Israel accused of discriminating against Negev desert clans

There are no road signs to the village, just a dirt
track off the highway to the north of the Israeli city of Beer Sheva.
Officially Twayil Abu Jarwal, a village on the land where the Talalqah
clan has lived for generations, does not exist. It is “unrecognised” in
the terminology that shapes the bitter land dispute between Israel’s
160,000 indigenous bedouin in the Negev desert and the Israeli state.

Last
year the authorities mounted eight separate operations in Twayil to
demolish the homes of those living there, but the villagers stayed on.
Now they live in poor quality tents surrounded by the remains of
destroyed homes: corrugated iron, bricks and heaps of dirt piled on
torn-down tents.

“The government used force against us, they
detained people, demolished houses, fined us and nothing helped,” said
Aqil al-Talalqah, 66, a retired headmaster who now lives in a tent in
Twayil, only a few hundred yards from the demolished two-room building
where he once went to school as a child. “They say we are invading
state land. How are we invading state land? This is our land.”

A
leading international human rights group yesterday accused the Israeli
government of discrimination against the bedouin, citing a sharp
increase in housing demolitions and a “systematic violation” of their
land and housing rights.

The detailed 126-page report from Human
Rights Watch (HRW) comes as a new government-appointed commission
begins a study on the long-running land ownership dispute. The Goldberg
Commission, appointed by the housing ministry but without any
representatives from the unrecognised villages, is due to report later
this year.

Tens of thousands of bedouin – Arabs who have lived a
semi-nomadic life on the land for many generations and who all carry
full Israeli citizenship – live in 39 “unrecognised villages” in
southern Israel where their homes are subject to frequent demolition.

“Discriminatory
land and planning policies have made it virtually impossible for
bedouin to build legally where they live and also exclude them from the
state’s development plans for the region,” HRW said in the report.

It
described “discriminatory, exclusionary and punitive policies” and
noted that new farms and towns for Jewish Israelis were being built in
the area. “The state appears intent on maximising its control over
Negev land and increasing the Jewish population in the area for
strategic, economic and demographic reasons,” it said. In 2005, the
Israeli government adopted a $3.6bn (about £1.8bn) plan to bring
another 200,000 Israelis to the Negev to ease housing pressure
elsewhere.

HRW called for an immediate halt to house demolitions and the creation of an independent commission to investigate the dispute.

Twayil
is one of the villages worst hit by the recent increase in demolitions.
The Talalqah clan was moved from the area in the 1950s, a time when
Israel’s Arab population was subject to military rule. In 1978, clan
members bought plots of land in Lakiya, one of seven townships
established for the bedouin on the advice of a government committee,
thinking they could restart their lives. But they have not received
their land and soon discovered Lakiya was built on land claimed by
another bedouin tribe. Eventually, they returned to Twayil, where they
now live surrounded by the signs of demolitions and without even basic
services like water or electricity.

Talalqah, who was one of
those who bought land in Lakiya, acknowledges that bedouin traditions
of grazing are largely gone and irreplaceable. Now he wants the village
of Twayil to be formally recognised and provided with basic public
services. “They put so much pressure on us,” he said. “But we will not
evacuate unless we have a real solution.” Six bedouin villages have
received limited recognition from the state.

The bedouin case is
complicated by disputes between the different groups representing them
and the fact that few have the mid-19th century Ottoman land ownership
document, known as a Tabu. There is also a broad Israeli perception
that the community is responsible for most of the crime in the area and
is making unrealistic claims to the land.

In December 2000,
Ariel Sharon, who was then head of the Likud opposition party and later
became prime minister, said: “The bedouin are grabbing new territory.
They are gnawing away at the country’s land reserves and no one is
doing anything significant about it.”

A spokesman for Israel’s
housing ministry said that it wanted to encourage all bedouin to move
into the seven townships built for them. A bedouin administration is
recruiting bedouin staff to deal with the community’s issues and the
Goldberg Commission, which will report later this year, will advise on
how to resolve the land ownership dispute. “Our goal is to stop them
from spreading out and to bring them into these towns,” the spokesman
said. “The land they are sitting on today is not their land. This is
Israeli land.”

The Israel Land Administration, which manages the
93% of Israeli land that is publicly owned, said it is “doing
everything in its power to resolve the problems of the landless bedouin
in the Negev.” “Instead of prosecution, Israel proposes to settle the
conflict by offering extremely generous settlements in return for the
withdrawal of the bedouins’ ownership claims,” it says.

However,
the seven townships to which it wants the bedouin to move are already
overcrowded and have poor living conditions – in stark contrast to the
new communities being built nearby for Israelis relocating to the
Negev.

According to the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics,
in 2003 all the townships ranked among the eight poorest areas of
Israel. But of the newly built communities around Beer Sheva, with
their predominantly Jewish populations, two were in the top five
wealthiest areas of the country.