Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, March 2008, pages 20-21

60 Years of Al-Nakba

“Bringing Life to the Desert”: Israel’s Master Plan for Dispossession in the Negev

By Isabelle Humphries

	A Bedouin woman weeps amid the ruins of her demolished Negev home. (Photo Courtesy RCUV).

JUST AS I WAS sitting down to write this article on the second day of the new year, a new message arrived in my inbox: “Demolitions right now at Wadi Mshash.” Yet more Bedouin families in the Negev would find themselves without a roof over their heads this evening. Some welcome to 2008.

Marking as it does six decades of dispossession, this is a poignant year for Palestinians. In 1948 around 850,000 people were made homeless by the establishment of the state of Israel—yet dispossession did not end with the Palestinian Nakba, or catastrophe. In the ensuing years, from Gaza to Lebanon, from the Galilee to the Negev desert (or Naqab), hundreds of thousands more Palestinians have been dispossessed and re-dispossessed in Israel’s ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestinian land.

Nor does Israeli citizenship guarantee a secure home and livelihood. Since Israel’s May 8 destruction of the Bedouin village of Twail Abu Jarwal (see August 2007 Washington Report, p. 14), 20 of the tin homes assembled to shelter the homeless families have been bulldozed once again. At the fringes of Israeli society, the country’s Bedouin Arab community continue to remain a key target of Israel’s ongoing expansion program to “Judaize the Negev and the Galilee,” areas which have significant Palestinian populations remaining from 1948.

A key player among the quasi-state Zionist organizations given extensive powers to reshape the land and continue to dispossess Palestinians is the Jewish National Fund (JNF). As an officially “non-governmental” organization—whose chairman and former president is Ronald S. Lauder, the cosmetics heir and former U.S. ambassador to Austria who lost his bid for mayor of New York to Rudolph Giuliani—the JNF can be explicit that its mandate is to serve the Jewish community only. Despite that status, however, it is given state-level powers to implement its program.

A visitor to the Jewish National Fund web site, <www.jnf.org>, can click on a link entitled “Blueprint Negev” and learn that:

A man collects water from a community water pump. (Photo Alberto Denkberg).

As Israel’s population grows, its central region is running out of space. The Negev desert is a massive land reserve waiting to be developed—it represents 60 percent of Israel’s land mass but is home to only 8 percent of the population. JNF’s Blueprint Negev is a far-reaching plan to ensure a prosperous and secure future for the land and people of Israel.

Over the next five years, our goal is to bring 250,000 new residents to the Negev. Seven out of a proposed 25 new communities have already been created. Existing communities are being strengthened with economic opportunities and improved quality of life.

Clearly, this last sentence does not apply to Israel’s non-Jewish citizens. For the ongoing Nakba against Palestinians is not, and never was, either random or an unfortunate side effect. It is supported by state planners, Zionist land organizations and “non-governmental” organizations at every level.

At the end of 2007, Adalah, a Palestinian non-governmental legal center in Israel, appealed to the Supreme Court against a decision by the Water Commissioner and the Israel Land Administration (ILA) not to provide drinking water to residents of a group of unrecognized Negev villages. Approximately 70,000 Bedouin are living in villages in the Negev which Israel refuses to recognize—denying them building permits and public services such as roads, utilities and piped water provided to other Israeli citizens. Some of these Negev residents have been living in the area since before 1948; others have been repeatedly dispossessed over the 60 years since Israel’s establishment.

But the Jewish state wishes to see these unrecognized villages removed and all Bedouin relocated to one of several overcrowded and underdeveloped settlements. Built as part of an effort to contain the Bedouin community, these towns provide neither a traditional agricultural lifestyle nor an adequate alternative source of income.

The appeal to the Supreme Court against the ILA decision was made by six Palestinian Bedouin citizens on behalf of 128 families living in six villages. Adalah argues that the government’s denial of a request for drinking water is a direct attempt to use water resources to force Bedouin to leave unrecognized villages. “These families have not left their land and have not relocated to live in other areas,” its press release pointed out. “The main basis for denying the requests of these residents is to exert pressure on them to relocate to these government-planned towns, which violates their basic right to dignity, solely in order to advance Israel’s policy…in practice a severe and totally illegal punishment.”

	A young boy drinks from a water tanker. (Photo Alberto Denkberg).

Currently inhabitants are forced to obtain drinking water from access points several kilometers from their homes, “via improvised plastic hose connections or by transporting the water in unhygienic metal containers by vehicle or donkey”—a health risk as well as a physical hardship (see photos). In its demand for proper access for the communities, Adalah cites Israel’s 1956 Water Law, which stipulates that “every person has the right to access and use of water.” Surely this is a constitutional right for the Bedouin villagers who have lived there for decades, just as much as for Jewish families living in settlements—sometimes without building permits—who are directly connected to the water network?

Another example of the exclusion inherent in Israeli plans is highlighted in Adalah’s joint campaign with Binkom (an Israeli planning rights organization) against the current master plan for the northern Negev. Working on behalf of 82 residents of heads of families of the unrecognized village of Atir-Umm al-Hieran, the organizations demand that the plan be revised to include this Bedouin community, with similar planning for infrastructure and employment as is done for new Jewish settlements.

According to the Beer el-Sabe (Beersheva) Master Plan, a new exclusively Jewish community will be constructed on most of the land in which Atir-Umm al-Hieran is currently located. This new community, to be named Hiran, will provide for 7,000 to 10,000 inhabitants. The state has filed lawsuits to evict and demolish the homes of the 1,000 Bedouin members of the Abu al-Qi’an tribe who already live there. Dispossessed in 1948 of their land in Wadi Zaballeh, the villagers first moved to another area, only to be transferred again so that new Jewish settlements could be built. In 1956 the Regional Military Governor ordered them to relocate to the Nahal Yatir area, which is where the village is located today.

Much of this land given to the Abu al-Qi’an already has been officially transferred to JNF control. One doubts that the people of the Abu al-Qi’an were asked what they think of the JNF’s policy to bring “life to the desert.”

Isabelle Humphries, based between Nazareth, Jerusalem and Cairo since 2000, currently is conducting doctoral research on internally displaced Palestinian refugees. She can be contacted at <isabellebh2004@yahoo.co.uk>.