Stop Persecuting the Bedouins in Israel!

The Israeli government is resolved to escalate the process of dispossessing the Negev Bedouin Arabs of their lands, and concentrating them in towns – a process that has been ongoing for sixty years now. The decision to accept the Prawer-Amidror plan is the culmination of the preparation of a proposed law to evacuate about 30-000-45,000 Bedouins from their homes and demolish their villages. This proposal, racist and discriminatory, and contrary to all international conventions, especially the Declaration of Rights of Indigenous Peoples by the UN, will be discussed by the present Knesset in session and pass as a bill without a civil response (see the law for evacuating Tel Malhata, named “The Peace Law”).
 
In the 1950s Israel concentrated the Bedouins inside the Sayag area to be ruled by martial law until 1966, after expelling them from their lands throughout the Negev. The Sayag area, in the eastern Negev between Beer Sheva, Dimona and Arad, was meant to reduce the territory belonging to Bedouins remaining in the Israeli Negev after 1948 (about 10% of the original population, over 10% of the original area), and make it easier for the State to take over their lands through administrative, legal and legislative means.

Since the late 1960s, the government has been concentrating the Bedouins in backward towns, stealing the rest of their lands and limiting their habitat to ever-diminishing territories. The means of dispossessing the Negev Bedouin population are varied:

-  ‪the State’s non-recognition of the Bedouin villages in the Negev;‬

-  ‪‪demolition of hundreds of Bedouin houses each year in various villages under the protection of aggressive “special” enforcing forces;‬

-  ‪‪demolition of entire villages time and again (Tawayil Abu Jarawal has been demolished fifty times, Al Arakib over thirty), entailing arrests and pressing charges against resistors;‬

-  ‪‪demolition orders issued for entire villages (Al Sira, Tel Arad, Al Sadir, Atir Um Al-Hiran and others);‬

-  ‪destruction of thousands of dunams of grain every year;‬

-  ‪‪denial of basic services such as water and sanitation, electrical power, roads and infrastructures, municipal services such as garbage removal, education services, refraining from building high schools in Bedouin villages which the State refuses to recognize, the lack of health services in some of the villages;‬

-  ‪‪counter-charges pressed by the State against claims made by the Bedouins in the 1970s for about 650,000 dunams, nearly forty years after they have been made;‬

-  ‪‪various government plans aiming to vacate the village areas, such as expanding road 31 and building road 31a, expanding JNF forests by demolishing villages such as Tawayil Abu Jarawal and Al Arakib, and the future demolition of Awajan, Al Masadiya and others, creating new localities for Jews only instead of the villages planned for destruction such as Um Al Hiran and Hiran, or in the new settlement region of “Mevo’ot Arad”;‬
 
The Prawer-Amidror plan approved by the Israeli government on September 11th 2011 is the “last nail” and will escalate the process of dispossession, intensifying the pressure exerted by the State upon the Bedouin population in the Negev.
 
We demand of the Israeli government:

-  ‪‪To cease its persecution of the Bedouin citizens and enable them to live in the style of their own choosing and culture in rural spaces and not just in rural circumstances;

-  ‪‪To recognize their villages according to the plan prepared by the Council of Unrecognized Villages;

-  ‪‪To recognize the ownership claims made by the Bedouins;

-  ‪‪To cancel the Prawer-Amidror plan de-facto;

-  ‪‪Instead of the government plan, a program for development of the Negev benefiting all its inhabitants is to be drawn up, through egalitarian public discussion and the rectification of the injustices resulting from discrimination to date.