The Indigenous World 2023: Israel
Israel’s Arab Bedouin citizens are indigenous to the Negev (Naqab, in Arabic) desert, where they have lived for centuries as a semi-nomadic people, long before the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. Members of the Bedouin community are an integral part of the Arab Palestinian minority, as well as citizens of the State of Israel. Combining herding with agriculture, they are settled in villages linked by kinship (tribes) systems, and this has largely determined land ownership. Prior to 1948, some 65-100,000 Bedouin lived in the Naqab. After 1948, most were expelled or fled to Gaza, Egypt, the West Bank and Jordan, with only approx. 11,000 remaining in the area.
During the early 1950s and until 1966, Israel concentrated the Bedouin in a restricted area, known by the name of “al-Siyāj”, under military administration, representing only around 10% of their original ancestral land. During this period, entire villages were displaced from their locations in the western and northern Naqab and their people were transferred to the Siyāj area.[1]
Today, some 300,000 Bedouin citizens of Israel live in the Naqab, in four types of locations: government-planned townships, recognized villages, villages in the process of recognition[2] and villages that Israel refuses to recognize (unrecognized villages).[3] There are 35 unrecognized Bedouin villages in the Naqab that Israel refers to either as the “dispersion” or as “illegal villages”, calling their inhabitants “trespassers” on State land and “criminals”.[4]
Most of the Bedouin population lost their lands when Israel declared it as Mawat (“dead”, uncultivated agricultural lands) and reclaimed it as State land.[5] The land that belonged to those Bedouin who became refugees, as well as much of the land owned by the Bedouin who remained in Israel, was appropriated and nationalized by way of a number of laws, including the Absentee Property Law (1950)[6] and the Land Acquisition Act (1953).[7]
There was no exception made for the Naqab Bedouin, who were forcibly evicted from their ancestral lands by the very same Israeli government that went on to become the “rightful” guardian of those homesteads. The Planning and Building Law enacted in 1965 led to the classification of most of the Siyāj area as agricultural land. From the moment the law came into effect, every house built in this area was defined as illegal and all the houses and structures already standing in the area were retroactively declared illegal.[8]
Since the beginning of the 1970s, Israel has been conducting an ongoing non-consensual and non-participatory urbanization process. The State documents that 72.9% of the Naqab’s Bedouin residents are poor and 79.6% of Bedouin children live below the poverty line.[9] However, Bedouin residents from unrecognized villages are not included in these national poverty indicators.[10] In addition to the seven townships, the State recognized 11 Bedouin villages from 1999 onwards,[11] hailing their recognition as a fundamental shift in government policy, which had previously focused exclusively on forced urbanization. In June 2021, the coalition agreement signed by the Head of the United Arab List, the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs and Prime Minister included the recognition of the unrecognized Bedouin villages of Khašim Zannih, Rakhamah and ̕Abdih within the first 90 days of the government. Although the Cabinet approved the decision in November 2021, it was conditional upon the requirement that at least 70% of the Bedouin residents give their consent to leave their lands and move to the new established villages before the recognition process is finalized. That condition is unprecedented when compared to Jewish localities and hardly feasible given its requirement of moving the residents into the boundaries of a village that has yet to be properly recognized.[12]
Two decades later, however, there is no significant difference between these villages and the unrecognized ones. The residents of most recognized villages continue to be denied access to basic services and are under constant threat of house demolitions.[13] The remaining 28% of the Bedouin population (around 100,000 people) live in unrecognized villages[14] that do not appear on any official map and most of which contain no health or educational facilities or basic infrastructure. Their residents have no formal local government bodies and are represented only in the Regional Council for the Unrecognized Villages (RCUV), an informal community body.
This article is part of the 37th edition of The Indigenous World, a yearly overview produced by IWGIA that serves to document and report on the developments Indigenous Peoples have experienced. The photo above is of an Indigenous person in Tanzania. This photo was taken by Geneviève Rose, and is the cover of the Indigenous World 2023 where this article is featured. Find the Indigenous World 2023 in full here.
The State’s systematic violation of the Indigenous citizens of the Naqab’s right to freedom of expression and protest
In January 2022, the Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael and the Jewish National Fund (hereinafter KKL-JNF) began to plant forests over the lands of the Al-Atrash family in the villages of Saʿwah and Khirbit al-Watan. This project, the “communal seeding of trees”, targeted 5,000 dunams (1,250 acres) along the Anim stream, which runs to Beer Sheva wadi.[15] On 13 January, thousands of Bedouin residents and other activists gathered on Road 31 to protest the KKL-JNF activities, including on the lands of the Al-Atrash family, in a demonstration approved by the police. Community members and activists from around the region voiced their objections to the extra-judicial appropriation of Bedouin lands whose ownership is partly claimed by the Al-Atrash family.[16] In response, they were met with unprecedented police brutality.
Multiple testimonies reported to the Negev Coexistence Forum (NCF)[17] document how, several minutes after the beginning of the protest, police violently repressed the demonstration. Methods NCF has documented include: live-firing of rubber bullets, the use of horses to trample and intimidate protestors, unnecessary and extreme physical violence, and firing tear gas from drones. These methods remain legal and can be used at liberty by the police, no matter the outcome. It is important to stress how, ultimately, the objective of these measures was to repress unarmed Israeli citizens from exercising their legitimate right to protest. Five months later, some of the protestors were still under arrest, while others were experiencing post-traumatic stress and fear.
As a result of the international advocacy work NCF has been carrying out to denounce police violence during protests in the Naqab in January 2022, the UN Special Rapporteur on minority issues, the Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rights, the Special Rapporteur on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association and the Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance have sent a communication to the State of Israel requesting observations relevant to these allegations regarding the international human rights law, (Special Rapporteur on minority issues, 3 July 2022).
In the following weeks, police detained, investigated, and terrorized Bedouin citizens in the surrounding communities. Witnesses wonder whether the attacks were premeditated as a way to suppress future demonstrations, and stifle the growing political activism against the JNF, led by Bedouin civil rights leaders. One hundred and fifty-five Bedouin citizens were arrested for simply appearing at a demonstration.[18] The Israeli Security Agency Shabak detained and investigated six to eight people in what was allegedly considered an “anti-terror” campaign. By July 2022, the number of criminal charges had reached 38. Hundreds of Bedouins were arrested in the weeks following the demonstration, often without cause or warrant. By July 2022, there were four minors under house arrest, all with restraining orders and another four adults in custody until the end of proceedings. A security indictment was filed against all of them. Dozens of activists were severely injured during the demonstration.
Continued form of targeting Bedouin activists and human rights defenders
Watan Mahdi, a female Arab student and left-wing activist affiliated with the Hadash party, was summoned by the academic secretary to the Ethical Committee of Ben Gurion University in disciplinary proceedings over a Mahmoud Darwish quote she read at a Nakba Day demonstration on 22 May. The university claims that her recalling of the Palestinian poet to “remember the martyrs who fulfilled the unity of the country, the people and history” constituted incitement to terrorism. The summons letter was sent on 27 July following a complaint filed by the university’s group of “Im Tirtzu”, a right-wing Zionist group, according to which the student was disobeying the instructions of the authorities and agreements that had been reached with the university before the demonstration. On 27 October, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) appealed to the president and the rector of the university demanding that the disciplinary procedure taken against the student be cancelled.[19] They also claimed that filing a lawsuit due to a sentence said in Arabic because of the alleged interpretation of a word among the Jewish public was absurd, and that it was furthermore flawed by cultural and racial bias.
Another case that portrays the State’s oppression of the basic right of freedom expression is the arrest of Bedouin human rights defender and pharmacy student, Mariam Abu Kwider. On 12 May, after a demonstration in memory of journalist Sheerin Abu Aqla held at Ben Gurion University, several policemen in civilian clothes detained her. She had previously been interrogated by the Israeli Security Agency for publishing content on social media allegedly promoting incitement. Mariam was forcibly arrested and taken to the police station in a civilian car, while other students followed her in their private cars.[20] The Magistrate’s Court agreed to release her on restrictive conditions (house arrest and non-use of social media, computers and telephone) and bail of USD 1,500 on release plus two guarantors of USD 3,000 each. After the judge had issued their decision, the police appealed it in the District’s Court. Adv. Ibn Bari lodged an appeal to cancel the decision of detention for four days and the Judge decided to keep her arrested for 10 days. Mariam Abu Kwider is being charged with incitement, is prohibited from using her phone and from having any access to the internet. In addition, she is “in human custody”, in other words she cannot move without one of her guardians accompanying her.
UN bodies in relation to the Bedouins’ Indigenous rights in 2022
Since the violent escalation of May 2021[21] the International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel (hereinafter CoI) has worked to gather information on multiple human rights violations that have been initiated since then. NCF has contributed to the Report of the CoI, presented at the 77th session of the United Nations General Assembly in September.
In chapter four, Nature of the control exerted by Israel in the territories that it occupies and the situation inside Israel, it is reported that in 2022:
Palestinian citizens of Israel are still subjected to discriminatory policies including the confiscation of land, demolitions and evictions that affect the Bedouin in the Negev and Palestinians residing in other areas of Israel. In addition, several Israeli laws discriminate against Palestinian citizens of Israel. For example, the Nation State Law of 2018 gives only Jews the right to self-determination in Israel and removes the status of Arabic as an official language alongside Hebrew…Bedouin and herder communities are at a particular risk of demolitions, forced evictions and forcible transfer. Israeli authorities have used overt coercion in forcing them to leave their homes and make way for Israeli use of the land.[22]
In its conclusions, it is stated that:
Actions by Israel constituting de facto annexation include expropriating land and natural resources, establishing settlements and outposts, maintaining a restrictive and discriminatory planning and building regime for Palestinians and extending Israeli law extraterritorially to Israeli settlers in the West Bank.[23]
The systematic actions of occupation in the West Bank are replicated and applied in the Bedouin unrecognized villages of the Negev-Naqab, inside Israeli territories, where historical lands are continuously being expropriated, and uprooting and afforestation activities are frequent State practices with which to dispossess the Bedouin citizens of their lands.
According to the announcement of the former Minister of Interior, Ayelet Shaked, in March, the government approved the establishment of 14 new Jewish settlements in the Negev.[24] Those government decisions reflect a reproduction of the mechanisms of oppression that are taking place in the occupied Palestinian territories and portray a clear segregation between Jewish and Arab residents living in the Negev-Naqab.
Since the events of May 2021 in the Negev-Naqab, including the mass arrests, use of violence and multiple mechanisms for oppressing the Bedouin, these Indigenous communities are experiencing a growing breakdown of trust with the government, being increasingly threatened over their basic civil and political rights. This is resulting in a more vulnerable context for a population that continues to fall below the poverty line and is the poorest in Israel, without any means of escape. Furthermore, the government does not seem to be willing to treat the Bedouin Indigenous people as citizens but rather demands that they be punished and their rights stripped from them, not for crimes they have committed but for their steadfast resistance to the State’s long-standing neglect and its discriminatory policies.
General outlook for 2023
A dangerous amendment passed by the Israeli parliament now gives far-right politician and new Minster of National Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, expanded powers and authority over the police to further target Palestinians in Israel. The proposed law would lead to an increase in cases of abuse, and degrading treatment by police officers targeting activists and demonstrators, including the Bedouin communities living in the Negev-Naqab. The Negev-Naqab has witnessed violent practices, especially during the May escalation of 2021,[25] with Israeli police targeting Palestinian youths and unleashing fascist militias that stormed and attacked Palestinian neighbourhoods. This cruel and degrading treatment by the police often includes extremely violent practices, prohibited according to international conventions and according to the Israeli Supreme Court itself – but the practices continue, nonetheless.
It is feared that the goal of this new change is to give the minister full authority over the police, and to be able to seize the powers available to the police chief and transfer them to himself so he can use the police as a weapon to spread his dangerous ideology. The minister can thus decide to target certain groups and subject them to police measures and repression, and to deny certain groups, especially Bedouins, the right to demonstrate. Guarantees of the civil rights of the Bedouin, as a Palestinian Indigenous minority, to demonstrate, express their identity and make use of their basic rights and services, are thus being threatened and are likely to be denied if the law is finally approved.
The Negev Coexistence Forum for Civil Equality (NCF) was established in 1997 to provide a space for Arab-Jewish shared society in the struggle for civil equality and the advancement of mutual tolerance and coexistence in the Negev/Naqab. NCF is unique in being the only Arab-Jewish organization that remains focused solely on the problems confronting the Negev/Naqab area. NCF considers that the State of Israel is failing to respect, protect and fulfil its human rights obligations, without discrimination, towards the Arab Bedouin Indigenous communities in the Negev/Naqab. As a result, NCF has set one of its goals as the achievement of full civil rights and equality for all people who make the Negev/Naqab their home.
Elianne Kremer is a Uruguayan-Israeli development expert with experience in field research, analysis and M&E in humanitarian aid and social development. She directs the Research and International Relations department of NCF, working closely with community activists.
This article is part of the 37th edition of The Indigenous World, a yearly overview produced by IWGIA that serves to document and report on the developments Indigenous Peoples have experienced. The photo above is of an Indigenous person in Tanzania. This photo was taken by Geneviève Rose, and is the cover of the Indigenous World 2023 where this article is featured. Find the Indigenous World 2023 in full here.
Notes and references
[1] Negev Coexistence Forum for Civil Equality. “The Arab-Bedouin Community in the Negev-Nagab – A Short Background.” accessed 10 January 2022, https://www.dukium.org/the-arab-bedouin-community-in-the-negev-nagab-a-short-background/
[2] Kremer, Elianne., and NCF. “The Indigenous World 2022: Israel.” In The Indigenous World 2022, edited by Dwayne Mamo. P 517. Copenhagen: International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs (IWGIA), 2022, https://www.iwgia.org/en/israel/4680-iw-2022-israel.html
[3] “Online Database - Life Characteristics of the Bedouin Population in the Negev - Demographics.” Accessed 9 January 2023, https://in.bgu.ac.il/humsos/negevSus/SYBSN/Pages/demographics.aspx
[4] For an interactive map of the Arab Bedouin villages in the Negev-Naqab, including background and information on services and infrastructure, see https://www.dukium.org/map/
[5] For example, see: http://law.haifa.ac.il/images/documents/ColonialismColonizationLand.pdf
[6] Absentee Property Law, 1950-57, https://tinyurl.com/y2ckm8kl
[7] Land Acquisition Law, 5773-1953, https://tinyurl.com/y6p2aq4x
[8] Negev Coexistence Forum for Civil Equality (NCF). “No Shelter in Place: State Demolitions in the Bedouin Communities and its Impact on Children; During the Covid-19 Pandemic” July 2021, p.7, https://www.dukium.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/HDR-2021-Data-on-2020-Eng-5.pdf
[9] Dimensions of Poverty and Social Disparities - Annual Report, 2018, https://tinyurl.com/6jve9ckz
[10] Negev Coexistence Forum for Civil Equality (NFC). “Indigenous Bedouin citizens neglected by the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics.” August 2021, https://www.dukium.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Indigenous-Bedouin-citizens-neglected-by-the-Israeli-CBS.pdf.
[11] Land Acquisition Law, 5773-1953.
[12] A coalition agreement to form a unity government, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/2shszxk3
[13] NCF and Adalah (The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel). “Violations of the ICERD against the Arab Bedouin citizens of Israel living in the Naqab/Negev desert.” Joint NGO Submission to the CERD, 2019, p.2, https://tbinternet.ohchr.org/_layouts/15/treatybodyexternal/Download.aspx?symbolno=INT%2fCERD%2fNGO%2fISR%2f37260&Lang=en
[14] Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS). Total population estimations in localities, their population and other information, 2018, https://www.cbs.gov.il/en/mediarelease/pages/2019/localities-in-israel-2018.aspx
[15] Tov, M.H., Josh Breiner., Deiaa Haj Yahia., Jack Khoury., and Anshel Pfeffer. “JNF tree-planting in Israel's Negev ends after days of clashes with local Bedouin.” Haaretz, 12 January 2022, https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2022-01-12/ty-article/.premium/after-clashes-more-police-sent-to-guard-jnf-forestation-work-in-israels-negev/0000017f-e6a7-da9b-a1ff-eeef8b760000
[16] Negev Coexistence Forum. “Enforcing the Invisible Barrier: Police Violence during the January 2022 Protests of KKL-JNF Afforestation Projects.” July 2022, p5, https://www.dukium.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Violence-Report_2022_ENG_01-1.pdf
[17] Ibid, p2.
[18] Ibid.
[19] “Violation of the freedom of expression of a female student at Ben Gurion University.” The Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), accessed 4 December 2022, https://www.acri.org.il/post/__836
[20] See the video documenting the events, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvcmR9sYraI
[21] Negev Coexistence Forum for Civil Equality. “The Arab-Bedouin Community in the Negev-Nagab – A Short Background.” accessed 10 January 2022, p512.
[22] United Nations, General Assembly. “Report of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel.” [A/77/328], 14 September 2022, https://reliefweb.int/report/occupied-palestinian-territory/report-independent-international-commission-inquiry-occupied-palestinian-territory-including-east-jerusalem-and-israel-a77328-enar
[23] Ibid.
[24] Melenitzki, G. “We were dreamers: Ayelet Shaked dreams of another 7 new settlements in the Negev.” The Marker, 10 April 2022, https://www.themarker.com/realestate/2022-04-10/ty-article/.premium/00000180-5bd0-de8c-a1aa-dbf8fff50000
[25] Dimensions of Poverty and Social Disparities - Annual Report, 2018.
Tags: Global governance, Human rights, IWGIA
