From ‘city of camels,’ Beersheba's reinvention under Mayor Danilovich

“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…