Aviva Lori | Haaretz
The home of Samaher and Salman Abu Jlidan is easy enough to find. Deep in the Negev desert, a little past the Midreshet Sde Boker school, on one of the turns in the road leading to Mitzpeh Ramon, stands a large green garbage bin. Hidden behind it is a dirt road that leads to the Bedouin homes. Five children on one bicycle in the middle of the desert, one riding piggyback and two in front and two in back. They seem to float in the air between the tents and the corrugated tin huts, the goats and the chickens, above the parched yellow earth. The “house” is a large tent with four openings for air. On the floor is a faded carpet and colorful cushions, and at the center is the traditional finjan for cooking coffee. “This is our living room,” Salman says, “it is for the guests.” The living room, and the attached family room, are part of an “estate” that also includes a permanent structure, in an “unrecognized” Bedouin village called both “Ramat Tziporim” (”bird heights”) and also “Har Boker” (”morning hill”). A few weeks ago, the Tel Aviv Cinematheque screened a documentary film about the Bedouin living in the unrecognized villages in the Negev. Entitled “Recognized,” the film was made by Ori Kleiner, an M.A. student at Hunter College in New York. Kleiner, 35, who has lived in New York since 1993, has studied the relations between Israel and its Bedouin citizens. The film’s protagonists were invited to the screening, which was followed by a discussion in the hall.
Samaher Abu Jlidan listened quietly to the discussion, until a young woman in the audience questioned the Bedouins’ demand to receive from the state what its Jewish citizens get, electricity in their homes, for example, which would make it possible to run a computer. Abu Jlidan asked for the floor, and delivered a remarkable extemporaneous speech in fluent Hebrew (”No one taught me Hebrew; I learned from life”). The hall fell silent when Abu Jlidan, a very comely woman, her face covered with a veil (”Not because of religion, but because there are men here - that is our custom”) and holding a 6-month-old baby on her knees, invited her fellow audience members to visit her home and see for themselves the conditions in which she and her family live.
She is 31, Gaza-born. When she was 18, her father became ill and the family fell on hard times. A close friend of hers, who was married to a cousin of Salman Abu Jlidan, praised the life and the numerous possibilities available in Israel. Samaher was inclined to believe her. The girlfriend invited her to come and marry Salman, who was then 52, becoming his second wife. Samaher was inclined to be persuaded. She had far-reaching plans. As the possessor of a high-school matriculation certificate and high marks, she hoped to take advantage of the opportunity and attend an Israeli university. Mathematics - that was her best subject.
The transaction was arranged by remote control. Salman paid Samaher’s father a moher (dowry) of 6,000 Jordanian dinars. With the money, her father bought gold jewelry and sent her across the border. It was a hard landing, she says, very hard. The dream of university studies faded quickly, after her first child, Suha, was born a year and a half later. She then had five more children, one after the other, four boys and another daughter. She sold her gold and with the money built a house, “so the children would have a place to sleep,” she says, and is ashamed of the emptiness that is projected by its bare walls.
No more, but no less
The space she calls a living room contains not one stick of furniture. In the other rooms, too, apart from mattresses and old beds, there are hardly any objects that recall a house or lend it an air of coziness. The family life revolves around a tent, in the center of which is a taboun for making pitas. An old TV is powered by electricity generated by two improvised solar receptors. Sometimes on summer nights it has reception. There is also a refrigerator which functions as a storage cupboard. This is the fate of those who chose to live on their ancestral lands and be an “unrecognized village.” It means forgoing a hookup to the national power grid and to a sewer system.
“I came here in 1994,” Samaher says. “Salman was married at the time to a sick woman who had kidney problems. Actually, I came to take care of her, but we soon fell in love and they were divorced and we were married, but we all went on living together. She did not want anything from him, only to be looked after. She went to Soroka [Medical Center in Be'er Sheva] every day for dialysis treatments.
“In 1981,” Samaher continues, “Salman’s herd of 253 goats was confiscated, and since then he has not worked. Every day he sits in the house. A few years later, he received NIS 24,000 in compensation for the goats, and with that money he took his wife to India for a kidney transplant. After they came back from India, she had to go to Soroka for an eye examination. She had eye problems, the poor woman. Salman went with her and on the way there was an accident and she was killed. Salman was injured, and to this day he suffers in his back and shoulder. He has a disability there. His family were all born in this place. His father and his grandfather, all are from the Azazma tribe [Ziadin branch]. He has eight children from his first wife.
“In Tel Aviv, at the movie theater, there was a woman who spoke who had no interest at all in how we live here. I told her, ahalan wasahalan - you are welcome to come and see. We are dumped here like something that is not wanted in the whole country. We did not have water until seven years ago. And they are always making up new laws for us. You are not allowed to grow anything, they say. No farming, no nothing. This land belongs to the nature reserves and that land is army territory, they say, a firing zone. But aren’t we part of the state? We go to the army, we do everything for the state - there are Jews who do not do what we do, and that is something that burns the heart.
“That woman [at the movie] said that 60 years had gone by and nothing had changed, that we were making demands all the time. I told her, ‘You live here, but you do not know what we have and what we do not have.’ We have nothing. No school, no kindergarten, no health service, no well-baby clinic and no bus stop. We have to walk almost three kilometers to get to the road and then another kilometer to reach the bus at the junction, and with a child or two that’s how I get to the health clinic and then back again. The bus driver drops us on the road and can’t enter here, not even a millimeter.
“I told that woman, ‘Come and see, we have children of 4, 3, 2 and they are in the house with their mother all the time. Never leaving her alone. Your son goes to nursery school at age 1 year, he has something to do, he has a playground, but with us they have to play inside all the time, filling their time with things that don’t do anything for their head, not advancing, not understanding and not knowing how to do anything. Come and see how we eat and what we drink. Just getting water was a big accomplishment.’
“The rock quarry here, a hundred meters from us, has electricity, and we are here and have no electricity. There is no generator, nothing. They are setting up one-family farms [in the Negev] and giving them water and electricity and a fence and a dog to guard the house. And us? We are treated like dogs. Sometimes there is television at night from the sun. In the winter there is nothing, because there is no sun. To get to school the children go by foot to the road and from there have to travel 60 kilometers. There is no nursery school until age 5. They just stay home.
“The army camp here has a small neighborhood for families. They have nine kindergartens. We are 300 people here, and do not even have one. During the summer vacation the children drive me nuts. At the end of the day I leave them to themselves and fall asleep like the dead. More children? I only hope God will hear my voice and spare me. But there is nothing I can do. He will not agree to forgo it, he needs a lot of children and I must listen to him.
“We live from the children and from a guaranteed income allowance. A thousand shekels is the child allowance and three thousand guaranteed income. That is about a quarter of what we need. Three-quarters we do not get. How can you raise six children like that? All the people here, their condition is critical. Worse. Down and out. Look around at what you see, it’s all clear from that. When Salman had the goats, there was at least milk for the children, and cheese. That was his living, from the goats. He sold the small ones. Now he has no living and they tell us, ‘There are no goats but there is Tnuva’ [the giant dairy company]. Every day I buy two liters of milk and what we do not finish we throw away, because we don’t have a refrigerator. The boy goes on the bicycle and brings it from the small grocery store here.
“We say that if this place helps the state and is needed for the army, then give us another place and we will go - we don’t have to live here - but a place where we can farm. We petitioned the court, but they do not hear; they tell us, ‘Why don’t you move to Rahat or to Segev Shalom [recognized towns]?’ Wallah, believe me, there our children would go out of the house and die on the road. They do not get used to it. Here they have a place to move around, there they don’t. Four years ago, my son Yasser asked me if he could go on a trip to Gaza. He went, and on the spot was hit in a road accident, he was run over by a car: he walks and doesn’t hear and doesn’t understand. He was in Schneider [Children's Medical Center] and they removed his spleen. How am I supposed to go live in Segev Shalom with the children? I would be living in daily fear there. In the end I would not have any children left.
“If only they would give me the children and my husband and we would go to live in Gaza. Even if the situation there is harder and critical, I still feel better there. There is a school, a health clinic, a well-baby clinic, you live, no one will tell you this is forbidden and this must not be done. It’s better there for the head. More comfortable.
“I do the shopping in the market of Be’er Sheva. Once a week? Are you kidding? I can do it once every three months. Twice a year. Today I took the child allowance and bought them a few pieces of fruit. Whenever the allowance comes, I buy something for them. What I eat, they eat. We have lentils and I grow a small watermelon here and that is all. The whole week, every day, we eat lentils. Meat? Sometimes. Thank God, the children are healthy. Baruch Hashem.
“School will be starting soon. I need money for books, clothes, shoes, schoolbags. What am I supposed to do? What will I use to buy them things? For me, school is the most important thing. Clothes? If I tell you where I get their clothes from, you’ll say I’m crazy. There’s a store in Mitzpeh [Ramon] called ‘From Hand to Hand,’ and that’s where I shop. If you go into all the homes here, you’ll see people in even worse situations.
“What are we asking for? For you to talk to the government so they will give us a place to live. A place we can farm, with water and electricity, like all the people in the country. Like all the people in America. We’re not asking for more, but also not less.”
The plan
There are seven recognized Bedouin communities and another 10 in various stages of planning and approval. About half of the country’s 160,000 Bedouin live in 43 unrecognized sites, which are not connected to the infrastructure. Most of them have been served with eviction and demolition notices, on the grounds that they are located on state land. The Bedouin, for their part, maintain that they have lived on these lands for untold generations and that if the state wants to evict them, it must give them alternative farming land. Many of them refuse to move to towns for fear they will lose their tribal identity and their way of life.
Attorney Yitzhak Shavit, from Motza Illit, outside Jerusalem, represents 30 families of the Azazma tribe, including Salman Abu Jlidan, against whom are pending eviction and demolition orders, issued years ago by the state. They appealed to the District Court, which rejected the appeal, and then to the Supreme Court. In March of this year the Supreme Court also rejected the appeal, but deferred execution of the decision for a year and a half to allow the sides to reach an arrangement.
Last month, the government decided to establish an authority for Bedouin affairs. The housing minister, Ze’ev Boim, is devoting much of his time to the problem of the Bedouin in the Negev, says Yehuda Bachar, chairman of the directorate for the coordination of government and Bedouin activities in the Negev. “A plan was presented to the government that was designed together with representatives of the Bedouin population, including representatives of the unrecognized villages,” Bachar says. “It has been decided that they will be integrated into the plan’s committees and operative machinery.”
He explains that a public committee is supposed to be established, under the chairmanship of a retired Supreme Court justice. Within three months, the judge, together with representatives of the Bedouin and of the government, is supposed to come up with recommendations to present to the government.
Bachar says that the committee was given clear government guidelines. “We are talking about five years, at the end of which 70 percent of the population will live in permanent communities. The Finance Ministry and representatives of other ministries are working out recommendations on the scope of the budgets. Every Bedouin will have the chance to appear before this committee and describe his personal problems. At the end of the process, the whole matter will be brought for legislation with the agreement of both sides. The minister of housing and construction, in consultation with the interior minister, has asked the attorney general to examine the possibility of deferring the demolition procedures for a year. I hope the direction will be positive.”
