Unrecognized Bedouin villages in Israel

Number of the villages The exact number of unrecognized Bedouin villages is unknown. Different bodies use different definitions of the term "village". As a result, numbers offered by them differ, but there is an increase in the last decade, in spite of a slow recognition process of some of these communities. According to Maha Qupty, representing the Bedouin advocacy organization RCUV, in 2004 there were 45 unrecognized Bedouin villages in the Negev. According to the Human Rights Watch report based upon the 2006 statistics offered by the Adva Center, approximately half of Bedouin citizens of Israel (85,000 out of 170,000) live in 39 such villages. According to another Bedouin advocacy organization The Association of Forty, in 2013 there were about 92 unrecognized villages in Israel, 59 of them were Bedouin villages in the Negev. According to the head of the Bedouin Administration, Yaakov Katz, and geographer Arnon Soffer, in the Negev area alone, there were about 1000 illegal Bedouin concentrations with over 64,000 homes in 2011, with about 2200-2000 new buildings adding every year. For comparison, in 2008 the Goldberg Commission stated that there were 50,000 illegal buildings in the Negev, and about 1,500 to 2,000 more were built every year. Testifying before the Goldberg Committee in 2010, Israeli right-wing NGO Regavim reported 2,100 separate concentrations in Negev of 3–400 constructions each, covering over 800,000 dunams. Size of the area According to the Israel Land Administration, Negev Bedouin claim area 12 times bigger than that of Tel Aviv. According to Sofer, the Bedouin expansion continues rapidly in all directions and occupies spaces that Israel did not know before. Number of residents Between 1994 and 2007, Israel recognized 21 Arab townships with a similar illegal status until then. In the Galilee, most of the illegal villages were regulated and recognized, and from a population of 90,000 Bedouin in the north, a few hundred still live in unrecognized villages. In the south, it is estimated that about 90,000 residents live in unrecognized Bedouin villages; these Bedouin comprise 45% of the total Bedouin population. Status The unrecognized Bedouin villages were either built without authorization from the Israeli state or predate either the state itself or the "Planning and Construction Law" passed in 1965. As the state considers them a menace, they remain ineligible for municipal services, such as connection to the electrical grid, water mains or trash-pickup, and they cannot elect government representatives. These communities dot the Northern Negev, with military fire zones, natural reserves and landfills often being built around them. For example, in the 1950s, the 'Azazme were forced off their grazing grounds and settled in Wadi al-Na'am. Since then, an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) munitions factory and military fire zone, the Efrat Oil Terminal – an oil-storage site, the Israel Electric Corporation and Mekorot – the national water carrier site have come to surround the village. According to a report by the Israeli NGO Adva Center, "The Bedouin living in the Negev constitute the only group of Arab citizens of Israel that still has a large-scale hold on the land, a hold that the state officially denies in principle, while recognizing in practice." Since 2003 a number of previously illegal Bedouin communities were recognized by the state (such as al-Sayyid), and several new ones were built (such as Tirabin al-Sana) totaling 12 (not including the previous seven townships). They were united under Abu Basma Regional Council that was split on 5 November 2012 into two newly created bodies: Neve Midbar Regional Council and al-Kasom Regional Council. As of July 2013, there are no updated official statistics on the number of Bedouin living outside the government-planned and officially recognized communities. ==History==

The Ottoman Empire During the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, the semi-arid region of the Negev was inhabited mostly by semi-nomadic Bedouin tribes. In 1858 the Turks enacted a law stating that all landowners names must be officially documented as a means of regulating matters relating to land in the Ottoman Empire. Most of the land in the Negev was classified as muwat (موات, dead land, wasteland unsuitable for cultivation). The Bedouin did not create a written record of their connection to the land, and some argue that even opposed to it, since it would make them subject to the Ottoman Empire, what would require them to pay taxes and serve in the Ottoman army. Also, when the publication of the Ottoman Lands Ordinance, the Negev area had no permanent settlement. By the year 1896 Negev Bedouin lived almost completely independently of the state. The Ottomans were not interested and did not intervene in the Negev and the Bedouins. According to Yosef Ben-Dor, only after a tribal war, the Turkish government marked tribal boundaries, but did not give the Bedouins in this agreement "ownership" of tribal territorial lands. British Mandate The British government adopted the Ottoman land laws, and added to them the Land Ordinance, intended to prevent squatting and recognition of unauthorized takeover of land. In 1921, the government of the British Mandate issued an order for all the Negev residents to register their land. According to the Land Ordinance of 1921, any Bedouin who cultivated and improved a "mewat" (dead) land received a confirmation of ownership on that same land. Although the Bedouin were granted with a special extension of two months to register their land, they have never done so, and the land remained unregistered. Mandate authorities also conducted a preliminary registration of land and since 1934 began to collect land taxes. Mandatory maps show the location of the Bedouin tribes, however, the maps never marked the boundaries of each tribe. The 1947 report of the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine estimated the number of bedouins in the Beersheba district to be about 90,000. In preparation for a 1946 census of Palestine that was never carried out, the British government surveyed all the tribes in situ and concluded that the number of bedouin in the Beersheba district was about 92,000 out of 127,000 in the whole country. The same figure of two million dunams appeared in a 1944/5 book of Yosef Weitz, but in contrast "Shimoni and Tartakover estimate the area cultivated by Bedouin in the Negev at only 60,000 dunam." According to Sasson Bar Zvi, a cultural researcher of the Negev Bedouin, and Arie Efrat who served as director for the Arab villages in the south, the lack of water in the Negev area did not allow its residents to revive the land and therefore they preferred nomadic life and shepherding to an organized and rental land cultivation, and this is why the land remained a desolate area. According to the Bedouin, although they did not document land ownership, the Turkish government and the British recognized the rights of ownership of land in which they roamed, and this recognition was expressed when the Bedouins sold land to the Zionist movement during the British Mandate, and the sales were recognized and recorded in the Tabu (land registry). In contrast, Yosef Ben-David explains this fact by claiming that the Ottoman and British authorities saw a blessing in transferring land from the Bedouin to the applicant for registration, because they will be likely to use land intensively, without the authorities taking into consideration any legal rights the Bedouins had to the land recognized by either government. Israel During the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, the Negev region saw harsh battles between the newly created IDF and the Egyptian army. In the aftermath of the war, most of the Negev was included within the borders of the newly established State of Israel. Censuses before and after the war indicate that about 80% of the Bedouin population left the Negev to areas that remained under Arab rule. The Israeli authorities' treatment of the Bedouin population was ambivalent. On the one hand, the Bedouin were considered loyal to the new state, and some of them even volunteered to serve in the IDF. On the other hand, Israel saw the Negev as its "hinterland", being sparsely populated and as the West Bank came under Jordanian rule. The policy eventually adopted was forcing the Bedouin to concentrate in an area of 1,100 km2, that has become known as the Siyagh (Arabic for "the permitted area") region, stretching between the West Bank border to the north-east, Be'er Sheva to the south-west and Arad to the south. All the Bedouin remaining under Israeli rule were granted Israeli citizenship, but the Siyagh region was placed under martial law until 1966, like many other mostly Arab-populated areas in Israel at the time. downtown In order to reinforce the invisible Siyag fence and sedentarize the Bedouin, the State employed a reining mechanism, the Black Goat Law of 1950. The Black Goat Law curbed grazing so as to prevent land erosion, prohibiting the grazing of goats outside recognized land holdings. Since few Bedouin territorial claims were recognized, most grazing was thereby rendered illegal. Most Bedouin who had the option, preferred not to register their lands under the Ottoman rule as this would mean being taxed without representation or services. Those whose land claims were recognized found it almost impossible to keep their goats within the periphery of their newly limited range. Into the 1970s and 1980s, only a small portion of the Bedouin were able to continue to graze their goats. Instead of migrating with their goats in search of pasture, the majority of the Bedouin migrated in search of wage-labor. The Israeli government has promoted the sedentarization of the Bedouin population. In 1963, Moshe Dayan said: Dayan added, "Without coercion but with governmental direction ... this phenomenon of the Bedouins will disappear". The Bedouin communities in the Negev, many unrecognised by the Israeli government, were classified as "open areas" during the 2014 Israel–Gaza conflict and so their 200,000 residents did not have warning sirens or anti-rocket protection. ==State treatment==

Arrangement attempts In the 1970s Israel collected all the "claims of ownership" in the Negev, without permits and without proof, for the purpose of registering these claims. However, the Bedouin saw the state registry as a recognition for their claims. More than 3,000 ownership claims were filed for the land sized over 800,000 dunams, which includes nearly the whole area between Be'er Sheva – Arad – Dimona and other areas throughout the entire Negev, including those that belong to kibbutzim and cities. In the first years of the arrangement, anyone demanding area of over 400 dunams had the opportunity to get 20% of the land from the Land Registry, and for the rest of the area they would receive financial compensation. Anyone who demanded less than 400 dunams, had received only monetary compensation. In addition, the state of Israel compensated the Bedouin for any building, tin shack, barn or even a tree that the Bedouin placed and the government removed. The compensation value was even higher than the property's value in the market. In 20% of the claims the state has reached a settlement with the Bedouin. In all 80 cases in which Bedouin claims arrived to court, the judges ruled in favor of the state, since there was no document proving Bedouin land ownership. According to recent data submitted to the Goldberg Commission by the Bedouin Administration in July 2008, 2840 claims remained, whose overall area is 571,186 dunams. Planned townships Dealing with the problem of the Negev Bedouin, between 1968 and 1989 Israel built seven planned townships especially for the Bedouin in the attempt to urbanize them. Since grazing has been severely restricted, and the Bedouin rarely receive permits to engage in subsistence agriculture, few of the Bedouin in unrecognized villages consider the urban townships as desirable form of settlement. Denied access to their former sources of sustenance via grazing restrictions, severed from the possibility of access to water, electricity, roads, education, and health care in the unrecognized villages, tens of thousands of Bedouin citizens of Israel resettled in the townships. as Harvey Lithwick of the Negev Center for Regional Development explains: "the major failure was a lack of an economic rationale for the towns". Abu Basma Regional Council On 29 September 2003 Israeli government has adapted a new "Abu Basma Plan" (Resolution 881), according to which a new regional council was formed, unifying a number of unrecognized Bedouin settlements – Abu Basma Regional Council. This resolution also regarded the need to establish seven new Bedouin settlements in the Negev, literally meaning the official recognition of unrecognized settlements, providing them with a municipal status and consequently with all the basic services and infrastructure. The council was established by the Interior Ministry on 28 January 2004. Moreover, Israel is currently building or enlarging some 13 towns and cities in the Negev. It will have a hospital and a new campus inside. Recognition vs demolition Israel is trying to solve the problem of unrecognized villages by attracting the scattered communities into government-planned townships and villages offering land plots at low prices and as an extreme measure – following the court order and all the legal procedure – demolishes houses built without state's permission on what it considers to be state lands. The unrecognized villages are not accurately marked on any official maps. A number of villages has been recognized in the 2000s as a part of creation of the Abu Basma Regional Council. In 2009 the Goldberg Commission recommended that most of the 46 unrecognised villages east of Route 40 should be recognised and their 50,000 illegal structures be legalized. In 2010, Israeli authorities demolished the unrecognized village of al-Araqeeb. Since then it has been rebuilt and destroyed several dozen times (September 2012). The matter of land ownership in the area of al-Araqeeb was raised in court when several members of al-Uqbi family filed a suit against the State claiming ownership of land. After a thorough examination of this case involving leading experts in the field, in March 2012 came a court ruling in favor of the State. Judge Sarah Dovrat said that the land was not "assigned to the plaintiffs, nor held by them under conditions required by law," and that they still had to "prove their rights to the land by proof of its registration in the Tabu" (Israel Lands Authority). The judge noted that the Bedouin knew they were supposed to register but did not. Prawer plan In September 2011, the Israeli government approved a five-year economic development plan called the Prawer plan. One of its implications is a relocation of some 30.000–40.000 Negev Bedouin from areas not recognized by the government to government-approved townships. According to the PMO official press release, the plan is based on four main principles: • Providing for the status of Bedouin communities in the Negev; • Economic development for the Negev's Bedouin population; • Resolving claims over land ownership; and • Establishing a mechanism for binding, implementation and enforcement, as well as timetables. and come to a conclusion that relocation of the Bedouin will be compelled. Some even speak about ethnic cleansing. As a result, these remarks provoked heavy criticism of the plan by the European Parliament. There are several examples of success in this matter: after a number of complicated agreements with the state all of the Bedouin of Tarabin clan moved into a township built for them – Tirabin al-Sana. Following negotiations, the Bedouin of al-'Azazme clan will take part in the planning of a new quarter that will be erected for them to west of Segev Shalom township, cooperating with The Authority for the Regulation of Bedouin Settlement in the Negev. Hindrances for the arrangement One of the main hindrances in finding a solution for the illegal settlement is the Bedouin Tribal Law which states that one should not settle on a land that other Bedouin claims to own it. According to the head of the unrecognized villages – Hussein Abu Pia testifying in front of the Goldberg Committee members: "If the land is in a one Bedouin's claim of ownership, the other will not come close. He would not dare. He will prefer to live in a cave, instead of approaching the land". There is a common phenomenon of the Bedouin who receive compensation and new homes in legal towns, yet return and construct again in state lands thus not fulfilling the agreements signed with the government. They were paid a compensation for relinquishing their claims to the state, but still claim ownership on the land to other Bedouin, so the problem remains unsolved. The town of Kuseife, for example is built almost entirely on lands claimed by different tribes, and thus two-thirds of the city is empty. According to government sources, another hindrance in the arrangement attempts is the absence of deadline for the negotiations. ==Features==

High natural growth The Israeli state consider the high fertility rate among Bedouins to be a big problem. The Negev Bedouin have one of the highest rates of natural growth in the world, standing at 4–5.5% per year, which means doubling the population every 12–15 years. but it still remains high relatively to other population groups inside Israel. The high fertility rate for Bedouin is exacerbated by polygamy (up to 36% of Bedouin men are polygamous) and illegal immigration estimated at 16,000 women who immigrated for polygamy (until 2004) and were accompanied by their families. In 2008, the state together with Bedouin leaders initiated a state program to address the phenomenon of Bedouin polygamy and its severely harmful effects on family structure. Bedouin advocates argue that the main reason for the transfer of the Bedouin into townships was demographic. They note that in 2003, director of the Israeli Population Administration Department, Herzl Gedj, described polygamy in the Bedouin sector as a "security threat" and advocated various means of reducing the Arab birth rate. In 2003, Shai Hermesh, the treasurer of the Jewish Agency, told The Guardian: "We need the Negev for the next generation of Jewish immigrants" and added, "It is not in Israel's interest to have more Palestinians in the Negev." In October 2011 the government decided to establish seven new agricultural settlements in the area of Mevo'ot Arad. On 14 August 2012, residents of five unrecognized Bedouin villages, along with residents of Arad, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), Bimkom – Planners for Planning Rights, and the Negev Coexistence Forum for Civil Equality, petitioned the High Court of Justice against the plan saying that it will uproot 800 Bedouin. Acceleration in illegal construction Israel has encountered a problem of maintaining law due to uncontrolled illegal construction in the Negev Bedouin dispersed communities. In 1945 there were 290 illegal structures in the dispersed communities, in 1956 – 955, in 1994 – 12,000, in 1998 – 24,225, in 2004 – 42,561, and in 2011 – 64,000. Between the years 1998–2001, the demolition of illegal buildings stopped as a government policy and gradually resumed later. Law enforcement has failed, and there is no viable option to destroy all illegal construction. The threat of destruction does not deter residents from illegal building. According to enforcement officials, it is not possible to monitor every case of illegal construction because the residents who build in the dispersed communities impose on the inspectors criminal and terrorist threats. According to the Commissioner of Administrative Enforcement Shlomo Cizzer: "We evacuate only intruders who have a place to live, we have evacuated, and will re-evacuate, the people who invaded al-Araqeeb, because they have homes in Rahat, Lod, and in Kafr Qasim. They invaded just to prove ownership of the land. There are tens of thousands of others who are also criminals whom we do not evacuate, because they have no other houses to go to. Until the state decides what to do with them, we will act in accordance with the law ". Ecological issues While Bedouin take up open spaces that could be used for touristic purposes and construction of towns to accommodate new settlers, prominent Israeli environmental figures argue, that unapproved construction of unrecognized villages are an environmental hazard. Some ecologists say that Bedouin communities are causing damage to ecosystems since the Negev has unique habitats. There is a transitional area between the desert and the border region of the south of Judaean Mountains and Shfela, where most plant and animal species perform a gradation between habitats. Therefore, this zone is vital for them, especially during the global warming when species of the desert are expected to migrate to the north. The keeping and feeding livestock bring steady amounts of vegetation food that grow wild and bring about consolidation of invading flora species. The Bedouins keep livestock in herds greater than the carrying capacity of the land, which leads to serious overgrazing, and to the creation of vast areas of empty of any plants. The cumulative effect creates huge areas where there is no vegetation at all (not natural and not agricultural) and no animals. In fact, the result is an ongoing and total destruction of habitat. Species unique to the region as Pterocles, houbara bustard, leopard fringe-fingered lizard and irises, disappeared from large surfaces. represent a threat to the quality of air, soil and groundwater as fuel tanks do not meet basic standards of environmental protection meant to ensure that the fuel does not soak into the soil and groundwater, as well as the fuel itself does not meet environmental standards. According to Itamar Ben Dodi from the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel, the lack of sewage infrastructure and waste removal and illegal slaughter houses in the Bedouin dispersed communities cause an accumulation and spreading of wastewater and household waste that reach streams channels and cause odor nuisances, health problems for residents, and damage to nature. In July 2013 Israeli government ordered to allocate NIS 40 million for garbage pick-up and recycling for the Negev Bedouin communities in the area of the Al-Kasom and Neveh Midbar regional councils – for the first time. The main reason for the lack of garbage collecting services was unresolved land ownership disputes. Some homes in the area do not have legal standing and consequently do not pay local taxes which leads to the lack of income for the local authorities to operate garbage collection services. A large number of Israelis, including both Bedouin and Jews, are settled in some 2.5% of the Negev desert available for civilian use living in proximity to Israel's nuclear reactors, 22 agro and petrochemical factories, an oil terminal, closed military zones, quarries, a toxic waste incinerator (Ramat Hovav), cell towers, a power plant, several airports, a prison, and two rivers of open sewage. Some of this infrastructure is concentrated on the grounds of the unrecognized village of Wadi el-Na'am. According to the Ministry of Health data (as of June 2004), the rates of cancer and mortality are 65% higher for those living within a 20 km radius of the Ramat Hovav Industrial Zone. Some 350,000 people live within this danger zone, including the residents of Beer Sheva. ==See also==