[News] Israel Prepares to Turn Bedouin Citizens into Refugees in Their Own Country

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/10/17/israel-prepares-to-turn-bedouin-citizens-into-refugees-in-their-own-country/ 



  Israel Prepares to Turn Bedouin Citizens into Refugees in Their Own
  Country

by Jonathan Cook <https://www.counterpunch.org/author/jonathan-cook/> - 
October 17, 2019
------------------------------------------------------------------------

/Nazareth./

The decades-long struggle by tens of thousands of Israelis against being 
uprooted from their homes – some for the second or third time – should 
be proof enough that Israel is not the western-style liberal democracy 
it claims to be.

Last week 36,000 Bedouin – all of them Israeli citizens – discovered 
that their state is about to make them refugees in their own country, 
driving them into holding camps. These Israelis, it seems, are the wrong 
kind.

Their treatment has painful echoes of the past. In 1948, 750,000 
Palestinians were expelled by the Israeli army outside the borders of 
the newly declared Jewish state established on their homeland – what the 
Palestinians call their Nakba, or catastrophe.

Israel is regularly criticised for its belligerent occupation, its 
relentless expansion of illegal settlements on Palestinian land and its 
repeated and savage military attacks, especially on Gaza.

On rare occasions, analysts also notice Israel’s systematic 
discrimination against the 1.8 million Palestinians whose ancestors 
survived the Nakba and live inside Israel, ostensibly as citizens.

But each of these abuses is dealt with in isolation, as though 
unrelated, rather than as different facets of an overarching project. A 
pattern is discernible, one driven by an ideology that dehumanises 
Palestinians everywhere Israel encounters them.

That ideology has a name. Zionism provides the thread that connects the 
past – the Nakba – with Israel’s current ethnic cleansing of 
Palestinians from their homes in the occupied West Bank and East 
Jerusalem, the destruction of Gaza, and the state’s concerted efforts to 
drive Palestinian citizens of Israel out of what is left of their 
historic lands and into ghettoes.

The logic of Zionism, even if its more naive supporters fail to grasp 
it, is to replace Palestinians with Jews – what Israel officially terms 
Judaisation.

The Palestinians’ suffering is not some unfortunate side effect of 
conflict. It is the very aim of Zionism: to incentivise Palestinians 
still in place to leave “voluntarily”, to escape further suffocation and 
misery.

The starkest example of this people replacement strategy is Israel’s 
long-standing treatment of 250,000 Bedouin who formally have citizenship.

The Bedouin are the poorest group in Israel, living in isolated 
communities mainly in the vast, semi-arid area of the Negev, the 
country’s south. Largely out of view, Israel has had a relatively free 
hand in its efforts to “replace” them.

That was why, for a decade after it had supposedly finished its 1948 
ethnic cleansing operations and won recognition in western capitals, 
Israel continued secretly expelling thousands of Bedouin outside its 
borders, despite their claim on citizenship.

Meanwhile, other Bedouin in Israel were forced off their ancestral lands 
to be driven either into confined holding areas or state-planned 
townships that became the most deprived communities in Israel.

It is hard to cast the Bedouin, simple farmers and pastoralists, as a 
security threat, as was done with the Palestinians under occupation.

But Israel has a much broader definition of security than simple 
physical safety. Its security is premised on the maintenance of an 
absolute demographic dominance by Jews.

The Bedouin may be peaceable but their numbers pose a major demographic 
threat and their pastoral way of life obstructs the fate intended for 
them – penning them up tightly inside ghettoes.

Most of the Bedouin have title deeds to their lands that long predate 
Israel’s creation. But Israel has refused to honour these claims and 
many tens of thousands have been criminalised by the state, their 
villages denied legal recognition.

For decades they have been forced to live in tin shacks or tents because 
the authorities refuse to approve proper homes and they are denied 
public services like schools, water and electricity.

The Bedouin have one option if they wish to live within the law: they 
must abandon their ancestral lands and their way of life to relocate to 
one of the poor townships.

Many of the Bedouin have resisted, clinging on to their historic lands 
despite the dire conditions imposed on them.

One such unrecognised village, Al Araqib, has been used to set an 
example. Israeli forces have demolished the makeshift homes there more 
than 160 times in less than a decade. In August, an Israeli court 
approved the state billing six of the villagers $370,000 (Dh1.6 million) 
for the repeated evictions.

Al Araqib’s 70-year-old leader, Sheikh Sayah Abu Madhim, recently spent 
months in jail after his conviction for trespassing, even though his 
tent is a stone’s throw from the cemetery where his ancestors are buried.

Now the Israel authorities are losing patience with the Bedouin.

Last January, plans were unveiled for the urgent and forcible eviction 
of nearly 40,000 Bedouin from their homes in unrecognised villages under 
the guise of “economic development” projects. It will be the largest 
expulsion in decades.

“Development”, like “security”, has a different connotation in Israel. 
It really means Jewish development, or Judaisation – not development for 
Palestinians.

The projects include a new highway, a high-voltage power line, a weapons 
testing facility, a military live-fire zone and a phosphate mine.

It was revealed last week that the families would be forced into 
displacement centres in the townships, living in temporary accommodation 
for years as their ultimate fate is decided. Already these sites are 
being compared to the refugee camps established for Palestinians in the 
wake of the Nakba.

The barely concealed aim is to impose on the Bedouin such awful 
conditions that they will eventually agree to be confined for good in 
the townships on Israel’s terms.

Six leading United Nations human rights experts sent a letter to Israel 
in the summer protesting the grave violations of the Bedouin families’ 
rights in international law and arguing that alternative approaches were 
possible.

Adalah, a legal group for Palestinians in Israel, notes that Israel has 
been forcibly evicting the Bedouin over seven decades, treating them not 
as human beings but as pawns in its never-ending battle to replace them 
with Jewish settlers.

The Bedouin’s living space has endlessly shrunk and their way of life 
has been crushed.

This contrasts starkly with the rapid expansion of Jewish towns and 
single-family farming ranches on the land from which the Bedouin are 
being evicted.

It is hard not to conclude that what is taking place is an 
administrative version of the ethnic cleansing Israeli officials conduct 
more flagrantly in the occupied territories on so-called security grounds.

These interminable expulsions look less like a necessary, considered 
policy and more like an ugly, ideological nervous tic.

/A version of this article first appeared in the National, Abu Dhabi./

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