Unrecognized villages

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 This article or section relies largely or entirely upon a single source.
Please help improve this article by introducing appropriate citations of additional sources.
The neutrality of this article is disputed.
Please see the discussion on the talk page.
Please do not remove this message until the dispute is resolved.

The term unrecognized village refers to a Bedouin village in the Negev Desert which the Israeli government does not recognize as a legal settlement. As of 2008, there were approximately 45 such villages, with a population of over 80,000, comprising half of the Bedouin population in southern Israel. The residents of these villages are Israeli citizens, yet lack access to education, health, transportation and municipal trash services; they are also denied access to regional water and electrical grids. Because their villages are considered illegal, their homes are subject to demolition at any time. The unrecognized villages are not marked on any official maps.

Contents

[edit] History

Between 1948 and 1966, the new State of Israel imposed a military administration over Arabs of the region and designated 85% of the Negev "State Land." All Bedouin habitation on this newly-declared State Land was retroactively termed illegal and "unrecognized." Now that Negev lands the Bedouin had inhabited upwards of 500 years was designated State Land, the Bedouin were no longer able to fully engage in their sole means of self-subsistence – agriculture and grazing. The government then forcibly concentrated these Bedouin tribes into the Siyag (Arabic for 'fence') triangle of Beer Sheva, Arad and Dimona[1]. (By 2003, at least 75,000 citizens lived in 40 unrecognized villages. Today, all of these citizens and the children they have had since, live under the threat of demolition of their homes, and transfer into urban townships.)

[edit] Grazing

In order to reinforce the invisible Siyag fence, the State employed a reining mechanism, the Black Goat Law of 1950. The Black Goat Law curbed grazing so as to prevent land erosion, prohibiting the grazing of goats outside recognized land holdings. Since few Bedouin territorial claims were recognized, most grazing was thereby rendered illegal. (Both Ottoman and British land registration processes failed to reach into the Negev region. Most Bedouin who had the option, preferred not to register their lands as this would mean being taxed.) Those whose land claims were recognized found it almost impossible to keep their goats within the periphery of their newly limited range. Into the 1970’s and ‘80’s, only a small portion of the Bedouin were able to continue to graze their goats. Instead of migrating with their goats in search of pasture, the majority of the Bedouin migrated in search of wage-labor.[2]

In 1979 Agriculture Minister Ariel Sharon declared a 1,500 square kilometer area in the Negev, a protected nature reserve, rendering a major portion of the Negev almost entirely out of bounds for Bedouin herders. In conjunction, he established the Green Patrol,[3] the 'environmental paramilitary unit' with the mission of fighting Bedouin 'infiltration' into national Israeli land by preventing Bedouin from grazing their animals, seen as creating 'facts on the ground.' During Sharon's tenure as Minister of Agriculture (1977-1981), the Green Patrol removed 900 Bedouin encampments and cut goat herds by more than 1/3.[4] Today the black goat is nearly extinct, and Bedouin in Israel do not have enough access to black goat hair to weave tents.

[edit] Sedentarization

Bustan Archives: "Goats grazing beneath disused garbage bins in the government township of Tel Sheva, on the Israeli side of the Green Line. The region is lauded as "Israel's Last Frontier," a pristine wilderness, while the government fails to extend proper municipal trash pickups within 'government-sanctioned' urban townships."
Bustan Archives: "Goats grazing beneath disused garbage bins in the government township of Tel Sheva, on the Israeli side of the Green Line. The region is lauded as "Israel's Last Frontier," a pristine wilderness, while the government fails to extend proper municipal trash pickups within 'government-sanctioned' urban townships."

Counter to the image of the Bedouin as fierce stateless nomads roving the entire region, by the turn of the 20th century, much of the Bedouin population in Palestine was settled, semi-nomadic, and engaged in agriculture according to an intricate system of land ownership, grazing rights, and water access.[5]

“ We should transform the Bedouins into an urban proletariat - in industry, services, construction, and agriculture. 88% of the Israeli population are not farmers, let the Bedouin be like them. Indeed, this will be a radical move which means that the Bedouin would not live on his land with his herds, but would become an urban person who comes home in the afternoon and puts his slippers on... ”

—Israeli General Moshe Dayan to Haaretz, 1963[6]

Dayan said, in the years leading up to the building of the first recognized townships, "Without coercion but with governmental direction ... this phenomenon of the Bedouins will disappear." Today, many Bedouin call themselves 'Negev Arabs' rather than ‘Bedouin,’ explaining that 'Bedouin' identity is intimately tied in with a pastoral nomadic way of life – a way of life they say is over. Although the Bedouin continue to be perceived as nomads, today all of them are fully sedentarized, and about half are urbanites.[7]

[edit] Urban Townships

Denied access to their former sources of sustenance via grazing restrictions, severed from the possibility of access to water, electricity, roads, education, and health care in the unrecognized villages, and trusting in government promises that they would receive services if they moved, in the 1970s and 80's tens of thousands of Bedouin citizens of Israel resettled in 7 legal towns constructed by the government. (In 2003, about half of the Bedouin population of approximately 150,000 lived in 7 urban townships, and half lived in 40 unrecognized villages).

Harvey Lithwick of the Negev Center for Regional Development points out that the towns did not offer any alternative means of livelihood (to self-subsistence off the land): “....the major failure was a lack of an economic rationale for the towns....” Today, Dayan’s vision of the transformation of the indigenous Bedouin into an urban proletariat has both manifested and failed: In the most established of Bedouin towns, over 25% of Bedouin men (not to speak of the women) are unemployed. Since Bedouin never receive permits to engage in agriculture, and grazing has been severely restricted, the only remaining source of income is trade in drugs and prostitutes. An additional 7 urban townships 'planned' by the government today have failed to incorporate the lessons of the urban ghettos built in the 1970s; feature any business districts, and no permits for Arab-owned industrial zones have been dispensed (as is the case throughout Arab towns across Israel). Few of those Bedouin still able to maintain a degree of self-sufficiency in the unrecognized villages through grazing and agriculture without a permit, see the urban ghetto as a desirable form of settlement.[8]

[edit] Related issues

[edit] Jewish-only development

Bedouin advocates argue that the main reason for the transfer of the Bedouin into townships against their will is demographic. Today there are around 160,000 Bedouins living in the Negev, and the number is increasing fast. With an annual growth rate of 5.5%, their birthrate is amongst the highest in the world; there will be 320,000 Bedouin in the Negev by 2020. In 2003, Director of the Israeli Population Administration Department, Herzl Gedj, described polygamy in the Bedouin sector a “security threat” and advocated various means of reducing the Arab birth rate.[9]The JNF's "Blueprint Negev" was introduced in 2005 as a way of combating the 'existential threat' to Israel's demographic Jewish majority that the Bedouin are perceived to pose.[10] In 2005, then-American head of the Jewish National Fund (JNF), Ronald Lauder, announced the JNF's ‘Blueprint Negev,’ aimed at settling over 500,000 Jewish people (particularly Americans) in the Negev/Naqab Desert by 2010. The numbers have since been revised down to 250,000. Ronald Lauder says: "Blueprint Negev answers the need for Jews in the Diaspora looking to make aliyah the pioneering way."[11]

In May 2006, Peres announced that his first task as minister in charge of development of the Negev and Galilee is to push forward the construction of a new Jewish community in the Negev, Carmit. Carmit is the first of many such settlements under the Blueprint, YNet reports, “designated for wealthy, young American immigrants who want to make aliyah and live in style.”[12]

[edit] Environmental concerns

Concentrating the indigenous Bedouin into urban townships so as to preserve National Reserve spaces for tourist uses and Jewish-only development purposes has been argued to be necessary to preserve the pristinity of the ‘Last Frontier.’ In 1979 Agriculture Minister Ariel Sharon declared a 1,500 square kilometer area in the Negev, a protected nature reserve, rendering a major portion of the Negev almost entirely out of bounds for Bedouin herders. In conjunction, he established the 'Green Patrol,' [1] the ‘environmental paramilitary unit’ with the mission of fighting Bedouin ‘infiltration’ into national Israeli land by preventing Bedouin from grazing their animals, seen as creating 'facts on the ground.' During Sharon’s tenure as Minister of Agriculture (1977-1981), the Green Patrol removed 900 Bedouin encampments and cut goat herds by more than 1/3.[13] Today the black goat is nearly extinct, and Bedouin in Israel do not have enough access to black goat hair to weave tents.

Prominent Israeli environmental leader Alon Tal has openly referred to Bedouin construction as among the top ten environmental hazards in Israel.[14] However other environmentalists argue that the Bedouin should not be compared with large-scale industrial pollution, or for that matter, the role of the military in the Negev.[15] Not long after Sharon’s 1979 decision to set aside a portion of the Negev as a nature reserve, the military soon took over the State Lands from which the Bedouin had been evicted, conducting exercises on JNF lands designated as park space. Some argue that these exercises cause erosion or leave behind 'footprints' that can remain for decades.[16] This military range today amounts to 85% of the Negev (the Negev is 60% of Israel).

In the remaining portion of the Negev available for civilian purposes, a large number of citizens live together in close proximity to a range of types of hazardous infrastructure. The most toxic infrastructure in the Negev, including waste dumps, mines, and chemical factories, is located adjacent to Bedouin villages and grazing grounds, as well as, (given the small scale of the country) in close proximity to Jewish towns. In the past few decades, Bedouin of the region have come to share some 2.5 % of the desert with Israel's nuclear reactors, 22 agro and petrochemical factories, an oil terminal, closed military zones, quarries, a toxic waste incinerator Ramat Hovav, cell towers, a power plant, several airports, a prison, and 2 rivers of open sewage.[17] Much of this infrastructure is located on the grounds of the unrecognized village of Wadi el-Na'am; the Ramat Hovav toxic waste facility, the largest in the region, as well as over half of Israel’s chemical plants, were built on village grounds starting in 1979. Ben Gurion University epidemiologist Batya Sarov, formerly a specialist at Chernobyl, told the Negev environmental justice organization Bustan: "The environmental monitoring at Chernobyl was better, and the health risks no more severe, than at Ramat Hovav."[18]

[edit] References

  1. ^ Criminalizing Self-Subsistence
  2. ^ Criminalizing Self-Subsistence
  3. ^ Devorah Brous: "Uprooting Weeds"
  4. ^ Bedouin as Environmental Hazards
  5. ^ Criminalizing Self-Subsistence
  6. ^ Criminalizing Self-Subsistence
  7. ^ Criminalizing Self-Subsistence
  8. ^ Desert Timeline
  9. ^ MERIP on Gedj
  10. ^ BUSTAN on the Blueprint
  11. ^ Blueprint Negev
  12. ^ YNet on Peres as Minister of Development
  13. ^ Bedouin as Environmental Hazards
  14. ^ Bedouin as Environmental Hazards
  15. ^ Bedouin as Environmental Hazards
  16. ^ Bedouin as Environmental Hazards
  17. ^ The Rising Role of American Money in Negev Development
  18. ^ Desert Timeline

[edit] External links

[edit] See also