“When I was a child in Beersheba, between Beersheba and Tel Aviv it was like light-years,” the mayor told The Jerusalem Post. “They called us the city of camels, the end of the world, a desert city.”
Danilovich, born in Beersheba in 1971 and mayor since 2008, has spent much of his political life trying to dismantle that image. Today, the city has around 223,600 residents and some 30,000 students studying at its higher-education institutions. Ben-Gurion University of the Negev alone has around 20,000 students and says roughly a third of Israel’s engineers graduate from BGU.
Those numbers help explain why Danilovich’s enthusiastic outlook on his hometown suggests a place seen less as Israel’s periphery and more as a place where several of the country’s largest national projects are now converging.
The IDF began moving units into its new technological campus in Beersheba in May, next to the Gav-Yam Negev high-tech park and close to BGU. Around 8,000 soldiers and career officers are ultimately expected to serve there. Northeast of the city, the Intelligence Campus near Shoket Junction is being built for well over 10,000 Intelligence Directorate personnel.
Across the road from the university, Gav-Yam says some 2,500 engineers already work for around 70 companies at its Beersheba technology park. Nvidia, meanwhile, has been expanding its presence in the city, tripling its office space and planning to recruit hundreds of employees.
Beersheba’s tech ecosystem draws global companies
“The companies come by themselves,” Danilovich said. “They are not philanthropic. They are business companies. They come where it is worthwhile for them.”
He reeled off Microsoft, Dell, Nvidia, IBM and Deutsche Telekom before turning to the geography itself: the university, Soroka University Medical Center, the National Cyber Directorate, military technology units and defense companies, all clustered within a relatively small area.
“Show me another city – not in Israel, in the world – where in such a small radius there is such a concentration of knowledge,” he said.
That concentration is at the heart of what Danilovich repeatedly calls the “new Israeli dream.” The Negev accounts for around 60% of Israel’s territory and is home to roughly 1.5 million people. He argues that successive governments have allowed too much of the country’s population and economic activity to remain concentrated in the center, while neglecting the South's sheer size and potential.
“The Negev is not the problem of the State of Israel,” he told the Post. “The Negev can be the solution.”
Beersheba mayor looks to aliyah to reshape Israel’s periphery
Aliyah is central to that proposal. Danilovich wants Israel to set a national target of one million new immigrants over five to seven years, paired with housing incentives, employment, and community infrastructure intended to encourage many to settle in the Negev and Galilee.
Beersheba has precedent for immigration changing the character of the city. More than 60,000 immigrants from the former Soviet Union arrived during the great aliyah wave of the 1990s, bringing doctors, engineers, academics, and a substantial new Russian-speaking community to Beersheba. Danilovich points particularly to Soroka, where some of the young immigrant physicians who arrived then would later rise to head hospital departments.
“When did we become the Start-Up Nation?” Danilovich asked. “When the gates of the former Soviet Union opened.”
Since October 7, he has also framed his aliyah drive around the rise in antisemitism abroad, particularly in countries such as Britain, France and Canada. His complaint is that while Israel has mechanisms for absorbing newcomers, it lacks the kind of large-scale national plan that could take advantage of a major new wave of immigration if one materialized.
“Come home,” he said. “We will receive you with open arms.”
Another part of that thinking is already taking shape in Beersheba. JNF-USA is developing a $350 million World Zionist Village in the city, whose master plan was approved in 2025. The organization now expects it to open in 2029, with plans for educational programs, accommodation and a center intended to bring young Jews and community leaders from around the world to spend meaningful periods of time in Israel.
Danilovich hopes some will stay. He is almost as interested, however, in those who eventually return to London, Toronto, Johannesburg, Melbourne or elsewhere after a year spent in Beersheba.
“Maybe you will want to make aliyah,” he said. “And even if you don’t, you will go back... but you will be a good ambassador for the State of Israel.”
War leaves its mark on Beersheba’s growth
Beersheba’s development has taken place alongside a less welcome constant: war. Soroka, the main hospital serving southern Israel, took a direct hit from an Iranian ballistic missile on June 19, 2025. The government subsequently approved NIS 360 million toward reconstruction, while philanthropist Sylvan Adams pledged another $100 million.
For Danilovich, the cranes that will rise at Soroka are something he has been through before. He was in his mid-30s when he defeated veteran mayor Yaakov Turner in the November 2008 election, after already serving a decade as deputy mayor. Within weeks, Beersheba was under rocket fire from Gaza during Operation Cast Lead.
Since then, he has led the city through repeated rounds of fighting, each followed, in his memory, by the return of construction.
“After every round ended, I would see the cranes in Beersheba,” he recalled. “Suddenly we are building another neighborhood, suddenly the lake, suddenly the amphitheater, suddenly the high-tech park, suddenly the stadium. We don’t stop for a moment.”
The physical change is obvious to anyone who remembers the older city. Beersheba River Park occupies land where sewage, rubbish and industrial waste once lined the banks of Nahal Beersheba; the rehabilitation project now stretches for kilometers through the city.
From football stadium to high tech, Danilovich eyes the next stage
Danilovich has his own, rather less grandiose benchmark. A former amateur football player, he remembers Beersheba’s old stadium as so uninviting that women and children rarely attended, and even decent toilets were a problem.
Today, he can list the stadium alongside the high-tech park, university, cultural institutions and national park River Park when describing how far his hometown has traveled. Yet after nearly 18 years as mayor, he is wary of sounding satisfied.
“A mayor who is satisfied is not a serious mayor,” Danilovich told the Post. “A mayor should never be satisfied, because he always has to aspire to the next thing.”
Danilovich has received many offers over the years to make the move into national politics, including approaches from prime ministers and other political leaders. He said he turned them down.
“My mission for the State of Israel, for my people and for my country is here,” he said. “It is in the Negev.
“If we do not make it flourish, if we do not strengthen it, if we do not build it and make it attractive, if it does not become the new Israeli dream, the State of Israel will be in danger.”