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<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://mondediplo.com/2012/08/06bedouin">http://mondediplo.com/2012/08/06bedouin</a><br>
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<div class="entry-date">August 02, 2012
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<div style="float: left;"><a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/08/02/the-end-of-the-bedouin/print"
target="one"><br>
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<div class="subheadlinestyle">Israel's Plan to Uproot the Bedouin of
the Negev</div>
<h1 class="article-title">The End of the Bedouin</h1>
<div class="mainauthorstyle">by JILLIAN KESTLER-D'AMOURS</div>
<div class="main-text">
<p>“I was born in Al-Sira,” said Khalil al-Amur, 46. “My parents were
born here, and we have been living for many, many generations in
Al-Sira. It’s my roots, my family, my tradition, my values, my
everything.” Al-Sira is “unrecognised” — one of many such Bedouin
village in Israel’s southern Negev desert — and according to the
Israeli authorities, has no right to exist. A few years ago, al-Amur, a
teacher, law student and father of seven, woke up to find demolition
orders posted on every door in the community.</p>
<p>A local court froze the orders late last year. Al-Amur said the
court ruled in favour of the villagers because it was clear the state
hadn’t worked out where the 500 residents would move once their homes
were destroyed. The Israeli government is currently appealing the
decision. “They don’t know where exactly they want to move the people,”
said al-Amur. “They don’t have a resettling plan, not just for Al-Sira
but for all the Bedouin.”</p>
<p>All the Negev Bedouin — 180,000-190,000 people — are Israeli
citizens. About half of them live in some 35 unrecognised villages like
Al-Sira. These communities, of a few hundred to several thousand people
each, are deemed illegal — even though many existed before Israel’s
foundation in 1948. They aren’t on any official maps, and they lack
electricity, water, schools, sewage systems and other state services.</p>
<p>Israel is now pushing a plan to uproot 40,000 Israeli Bedouins
living in unrecognised villages, and resettle them in seven existing,
government-planned Bedouin townships. The Prawer Plan has been widely
criticised as an attack on their basic rights. The Bedouins reject it
for ignoring their historic connection to the land and attempting to
ghettoise them in the poorest towns in Israel. “It is the worst option;
the towns have the highest rates of violence, the highest rates of
poverty, the highest rates of unemployment, and are marginalised by the
government,” said al-Amur. “What is attractive in these cities?
Nothing.”</p>
<p>Ismail Abu Saad, a Bedouin academic and professor at Ben-Gurion
University, who lives in the recognised town of Lakiya, says Israel’s
policy of Bedouin urbanisation has created “third-world enclaves in the
middle of an affluent society. The government planned this urbanisation
process to fail. It is interested in controlling the people and keeping
people poor, with a lot of social problems so that you’re busy all the
time for survival; you don’t have time to think about anything else.”</p>
<p>The Israeli government says urbanisation will provide services and
opportunities for the Bedouin of the unrecognised villages, but the
townships are crippled by lack of services and socio-economic problems.
“There are no incentives [to move],” said Abu Saad. “If the government
really meant to … build a better place for people to live, people would
come.”</p>
<p style="text-align: left;" align="center"><strong>Who are the Bedouin?</strong></p>
<p>Before 1948, 65,000-90,000 Bedouin lived in the Negev desert; nearly
90% of these semi-nomads subsisted on traditional agriculture; the
other 10% raised livestock. During the 1948-49 war, some 85% of the
Negev Bedouin were expelled from their lands and went to the West Bank,
Gaza, Jordan and Egypt. By the early 1950s, only 19 of the original 95
Bedouin tribes remained.</p>
<p>As the Palestinian population that remained within Israel’s Green
Line were subject to military rule, the Bedouin there could no longer
travel with their herds or cultivate their lands. Twelve of the 19
remaining tribes were forcibly displaced from their lands and confined
to a restricted area in the northeastern Negev, which they could only
leave with a special permit. This area, the Siyag, covered only 10% of
the land the Bedouins controlled before 1948, and was known for its low
fertility.</p>
<p>Israel also passed laws to facilitate taking control of the land,
including the Absentee Property Law (1950) and the Land Acquisition Law
(1953), which allowed the expropriation of 93% of land in the Negev.
According to legal researcher Tawfiq Rangwala, Israel has perpetuated a
myth of rootless nomads with no connection to the land to legitimise
this land grab and ensure no Bedouin land claims would later be
accepted.</p>
<p>“The Bedouin are viewed as an unsettled population, and their
settlements labelled as ‘spontaneous’ rather than ‘planned’. This
cultural dichotomy can be extended into the legal realm, where such
conceptualisations obscure Bedouin claims to historic land ownership
and only recognise formal land registrations, making the Bedouin
worldview appear incompatible with any modern conception of land
ownership. Such thinking has by extension fostered a view of Bedouin as
trespassers and intruders in their own homes” (<a
href="http://mondediplo.com/2012/08/06bedouin#nb1"
onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackEvent','outbound-article','http://mondediplo.com']);">1</a>).</p>
<p>Yet many Bedouin tribes hold deeds to their land dating back to
British and Ottoman rule, and families are now in Israeli courts
attempting to prove ownership of the land. Israel has not recognised a
single Bedouin land claim in the Negev. Although Israel’s Bedouin
citizens are 30% of the population in the Negev, they only occupy 2% of
its land. The entirety of their land claims amount to only 5% of the
land.</p>
<p style="text-align: left;" align="center"><strong>‘A permanent cheap
motel’</strong></p>
<p>In 1963 Moshe Dayan said: “We should transform the Bedouins into an
urban proletariat… Indeed, this will be a radical move which means that
the Bedouin would not live on his land with his herds, but would become
an urban person… His children would be accustomed to a father who wears
trousers, does not carry a <em>shabaria</em> [the traditional Bedouin
knife] and does not search for vermin in public. This would be a
revolution, but it may be fixed within two generations. Without
coercion but with governmental direction… this phenomenon of the
Bedouins will disappear” (<a
href="http://mondediplo.com/2012/08/06bedouin#nb2"
onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackEvent','outbound-article','http://mondediplo.com']);">2</a>).</p>
<p>From the late 1960s, the state promoted a clear policy of Bedouin
urbanisation. There are now seven recognised Bedouin towns: Rahat, the
largest, has a population of over 50,000. The towns lack basics like
sidewalks, fully paved roads, banks, libraries and job opportunities.
Seen largely as dormitory towns, they fail to acknowledge Bedouin
culture, and have had an irreversible impact on family and community
structures. “The planning didn’t take into account … that extended
families want to live next to each other. What about the new
generation? There is no space for them,” said Khaled Alsana, the mayor
of (recognised) Lakiya. “It’s like a motel. People sleep here and go to
work [outside]. It’s a permanent, cheap motel. There is nothing that
keeps you attached to the place. That’s the policy, to bring more
people to the towns; that means more land for the state and less for
the people.”</p>
<p>Drug abuse, crime, unemployment and school dropout rates are
disproportionately high in Bedouin towns, compared with nearby Jewish
cities, and the land allocated to the towns is insufficient for natural
growth and development. The towns also fail to provide adequate health,
educational and recreational services to young people, and lack a solid
economic base. Each year the Bedouin townships receive the lowest
socio-economic rankings in the country.</p>
<p style="text-align: left;" align="center"><strong>An apparent threat</strong></p>
<p>In 2000, before becoming prime minister, Ariel Sharon outlined what
he called “a serious problem”. “About 900,000 dunums of government
land are not in our hands, but in the hands of the Bedouin population.
As a resident of the Negev, I see this problem every day. It is,
essentially, a demographic phenomenon” (<a
href="http://mondediplo.com/2012/08/06bedouin#nb3"
onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackEvent','outbound-article','http://mondediplo.com']);">3</a>).
Last July Israeli media reported that the current prime minister,
Binyamin Netanyahu, said the state’s ability to maintain a Jewish
majority in the Negev was under threat: “Different elements will demand
national rights within Israel, for example, in the Negev, if we allow
for a region without a Jewish majority. It has happened in the Balkans,
and it is a palpable threat” (<a
href="http://mondediplo.com/2012/08/06bedouin#nb4"
onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackEvent','outbound-article','http://mondediplo.com']);">4</a>).</p>
<p>To combat this, the government publicly affirmed its goal to
strengthen Jewish settlement in the Negev and increase its population
by 70% by 2015. Jewish development projects in the Negev are
immediately given basic services and infrastructure and encouraged to
grow. Resources remain insufficient in Bedouin communities, recognised
or not.</p>
<p>Jewish citizens can live in different Negev communities — cities,
kibbutzim, moshavim (agricultural villages) or individual farms.
Bedouin citizens have no option but to move into urbanised centres.
This continuing policy means the largest possible number of Bedouin
citizens will be restricted to smaller, more-easily controlled plots of
land.</p>
<p>“Bedouin [would] like to live in kibbutzim and moshavim. Why not?
This is our traditional life. Why is it OK for Jewish people to live as
farmers in all of Israel, and not the Bedouin?” said Khadra Elsaneh,
director of Sidreh, an organisation established in Lakiya in 1998 to
improve the lives of Bedouin women through economic empowerment and
education. “We have a group of women that started with nothing and we
empowered ourselves. We have the support of our community and we don’t
have any support from the government. Why? The government doesn’t give
the Bedouin any hope. It must come to a solution with the community,
not come to impose a solution, or the people here will explode.”</p>
<p style="text-align: left;" align="center"><strong>No incentive to
leave</strong></p>
<p>The Prawer plan wants to relocate 40% of the Bedouin now living in
unrecognised villages into expanded areas of the government-planned
townships; the plan says the government would offer compensation for
only 50% of the land the Bedouin currently control. According to a <em>Haaretz</em> report
on 2 June 2011, the cost of displacement would be between $1.7 and
$2.4bn, including $356m for economic development in recognised Bedouin
townships.</p>
<p>On 5 July the European parliament condemned Israel’s treatment of
its Bedouin citizens, which it described as an “indigenous people
leading a sedentary and traditionally agricultural life on their
ancestral lands”, and urging Israel to withdraw the Prawer Plan.</p>
<p>But despite international condemnations, the Israeli government
seems prepared to carry out its plans. A special Israeli police unit
has been formed to safeguard and enforce demolitions and evictions in
Bedouin communities throughout the Negev, and it is expected to begin
work at the start of August.</p>
<p>In protest, the Bedouin have held strikes and rallies,
thousands-strong, in front of the prime minister’s office and Knesset,
lobbied the government to negotiate with them directly, and presented
an alternative master plan for the unrecognised villages. To no avail.</p>
<p>The Prawer plan will be “a disaster for me, my family, my community
and all the Bedouin of the Negev,” says al-Amur. “[Urbanisation] has
killed our desert agriculture, the sources of our life. And now they
are killing our morale, our being; they’re eliminating our population.
If you visit us in 10 or 20 years, you won’t see any Bedouin anymore.”</p>
<p><em><strong>Jillian Kestler-D’Amours</strong> is a Canadian
journalist based in Jerusalem. Her documentary Sumoud: the Struggle for
Al-Araqib can be found <a href="http://mondediplo.com/2012/08/com"
onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackEvent','outbound-article','http://mondediplo.com']);">on
her website</a>.</em></p>
<p><strong>Notes.</strong></p>
<p>(<a href="http://mondediplo.com/2012/08/06bedouin#nh1"
onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackEvent','outbound-article','http://mondediplo.com']);">1</a>)
Tawfiq Rangwala, “Inadequate housing, Israel and the Bedouin of the
Negev”, Habitat International Coalition — Housing and Land Rights
Network Middle East and North Africa (HIC-MENA), 2004.</p>
<p>(<a href="http://mondediplo.com/2012/08/06bedouin#nh2"
onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackEvent','outbound-article','http://mondediplo.com']);">2</a>)
Elana Boteach et al, “The Indigenous Bedouins of the Naqab-Negev Desert
in Israel”, Negev Co-Existence Forum for Civil Equality, April 2008.</p>
<p>(<a href="http://mondediplo.com/2012/08/06bedouin#nh3"
onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackEvent','outbound-article','http://mondediplo.com']);">3</a>)
Thabet Abu-Ras, “<a
href="http://www.adalah.org/newsletter/eng/apr06/ar2.pdf"
onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackEvent','download','http://www.adalah.org/newsletter/eng/apr06/ar2.pdf']);">Land
Disputes in Israel: the Case of the Bedouin of the Naqab</a>” (PDF),
Adalah (legal centre for Arab minority rights in Israel) newsletter,
vol 24, April 2006.</p>
<p>(<a href="http://mondediplo.com/2012/08/06bedouin#nh4"
onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackEvent','outbound-article','http://mondediplo.com']);">4</a>)
Human Rights Watch, “<a
href="http://www.hrw.org/news/2010/08/01/israel-halt-demolitions-bedouin-homes-negev"
onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackEvent','outbound-article','http://www.hrw.org']);">Israel:
Halt Demolitions of Bedouin Homes in Negev</a>,” 1 August 2010.</p>
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