11 December 2009
By
Jonathan Cook
Some 35,000 Bedouin
residents of Israel’s southern Negev have been denied
the right to hold their first local council election
after the Israeli parliament passed a law at the last
minute to cancel this month’s ballot.
The new law gives the
government the power to postpone elections to the
regional council, known as Abu Basma, until the
interior ministry deems the local Bedouin ready to run
their own affairs.
Legal and
human rights groups
say the move is an unprecedented violation of Israel’s
constitutional principles. Taleb a-Sana, a Bedouin
member of Israel’s parliament, has written to its
speaker warning that “it is not possible to have
democracy without elections”.
The vote in Abu Basma
was scheduled to take place six years after the
council was established under the transitional
authority of a panel of mostly Jewish officials
appointed by the interior ministry.
Critics say the
government changed the law specifically to avoid
bolstering the position of the Bedouin residents, who
are engaged in a legal battle with the state for the
return of ancestral lands confiscated decades ago.
“The Bedouin have a
claim on a large area of the Negev and the government
wants someone ruling the council who is on its side
until the case is settled to the state’s advantage,”
said Thabet Abu Ras, who was head of an empowerment
scheme for Abu Basma’s
residents until 2007.
The residents of Abu
Basma are among 90,000 Bedouin in the
Negev desert who have
been denied any local representation since Israel’s
founding in 1948. For most of that time the state has
refused to recognise any of their villages.
According to officials,
the Bedouin are living illegally on state land and
must move to a handful of locations in the Negev
approved by the government.
Bedouin leaders counter
that their villages predate Israel’s creation and that
the approved locales are so tightly confined that they
cannot maintain their traditional pastoral way of
life.
Israel has faced
mounting criticism for its treatment of the 45
so-called “unrecognised villages”, which are denied
all public services, including electricity and water.
The inhabitants are invariably forced to live in tents
or tin shacks because concrete homes are subject to
demolition.
Instead, since the
1970s Israel has established a half dozen “townships”,
to which the Bedouin in the unrecognised villages were
expected to relocate. But the townships, whose rates
of unemployment and poverty are the highest in the
country, have attracted only half of the Negev’s
180,000 Bedouin, mostly those without any claim to
land.
In what many Bedouin
hoped was a change of tack, however, the government of
Ariel Sharon launched
a plan in 2003 to begin a process of recognising nine
of the larger villages, home to 35,000 Bedouin.
They were grouped into
a new regional council called Abu Basma, with the goal
of encouraging the inhabitants of the other
unrecognised villages to move into its jurisdiction.
Under the regional
councils law, the interior ministry was allowed to
appoint a panel of officials to oversee local services
for four years while the residents prepared to run the
authority themselves, said Gil Gan-Mor, a lawyer with
the Association of Civil
Rights in Israel (ACRI).
He added that the
interior ministry then sought, under extraordinary
powers, two year-long extensions. But shortly before
the deadline for staging elections was reached this
month, the government pushed through an amendment to
postpone elections indefinitely.
“The interior ministry
says the law could be applied to any regional council,
but in practice it is clear that this law was drafted
with only Abu Basma in mind,” he said. “The aim is to
continue controlling the lives of the Bedouin,
treating them as though they cannot look after
themselves.”
ACRI and another group,
Adalah, a legal centre for Israel’s Arab minority,
will challenge the law in the
Supreme Court next month.
Alaa Mahajneh, a lawyer
with Adalah, said the regional council’s current panel
was dominated by Jewish officials and headed by Amram
Kalaji, a former director general of the interior
ministry identified with the right-wing Orthodox
religious party Shas.
Mr Abu Ras, a geography
professor at Ben Gurion
University in Beersheva, said it was impossible
to separate the postponement of the elections from the
wider issue of Bedouin land claims.
Abu Basma is the only
one of 47 regional councils in Israel that does not
have territorial continuity, he said. “The council’s
jurisdiction is restricted to the built-up area of
each village and does not include the lands between
the villages or the surrounding land. Despite the
Bedouin way of life, Abu Basma has not been allocated
any agricultural areas.”
He added that the chief
concern of Israeli officials, although unspoken, was
that the Abu Basma region was the only territorial
buffer between the West Bank and Gaza. “If there is a
Palestinian state, Israel does not want the Bedouin
controlling lands that connect those two
Palestinian territories.
It would rather the Bedouin were concentrated in as
small a space as possible.”
According to Nili
Baruch, an Israeli planner, Abu Basma has been starved
of land compared to its Jewish counterparts. Its
jurisdiction extends to only 3,400 hectares, making it
the most densely populated regional council in the
country.
By contrast, the 10
other regional councils in Israel’s south – home to a
total of 45,000 Jews – have jurisdiction over a vast
swath of rural land, nearly 1.2 million hectares.
Yeela Ranaan, a
lecturer at Sapir College in Sderot and spokeswoman
for the Regional Council for the Unrecognised
Villages, an unofficial Bedouin
advocacy group, said
the creation of Abu Basma had been a “partial
victory”.
Recognition meant those
homes of Bedouin living in the centre of the villages
were no longer under threat of destruction, roads
could be paved, and schools opened, she said. But the
planning process in all the villages was stalled and
land claims were not being addressed.
In an apparent vote of
no-confidence in Abu Basma, only 7,000 of the 35,000
Bedouin residents have registered with the regional
council so far, said Mr Gan-Mor. Shortages of schools
and a failure to improve living conditions meant most
had chosen to remain enrolled for services with the
nearby townships.
The Bedouin’s land
dispute with the government is over 80,000 hectares.
Mr Abu Ras said he believed the government hoped to
force an evacuation of all the unrecognised villages
over the next three years, forcing the inhabitants
into the already confined areas available to Abu Basma.
“Only once there is a
settlement in its favour will the government think
about elections for the regional council.”
Tal Rabina, a spokesman
for Abu Basma council, said the criticism that Bedouin
rights had been violated by the law change reflected a
“political agenda”.
“At this stage, when
there are still many disputes between villages and
families, most of the residents prefer that someone
outside the community makes decisions. The current
leadership brings a great deal of experience and
professionalism to the task.”
Jonathan Cook is a
writer and journalist based in
Nazareth, Israel.
His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of
Civilisations: Iraq,
Iran and
the Plan to Remake the
Middle East” (Pluto
Press) and “Disappearing Palestine:
Israel's Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books).
His website is
www.jkcook.net.
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