Bedouin Citizens of Israel Are Campaigning for Their Rights, in The Economist

THE Bedouin of Israel are not a happy lot. Once nomadic lords, Binyamin Netanyahu’s government plans to pen tens of thousands of them into cities. This may be Israel’s biggest removal of Arabs from the land since the 1948 war.In the Israeli-occupied West Bank, soldiers knock down their shacks with abandon. Plans are afoot to transfer some 2,000 to the edge of a rubbish dump to make way for more Jewish settlers east of Jerusalem. To cap it all, religious Jews recently torched a mosque in Tuba, a Bedouin town in the north-east of Israel.

Traditionally split into often feuding clans, the nomads have been easy for Israel to divide, conquer, shift and, at least in the Israeli state’s early days, expel. Whole tribes of Bedouin once roamed from Libya to Iraq. But concrete walls and a regime of permits have splintered them, reducing contact, commerce and marriage between Israel’s 200,000 Bedouin, the West Bank’s 40,000 and millions beyond, in Gaza, Jordan, Sinai and the Arabian peninsular.

Forced first into narrow enclaves and then into towns, they have generally downsized from camels to goats. Many have abandoned their herds entirely. The West Bank’s last surviving herders are hemmed in by Israeli military bases, by-pass roads and Jewish settlements. Israeli soldiers confiscate flocks that stray. The settlers see them as trespassers and bar access to springs.

Life in Israel proper is little better. Nearly half the Negev’s Bedouin live in villages often predating the state but officially unrecognised and so denied state support. There are no paved roads, public transport, electricity or water. Alongside Wadi Naam, a dusty Bedouin camp of 4,000 people, a toxic waste plant puffs away.

The Bedouin once hoped to integrate. Unlike most Israeli Arabs, bar the Druze, some volunteered to serve in Israel’s army. But the latest plan for mass resettlement is changing the mood. Mr Netanyahu’s advisers say they are simply rehousing squatters. Even the Palestinian Authority, the proto-government on the West Bank, seems to hold its nose.

Israeli officials say the masterplan for mass resettlement will entail an unprecedented transfer of government land to Israeli Arabs. Bedouin who can prove entitlement will receive half their land, or compensation. “By law the government owns the land,” says Ehud Prawer, the official who devised the plan. “But as long as the dispute continues, the Bedouin can’t cultivate it and we can’t develop it. We need a compromise.” “Concentrated” in new towns, he adds, the Bedouin will get all the services they are now denied.

The Bedouin are refusing to budge. “When a Jewish Israeli wants to go and live in the Negev, it is called the development of the south,” says Rawia Abu Rabia, a Bedou lawyer. “But when Bedouin already living there want to go on living in the same place, it is considered an effort to take over state lands.” Some people say it could be a dry run for transferring Arabs in northern Israel to the West Bank.

The Negev’s Bedouin are forming a Council of Bedouin Tribes. Less genially, Tuba’s youths protested against the torching of their mosque by vandalising the town council building. The sole Bedou in Israel’s parliament, Taleb al-Sana, warns of a Bedouin intifada if the planners persist.

In neighbouring countries, the Bedouin are also on the move. In Jordan, where they once were top dogs, they have staged protests against a monied, urbanised Palestinian elite. In Egyptian Sinai they have risen up against the remnants of the ousted Hosni Mubarak’s security regime.

Might a pan-Bedouin identity yet arise, linking the Bedouin under Israeli rule with the million or so scattered across the region? Many of Sinai’s angry Bedouin carry Israeli mobile telephones, renewing contact across borders after decades of separation. The lucrative tunnels linking Gaza to Sinai are reviving commercial ties. A high birth-rate adds confidence in numbers. A newly educated elite is fashioning a political identity. “We’re all victims of the same policy to dispossess us,” says Muhammad Korshan, a West Bank Bedou activist.

This year he went to New York to ask the UN’s Forum on Indigenous Peoples to recognise the Bedouin as an ethnic-minority people with rights to tribal lands. They have a long way to go. Unlike Berbers and Kurds, they have no flags or leaders. But a belated bid for recognition has begun.

Read More: http://www.economist.com/node/21536645

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.