The Global Sociology Blog

Via The Guardian, the indigenous Bedouins are facing the all-too common fate of indigenous peoples who do not fit nicely within the culture of capitalism (something described fairly extensively by Richard Robbins).

“Tens of thousands of bedouin – Arabs who have lived a semi-nomadic life on the land for many generations and who all carry full Israeli citizenship – live in 39 “unrecognised villages” in southern Israel where their homes are subject to frequent demolition. (…) Twayil is one of the villages worst hit by the recent increase in demolitions. The Talalqah clan was moved from the area in the 1950s, a time when Israel’s Arab population was subject to military rule. In 1978, clan members bought plots of land in Lakiya, one of seven townships established for the bedouin on the advice of a government committee, thinking they could restart their lives. But they have not received their land and soon discovered Lakiya was built on land claimed by another bedouin tribe. Eventually, they returned to Twayil, where they now live surrounded by the signs of demolitions and without even basic services like water or electricity.”

Israel has plans for the land occupied by the Bedouins, either for resources exploitation or to establish settlements, so in a move not that different from the relocation of Native Americans to reservations, the Bedouins are to be relocated to specific townships. It has not worked before, as the previous excerpt indicates, but maybe it will work this time.

“However, the seven townships to which it wants the bedouin to move are already overcrowded and have poor living conditions – in stark contrast to the new communities being built nearby for Israelis relocating to the Negev. According to the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics, in 2003 all the townships ranked among the eight poorest areas of Israel. But of the newly built communities around Beer Sheva, with their predominantly Jewish populations, two were in the top five wealthiest areas of the country.”

I guess not. Jimmy Carter took some heat when he used the term “apartheid” regarding Israel, but how else to describe the treatment of this indigenous group. Of course, the Bedouins are full citizens of Israel but the villages they occupy technically do not exist (which is why they get demolished all the time) and they have no claim to the land they live on. And actually, these people do not “occupy” the land (as Israel occupies the Occupied Territories). They have lived there for a long time and sometimes still have documentation of such residency. They are not squatters. It is deliberate Israeli land policy that has created such a situation, as stated by Lucy Mair, the author of a Human Rights Watch (HRW) report (press release, full report) on this issue.

“Many Israelis believe the country’s Bedouin citizens deserve their lot – that they have trespassed onto land that wasn’t theirs and willfully built without proper permits. Yet during months of research for Human Rights Watch I found the opposite to be true. Bedouin presence on this land in the Negev dates back generations. Some Bedouin have documents to show that their fathers and grandfathers bought land from other Bedouin or paid land taxes to the Ottoman and British authorities before the state of Israel was founded. Others showed Human Rights Watch the ruins of family homes and school buildings from decades ago, or graveyards where their ancestors were buried in the 1800s. And others showed us military orders asking Bedouin to “temporarily” leave their villages in the early 1950s.

But these displaced Bedouin were never allowed to return to their ancestral villages. Israel passed a series of laws in the 1950s and 60s confiscating the land from which the Bedouin were displaced and registering it in the name of the state. In the 1960s, when Israel drew up its first master plan, planners purposefully ignored the Bedouin villages, rendering them illegal with a stroke of the pen, thus denying them access to building permits and basic services. These state actions are the root cause of the terrible conditions that tens of thousands of Israel’s Bedouin citizens endure to this day.”

Land policies are one of the major means, according to Richard Robbins, to produce ethnocide, that is, the cultural elimination of indigenous culture (along with military intervention, extension of government control, cultural modification policies, attempts as assimilation through education presented as progress, and economic development). We can see some of these strategies at work in this case as well. It is hard to see how this situation could improve considering the lack of sympathy from the Israeli population and the fact that the Bedouin are not as media-savvy as the Zapatistas in making their case to the international community via global media.