Dr. Yoav Peled is an attorney and Professor of Political Science emeritus at Tel Aviv University. He has published extensively on Israeli politics. His latest study, co-authored with Horit Herman Peled, is The Religionization of Israeli Society (Routledge). This post was originally published by the Los Angeles Times.
In the summer of 1980 I accompanied my wife, Horit Herman Peled, on a research trip to Israel’s Nakab (in Hebrew Negev) region for her study of traditional Bedouin women’s weaving. In October of that year the Los Angeles Times published my op-ed article, “Bedouins: Defiance, Vows of Resistance,” based on our conversations with the region’s Bedouins.
The concluding paragraph of that article began with: “So far the Bedouins have been remarkably calm, and have not engaged in acts of hostility against the Israeli government. But … I often heard vows of resistance and defiant statements to the effect that ‘we are not going to submit peacefully any longer’.” Now, many of the children of the Bedouins we had spoken with 45 years ago have indeed turned to violence.
That violence, however, does not take the form of armed resistance against the state but rather that of criminal activity. Reports abound about Bedouins engaged in protection rackets, possession of illegal firearms, illegal growing and smuggling of cannabis, terrorizing motorists on the highways that cross their region, and sexual harassment of women on the streets of Beersheba, the area’s major city.
Other social ills as well plague the Bedouin communities: polygamy, practiced by about 20% of the men, which often results in large dysfunctional families; marrying off of minor girls to older, married men; violence against women; murder of women for allegedly violating “family honor.” The public discourse in Israel treats this issue as a problem of “governability,” ignoring the underlying conditions that give rise to this kind of behavior.
Using this criminal activity as pretext, the police, led by the extreme right-wing Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, recently placed the Bedouin community of Tirabin al-Sanaa under siege for two weeks, terrorizing the population and killing one resident who did not pose any danger to them.
They also confiscated all of four rifles, two handguns and several hand grenades. According to police, two more Bedouin communities are up for similar treatment in the near future.
At the heart of the matter is a dispute over land between the Bedouins and the State of Israel. At the end of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, only about 12,000 Bedouins were left in the Negev, out of 70,000 who had lived there before. The rest left, or were expelled, to the Gaza Strip (then under Egyptian rule) or to Jordan.
Those who remained were concentrated in the eastern Nakab where they lived under military rule until 1966. When the military rule ended, the Bedouins demanded to be returned to their original lands, but because of the erratic nature of land registration in that area most of them did not possess title deeds.
In 1984 Israel’s High Court of Justice, relying on a spurious interpretation of the Ottoman land law of 1858, determined that the entire Nakab was state land and the Bedouins, therefore, were trespassers there. Still, in recognition of the fact that many of them had lived in that area for generations, the state did not proceed to evacuate them by force, but tried to reach agreements with them.
The essence of these agreements was that the state would recognize the Bedouins’ ownership of their land, provided they agreed to move to townships established for that purpose and receive there, as compensation, much smaller parcels of land than the ones they originally claimed. Since 1966,
seven such townships have been established, which are among the poorest communities in Israel.
seven such townships have been established, which are among the poorest communities in Israel.
Of the 250,000 Bedouins in the Negev, about 70% live in the townships and in villages recognized by the state as legitimate communities, and the rest, unwilling to accept the terms offered by the state, live in forty-five “unrecognized villages,” shanty towns lacking the most essential infrastructure – water, electricity, sewage, paved roads, etc.
All dwellings in those villages are considered to be illegal structures and are constantly under threat of demolition. Over the years the High Court of Justice mandated the establishment of a few schools and medical clinics in some of those villages, but these are far from providing adequate services to the population.
In 2018, before the outbreak of the Coronavirus pandemic and the Gaza war, the unemployment rate among the Bedouins in the officially recognized communities was more than double the national average, and the average income of a Bedouin wage-earner in the recognized communities was about two-thirds of the national average.
During the school year 2018-2019, the rate of Bedouin twelfth grade students who gained a matriculation certificate, required for admission to higher education, was about 50%, compared with a national average of 70%. No comparable figures are available for the unrecognized villages, but the situation there is undoubtedly worse.
The Bedouins who live in the unrecognized villages are willing to settle with the state, but they demand adequate compensation, in the form of sufficient land and water allocation to establish agricultural communities, like the many Jewish agricultural communities in the area.
So far the state has refused these demands and insists on relocating the Bedouins to the townships, while planning to establish additional Jewish settlements on land the Bedouins claim as their own. This approach, supposedly meant to enhance the state’s “governability” in the Negev, is not going to solve the problem of violence there, only to aggravate it.
