Associated Press
A major Israeli power station stands next to the village of Wadi al Naam, but the 7,000 Bedouin Arabs who live there in dirt-floor shacks can’t hook up to the grid.
As far as the Israeli government is concerned, the shantytown – where residents get light from kerosene lamps and heat from burning wood – doesn’t exist.
Wadi al Naam, near the Israeli city of Beersheba, is one of three dozen destitute Bedouin communities in Israel’s southern desert that authorities do not recognize. The estimated 60,000 Bedouins who live in these communities cannot legally build homes and, with few exceptions, the government does not provide them with schools, roads, garbage collection, clinics, water or electricity.
Israel wants the Negev Bedouins to live in government-developed communities. But many Bedouins have balked, demanding title to the land they and their nomadic ancestors have inhabited for generations.
“How are we squatters?” asked a man who identified himself as Riyadh, 35, an unemployed father of two who lives in a village near Wadi al Naam. “We were here before the state.”
House demolitions in unrecognized villages have been on the rise in the past two years, advocates for Bedouin rights say.
The village of Tawil Abu Jarwal was razed four times between August 2006 and February 2007, residents said. In June, Israeli bulldozers demolished nearly 30 houses and other makeshift structures in two adjacent villages, leaving at least 150 residents homeless, activists said.
“In the past, they would demolish one or two, at most three. But 28 in one day, that’s new to us,” said Yeela Rannan, an activist with the Regional Council for Unrecognized Villages. She said thousands of shanties and other structures face the threat of demolition.
The Bedouins are citizens of Israel. Yet in the barren deserts of the Negev, they say, they are being discriminated against on racial grounds, systematically denied the services that Jewish villages enjoy.
Most Bedouins in the unrecognized villages live in corrugated metal shacks. Furniture might consist of a collection of thin mattresses, their foam spilling out, and tables nailed together from slabs of wood.
In a shack in Wadi al Naam, a car battery powered an old television. Outside another, a weathered satellite dish was screwed to an empty oil barrel. In one village, residents have improvised an Internet hookup.
Chemical companies, the power station and Israel Military Industries operate close by, polluting the land and air. A huge fuel storage facility is nearby.
“They’re not spoiled people,” said Clinton Bailey, a scholar of Bedouin culture. “Their pride and sense of justice is much more important to them than material benefits.”
The Israeli government contends that it cannot accept the Bedouins’ undocumented land claims and build expensive infrastructure every place the Bedouins have settled. Government efforts to improve life for the Bedouins, officials say, often have been scuttled by tribal infighting and by a traditional society’s reluctance to accept the authority of a modern state.
In the meantime, tens of thousands of jerry-built structures fed by makeshift services dot wide expanses of sand and brush. Because the houses are built illegally, the government tears some down – deepening the Bedouins’ sense of estrangement from the state.
Wadi al Naam resident Ibrahim Abu Afash said the army recently tacked up a demolition notice on the home of a cousin, a 26-year veteran of the Israeli army.
“Demolitions hurt the state more than they help,” said Abu Afash, himself an army veteran. “It alienates people.”
Some 170,000 Bedouins live in Israel, most in the Negev and about 50,000 in the northern Galilee region. Traditionally, they were desert-dwelling nomads descended from Saudi migrants or Egyptian peasants who raised goats and sheep. But like their counterparts across the Middle East, they have become far more sedentary in recent decades because of urbanization programs and societal shifts.
Their primary alliances are to families and tribes, and they do not share the nationalist goals of the Palestinians and other Arabs.
The Bedouins’ participation in the Israeli military has sharply declined, with just a few hundred Negev Bedouins now serving, according to the military, which recently ran a course aimed at promoting recruitment.
Critics say the Israeli government is trying to force the Bedouins to cave in to state solutions. The government says the Bedouins do not have to live this way, because it has offered free building plots in communities it has established for them or has agreed to develop, largely at its own cost.
Both sides agree that the Bedouins – who make similar territorial claims in countries across the Middle East – have few documented claims. Israel’s government says it is willing to give the Bedouins land and cash to settle thousands of claims and that the compensation rate has risen in recent years.
But there have been few takers because the Bedouins have little desire to move. From 2001 to 2006, the state reached settlements with Bedouins on less than 3 percent of the 160,000 acres in dispute, said David Cohen, the Israeli Interior Ministry official in charge of the district.
“It will take 200, 300 years to wind this up at this pace,” he said.
In recent years, the government has approved nine unrecognized villages, but other than two schools, no services have been provided and no permanent housing has been built, said Dudik Shoshani, a kibbutznik who served as the first head of the government’s Authority on Bedouin Advancement, from 1996 to 1999.
Shoshani said the government has acted “in bad faith” across the decades, imposing solutions that discriminate against the Bedouins.
Cohen said Israeli efforts to help have been hampered by the Bedouins’ reluctance to occupy land claimed by rival tribes. It is not an unfounded fear, as violent clashes among the Bedouins have erupted in the past.
The unrecognized villages date back to Israel’s establishment in 1948. Most of the 65,000 Bedouins then living in the Negev fled Israel or were expelled. The 11,000 who stayed were forced to live in a small zone in the northern Negev – an arrangement they were told would be temporary but for some has lasted to this day.
