Back to the Land: A new generation of activists is raising the global profile of Indigenous Arab Bedouins and resisting Israeli government efforts to seize their territories

MANSOUR NASASRA

The Indigenous Arab Bedouin have lived in southern Palestine for centuries, mainly in the city of Beersheba, known as Bir al-Saba’ in Arabic. The community preserved its traditional Islamic culture under Ottoman and British rule, and has continued to do so under the sedentarization polices of the Israeli state. Various regimes have come and gone in the Naqab, a region that today accounts for more than half of Israel’s landmass, but the Bedouin have remained loyal to their ancestral lands.

Following the creation of Israel in 1948 and the subsequent nakba (the mass Palestinian exodus that took place that same year), 13,000 Arab Bedouin in the Naqab were confined in a militarized zone (called sayeg in Hebrew or siyaj in Arabic), separated from both Jewish and other Arab communities. Geographically, this zone included the entire Naqab and Beersheba regions, extending from the Jordanian border in the north to the Gaza Strip in the west. In the south, the Bedouins faced different challenges: Many were evicted from their lands and forced to live as internally displaced peoples in an enclosed zone northeast of the city of Beersheba.

Today, more than 270,000 Bedouin live in the Naqab region. Approximately half live in government-planned towns, and the other half reside in “unrecognized” villages. The Indigenous Arab Bedouin make up 31 percent of the entire population of the Naqab, and approximately 12 percent of the total Palestinian minority in Israel. Their situation is bleak, as those who have relocated to towns suffer mass unemployment and the effects of poor urban planning, and those who live in villages against Israeli government wishes are cut off from state services and constantly threatened with the destruction of crops and livestock.

Since the late 1960s, almost half the Bedouin population has been forcibly moved into planned townships under the premise of “modernizing” the community, though this also has the effect of creating “a landless population” that is easier to control, assimilate, and perhaps erase. Once the government-planned towns were completed, all Bedouin who refused to relocate were classified as “illegal and unrecognized” despite being full Israeli citizens. (The label is particularly ironic because many Bedouin villages predate the establishment of the Israeli state.) The Bedouin who have resisted the townships continue to live in “unrecognized” villages, a term coined in the late 1980s when the community was under pressure from planning policies directed at the Naqab.

In 2007, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert established the Goldberg Commission to resolve the status of Bedouin land claims in the Naqab and address the issue of unrecognized villages. In thousands of claims dating back to the 1970s, the Bedouin sought to have 200,000 acres—a small portion of their historical lands—recognized and recorded in the state registry. In response, a proposal released by the commission (named after former Israeli high court judge Eliezer Goldberg) offered to acknowledge around 50,000 acres of Bedouin territory, as well as a number of unrecognized villages. In January 2009 the government formed a team, headed by Ehud Prawer, chief of policy planning in the Prime Minister’s Office, to implement these recommendations. The Prawer panel offered to meet less than a quarter of Bedouin claims. The Bedouins, represented by the Regional Council of Unrecognized Villages and various local organizations, refused, seeing clearly that acceptance would lead to further loss of land and demolition of their villages.

In 2011, Yisrael Beiteinu, a right-wing political party led by Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, urged the government to withdraw the plan altogether. Several members of the Knesset and local Israeli council leaders in the Naqab came out in support of this idea, and the pressure from the far right paid off. The commission modified its report, offering less land to Bedouin communities and some compensation if residents agreed to leave. Around that time, Bedouins formed the Bedouin High Committee to stop the Prawer...