18 Month CD

Between A Rose
And A Hard Place

Ibrahim El-Atika has found prosperity raising
flowers, but his Bedouin soul longs for the desert.

JENNIFER FRIEDLIN SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH NEWS

Annual
Percentage
Yield

W

hen Ibrahim El-Atika
was a small boy, he
would wander the
Negev, accompanying
his father as he herded the fam-
ily's flock of sheep. He would
spend hours at his father's heel,
walking through the rocky hills
and dreaming of the day when
he would be in charge of the
herd.
Today, Mr. El-Atika is in
charge. However, he doesn't
own any sheep. Instead, he
abandoned the traditional
Bedouin way of life and became
a textbook case of the success-
ful entrepreneur. At just 28, Mr.
El-Atika, a resident of the
Bedouin city of Rahat, has built
his family-run rose-growing
business, which, after two years
of operation, currently exports
hundreds of thousands of dol-
lars worth of flowers a year.
While Mr. El-Atika's transi-
tion from prodigal son to inde-
pendent businessman is still not
the norm among the 150,000
Bedouins living in the Negev,
30,000 of whom live in Rahat,
his story is becoming increas-
ingly common as various people,
from government officials to eco-

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nomic-development groups, re-
alize the social
and economic
dangers of try-
ing to settle a
people with-
out supplying
the means to

make the
transition suc-
cessful.
In the early
1970s, when —
Israel decided
to try and
tame the Bedouin's nomadic
spirit, the government began
building townships such as Ra-
hat in the hopes that this wan-
dering people would plant roots
and develop stable communities.
During the first 20 years of the
township's existence, however,
the government did little to help
residents incorporate societal
norms into their new way of life,
causing high unemployment
among a group of increasingly
disgruntled people.
While Rahat's main thor-
oughfare housed small eateries
and shops, a bank and a gas sta-
tion, the lack of economic infra-
structure forced residents to
leave Rahat in search of work.
But once outside of Rahat, the

Bedouins, who were undered-
ucated in comparison to their
Jewish counterparts, were often
discriminated against by po-
tential employers.
In 1992, then-Interior Minis-
ter Arye Deri announced the in-
corporated city status of Rahat
and promised to help strength-
en the city's infrastructure.
While Mr. Deri's support of Ra-
hat's Bedouins, who tradition-
ally supported the Islamist
party, was considered contro-
versial, his announcement pro-
vided the jump-start for a host
of local initiatives.
After exploring a variety of
ways the Bedouins' skills could
be mainstreamed into money-
producing businesses, the Min-
istry of Agriculture developed a
program in 1994 that would as-
sist local entrepreneurs in es-
tablishing rose-growing
businesses which would, in ad-
dition to helping the Bedouins,
boost Israeli exports.
While the Ministry of Agri-
culture offered technical assis-
tance and provided the means
to develop the hothouses, and
the government offered about
50 percent of the initial capital
needed for the project, the mu-
nicipality and
the local Busi-
ness Develop-
ment Center
(BDC) helped
guide the 15
Bedouins origi-
nally selected
for the project
through the un-
familiar bureau-
cratic jungle.
Despite initial
hardships, the
BDC, along with other organi-
zations such as the Center for
Jewish-Arab Economic Devel-
opment, the Abraham Fund and
the Mercantile Discount Bank,
began to offer their support for
the initiative and provided the
means to help the first-time en-
trepreneurs get their business
started.
Today, 14 of the original 15
rose growers are still in busi-
ness, each one owning three-
quarters of an acre of land and
the computerized technology to
make raising the flowers a prof-
itable proposition. Last year,
rose exports from Rahat totaled
more than $8 million.

ROSE page 74

