07 August 2010
By
Jonathan Cook
Israeli security forces destroyed a Bedouin village
this week for the second time in a matter of days,
leaving 300 inhabitants homeless again after they and
dozens of Jewish and Arab volunteers had begun
rebuilding the 45 homes.
Human
rights groups
warned that these appeared to be the opening shots in
a long-threatened campaign by the Israeli government
to begin mass forced removals of tens of thousands of
Bedouin from their ancestral lands in the southern
Negev.
The
High Follow-Up Committee, the main political body for
Israel’s Arab
minority, vowed this week to help rebuild the village
for a second time and said it would call on the UN to
investigate Israel’s treatment of the Bedouin.
Al
Araqib village, which is a few kilometres north of the
Negev’s main city Beersheva, has become a symbol of
the struggle by about 90,000 Bedouin to win
recognition for dozens of communities the government
claims are built on state land.
In a
test case before the Israeli courts, an inhabitant of
al Araqib has been presenting documents and expert
testimony to show his ancestors owned and lived on the
village’s lands many decades before Israel’s
establishment in 1948. The judge is expected to rule
within months.
“Tearing down an entire village and leaving its
inhabitants homeless without exhausting all other
options for settling longstanding
land claims is outrageous,” said Joe
Stork, the deputy Middle East
director of
Human Rights Watch.
A
force of 1,500 police, including a special riot squad
wearing black balaclavas, entered the village early on
Wednesday to pull down a dozen wooden shacks and a
half-built concrete home. The local Aturi tribe had
been in the process of rebuilding the village after it
was razed by bulldozers a week earlier.
The
Israeli forces also uprooted 850 olive trees, said
Ortal Tzabar, a spokeswoman for the government’s Land
Administration.
Yesterday Adalah, a legal group for Israel’s 1.3
million Arab citizens, demanded a criminal
investigation into what it called “police
brutality” during both demolition
operations.
Sawsan
Zaher, a lawyer, said assaults on villagers,
confiscation of their property and the security
forces’ decision to cover their faces and not wear
identity tags were all designed to “instil fear” in
the residents.
Taleb
a-Sanaa, a Bedouin member of the Israeli parliament
who was left unconscious on Wednesday after police
dragged him from a tent in which he was staging a
protest, warned that the government was risking “an
uprising in the Negev”.
Six
village leaders were arrested shortly afterwards when
they refused to sign a paper committing not to return
to al Araqib.
Awad
Abu Freih, a village spokesman, said they remained
defiant. “The authorities want to break our connection
to this land so it can be turned over to Jews. They
can keep destroying, but we will continue rebuilding.
We will not leave.”
The
first demolition of the village, late last month, came
shortly after
Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu warned his cabinet that the
growth of the country’s Arab minority, already a fifth
of the population, posed a “palpable threat” to the
state’s Jewishness.
“The
effect could be that different elements will demand
national rights within Israel – for example, in the
Negev – if we allow for a region without a Jewish
majority.”
Last
month the government announced a $50 million
assistance programme to encourage army personnel to
relocate to Jewish communities in the Negev.
The
Bedouin’s increasing assertiveness about their
indigenous status, which is backed by international
groups, has led to a backlash from officials, who
regularly refer to the Bedouin as “squatters” and
“invaders” of state land.
Nili
Baruch of Bimkom, an Israeli planning rights group,
said a master plan currently being approved for the
metropolitan area of Beersheva required “more house
demolitions and more forced removals of the Bedouin
population”, such as occurred at al-Araqib.
In
addition, she said, the authorities had approved a
special operation known as “Hot Wind” to carry out the
demolitions
The
government’s conflict with the Bedouin dates back to
Israel’s founding, when most of the Negev’s population
were driven out of the new state.
With
the highest birth rate in Israel, the surviving tribes
have grown rapidly and now number 180,000, more than a
quarter of the Negev’s population despite waves of
state-sponsored Jewish migration.
Israel
has refused to recognise most of the Bedouin’s
traditional communities and insists they move into
seven deprived townships built by the government
several decades ago. Only about half have done so,
with the rest insisting on their right to continue
with their pastoral way of life.
Al-Araqib
has become a particular point of friction because most
of the Aturi moved into a nearby township,
Rahat, in the 1970s, after their lands
had been declared a closed military zone.
But
faced with severe overcrowding in Rahat and no new
land for expansion, many young families began moving
back to al-Araqib a decade ago.
Like
45 other unrecognised villages, al Araqib is denied
all services, including water and electricity, and its
buildings are illegal.
A
recent government commission found that tens of
thousands of Bedouin buildings are subject to
demolition orders, though until now individual
buildings have been targeted, not whole communities.
Last
month the Beersheva planning committee approved a
scheme to recognise 13 Bedouin villages and force the
other inhabitants into the townships.
In
that plan, al Araqib’s lands are designated for a
“peace forest” – funded by an international Zionist
organisation, the
Jewish National Fund
– a move Mr Abu Freih said was designed to prevent the
villagers’ return.
Ms
Baruch said the authorities were demanding the
inhabitants move to Rahat, even though no homes were
provided for them.
Mr Abu
Freih said other parts of the tribe’s lands nearby had
been secretly settled by Jews in 2004. In a night-time
operation JNF and government officials set up caravans
that subsequently became an exclusively Jewish known
as Givat Bar.
From
2002, Israel began a policy of annually spraying
herbicide on al-Araqib’s crops, in an attempt to move
them off the land, until the supreme court deemed the
practice illegal in 2007.
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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