“The Negev affords me the pleasure of watching a wasteland develop into the most fruitful portion of Israel by a totally Jewish act of creation.” –David Ben Gurion, Memoirs
In the middle of the night on August 10, residents of the unrecognized Bedouin village of al-Arakib sent a panicked text message to Israeli activists in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Israeli police helicopters were buzzing overhead, surveying the scene ahead of what was likely to be a new round of demolitions. Three activists staying in the village had been nabbed during a night raid. Having already witnessed the razing of their homes twice in the past two weeks, the residents of Al-Arakib expected the third round of demolitions to arrive tonight, on the eve of Ramadan. During Ramadan, when the villagers fasted all day, the police and Israeli Land Adminstration reasoned they would be too weakened to rebuild — it was prime time for destruction.
I arrived in Al-Arakib at 3 AM with a handful of Jerusalem-based activists. A local couple hauled out mattresses and blankets and poured us small cups of coffee. “I’ve had enough of sleeping,” the man grumbled as he reclined next to his wife. He seemed grateful to have company. I laid down and stared at the desert sky, listening to the man describe in a lulled tone the experience of watching his neighbors’ homes crumple under the teeth of bulldozers again and again. As he trailed off, I heard a low droning sound in the distance. Were they here already? I looked around at the others. No one to register the slightest sign of concern. Finally, I slipped into a light slumber.
Two hours later I was torn from my sleep. “They’re here!” someone shouted in Hebrew. I leapt from my mattress and scrambled up a dune until I reached the center of the village. A phalanx of one hundred riot cops had assembled in a tight formation. They were bristling with assault weapons and centurion shields. Flanked by bulldozers, the police quickly ringed the activists and journalists, who numbered about two dozen, and began forcibly pushing them away from the site of the demolitions. Their intention seemed to be to prevent any brave souls from standing between the bulldozers and the homes they sought to destroy. Dispatched by a faceless network of clerks and engineers in air-conditioned offices to do the dirty work of the state, the police performed their duty with cold efficiency.
As the bulldozers trundled around the village, tearing tarps from plywood pylons, crushing tin roofs, and dragging the shattered structures into hulking piles, the villagers watched with resignation. Seated on her bed in the naked desert, a girl wiped a few tears from her eyes, grimacing at the sight before her. On a nearby hill, a man quizzed his daughter on surahs from the Quran before sending her to collect mattresses from beneath the dusty waste of what used to be their sleeping quarters. An old woman stood impassively by a flock of birds perched on the collapsed remains of her house. Dispossession and homelessness have become nearly mundane in Al-Arakib.
The villagers remain devoted to the nomadic Bedouin tradition. (Why else would they resist with such tenacity the Israeli government’s plan to resettle them in one of the Indian reservation-style “development communities” the state has created for them?) However, they have established a permanent presence in the areas around their village that pre-dates the foundation of Israel. Al-Arakib’s cemetery, for example, contains the graves dating back to the end of the 19th century. Yet the Bedouins’ historical claim to the Negev has not convinced the state that they deserve legal recognition. Nor have their attempts to demonstrate their loyalty by serving as front-line combat soldiers in the Israeli Army. In the eyes of the state, the Arabs of the Negev are at best quasi-human.
In 1953, the first Prime Minister of Israel David Ben Gurion (original name: David Gryn) moved to Sde Boker, a kibbutz in the Negev. A self-described messianist who rejected the existence of God while simultaneously describing the Torah as his political guidebook, Ben Gurion saw the Negev as a blank slate for realizing his revolutionary fever dreams. In his memoirs, he fantasized about evacuating Tel Aviv and settling five million Jews in small settlements throughout the Negev. Just as he disdained the cosmopolitan spirit of Tel Aviv’s urbanists, Ben Gurion was disgusted by the sight of the open desert, describing it as “a criminal waste.” In the place of sand dunes, he imagined a Jewish replica of Northern Europe.
“When I look out of my window and see a tree standing [in the Negev],” Ben Gurion wrote, “that tree gives me a greater sense of beauty and personal delight than all the vast forests I have seen in Switzerland or Scandinavia… Not only because I helped to grow them but because they constitute a gift of man to Nature, and a gift of the Jews to the cradle of their culture.”
With the ethnocentric Ashkenazi outlook of Labor Zionism, Ben Gurion held deep contempt for non-European cultures. He denigrated the Jews who had immigrated to Israel from Arab countries as “savage” and as “a primitive community” that reveres pimps and thieves. But he at least acknowledged their existence in Israeli society. In his writings about the Negev, Ben Gurion did not once mention the presence of the tens of thousands of Arab Beduoins whose villages abutted his kibbutz. To him, their culture was void; they lived in a “wasteland.” They were obstacles to his utopian vision, not human beings.
Today the Israeli government remains committed to fulfilling Ben Gurion’s fantasies even though the Israeli public has completely turned its back on the Negev. “It seems that the fantasies grow stronger especially when the Jews do not move to live in the desert,” the Israeli blogger Eyal Niv wrote. “The more the Jews back away from the desert, the more their leaders toughen the force, frequency, and cruelty of the expulsion of its other residents.”
In the areas in and around Al-Arakib, just 5 km north of the city of Beersheva, the Jewish National Fund is in the process of planting the “Ambassador Forest.” The forest will cover the land inhabited for over 100 years by the residents of Al-Arakib and prevent them from ever returning. The “Blueprint Negev” plan of the Jewish National Fund, an organization that claims to be acting “on behalf of Jewish people everywhere,” can only be realized through harsh military force, the razing of villages, and ultimately, ethnic cleansing. The meting out of these practices against citizens of Israel should raise serious questions about the country’s claim to uphold democratic values.
After the Israeli Police completed their third demolition of Al-Arakib, the villagers collected the remains of their homes and, with the assistance of a few international and Jewish Israeli activists, began rebuilding again. Without any recourse from the state or its courts, they have no other option but to start over from scratch. And they have nowhere else to go.
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ok max
so what part of israel do you believe israel has the right to control? a tiny sliver of tel aviv?
israel will not be junden frei…no matter what you or your comrades want.
the negev is israel
and being that it is israel, the state has the right to do with it what it wants
hey max….do a google search on chavez ravine….find out how dodger stadium displaced an entire village that had been there for 100 years.
if 100 years makes someone indigenous….then most people in america are indigenous….which of course is absurd.
oh, and why dont you look up how long jews resided in places like gaza and hevron….well over 100 years….until 48
which according to you, makes that part of the jewish population of the land…indigenous.
come home max…there is an election coming up.
israel is not for you
walt,
I’m from sicily, the mediterranean is full of complex history and civil culture. I’m grateful for the work Max is contributing to our world in need of more compassion.
An extract from:
Negev Coexistence Forum for Civil Equality, The Bedouin-Arabs in the Negev-Naqab Desert in Israel, August, 2009
http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/hrc/docs/ngos/Negev_Coexistence_Forum_Civil_Equality.pdf
In Collaboration with:
Association for Support and Defense of
Bedouin Rights in Israel
Recognition Forum
Physicians for Human Rights – Israel
“…By the end of 2007 approximately 163,200 Bedouin-Arabs lived in the Negev in six townships and in the city of Rahat which were established by the State and in villages that have recently been recognized and in villages not recognized by the state. 6 We estimate that at the end of 2007, only about 55%-60% of the Bedouin-Arab population actually lived in these towns while 40%-45% lived in the unrecognized villages. According to the Central Bureau of Statistics, 67% of the Bedouin-Arab population – about 109,353 – lived at the end of 2007 in townships and villages that were established or recognized by the government (See Table 1). Approximately 53,847 Bedouin-Arabs, mainly those who own land, live in dozens of unrecognized villages that do not appear on official maps of the state. These villages have no infrastructure for water, electricity, sewage, roads, health services, education, garbage disposal, or other public services.7 Revoking the recognition from the Bedouin-Arab villages, preventing basic services, use of demolition orders, destroying crops in the fields, and repeated harassment on the part of the “Green Patrol”, are all designed with one objective in mind: to force the Bedouin-Arabs to abandon their land and to move to the towns…
…The Bedouin-Arabs are a unique Indigenous population who has been living in the Negev for hundreds of years. In 1948 the Bedouin-Arabs numbered between 60,000 to 90,000 people, and there are researchers who estimate that the number was even higher. After the 1948 War only 11,000 Bedouin-Arabs remained in the Negev while the others left or were expelled beyond the armistice lines to Jordan and Egypt (the Gaza Strip and Sinai Peninsula). The eviction of the remainder Bedouin-Arab population still living in the Negev began in the early 1950s. They were concentrated in a restricted geographical area of approximately 1,000 square kilometers, in the eastern less fertile Negev-Naqab, which was called the “Sayag” area, while the fertile lands in the western and northern areas of the Negev were turned over to the newly established Jewish settlements: kibbutzim and moshavim to be used for agriculture. Almost no Bedouin-Arabs were left in the western, northern, and southern Negev. The Bedouin-Arabs who lived in the “Sayag” area were under military rule until 1966. This area constituted 20% of the Bedouin-Arabs land before 1948.1 The Internal displacement and transfer of the Bedouin-Arab population to the eastern Negev and the dispossession of tribes from their land was accompanied by the concentration of the Bedouin-Arabs on land that was not theirs, in increasingly crowded conditions and hardship….
The transfer was carried out without the Bedouin-Arabs’ consent and under false assurance claims that they would be able to return to their land after a few months. It should be noted that no arrangements were made for settling the dislocated population and for providing any elementary infrastructure such as residential and economic infrastructure, education, or health care (See Map No. 1).2 With the legislation of the planning and construction law of 1965 all the land in which the Bedouin-Arabs resided was categorized agricultural land and all the buildings on it became “illegal”. These areas are known as “unrecognized villages” despite the fact that some of them have existed even before the State of Israel was established and some were created as a result of the transfer of the Bedouin-Arabs population from their traditional dwelling places turning them into internal displaced people. In fact an impossible situation has been created by which the state that uprooted the Bedouin-Arabs from their original land does not recognize the villages that it created, while at the same time discriminating their residents and “legally” preventing them from the most basic human rights.”
walt kovacs says: “the negev is israel
and being that it is israel, the state has the right to do with it what it wants”
So I guess by that logic the Nazi concentration camps which were located in Germany (like Dachau) were okay, since they were German lands and according to you (and I am quoting you WORD FOR WORD) “being that it is (Germany), the state has the right to do with it what it wants”.
Listen Walt, if you want to support the Nazis just come up and say it rather than giving us all these cryptic signs. Your arguments justify practically everything they did, so just be honest with yourself and say that you support what the Nazis did.
Classical Herzlian Zionists would repudiate this policy of ethnic-cleansing. Sadly, very little is left of classical Zionism, while Revisionist Zionism has transmogrified so many times that it bears little resemblance the bucolic utopia envisioned by the pioneers of Zionism in the late 19th and early 20th century. Uri Avnery is the leader of classical Zionism, and we know he is appalled by this policy and those who callously support the persecution of the Arabs.
Classical Herzlian Zionists would repudiate this policy of ethnic-cleansing. Sadly, very little is left of classical Zionism, while Revisionist Zionism has transmogrified so many times that it bears little resemblance the bucolic utopia envisioned by the pioneers of Zionism in the late 19th and early 20th century. Uri Avnery is the leader of classical Zionism as it was once known and practiced, and we know he is appalled by this policy and those who callously support the persecution of the Arabs.
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Hail triumphant Zionism. One these Bedou sub-humans are disposed of, no doubt more useless eaters can be identified and dealt with appropriately.
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And, here is the problem with agreeing outright with the happenings the writer described: you are not only allowing the uprooting of people with no real reason, but you are also giving the Government permission to continue do what it is doing because no one else is checking it.
This is a situation where ‘walking a mile in another persons’ shoes is necessary; 100 years is a long time, and to be uprooted because someone wants to plant a forest, is both ridiculous and heart breaking. This is, with out a doubt, an occupation. There is no balance on either side.
I think what disgusts me the most is when that young woman is screaming ‘just give him five minutes!’ and no one would even listen.
Cold efficiency, yes, but my first thought on watching the video was “arrogant pricks.”
there goes poyani, trying to compare israel with nazi germany…when i gave a comparable example from recent american history of an entire village of hispanic americans…a village that had been in place before california had become a state, being removed so that a baseball stadium could be built
in the united states, there is the concept of eminent domain
now i dont know enough about israeli law to say that they have the exact same laws….but im sure that they have something comparable
has nothing to do with nazism
wonder why when hamas was tearing down illegally built buildings in gaza and putting residents out in the streets, not you or any of your comrades said word one…..hmmmmmmm
Walt Kovaks wrote: “there goes poyani, trying to compare israel with nazi germany”
I did not compare Israel to anything. I didn’t even mention Israel.
I just pointed out the implication of YOUR argument. It’s called “riductio ad absurdum”. But don’t worry, I don’t expect you to understand.
What amazes me is that you are not even able to distinguish yourself from Israel. If I call you a Nazi (which you are not far off), then you think I am comparing “Israel” with “Nazi Germany”.
You think you are Israel personified. Very interesting delusion!
Walt Kovaks wrote “wonder why when hamas was tearing down illegally built buildings in gaza and putting residents out in the streets, not you or any of your comrades said word one…..hmmmmmmm”
Because Hamas are criminals. Everyone knows Hamas are criminals, so why argue about it?
But it’s good to know that you are comparing Israel to Hamas. At least you know where Israel fits morally!
poyani,
your statements above are why i dont usually, and shouldnt even bother with attempting to argue with the likes of you.
you dont get it
the jews are a nation….the land was given to that nation…so yes, we are connected to the land…just as we are connected to each other
unless the other is like max, and chooses to disconnect himself from his people
i wont even argue the point…dont expect you to understand
im glad to see you acknowledge hamas as a criminal faction, but it doesnt explain why you, max and other faux libs attack israel as a criminal state, so why then bother attacking them? shoot…everyone knows that they are criminals…right?
why cant you accept that you are a hypocrite
and i wasnt comparing israel to hamas…i am comparing israel to america…who, with the use of the law eminent domain, frequently takes privately owned land for public use.
thing is…the land that this village is on, isnt privately owned…never was
and america even more frequently kicks squatters off of land they dont own
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