The media usually
weren't interested. "So
the Bedouins are demonstrating again? Against the Prawer Law? You mean this law
of Minister Begin? And also Jews will demonstrate with them? A few leftists
perhaps. How do you call this village where they demonstrate? I never heard of
such a place. An unrecognized village? Well then, who can recognize it. Twenty
kilometers from Beershebah? I see. Tomorrow evening at seven? Well, we'll see
if we have somebody free. Say, why are the Bedouins crying so much, anyway? The
government wants to give them modern houses, what's wrong with that. What do
you say? They are going to be expelled from their lands? Tens of thousands? But
Bedouins are nomads. Nomads don't have lands. What do you say? Bedouins aren't
nomads? But everybody knows Bedouins are nomads. No matter, say, is there going
to be something hot in this demonstration? Some clash, something sexy? What?
You are not planning to clash with the police? No action? Well, I will see
whether we have somebody free in the South at that time. Bye."
On lucky
occasions, a photo did make it into the back-pages: a sheikh in traditional
clothing, and behind him young Bedouins in jeans together with students from
Tel-Aviv University holding signs "Prawer will not pass!" in Hebrew and Arabic. But it
quite often happened that a demonstration - even a big one - took place without
the Israeli public knowing about it even by a hint.
Politicians
and commentators were heard saying that this was a good law which would greatly
benefit the Bedouins and what a pity it was that the ingrates did not grasp this.
There were also who said that the law would give the Bedouins far more than
they deserved, that indeed they deserved nothing at all, since the Bedouins “are taking over State
Lands and building on them illegally " and “constitute a demographic threat"
and “organized crime is rampant among them " and so on and so on. "
State Lands" was the term commonly used, which is their status under
Israeli law.
The Bedouins
tried their best to reiterate that they had lived in the Negev centuries before
Israel dreamed of being born, that land ownership by every tribe and every
family within each tribe had been determined by Bedouin Tribal Law and has been
recognized by the many changing rulers who had power in this country. For
example, Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II had not always been a paragon of
enlightenment in his conduct, but when he decided to build the town of Beersheba
in the middle of the desert he made sure to buy the land from its Bedouin owners at full price. When
the land came under British rule, Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill came to Jerusalem
in March 1921, where he met with a delegation of Bedouin sheikhs and assured
them that the tribes’ ownership over their lands would be respected and that
land ownership cases in the Negev would be adjudicated according to Bedouin Tribal
law - a promise which was honored until the day when the last British High
Commissioner sailed away. Also the Zionist movement at the time, when seeking
to set up Kibbutzim in the Negev, saw no problem in approaching Bedouin land owners, paying for the land and
signing with them deeds of sale.
Only when
the Negev became part of the newly founded Israel was the legal situation changed
and with a stroke of the pen all Bedouin lands became State Lands, a property
of the Government of Israel earmarked for the settlement of Jews. Overnight,
the Bedouins became "intruders" and "squatters" in their
own ancestral lands, and many of them were expelled in the early 1950’s. Some
were transferred by force beyond the borders, and those who remained inside
Israel were concentrated in a small area called "The Sayyag”. It is from this
small remnant that the "Prawer Law " would expel them.
The facts
of this history had been written down by Bedouins with a university education and
by several Human Rights organizations. This
was published in articles and brochures and internet websites as well as in several
thick tomes, full of documents and photos. But all this stuff reached mainly
those who were convinced already. Most
citizens of Israel neither knew nor cared.
The Prawer
Law’s public relations were greatly
helped by its being identified with
former minister Benny Begin, a man with a reputation for honesty and integrity who was considered a Liberal
by Likud Party standards – which led other Likudniks, who have no fondness for
Liberals, to terminate Begin’s career early this year. The “Regulation of Negev Bedouin Settlement
Act", to cite its official name, was Begin’s swan song. He gave repeated
assurances that his bill was drafted in
consultation with Bedouins; that it was designed to help them and improve their
conditions and to give their children better opportunities in life. It is quite
possible that Begin himself honestly believed so.
But Human
Rights activists have examined the text of the bill presented to the Knesset
and found that, as in many cases, "the devil is in the details." When
the details were looked into, it emerged that the bill which Begin introduced
in the cabinet and the Knesset was virtually identical with that proposed a
year earlier by Ehud Prawer, former military officer and a senior official of
the Prime Minister’s bureau.
The bill
states that any Bedouin may file a request for a piece of land to be registered
in his name and that "whenever possible" this would be the land on
which he is living at present. But what will determine whether this is "possible"
or "impossible"? The bill does not say. And where will those who are
moved get alternative land? Would it be in one of the Bedouin townships, very densely
populated and poverty stricken, where the State of Israel already concentrated tens
of thousands of Bedouins in the seventies? On this, too, the bill remains silent.
What does
appear very explicitly is the penal clause: a Bedouin dissatisfied with the
deal offered him could not challenge it in court - and if insisting on
remaining at his current location, he would be evicted by force and might be liable
to as much as two years’ imprisonment. At the cabinet meeting where the bill
was adopted as an official policy of the Government of Israel, the estimate was
made that implementation of the law would necessitate the recruiting of several hundred new police officers. By now, even
without the law being finally adopted, the officers have already been recruited
and a new police unit, called "Yoav
" has already started operations in the Negev Bedouin villages.
How many
of the thirty-five “Unrecognzied Villages”, which have existed for many years
though denied links to water and electricity, are condemned by the Prawer Law
to be demolished and razed to the ground? No one knows. How many residents would
be expelled? No one knows this, either. The figure of thirty to forty thousand,
mentioned in various demonstrations and protests, is only a reasonable
estimate. To be more precise, somebody – or a few select somebodies – might
know. Already for some time, journalists with good sources in the corridors of
power tell of a map depicting exactly what the consequences of the Prawer Law would
be on the ground, which villages would be destroyed and which would survive.
But this map, if it exists, is kept a closely guarded secret, as if it were a
top secret military document. Certainly no one had presented it to the Knesset Members
who are expected to vote on this bill.
By the
way, it might be that the similarity to military secrecy is not completely coincidental,
considering that most of the government officials involved in the issue have an
extensive military past. In charge of the implementing the Bedouin Resettlement
Project is none other than Major General ( Ret.) Doron Almog – the same Doron
Almog who in 2005 fled in haste from Heathrow Airport in London when being told
that a British arrest warrant had been issued against him on suspicion of war crimes,
because of his involvement in the destruction of fifty Palestinian houses in
the Gaza Strip .
The Bedouins
have very many good reasons for protesting and crying out with all their might
against this bill, but until this week their cry did not really reach the ears
of the general public. Out of Israel, it got a bit little more of an echo. In many places there were protest demonstrations at
Israeli embassies and institutions (including some by young American Jews ). Quite
a lot of people went into YouTube to view “Fiddler Without a Roof”, the video
produced by " Rabbis for Human Rights and featuring Theodore Bikel , well known
for portraying Tevye in “Fiddler on the
Roof”. " A comparison is drawn between the expulsion of the Jews from the shtetl
of Anatebka in Czarist Russia - with which the musical ends - and the expected
expulsion of the Negev Bedouin, touching many sensitive strings.
Also the
European Parliament held a special session on the Prawer Law and its
implications. This did get covered in the Israeli media, mainly in a tone of exasperation
at the European interference in internal Israeli affairs and broad hints that this
was due to anti-semitism.
The Prawer
Law rolled forward through the Israeli legislative system – approved in its First
Reading after a tense and heated debate and going on to the Knesset Internal
Affairs Committee – towards final approval and entry into the statute books of
the State of Israel and implementation on the ground by the hundreds of police
officers who were already been recruited. But then the government of Binyamin Netanyahu went
one provocation too far. A few weeks ago the ministers went southwards to the
Negev and held a special cabinet meeting at Kibbutz Sde Boker, where Israel’s first
Prime Minister David Ben Gurion lived in his last years and where he is buried.
So as to celebrate Ben Gurion’s heritage, a special “Facing towards the Negev” governmental
program was adopted. Its centerpiece would be the demolition and complete
razing of the Bedouin village of Umm Al Hiran and the creation on its site of a
a Jewish community called - how original
– Hiran. A kind of appetizer towards the main course to be served once the
Prawer Law is enacted by the Knesset. The intended new residents of
Jewish-Hiran-to-be have already been selected and are getting ready to move in.
Interestingly, they are religious-nationalists, mostly young settlers who will
be coming directly from settlements on the West Bank. "The Negev is Eretz-Yisrael,
too, and it is incumbent on Jews to settle there." said their leader on
the radio. " I don’t understand all this fuss. When we went into Judea and Samaria, Peace Now
called upon us to go down to the Negev instead. Now we are really going there. Has
that become forbidden, too?" Yes, mister settler, also within the Green
Line stealing somebody else’s property is a morally unacceptable act.
The Umm
al-Hiran affair was the spark which set off the “Bedouin Day of Rage", on November 30,
2013 – a date which might well go down in the history of the Bedouins in Israel,
and not only theirs. There was a major demonstration of Bedouins and their
supporters at the Bedouin town of Hura in the Negev, as well as solidarity
protests in Haifa and Jaffa and Taybeh
and the Damascus Gate of the Old City of Jerusalem. And the media editors were
certainly not disappointed this time. These demonstrations were very hot indeed,
with a lot of "action " .
"A policeman grabbed a
girl by the throat, right near me. When I tried to convince him to leave her
alone, he hit me in the leg with his club” wrote veteran activist Alma Biblash
a few hours after returning from Hura. "Another officer grabbed me by the
arms and dragged me away. A moment later the second policeman grabbed a little
boy standing next to me, and stuck his face hard into the ground, screaming and
threatening to kill him . A young woman called out “Relax, stop beating everybody!”.
He slapped her hard in the face and she fell. They started spraying the crowd
with a strong stream of stinking water, and I run and run to get away from this
horrible smell. A man ran near me. Suddenly the mounted police came, throwing
him up into the air. I hid behind a parked car with stun grenades exploding all
around. At a quiet moment I decided to go back again towards the buses. On the
way I saw a crying child on the floor, I told him it was dangerous to sit there
like this, but he did not hear me or maybe did not understand Hebrew . Finally
he got up and ran with me. Suddenly somebody called him, he recognized the
voice, snatched away his hand and run off. Finally I got back on the bus, more
or less a safe place. One friend came in with a swollen face, another with a
deep gash in her back, blood on her face and her shirt. Some who were at the
demonstration did not return, they were left in police detention. Some had been
taken off to detention in ambulances . "
The next
day, the Bedouin made the headlines in every newspaper in Israel. "Riot, Disturbances,
Clashes". "Bedouins take to the streets." "Bedouins burst
out in furious demonstrations." "Bedouins rioted and rampaged."
"Violence in the Negev." "Bedouins threw stones at police officers".
" Brutal police violence against Bedouins, children and youths dragged on
the pavement". “The Negev is exploding". “Is The Third Intifada starting
- in the Negev?". The angles of coverage were different and contradictory,
but certainly a few hours of clashes in front of clicking cameras did what a year
of peaceful protests never did. The Bedouins and their problem with the Prawer Law
got to the top of the public agenda .
"This
was only a minority of radical law-breaker, the Bedouin silent majority supports
the government’s plan. We will not yield to violence" declared PM Netanyahu.
Also President Peres declared his support for going on with the legislation as
“the best available solution”. But precisely Netanyahu’s partners on the far right
seem to have a different opinion. "Bennett and Lieberman agreed to torpedo
the Bedouin Law " announced a banner headline in Ma’ariv”. As the reporter
noted, there is only a narrow margin in the Knesset separating the left-wing
which opposes the Prawer Law and the government supporters. If it will also be
opposed by two major right wing parties, Naftali Bennet’s “Jewish Home” and
Avigdor Liebarman’s “Israel is Our Home”, it would be a death blow to the
Prawer law. "This law was a personal project of Benny Begin. Begin assured
us that the Bedouins will support it. Now we see the Bedouins are violently
resisting it, so why should we support it? Why should we give them anything at
all? We will teach the Bedouins a lesson, torpedo this law and then go on to defend the
lands of the Jewish Nation, with no concessions. No holds barred" said KM Robert
Iltov, Lieberman's representative .
Rabbi
Arik Ascherman, a veteran Human Rights activist, compared the “punishing" of
the Bedouins by torpedoing the Prawer Law with the story of the mischievous "Br’er Rabbit" in
Black American folklore, who tricked his enemies bent upon punishing him and
made them throw him into the thicket of thorns which was his home.
And
seriously - with or without the Prawer Law , the struggle for the rights of the Negev Bedouins has
just begun.
Stop the Begin-Prawer
Law -
Demonstration
in Tel - Aviv
Today ,
Saturday , December 7, 2013 at 19:00
Ben-Zion Boulevard
corner King George
We call:
No to the
Begin-Prawer Plan!
No to displacement
of 40,000 Bedouin from their homes!
No to the
destruction of dozens of villages!
Yes to
the alternative zoning plan formulated by the Bedouin community!!!
Stand with the Bedouin Community! Come and be
counted!
(signed)
The Recognition Forum
