The Naqab (Negev) Under the Microscope: Roots, Reality, Destiny
These eyes gazing at the Naqab, gazing at home in longing, passion and pain. They are the eyes of the natives, the original people of the home and the land holding tight to its past, present and future. Greedy are the eyes of the authority, desiring to end life in the Naqab, as it is currently lived, to uproot its people and fence them in Ghettos.
The area is restricted under the pretence of development and civilizing the Bedouins. This tragedy is part of the discourse of the ongoing Nakba; they all became refugees and displaced overnight.
They are a genuine part of the Palestinian people, but they are the forgotten ones. While the alarm bells ring more loudly today than at any other time in the past, Palestinian citizens from the Galilee and the Naqab (Negev) face one of the hardest and most dangerous times. They are having to confront laws that endanger the Palestinians and their land. With Israel’s family reunification law, laws and regulations of construction and home demolitions, and ‘voluntary’ transfer plans, the situation in the Naqab is serious, dangerous and tragic.
The Naqab (Negev) covers two-thirds of historic Palestine. It stretches over an area of 13 million dunams from Al Faloujah, a village that was sieged, occupied and then totally destroyed by Zionist forces in 1948, in the north to Um Rashrash, now Eilat, on the Gulf of Aqaba in the south. The city of Beer Es-Sabe’ (Beer Sheva’) witnessed some golden years as a major city of the region that attracted people from the surrounding areas to its markets, shops and mosques before it fell in 1948. With the fall of Beer Es-Sabe’, the 110,000 strong Naqab population was expelled. They were scattered and forced to move towards Egypt, Sinai, Jordan, Hebron and Gaza. This is how 90 percent of the Naqab Arabs were displaced. The social structure that existed prior to 1948 collapsed. Like the rest of the Arab villages and cities, military rule was enforced over them and they were banned from working and learning, which led to their becoming uneducated, poorer and more isolated.
Most of the Bedouin inhabitants were gathered by force into contained, remote and arid areas, so that they would not create any obstacle to the rapidly expanding Jewish settlements in the Naqab. They found themselves in a limited area named “the area of the fence”, which is a closed area located in the north eastern part of the Naqab, a triangle limited by Beer es-Sabe’, Dimona and Arad. It constitutes only 10 percent of the area owned by the Bedouins prior to 1948. The Naqab Arabs today live on less than 2 percent of their land, although they constitute 27 percent of the population there. In order to control the land, the state of Israel legislated the Planning and Construction Act in 1965. The "area of the fence", according to this law, became an agricultural zone where constructions is not allowed, which rendered illegal all the homes and structures existing in the area and unleashed wide scale demolition orders.
Plans to settle the Bedouin population
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Israeli government revived the idea of resettling the Bedouins and designed new plans for seven towns: Tel al Saba’, Rahat, Ararat Al Naqab, Kasifah, Shaqeeb al Salam, Hora and Al-Leqya. The government did so without taking into consideration the Bedouins' traditional lifestyle and without consulting the Bedouin communities. Officially, the government designed these plans to create conditions which provide basic services for the Bedouin population. The underlying reason is for Israel to prevent the Bedouins from living on their land and claiming ownership rights. This resettlement plan deprives the Bedouins from their property and separates them from their land; the source of their livelihood.
The seven towns were doomed to fail. The budgets for the townships introduced by the government were and continue to be very scarce. The standard of services provided in these towns is low and unemployment is widespread. Criminality, as a result, is dangerously high. Despite the announced objective, the Bedouin public remains at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder in Israel while the neighboring Jewish towns located on Bedouin land (such as Omer, Mitar and Lahavim) are among the wealthiest in the state.
Despite the services offered in the new permanent towns, such as schools, kindergartens, water networks and clinics, they have failed to attract more than 50 percent of the 160,000 members of the Naqab Bedouin population. More than 86,000 Bedouins chose to live in 45 unrecognized villages which the state deprives from the most basic services, including water, electricity, roads, medical clinics, kindergartens, elementary and secondary schools. The authorities consider illegal all forms of housing other than tents or tin shacks and impose large fines on the owners while starting demolition procedures. Between 1992 and 1998, 1298 buildings were demolished. In the past two years, more than 200 houses were demolished and more than 29,700 dunams of land cultivated with wheat have been sprayed with weed extermination chemicals.
Prof. Isma’eil Abu Saa’d, Ben-Gurion University, explains that the education system rests on employing education as a tool to remove people from the unrecognized villages by adopting a "temporary school" model. This involves 19 elementary schools that serve the population of 45 unrecognized villages; they are wood, tin, or concrete structures without appropriate classrooms and facilities. Many unrecognized villages lack schools. 6,000 children have to cover long distances daily: eight and nine year old children of the Azazma tribe, for example, have to get up at 5 o’clock in the morning and walk two kilometers from their tin-shack homes to the main street where they catch the bus which takes them on a 100km ride to the schoold located in the Segev Shalom/Shaqeeb al Salam township. They travel 200 km a day. It gets much harder in winter times. “Mother wakes us up while it is still dark, then we have to walk in the rainy weather using all the energy that we have, and if we are late, we miss the bus.”
The poorest seven towns in Israel are the same permanent towns built by Israel to resettle the Bedouins who have been uprooted from their land and lost everything they had. (Prof, Isma'eil Abu Saad, Ben Gurion University).
The State's Solution to the Unrecognized Bedouin Villages in the Naqab: the Abu Basmah Council
Strategic advisors to the Israeli government have repeatedly raised that no comprehensive policies for the Naqab area have been definedsince1990, a fact which has led to an increase number of illegal construction. At the 2006 Herzelyia Conference, for example, it was raised that the state had proven its ability to deal with complex organizational, financial and legal challenges related to the implementation of the Gaza redeployment (i.e. disengagement) plan, and a similar plan was recommended for the Bedouins: to present the scattered communities with specific solutions related to a timeline and a sum of money for a whole group of residents, providing that it is interested in reaching a solution.
Accordingly, the state has proposed to settle the problem of unrecognized Bedouin villages in the Naqab through the establishment of the Abu Basmah Regional Council. Bedouin communities joining the new Council are recognized under the condition that they change their original names. Moreover, according to Atra Abu Frieh, general director of the community-based and independent Regional Council for the Unrecognized Villages in the Naqab: "the land of communities joining the Abu Basmah Council will be declared state land and the communities' historical boundaries will be changed. Land ownership title will be transferred from the current owners to the Israel Land Administration (ILA). Once this is done, people will have to obtain land from the state for housing and construction at outrageous cost." Some 13 new villages are currently in various stages of planning and establishment in the framework of the Abu Basmah Council, most of them are located in remote areas far away from the main roads.
The Regional Council for the Unrecognized Villages in the Naqab: a community-based alternative
The Regional Council for the Unrecognized Villages (RCUV) was established in 1997 as a result of the state's plans and blueprints to confiscate land from itso wners.
Said Abu Sumoor, head of the RCUV's Planning Department describes the background and experience of decades of community-based struggle for justice in the Naqab:
When we talk about the Naqab, we must refer to the Naqab prior to the Nakba; its boundaries then stretched from Falouja in the north (northeast of Gaza) to the Gulf of Aqaba in the south. The population of the Naqab was between 90,000 and 110,000. When the war ended, only ten thousand remained on the land; most were gathered in fenced areas while some displaced groups continued to lived on their native land. The first group surrendered to "modernization and settlement solutions" while the other group resisted and stayed on their property. As a result of the peace treaty with Egypt, Israel had to evacuate its airforce bases in the Sinai. They chose the land of Tel Al Milh village in the Naqab as the site for their new military installations. The population of Tal Al Milh was removed and concentrated in the towns of Kasifa and Ararah. They built Nefatim airforce base on the ruins of Tel Al Milh. I consider these villagers Internally Displaced Persons (IDP).
Since the creation of Israel, 80 Jewish agricultural settlements were built on the ruins of the depopulated communities in the northern Naqab. Israel is now talking about establishing 34 new settlements in addition to the some 60 private farms. Palestinians, on the other hand, live in seven concentration cities, and nine additional concentration towns are planned as part of the Abu Basmah Council. The area of jurisdiction of these concentration towns is no more than one percent of the area of Beer Es Sabe’. Israel is afraid of the demographic growth of the Naqab Arabs whose number today is 15 times the number it was 57 years ago.
Israel considers us all nomadic Bedouins, with no relationship to a specific territory, who need to be settled. It is wrong, however, to think that the Naqab Arabs are one homogeneous group: some are urban and lived in the northern Naqab while others are Bedouins, especially those in the south. Even the Al Azasmah tribe, however, who has many Bedouin characteristics, owns water wells and land with ownership certificates. They had livestock and seasonally cultivated land. In order to further the separation of the Arab people from their land, the authorities recorded in the population registry the name of a person's tribe instead of writing the address of the person's village. This has helped erase the identity of the original towns and villages and reinforced tribal belonging. This is how tribal identity was constructed, although tribal considerations were never obvious or used in this manner before.
Israel argues it bases its policies on the Ottoman Wasteland Law. In fact, the state strips the law from its spirit: the Wasteland Law permits the state to consider wasteland as its own if the land is not cultivated and located at more than two and a half kilometers from the village. The objective of this law is to encourage people to cultivate land and not to merely impose control. If they decided to depend on the rulings of the British mandate for their purposes, the result would be in the favor of the Bedouins, not the state.
In reaction to the Negev (Naqab) Plan 20-20, the Regional Council of the Unrecognized Villages was established. The state has long claimed the absence of a Bedouin leadership and that Bedouins do not know what they really want. Since the creation of the Council in 1997, every village has chosen a local committee that elects one of its members to represent the village at the General Assembly of the Council, which in turn, elects its chairman once every four years. The Council prepared a detailed plan involving the 45 unrecognized villages in which we argue that these villages are qualified for recognition because they meet the Israeli planning requirements. The population in the unrecognized villages ranges from 500 individuals in the smallest to approximately 5,000 in the largest. In addition, they are well known villages and have maintained their historical names. We previously appealed to the court through The Citizen’s Right Society and demanded our right in various ways, exactly like other Jewish citizens, especially since we are a community with its own culture and lifestyle, but to no avail.
Although not all Internally Displaced in the Naqab (i.e. those who have been moved to concentration points/cities) have a leadership to protect their interests, it is important that the Council of the Unrecognized Villages demands the recognition of the ownership rights of all Internally Displaced in the Naqab, so that they can relate to their past. Today they live in other cities but they are not urban; not in culture nor in spirit. Due to the obvious and the concealed conflicts, they suffer bitterness in the midst of difficult living conditions such as high unemployment rates, poverty, crime and terrible education systems.
* This is a shortened version of an article published in Arabic in Haq al-Awda in May 2006. Elizabeth Nassar is a journalist from Nazareth, she works with a number of Arabic newspapers within 1948 territories and participated in many radio programs.