 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
|
 |
||
Palestinian Bedouin of the Negev May 9, 2005 Suleiman Al-Ma’abda was suspicious of welcoming strangers. “No photos,” he cautioned as visitors surveyed the villagers of Katamat rebuilding three houses that the Israeli army had destroyed the previous week. Soldiers had surrounded the village, young men were handcuffed and rounded up in police cars, while an IDF helicopter watched three bulldozers in action from the sky above. But the village is not in the West Bank or Gaza, and all the residents hold Israeli passports. The demolitions at Katamat were just another incident in the ongoing dispossession of the Arab Bedouin of the Negev.
The Bedouin community of the Negev (Naqab) is part of the wider Palestinian Arab community inside Israel, who represent 20 percent of the Israeli citizenry. Yet citizenship seems to be in name only for Arabs inside the Green Line. Today there are approximately 110,000 Arab Bedouin living in the Negev. Half live in seven planned townships, the poorest recognized localities in Israel, while the other half live in impoverished villages, declared illegal by the state. Planned Townships The government’s ideal scenario is that the Bedouin “problem” can be tidied away by moving the Bedouin to government-recognized townships. Some 57,200 people now live in these underdeveloped towns, in the area of Beersheva at the northern end of the Negev. Built with no active participation of the designated residents themselves, the towns were given Hebrew names. The government installed Jewish religious, right-wing heads of the municipalities, areas within which no Jew lives. Entering Kseife, Lakiya, or Rahat, nothing captures your eye except kids playing on the unpaved streets and shopkeepers loitering in doorways. A tour of one of the planned townships does not last long because there is nothing much to see other than one rundown neighborhood after another. “It’s like a refugee camp,” said our local guide in Rahat. Apart from the absence of IDF soldiers, in terms of impoverishment, there were few differences between this and the refugee camps of the West Bank and Gaza. There is no large-scale industry, just the odd bakery or small business. Stripped of their traditional pastoral lifestyle, the Bedouin have an unemployment rate of 62 percent, the highest among Israeli citizens. Some enterprising individuals and NGOs have established small-scale cooperatives, such as the flower growing company in Rahat or the women’s weaving and embroidery cooperatives in Lakiya. While proving a lifeline for some individuals, such initiatives can never address unemployment on a wider scale.
A group of Palestinian citizens from the north of the country have come to visit Bedouin community activists. “I had never been here before,” said 25-year-old Heba from Nazareth in the Galilee. “I had no idea how bad the situation was.” Heba’s reaction reflects the success of the Israeli adoption of “divide and rule” strategy. Official policy divides the one million Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel into four distinct categories: Muslim, Christian, Druze, and Bedouin. The aim is to isolate the various communities in order to prevent solidarity and support of one another’s struggle. Activists in the Negev insist that the term Arab or Palestinian be used in conjunction with the name Bedouin, precisely to try and counteract this Israeli policy of controlling Arab citizens by dividing one from another. History Ottoman and British occupation of Palestine largely left the Arab Bedouin of the Negev to their own devices. British Mandate records show that the Bedouin lived on 12,600,000 dunams of the Negev. Today Israeli expropriation has resulted in the Bedouin struggling to avoid eviction on less than 2 percent of this original land area. Prior to 1948, the Bedouin had relied even more than the rest of the Palestinian community on agriculture and livestock as their primary economic activity. Owing to lack of official statistics, a precise population figure is impossible to give, but historians estimate that between 65,000 and 95,000 Bedouin lived in the Negev, spread among eight different tribes. In 1948 the majority of these Arab Bedouin were driven beyond the borders of the new Jewish state, just as Palestinians were expelled from all parts of the land. Israeli “revisionist” historian Benny Morris estimates a further 17,000 Negev Bedouin were expelled in the years 1949–1953, leaving a population of only 13,000. Those who remained were rounded up into “enclosure zones,” and along with the rest of the Palestinian population inside Israeli borders, spent the next 18 years under military rule.
The Israelis instituted the dispossession of Bedouin land into their developing legal system, notably in three primary laws. The Land Acquisition Law (1953) declared that land not in possession of an owner in April 1952 could be registered as state property. This enabled the Israeli authorities to “legally” transfer extensive amounts of Negev land into state hands, as the majority of Bedouin in 1952 were kept under military curfew in Israeli-defined enclosure zones. Once military regulations were lifted two decades later, some Arab Bedouin did return, only to discover that their land was now deemed state property. Returnees faced two choices: to officially trespass or to lease their land from the state. If an individual chose to lease from the government, this was seen in a court of law as admittance that the land did not belong to that individual to begin with. The Land Rights Settlement Ordinance (1969) classified all Ottoman mawat land as state property, unless a formal title deed could be produced. Mawat land was land that was “unworked” and more than 1.5 miles (2.4 km) from the nearest settlement. The same justification is used by the current administration. In April 2001, in an official reply to a complaint filed to the United Nations, Israel reiterated that Bedouin land claims were not supported by proper documentation on ownership: “Furthermore, Bedouin land claims are often exorbitant, and cover huge areas of land through which they moved over the years without maintaining continuous possession.” The government used the 1969 law to confiscate substantial amounts of Bedouin land, entrapping Arab landowners in two ways. The last opportunity to register land had been in 1921, when Bedouin had seen no necessity to do so, as no one was challenging their right to the land. Secondly, the Israeli authorities did not recognize Bedouin tents as legal settlements, or Bedouin pastoralism as an economic activity that “worked” the land.
In 1980, the Negev Land Acquisition Law was established as a direct response to the peace treaty with Egypt. Like previous laws, it facilitated large-scale confiscation of Bedouin Arab land, this time justified by the Israelis for construction of military bases in the Negev, following the withdrawal from Sinai military positions. No right to appeal was given, and Bedouin received between 2 and 15 percent of the financial compensation offered to relocate Jewish Sinai settlers. At Umm Matnan, a town of 3,500 people, 56,000 dunams were confiscated to build a military base, but no such base was built. In 1994 the land was turned over to Jewish settlers. Suleiman Al-Ma’abda was told that his village was illegal because it was on land designated as a military zone. “We’ve never heard any firing,” he said bitterly. “There is no military range here.” Unrecognized Villages, Housing Demolitions, Land Confiscation Half the Bedouin population has refused to be pushed off their land into Israeli-created towns. Some 68,000 Bedouin live in 45 villages that the government has refused to recognize. “It is our land,” said Sara Abu Kaf, 23, a graduate student in clinical psychology from the unrecognized village of Umm Batin. “I don’t think about moving to another place.” The population of individual villages varies between 600 and 4,000 inhabitants. All are denied basic services such as water, sewage systems, and electricity.
Housing in the unrecognized villages is an arrangement of tents and metal shacks with corrugated zinc roofs. Residents are forbidden to build permanent stone houses. Zinc is a highly dangerous building material: even the Israeli Ministry of Environment recognizes that it can cause cancer. Poor health is one of the side effects of more than half the population living below the poverty line. The Regional Council for the Palestinian Bedouin of the Unrecognized Villages (a non-governmental body), reports that 90 percent of the children at the local Soroka hospital are Bedouin, even though Arabs represent only 25 percent of the Negev population. Another health risk to the Bedouin of the unrecognized villages is pollution from Israeli industry, such the large industrial plant at Ramat Havav. In 1990 members of the Azazmeh tribe were evicted from their lands on the pretext of the construction of a military zone. (Three months later the land was handed over to a Jewish agricultural settlement.) The Azazmeh tribe is now living in an unrecognized village next to the factory. Many villagers have since been hospitalized for respiratory and skin conditions as a direct result of the fumes and pollution from Ramat Havav. The famous nuclear plant at Dimona is also a cause of sickness in the local Bedouin community.
Educational standards within the unrecognized villages and the community as a whole are low. Twenty-five percent of teachers are not qualified to teach. Children often have to walk several kilometers to attend school, along routes with no bus services. Less than one percent of those who manage to achieve their high school certificate pursue a university education. Obviously these statistics are similar to many impoverished communities across the developing world, but it must be remembered that Israel claims to be a Western democracy. If Bedouin Arabs are Israeli citizens as their passports suggest, why are they denied the economic and social infrastructure and development grants that are readily available to new Jewish immigrants? The Green Patrol In 1979 Ariel Sharon, as agriculture minister, declared all the land south of the Dead Sea—the majority of the Negev—as a nature reserve and thus it was “forbidden to graze goats.” Sharon, who still maintains an extensive agricultural range in the Negev, established a special armed unit, the Green Patrol, “to locate and rapidly evacuate trespassers on state land.” For the past two decades the Green Patrol has been responsible for housing demolition and land confiscation in the name of nature conservation. The so-called nature reserve rangers have been known to spray Bedouin crops with defoliants. In August 1998 a young Bedouin man, Sulieman Abu Jlidan, was killed by a member of the patrol when he was riding in the back of a van driving across one of the closed areas. “The Green Patrol’s job is to remove us from our land, kill our animals and ultimately our way of life,” Bedouin rights activist Uri Okbi told the Washington Post following the killing. “They’re in charge of ethnically cleansing the Negev of all Bedouin.”
The Israelis justified their destruction of the three houses at Katamat by the fact that they were new buildings. The residents were aware before the demolition that officials were observing and taking photographs, hence the suspicion of media arriving with cameras. The typical pattern for demolitions begins with the taking of aerial photographs. When a new construction is discovered, the owner is served with a demolition order. Although technically the house can only count as new if it was built less than 60 days previously, this rule is often not adhered to. The Bedouin residents are fined twice the value of the house as demolition costs. Sixteen thousand houses in the Negev unrecognized villages are currently served with demolition orders. The three houses destroyed recently were part of the more than 100 that are demolished annually. This is a conservative estimate; in 1998, 370 houses were destroyed. “They destroy their homes because they say the Bedouin have built without a permit, but you can’t get a permit because they say you can’t live there,” says Talab Al-Sana, the only Bedouin member of the Israeli Knesset and a resident of the planned town of Lakiya. Al-Sana suffers the same fate as the other 12 Arab MKs; they wield little influence on government and risk charges of incitement. Like MK Azmi Bishara, Al-Sana has been under police investigation for comments he made that are alleged to show his support of “terrorism.” Bedouin activists, such as the members of the Regional Council for the Unrecognized Villages, say that their demands are simple: civil rights, recognition of their right to the land, and basic government services that their Israeli citizenship should entitle them to. But challenging the status quo is not easy. “Whenever we petition for a basic right, the first argument is that is an illegal village, and you can’t give people who are breaking the law these services,” said Marwan Dalal, a civil rights lawyer who works to acquire Bedouin access to basic services such as social welfare. There are many Arab, Israeli, and international NGOs working to raise awareness and improve living conditions for the Bedouin of the Negev. Yet in the main, such activities can only challenge the symptoms rather than the root of the problem. The Bedouin are denied basic civil rights because they are living as Arabs, that is, non-Jews, in a state defined as Jewish. An obscure but significant fact about the demolitions stuck in Suleiman Al-Ma’abda’s mind. “They were Thai,” he repeated over again. “They were Thai workers who came and threw the belongings out of our houses.” Before they moved in with the bulldozers, the IDF had employed some of the many non-Jewish, non-Arab workers whose difficult financial circumstances mean that they are prepared to take on the dirty work. For the indigenous people, who are told that there is no room for them in their own land, this adds insult to injury. The Bedouin Arabs of the Negev are not physically fighting for national independence, as are the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. The Israelis describe the status of the Bedouin as a “domestic issue.” The Bedouin are thus treated in the same manner as are indigenous people by colonial governments across the world: denied land rights and pushed into planned townships, effectively reserves for the natives.
The oppression of the Bedouin, however, is not entirely separate from the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. Israeli policy towards Palestinians and Arabs on both sides of the Green Line stems from a deep-rooted fear of the so-called Arab demographic threat. Israeli demographers, such as Haifa University’s Arnon Sofer, claim that the greater birthrate within the Arab community will be a stumbling block to Zionism. Sofer believes that unless there is a change in state borders and policy, the enlarged Arab citizenry will render a Jewish-majority- controlled state an impossibility as early as 2020. Israel is ideologically a Jewish state and while it remains defined as such, it will continue to discriminate against non-Jews, whether they are citizens or not. In a state designed to serve the needs of the Jewish people, the Bedouin people will always be controlled and subject to discrimination. Even if in the unlikely situation that a Palestinian state is recognized by Israel in the West Bank and Gaza, the situation for the Bedouin in the Negev can only get worse. The Jewish state will seek to maintain its Jewish identity in the face of loss of territory, and thus Palestinian Arab citizens in Israel will be the sole targets of anti-Arab feeling. Despite the best efforts of NGOs, there is no reason to predict an end to human rights violations and house demolitions such as took place at Katamat. Resources: Articles on IslamOnline.net: External Links: External links last accessed January 18, 2005.
|
