Is there no stopping the inhumane, illegal and obscene conduct of the Israelis? Now, it's uprooting and displacing no less than 30,000 Bedouin people. Neve Gordon, an academic in Israel, writes on the subject in AlJazeera.
"It is not every day that a government decides to relocate almost half a per cent of its population in a programme of forced urbanisation," Rawia Aburabia asserted, adding that "this is precisely what Prawer wants to do".
The meeting, which was attempting to coordinate various actions against the Prawer Plan, had just ended, and Rawia, an outspoken Bedouin leader who works for the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, was clearly upset. She realised that the possibility of changing the course of events was extremely unlikely and that, at the end of the day, the government would uproot 30,000 Negev Bedouin and put them in townships. This would result in an end to their rural way of life and would ultimately deprive them of their livelihood and land rights.
Rawia's wrath was directed at Ehud Prawer, the Director of the Planning Policy Division in Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's office. Prawer took on this role after serving as the deputy director of Israel's National Security Council. His mandate is to implement the decisions of the Goldberg Committee for the Arrangement of Arab Settlement in the Negev, by offering a "concrete solution" to the problem of the 45 unrecognised Bedouin villages in the region.
An estimated 70,000 people are currently living in these villages, which are prohibited by law from connecting any of their houses to electricity grids, running water or sewage systems. Construction regulations are also harshly enforced and in this past year alone, about 1,000 Bedouin homes and animal pens - usually referred to by the government simple as "structures" - were demolished. There are no paved roads in these villages and it is illegal to place signposts near the highways designating the village's location. Opening a map will not help either, since none of these villages are marked. Geographically, at least, these citizens of Israel do not exist."
Continue reading here - and be disgusted.
"It is not every day that a government decides to relocate almost half a per cent of its population in a programme of forced urbanisation," Rawia Aburabia asserted, adding that "this is precisely what Prawer wants to do".
The meeting, which was attempting to coordinate various actions against the Prawer Plan, had just ended, and Rawia, an outspoken Bedouin leader who works for the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, was clearly upset. She realised that the possibility of changing the course of events was extremely unlikely and that, at the end of the day, the government would uproot 30,000 Negev Bedouin and put them in townships. This would result in an end to their rural way of life and would ultimately deprive them of their livelihood and land rights.
Rawia's wrath was directed at Ehud Prawer, the Director of the Planning Policy Division in Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's office. Prawer took on this role after serving as the deputy director of Israel's National Security Council. His mandate is to implement the decisions of the Goldberg Committee for the Arrangement of Arab Settlement in the Negev, by offering a "concrete solution" to the problem of the 45 unrecognised Bedouin villages in the region.
An estimated 70,000 people are currently living in these villages, which are prohibited by law from connecting any of their houses to electricity grids, running water or sewage systems. Construction regulations are also harshly enforced and in this past year alone, about 1,000 Bedouin homes and animal pens - usually referred to by the government simple as "structures" - were demolished. There are no paved roads in these villages and it is illegal to place signposts near the highways designating the village's location. Opening a map will not help either, since none of these villages are marked. Geographically, at least, these citizens of Israel do not exist."
Continue reading here - and be disgusted.
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