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Uprooting 30,000 Bedouin in Israel

By Neve Gordon - posted Tuesday, 10 April 2012


"If the state is so adamant about not recognising the villages in their existing locations, I would have at least expected Prawer to state clearly that the government will build a specific number of villages and towns for the Bedouin, to specify exactly where they will be located, and to promise that they will be planned so as to take into account the Bedouin's rural form of life," Hia Noach, the Director of the Negev Co-existence Forum, explained in an interview.

"Instead, the plan, which will soon become law, focuses on creating an algorithm for dividing private property among the Bedouin, while discussing in a few ambiguous sentences the actual solution for the unrecognised villages. Isn't it mysterious that the plan dealing with the relocation of the Bedouin does not include a map indicating where the Bedouin will be moved to?"

Prawer's algorithm is an extremely complex mechanism of expropriation informed by the basic assumption that the Bedouin have no land rights. He is aware that, in the 1970s, as Israel was relocating Bedouin to townships, about 3,200 Bedouin filed petitions to the Justice Ministry, claiming rights over property that had belonged to their family for generations.

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All in all, they petitioned for a million and a half dunams, of which 971,000 were claims regarding property belonging to individuals, and the remaining half a million dunams were land that had been used by communities for pasture. Over the years, the Ministry of Justice has denied claims relating to two thirds of the land, which means that, currently, property claims amounting to about 550,000 dunams, or four per cent of the Negev's land, are still waiting to be settled.

Prawer's plan aims to settle all the remaining petitions in one fell swoop. Ironically, though, his underlying assumption is that all such claims are all spurious. At the very end of the government decision approving the Prawer Plan (Decision 3707, September 11, 2011), one reads:

The state's basic assumption over the years … is that at the very least the vast majority of the claimants do not have a recognised right according to Israeli property laws to the lands for which they have sued … By way of conclusion, neither the government decision nor the proposed law that will be brought forth in its aftermath recognise the legality of the property claims, but rather the opposite - a solution that its whole essence is ex gratia and is based on the assumption of the absence of property rights.

The strategy is clear: Take everything away, forcing the Bedouin to be grateful for any morsel given back. And this, indeed, is how Prawer's algorithm of expropriation works.

First, only land that is disputed (meaning land that families filed suit for 35 years ago) and that a family has lived on and used consecutively (as opposed to pasture areas that have been collective) will be compensated with land, but at a ratio of 50 per cent. So if a person has 100 dunams, lived on this land and planted wheat on it for the past three-and-a-half decades, this person will be given 50 dunams of agricultural land. Most of this newly "recognised land" will not be located on the ancestral lands, but at a location wherever the state decides.

Second, cash compensation for land that had been petitioned for, but held by the state and therefore not used by Bedouin will be uniform, regardless of the location of the land and whether or not it is fertile, remote or attractive.

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Third, the rate of compensation will be about 5,000 shekels ($1,300) per dunam, a meagre sum considering that half a dunam in a township such as Rahat costs about 150,000 shekels ($40,300). The cost of a plot is important, since the families will have to buy plots in the towns. If a Bedouin landowner has five or six offspring, by the time he buys plots for the family, he will be left with little, if any, land for agricultural use. Finally, Bedouin who filed land claims and do not settle with the state within five years will lose all ownership rights.

To where?

Hia Noach estimates that of the existing 550,000 dunams of unsettled land claims, about 100,000, which is less than one per cent of the Negev's land, will stay in Bedouin hands after the Prawer Plan is implemented. But this, she emphasises, is only part of the problem. Another central issue has to do with the actual relocation. Where will the Bedouin be moved to and to what kind of settlement? These are precisely the questions Ehud Prawer is yet to answer.

One detail that has become public knowledge is that the unrecognised Bedouin will be relocated east of route 40, which is the Negev's more arid region situated close to the southern tip of the occupied West Bank. While this part of Prawer's plan is reminiscent of Ben Gurion's strategy of concentrating the Bedouin within certain parameters in order to vacate land for Jews, it may be the case that there is something more sinister at hand. If there are ever one for one land swaps with the Palestinians in the West Bank, what could be more convenient for the Jewish state than handing over some parched Negev land with a lot of Bedouin on it?

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This article first appeared in Al Jazeera. A shorter version of the article also appeared in the London Review of Books.



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About the Author

Neve Gordon is the co-author (with Nicola Perugini) of the newly released The Human Right to Dominate.

Other articles by this Author

All articles by Neve Gordon

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

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