New Jewish settlements planned 'on top of' Bedouin villages, by Natasha Roth, +972

The Israeli government approves a plan for five new settlements in the Negev/Naqab. Rights group says the plan, like Israel’s overall policy regarding its Bedouin citizens, is discriminatory.

A man from the Zanoun family sits on the ruins of his house in the unrecognized Bedouin village of Wadi Al Na’am a few hours after it was demolished by Israeli authorities, Negev, May 18, 2014. Wadi Al-Na’am is the largest unrecognized village in Israel, with about 13,000 inhabitants, most of whom are internally displaced from elsewhere in Israel. The village is not connected to electricity. (Keren Manor/Activestills)

The Israeli government on Sunday [Nov. 22, 2015] approved a plan for five new Jewish settlements to be built in the Negev (Naqab) in the south of Israel. The plan, which was submitted by Housing Minister Yoav Galant of Kulanu, threatens to displace thousands of Bedouin from their homes.

Two of the settlements are due to be built where Bedouin villages already exist, according to the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI). The new town of Daya is to be established on top of the unrecognized village of Katamat, which would displace its 1,500 Bedouin residents. Neve Gurion, meanwhile, is meant to be built on part of the land of the recognized village of Be’er Hadaj, home to 6,000 Bedouin citizens of Israel.

“This decision is a mere continuation of the government’s unequal planning policy, which attempts to move the inhabitants of Bedouin villages to urban or semi-urban settlements or existing townships, which are ranked at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder and are already under significant stress,” ACRI wrote in a statement on Sunday.

The government’s announcement comes just weeks after the unrecognized Bedouin village of Al-Araqib in the Negev was demolished for the 90th time. Israel’s continual razing of Al Araqib began in 2010, and the village has become a symbol of the ethnic discrimination that characterizes the state’s policies in the Negev.

Since the founding of the State of Israel, Jewish settlement in the Negev has been considered Zionism’s final frontier — an impression largely instilled by the vision of David Ben-Gurion, the country’s first prime minister. “It is in the Negev that the people of Israel will be tested,” Ben-Gurion said in the 1950s.

“Only with a united effort … will we accomplish the great mission of populating the wilderness and bringing it to flourish. This effort will determine the fate of the State of Israel and the standing of our people in the history of mankind.” Several years later, he reiterated: “The Negev is a great Zionist asset, with no substitute anywhere in the country.”

Sixty years later, the wheels of Ben-Gurion’s dream have been firmly set in motion. The Prawer Plan, a government framework for forcibly moving thousands of Bedouin living in unrecognized villages in the Negev into impoverished townships, seemed dead in the water until the last elections. During coalition negotiations, the plan was resuscitated as a bargaining chip between the Likud and Jewish Home, with Naftali Bennett leveraging its revival as a condition for joining the government.

Israeli is also expropriating large tracts of Bedouin land – either for “greening” (i.e. planting forests on top of the ruins of demolished villages) under the auspices of the JNF, or for building new Jewish settlements on top of Bedouin towns, as is the state’s wont.

Israel has systematically refused to recognize many of the Negev villages and towns in which Bedouin citizens live, meaning that they have no connections to electricity, water or sewage infrastructure, and are in constant danger of demolition. The new suburban settlements the state builds in the Negev are generally designated for Jews, whereas Bedouin are encouraged to move to Bedouin-only townships that lack economic opportunities and are not designed with Bedouin social structures in mind.

The Negev village of Umm el-Hiran is perhaps the most blatant example of how the state hopes to displace Bedouin citizens for the benefit of Jewish citizens. The Israeli Supreme Court recently upheld plans to demolish Umm el-Hiran and build a Jewish town, named Hiran, in its place. Umm el-Hiran’s Bedouin residents would be forcibly relocated to the nearby township of Hura, according to the state’s plans.

Adjacent to Umm el-Hiran is the village of Atir, which also faces destruction — so that the JNF can expand a manmade forest, named Yatir, over its ruins. (Notice the pattern of only slightly altering names to Hebraize them?)

Housing Minister Galant on Sunday evoked Ben-Gurion when praising the government’s passing of his plan [Heb]: “It is our responsibility to settle the Negev … to turn it into a desirable and thriving area, in keeping with the Zionist vision,” he said.

Originally published at +972 on Nov. 23, 2015   

Stop Prawer-Begin plan for Bedouin resettlement, by Devorah Brous, Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles

Women stand near a washing line in the Bedouin town of Rahat
in southern Israel on Dec. 10.
Photo by Amir Cohen/Reuters

By Devorah Brous, Founder and former Executive Director Bustan, former co-director of the Campaign for Bedouin-Jewish Justice

 

The Negev Bedouin village of Umm el-Hiran is where I first learned about what it means to be rooted, to be devoted to something with steadfastness. It is here that I learned the true impact of Jewish National Fund (JNF) afforestation on the Bedouin, which is far from JNF’s whitewashed and spit-shined-glossy version. Rayid Abu Alkeean, an Israeli Bedouin, partnered with Bustan, an environmental justice organization that I founded, to host delegations on dozens of our Negev Unplugged Tours in his village, where we learned about Bedouin traditional life unplugged from the nation’s electricity grid, and from Israel’s democracy.

Imagine serving in the Israel Defense Forces and having your home demolished by the government in front of your children. Next, imagine being billed for the demolition. Imagine watching religious Jews building a barbed wire fence to stake a claim to the hilltop just above your home. Hiran and Kasif, two Jewish-only religious towns slated to be built on the lands of Rayid’s village, were just approved.

Fortunately, the Knesset vote on the controversial Prawer-Begin Plan to resettle the Negev Bedouin has been postponed for the next one to two months. We must urge Israeli officials to take this discriminatory plan off the table and encourage them to adopt the Alternative Master Plan (AMP) developed by Bedouin leadership and Jewish planners of the human rights non-governmental organization Bimkom. The AMP will delimit territorial boundaries on historical village lands. It will enable formal village planning and access to the full basket of rights and services afforded Jewish villages and towns — housing, clinics, roads, waste removal and schools. We must make every effort to advance this alternative plan and promote sustainable economic development for all residents of the Negev.

Here’s why it is in the best interest of every Jew in the Negev and the Diaspora to stop the Prawer Plan.

• Because it is morally unconscionable to uproot this Negev Arab minority from their homes and against their will.

• Because token symbolic gestures aimed at recognition, such as granting formal ownership over less than 2 percent of historic Bedouin lands to some while denying the rest to the vast majority of others, simply won’t work. The Prawer Plan will dispossess some 40,000 Bedouin, requiring entire villages to be demolished wholesale.

• Because squeezing the remaining lands that have not yet been confiscated from the Bedouin population and urging them to live as neighbors with Jewish homesteaders and families that replace them will deepen already existing social cleavages.

• Because it will lead to violence. Today the youth in Bedouin villages act on behalf of a civilian population of 200,000 Negev Arabs that has been marginalized, criminalized and pauperized for decades. “Days of Rage” protests and vigils are surging to increasingly high levels of tension in what is now front and center stage of Israel’s ongoing land conflict. By declaring a civilian population a national security threat, the government further alienates and even catalyzes an already enraged and disenfranchised minority into the streets. Many believe that despite the intentions of community elders to organize nonviolently, there is no further incentive to do so.

• Because living off the grid is hard, but the unrecognized Bedouin prefer that to losing their lands. Most “unrecognized villagers” have consistently resisted running water and electricity to power their computers and washing machines, preferring to stay on their lands rather than be holed up in cities with different and sometimes clashing familial clans, and pushed into wage labor —– when it is even available — at the expense of their traditional cultural pursuits. Unrecognized Bedouin have organized however haphazardly and have used nonviolent but futile tactics to have their land rights recognized by the Israeli courts. More than 100,000 Bedouin continue to resist being transferred into impoverished townships that are drug-riddled pits of crime. They fight to keep their lands because even in recognized towns, Bedouin are denied building permits, basic infrastructure and services.

• Because we’ve learned from villages like Al-Arakib and Umm el-Hiran, among others, that coercion is not sustainable. To try to rip Negev Arabs from their lands will only make them, and more of us, more resolute.

• Because the northern Negev is already a toxic tinderbox. Most Negev Arabs and Bedouin have been relocated into a triangle of territory in the northern Negev between Beer-Sheva, Arad and Dimona that has been zoned to encircle them  to prevent further construction.

The conflict between Bedouin and the State of Israel is about land, resources and control. Investment in developing Jewish towns and demolishing Arab villages happens most aggressively in Arab areas of the Negev and the Galilee, battlefields of Israel’s demographic war to create a Jewish majority in every region of Israel.  One tactic is to break apart contiguous Bedouin villages and to concentrate the maximum number of Bedouin onto the minimum amount of territory.

Like Rayid, head of the village council of al-Sira, Khalil el Amor resists the Prawer Plan. His entire village is slated for demolition. I spoke with Khalil yesterday. He said, “I am a teacher, and finishing school to become a lawyer. As a child, I would return home from school to tend our flock and help my mother milk the animals until dark. I would light a lantern and start my homework. I want my granddaughter Siraj (meaning “lantern”) to have the choice to tend a flock. If I stay on my village lands, I dream of inviting tourists to learn about our traditions and our changing Bedouin culture.” Rather than give up the land, and give up the lantern, Khalil holds steadfast.

The AMP is a viable way for Negev Arabs like Khalil and Rayid to showcase their village culture to tourists and to earn livable incomes rather than masquerading as traditional Bedouin for Jewish-owned tourist companies that romanticize their culture if they’ll pretend to be shepherds for a photo-op on a camel. If Prawer passes, that is all our children will know about Bedouin culture.

Published in the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles, December 14, 2013

Every Jew should see the Bedouin issue as test of Israel's moral values, by Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg, Ha’aretz

Why have the relocations and demolitions of Negev Bedouin homes, an issue not related to Israel’s security or vexed questions such as "Who is a Jew?", aroused such strong feelings amongst Diaspora Jews actively engaged with Israel?

Should the Begin-Prawer plan become law, it will have an enormous effect on Israel’s Bedouin, with tens of villages destroyed and tens of thousands of people removed from their homes into poverty-stricken townships. This will be extremely painful for Israel's supporters in the Diaspora to observe.

That is why the progress of the bill through the Knesset is making such an impact well beyond the Negev, in Israel and abroad. In Britain, sixty-five rabbis from across the denominations, supporting the courageous lead of Israel’s Rabbis for Human Rights, signed a letter to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other senior ministers, asking them to re-consider their proposals. In the U.S., the Religious Action Centre of the Reform Movement, the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association, T’ruah, the Rabbinic Call for Human Rights, and thousands of individual rabbis and Jews have written in a similar vein.

Why should this issue, which does not threaten Israel’s immediate security and has no influence over the vexed questions of ‘Who is a Jew?’ with its obvious Diaspora dimensions, have aroused such strong feelings amongst Jews actively engaged with Israel?

The matter goes to the heart of how we identify with Israel, and of the nature of Israel as a society. Living abroad, rightly or wrongly, we don’t experience Israel through the everyday realities of its traffic jams, cafes, and hamsins. We identify with Israel because we are family. We identify via those hyper-sensitive antennae which quadruple our anxiety the moment we hear Israel mentioned on the news. Primarily, we identify with Israel as Jews.

To some the slogan is ‘Israel, right or wrong’. To a few it is, sadly and unjustly, ‘Israel, usually wrong’. But for most of us, in spite of all the fears and frustrations, Israel remains the country where our Jewish values are, should and shall be realized. We still hope for and believe in the Israel whose founders, less than three years after the Holocaust, presented to the world the remarkable vision of a country which "will uphold the full social and political equality of all its citizens, without distinction of religion, race, or gender; will guarantee full freedom of worship, conscience, culture and education" and live and legislate according to "the precepts of liberty, justice and peace taught by the Prophets of Israel."

We know that, for all the daily difficulties the country encounters, this Israel is not just the stuff of dreams. Countless Israelis put into practice in their daily lives the values of justice and compassion. ‘That’s only a bubble’, someone recently told me. If so, it’s a big bubble or many bubbles. One has only to think of Israel’s extraordinary number of chesed organisations. To the outsider it can be hard to credit how many groups work across the painful divisions between Arab and Jew, Israeli and Palestinian and continue to affirm in spite of all the conflicts the core Jewish value of universal human dignity in the image of God.

That is why so many of us care when Israel threatens to pass a law so deeply at odds with its own principles. "So long as Israel claims to be a Jewish state, it must act according to Jewish moral values," commented Gidon Remba, Director of the U.S.-based Campaign for Bedouin-Jewish Justice. "The way a country treats its most disadvantaged citizens defines its moral character, and so too its Jewish character as a bearer of the Jewish moral tradition."

It’s not just that Diaspora Jews are pained by the prospect of watching on their national television Israeli bulldozers flattening villages and forcing thousands of men, women and children from their homes, actions which the Begin-Prawer plan could indeed entail. The matter goes deeper than the damage that would be done to Israel’s international reputation.

It relates to a profound moral instinct that Israel’s safety depends not only on military superiority and the skill and courage of its armed forces, but is connected in some unquantifiable way to its faithfulness to the age-old Jewish values of justice and human dignity.

It connects to those historical experiences of exile and persecution which Jews carry subliminally in their souls. As Theodore Bikel, who played Tevye in countless productions of Fiddler on the Roof, said, "What hurts is the fact that the very people who are telling them [the Bedouin] to “Get out” are the descendents of the people of Anatevka. My people."

I’ve been to El Arakib, demolished fifty times, spoken with its leaders and seen footage of its destruction. It was a shocking experience. "You mustn’t believe everything the Bedouin claim", I was told. Yet Bedouin land ownership was honoured by the Ottomans and the British, and pre-State aerial photographs document extensive Bedouin agriculture. There is much misinformation. A recent poll conducted by Panelresearch showed that 70% of Israelis thought on average that the Bedouin wanted forty per cent of the Negev. In fact, they are asking for just 5.4% of the area. When told this fact most Israelis felt the Bedouin claims were reasonable.

It’s beyond dispute that the situation of Israel’s Bedouin requires legislation. Their villages can’t remain unrecognised, without the provision of electricity and hygiene services other Israelis take for granted. After all, the Bedouin are full citizens and many have traditionally served in the IDF. What the thousands of voices from abroad and within Israel are asking for is a proper partnership between Israel and the Bedouin leadership in agreeing a solution. As Rabbi Jill Jacobs of T’ruah writes, "Demolishing homes, forcing people off their land, and denying basic government services contradict the moral values…on which the State of Israel was founded."

Surely the Knesset, and the Jewish community around the world, will not allow that to happen.

Jonathan Wittenberg is a rabbi of the New North London Synagogue and has strong family, communal and charitable connections with Israel.

Published in Ha'aretz on July 15, 2013

'JNF Judaizing Negev at Beduin Expense,' by Sharon Udasin, in Jerusalem Post

Following the Jewish National Fund’s announcement at last week’s Sderot Conference that it would be investing NIS 1 billion toward further Negev development, Beduin rights advocates have expressed concern that the investment will deepen already profound rifts between the Jewish and Beduin Negev residents.

JNF chairman Efi Stenzler unveiled plans to invest NIS 1b. in the next few years toward the construction of thousands of new housing units and related infrastructural development, in the hope of strengthening the Negev region and fulfilling a “Zionist vision” by attracting young people to move there. While the Negev has an area of 1.2 million hectares, or 60 percent, of Israel’s territory, it is home to only 600,000 people, or 8% of the country’s population, according to the JNF.

Although the difference in average real estate in the Center and the Negev was only about 10% in the 1970s, in now stands at 400%.

The organization will be working to develop the region in conjunction with architect Shamai Assif, various government ministries, the Israel Lands Authority, mayors and heads of local councils, regional councils and settlement movements, the JNF reported.

“The JNF will continue to help reinforce communities in the Negev,” the statement said, noting that the group intends to employ the already vibrant Negev population centers as “anchors” for future development.

Some of the specific plans for the area include upgrading the number of plots in Karmit from 250 to 700, creating 120 land plots in both Neveh Netzarim and Bnei Netzarim, expanding the Shlomit temporary camp from about 30 families to 500, and preparing another 32 lots in Kadesh Barnea – a community established by the JNF. In addition, on Amatzya, a moshav near Lachish, the JNF is preparing to create 200 housing units for people evacuated from Gush Katif in 2005, and the organization will be erecting a new community for about 100 evacuee families near Nir Akiva, according to the organization. The JNF and its partners will also help develop tourist facilities in Tzukim, and will prepare the communities of Idan, Paran and Ein Yahav for further agricultural development.

“This is a plan that is expected to help change the face of the Negev, encouraging families to move from the center to the Negev, together with shaping the existing communities, which will lead to a transformation in the residential experience,” Stenzler said. “All this in cooperation with heads of councils who are doing a great job and who together are transforming the region into a center of attraction, and there is hope in [first prime minister David] Ben-Gurion’s vision of making the desert bloom.”

The organization stressed that it is continuing to advance agricultural infrastructure in the Central Arava region, and said it will be preparing 5,000 hectares of land for citrus cultivation, in addition to the 1,500 already prepared for that purpose.

As far as the Beduin portions of the Negev Desert go, the JNF emphasized that it is currently working on many projects involving this sector, such as the recently completed first stage of Nahal Gerar Park in Rahat, which amounted to a NIS 1 million investment.

Meanwhile, the organization is also in the process of establishing recreational infrastructure for Beduin communities, such as the Lahav Forest for residents of Beersheba, Lehavim, Lakiya and Rahat, as well as the Yatir Forest for residents of the southern Hebron hills, Hura and Kuseifa, according to the statement.

But advocates for the Beduin community fear that the JNF’s development efforts will only further destroy “entire villages,” as occurred with al- Arakib village in 2010, during a JNF forestation project.

“There is minimal investment in Beduin communities relative to the size of the population,” said Haia Noach, executive director of the Negev Coexistence Forum for Civil Equality.

“The JNF’s plan reveals that it is continuing to not only ignore the reality of the Negev’s diverse population but inflame the relationship between the Jewish and Beduin communities,” Noach said. “It is clear that the mission of the JNF is to Judaize the Negev at the expense of Israel’s Beduin citizens.”

Read More: http://www.jpost.com/Sci-Tech/Article.aspx?id=248124

Israeli desert plan would uproot 30,000 Bedouin, by Allyn Fisher-Ilan, in Reuters

(Reuters) - Bulldozed by Israel more than two dozen times, a village known by Bedouin Arabs as Al-Arakib is one of many ramshackle desert communities whose names have never appeared on any official map.

If Israel's parliament adopts proposed new legislation, it never will.

The plan to demolish more Bedouin homes in the southern Negev region and move 30,000 people to government-authorized villages connected to power and water lines has been hailed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a "historic opportunity" to improve Bedouin lives.

But Israeli Arab leaders, who have long complained about discrimination against their community in the Jewish state, call it "ethnic cleansing," and aim to thwart the project with protests, a general strike and appeals to the United Nations to intervene.

"I will never leave here, I intend to stay until I die," said Abu-Madyam, 46, a farmer from al-Arakib.

He and his family of nine live in a makeshift plastic-sided shack in a cemetery near the ruins of their wooden home, razed by Israeli authorities last year.

The project is the most ambitious attempt in decades by the government to resettle Negev Bedouin and free up land in the largely open spaces of southern Israel for development and construction of military bases to replace facilities in the crowded center of the country.

Some Israelis argue the Bedouin have grown too dominant in the Negev, a geographic area wedged between Hamas Islamist-ruled Gaza and the occupied West Bank where Palestinians want a state, and that they pose a possible security risk.

The area being restructured also abuts Israel's largest Negev city of Beersheba and is near several military bases.

For decades, Israeli governments have tried to attract Jewish Israelis to move to the Negev, offering mortgage and tax breaks, but the region has fewer opportunities for employment than in the heavily populated center of the country.

Only 20 percent of Israel's Jewish population lives in the Negev, which covers more than 60 percent of the nation's land area. Bedouin villages take up two percent of Negev land.

This month, Netanyahu sat down with Bedouin mayors at his office to urge them to accept the plan, which could take at least five years to implement at a cost of more than 1 billion shekels ($300 million) once legislation due to be introduced shortly becomes law.

"Our state is leaping toward the future and you need to be part of this future. We want to help you reach economic independence. This plan is designed to bring about development and prosperity," Netanyahu told the Bedouin officials.

Arabs make up about 20 percent of Israel's population of seven million, 200,000 of them Bedouin citizens.

Most of Israel's Bedouin, who predominate in the desert area that accounts for two-thirds of its territory, are descendants of nomadic tribes that had wandered across the Middle East from Biblical times.

Half of the Bedouin live in towns and villages recognized as formal communities by the government. Others live rough, in tents and shacks on patches of desert.

"If everyone sat exactly where they felt their place was, then it wouldn't be possible to develop anything," said Yisrael Scop, a senior official at the Israel Lands Authority, which would bear responsibility for carrying out the Negev plan.

NEW VILLAGES

Some new villages will be built for displaced Bedouin, Scop told Reuters in an interview. He said about 60,000 acres would be affected, with 30,000 Bedouin called upon to abandon their homes in return for monetary compensation.

Another 2,000 Bedouin who have claims against Israel for past relocation would have their cases settled under the new project.

"We cannot have such a large population living in unorganized settlement," Scop said.

Bedouin leaders in the Negev say Israel has long discriminated against their communities, denying them public funds and services, in a bid to make their inhabitants leave.

Many of them were built, the officials said, because Israel had failed in the past to offer other housing options.

In a 2008 report on Israel's policy toward Bedouin in the Negev, Human Rights Watch said the government "appears intent on maximizing its control over Negev land and increasing the Jewish population in the area for strategic, economic and demographic reasons."

"The state implements forced evictions, home demolitions and other punitive measures disproportionately against Bedouin as compared with actions taken regarding structures owned by Jewish Israelis that do not conform to planning law," the New York-based group said.

Khalil Alamour, a 42-year-old schoolteacher, plans to head to Geneva this month to a meeting of a U.N. Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights as part of a delegation to protest against the resettlement project.

His village of Al-Sira, home to 500 Bedouin, has long been tagged by Israel for demolition. It is located near an airbase.

"I always thought we could be a bridge to peace but this has not happened because we don't feel involved," Alamour said about the Bedouin, some of whom serve as volunteers in Israel's military. Unlike Jewish men and women in Israel, members of its Arab minority are exempt from conscription at the age of 18.

Alamour called the Negev plan "a second Nakba," the Arabic word for "catastrophe" that Palestinians use to describe the displacement of hundreds of thousands of them in fighting over Israel's establishment in 1948.

"We've been around for so many years, yet they treat us as little more than numbers on a map. It's shameful," he said.

Like most unauthorized Bedouin villages, Al-Sira is not hooked up to Israel's electricity grid. Alamour and his neighbors have installed their own solar panels to generate electricity, supplementing the supply with power generators.

They have run their own pipes to hook up with a regional grid to provide running water for their homes.

In the ruins of al-Arakib, Abu-Madyam vowed to hang on to land which he said was once covered by lush grapevines and bought by his grandparents more than a century ago.

"I will seek justice until my last day. I don't have any objections to Jews living here, too, but why must I give up my own rights?" he said.

Read More: http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/11/23/us-israel-bedouin-idUSTRE7AM2EZ20111123 and http://www.jpost.com/Features/InThespotlight/Article.aspx?id=246731

Bedouin Battle to Stay in Their Villages Ends in Rubble, by Ruth Pollard, in The Sydney Morning Herald

Al-Sira, Israel: The Israeli authorities came without warning last week, and despite her pleas for time to pack, the house Rifa al-Oqbi shared with her two young sons was demolished, and with it, some of their most valued possessions.

Smashed pale blue and white floor tiles lay among the debris of broken brick blocks and wooden framing, as her sons Ali, 5, and Omar, 4, played in the rubble of what once was their home in their village in the Negev Desert.

Photo: Ruth Pollard

The village was under a demolition order, but experts say there is rarely any warning before the bulldozers arrive.

''They asked me to immediately leave my house, and I asked them for 24 hours so I could remove the furniture and my other belongings … and they said no,'' the 31-year-old explained. ''They closed this entire area, and when I tried to grab one more thing, they beat me and threw me to the ground … and beat up a relative who came to help.''

Israel's long-term goal of evicting between 30,000 and 40,000 indigenous Bedouin from their lands in the Negev Desert in order to create new Jewish settlements was cemented on September 11 with the adoption of the Prawer Plan.

Due before parliament in the coming days, opponents of the plan say it will result in the seizure of two-thirds of the Bedouin's land, destroy all but 10 of the 45 ''unrecognised'' Bedouin villages in the Negev and extinguish the Bedouin's land claims without proper compensation.

Thabet Abu Ras, the director of the Negev Project at Adalah, the Legal Centre for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, said that although they make up about 30 per cent of the region's population, the Bedouin occupy only 2.5 per cent of the Negev.

They have already been ''corralled onto the smallest amount of land possible,'' he said.

''If you take the land from the Bedouin … you are denying their right to exist.''

Professor Abu Ras, who is also a professor of political geography at Ben Gurion University, has just returned from a lobbying trip to the US to try to raise the plight of the Bedouin.

The Israeli cabinet this week gave the green light for work to begin on 10 Jewish settlements in the area ''to attract a new population to the Negev''.

On Thursday, the Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, met the mayors from some Bedouin villages before the implementation of the plan, in which the 10 villages that are allowed to remain will become eligible for government services.

All others will be razed and their residents forced to move to towns such as the government-created Hura, which has schools, a medical clinic, paved roads, water and electricity. To many Bedouin, Hura is overdeveloped and has no agricultural land for grazing. It ''feels like a prison'', one community leader said.

Mr Netanyahu said the plan would ''allow the Bedouin, for the first time, to realise their assets and turn them from dead capital into living capital to receive ownership of the land, which will allow for home construction, according to law, and for the development of enterprises and employment. This will jump the population forward and provide it with economic independence.''

In a report before the development of the Prawer Plan, retired judge Eliezer Goldberg recommended that many Bedouin villages be recognised, acknowledging their ''general historic ties'' to the land.

Then the government asked the former deputy head of the National Security Council Ehud Prawer to implement Justice Goldberg's recommendations.

He instead proposed the immediate transfer to the state of half the land claimed by the Bedouin, with minimal compensation for the remaining land. Not a single Bedouin was consulted by the committee.

One village, , al-Araqib, which is home to about 300 Bedouin, has been demolished and rebuilt 29 times in the past 18 months.

The battle between Israeli forces and Bedouin in al-Araqib is played out with monotonous regularity. It is a process repeated throughout the region.

Khalil al-Amour, school teacher, law student, father of seven and the leader of the village of al-Sira, knows this battle. His house, along with the rest of the village of 47 homes and 500 people, is the subject of a demolition order. ''It is about cramming the maximum Bedouin onto the minimum amount of land,'' he said.

And because his village is one of the many ''unrecognised villages'', there is no running water, electricity, social services or schools. They are cut off from the rest of Israeli society, despite the fact they serve in the army, vote, pay taxes and speak Hebrew, and some work in nearby Beersheba and other major centres.

Many are now fighting through the courts for ownership of what land they have left .

Mr Amour has a document he says proves his family's ownership of the land, dated November 23, 1921, notarised by Britain. It is not recognised by Israel.

There is often a deep misunderstanding of what it means to be a Bedouin, fuelled partly by a romantic image as the original nomads of the desert, resistant to the ways of the modern world.

''Bedouin are not against development and advancement and improvements to our lives,'' Mr Amour said. ''We just reject the way the government imposes this on us. They are asking us to move to cities and towns that are the antithesis of Bedouin being. Israel uses a demolition order to 'encourage' us to move''.

Forced to live under the constant threat of demolition the people of al-Sira are deeply frustrated and depressed.

''Even though they are determined to stay and fight, everything we build in this environment may not be here for the long term, so we build very rough just to survive,'' Mr Amour said.

Professor Abu Ras estimates that in 1948 there were 100,000 Bedouin in the Negev. By 1954, there were 10,000 remaining, the rest had been forcibly moved to Jordan and the Sinai in Egypt.

Professor Abu Ras said the plan to push the Bedouin from their land had been under development since the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, when they were first moved into what is known as the ''siyag triangle'' in the Western Negev, with the promise that they could soon return to their ancestral lands. ''They are still waiting.''

He estimates that under the Prawer Plan the Bedouin would receive just 100,000 dunams (10,000 hectares) of their outstanding claim of 600,000 dunams and monetary compensation will be far less than half the land value.

For many Bedouin, some of whom have already been forcibly relocated at least once by the government, that compensation is just not enough.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/world/bedouin-battle-to-stay-in-their-villages-ends-in-rubble-20111104-1mzzf.html#ixzz1dcengyzn

Listen to 3 Israeli Palestinian, Bedouin & Jewish human rights activists on WBEZ Worldview: Israel plans to displace 30,000 Bedouin Israeli citizens

Listen to the interview broadcast on NPR-affiliate WBEZ here.

Last month, the Israeli government approved a plan to relocate 30,000 Bedouin Arabs living in unrecognized villages and tent encampments in southern Israel to settlements recognized by the state. Critics say the plan forcibly removes people from their ancestral lands and sends them to some of the most destitute parts of the country.

We hear from a wide range of Israeli citizens, both Arab and Jewish, who are concerned about the relocation. The activists are on a tour of the U.S sponsored by the Telos Group and the Campaign for Bedouin-Jewish Justice in Israel and Rabbis for Human Rights-North America.

Rawia Abu-Rabia is a civil rights attorney, a Palestinian Bedouin citizen of Israel who heads the Bedouin project of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel. Michal Rotem is a Jewish Israeli with the Negev Coexistence Forum for Civil Equality in Israel. And Dr. Thabet Abu Ras is an academic who works for minority rights with Adalah: the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel.

Negev Bedouin rally in Tel Aviv against government-approved relocation plan

Protesters object to the cabinet's approval of plan addressing ongoing dispute between the state and the Bedouin over land ownership rights.

By Zafrir Rinat, Ha'aretz, Sept. 20, 2011

Negev Bedouin who oppose new government proposals to relocate some of the region's Bedouin residents and give official status to other currently unrecognized Bedouin communities brought their protests to Tel Aviv on Monday. They were joined by several hundred additional activists, including representatives of organizations active in social and human rights issues.

The protesters are objecting to the cabinet's approval two weeks ago of a plan that would address the ongoing dispute between the state and the Bedouin over land ownership rights. Although the plan grants official recognition to some unrecognized Bedouin communities, it also calls for the relocation of 30,000 Bedouin to recognized villages.

Monday's demonstration started at a building on Rothschild Boulevard that has become a center of the social protest movement. Among those attending the gathering was Sheikh Sayah Al-Turi of the unrecognized Al-Arakib village, which has been demolished and rebuilt 29 times. From there, the demonstrators marched to the government offices in the vicinity of the Defense Ministry headquarters.

"We have to tell the truth. Did we invade the State of Israel or did the State of Israel invade our land and the land of our ancestors when the state was established?" Al-Turi asked, adding that while the Bedouin wanted to forget what happened with the establishment of Israel in 1948, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wanted to revive the issue.

"[Netanyahu] said the Arabs in Israel have a high standard of living, but I live in a village without running water, electricity or medical services," the Bedouin leader said in reference to his unrecognized village. Al-Turi said the Bedouin were not prepared to move to other land.

"I don't understand how Netanyahu wants to make peace with the Palestinians and with the Arab countries if he is incapable of creating good relations with the Arab citizens of his country," Al-Turi added.

Photo: Bedouin protesting in Tel Aviv on Monday. Sign says, “Bedouin land taken, given to cronies.” Photo by: Moti Milrod

Israel approves plan to uproot 30,000 Bedouin, by Joseph Dana, +972 Magazine

The approval of the ‘Prawer Plan’ concerning Bedouins in the Negev desert demonstrates that Israel’s principle of divide and rule, which has been perfected in the West Bank and Gaza, also applies to citizens of Israel living inside 1948 boundaries.

Perhaps the most violent component of Israel’s control over non-Jewish inhabitants since the founding of the state has been the (unequal) distribution and allocation of resources. In Area C of the West Bank, the area designated for full Israeli military and civilian control by the Oslo accords which makes up the majority of land in the occupied territories, Israel has demonstrated its ability to control the Palestinians of the West Bank through the allocation of resources such as water, electricity and building permits. In the West Bank village of Susya, for example, Palestinians are forced to purchase water at rates close to 10 times higher than an Israeli living in Tel Aviv. Their wells are destroyed by Israel’s civilian administration due to lack of permits which are almost impossible to obtain and many living structures are deemed illegally built and subject to demolition.

The deprivation of resources leaves Palestinians helpless in the face of bureaucratic measures which even Kafka could not have imagined. The point of this system is clear, make Palestinian life in area C villages so unbearable that they their only option is to move into cities in Area A, under Palestinian Authority control. The unclaimed land is then expropriated by Israel using out of date Ottoman laws. This amounts to an effective use of the classic colonial practice of divide and rule given the fragmented nature of Area A cities in the West Bank and the settlements which form almost natural barrier between them.

Interestingly, this is not just happening to West Bank Palestinians. Something similar is taking place to non-Jewish citizens inside Israeli territory. This morning, Israel authorized the controversial “Prawer Plan” concerning the resettlement of Bedouins in the Negev Desert.

Authored by Ehud Prawer, head of the Policy Planning Department at the Prime Minister’s Office, the report contradicts an earlier report on how to resolve settlement issues in the Negev desert. The first report, penned by former Justice Eliezer Goldberg, demanded that Israel make every attempt to respect Bedouins living in the Negev, noting in particular the need to allow them to remain in their villages and homes.

The Prawer report, which has been criticized by the Israeli civil liberties outfit, the Association of Civil Rights in Israel, has proposed that as many as 30,000 Bedouins be removed from their homes and villages, against their will and for little reason. Removal has been approved by the government according to a report in today’s edition of Haaretz (Hebrew).

The decision to evacuate as many as 30,000 Bedouins and relocate them to large Bedouin towns such as Rahat, Khura and Ksayfe with some financial compensation has been called by some a “declaration of war on the Bedouin.” It is actually a long time coming if the experience of the Bedouin village of al Arakib is any indication. The village has been destroyed almost 30 times by Israel in an effort to make way for a new Jewish National Fund forest in its place.

During the height of the hopeful J14 tent protests this summer, demands for better Bedouin rights could be heard filling conversations even in the heart of Tel Aviv’s Rothschild boulevard tent encampment. However, hope has taken a backseat in recent days as many of the tent protesters’ demands for Bedouin rights have been dropped, ignored or simply disappeared.

Israel policies of divide and rule, based on classical colonial principles, are not limited to its occupied populations. The adoption of the Prawer plan by the Israeli government has shown that Israel uses this mechanism of control to subjugate all non-Jewish inhabitants under its control from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea regardless of the status of their citizenship.

Reprinted from +972 Magazine

Israel sues 34 Bedouin for costs of repeated demolitions of their homes (Ha'aretz)

Unprecedented law suit seeks NIS 1.8 million in damages from Negev Bedouin; Israel Lands Administration says defendants built homes on land belonging to the state. By Jack Khoury

The state filed an unprecedented suit against 34 Negev Bedouin in Be'er Sheva Magistrate's Court on Tuesday, seeking NIS 1.8 million in damages for the expense repeatedly incurred in evicting the defendants from state land and demolishing their homes.

The state, through the Israel Lands Administration, told the court that the defendants had built homes in the Al-Arakib area, northeast of Be'er Sheva, on what had been state land since the time of Ottoman rule.

"The squatters against whom the suit was brought, of the Abu Madigham and the Abu Jaber families, already have houses built on land the state gave them in the area of Rahat," the court was told by the ILA, representing the state. The ILA said the defendants keep returning to the disputed land, despite court orders prohibiting them from doing so.

The agency's representative told the court the fact that the Bedouin have homes in Rahat, some distance from Al-Arakib, shows they have no lack of housing, and that they are using public relations activities to accuse the state of repression, while they are the ones in breach of the law.

The ILA said that it had leased the lands in question until 1998 for seasonal agricultural activities for Bedouin in the area. But, in 1998, members of the defendants' families ousted the leasees and began squatting on the land.

In 1999, the state took action to evict the squatters, according to the prosecution.

In March 2000, the parties consented to a judgment in which a permanent injunction was issued barring the squatters from the land except to visit a cemetery and a small mosque, the only structures on the land at that time.

A source in the ILA said that suing for damages "can be an efficient way to deal with squatters and illegal construction."

Sheikh Siyah Abu Madigham al-Turi, the leader of the village of Al-Arakib, said neither he nor any of his family was told about the lawsuit, and that he first heard about it from the media.

"We also submit a lot of complaints but no one listens to us, about all the buildings of ours that they destroyed - and the state does not care. The first demolition cost us NIS 4 million. The trees that were uprooted in the village cost us NIS 500,000. They destroyed the village 27 times; that cost us NIS 150,000 each time.

The sheikh said the land belonged to them - and that the matter is still under consideration by the courts.

Dr. Awad Abu-Frih, a resident of Al-Arakib and an activist in the campaign against its demolition, told Haaretz the residents expect compensation from the state, not the other way around. "The state is afraid of a precedent over Al-Arakib, and so they talk to us in a language reserved for enemies who must be defeated, so the hold over the land won't be an inspiration to other Bedouin in the Negev."

Abu-Frih said hundreds of Bedouin, who are joined by Jewish and foreign volunteers, come to rebuild the village every time it is demolished.

The residents and activists are to hold a march Wednesday night from the Lehavim junction north of Be'er Sheva to Al-Arakib.

Dr. Thabet Abu Ras of the human rights group Adalah also said the matter is still before the courts. "The state recognizes ownership rights over the lands of Al-Arakib and is constantly offering them [the Bedouin residents] meager compensation for the land. What's more, a law requiring the builder of a house to pay for its demolition was not passed by the Knesset."

The state has demanded compensation for the demolition of illegally built houses in the past in the Galilee and the Arab communities of central Israel; those cases are still before the courts. However, most of those claims are against homes built on private land, not state land, for sums between NIS 300,000 and NIS 400,000. This is the first time such a large suit for damages has been brought against such a large number of defendants.

Published in Ha'aretz, July 27, 2011

Bedouin Israeli Human Rights Attorney Sana Ibn Bari Statement at the UN Forum on Indigenous Issues

Tenth Session of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues
(New York, 16 to 27 May 2011)
Presented by Sana Ibn Bari on behalf of the Negev Coexistence Forum for Civil Equality

Thank you Mr Chairman. I am Sana Ibn Bari and I will speak on behalf of Negev Coexistence Forum for Civil Equality. I wish to draw your attention to State of Israel’s efforts to displace the indigenous Bedouin from their ancestral land. Since the creation of the sate in 1948, Bedouins have lived as internally displaced citizens within Israel.

Today nearly 80,000 indigenous Bedouin live in so-called “unrecognized villages” which are characterized by a lack of basic services. They are denied running water, electricity, telephone lines, paved roads, schools, medical services and other public institutions.

Further, the Bedouin are not secure in their own homes. All buildings in these villages (about 50,000 structures) are considered illegal by the government even though it is impossible for the Bedouin to apply for building permits. Thus homes can be demolished by the government at any moment, increasing poverty levels and inflicting great hardship on the most vulnerable who are the women and children. In the last 12 months alone, the unrecognized village of Al Arakib has been demolished 21 times, leaving 300 residents exposed to the hot days and bitterly cold desert nights. The recent spike in the number of homes lost this year seems to be in line with the government’s policy decision early last year to triple the demolition rate.

As a Bedouin myself, I am compelled to remind the Committee about these challenges facing the unrecognized villages and the seriousness of the state’s action against its own people. The Arab-Bedouin face the harshest consequences of discrimination through laws as well as policy and practice.

I draw your attention in particular to a new government plan to deal with the Bedouin. The plan resulting from the Praver Commission, established to implement the recommendations of a previous commission, is yet to be publicly released. However, portions of the leaked document reveal that the government will recognize less than a third of the area claimed by the Bedouin under the Israeli legal system to be recognized as their traditional land. Additionally, thousands of Bedouin will be displaced when their villages are transferred to new locations. The implementation of this Praver Commission will have a serious detrimental impact on the Bedouin population in southern Israel. It has become clear to us that the government is moving to disinherit the Bedouin from their ancestral land.

Thank you for turning your attention to these issues.

JNF Challenged on Discrimination: The Forward

But No Precedent Bars Group’s Land Sale Restrictions in Israel

Getty Images: What Remains: In the village of Al-Arakib, a Bedouin woman sits amid the ruins of her family’s house, demolished last year by Israeli officials because it was built without a government permit.

By Josh Nathan-Kazis, Published April 20, 2011, issue of April 29, 2011, The Forward

A challenge to the tax-exempt status of Jewish National Fund’s American arm introduces a new wrinkle into an ongoing debate over how the Internal Revenue Service should treat charities whose foreign operations run counter to public policy of the United States. A coalition of anti-Zionist groups has claimed in its challenge that JNF ethnically discriminates by refusing to sell or lease its land in Israel to non-Jews.

It has long been established that a tax-exempt organization that violates the laws against racial and ethnic discrimination within American borders would likely lose its exempt status. But the IRS has not taken action when that discrimination occurs overseas.

Tax law experts say that the coalition’s argument has little chance of success. “We could argue that this would clearly be illegal and therefore violate the public policy doctrine in America, but the question is, since it’s happening in Israel, can we apply the same analysis?” asked Nicholas Mirkay, a law professor at Widener University.

The current narrow ban on tax-exempt organizations opposing the public policy of the United States has only been applied by tax authorities to organizations that break American law, practice racial discrimination in an educational environment in the United States or advocate civil disobedience.

The ban was affirmed by a landmark 1983 Supreme Court ruling in a case involving Bob Jones University, an evangelical Christian school in Greenville, S.C., that sued the IRS after the agency revoked its tax exemption over the school’s policy banning interracial relationships. The Supreme Court sided with the IRS, stating that “an institution seeking tax-exempt status must… not be contrary to established public policy.”

But the ruling did little to define what the Supreme Court meant by “established public policy.” So far, the precedent has been applied in only a narrow set of instances. Efforts to lobby the IRS to revoke the tax-exempt status of American groups that fund exclusively Jewish settlements in the Israel-occupied West Bank, for instance, have gained little traction. Some opponents of these settlements have argued that they conflict with long-established American foreign policy that labels the settlements as “impediments to peace.” But legal experts say American foreign policy has never been interpreted to fall within the rubric of established public policy.

The new complaint takes a different tack. In a March letter to the IRS, the groups opposed to JNF’s exempt status focus on the alleged racial discrimination practiced by the organization’s Israeli arm — a set of facts closer to the facts of the Bob Jones case, which also dealt with racial discrimination.

The letter targeting JNF was issued by the Stop the JNF Campaign, an international effort targeting the historic Zionist organization, which owns about 13% of all land in Israel. The campaign’s website criticizes JNF for its role in the “on-going displacement of indigenous Palestinians from their land.”

The campaign is endorsed by 108 organizations internationally, according to the website, including American Jews for a Just Peace, Al Awda-NY: The Palestinian Right to Return Coalition, Churches for Middle East Peace and the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network. Jodi Bodner, an American spokeswoman for JNF, did not respond by press time to questions she had requested be submitted by e-mail.

In its letter to the IRS, the Stop the JNF Campaign writes that JNF activities in Israel and the West Bank “are both contrary to the public policy of the United States and inconsistent with activities of a charitable or environmental organization.” It cites what it calls “discriminatory” JNF policies against selling land to Palestinians, among other things. “We want to make it clear that this is an issue of popular concern, that this is an issue of concern among taxpayers,” said Emily Katz Kishawi, an activist with the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network and a spokeswoman for the campaign.

Legal experts who give the campaign little chance of success highlighted the fact that charities violating the public policy doctrine abroad face no risk of losing their exempt status. “If you denied housing to an Arab here in the United States, that would probably violate some housing statute. It would seem to me you have some illegality there,” said Mirkay.

But Mirkay said that this doesn’t mean a charity would lose its exempt status for practicing racial or ethnic discrimination abroad. “There’s nothing that says you can take what would be an illegal act in the United States and say if you’re doing it abroad, that somehow violates public policy,” he said. But he pointed to signs that the agency is taking a hard look at the question.

In March 2010, an official with the IRS division that handles exempt organizations told a tax law convention that the agency was preparing to address the international activities of tax-exempt groups in a new publication, according to The Exempt Organization Tax Review, a trade publication. And in August, a right-wing pro-Israel organization called Z Street filed a lawsuit claiming that its application for tax-exempt status was being delayed because it opposed the Obama administration’s Middle East policies. Tax law experts called the Z Street claims far-fetched, though the case is still pending.

Recent statements “seem to point to the fact that the IRS has definitely got its radar up on this issue,” Mirkay said. “The question is how they’re going to proceed.” Another tax law professor warned that the alleged discriminatory activities of JNF and the facts of the Bob Jones case are not necessarily parallel. “I do not think racial [discrimination] in America, with our own unique history, is the same as the unique situation of Israel and the Palestinians,” Ellen Aprill, a professor at Loyola Law School, wrote in an e-mail. The Stop the JNF Campaign comes at a time when land-use policies of JNF are coming under increased criticism. The U.S. Department of State’s annual report on human rights in Israel, released in March, noted that the organization does not allow land it owns to be leased or sold to non-Jews.

And JNF has come under fire in relation to the repeated demolition of Al-Arakib, an unrecognized Bedouin village in the Negev that sits on land where JNF plans to plant a forest.

Still, not all of JNF’s critics support the campaign’s tactics. “I don’t disagree with the basic statements that the authors of this campaign put forward in their letter,” said Doni Remba, executive director of the Jewish Alliance for Change, which has partnered with Rabbis for Human Rights — North America in its own campaign against JNF policies toward the Bedouin. Remba said that he, too, opposed JNF policies barring land sales to non-Jews.

But he criticized the effort to strip the organization of its not-for-profit status. “This tactic is the tactic of a movement that is anti-Zionist,” Remba said. “It is opposed to the very existence of the Jewish National Fund, and of institutions like it, and of the State of Israel. We are a pro-Israel and Zionist organization, so we support, obviously, the State of Israel, and we want there to be a Jewish National Fund. We believe that JNF has to redefine itself for this day and age.”

Contact Josh Nathan-Kazis at nathankazis@forward.com or on Twitter @joshnathankazis

Trees without Bulldozers: Environmental Justice for the Bedouin, by David Krantz of the Green Zionist Alliance

NEW YORK (March 17, 2011)

When David Ben-Gurion envisioned making the desert bloom, bulldozing Bedouin villages to make way for new groves of trees is not exactly what he had in mind. But, in the name of environmentalism, that is exactly what Keren Kayemet L’Yisrael / Jewish National Fund did recently, bulldozing the village of al-Araqib for the 21st time since last July as part of its $600-million Blueprint Negev project.

It gets worse: In order to plant the new grove of trees, KKL-JNF also bulldozed about 850 olive trees owned by the villagers of al-Araqib.

And the bulldozing has not been bloodless: Village residents and protesters have been greeted by police with rubber and paint bullets that sent some of them to the hospital. When most people buy trees through KKL-JNF, they don't think they're financing the bulldozing of a village and the injuring of protesting civilians — neither of which are roles with which KKL-JNF was charged when it was founded at the fifth World Zionist Congress in 1901. Theodor Herzl, like Ben-Gurion, would be ashamed.

KKL-JNF was first proposed in the early 1880s by the Hovevei Zion (Lovers of Zion) movement and by Prof. Hermann Schapira as an organization for acquiring land for a Jewish national state, encouraging every farmer to work his/her own land, supporting collective farming and building large communities. In his 1896 book Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State) and his 1902 book AltNeuLand, Herzl proposed a Jewish people-funded “National Association for Trees” that would be tasked with afforestation. The leading Zionist thinkers behind the founding of KKL-JNF endorsed Jewish settlement and afforestation of the land; none of them endorsed the destruction of existing villages. Herzl, in fact, called for the creation of a model state, a state where all of its citizens would be treated fairly.

As beneficial as planting trees is, and as much as afforestation is needed and valued, new saplings should not come at the cost of displacing people from their homes, regardless of their religion, ethnicity or land-owning status. Because today is the fast of Esther, and Sunday is Purim, it's all the more important for us to remember the dangers of being a minority. Our collective history should spur empathy for minority groups such as the Bedouin.

Since Blueprint Negev was announced in 2005 by KKL-JNF's sister organization JNF-USA, the Green Zionist Alliance has challenged the project's virtues. The GZA also has channeled its carbon-offset efforts through the Good Energy Initiative, where one of the organization's carbon-mitigating efforts is replacing diesel power generators with solar power in off-the-grid Bedouin villages such as al-Araqib.

The Green Zionist Alliance representatives on the KKL-JNF board of directors — Dr. Alon Tal and Dr. Orr Karassin — have been working to stop KKL-JNF and JNF-USA from bulldozing al-Araqib and other Bedouin villages again. Tal has been meeting with Bedouin representatives and he and Karassin are urging the rest of the KKL-JNF board to put a stop to the evacuation and displacement of Bedouin in the Negev.

Part of the problem stems from questions of land ownership. More than 100,000 Bedouin live in villages like al-Araqib, unrecognized by the Israeli government. Although many of the villages predate the founding of the modern state, Israel declared state ownership over unrecognized villages after the War of Independence, leading, most significantly, to limited animal-grazing rights and to villages' exclusion from access to the energy grid, water and sewer lines, and paved roads. Still, the bulldozing of Bedouin villages en masse only began in earnest with the implementation of Blueprint Negev.

The state has given KKL-JNF the land to many unrecognized villages, including al-Araqib, to develop and forest because, under Israeli law, the land is owned by the state. But that arrangement may be coming to an end soon. The Israeli government is in negotiations with the Bedouin over disputed lands, with the latest Israeli offer likely to be a state handover of half of the Bedouin-claimed lands and billions of shekels in state compensation for the other half.

In the meantime, the Green Zionist Alliance position is clear: KKL-JNF should not be involved in the displacement or evacuation of people, regardless of whether or not they can be considered legally as trespassers. And KKL-JNF should not plant trees on lands whose ownership is being disputed through the country's judicial system.

Fortunately, the Green Zionist Alliance is not alone in this fight. Rabbis for Human Rights North America and the Jewish Alliance for Change have teamed up for the Bedouin-Jewish Justice in Israel Campaign to raise public awareness about the issue and gather signatures on petitions to KKL-JNF and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. And Bustan and the Negev Coexistence Forum have long sought environmental justice for the Bedouin.

Planting forests shouldn't mean destroying villages, and it's time that KKL-JNF ends that equation for the Israeli Bedouin. It's time for a greener, more just KKL-JNF for all Israelis.

Reprinted from Green Zionist Alliance: The Grassroots Campaign for a Sustainable Israel

Erasing Links to the land in the Negev, by Noga Malkin, Foreign Policy/Middle East Channel

Hiding in the cemetery where her parents are buried, Hakma al-Turi, an Israeli citizen, has watched bulldozers demolish her village -- al-Araqib -- more than 20 times. The Israel Land Administration first demolished the 45 structures on this patch of land in the Negev desert eight months ago. When the 300 Israeli Bedouin who lived here defiantly rebuilt tarp-covered shacks, the Israel Land Administration demolished them again and again, the last time on March 7.

But the Land Administration inspectors and the police officers escorting them have so far been reluctant to enter the cemetery adjacent to the village, where the extended al-Turi family has been burying family members since 1907. So Hakma, a mother of nine, devised a plan to protect her most fragile possessions: she put her family photographs, children's medicines, and a small refrigerator full of milk in an improvised wheeled cart. When the bulldozers came, her husband would tie it to their car and drag it from their house and into the cemetery.

But on January 17, as the tenth demolition took place, Hakma's family was too slow. Police officers caught them on the way to the cemetery, commandeered their car, forced in five other "illegal" residents, and drove it at what Hakma thinks was a deliberately reckless speed over unpaved roads to the police station. "They broke the cart and most of what was in it flew out; they confiscated the rest," Hakma told me.

The extended al-Turi family lived in al-Araqib from Ottoman times until 1952, when the Israeli army commander told them to leave for six months for military training, according to a government report citing village elders' testimony. Israeli authorities never allowed them to return, refuse to recognize Bedouin ownership claims, and consider the village illegal.

Al-Araqib is, or was, one of 36 "unrecognized" Bedouin villages -- home to at least 50,000 people -- that, as Human Rights Watch documented in a 2008 report, Israel refuses to connect to basic services or infrastructure such as water, electricity, sewage treatment, and garbage disposal. Israeli officials encouraged the Bedouin to relocate to the seven state-built new towns -- among the poorest communities in Israel. Many al-Araqib residents own homes in one such nearby town, Rahat.

"Those of us who could afford it bought homes in Rahat, because we wanted water and electricity," said Dr. Awad Abu Freih, chairman of the biotechnology department at a nearby college and al-Araqib's unofficial spokesman. "Does that justify evicting me and destroying the village where I was born?"

Hakma's family also settled in Rahat, but moved back to al-Araqib 12 years ago after hearing that the Israel Land Administration intended to plant a forest there, which would be a de facto revocation of their claims to the land. Indeed, according to the plans the Jewish National Fund is carrying out on behalf of the Land Administration, the village is a "recreational area" designated for "forestation."

But the government's professed plans seem to be more about politics than forestation. In March 2010, Israel's then-agriculture minister told the parliament that the Jewish National Fund was planting forests around al-Araqib "in order to safeguard national lands." In January 2011, the Israel Land Administration's development director said to Israeli news media that the agency "has begun preparing the ground for planting to guard the land." When it first demolished al-Araqib in July 2010, the Israeli government uprooted 850 of the villagers' olive trees, an administration spokeswoman told Human Rights Watch. All the while, Israel could easily plant forests in vast areas of the Negev where Bedouins have no land claims without erasing Bedouin links to their land.

Indeed, the day before the government first demolished al-Araqib, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hinted at the real motive, warning in a government meeting that "if we allow for a region without a Jewish majority" in the Negev, that would pose "a palpable threat" to Israel.

As Netanyahu's comment suggests, Israel's attitude to Negev land rights is different when it comes to Jewish citizens. Bedouin constitute 25 percent of the population of the northern Negev, but occupy less than two percent of its land. Over the past decade, Israeli authorities have allocated public funds and large tracts of the Negev to create 59 private ranches and farms, of which only one is Bedouin-owned. These farms stretch over 20,000 acres of land, greater than the total land area of the seven Bedouin towns built to house 85,000 people. Israeli authorities have never produced a justification for this difference in treatment.

The government's discriminatory practices in the Negev sometimes resemble its settlement policies in the West Bank, where Israel limits Palestinians' ability to build while encouraging Jewish settlement expansion, as Human Rights Watch documented in a recent report. In a nighttime operation in January 2004, the then-housing minister had ten mobile homes constructed on land adjacent to al-Araqib for settlement by a Jewish community and promptly connected them to electricity and water. The land, previously promised to Bedouin, is now the Jewish town of Gvaot Bar.

While international entities almost uniformly oppose the construction of Jewish settlements on Palestinian land in the West Bank, however, many of the same actors appear unaware of the simultaneous land grab happening in the Negev. In December 2005 diplomats from 49 countries, including Germany and Spain attended the inauguration of the "Ambassador's Forest," which villagers and an Israeli NGO, Dukium, says is on al-Araqib's land.

Meanwhile, Hakma's family has one remaining asset: a minivan parked in the graveyard. I looked inside and saw the family's clothes, and the younger children's schoolbags hanging neatly on nails. "We used to have a nice house," Hakma told me, searching for photographs to show me. Then she remembered that the police had confiscated them.

Noga Malkin is a Jerusalem-based research assistant for Human Rights Watch.
AFP/Getty images

Reposted from Foreign Policy Magazine, the Middle East Channel