating starlings make his eyes light up.

This year, the kalaniyot are blooming in fields next to an ancient Byzantine stone well that the Jewish National Fund recently named after Babayan’s 17-year-old daughter Marva, who lost a battle with cancer three months ago. “She loved nature, and she loved this area so much,” said Babayan. He knows she would have loved to see the kalaniyot this year, bringing so much color to the area.

This past year, the northern Negev was full of heartbreak. It was this reporter’s first trip back to the area since reporting on the Gaza periphery communities during the war. Driving past road signs, the name of each town immediately stirred memories of news events: fatal mortar attacks, tunnel infiltrations, the death of a four-year-old boy in his living room from a rocket. The anxiety of the whole country, a summer full of sirens and explosions and funerals, and for Babayan, a winter that brought a fresh loss of a daughter.

As Babayan drove away from the fields of red, we passed by a Bedouin shepherd and his wife. Just moments earlier, one of their ewes had given birth. The two baby lambs were so young they couldn’t even stand yet, and still lay on the ground, trembling and wet.

Unlike this summer, the golden afternoon light filtered through the trees as the peaceful quiet stretched across the land. And two new lives began, nestled among the red flowers.