Los Angeles Event: Civil Rights and Wrongs in the Negev, with Devorah Brous, April 23, 2011 12 noon

When: Saturday, April 23, 12:00pm - 1:30pm

Where: IKAR, 5870 West Olympic Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90036 (map)

Description: Join us after Shabbat lunch for a special discussion. For some Jews, Israel's Negev Desert is the "last Zionist frontier," a "barren wasteland" in need of development. For Israel's Bedouin citizens, it is an ancestral homeland, rich with tradition and sustenance. Arabs and Jews live side by side in the Negev, but their access to basic necessities such as water, energy, and medicine varies widely. With a rapidly expanding population on a small land mass with dwindling resources, the age-old Zionist question to develop or to preserve continues to arise. The development of the Negev for a new wave of Jewish settlements is increasingly undermining Israel's commitment to democracy and civil rights. Must we support development at the expense of democracy in the Negev?

About the Speaker: Devorah Brous lived in Israel and worked with Bedouin for 15 years. She is the founder of BUSTAN, a Jewish/Bedouin civil rights and environmental justice NGO in the Negev, where she served as Executive Director for 9 years. She currently serves as co-director of the Campaign for Bedouin-Jewish Justice in Israel, a Project of Rabbis for Human Rights-North America and the Jewish Alliance for Change. She holds two Masters degrees in Israel Studies and Development Studies.

Listed on the IKAR website events calendar

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

Tree Planting Near Omer: Environmentalism or Inequality?, by Rachel Metz

When seeing the way in which the mainstream Jewish press writes about issues that affect the Negev Bedouin, I sometimes get the impression that the authors are like the fourth child at Passover who does not even know how to ask a question. Because unrecognized villages are not on the map they are treated as if they do not exist. But when I read this article about a Tu B’Shvat tree planting in the vicinity of the town of Omer, my immediate question was, “Where near Omer?”

This affluent community near Beer Sheva is bordered by unrecognized villages, which begs the question of whether the land on which trees are being planted is anybody’s home. With that in mind, the quote in the article from a (Jewish) tree planter that, “'In a place where we plant trees, people live and the State prevails'” becomes an ominous declaration of the lesser rights thought to be due Arab citizens of Israel rather than the optimistic, pro-environmentalist message it might initially seem to be.

Where are the Jewish Greens?, by Devorah Brous, Tikkun

Published in Tikkun, Jan. 20, 2011

Jewish environmentalists have elevated a minor symbolic mystical ritual of holding a Tu B'Shvat Seder into an annual and provocative communal celebration. This week is Tu B'Shvat - the Jewish Earth Day that is traditionally marked by planting trees and eating their fruits in the dead of winter to symbolize that lifeforce will again rise to bear fruits in what appears dormant.

In advance of the Jewish National Fund (JNF) tree planting activities this Tu B'Shvat, the Bedouin village of Al Arakib was once again demolished. For the ninth time. This time, rubber bullets and batons were used by Israeli police in riot gear. Leading Bedouin and civil rights activists, Jewish professors and village residents were arrested and hospitalized during protests over the past few days in the escalating yet still largely unseen struggle in the Negev. Bedouin are now to be fined the costs incurred during the demolitions. Where is the outrage among Jewish Greens?

While planting a JNF tree may seem innocuous, make no mistake: it is a deeply political act. For every Jew who has ever planted a tree in Israel, whether you framed or tossed the certificate, or whether there's a gold plaque memorializing your family name, afforestation is done in our collective name. When we plant Bar/Bat Mitzvah trees, or when Evangelical Zionist Christians fund a JNF forest that displaces an entire Bedouin village, we are taking a position in the Jewish/Arab conflict. So although you may see tree planting as a way to reduce your carbon footprint and a symbolic yet tangible way to support the State of Israel, you may not be aware of the politics behind where your tree is planted. Each tree planted in the Negev is intended to make settlement more attractive for the 250,000 Jews the JNF is subsidizing to “redeem” desert lands for Jewish control.

The continuous rebuilding of Al Arakib after each demolition is the symbolic face of Negev Bedouin resistance. The Israeli government has used excessive violence to coerce villagers to accept meager compensation and to bulldoze the disputed Bedouin land for the JNF’s new “God-TV Forest” -- yet the Bedouin struggle remains non-violent. The Bedouin remain more determined than ever to hold steadfast to their lands. Put in the same position, I would do exactly the same.

Environmentalism in Israel cries out for re-branding. It seems apt to inaugurate a new term to demystify the celebrated image of “Greens” who claim to champion the care-taking of Israel’s resources. These “Greens” pay lip service to a tokenized Arab minority and remain silent in the face of outrageous environmental destruction to Arab villages, homes, and resources.

ECOnoclasts - eco-minded iconoclasts - would revolutionize status quo “green” movements by advancing an equitable stewardship of public resources with balance and sustainability for all people, regardless of demographics or zoning policies. ECOnoclasts would challenge the prevailing elite brand of environmental ideology in Israel that preserves or develops in order to further the hegemony of dominant groups. Through word and deed, ECOnoclasts would challenge discriminatory control over natural resources for public possession or private ownership. The ECOnoclast would expose the conditional and especially deceptive environmentalism that protests, researches or advocates using inclusive language to define its objectives, like, “the forest is a shared national symbol.”

ECOnoclasts would analyze and connect the dots on tactics of omission and commission - such as tree-planting to expand State boundaries; impose title; or confiscate land. ECOnoclasts would expose when “greens” omit controversial environmental issues in an effort to remain bipartisan, and, of course, funded. ECOnoclasts would eviscerate “greens” who support the agro-tech achievements of Negev greenhouses on Jewish farms that exploit Israel’s dwindling water reserve to export water-intensive Grade A produce - since their Arab neighbors are denied access to drinking water unless they relinquish their land claims and move to Arab-only urban ghettos built by the State. This would unmask the Green dimension of the Jewish/Arab conflict.

Until now, there is no forum for the ECOnoclast to be heard. It's much more palatable to discuss sourcing our fruits locally during our Tu B’Shvat seders than how our tree planting holiday has escaped all irony by becoming an occasion for bulldozing non-Jewish homes and expelling people to plant forests. Perhaps most disturbing is how rare it is to conduct an unfiltered and honest conversation about tree planting in the “organized” Jewish world, since the JNF funds most Jewish environmental organizations poised to speak out.

Whether you take a position on Bedouin rights and State wrongs; whether you think that urbanization equals modernization; whether you believe the JNF should plant to “redeem” inhabited Arab lands regardless of their standing in Israeli courts; we should be able to engage in open discourse without burying it under Tu B’Shvat trees, or the rubble of demolished Arab homes.

While Israeli politicians take strategic measures to plant over Al Arakib village and urbanize Bedouin against their will, let this Tu B’Shvat remind us that what appears dormant will once again rise with sap and bear fruit. Help buttress Negev NGO’s that work to bear the fruits of cooperation in the non-violent struggle to recognize Al Arakib. Ultimately, this will yield more fruit than any forest.

*

Devorah Brous lived in Israel and worked with Bedouin for 15 years. She is the founder of BUSTAN, a Jewish/Bedouin civil rights and environmental justice NGO in the Negev, where she served as Executive Director for 9 years. She currently serves as co-director of the Campaign for Bedouin-Jewish Justice in Israel, a Project of Rabbis for Human Rights-North America and the Jewish Alliance for Change. She holds two Masters degrees in Israel Studies and Development Studies and now lives in Los Angeles.

Photo Credit: Negev Coexistence Forum for Civil Equality

Seeing the Unseen: The Forgotten Palestinian-Israeli Problem, by Devorah Brous - Jerusalem Report, Jan. 3, 2011

To view the article in PDF as it appears in the Jerusalem Report, please click here.

In late November, for the seventh time in the last five months, Israeli authorities razed the “unrecognized” Bedouin village of Al-Arakib in the Negev, evicting 300 Israeli citizens from their homes. And for the seventh time the residents began to rebuild in a Sisyphean struggle with the Jewish state.

Even before the desert dust had settled, two major Jewish National Fund (JNF) projects were almost completed in the immediate vicinity of the village. Funded by Evangelical Christian Zionists from the “Land of Promise” and “GOD-TV” “to invite the Second Coming of Christ,” half of a new one million tree "GOD-TV Forest" already extends in a vast swath near Al-Arakib. And the Israel Antiquities Authority auspiciously uncovered the ruins of a 6th century Byzantine church at the entrance to the brand new JNF settlement of Givot Bar next to Al-Arakib.

Both JNF projects highlight a familiar cycle: Arab land is expropriated, cleared and re-zoned for State use to prevent Arabs from returning. Despite national master plans designed to keep development accountable, there is no effective process in place that enables full democratic participation of all interested stakeholders in decisions on future building and planting schemes in the Negev.

For example, to the surprise and chagrin of watchdogs on the ground, Bedouin wheat and lentil fields were uprooted by the State over a five-year period to establish Givot Bar. Then the GOD-TV forest sprouted out of nowhere and now church excavations have begun without any public scrutiny. The Israel Lands Administration offered Al Arakib villagers a very low rate to rent ‘agricultural land’ from the State. Since development on such land is prohibited, Bedouin would be legally barred from building homes there, so they refused the offer. Beyond pragmatic concerns, it’s a matter of principle: Why should they rent what they have long tended, grazed and believe they already own?

Most people are largely unaware of the non-violent struggle waged by some 74,000 Bedouin citizens of Israel’s “unrecognized villages.” These villagers are resisting Israel's attempts to relocate them in government-built and Arab-only “recognized cities” where roughly 96,000 landless Bedouin have moved. Though these cities boast better government services than the unrecognized villages, they suffer from years of state underfunding and consistently report the country's highest rates of unemployment and crime. Furthermore, they have proven not only inhospitable but destructive to an ancient Bedouin culture of dry lands farming and animal husbandry.

Bedouin in the “unrecognized villages” argue their land tenure cases vociferously in court and resist pressure to sign statements barring them from their lands. They choose to remain in tin shanties or cement block homes without electricity, sewage systems or running water, with one clear aim: to hold onto their village grounds. They challenge the discriminatory institutional, zoning and legal mechanisms used to deny building permits and keep Arab villages outside the state's planning frameworks.

Appeals to have their land rights recognized are doomed from the outset. Since the Knesset has passed laws enabling Bedouin acreage to be declared "state land," land claims are systematically denied under jurisprudence with a built-in bias. Deemed "illegal squatters" lacking land title, Bedouin are seen as "serial invaders" who "infiltrate and seize state land." Most recently, Israel’s parliament approved on preliminary reading a bill proposed by Avigdor Lieberman's Yisrael Beitenu party that would require owners of “illegal construction” to pay for the demolition of their homes. Far from serving justice, the law has become the hand-maiden of Jewish ultra-nationalism.

Despite fierce criticism by environmentalists and civil rights advocates, the JNF is working to entice an additional 250,000 Jews to settle in newly built desert neighborhoods like Givot Bar. Their ambitious “Blueprint Negev” plan is bankrolled by private American charitable support, unleashing a “new Zionism” that heeds David Ben Gurion’s clarion call to settle the Negev.

Such development is sold as “progress.” Yet many donors remain unaware that planting Bar and Bat Mitzvah trees in the “barren desert” is not mere tzedekah (charity), but a political act that deepens the Jewish/Arab conflict over land and resources. What could have been a noble pursuit is, in actual fact, discriminatory development designed to corral Bedouin into ever more constricted tracts of land in order to reclaim Arab-held territory for Jewish or Evangelical Zionist use.

JNF claims that tree planting is a shared national symbol that benefits Jews and Arabs. But it is also an invisible agent of conquest. Within no time, trees will effectively conceal evidence of the former inhabitants of Al-Arakib and the Negev Arab land rights struggle will remain unseen.

The first step in truly transforming the Blueprint of the Negev is to stop the nearly 200 Bedouin home demolitions a year, which the Netanyahu government has promised to triple. The second step requires seeing the forest through the trees. The JNF and government bodies must work with local communities to develop Israel’s Negev in a way that is equitable, sustainable and culturally appropriate for the region’s diverse inhabitants, including the Negev Bedouin, Israel’s most disenfranchised minority.

Devorah Brous, the founder of "Bustan," a Jewish/Bedouin environmental justice NGO in the Negev, is now based in Los Angeles, where she serves as co-director of the Campaign for Bedouin-Jewish Justice in Israel, a project of Rabbis for Human Rights-North America and the Jewish Alliance for Change (www.bedouinjewishjustice.blogspot.com).

Negev Bedouin, the IDF and Religion in Israel: News Analysis by Rachel Metz - Special to the Campaign for Bedouin-Jewish Justice in Israel

The Israel Defense Forces
Israel’s Defense Ministry has recently requested funds to move several military units to the Negev. In theory this is a good idea – the taxpayers save money and a peripheral area of the country gets an economic boost. The problem is that the Israeli government has a bad history of using such development projects to displace indigenous Bedouin from their lands without providing compensation that allows them to provide for themselves.

Many of the Bedouin displaced by Israel’s military forces were moved to the seven government-established Bedouin towns. Unfortunately, these towns, like the rest of Israel’s Arab areas, suffer disproportionately from low state investment in public infrastructure and services.

Other Bedouin have opted to stay on, or as close as possible to, their land, living in villages that are unrecognized by the state. Because these villages do not appear on maps, the health of their residents is not taken into account in planning decisions, and these villagers, particularly those living near the Ramat Hovav industrial site, suffer disproportionately from cancer, birth defects, asthma, and other problems. (It’s worth noting that the Bedouin are hardly the only indigenous people to suffer and die from health ailments that nobody else cared enough to prevent. In the U.S. context, perhaps the most glaring example is the Navajo, whose cancer rates among teenagers living near uranium mine tailings are seventeen times the national average.)

With the IDF being the biggest polluter in Israel, construction of a new base begs the question of what will happen to those currently living on the construction site.

RELIGION
The U.S. State Department has released its annual Religious Freedom Report for Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories. This report notes that Israel’s budget covers the costs of construction and maintenance for [orthodox] Jewish places of worship but does not cover construction at all, and maintenance only minimally, for non-Jewish places of worship. To put it bluntly, this discriminatory state policy forces members of some religions and denominations (including Reform and Conservative Jews) to subsidize the worship of orthodox Jews.

Living in Beer Sheva, I certainly felt the effects of this policy. Though there were several orthodox synagogues within walking distance of my apartment and dozens if not hundreds in the city as a whole (which no doubt benefited from the city tax that I had to pay but that they don’t), there is only one non-orthodox synagogue in the city, and it is privately funded.

The city’s historic mosque, which dates from Ottoman times, has been used for non-religious purposes since 1948. Despite efforts by the city’s roughly 5,000 Muslim residents, the city will not allow it to be reopened as a mosque. The religious needs of Israel’s non-orthodox residents are clearly not being met the way anyone committed to equality would want.

In Rahat, the largest Bedouin city with its population of over 40,000, Islamic Movement activists sought to fill this void by building a mosque. A few months later, in early November, the Israel Lands Administration demolished it. Over 1,000 local residents protested the demolition and the city declared a one-day general strike of all city services, including education, in protest as well. Were Israel trying to increase support for political Islamic groups it could not have done a better job of it.

Rachel Metz lived in Beer Sheva, Israel from 2007 through 2009 while earning her master's degree in Middle East Studies from Ben Gurion University. Her experiences in the Negev included interning for BUSTAN, a Jewish/Bedouin environmental justice NGO.

That same passion for social justice motivated her to combat U.S. poverty through AVODAH, the Jewish Service Corps, work on the largest reservation in the U.S., and write articles, opinion pieces and letters to the editor for publications including In These Times, The Jerusalem Post, and The Washington Post. She currently lives in the Washington, DC area where she works in environmental protection.