Bedouin | UN-Truth

Counting – Al-Arakib destroyed again this morning for 9th (or is it 10th?) time

The “unrecognized” Bedouin village of Al-Arakib (Al-Araqib) in the northern Negev, inhabited by Bedouin Arabic-speaking citizens of Israel, was bulldozed and destroyed again this morning. It is being reported as the 9th demolition since this summer.

The stated purpose of the demolition is to make way for the planting, by the Jewish National Fund (JNF), of a large forest in the Negev.

Each time so far, residents have “rebuilt”, making tents and flimsy shelters with what remained from each previous demolition, and have pursued their protests with the support of Israeli activists.

The Jerusalem-based Alternative Information Center (AIC) has reported this morning that “A large number of Israeli security and special forces arrived at El Arakib at approximately 9.00 this morning and completely demolished the village. And unlike in previous demolitions, the Israeli authorities are currently clearing away all the debris from this morning’s demolition, leaving the villagers with nothing … bulldozers from the Jewish National Fund remain on the villager’s land, even though the demolitions are completed”. This news is reported here.

The AIC also reported that “On 1 September 2010, the Bedouin residents of the ‘unrecognized’ villages in Israel wrote an unprecedented appeal to US President Barak Obama, requesting his assistance in calling on Israel to recognize the Bedouin traditional ownership of land and to stop demolishing their homes – fundamental rights of all human beings”.

The report adds that the villagers have already begun to rebuild, again.

UPDATE: The AIC has updated its report with this information; “When the families of El Araqib tried to resist, the Israeli authorities shot tear gas and rubber coated bullets. Five children between the ages of 16-17 were injured. The families of El Araqib claim that today’s demolition and plowing are in preparation for the Jewish Arbor Day holiday of Tu Bishvat this coming Thursday (20 January), on which hundreds of people are expected to come by invitation of the JNF to plant trees in the area”…

BACKGROUND: In late August, Haaretz published a lengthy article looking into the background of Al-Arakib, which is posted here, which we previously wrote about here.

The Haaretz story reports that “The driving force behind the suit to reclaim the Bedouin lands is Nuri el-Okbi. He is a 68-year-old garage mechanic who was educated in Kibbutz Evron, studied auto mechanics and worked in two kibbutzim in the Negev, Shoval and Lahav, before opening a garage of his own in Lod. At the end of the 1970s, when he, like many of his Bedouin friends, realized that submissive cooperation with the state would not be productive and that there was no chance his claims to land would be honored, he established the Association for the Support and Protection of Bedouin Rights. He has since worked by various means, some of them quite creative, to stir attention and compel the state to address the protracted dispute over Bedouin lands in the Negev … [el-Okbi said that] the state is creating a false impression and frightening the Israelis [i.e., Israeli Jews] into believing that the Bedouin are trying to seize control of the whole Negev. ‘If the state will one day have to expropriate land for true public purposes, it can always do so, and justifiably. For example, a section of my land was taken for a road that connects Lehavim to Eshel Hanasi, and I did not ask the state for anything and did not interfere with the building of the road. But I will not agree to dispossession for its own sake and for nationalist reasons’ … According to El-Okbi, a tribal court that was recognized by the state operated in his father’s house, a stone structure whose ruins still exist. But the state was unimpressed by El-Okbi’s documents, and in the fall of 1951 informed the tribe that its land was being requisitioned by the army for six months. They were evacuated eastward, to the Hora area, near Be’er Sheva. The same story is told by many Bedouin in the Negev. Since then, nothing has happened. Everyone who tried to return to his land was removed from it and accused of trespassing. In the 1970s, the state encouraged the Bedouin to submit claims for their lands to the land regulation unit in the Justice Ministry. Members of the Al-Okbi tribe, like others, submitted claims – which have since been gathering dust in interdepartmental filing cabinets. ‘We were expelled by deceit from our land, under the auspices of the military government’, El-Okbi says. ‘That is theft. We are citizens of the State of Israel, inhabitants of this country for generations’. Since then, the members of the Al-Okbi tribe and other Bedouin have been living in a state of suspended animation. The state has amended most of the Turkish and British laws and adapted them to its needs, but in the case of the Bedouin and their lands, one Israeli government after another has effectively decided to do nothing, or at most to set up a committee, which is the same as doing nothing, but looks better’. In 2005, Nuri el-Okbi asked the land regulator to register his land in his name. In response, the state sued him for invading mawat land [n.b. – uncultivated wasteland] and expropriated areas. The land regulator referred the resulting legal entanglement to the Be’er Sheva District Court … Four years ago, El-Okbi established a one-person settlement on his land. With the aid of human rights activists in the Negev he erected a tent, moved in and made it his headquarters for managing his affairs and the wider Bedouin issues. Every few weeks, a large number of police arrive at his hill with heavy machinery, destroy the tent, remove him from the site by force and take him into detention. When he is released, he returns to the hill and erects a new tent. In February of this year he was arrested for an entire week. ‘The incarceration was intolerable … People are treated like animals. I was brought to court, charged with 40 criminal counts of invasion, uprooting trees and violations of an order. I was released on bail, conditionally, and ordered to stay away from Arakib. I must now stay with my brothers, near Shoket Junction [north of Be’er Sheva], the place to which we were taken in 1951’ …
The claimants, headed by Nuri el-Okbi, are represented by attorney Michael Sfard. ‘I took this case’, Sfard explains, ‘because it is a classic case of the state using its overwhelming force, based on 150-year-old Ottoman laws which it interprets creatively, in order to justify dispossession and infringe the few rights of a weakened, trampled, discriminated community’.”

Al-Arakib: some background via Haaretz

Haaretz has published a lengthy look into the background of the situation at one of the unrecognized Bedouin villages in the Negev, Al-Arakib, that has been demolished four times in recent weeks by Israeli bulldozers protected by Israeli forces, but documented by Israeli human rights activists, as we have reported previously here.

Here are some extended excerpts from the Haaretz reportage”
“In 2006, claims were filed in court for 1,350 dunams (338 acres ) of land in the name of the late Suleiman al-Okbi and his heirs. These cases are being heard simultaneously by three judges. The biggest claim, involving about 800 dunams – three plots in the village of Arakib and two more in the Zuheilika area – is being heard before Judge Sarah Dovrat in the Be’er Sheva District Court. The claimants, headed by Nuri el-Okbi, are represented by attorney Michael Sfard. “I took this case,” Sfard explains, “because it is a classic case of the state using its overwhelming force, based on 150-year-old Ottoman laws which it interprets creatively, in order to justify dispossession and infringe the few rights of a weakened, trampled, discriminated community.”
…
The driving force behind the suit to reclaim the Bedouin lands is Nuri el-Okbi. He is a 68-year-old garage mechanic who was educated in Kibbutz Evron, studied auto mechanics and worked in two kibbutzim in the Negev, Shoval and Lahav, before opening a garage of his own in Lod. At the end of the 1970s, when he, like many of his Bedouin friends, realized that submissive cooperation with the state would not be productive and that there was no chance his claims to land would be honored, he established the Association for the Support and Protection of Bedouin Rights. He has since worked by various means, some of them quite creative, to stir attention and compel the state to address the protracted dispute over
Bedouin lands in the Negev.

“There are 13 million dunams of land in the Negev,” El-Okbi says. “Of that, the Bedouin claimed 800,000 dunams. As of now, the state has reached agreements with the Bedouin for 200,000 dunams, so that less than 600,000 dunams remain in dispute. But the state is creating a false impression and frightening the Israelis [i.e., Israeli Jews] into believing that the Bedouin are trying to seize control of the whole Negev. If the state will one day have to expropriate land for true public purposes, it can always do so, and justifiably. For example, a section of my land was taken for a road that connects Lehavim to Eshel Hanasi, and I did not ask the state for anything and did not interfere with the building of the road. But I will not agree to dispossession for its own sake and for nationalist reasons.”
…
The Bedouin brought as an expert witness Prof. Oren Yiftachel, a political geographer and town planner from Ben-Gurion University in Be’er Sheva. The state is putting forward two contradictory arguments: on the one hand that the land was mawat land [n.b. – uncultivated wasteland], and on the other that it has been expropriated. Logic says that if it was mawat it did not have to be expropriated, and if it was expropriated, perhaps it was not mawat. The main witness for the defense is Prof. Ruth Kark, an expert in historical geography and the Middle East from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The summations are scheduled for September 30. In the meantime, the Bedouin claimants have submitted a special request to call another witness on their behalf, Dr. Yitzhak (Clinton ) Bailey, an expert in Bedouin law and ways of life and the author of “Bedouin Law from Sinai and the Negev” (Yale University Press, 2009 ). In the meantime, Kark and Yiftachel, two learned scholars, have looked at the same maps, read the same 19th-century books by scholars and travelers to Palestine, but each offers a completely different interpretation of the material. Kark maintains that the Bedouin have no attachment to the land and that it is impossible to prove they ever did; Yiftachel says it is as clear as day that the Bedouin have owned the land for untold generations.
…
Oren Yiftachel did his undergraduate and master’s degrees in Perth, Australia, majoring in urban studies with reference to geography, political science and economics. He began his Ph.D. thesis – an analysis of the judaization of the Galilee – in Australia and completed it at the Technion in Haifa. In the early 1990s, Prof. Avishay Braverman [n.b. – he is now Israel’s Minister of Minority Affairs , appointed by Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu], who was then president of Ben-Gurion University, issued a tender for a young academic to join the university’s faculty and Yiftachel applied and won. Since then he has been involved in social issues in the Negev, such as public housing in what are known as ‘development towns’, built in the 1950s to house new immigrants; social services in Be’er Sheva and Mizrahi identity (referring to Jews of Middle Eastern and North African origin ). ‘I am an involved researcher’, he says. ‘The human perspective always interests me. Gradually I got into the Bedouin issue. I believe that knowledge has to be used not only for academic publications, but also translated into something that can improve the society. The eros that moves me is the passion for change, as Herbert Marcuse said’. Yiftachel is [also] co-chair of B’Tselem, which monitors human rights in the occupied territories, and an adviser to the regional council of unrecognized (by the state) Bedouin villages. He is testifying pro bono in the El-Okbi trial.

Prof. Kark does not support a change in the situation. In other countries, too, she says, the Bedouin get no special treatment. ‘For the past five-six years I have been researching the subject of Bedouin land in the Middle East, examining how other countries address the question of their lands … According to this research there are two groups of countries. Those whose leaders are of Bedouin origin, such as Saudi Arabia, which treat the Bedouin slightly more tolerantly; and countries like Syria, which show no great tolerance for them. There is much talk today in the international community about indigenous peoples and their rights. Australia, New Zealand and Canada are mentioned in this regard. But in none of those countries do the natives have private land rights of the kind that some people want to see here. They have collective rights of fishing, hunting, use of reservations for all kinds of needs. But the Bedouin cannot be viewed as indigenous … because they have not been in the Negev since ancient times. The majority of the Bedouin have been in this country for less than 200 years. They do not originate in the Negev. The Bedouin are not defined as indigenous peoples in the other Middle Eastern countries, either, so why should it be different only in Israel? Why is it that only in Israel all the human rights fighters and activists claim that they are indigenous? There is something terribly anti-Israeli about this’ …

Continue reading Al-Arakib: some background via Haaretz

Third Israeli demolition of Israeli Beduin village in less than three weeks – Israeli activists document and protest

Ibn Ezra (Joseph Dana), an Israeli photographer, film maker and writer who is also a political activist, has done a great job in recording the third Israeli military destruction of the small Bedouin village (encampment might be a better word) of Al-Araqiib in Israel’s northern Negev desert this morning.

It was the third destruction of this community in less than three weeks.

This “unrecognized” Israeli village is reportedly being destroyed in preparation for making a Jewish National Fund forest in its place.

Ibn Ezra posted news about the impending demolition on Twitter just before 10 pm Monday evening, saying he was on his way to the site.

There is something extremely chilling about using military bulldozers to tear down tents — it increases the awfulness of destroying the homes of people who are already living precariously.

It is difficult even to imagine the terror and disorientation of seeing one’s own home destroyed by military force before one’s own eyes…

Writing tonight on the Electronic Intifida website (which usually can’t turn material around this fast), after nearly 24 hours of non-stop reporting — and travelling to and from the site — Ibn Ezra said that when he arrived on the scene last night, before the third demolition carried out this morning, “Simple tent structures consisting of four wood shafts and a black tarp was the only remains of this village. We, Israeli and international activists, were invited to sit in these tents through the night and sip coffee in the cool desert night with the villagers. They told us about their livelihood now that the village is constantly facing demolition. Some talked about their military service in the Israeli army and their disbelief that the country they served could behave in such a way as to destroy their entire village … [As] the light began to change, the first sounds of the demolition crew could be heard far off in the distance. Before we had time to blink, 200 fully clad police officers were on microphones telling us to leave and that any violence would be met with harsher violence. As soon as the voices on the microphones stopped, the bulldozers began to work. The place we had been sitting and having coffee through the night was leveled before our groggy, disbelieving eyes. The demolition crew worked efficiently and without pause. Every structure that served some form of life in the village was leveled and all the building materials from it were trucked away. As we were pushed further from the village, a couple of activists tried to sit inside or in front of the tents. This was met with violence by the police as people were thrown to the ground like rag dolls. At one point in the chaos, a professor of medieval history at Tel Aviv University was grabbed by a police officer, who quickly wrenched his hand behind his back. The professor was held like this for a number of minutes and then arrested. It is still unclear under what terms. Finally, the police confined us to a hilltop and had us look over the village as it was destroyed. The water canisters, which are needed because Israel refuses to give the villagers water pipes, were broken and then placed on flat bed trucks to be carted away. The image of massive bulldozers flanked by heavily armed riot police destroying makeshift Bedouin living structures is something that no one would be able to forget. As soon as the forces left, the villagers began rebuilding what little they have left. Every week, their resources shrink and yet they rebuild. They have no choice”. This report can be read in full here.

There is more from Joseph Dana on Facebook, and this is from his Ibn Ezra account on Twitter”

They are destroying el arakib again. I am leaving jerusalem soon and will be live tweeting through the night from there
9:52 PM Aug 9th

Middle of the night 10 km away from the village

Sun is just beginning to peak in the desert

Army just arrived in the village

Massive police force now

Ibn Ezra on Twitter

Destroying the village now and beating us

I have never seen anything like this in my life

The police are very violent now. This is very bad

They are destroying the entire village again

They have penned us in and are destroying the entire village before our eyes

I have no words. This is just violence

I have never seen anything like. Beyond words only pain

The villages has been destroyed and now the army is taking all the materials away so it can’t be rebuilt

When that is done they are going to spray the area with the shunk so the area is toxic for a week

There are about 400 heavily armed soldiers in the village which has about twenty residents. There are 30 activists roughly

They started at 6 in the morning. There are 3 injuries among the activists from major army violence

Just so it is clear. It is difficult to take photos on a blackberry while you are being hit with a club. That is why there are no vio shots

Army is gone and we are rebuilding the village now

More Joseph Dana from Facebook

Joseph Dana via Ibn Ezra on Twitter

And, more photos are also available here.

[Al-Araqib was destroyed, then partially rebuilt, on 27 July, 6 August, 10 August — while several other nearby villages were destroyed on 3 August. Bedouin communities have also been destroyed in the West Bank, including in the Jordan Valley.]

via Max Blumenthal

Max Blumenthal, who was also apparently at Al-Araqib overnight and today, has chilling reports on his blog here and here that Israeli youth volunteers were organized to participate in the first demolition of Al-Araqib on 26-27 July.