Israeli misconduct - and lack of any degree of humanity - continues, this time in the displacement of some 70,000 Bedouins from the Negev, their homeland for well before the establishment of Israel.
"On June 24th the "Prawer Plan for the Arrangement of Bedouin-Palestinian Settlement in the Negev" passed its first reading in the Israeli parliament. If implemented, the Plan will constitute "the largest single act of forced displacement of Arab citizens of Israel since the 1950s", expelling an estimated forty thousand Palestinian Bedouin from their current dwellings.
The Plan’s ultimate objective is to Judaize the Israeli Negev. In order to do this, however, seventy thousand (out of 200,000) Bedouin who currently live in villages classified as ‘unrecognised’ by the Israeli government must be moved. The government already forbids them from connecting to the electricity grid or the water and sewage systems.
Construction regulations are also harshly enforced, and in 2011 alone about a thousand Bedouin homes and animal pens - usually referred to by the government as mere "structures" - were demolished. There are no paved roads, and signposts from main roads to the villages are removed by government authorities. The villages are not shown on maps, since as a matter of official geography, the places inhabited by these second-class citizens of Israel do not exist.
This transformation of the indigenous into an invader or a "Palestinian settler"... is key to understanding not only the Prawer Plan, but also the very logic of the State of Israel
The government has, for years, argued that because these people live in small villages scattered across a relatively large area, it cannot provide them with basic services and therefore its objective has been to concentrate them in a few townships.
Consequently, in 2009 Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu appointed his planning policy chief, Ehud Prawer, to liberate the "Jewish land". Prawer’s main task was to relocate these seventy thousand Bedouin who have refused to sign over their property rights to the State and have continued living in their "unrecognised villages".
The logic informing the plan is actually best expressed in There is a Solution, a 2010 report published by a settler NGO called Regavim (The National Land Protection Trust), which has been working in conjunction with several government agencies. The report maintains that the Negev’s Bedouin inhabitants "rob" the Jewish people "of the Land of Israel…ever so quietly, without the roar of battle and clamour of war."
"On this battlefield", the organisation continues, cement mixers have replaced tanks, ploughs replace cannons and innocent-looking civilians replace uniformed soldiers.... Acre after acre, house after house, buying, squatting, illegally cultivating the soil that is not theirs, sometimes with guile, other times with violence, with huge sums of money and firmly backed by anti-Zionist organisations in Israel and abroad - Israel is losing its hold on the Jewish people’s lands."
"On June 24th the "Prawer Plan for the Arrangement of Bedouin-Palestinian Settlement in the Negev" passed its first reading in the Israeli parliament. If implemented, the Plan will constitute "the largest single act of forced displacement of Arab citizens of Israel since the 1950s", expelling an estimated forty thousand Palestinian Bedouin from their current dwellings.
The Plan’s ultimate objective is to Judaize the Israeli Negev. In order to do this, however, seventy thousand (out of 200,000) Bedouin who currently live in villages classified as ‘unrecognised’ by the Israeli government must be moved. The government already forbids them from connecting to the electricity grid or the water and sewage systems.
Construction regulations are also harshly enforced, and in 2011 alone about a thousand Bedouin homes and animal pens - usually referred to by the government as mere "structures" - were demolished. There are no paved roads, and signposts from main roads to the villages are removed by government authorities. The villages are not shown on maps, since as a matter of official geography, the places inhabited by these second-class citizens of Israel do not exist.
This transformation of the indigenous into an invader or a "Palestinian settler"... is key to understanding not only the Prawer Plan, but also the very logic of the State of Israel
The government has, for years, argued that because these people live in small villages scattered across a relatively large area, it cannot provide them with basic services and therefore its objective has been to concentrate them in a few townships.
Consequently, in 2009 Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu appointed his planning policy chief, Ehud Prawer, to liberate the "Jewish land". Prawer’s main task was to relocate these seventy thousand Bedouin who have refused to sign over their property rights to the State and have continued living in their "unrecognised villages".
The logic informing the plan is actually best expressed in There is a Solution, a 2010 report published by a settler NGO called Regavim (The National Land Protection Trust), which has been working in conjunction with several government agencies. The report maintains that the Negev’s Bedouin inhabitants "rob" the Jewish people "of the Land of Israel…ever so quietly, without the roar of battle and clamour of war."
"On this battlefield", the organisation continues, cement mixers have replaced tanks, ploughs replace cannons and innocent-looking civilians replace uniformed soldiers.... Acre after acre, house after house, buying, squatting, illegally cultivating the soil that is not theirs, sometimes with guile, other times with violence, with huge sums of money and firmly backed by anti-Zionist organisations in Israel and abroad - Israel is losing its hold on the Jewish people’s lands."
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