How to stir up hatred between Jews and Bedouin in Israel -
By Rabbi Arik Ascherman | Nov. 4, 2013 |
Haaretz
▻http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.556001
The struggle on behalf of “unrecognized” Bedouin villages in Israel’s Negev Desert comes to the Knesset Interior Committee this week, as its members begin to debate the Begin/Prawer bill.
If this bill is passed, dozens of villages are likely to be demolished. Bedouin will be dispossessed of most of their remaining land. Up to 40,000 Israeli citizens will be transferred from their homes to townships that are magnets for crime and poverty because the Bedouin living in them have been torn from their agricultural sources of income and their culture. In his op-ed “Why don’t Rabbis for Human Rights care about Bedouin women?” Alon Tal attempts to delegitimize Rabbis For Human Rights’ support for this struggle by claiming that we neglect Bedouin women’s rights. But what is planned in the bill, and its consequences, will harm Bedouin women even more than men.
The issues facing Bedouin women are very serious, as we frequently hear from the Bedouin women activists we partner with. But the reality is that these women still choose to fight this bill while struggling in their communities on women’s issues because they know just how deeply they will be harmed by the bill’s passage. Unemployment in townships like Rahat is four times higher than in recognized villages (there are no statistics for unrecognized villages). In addition to suffering transfer and dispossession as Bedouin, women will be the first to be unemployed. The social anomie created by urbanization only increases violence against women.
While fighting the Begin/Prawer bill would be legitimate and necessary were Rabbis for Human Rights doing nothing on behalf of Bedouin women, a quick Google search reveals that we just concluded Women Citizens For Equality, a three-year empowerment program for Jewish and Bedouin women. Tahrir Elatika, the young Bedouin woman who co-coordinated the project, has written to Prof. Tal. After describing the projects that Bedouin women have established in cooperation with RHR to promote women’s rights, she concludes: “Let the women flourish and develop in their own villages, as they do not want to move to townships like Rahat, that offer only poverty and neglect.”
Tal plays on the stereotype that the Bedouin have no legitimate land claims and are illegally taking over the Negev. In 1920, the Palestine Land Development Company of the Zionist movement recorded nearly 650,000 acres as belonging to the Bedouin. When the Bedouin were invited to submit their land claims in the ’70s they submitted claims for less than half of this (many landowners had fled or been expelled). The government said it would not recognize Bedouin claims to 124,000 acres of communal grazing land, and nearly 50,000 acres have been dealt with since then either through arbitration or in court.
Most of these cases have not gone well for the Bedouin. Unlike the Ottomans, British and pre-state Zionist movement, Israel does not honor the internal Bedouin system of land ownership. Some 150,000 to 160,000 acres of land are still unresolved. Altogether the Bedouin land claims amount to around 5.4 percent of the Negev, while the Bedouin compose 30 percent of the Negev population. When stereotypes about the Bedouin “taking over the Negev” are peeled away, an RHR-commissioned opinion poll shows that most Israeli Jews think the Bedouin land claims are fair.
