Israel-Palestine, January 12 — More than two dozen working-class supporters, both Jewish and international, came to show solidarity with three of the so-called  “unrecognized” villages in the Negev. Two PL’ers joined this important fight against apartheid and racist evictions and demolitions in the south.
Approximately 150,000 Bedouins live in the Negev, the vast majority in the “Siag” area — a tiny reservation between the city of Beersheba and the towns of Omer and Dimona. Before the state of Israel was established in 1948, Bedouins lived in the entire Negev (which is 60% of Israel-Palestine’s land) and had their own, pre-capitalist system of tribal land ownership. The majority of Bedouins were deported from the Negev between 1947 and 1959, and the rest were forced to re-settle in the Siag area.
Farmers Become Proletarians
Until 1967 they, like all Arabs under Israeli rule, lived under martial law and their movement was strictly limited. In the 1960’s, the Israeli government decided to settle the Bedouins, formerly semi-nomadic herders and farmers, in dense state-planned towns. One reason for this move was to remove the Bedouin peasantry from its ancestral land and give that land over to the state for the benefit of the Zionist movement and its rich U.S. and Western European backers.
Another reason was to try to give the Bedouins no other option than being wage-laborers in the service of Israeli bosses.
Today, half of the entire Bedouin population in the Negev lives in seven (mis-)planned towns, where there are no jobs and where crime, unemployment and drugs are common. The rest live in villages without infrastructure such as proper running water, sewage or electricity, and without services such as healthcare or schooling. They usually have to make do with generators and improvised wells and travel for long distances to get to a hospital or a school.
They are faced with two devastating options: if they leave their ancestral land, the state will most likely confiscate it. But if they move to the “planned towns,” they will suffer from chronic unemployment, as against eking out a living as small-time herders in the “unrecognized” villages.
Zionist Land Takeover
Ninety-three percent of the land inside the “green line” is owned by the State of Israel and managed through the National Fund (JNF) and the Israel Land Administration, both of which have strong Zionist agendas and racist outlooks. The JNF likes to present itself as an “ecological” organization working on “flowering up the wilderness”; in reality, its job is to make sure that the land can only be used by the state of Israel and the wealthy U.S. real-estate tycoons, such as Ronald Lauder, who wish to exploit it.
The first visit in our trip was to the Bedouin village of Bir Hadaj. Since 1904, the Bedouin villagers held title to the land but in the mid 1970’s they were moved by the state far away. In the 1990’s, the villagers were promised five dunams (approximately 1.25 acres) of land per nuclear family for both housing and agricultural use.
The government, however, soon broke its word and said it will only give 2.5 dunams (approximately 0.75 acres) to each family, and, finally, only one dunam (approximately one quarter of an acre). All this was done while rich farmers with the “right” connections to government officials received thousands of acres in “individual farms” from the state, free of charge or for a paltry sum. There are no jobs to be found in the vicinity of Bir Hadaj, so agriculture is the main source of livelihood available to the Bedouins there, and without much land they are doomed to poverty.
The villagers protested against the state’s plan of turning Bir Hadaj into a de facto town with no agriculture or jobs to be found. Since they objected to the state plan, there is no official plan for Bir Hadaj, and, consequently, no way at all for the Bedouins to be granted building permits for their homes. The state uses this as an excuse to demolish the village homes, usually with much police brutality in the process, in order to apply pressure on the villagers and force them to accept the urbanization plan.
Racist State Terror
Faced with this kind of racist state terror and land theft, the villagers have joined forces with supporters of all ethnicities from throughout Israel-Palestine, and are organizing a struggle for land and livelihood.
After Bir Hadaj, we visited the unrecognized village of Wadi al-Naam. The Israeli state, coveting the village’s lands, has allowed chemical factories and even a power plant to be built there in order to force the villagers to leave. Villagers are poisoned by both air pollution from the turbines and electro-magnetic radiation from the generators and power lines. Wadi al-Naam has the highest cancer rate in all of Israel-Palestine.
The state has offered to move the Wadi al-Naam villagers to the nearby (mis-)planned town of Segev Shalom, which is not only stricken with intense unemployment, but also, like Wadi al-Naam, the same deadly pollution. Other re-settlement ideas proposed by the villagers were rejected by the state.
We finished our tour in the village of al-Araqeeb, next to the (mis-)planned town of Rahat and close to Beersheba, which was demolished no less than 42 times (!) by the Israeli state in the last two and a half years. Again, the villagers hold title to their land, but this does not interest the JNF and the government. They speak all the time about how they protect “private property” — but care only about the property of the rich.
This visit highlighted the horrors of Zionist apartheid, where Bedouin workers and peasants may serve in the army and pay taxes, but are thrown off their land and rarely get a decent job. There is no capitalism without racism, not in Israel-Palestine and not in the rest of the world. But we, workers and peasants of all ethnicities and nations, have each other to rely on when we fight back against racism, land theft and capitalism. And we will eventually win!