02 September 2010By
Jonathan Cook
Nuri al Uqbi’s small cinderblock
home in a ramshackle neighbourhood of Hura, a Bedouin
town in
Israel’s
Negev
desert, hardly looks like the epicentre
of a legal struggle that some observers say threatens
Israel’s Jewish character.
Inside, the 68-year-old Bedouin
activist has stacks of bulging folders of tattered and
browning documents, many older than the state of
Israel itself, that he hopes will overturn decades of
harsh government policy towards the Negev’s 180,000
Bedouin.
For the past few months, Mr al
Uqbi has been in court pursuing a case that has pitted
his own expert witnesses against those of the state.
Mr al Uqbi claims the right to
return to a patch of 82 hectares in the Negev, close
to the regional capital, Beersheva, that he says has
belonged to his family for generations. But as both
the government and the judge in the case, Sarah Dovrat,
seem to appreciate, much more is at stake.
Should Mr al Uqbi win his case,
tens of thousands of Bedouin, who long ago had their
properties confiscated, could be entitled to repossess
their agricultural lands or seek enormous sums in
compensation.
Theoretically, it might also open
the door to claims by millions of
Palestinian refugees
scattered across the
Middle East.
The Negev, constituting nearly
two-thirds of Israel’s territory, has been almost
entirely nationalised by the state, with the land held
in trust for world Jewry. But the Bedouin have
outstanding legal claims on nearly 80,000 hectares of
ancestral property.
Tom Segev, an Israeli historian,
observed that the historical documents presented by Mr
al Uqbi “raise a fundamental question: Who does this
country belong to?”
The lawyers and witnesses in the
case, Mr Segev added, were not just “arguing over a
plot of land. They are arguing over the justness of
Zionism”.
Such high stakes may explain why
over the past few weeks, as Ms Dovrat has been
considering her verdict, the authorities have sped up
plans to plant over Mr al Uqbi’s land a “peace
forest”, paid for by an international Zionist charity
called the
Jewish
National Fund (JNF).
Until now the main obstacle in
their way has been a small village, Al Araqib,
re-established a decade ago by several Bedouin
families who, rather than pursue Mr al Uqbi’s legal
route, have simply reoccupied the land.
Last week, about 300 Bedouin were
again evicted when the police destroyed the village’s
40 homes for the fourth time in less than a month.
Mr al Uqbi, a father of eight,
said that five years ago – after years of challenging
the land confiscation with protests and appeals to the
authorities – he launched the lengthy legal process
that has finally reached the Beersheva court.
“I realised that the authorities
were simply waiting for me to die. When all the old
people are gone, who will be left to come and
testify?”
Mr al Uqbi said his father,
Sheikh Suleiman al Uqbi, and the other villagers were
“tricked” by the authorities in 1951. They were told
that they would have to relocate “temporarily” while
military exercises
were carried out in the area.
Mr al-Uqbi, who was nine at the
time, remembers the tribe being forcibly moved to a
new site, next to Hura, where they have lived ever
since, although their neighbourhood has never been
recognised by the state.
All these years later, Mr al
Uqbi’s home, like his neighbours’, is still illegal,
and they are all denied water, electricity and other
services.
The only option they had been
offered to make their lives legal again, Mr al Uqbi
said, was to move to one of seven government
“townships” set up in the 1970s. All are sunk at the
very bottom of Israel’s social and economic tables.
The families have refused,
protesting that they would also have to renounce both
their claim to their ancestral lands and a pastoral
and agricultural way of life known by the Bedouin for
centuries. The Uqbi tribe’s fate is far from unique.
Tens of thousands of other Bedouin were also moved by
the army and have been faced with a similar, stark
choice.
Today, 90,000 Bedouin, or half
the Negev’s Bedouin population, live in unrecognised
communities, according to a
human rights group.
Mr al Uqbi’s court case has set
two noted Israeli geography professors in sharp
opposition.
The state’s position is
represented by Ruth Kark, of Hebrew University in
Jerusalem, who claims that the
Negev
Bedouin were nomads with no ties
to the land. Instead, she argues, most of the Negev
was considered “mawat”, or dead, and its ownership
passed to Israel in 1948 as the new sovereign ruler.
On these grounds, the state has
long classified the Bedouin as “trespassers” and
“invaders”.
But Mr al Uqbi’s expert, Oren
Yiftachel, of
Ben
Gurion University in Beersheva, has
countered that there was a well-established system of
Bedouin land ownership and crop cultivation in the
Negev long before Israel’s creation.
He says Bedouin deeds – though
never formally recorded – were recognised by the
Ottomans, the British and even early Zionist
organisations such as the JNF, which bought land from
the Bedouin.
A 1921 document from the
public records office
in London unearthed by Mr Yiftachel shows that Winston
Churchill, the colonies minister, signed an agreement
with Bedouin in the Beersheva area that exempted them
from registering their lands and set up a special
tribal court to settle land disputes.
Mr al Uqbi has kept a large store
of documents passed on to him, showing that his father
cultivated crops on the land and paid regular tithes
on the profits to the Ottoman and British authorities.
He also has a copy of the treaty
signed in 1948 between 16 Bedouin tribes, including
the Uqbi, and the new Israeli army, pledging loyalty
in return for a guarantee that they could continue
living on their lands.
Mr Yiftachel said the legal
battles of the Bedouin should be compared to those
waged by other
indigenous peoples
in countries such as Australia, Canada, South Africa,
India and
Brazil.
“Like them, they are fighting for recognition of
‘native title’,” he said.
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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