The Militant (logo)  

Vol. 79/No. 14      April 20, 2015

 
Bedouin demand Israel
recognize Negev villages
 
BY SETH GALINSKY  
“We don’t have electricity. We don’t have health care. It means no paved roads and in the winter they’re so muddy you can barely drive your car. The government can demolish your house any second,” Amir Abo-Kweder said by phone April 6, describing conditions in Al Zournog, where he lives, one of 36 unrecognized Bedouin villages of the Negev in southern Israel.

Abo-Kweder, an organizer with Shatil, which fights for civil rights in Israel, was one of hundreds who joined a march from the Negev to the house of Israeli President Reuven Rivlin in Jerusalem just days after the elections to Israel’s parliament. The four-day march, demanding recognition of the villages and access to basic services, was initiated by Ayman Odeh, head of the Arab-based Joint List, which won third place in the elections.

When the State of Israel was formed in 1948 most of the up to 95,000 Bedouin living in the Negev were expelled or fled. While the 11,000 who remained were given Israeli citizenship, the government has systematically dispossessed them of the land they had lived on for hundreds of years.

“The state demanded all kinds of complex legal requirements,” Michal Rotem, a spokesperson for the Negev Coexistence Forum for Civil Equality, who helped organize the march, said by phone from Beersheba March 30. “They made it impossible for the Bedouin to prove their land rights. The government then argued that since no one owned the land, it belongs to the state and built Jewish villages there.”

The Israeli government has tried to relocate the Bedouin, now numbering more than 100,000, to a handful of authorized townships. Entire villages have been repeatedly razed by the government and then rebuilt by the Bedouin.

“My late grandfather had 40 sheep and goat, it was an essential part of our identity,” Abo-Kweder said. “But now we have very little livestock.”

“Today we work as laborers in Israeli factories, in construction or on farms. In the last decade more of us have become teachers and government employees,” he said. “Some own small businesses.”

While the Bedouin villages, including 13 that were granted legal recognition, can’t get even basic water and electrical service, “you have prospering Jewish communities with electricity and granted subsidies for agriculture just a few minutes away,” Abo-Kweder said.

“I am Jewish,” Rotem said. “I’m happy that we held the march after the elections. I think the biggest problem is that not enough people in Israel are aware of the problem, that the Bedouin are without running water, that their children don’t have schools. The elections didn’t change anything on the ground.”  
 
 
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