In a test case before the Israeli courts, an inhabitant of al
Araqib has been presenting documents and expert testimony to show his
ancestors owned and lived on the village’s lands many decades before
Israel’s establishment in 1948. The judge is expected to rule within
months.
“Tearing down an entire village and leaving its inhabitants
homeless without exhausting all other options for settling longstanding
land claims is outrageous,” said Joe Stork, the deputy Middle East
director of Human Rights Watch.
A force of 1,500 police, including a special riot squad wearing
black balaclavas, entered the village early on Wednesday to pull down a
dozen wooden shacks and a half-built concrete home. The local Aturi
tribe had been in the process of rebuilding the village after it was
razed by bulldozers a week earlier.
The Israeli forces also uprooted 850 olive trees, said Ortal
Tzabar, a spokeswoman for the government’s Land Administration.
Yesterday Adalah, a legal group for Israel’s 1.3 million Arab
citizens, demanded a criminal investigation into what it called “police
brutality” during both demolition operations.
Sawsan Zaher, a lawyer, said assaults on villagers, confiscation of
their property and the security forces’ decision to cover their faces
and not wear identity tags were all designed to “instil fear” in the
residents.
Taleb a-Sanaa, a Bedouin member of the Israeli parliament who was
left unconscious on Wednesday after police dragged him from a tent in
which he was staging a protest, warned that the government was risking
“an uprising in the Negev”.
Six village leaders were arrested shortly afterwards when they
refused to sign a paper committing not to return to al Araqib.
Awad Abu Freih, a village spokesman, said they remained defiant.
“The authorities want to break our connection to this land so it can be
turned over to Jews. They can keep destroying, but we will continue
rebuilding. We will not leave.”
The first demolition of the village, late last month, came shortly
after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned his cabinet that the
growth of the country’s Arab minority, already a fifth of the
population, posed a “palpable threat” to the state’s Jewishness.
“The effect could be that different elements will demand national
rights within Israel – for example, in the Negev – if we allow for a
region without a Jewish majority.”
Last month the government announced a $50 million assistance
programme to encourage army personnel to relocate to Jewish communities
in the Negev.
The Bedouin’s increasing assertiveness about their indigenous
status, which is backed by international groups, has led to a backlash
from officials, who regularly refer to the Bedouin as “squatters” and
“invaders” of state land.
Nili Baruch of Bimkom, an Israeli planning rights group, said a
master plan currently being approved for the metropolitan area of
Beersheva required “more house demolitions and more forced removals of
the Bedouin population”, such as occurred at al-Araqib.
In addition, she said, the authorities had approved a special operation known as “Hot Wind” to carry out the demolitions.
The government’s conflict with the Bedouin dates back to Israel’s
founding, when most of the Negev’s population were driven out of the new
state.
With the highest birth rate in Israel, the surviving tribes have
grown rapidly and now number 180,000, more than a quarter of the Negev’s
population despite waves of state-sponsored Jewish migration.
Israel has refused to recognise most of the Bedouin’s traditional
communities and insists they move into seven deprived townships built by
the government several decades ago. Only about half have done so, with
the rest insisting on their right to continue with their pastoral way of
life.
Al-Araqib has become a particular point of friction because most of
the Aturi moved into a nearby township, Rahat, in the 1970s, after
their lands had been declared a closed military zone.
But faced with severe overcrowding in Rahat and no new land for
expansion, many young families began moving back to al-Araqib a decade
ago.
Like 45 other unrecognised villages, al Araqib is denied all
services, including water and electricity, and its buildings are
illegal.
A recent government commission found that tens of thousands of
Bedouin buildings are subject to demolition orders, though until now
individual buildings have been targeted, not whole communities.
Last month the Beersheva planning committee approved a scheme to
recognise 13 Bedouin villages and force the other inhabitants into the
townships.
In that plan, al Araqib’s lands are designated for a “peace forest”
– funded by an international Zionist organisation, the Jewish National
Fund – a move Mr Abu Freih said was designed to prevent the villagers’
return.
Ms Baruch said the authorities were demanding the inhabitants move to Rahat, even though no homes were provided for them.
Mr Abu Freih said other parts of the tribe’s lands nearby had been
secretly settled by Jews in 2004. In a night-time operation JNF and
government officials set up caravans that subsequently became an
exclusively Jewish known as Givat Bar.
From 2002, Israel began a policy of annually spraying herbicide on
al-Araqib’s crops, in an attempt to move them off the land, until the
supreme court deemed the practice illegal in 2007.
