Last June, I set out to visit one of the settlements in the southern Arava region. At first, I thought I would drive, but then I found a cheap flight from Ben Gurion International Airport to the new Ilan and Asaf Ramon Airport, named after the Israeli astronaut and his pilot son, respectively. I had never been to Ramon, opened in January some 12 miles north of Eilat, and I could never have imagined what I found when I stepped off the plane there: a barren wilderness, screaming to the heavens, and vast aircraft stands devoid of planes. The desert silence only intensified the sense of strangeness.

When I got to the baggage carousel, the feeling that this was all a farce grew even stronger. The airport — built over five and a half years at a cost of 1.8 billion shekels (half a billion dollars) — was for all intents and purposes empty. A custodian wandering the halls with his cleaning equipment was the loudest thing there.

Ramon is Israel’s second international airport, but that is only its part-time job. International airlines only operate flights from Europe to Eilat in the winter, when Eilat’s weather and cheap prices are attractive to tourists. The airport is all but empty in the summer, when it mainly services domestic flights.

The stated purpose of the airport is to connect the center of the country to the distant south and serve the Zionist ethos of “making the desert bloom.” At the facility's festive inauguration on Jan. 21 in the presence of the Ramon family, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu proclaimed, “The Zionist vision is being realized.” He went on to promise that the new airport would bring “further momentum, enormous in scope, to the Negev, the Arava, and the city of Eilat, and that it would cause the Negev to blossom.” Seven months later, however, Netanyahu’s promise seems almost ridiculous.