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<div class="header reader-header reader-show-element" dir="ltr"> <font
size="-2"><a class="domain reader-domain"
href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/10/17/israel-prepares-to-turn-bedouin-citizens-into-refugees-in-their-own-country/">https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/10/17/israel-prepares-to-turn-bedouin-citizens-into-refugees-in-their-own-country/</a></font>
<h1 class="reader-title">Israel Prepares to Turn Bedouin
Citizens into Refugees in Their Own Country</h1>
<span class="post_author_intro">by</span> <span
class="post_author" itemprop="author"><a
href="https://www.counterpunch.org/author/jonathan-cook/"
rel="nofollow">Jonathan Cook</a> - October 17, 2019</span></div>
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<p><em>Nazareth.</em></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>The starkest example of this people replacement
strategy is Israel’s long-standing treatment of 250,000
Bedouin who formally have citizenship.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>It is hard to cast the Bedouin, simple farmers and
pastoralists, as a security threat, as was done with the
Palestinians under occupation.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Many of the Bedouin have resisted, clinging on to their
historic lands despite the dire conditions imposed on
them.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Now the Israel authorities are losing patience with the
Bedouin.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“Development”, like “security”, has a different
connotation in Israel. It really means Jewish
development, or Judaisation – not development for
Palestinians.</p>
<p>The projects include a new highway, a high-voltage
power line, a weapons testing facility, a military
live-fire zone and a phosphate mine.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>The Bedouin’s living space has endlessly shrunk and
their way of life has been crushed.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>These interminable expulsions look less like a
necessary, considered policy and more like an ugly,
ideological nervous tic.</p>
<p><em>A version of this article first appeared in the
National, Abu Dhabi.</em></p>
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