It's not just settlers who oppose Israel's plan to relocate Bedouin in West Bank
Thursday, May 16, 2013 at 03:57PM Bedouin say plan would merge different tribes, which clashes with their tradition; Israel has already shelved plan due to settler opposition, Maariv reports.
by Amira Hass Haaretz 16 May 2013
By Amira Hass | May.16, 2013 | 9:20 AM | 8
A Bedouin woman carries her child in the West Bank village of Wadi al-Maleh. Photo by Reuters
A Civil Administration plan to settle West Bank Bedouin in a new community north of Jericho has met with opposition not only from settlers but from the Bedouin themselves. The Bedouin say the project is part of plan to evict thousands of Bedouin from their tents, that they were not consulted, and that the plan would merge Bedouin of different tribes, which clashes with their tradition.
According to a report in Maariv on Tuesday, the defense minister has shelved the plan due to opposition by settlers.
The Civil Administration wants to put together Bedouin from the Rashadiyeh, Kaabneh and the Jahalin tribes, all of whom maintain a traditional lifestyle based on raising and herding sheep and goats.
Part of the Rashadiyeh tribe, who were evicted from the Ein Gedi area when Israel was established, live in three groups in the area of Nu’eimeh, north of Jericho, near the site where the Civil Administration wants to build the new community for them. They were forced to move to the Nu’eimeh area a quarter century ago from an area east of Ramallah, where they were not able to graze their flocks.
In 2010, the Civil Administration issued demolition orders for dozens of tents and shacks built at Nu’eimeh, but the High Court of Justice prohibited the demolition. Issam Aruri, head of the Jerusalem Legal Aid and Human Rights Center, which represents the Rashadiyeh community, told Haaretz that the State Prosecutor’s Office pledged that an alternative community would be built for them nearby.
Over the past seven years, during hearings on other petitions demanding that the Civil Administration prepare master plans for Bedouin communities and not only for settlers, the prosecution and the Civil Administration gave similar responses − that the Bedouin would be resettled in permanent communities in the West Bank.
Master plans
A senior official in the Palestinian local government ministry told Haaretz that as long as Israel rules Area C − the West Bank area under both Israeli military and civil control − the Civil Administration must prepare master plans for the Palestinian inhabitants of the area. However, the residents’ lifestyle must be taken into account and they must be consulted.
The Rashadiyeh Bedouin initially agreed to the plan because they thought the community was going to be rural and only for their tribe. Only in 2012 did they realize that the plan had grown and now included three tribes, and that their part of the community consisted of two out of nine neighborhoods.
The Civil Administration’s plan apparently changed in April 2012, after the Civil Administration abandoned a plan to forcibly move Jahalin Bedouin living near the Khan al-Ahmar, north of the settlement of Ma’aleh Adumim, to an area near the Abu Dis city dump, which the Jahalin fought via their lawyer Shlomo Lecker.
The Kaabneh and the Jahalin were expelled to the West Bank from the Be’er Sheva area after the establishment of the state. In 1967 they were forced to move again due to Israeli construction, IDF training zones and nature reserves in the Jordan Valley. The members of the three tribes are registered with UNRWA as refugees.
The plan calls for construction of the community on about 1,600 dunams (400 acres) of land out of a total of some 1,350 acres registered as state land already during Jordanian rule. A representative of the Bedouin said that more than 1,000 lots, each of half a dunam and for a single home, were to be built there. In comparison, according to Alon Cohen-Lifshitz of Bimkom − Planners for Planning Rights, a new plan for the Israeli settlement of Rotem calls for 200 housing units on 1,500 dunams.
A representative for the Bedouin told Haaretz on Wednesday that the planned community “will be a social and economic disaster for us because of the unacceptable proximity of different tribes and the lack of access to grazing areas.”
Cohen-Lifshitz said there was no planning rationale for the community other than “a political plan to evict them. The right thing would be to plan communities in the places where they live in keeping with their traditional lifestyle.”
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By Yanir Yagna | May.09,2013 | 12:12 PM
A Civil Administration plan to settle West Bank Bedouin in a new community north of Jericho has met with opposition not only from settlers but from the Bedouin themselves. The Bedouin say the project is part of plan to evict thousands of Bedouin from their tents, that they were not consulted, and that the plan would merge Bedouin of different tribes, which clashes with their tradition
Bedouin leaders of unrecognized communities in the Negev held an emergency meeting Wednesday night in order to fight a bill that they say would compel them to leave their current homes. The meeting follows the decision of a ministerial committee to approve a bill to regulate Bedouin settlement in the Negev.
The Council of Unrecognized Villages and the Council for Equality and Justice for the Bedouins said the proposed law would forcibly uproot Bedouin communities.
The community’s leaders, who are trying to unify their ranks in the face of the bill, which they called discriminatory and said it would compel the Bedouin to move to centralized locations.
The proposal calls for the relocation of up to 30,000 Negev Bedouin from areas not recognized by the government as residential locations. Known as the Prawer plan, it was approved by the cabinet in September, based on a proposal developed by a team headed by Ehud Prawer, policy planning chief in the PMO.
At that time, the cabinet also approved a NIS 1.2 billion economic development program for Bedouin Negev.
The speakers called on the government to cooperate with the Bedouin in building agricultural villages in keeping with their needs and to ensure equality in services to unrecognized villages. They also demanded that Housing Minister Uri Ariel not be allowed to be involved in the plan.
“The plan leaves us only 17 percent of the land under our ownership. I hope there won’t be violence although I see how the state is pressuring and pressuring the Bedouin and in the end [the community] will erupt,” Atiah al-Assasm, head of the Council of Unrecognized Villages, said.
A large number of Bedouin women were prominent at Wednesday’s meeting. Attorney Rawiya Aburabia, from the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, spoke at the meeting, calling the plan racist. “The state and its authorities have declared war on the Bedouin. This meeting is to convey a clear message: We will not accept this quietly. The state must recognize all the unrecognized villages immediately and not forcibly enact plans.”
The Bedouin leadership intends to launch a media campaign against the plan in Israel and abroad, including approaches to local and foreign human rights groups with the goal of pressuring the government not to implement it. “We also intend to go to the United Nations against this plan, and to turn to lawyers from the European Union, to demand [action] from Israel with regard to the 65 Bedouin communities that have no infrastructure, transportation or water, ” al-Assad said.
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