Peter Beinart’s pro-settlement boycott article in the New York Times has rightly been critiqued from the left for ignoring the fact that “Israel is only a ‘genuine democracy’ for its Jewish citizens,” as Adam Horowitz put it. A close look at the Israeli government’s Prawer Plan, which calls for the forced relocation of tens of thousands of citizens of Israel, further shows why the notion of a “democratic Israel” is a farce.
Beinart’s NYT Op-Ed constantly mentions “democratic Israel,” or variations on the phrase, to distinguish between the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and “Israel proper.” But how do the Bedouin citizens of Israel targeted for forced relocation fit into this “democratic Israel”? The answer is they don’t.
The Prawer Plan, recently okayed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office, calls for the uprooting of 30,000 Bedouin citizens living in the Negev. The Israeli government wants to move these citizens to “recognized” communities set up by the state. Part of the plan is to build new, Jewish-only settlements on the formerly Bedouin land, where generations of Bedouins have been living, longer than the State of Israel has existed. The Bedouin communities are not happy with the plan, but the Israeli government is offering them money and support for infrastructure to convince them to move.
It sounds like a typical story in the occupied West Bank (minus the incentives to move), but this is happening on the Israeli side of the ever-fading Green Line. And the people Israel wants to uproot are citizens.
The Association for Civil Rights in Israel and Adalah have more on the Prawer Plan:
With respect to the unrecognized villages: the organizations stress that the proposed legislation ignores the fact that most of these villages have existed on their lands since before the establishment of the State, while others were established when the Israeli military government forcibly relocated Bedouin residents from their lands in the 1950′s. Underlying the proposed law is the sweeping misconception that the 70,000 people residing in 36 unrecognized villages are squatters without rights to the land.
With respect to the issue of land ownership in the Negev: the organizations argue that the facts, supported by ample legal precedents, formal reports and research, prove Bedouin ties and ownership to the lands in question. The government, however, ignores these facts, while purporting that the “arrangement” it intends to impose on the residents is actually for the benefit of Bedouin citizens.
The organizations warn that the central tenant of the proposed law is the “concentration” of Bedouin in limited predefined areas which will force them to abandon their traditional agricultural livelihood, while industrial areas, a military base, and new Jewish settlements are expected to be established on the lands of the unrecognized Bedouin villages. The proposal includes the use of administrative authority, similar to the emergency powers of legislation reserved for wartime, in a manner which would grossly violate the residents’ rights to due process. Accordingly, this proposal would enshrine wholesale discrimination against the residents of unrecognized villages into law.
And today, Neve Gordon, the author of Israel’s Occupation, takes us deep inside the Bedouin Negev to explore the Prawer Plan. Here are some excerpts from his Al Jazeera English piece:
“It is not every day that a government decides to relocate almost half a per cent of its population in a programme of forced urbanisation,” Rawia Aburabia asserted, adding that “this is precisely what Prawer wants to do”.
The meeting, which was attempting to coordinate various actions against the Prawer Plan, had just ended, and Rawia, an outspoken Bedouin leader who works for the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, was clearly upset. She realised that the possibility of changing the course of events was extremely unlikely and that, at the end of the day, the government would uproot 30,000 Negev Bedouin and put them in townships. This would result in an end to their rural way of life and would ultimately deprive them of their livelihood and land rights.
Rawia’s wrath was directed at Ehud Prawer, the Director of the Planning Policy Division in Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s office. Prawer took on this role after serving as the deputy director of Israel’s National Security Council. His mandate is to implement the decisions of the Goldberg Committee for the Arrangement of Arab Settlement in the Negev, by offering a “concrete solution” to the problem of the 45 unrecognised Bedouin villages in the region.
The wholly undemocratic Prawer Plan is only the latest indignity to target Bedouin citizens of Israel. Their homes, and even full villages like Al Araqib, are frequently demolished.
Gordon provides more history in his piece, further showing that non-Jews living within Israel have always been inferior in the eyes of the state:
Under the directives of Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, many of the remaining Bedouin were uprooted from the lands they had inhabited for generations and were concentrated in the mostly barren area in the north-eastern part of the Negev known as the Siyag (enclosure) zone…
After their relocation and up until 1966, the Bedouin citizens of Israel were subjected to a harsh military rule; their movement was restricted and they were denied basic political, social and economic rights. But even in the post-military rule of the late 1960s, many Israeli decision makers still considered the Bedouin living within the Siyag threatening and occupying too much land.
These are not the actions of a democracy.
It’s important to acknowledge that there are differences in how Israel rules over its own citizens versus those in the West Bank and Gaza. But the difference is more a matter of the degree of repression than a stark contrast between a “democratic” state and a “non-democratic” occupied area.
How Israel functions stays the same on both sides of the Green Line: ethnic privilege for Jews, and inferior status for non-Jews in every area of life. The Prawer Plan is a glaring example of that. As Rawia Aburabia, an attorney for ACRI, says:
The attempt to enshrine the Prawer Plan into law is a farce. A democratic state cannot pass a law of discrimination, one that violates human rights and continues to harm a minority that has suffered from neglect and discrimination dating back to the founding of the State. Demolishing an Arab Bedouin village in order to establish a Jewish settlement on its ruins is not the action of a democracy – it is a step that takes us back to the military regime.
So does it say anywhere in this plan that the new towns are to be Jews only, or are you just assuming? Even in the U.S. we have eminent domain laws which lets various governments (Federal, State, local) take land that people actually own, not just are squatting on. I guess we’re not democratic either.
The new housing for the Bedouins will undoubtedly have amenities like running water, electricity and sewer systems which these villages lack.
Israel will kick Palestinians, Arabs, Bedouins and anyone else it doesn’t like outside its borders or even kill them if they have to, but settlers… hey… http://edition.cnn.com/2012/04/03/world/meast/hebron-settlers/index.html?section=cnn_latest
Since Israel’s birth over 600 new housing communities were established and build for Jewish Israelis and NOT A SINGLE ONE has been build for non-Jewish (read Arab) Israelis.
And, as I recall reading here, it was only in 2010 that for a FIRST TIME since 1948 one solitary non-Jewish (read Arab) community was connected to public transport network.
Bedouins have been a nomadic people. With the creation of multiple states and borders, including Israel, the Bedouins can no longer travel wherever they like. They are no longer a few wandering nomadic communities practising the ways of their ancestors; they have settled in fixed locations and established ‘permanent’ communities. The vast and rapidly expanding Bedouin communities of the Negev cannot be left unregulated. Now for the last few decades they dot the landscape in tents which a developed state finds unacceptable in the 21st century. Furthermore it is completely impractible to build a complex infrastructure of sewage, pipes and roads across the Negev just to reach a few tents scattered here and there. That is why cities for the Bedouin population have been conceived.
With the relocation of the Bedouins a city can grant them basic services such as sewage, electricity, water, welfare, road access and education. In return the state gets to tax them for these services and in the future receive an educated workforce to drive its economy. For a state to prosper its citizens must move from tents to cities and join civilization, this is basic logic. It is unfortunate that the Bedouins themselves have not been involved as much as they could have been in this whole process, but as one might expect they are obviously resistant to changing their traditional way of living.
Another issue is the vast amount of land being clogged by those scattered tents. Building new infrastructure, mining, and other public projects becomes difficult and many legal issues can arise as more land is being illegally clogged by new tents. The urbanization of the Bedouins is a necessary step to provide them and the state with progress and a better way of life.
While Egypt neglected its Bedouin population in the Sinai, Israel must develop and invest in her own Bedouin population, not only for the reasons mentioned above, but to serve as an example to neighboring states, who treat their Bedouin populations with far less dignity.
Israel already has a problem trying to establish 2 states – it cannot support a 3rd state within Israel which is what is happening. The Bedouin must accept to be regulated like everyone else. To pay taxes, receive a proper 12 year education for their children and health care. They must be part of either Israel or Palestine; they cannot become a new state of Bedouinstine. To suggest that this is all about colonialism is pure, unmitigated crap.
Israel claims to be a jewish democracy. That is clearly different from a democracy. It looks more like a white democracy.