On Tuesday, many participants in the seventh annual ICAHD Summer Rebuilding Camp went south again, this time to the Negev, to learn about the condition of the Bedouins living inside Israel.
Led by ICAHD’s Action Advocacy Officer Angela Godfrey-Goldstein, we traveled to the city of Rahat, the largest Bedouin city in Israel. With no overall planning, this city is a study in contrasts – trash-filled lots with corrugated metal shacks sit next to relatively large buildings housing several families. The old tribes are clustered loosely by neighborhood. One quarter of the city has no sewage services and the unemployment rate is high. The Bedouin are not allowed to raise animals in Israel, and in many cases they raise them illegally in the urban centers, creating unsanitary conditions.
Rawia Abu-Rabia, a lawyer working in Rahat, explained how the Bedouins have been fared since the founding of the state of Israel. Before 1948, about 100,000 semi-nomadic agricultural Bedouin lived in the Negev. With the founding of Israel, many were expelled or left outside the Israel’s borders, and the remaining 10,000 were forced into a small geographic area and most of their original lands given to Jewish settlements. The Bedouin are still disputing the ownership of their lands.
In the early 1960s, Israeli state established seven townships into which it forced the Bedouin. Today, half of the 150,000 Bedouin live in these townships, and the other half live in 45 “unrecognized” villages with no municipal services, paved roads, or infrastructure. Residents are prohibited from building permanent houses, and many homes have been demolished.
For lunch we went to one such “unrecognized” village, Tel Sheva, where we heard the story of Mariam and her Daughters of the Desert center. Mariam studied business administration in London, and when she returned, instead of entering into an arranged marriage, she pursued her dream of creating her own business, manufacturing and selling organic soaps, creams and healing ointments using techniques she learned from her grandmother. With our packed schedule of construction work, presentations, and tours, we ICAHD campers have had little chance to shop here, and we were eager to take some of Mariam’s merchandise off her hands for ourselves and as gifts for friends and family back home.
Next we drove through the nearby Jewish city of Be’er Sheva, with the highest standard of living in Israel. We were struck by the grassy landscaping, large parks and smooth paved roads, so different from the bumpy dusty tracks in Mariam’s village. On one end of town, the Israelis have built up a dirt mound to hide from view the ramshackle Bedouin tents a few hundred yards away.
As we drove back north toward Hebron, we could see how nearly every small road leading into this section of Highway 60, the main north-south route in the West Bank, has been obstructed by cement blocks, large rocks, or dirt mounds, making it impossible for the villagers to move equipment to their fields or bring produce out with wagons.
Our final stop for the day was the farm of Atta Jaber, whose house has been demolished by Israeli authorities and was rebuilt by ICAHD in 2000. Angela was relieved to see that the irrigation system, which had been destroyed when she visited a few weeks earlier, had been repaired. She had expected to find the fields of dead and dying crops. Atta Jaber told us how his family is under threat of eviction, despite having reached an agreement with the Israeli government allowing them to farm their lands.
Afterward, we were served tea as we relaxed in the shade; some of the children showed off for us, jumping into the cistern that holds the water supply for the 11 families there. As we enjoyed this typical Palestinian hospitality, we looked across Highway 60 at the settlement of Qiryat Arba, whose residents have greeted their Palestinian neighbors with nothing but violence and harassment; we wondered how long Atta Jaber and his family would be allowed to hold on to their land in the face of the ever-encroaching settlement snaking across all the hilltops in sight.
