Most of the human rights
issues covered by international media and NGOs concern the
Palestinian population living in the West Bank and Gaza.
Notwithstanding the fact that the Bedouin communities living inside
Israel are being increasingly deprived of their resources, the
discrimination they are facing usually receives less attention by the
international community.
A visitor seeking to embark on an
alternative tour through Israel has to include a Negev tour that
takes into account the situation of the Bedouins living there. With
their Bedouin Reality Tour, Green Olive Tour provides you with the
rare opportunity to listen directly to those, whose voices are rarely heard
and whose futures are typically being decided over their heads, as
shall be seen in the following.
Approximately 160,000 Arab-Bedouins
call the 13,000km² of desert that stretches out in the south of
Israel and that is usually referred to as Negev, or “Naqab” in
Arabic, their home. Having resided in those lands for centuries,
today's Bedouins constitute the most disadvantaged citizens in Israel
and struggle hard for equality, recognition, and pursuing their way
of life. Half of the community lives in government planned towns,
with the remainder residing in 45 unrecognised villages, which lack
any basic services, such as running water electricity, garbage
collection, proper education and other social services. In addition
to that they live under the constant threat of dispossession and
displacement.
Most prominently, the unrecognised village of Al Araqib
has been demolished 35 times in order to give way to a forest that
the Jewish National Fund is planning to plant on Al Araqib's land.
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| A resident of Al Araqib sitting in the ruins of her home, ActiveStills |
More recently, in September 2011, the Israeli government approved a
plan for the regulation of settlement of Arab Bedouin citizens of
Israel in the unrecognised villages in the southern Negev. Instead of
recognising the villages in question, and connecting them to
infrastructure and services, as suggested by the Regional Council of
Unrecognized Bedouin Villages and Bimkom - Planners for Planning
Rights, the Prawer Plan, named after Ehud Prawer, the head of the
Committee who prepared the plan, outlines arrangements for permanent Arab
Bedouin settlement within a clearly demarcated area in the Negev in
the form of a completely unnecessary expulsion of 30,000 people and
their relocation to Bedouin towns. Obviously, no single Bedouin
representative has been consulted or was involved during the planning
process or before the approval through the government and since the
state only recognises those ownership claims to the land that were
filed prior to 1979, there will be hardly any monetary compensation
or compensation in the form of land.
At the time of writing, the
Israeli government has just postponed the deadline for public
objections to the bill and there is still time to respond to this
shameful act of discrimination and land theft. Please, click here and
send your objection to the Prawer Plan.
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