Muhaideen forwarded these two articles for us: Israel's Bedouins fight to keep their ancestral land
By Jonathan Cook The Daily Star 10 September 2004 http://dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=10&categ_id=2&; article_id=8242 ATIR, Negev: Four years ago Raed Abu Elkian, 27, finished serving in the Israeli Army as a Bedouin tracker. Today the entrance to his village in Israel's southern semi-desert region, the Negev, is marked by a giant concrete block stamped in black ink with the words "Danger. Entry Forbidden: Firing Range." "It's like we're invisible, we don't exist as far as the authorities are concerned," he said. The army laid a trail of these blocks along the road to the village in March to alert anyone venturing into this part of the Negev to keep away. For the 1,000 residents of Atir, who have farmed this corner of Israel for generations, the creation of a military firing range next to their homes was only advance warning of the authorities' intentions. In April the supply from a single standpipe, the only source of running water in the village, was cut off. Finally, in June everyone over the age of 16 was issued with an evacuation notice telling them, according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, to leave the village "vacant, without person, object or animal in the area." A lawyer representing the state, Gioara Adatao, told the same newspaper: "As far as I am concerned, these are people who seized land illegally. The state has no obligation to supply them with alternative places of residence." Although the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians in the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza has long been in the spotlight of the international media, few outside Israel have noted the potentially violent confrontation developing between the Israeli government and its Bedouin citizens. In late June, it was widely reported in the Israeli media, some 23 members of the Abu Elkian tribe, mostly women and children who were not at work, were injured when a paramilitary police force known as the Green Patrol entered the village to enforce the demolition of seven homes, including that of Raed's grandfather, Moussa Abu Elkian, 90. The harsh measures being taken against the Abu Elkian tribe are being repeated across the Negev, as the state begins implementing the Negev Development Plan, a scheme officially begun over a year ago by the Prime Minister's Office. Ariel Sharon himself is said to have taken a personal interest. The plan's purpose is to claim the ancestral lands of the Bedouin as state property, forcing the tribes to abandon their traditional practices of growing cereal crops and herding cattle, sheep and goats and instead move to specially created urban centers. The state argues that this will benefit the Bedouin in the long term, although officials are reluctant to speak to the foreign media about the scheme. One senior official in the Israel Lands Authority, Yaakov Katz, has been reported as saying: "It's high time for this to take place. It should have been done ages ago. The main goal is to make order in (the Negev) and to make sure the Bedouin get their rights and (fulfill their) duties." Over the next few years the government has set aside $200 million to enforce the removal from the Negev of the last remaining Bedouin farming communities, home to some 70,000 Bedouin. "The development Sharon wants for the Negev is only Jewish development," said Raed Abu Elkian. "And that means ethnic cleansing for us." The Negev Bedouin have been living as outlaws ever since Israel was created over 50 years ago. The state refuses to respect Bedouin land holdings recognised by both the Ottoman and British authorities because the title deeds were rarely set down in writing. The collective criminalization of the Bedouin, however, was only codified in Israeli law in 1965 by a planning law which zoned the lands on which they live as green areas, making their homes retroactively illegal and subject to destruction. Today half the Negev's 140,000 Bedouin live in 45 villages the state refuses to recognize and which lack all public amenities, including running water, electricity, sewage and garbage disposal, medical care and schools. But despite their appalling living conditions in these "unrecognized villages" the Bedouin have so far proved unwilling to move into the townships. The reason, says Jabr Abu Kaff, a Bedouin leader, is because the other 70,000 Bedouin in the Negev agreed under pressure in the early 1970s to move into seven urban reservations, officially known as "concentration centers." All these townships languish at the very bottom of the country's social and economic league tables. "Although they were designed to urbanize the Bedouin, the townships lack industrial areas and even the most basic infrastructure," he said. The largest, Rahat, which has 40,000 Bedouin inhabitants, boasts only a post office and one bank. Observers suggest the confrontation between the Bedouin and the state was inevitable given that one of the core Zionist goals is the "freeing up" of the huge land mass of the Negev - some two-thirds of Israeli territory - for Jewish immigration. Today the Bedouin, a quarter of the Negev's population, live on under 2 per cent of its land. Sharon's Negev Development Plan is designed to use draconian measures to ensure that the townships policy partially implemented in the 1970s succeeds three decades later. According to legislation Sharon is pushing through the Knesset, any Bedouin living outside a township will be redefined as an illegal squatter. Repeat offenders risk two years in jail. "The government wants to force us to move to Hura," says Abu Elkian, referring to a Bedouin township a few miles from Atir. "But the townships are graveyards for the living. There we will be choked to death." The war of words over land rights in the Negev has grown increasingly inflammatory, stoked by right-wing members of the government. In February 2002, National Infrastructures Minister Avigdor Lieberman told the Israeli media: "We must stop (the Bedouin's) illegal invasion of state land by all means possible. The Bedouin have no regard for our laws." And Tzachi Hanegbi, the public security minister, urged an audience of Jews in the Negev: "Come on friends, pick up a stick and beat any Bedouin criminal until he leaves." Officially, the state justifes its concentration program on the grounds that the Bedouin are too scattered to be connected to public services. The irony is not lost on Labad Abu Afash, the mayor of the unrecognized village of Wadi al-Naam, near Beersheva. In the late 1970s the state built the Negev's main electricity sub-station in the very center of the village, with volts surging over the heads of the 3,000 inhabitants, even though none of their homes is connected to the supply. "We can feel the electricity humming in our heads, but we are not allowed to benefit from it," he says. The same criteria have not been applied to the 100 Jewish communities that have sprung up all over the Negev in last few decades. Some comprise barely over a dozen families but are usually connected promptly to public services. Sharon's expressed goal is to establish in the place of the Bedouin villages dozens of new Jewish settlements in the Negev to house some of the 350,000 immigrants the World Zionist Organization hopes to bring to the Galilee and the Negev by the end of the decade. So far there have not been many takers, and Sharon has therefore appealed to Jews in the diaspora to seek refuge from anti-Semitism in Israel. Just such a speech, urging France's 600,000 Jews to leave their homeland, recently infuriated French President Jacques Chirac. Sharon told a meeting of Jewish leaders: "If I have to advocate to our brothers in France, I will tell them one thing. Move to Israel, as early as possible." He also wants the territory for a network of land-hungry private Jewish-owned ranches similar to his own Negev farmstead, Sycamore Ranch. Grapes and dates will be grown in the desert climate by offering the ranchers large quantities of subsidized water. The infrastructure for 36 ranches has already been approved in what will form the spine of a touristic "wine road." Finally there are widespread rumors that Sharon intends to use the cleared Negev land to provide homes for settlers evacuated from Gaza or the West Bank, if a disengagement plan can be agreed by his cabinet. A row briefly flared late last year when the Avraham Poraz, the interior minister, gave public expression to the suggestion. Faced with the blanket opposition of the Bedouin to his plan, Sharon is resorting to ever more intimidatory tactics, says Mohammed Zeidan of the Human Rights Association in Nazareth. "He has been drafting laws to criminalize the Bedouin and strengthening paramilitary police forces whose job is to demolish homes." Zeidan's organization is especially critical of a recent tactic employed by the authorities: crop-spraying planes have been showering Bedouin fields with herbicides to kill their crops shortly before harvest time. Several Bedouin have had to be treated for poisoning after being sprayed. The Israeli courts have agreed to a temporary injunction on the crop-spraying until a hearing due in October when they will decide whether the government's actions are legal. "This is a new phase in the government's quiet war on the Bedouin," Zeidan said. "In the rest of the world, governments are recognising the rights of indigenous peoples and making amends for past injustices. In Israel the climate of persecution continues unabated." ==================================== Concern for the small animals By Meron Benvenisti Haaretz 10 September 2004 http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/476207.html Two main demands have been raised by environment groups in connection with the environmental damage caused by the separation fence: "environmental compensation" within the Green Line and "setting up crossing points for small animals." One stands incredulous before such a blatant expression of disregard for the human and physical landscape. Terrible environmental damage is being inflicted on large areas in the heart of the country. Seventeen million cubic meters of soil, with tens of thousands of olive trees, thousands of dunams of orchards and groves, tens of thousands of dunams of natural growth, hothouses, archaeological sites and wells - as well as the fabric of life of hundreds of thousands of people - are being crushed by giant bulldozers. Yet the environmental organizations have nothing to say about the damage caused by the fence. On the contrary, they exploit the tragedies of others to promote their own interests: The destruction of the Palestinian environment presents the opportunity to demand "environmental compensation" within Israel. Moreover, the environmentalists are fighting for safe passage for small wildlife, while ignoring the fact that freedom of movement is being denied to hundreds of thousands of people - including small children - in an arbitrary manner. What selective sensitivity! Of course, the environmentalists wish to avoid issues that are considered political - especially when the separation fence enjoys widespread domestic support and its few opponents are castigated as traitors. The "mandate" the environmentalists took upon themselves ends at the Green Line and whatever happens on the other side is of no interest to them. Just don't accuse them of annexing land. But attention should be directed to the destructive consequences of an ethnic or geopolitical approach to the environment, rather than addressing the environment from an ecological perspective. A mountain range that happens to fall within Israel's borders deserves careful preservation as "an ecological pocket" of great value. But the part of this same range that lies on the other side of the fence is of no interest. The environmental damage incurred is justified by security considerations and can be ignored because it "is not under our responsibility." In this way, those who destroy the environment and rape the landscape enjoy full freedom to continue their destructive work, which - how ironic - is driven by a love of the Land of Israel and the sanctity of its soil. The array of outposts and the plan for settlement contiguity, as exposed in Haaretz, constitute a program of environmental destruction of monstrous proportions. A chain of outposts, whose location is only determined by political considerations, aims to insert a wedge between Palestinian population blocs. The result is a series of octopus-like arms that stretch for many kilometers and include homes and other installations, as well as roads and infrastructure, defacing the environment and engendering chaotic development. These octopus arms, which hold a grip on Palestinian population centers, connect to Israeli settlement blocs via broad highways allocated "for Jews only," while parallel roads are paved "for Palestinians only." Together, these road systems damage the landscape and destroy ecological habitats. Who would dare to engage in something trivial like environmental protection when we are dealing with a fateful struggle for the Land of Israel? And if those responsible for protecting the environment remain silent, then those who raise a hue and cry about this must just be exploiting ecology to promote their political agenda. And woe to those who claim, for example, that the outpost fever is in some way related to real-estate profiteering, with an eye toward the privatization budget for kibbutz and moshav lands. In any case, while the opponents of Jerusalem's westward expansion sit on Mount Sansan and preach about preserving "the ecological pocket," they remain indifferent to the construction in Beitar Ilit (on the other side of the Green Line), which destroys part of the very same ecological pocket. And if this is the settlers' attitude toward the environment in the redeemed Land of Israel, what chances do values of landscape and history have in the face of Israel Defense Forces tanks and bulldozers, which plow through flora and destroy buildings out of security considerations. Less than a year ago, IDF tanks destroyed many historic buildings in the Old City of Nablus, including Byzantine, Mameluke and Crusader structures, as well as monumental Palestinian structures. In early August, the Palestinian Authority complained about the destruction of Mameluke structures near the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron. This destruction is continuing to this very day as retribution for the firing of Qassam rockets into the western Negev. And the Palestinians, who are hungry for land and suspicious of appropriation schemes, are building without any environmental planning or rational urban considerations, thus contributing to the damage of environment and landscape. This is the same thing that happened in the giant metropolitan area of greater Jerusalem, stretching from Ramallah to Bethlehem. A desperate thought comes to mind - that before the fate of the disputed land is resolved there will be nothing left to fight about. And then a great cry will be heard over the ruins. ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> $9.95 domain names from Yahoo!. Register anything. http://us.click.yahoo.com/J8kdrA/y20IAA/yQLSAA/MknplB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/VTJP/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
