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An archive photo from 2010 showing kids in the Bedouin village of Avdat. Photo by Gil Cohen-Magen
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The government seeks to uproot residents of four villages and move them to a new town; the local council wants to bring infrastructure to existing dwellings.

By Shirly Seidler for Haaretz

The head of the Ramat Hanegev Regional Council has asked the government to bring four unrecognized Bedouin villages located in its jurisdiction under its purview and thus recognize them.

The four villages along Route 40 – Avdat, Ramat Tziporim, Kafr Arikha and Meshulash Hava – are home to 180 families, totalling around a thousand people. In contrast to the prevailing government plan for the area, the regional council does not plan to remove the residents from their villages. Unrecognized villages do not have approved master plans and therefore lack basic infrastructure, including connections to the national water and electricity grids.

“No Israeli government wants to regularize the settlement of the Negev Bedouin,” Ramat Hanegev Regional Council chairman Shmuel Rifman told Haaretz. “It’s a matter of money and there are always other priorities, things that are more important; sometimes it’s a war and sometimes it’s Judea and Samaria – there’s always something more urgent. So we in the council came up with the idea to make an effort to regularize Bedouin settlement, something that the state hasn’t yet succeeded in doing.”

Over the past few weeks, ever since the council’s plan emerged, there have been a number of meetings, at which the plan was presented to Jewish residents of the regional council. “We got a green light for the plan,” said Rifman. “There will be many who will object but most of them won’t be from here.” The major objections, he said, would be “from the government and from the Bedouin Resettlement Authority, which opposes our proposal.”

Under the government plan, residents of the four villages will be evacuated and a new town built for them at Ramat Tziporim. According to Rifman, the planned town will be similar to the upscale Be’er Sheva suburbs of Lehavim and Meitar. “It’s not appropriate for the Bedouin,” he said. “Our plan is to leave the villages, do planning appropriate for them and not move the people anywhere.” In a letter he sent over the weekend to Agriculture Minister Uri Ariel (Habayit Hayehudi), who is responsible for the Bedouin resettlement plan, Rifman called for freezing the authority’s plan and holding an urgent discussion on the issue.

In recent years the regional council has been working with a number of villages on various initiatives, mostly in the realm of tourism, aimed at making the Bedouin villages tourist attractions. Today tourism is one of the primary sources of livelihood in the region, along with traditional farming.

Salman Sadan, a leader of Kafr Arikha, said the residents welcome the regional council’s plan. “The plan being drawn up by the state is not appropriate for the Bedouin and it will never happen. You can’t trample on our culture; you can’t change in one day things that exist for hundreds of years. They made that mistake with the Bedouin in the 1970s and to this day are paying the price.”

Sadan said that the residents of the villages had lost faith in the state’s institutions, and believe the only body they can work with is the regional council. “There they listen, they are concerned for our needs. We want good neighborly relations in the Negev, not disputes, and in particular more concern about education.”

He said that the Bedouin of the region in question, between Midreshet Sdeh Boker and Mitzpe Ramon, need careful handling. “The state never prepared the Bedouin to live in a permanent place. There were a lot of problems that were never addressed, like garbage removal and keeping the place clean. No organization instructed the residents how to act, and we took care of ourselves. Despite all the difficulties and all the discrimination, we want to give people hope. The villages will cooperate with this proposal.”

Since taking office, Ariel has held several meetings with heads of the recognized Bedouin local councils and has visited the area several times to study the issue up close. But he has yet to present any operative plans, nor is it known whether those plans will differ significantly from the original government plan, known as the Prawer Plan, which was put on hold a year-and-a-half ago.

According to Rifman, solutions for Bedouin settlement won’t come from the Bedouin themselves, since he believes they don’t have a strong leadership. Instead, he believes they must come from the Jewish leadership of the Negev. “The state failed in its treatment of the Bedouin sector. Regularizing [their settlement] is also important to the Jewish sector, perhaps even more so, because [its absence] is an obstacle to developing the Negev,” he said.

Saying the Bedouin suffer from a stigma of being involved in crime, Rifman noted, “In the center of the country there’s more crime than in the Negev.” He said one objective is to prevent the building of a Bedouin town that will then be abandoned by the state after it’s established, which often leads to it becoming an incubator of crime. “I plan to battle for this, and hope that common sense will prevail and we don’t find ourselves making mistakes,” Rifman said.

The Agriculture Ministry said it was studying the Ramat Hanegev plan and would make decisions about it as part of an overall approach to the regularization of Bedouin settlement. The Bedouin Resettlement Authority said, “A decision on this request, if it is even submitted to the government, will be by the Israeli government and the authority will operate as per government instructions.”