Ethnic-Cleansing Continues in Israel

SEE UPDATE

From Nadia Ben-Youssef's Huffington Post article "Put a Stop to the Displacement of Bedouin Communities in Israel":

The Prawer Plan is specifically targeting the some 70,000 Palestinian-Bedouin citizens of Israel who continue to live in 35 historic villages, which are unrecognized by the state and therefore denied access to all basic services such as water, electricity, sewage, schools and health clinics. The Prawer Plan seeks to destroy these villages and forcibly displace their residents (again, all citizens of Israel). If fully implemented, the Prawer Plan would be the largest confiscation of Palestinian-owned land since the 1950s.

The Bedouin have lived in the Negev since the 7th century, and, while members of the Palestinian people, have retained a traditional, pastoral existence in the desert. Since the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, the government has sought to dispossess the community not only of their ancestral lands, but also of their very livelihoods, concentrating them into crowded and impoverished urban towns, unsuited to their way of life. Simultaneously, the government has sought to encourage Jewish settlement and agricultural activity in the same area, developing over one hundred small rural communities (kibbutzim and moshavim) as well as sixty individual single-family farmson confiscated Bedouin land.

The Prawer Plan seeks to legalize Israel's discriminatory treatment of its most vulnerable citizens, through a piece of legislation known as the Prawer-Begin bill. The bill passed its first reading (a critical initial vote of approval) in the Israeli Knesset in June of this year, and is expected to be brought for its final readings in the coming weeks. The Prawer-Begin bill joins the wave of discriminatory legislation to have been proposed or passed in recent years by successive Israeli governments that directly threatens the rights of Palestinian citizens of Israel, a 20 percent national minority. While not unique in its explicit and exclusive applicability to only a subset of the population in Israel, the Prawer-Begin bill exceptionally proposes a legal regime for the Bedouin citizens of Israel, which is completely separate from the one that applies to their Jewish neighbors....

The Bedouin community, together with civil society, have proposed an Alternative Master Plan that, on the basis of equality, recognizes the Bedouin villages in their existing locations, using the traditional land system as a foundation for future planning. The community has presented the plan to the government several times, but in response, is witnessing an increase in home demolitions coupled with government approval to build new Jewish towns, Jewish National Fund forests, and industrial or military projects on Bedouin land.

This is a monstrous violation of individual rights and a flagrant act ethnic-cleansing based on the presumed superiority of Jews. Friends of liberty everywhere will demand that the plan be stopped.

UPDATE: The Israeli Knesset has shelved the plan under pressure.

Just Another Day Under Israeli Rule

From Ynetnews
'Turning Bedouin village into Jewish settlement is racist'

Government's decision to convert Umm al-Hiran into Jewish settlement enrages Bedouin residents; 'You can’t just take an Arab and put a Jew in his place. This is Nakba of 2012,' they say

by Ilana Curiel

The continuous struggle of the Bedouin community in southern Israel has once caused a stir in a move Bedouins are calling "racist."

"We will continue fighting. We will not leave our land," residents of Umm al-Hiran, an unrecognized Bedouin village in the Negev slated for demolition, said. The government intends to build a new Jewish settlement called Hiran in place of the village.

"They say they want to evict us because of illegal construction," Salim Abu Al-Kian, 53, told Ynet. "We are ready to reach a settlement on the matter. We're willing to issue permits for homes that have yet to receive them. Unfortunately, the state does not want to help us. They want to expel us from our land. We have no value to them," he said.

After a stretched out legal battle, the National Council for Planning and Construction rejected the motion submitted by the Bimkom organization and Adala, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, and approved the government's plans to establish a new Jewish village in northern Negev.


 

Umm al-Hiran village in the Negev (Photo: Hertzel Yosef)

The new village will be built in place of the Bedouin village which currently houses 500 people.

Amna Abu Al-Kian said that she would be willing to die before leaving her home. "I have six children and we have nowhere else to go to."

"Instead of the state helping us, we are thrown out to the street like animals," she exclaimed.

'We can live alongside Jews'

Other residents of the Bedouin village could not understand the council's decision and offered an alternative solution. "We wouldn't mind living alongside Jews. I wouldn't object to us being neighbors," said Salim Abu Al-Kian.

"You can’t just take an Arab and put a Jew in his place. This is racism. This is the Nakba of 2012," he added.

Another Bedouin resident said "we're citizens of the state of Israel. Israel claims to be a democratic country but it has neglected its citizens for decades. Why not recognize our rights? We have been the most loyal to Israel since its establishment. They can't keep pushing us into a corner."

Attorney Suhad Bshara from the Adala Center said that the "government's decision coincides with Israel's policy to expel the Bedouin residents from their lands and destroy their homes in order to clear the land for Jewish settlements."

The authority charged with regulating Bedouin towns in the Negev said that many of the residents have already found a solution – they are to move to the nearby newly-constructed Bedouin village of Horah.

Hassan Shaalan contributed to this report