The streets of Beer Sheva

The Streets of Beer ShevaOrhan Pamuk writes in his memoirs about Istanbul, "Only one of the city's idiosyncracies has refused to melt away under the western gaze: the packs of dogs that still roam the streets. After he abolished the Janissaries for not complying with western military discipline, Mahmut II turned his attention to the city's dogs. In this ambition, he, however, failed. After the constitutional Monarchs, there was another "reform" drive. This time aided by the Gipsies, but the dogs they removed one by one to Sivriada managed to find their way truiamphantly back home. The French, who thought that dog packs were exotic, found the cramming of all the dogs into Siriada even more so; Sartre would joke aboutt this years later in his novel The Age Of Reason.."

Since I arrived to Beer Sheva three years ago, I have in vain searched for its past. Being a Palestinian from Jerusalem, I have come to breathe the same air filled history of my own city, an air that maintains my airways constantly open, and my mind alive, oxygenated. A dry air, void of the tracks of its past, hurts my lungs.

As a medical student in Beer Sheva, my way of meeting the past happens pervasively when interviewing my patients in geriatrics. In doing so, instead of meeting a city whose ruins and heritage I have been in seach of, I met Eastern European, North African and Asian history; some survived the holocaust, others had to leave Tunisia and further than both were those who escaped Moldova, and Tajakistan. On the other hand, I found few Bedouin patients in the geriatric ward, whether it be because they dont live long enough to be admited, or whether it be that they insist on getting discharged, the reason, epidimiologically speaking, remains unknown.

"The city is growing and in ten years, there will be a lot of history," a young student told me. Perhaps, I thought, keeping in my mind my beloved rich stories of Jerusalem of thousands of year. And yet, after having gone in search for a heritage whose existence I am not sure about, I come to appreciate Orhan Pamuk's words: anywhere that you go in Beer Sheva, dogs are ever present. Though I dont speak the language of dogs, a part of me wonders, where they have come from, if they always had been in Beer Sheva, and whether they can tell me the story of the ruins of the Turkish mosque and the Bristish cemetary in the Old City.

I have heard other new western comers identify Beer Sheva as the city of lights, the city where new restaurants are open and where new buildings in Ramot and in Vave are being built. As a traveller through this city, I call it the city whose story and heritage is entrusted to its stray dogs.