As the third anniversary of the devastating Oct. 7 terror attack approaches, it is a moment to remember the terrible human cost of that day – and to consider what we are building in its aftermath.

Sapir College sits less than two miles from the Gaza border. On Oct. 7, 2023, the reality we had known was shattered. Fifty members of the Sapir community – students, alumni, faculty, and staff – were killed. More than 1,000 students and hundreds of employees were evacuated. Around 1,000 of our students were called up for reserve duty. Our campus became a closed military zone, with armored vehicles stationed on the grounds and soldiers occupying classrooms. For a time, even something as basic as electricity was uncertain.

When the attack began, I was hiking with my family in Canada. For three days, I tried to manage the crisis from Montreal while I sought a means to return to Israel. The college was closed for the Simchat Torah holiday that morning, but terrorists drove past the campus on their way into nearby Sderot. As communities across the region were evacuated, our immediate task was to find our students and employees, many of whom had been displaced across the country, and make sure they had the basic support they needed. 

At the same time, there were some who doubted whether Sapir would recover at all. I told those who expressed concern that Sapir would reopen and become a central engine of the region’s recovery and growth. We decided to do everything we could to open the academic year alongside Israel’s other higher-education institutions. With the region still evacuated and the campus inaccessible, we began online, supporting faculty, staff, and students scattered across the country and providing additional assistance to more than 1,000 students serving in the reserves. Despite the logistical challenges, we opened remotely, brought small groups back for in-person practical coursework in the second semester, and returned to regular campus life the following academic year.

Three years later, we have learned an important lesson: resilience cannot mean simply returning to where we were before the disaster. We are not trying to return to Oct. 6. We are trying to build something better – and that has shaped everything we have done since. Sapir cannot simply wait for the western Negev to recover; it must help create the region’s future. Higher education must be part of that reconstruction, of the region’s infrastructure, economy and social life.

Today, Sapir is the largest employer in the area surrounding Gaza and a growing force in the western Negev’s emerging technology ecosystem. That role matters because the region’s challenges did not begin on Oct. 7.

For decades, southern Israel has lagged the country’s center economically and educationally. According to Israel’s National Insurance Institute, about 41% percent of employees in the south earn the minimum wage, compared with about 34% percent in the Tel Aviv metropolitan area. The Taub Center for Social Policy Studies found that adults aged 30 to 44 in the Southern District have the country’s lowest rate of university degrees. In 2019, according to the Central Bureau of Statistics, southern Israel had just 124 active startups, compared with about 2,000 in the Tel Aviv district, and employees at southern startups earned about 26 percent less on average. That is the gap we are working to close.

Technology is central to that effort. Together with the Sha’ar HaNegev Regional Council, the Sderot municipality and the Tkuma Directorate – the government body established on Oct. 19, 2023, to lead the revival of communities in southern Israel affected by the Oct. 7 attack – we are establishing a new technology campus in Sderot. Over the next five years, we plan to increase enrollment and expand our academic offerings, creating the human capital the western Negev needs to support new businesses, strengthen existing industries and give young people more reasons to build their futures here.

Our goal is not to build another version of Tel Aviv in the Negev. The region has its own strengths – agriculture, manufacturing, rural communities and entrepreneurs – and technology should grow from them. Data science can address agricultural challenges, artificial intelligence can strengthen local industries, and the desert itself offers opportunities in water technology and clean energy. Our innovation labs and partnerships connect students and faculty with businesses so that research, talent and new ideas can become part of the regional economy.

David Ben-Gurion understood the Negev’s potential long ago. Israel’s first prime minister wrote that “it is in the Negev where the creativity and pioneering vigor of Israel shall be tested.” Decades later, the test remains: whether this region can become a place where young people find opportunity rather than somewhere they must leave to seek it.

That challenge is economic, but it is also social.

Sapir brings together students from Sderot and surrounding rural communities, immigrant families and Israel’s major cities. Roughly 65% of our students come from southern Israel, many of them the first in their families to pursue higher education. Approximately 15% of our students are Israeli Arabs, many of them Bedouins from nearby Negev communities.

After Oct. 7, we made a conscious decision not to retreat from that diversity. Jewish and Bedouin students continue to study together, including students serving in the reserves and classmates whose experiences of the war have been very different. A college cannot solve Israel’s divisions, but it can create sustained, ordinary contact among people whose lives might otherwise never intersect. They learn together, solve problems together, and prepare to build their futures in the same region.

That matters for the western Negev we are trying to build. A region that creates jobs but leaves parts of its population behind will remain fragile. A stronger future depends on giving people from different communities a stake in the same place.

Today, our campus is full again, and the new technology campus is moving forward. The trauma of Oct. 7 will always be part of Sapir’s story. The loss of 50 members of our community can never be erased. But it cannot be the final chapter.

Survival was the first task. It cannot be the ambition.

Our ambition is a western Negev where education opens doors, technology creates good jobs, young people can build their futures close to home, and people from very different backgrounds have a stake in the same region.

That is how we honor what was lost. And that is how we build what comes next.

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