Zionism on wheels: Meet Israel’s New Nomads

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They’ve been living in the same home for two years. But every ten days or so, the view changes, says Noa Bouzana. “When our water tank runs out it’s time to move on,” she says. Bouzana, 39, lives in a mobile home with her 8-year-old daughter Shai and her partner, Dotan Barzilai, 40.

Two years ago, the Barzilai-Bouzana family decided to ditch monthly rent for concrete walls, give up their car, abandon any possessions that wouldn’t fit into 12 square meters of space, dismiss fear and emotional baggage, and embark on a new, minimalist way.

Dotan, left, Shai and Noa Barzilai-Bouzana outside their mobile home.
Gil Eliahu

“The big thoughts that preoccupy us are where we’ll eat today, where we’ll go and how we’ll spend our time together as a family,” Bouzana continued. “Around once every two weeks, when we change location, that’s the time to shop, run errands, get more sawdust for the composting toilet and make repairs if needed. The day we feel that this no longer suits us, or that Shai wants to go to school with a teacher and after-school clubs and friends who aren’t only on Zoom or in the neighboring mobile homes, we’ll change,” she added.

They are part of a growing community of mobile home dwellers in Israel. Some are driven to this life by the mounting difficulty of finding affordable housing, or the cost of living; some simply want an alternative lifestyle.

Noa and Dotan belong to the second group. They bought a mobile home for 200,000 shekels ($62,000) and have been in constant motion ever since. Until 2014, they lived in Australia, having gone there after their army service. That is where Shai was born. They set up businesses there and lived in a spacious home. During weekend trips they met Australians who had sold their houses after retiring and moved into mobile homes. They began wondering whether that’s something they would like, too.

The Barzilai-Bouzanas inside their mobile home.
Gil Eliahu

In late 2013, the mobile home idea got a serious boost when Noa was diagnosed with intestinal cancer. The first operation to remove the growth was done in Australia, but it failed. They returned to Israel in 2014. After treatment with an experimental drug, she recovered. “I was on a high. My feeling was that I had received an enormous gift, after such a shakeup and such terrible abysses. And then I arrived at an insight: I have to live. Urgently. I felt that I had no time to plan for another 30 years, I had to fulfill myself, and now.”

It caught her partner unprepared. After two years of accompanying Noa through her illness, raising their young daughter and dealing with the life they had left behind and the move back to Israel, Dotan just wanted to put himself back together. It took them almost two years, several moves to different apartments and a book written by Barzilai to process the family trauma and decide they were ready to start a new chapter.

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“I’m not a handyman, and I was afraid that if we went on the road and there was a problem, I wouldn’t know what to do,” Dotan admitted. “I persuaded myself that I was buying a good trailer in which another family had already lived and that had a television, air conditioner and coffee machine, and in the worst case I’d lose a few tens of thousands of shekels on the investment, and at best, we’d succeed. This was an astonishing decision that launched a journey from which there is no ‘reverse,’ only drive,” he added.

The Barzilai-Bouzanas stand outside their mobile home. ‘The big thoughts that preoccupy us are where we’ll eat today, where we’ll go and how we’ll spend our time together.’
Gil Eliahu

The family is not amused

While the Barzilai-Bouzana family spoke to me en route from the Jerusalem Hills to Palmahim on the Mediterranean coast, Uki and Shlomo Shafran, both 68, spoke to me from their mobile home at a parking lot at Mount Meron in the north. “This is the place with the best air at this time of year,” Uki said.

The couple were first introduced to life on wheels in the early 1980s, when they set out on a trip after finishing their university studies. At the time, they had a 3-year-old son and two large backpacks. They began their trip in Greece, which ultimately became a three-year journey around Europe in a travel trailer. Upon return to Israel they bought a used post office truck and converted it into a home on wheels.

Uki Shafran and her mobile home. ‘The real community of trailer dwellers look to move around and don’t stay in one place.’
Rami Shllush

“Our parents thought we were crazy, treating us as if we were not fulfilling our potentials and that we were wasting our time, but we had caught the bug. There were friends who thought we were being irresponsible,” Uki recalled.

When their three children were young, the family stayed three months of the year on the shores of the Sea of Galilee in a converted truck and at times also took long trips around the world. During the rest of the time, their mobile home was parked in the yard of the regular house that they had purchased at Ein Iron in the north.

Since their children left home, the couple have been living in the truck most of the year (“about 250 days a year”), but despite their addiction to their nomadic lifestyle, they say that the view that others may have can be deceiving. “From the sidelines, it may look like a photogenic experience, but it’s complicated to pull off and you need to know how to deal with it when things go wrong. The fact that we are very familiar with the parking lots and the little places where we can stay helps,” Uki said. Her profession in recent years as an editor and author of children’s books helps make their lifestyle possible.

Over the past decade, quiet trailer campgrounds available for months at a time in nature, or in cities, have been proliferating in Israel. They attract people with a range of stories.

Uki Shafran inside her place.
rami shllush

“Some want to beat the system. They buy a trailer, put it on the seashore without paying municipal property tax and lower their cost of living. And there are certainly also those whose circumstances in life have led them there,” Shafran remarked. “But the real community of trailer dwellers, based on 300 to 400 trailer and truck owners, look to move around and don’t stay in one place. There’s also a Facebook page with thousands of interested people.”

There is also a less romantic side to this itinerant scene. “Over the years, we’ve parked in amazing areas where trailer owners have settled in, and they’ve turned wonderful places, beautiful beaches and groves into environmental and sanitary hazards. We jokingly call them ‘the settlers,’ but they have turned the trailers into the enemies of the inspectors and of those who manage the land in this country – the Jewish National Fund, the Israel Nature and Parks Authority and the Israel Land Authority,” she said. “If in the United States, there are impressive trailer neighborhoods in response to the housing issue, in addition to [that country’s] many well-funded and tended national parks for travelers on wheels, here there is neither. There’s a war over every scrap of ground.”

In the heart of Holon

The last remaining residents of the makeshift trailer neighborhood in a parking lot on Hamerkava Street in the Tel Aviv suburb of Holon are familiar with fights with the authorities. Their reality is a bit different from that of the itinerant families seeking adventure. In this forlorn parking lot, where the asphalt paving is burning hot during the summer, there is barely a person to be seen.

In contrast to the rich travel experiences of the Shafrans and the Barzilai-Bouzanas, here the people never had a dream of living in a trailer. Only the sound of a single generator makes it clear that there are people living here. The one resident peeking out at me doesn’t want to come out to talk and three men who are preparing to move a trailer look at me with suspicion.

“There’s really no longer a neighborhood here. It was crowded for a time, but the inspectors killed it,” one of the men, who asked not to be identified, said. “Now there are maybe ten trailers where people are really living. It’s mostly those who can’t move their trailer to a more pleasant spot in this heat and who have nowhere else to go,” he said.

“Most of those who are here don’t view a trailer as a first choice but rather something forced on them,” he added. “Life has brought them to a situation in which 12 square meters [130 square feet] in this parking lot is the best that they can do, and they hope it’s temporary. Most of them don’t have the money for gasoline or insurance and to move and live the dream that they talk about.”

Mobile homes parked in Haifa
Rami Shllush

A mobile home park in Holon, south of Tel Aviv.
Ofer Vaknin

I met 37-year-old Guy in 2017, when he built his truck home. He was cast about among friends, falling asleep at night in his van, parking near a group of trailers and trucks in the stretch between Bat Yam’s Tayo beach and a grove of trees in north Tel Aviv. He also spent time on Haifa’s southern beach and even in Eilat. He would do carpentry work and assemble gazebos, scraping a few shekels together to finish building his mobile home. He didn’t want to go back to living with his parents and was never enamored with a conventional home. He finished converting his truck in 2019 and in recent months, he has been parked on a patch of agricultural land on a moshav, a collective farm community, in the south. He has an unwritten arrangement in which he is considered to be there to look after the land and the moshav residents permit him to use their water to fill his water tank and let him hook up to their electricity.

“For long periods, I would move from place to place, but if you want to stay somewhere for more than a few weeks, the inspectors come,” Guy explained. “It’s hard without an arrangement and that you have to find another spot all the time. It’s especially a problem when I get work in the center of the country,” he noted. “During the coronavirus, it was good, but I still needed to pay to renew my license and for insurance and that costs a lot.”

‘Rent’ of 1,400 shekels a month

Yonatan Alon’s story has two aspects. He’s an architect who prefers to design temporary structures. He lives in a truck and wants to be connected to nature but for the past several months, he has been parked at a moshav in the center of the country. He is an advocate of the “tiny house” concept and views minimalism and a return to the earth as a way of life, but he also knows that for him, it’s also a necessary solution from an economic standpoint.

Trailers are not only for people having difficulty finding affordable housing, he said. “It’s mainly a story of people for whom being on the move is something that they need, from a gut feeling. Somehow it has also turned out that when I’ve already wanted to settle down – because my daughter, who by age two, had lived in eight houses – there were constraints and restraints and, so we listened to our gut and continued moving around.” Come the coronavirus, Alon spotted an opportunity to fulfill a dream. He bought a truck and with a little help from friends built himself a 16?square?meter home for his family of four at a cost of about 160,000 shekels ($50,000).

Yonatan Alon. ‘I based the design on research and with inspiration from modest home topology.’
Marcus Amgar

“I based the design on research and with inspiration from modest home topology,” he said, referring to the study of geometric properties and spatial relations, “homes that can move, be folded up, with an influence on modernism. In addition, I combined modern systems, including a copper bathroom with hot water, fans, a stove and a playroom for the children.”

His trailer, Alon said, freed him from chasing after money and gave him time to be creative and to develop. “Our entire family lived that way for a year until recently our relations as a couple fell apart. I’m living here today and for half of the week, my children are too,” he explained.

Living in a small space in a modest structure reflects a more sustainable approach than the most current concepts of urban density, Alon claims. “I find my living space more suited to the earth and less harmful than the industrialization and mechanization of construction and urban life, but I’m not preaching to anyone,” he said. “I am just seeking to offer housing solutions other than a four-room apartment in Hadera or Afula,” he added, referring to towns that are outside of the country’s major urban areas.

Yonatan Alon’s converted truck
Yonatan Alon

But these solutions also require access to land. Alon’s solution, which he prefers to leave under the radar, is temporary long-term parking for a fee at moshavim in the center of the country for a monthly fee of 1,400 shekels.

“Many people look at me and say, ‘You’ve cracked the system. You’ve found a way to get out of the rat race and moderate expenses, and that’s true. I breathe more easily from an economic standpoint, but on the other hand, the law in its current form is constructed in such a way as to present difficulties for me and the authorities also make it difficult,” Alon said.

Another arrangement recently been developed includes restrooms, water and electricity: it is the trailer parking lot at Beit Yanai, between Tel Aviv and Haifa. It is considered a glamorous camping site – or glamping as it is known, but it also offers a 1,400 shekel monthly parking rate for trailers. The site is described as “the only organized trailer complex in the center of the country,” and spares one the worry about water, electricity and municipal inspectors. The owner of the site, which is near the M Haderech shopping center, refused to be interviewed for this article.

‘Temporary’ solutions

Owners of smaller, more mobile trailers have the same parking problem as more permanent mobile homes, because of the way the Israel Land Authority and the national government think: they see no reason to allocate land for people only wanting parking for a time, not to settle down. Another reason is the lack of public pressure for such solutions as a remedy for the shortage of housing, or even a growth engine for tourism: in high season, a night at a hotel can run to thousands of shekels.

Ma’ayan Zimri, who lived on wheels for two years, said that in the current the housing market, moving into a trailer was an economic necessity for him. “While I lived in a trailer, I managed to put money aside and to begin saving for an apartment. There are trailer sites that give the others a bad name, but most of them maintain the area,” he said. “It was convenient when we were able to stay in one place for a considerable time. I would have expected that the government would find suitable infrastructure for this that wouldn’t turn the trailer owners into criminals. If the local authorities or the Israel Nature and Parks Authority were to designate organized sites at reasonable prices, with minimum services, they would have taken an active role in creating housing solutions for young people.”

Yossi Tayar, who has in the past tried to deal with the problem, was considered the father of the community of “villages on wheels.” At a lecture that he delivered in 2013, he explained, “Living in this truck is like living on a yacht. It also requires a home port. In Israel, the situation is not organized for this lifestyle and there aren’t enough places to put them safely.” Later that year, at the age of 52, Tayar died of a cardiac problem in the truck of his dreams, which he had designed and built for the considerable sum of about 800,000 shekels.

In the past, briefly, the Israeli government actually did give trailers a chance and even promoted mobile homes as a housing solution. In the 1990s, it established trailer parks at various locations as a temporary solution for the wave of immigration from the former Soviet Union and Ethiopia, and to help provide public housing. More than 25,000 trailers were placed around the country, including the Be’er Sheva area, Haifa and Acre.

Although it was supposed to be a temporary solution for emergency, some residents stayed there for years, mainly due to government incompetence.

At two kibbutzim in the north, Kfar Hanassi and Ayelet Hashahar, mobile home neighborhoods have existed for more than two decades. Neta, who is 40, came to trailer park at Kfar Hanassi about a decade ago, after looking for a house in the north. From there, she moved to the trailer park at Ayelet Hashahar.

“It was a conscious choice. It didn’t happen by accident and I didn’t just happen into it. There’s something in this airy material that provides a sense of being both inside and outside and it’s a sense that I connect with. I hope to be able to continue to live in a trailer my whole life. It’s not like living in a house made of solid concrete,” she said.