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BETHLEHEM (Ma'an) -- Israel approved a draft law on Monday to implement a plan which will displace thousands of Bedouins in the Negev desert, an Israeli rights group said.

The Ministerial Committee on Legislation approved a bill which outlines a framework for implementing the Prawer-Begin plan, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel said.

"Today the government approved a plan that will cause the displacement and forced eviction of dozens of villages and tens of thousands of Bedouin residents," ACRI lawyer Rawia Aburabia said.

"All of this while the government simultaneously promotes the establishment of new Jewish communities, some of which are even planned to be built on the fresh ruins of Bedouin villages," she added.

The Israeli government approved the plan in 2011, in what it says was an attempt to address the problem of unrecognized Bedouin villages in the Negev desert of southern Israel.

The 2011 proposal was formulated without any consultation with the Bedouin community and rights groups slammed it as a major blow to Bedouin rights.

Bedouins protest

The Regional Council of Unrecognized Arab Villages of Negev along with the High Steering Committee of the Arabs of Negev organized Monday a demonstration near office of Israeli prime minister in Jerusalem protesting approval of the recommendations.

Knesset member Ibrahim Sarsour addressed the demonstrators confirming that his party, the United Arab List, rejected the recommendations. He expressed concern that the recommendations might be approved as a law and urged the Arab public to use legal means to try and prevent such a step.

Talab Abu Arar, another lawmaker, echoed Sarsour’s remarks but appealed to “the rational people on the Israeli side to treat the Arabs wisely giving them their rights, recognizing their unrecognized villages, and involving them in the planning process.”

He warned the Israelis against being driven by “racist and extremist blocs in the Knesset.”


“Approval of the Prawer committee recommendations means Judaisation of Negev. The main goal of these plans is to seize Arab lands and exterminate Arab roots,” said head of the Regional Council of Unrecognized Arab Villages of Negev Atiyeh al-A’sam.

According to ACRI, the plan will forcibly evict nearly 40,000 Bedouins and destroy their communal and social fabric, condemning them to a future of poverty and unemployment.

Israel refuses to recognize 35 Bedouin villages in the Negev, which collectively house nearly 90,000 people.

The Israeli state denies them access to basic services and infrastructure, such as electricity and running water, and refuses to place them under municipal jurisdiction.

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via email from Rabbis for Human Rights

May 3, 2013

"I am certain that the world will judge the Jewish State by what it will do with the Arabs"
Chaim Weizmann - The First President of Israel


Dear Friends and Supporters

I apologize in advance that this is not a calm and reasoned appeal, as you are accustomed to receive from human rights organizations. This is an emotional appeal asking you to help save the soul of our country.

Act Now!

I truly believe that history will judge all of us on how we act in the coming days. The enormity of the impending moral disaster is perhaps greater than any I have dealt with in the 18 years I have been working for Rabbis For Human Rights.

I need you to take a few minutes of your time to prevent that disaster.

Please click here to help us to prevent Forty thousand Israeli Bedouin citizens from being forcibly removed from their homes, wrenched from their way of life and sources of income, and forced to live in artificially created townships that have become centers of unemployment, poverty, crime, poverty and despair.

Forty Thousand.

Please click here, to read our background information and position paper.

Additional information from The Association For Civil Rights in Israel can be found by clicking here.

Please click here to write a letter to Israeli government ministers Livni and Lapid urging them to pull back from the brink. Please feel free to write additional letters to Prime Minister Netanyahu, your country's Israeli Ambassador, and your nation's government officials responsible for foreign policy.

From the moment that I first understood our government's intentions, I have not been able to get out of my head the final scene of "Fiddler on the Roof," as the Jews of Anatevka are expelled from their homes. Watch it for yourselves http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hdm2CKLiJ6Q, starting at 2 hours and 36 minutes.

I imagine the residents of El-Araqib saying goodbye to the generations buried in their cemetery, and the residents of numerous villages giving one last longing look at their lands. I imagine the Bedouin soldier serving in the IDF returning his uniform after taking a furlough to help his family pack. At least as likely, I imagine 40,000 Bedouin battling the special police force to be created to enforce this plan, and eventually being forcibly herded into the "Pale of Settlement," where they will be allowed to live. I see the hatred in young people's eyes, rising incidents of skirmishes between Jews and Bedouin, and the headlines mourning declining investments and rising unemployment for Jew and Arab alike. As we are warned in this week's Torah portion, "If you reject My Laws and spurn "My rules,….I will wreak misery upon you…" (Leviticus 26: 15-16)

The bottom line is that successive Israeli governments have desired for years to move the Negev Bedouin out of villages where they have lived before the creation of the state, or in some cases from villages into which Israel had forcibly moved them during the first years of the state. The goal has also been to take over their lands. Fear mongers have told the Israeli public that the Bedouin are criminals who will take over the Negev if they are not stopped. The truth is that, if the Bedouin were granted a fair opportunity to prove their land claims, and were they to win every claim, they would hold on to 5.4% of the Negev.

The Ministerial Committee on Legislation is scheduled to vote on Monday whether or not to send the latest plan to the Knesset to make it into law. Our ask is very simple. "Don't approve this, or any other proposal that steals land and hope. Build a better future together with the Bedouin" Beyond the enormous moral implications almost impossible to grasp, there is self interest as well. The additional tension, strife and social problems will drive away investments, and discourage people from living in the Negev.

When Sheikh Sayekh al-Touri watched that scene of the Jews of Anatevka being expelled from their homes. He exclaimed, "They did to the Jews just what the Jews are trying to do to us!" However, I was always taught that we are a people commanded to learn from our own oppression how NOT to treat others, and how NOT to repeat history, "For you were resident aliens in the land of Egypt."

And so, I also have an alternative vision in my head. It is one of Jews and Bedouin working together for the good of the Negev. It is one in which we will merit the blessing of this week's Torah portion,"You shall observe my laws and faithfully keep My rules, that you may live upon the land in security, the land shall yield is fruit and you shall eat your fill…"(Leviticus 23:18-19), because we will remember that even the Covenant between God and the Jewish people does not mean that the land belongs to Arab or Jew, "For the land is Mine; you are but strangers resident with me."(Leviticus 25:23) If we act fairly and justly to Jew and Bedouin alike, we will be truly living the Torah's command:


"You shall proclaim freedom throughout the land for ALL its inhabitants." (Leviticus 25:10)

Please act now (link). Your decision at this moment could influence whether Israel ignores the moral lessons of our own history and perpetuates strife, or whether Israel acts according to the precepts of justice and fairness at the heart of our Jewish tradition, and promotes a better future for both Jews and Bedouin in the Negev.

Shabbat Shalom,
Arik

"Therefore beware, so runs the warning, from making human rights in your own state conditional on anything other than on the basic humanity which every human being as such bears within him/her by virtue of being human. Any suppression of these human and civil rights opens the gate to the indiscriminate use of power and abuse of human beings to the whole horror of Egyptian mishandling of human beings that was the root of abomination of Egypt." Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch on Exodus 22:20

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Israeli ministers endorse controversial plan to relocate Bedouin
The Ministerial Committee on Legislation overcame serious disagreements to approve a legal framework for moving the Bedouin into recognized communities; vote had been postponed two weeks to allow Yesh Atid and Habayit Hayehudi to study the issue.

By Jonathan Lis for Haaretz| May.07, 2013 | 2:30 AM |

Israeli cabinet ministers agreed Monday after a heated debate to back a controversial plan for resettling the Bedouin who live in the Negev Desert.

The Ministerial Committee on Legislation approved the Begin Law to resolve land-use issues related to the population, after Housing and Construction Minister Uri Ariel managed to reach a series of compromises with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former minister Benny Begin on that matter to win the support of the Habayit Hayehudi party.

The committee's vote had been postponed two weeks to allow Yesh Atid and Habayit Hayehudi to study the issue.

As part of the draft legislation, some 20,000 to 30,000 Bedouin are to be relocated to officially recognized towns in the Negev including Rahat, Khura and Ksayfe.

Those who are moved are to receive financial compensation as well as new plots of land. The plan is estimated to cost the state NIS 6.8 billion.

Among the concessions Habayit Hayehudi won were the inclusion in the plan of a detailed zoning map of the lands earmarked for the Bedouin and the creation of a ministerial committee headed by Netanyahu to supervise its implementation based on biannual reports.

Public Security Minister Yizhak Aharonovich of Yisrael Beiteinu nearly scuttled the plan by demanding the hiring of hundreds of additional police officers to enforce it.

It was ultimately decided that the bill would not be voted on its second and third readings in the Knesset until a deal is reached with the Finance Ministry on adding 250 officers to the police force, in addition to the 200 new positions already approved. If such a deal cannot be reached, the bill will be returned to the committee.

Bedouin leaders harshly criticized the plan, calling it immoral and impractical. "This is a step that harms the basic rights of the Bedouin. Instead of the state contributing to the Bedouin population, it is acting against it," said Rahat Mayor Sheikh Faiz Abu Seheban. "I call on all human rights organizations to oppose the decision, since it damages the social framework in the Negev."

"The plan will under no circumstances be carried out; the Bedouin population will not give up its land," said Hussein Al-Rafia, the former head of the regional council of unrecognized Bedouin communities. "I think the state needs to sit with the Bedouin population and solve the problem once and for all. They have not sat with us seriously."

Originally known as the Prawer Plan, because it was based on the proposal of a team headed by Ehud Prawer, the head of policy planning in the Prime Minister's Office – a version of the plan was approved by the cabinet in September 2012 along with a NIS 1.2 billion economic development program for recognized Bedouin communities in the Negev.

Benny Begin was charged with listening to Bedouin complaints regarding the plan and incorporating them into draft legislation.

The state has struggled with what to do with the Negev Bedouin for nearly 60 years. The previous cabinet approved the Law for the Regulation of Bedouin Settlement in the Negev after the national election in January 2012, but the move drew heavy criticism.

In 2008, the government formed the Goldberg Committee, led by former High Court judge Eliezer Goldberg, to organize Bedouin settlement in the Negev. Based on the committee's report, which marked the State of Israel’s first attempt to formally hear Bedouin grievances, the government drafted a legal memorandum on organizing Bedouin settlement.

At the heart of the Bedouin question is the ownership of land the Bedouins say they purchased before the establishment of the State of Israel. The agreements were verbal and never registered in the official Land Registry, and Israeli law does not recognize land claims without some form of written proof of purchase or ownership.

The Begin Law as approved by the cabinet calls for communities and employment centers for the Bedouin to be established along three main routes: the Rahat-Be'er Sheva road, the Shoket junction-Tel Arad road and the Be'er Sheva-Dimona road. The boundaries of the communities are to be drawn with regard to existing farming patterns and the government's allocation of land. Relocated Bedouin who can prove they owned land until 1979 are to be given alternative land, while others are to receive monetary compensation.

The plan also provides for recognition of some unrecognized communities in areas that the regional master plan for the greater Be'er Sheva area has already designated as residential. Some 70,000 Bedouin currently live in unrecognized villages in the Negev.