T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights today strongly denounced a reported agreement by four leading Israeli coalition parties to reduce land allocated for the Bedouin population in the Negev. A Cabinet Committee is scheduled to meet on Monday to discuss the Bill on the Arrangement of Bedouin Settlement in the Negev ahead of it beginning the legislative passage through the Knesset (Israeli parliament).
“We urge the coalition parties to reverse the current agreement, and to create a plan that respects the dignity and human rights of the Bedouin people,” said Joshua Bloom, T’ruah’s Director of Israel Programs. “Demolishing homes, forcing people off their land and denying basic government services builds animosity among the Bedouin population, towards the state and towards their Jewish neighbors.”
Recent Israeli news reports indicate that prominent members of Knesset from all major coalition parties have agreed to modifications to the previously announced Prawer plan, which would already expel 30,000-40,000 Bedouin Israelis from villages considered to be “unrecognized.”
Permanent Bedouin communities have been living in many of these areas since the Ottoman Empire. Other villages were established after Bedouin communities were forcibly relocated under martial law shortly after the end of Israel’s War of Independence in 1948. However, the government of Israel has never recognized maps, or granted building permits to families living there.
The new agreement would take an already harsh plan and makes it worse. As reported in +972, the revised plan would remove much of the land previously promised the Bedouin, and “place a five-year limit for removing the population from their current homes and resettling them into [designated zones]… During this period, Bedouin can appeal their individual cases to the courts, but all remaining Bedouin land claims will be erased after five years.”
Rabbi Jill Jacobs, Executive Director of T’ruah said, “As a nation of people who know too well the pain of homelessness and oppression, Israel has a moral obligation to protect its most vulnerable citizens.” She added, “The prophet Micah warned us about such abuses of power, saying: ‘They covet fields, and seize them; and [they covet] houses, and take them away; thus they oppress a man and his house, even a man and his heritage.'”
T’ruah continues to call on the Israeli government to stop the dispossession of tens of thousands of Bedouin Israeli citizens, to legalize the remaining unrecognized Bedouin villages in southern Israel, which involve less than five percent of the area of the Negev, and to provide Bedouin communities with the government services that will enable children to attain a good education, and adults to develop economic self-sufficiency.
Read more about T’ruah’s work on Bedouin human rights here:
https://www.truah.org/issuescampaigns/bedouin.html
https://www.truah.org/images/stories/6-bedouin-rights-israel.pdf
For an unofficial translation of the Begin Plan, see more here:
http://www.acri.org.il/en/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Begin-Report-English-January-2013.pdf
Read the Israeli Alliance of Organizations for Equality and Justice for the Bedouin’s Memorandum of Law to Regulate the Bedouin Settlement in the Negev, 5773-2013 here: http://www.acri.org.il/en/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/beginplanletter.pdf