Well, Israel finally did it. We finally managed to actually remove an illegal settlement.
Oops... Wait a minute... Looks like this "settlement" is in Israel proper!
And oops! Looks like its status as "illegal" is under debate.
And oops again! Looks like the inhabitants aren't Jewish settlers... They're Bedouins! In the Negev!
So wait... Are you basically saying that what's so hard to do to over 100 illegal outposts in the West Bank -- some of them occupied by just a handful of people -- is actually a piece of cake down in the Negev, even though we're talking about hundreds of people in one village?
I don't get it...
I don't get why 1,500 cops, with horses, bulldozers and a chopper came down today to the town of el-Arakiv and demolished all 40 homes, sheep stalls, removed belongings, destroyed trees and left over 300 people -- a majority of them children -- to fend for themselves in the July Negev heat.
Actually, maybe I do know why.
There's really a simple answer to this.
It's the trees.
Don't get me wrong. It's not the tree's fault. But Israel and the JNF have a massive plan (Blueprint Negev) to make the Negev green with trees, and one of the planned forests is supposed to grow right where those el-Arakiv bedouin had the chutzpah to put their tents up.
It doesn't matter that el-Arakiv was in the Negev before Israel was founded.
It doesn't matter that the state has moved the el-Arakiv bedouin from place to place over and over again.
What probably DID matter was what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said just the day before, when he publicly announced that the Bedouins are a threat to Israel. Netanyahu warned of a situation in which "various elements will demand nationality and rights within Israel, in the Negev for example, if a region is created without a Jewish majority. This occurred in the Balkans and this is a real threat."
So, obviously a decision had to be made.
And as is the case in any normal, Western country, when it comes down to people and trees -- you choose the trees, right? Right. And that's what Israel did today.
Israel sent its elite police forces, dressed in black, to deal with the enemy. The bedouin. Who are multiplying so fast, they endanger the Jewish identity of the State of Israel. And the Jewish trees will keep that identity alive.
I'm proud to be an Israeli today.
"Israel. We choose trees"
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Aa Israel has demonstrated over and over again, what really counts is the religion of the people who inhabit a place. If they are of the incorrect one, you (luckily) don't have to respect petty details like who actually owns a piece of land or moral and ethical concerns.
As of this morning 19 organizations in Israel have joined us in posting our own petition condemning this brutal act of force of our government against an entire village whose status is presently being discussed in the courts.
While it is true that the JNF does not determine the legality of any village in Israel, it would behoove them to check the realities on the ground before planting trees that will then be used as a weak excuse for committing the horrors we witnessed this week.
Vivian Silver and Amal Elsana Alh’jooj
Co-Executive Directors
Negev Institute for Strategies of Peace and Development
Moreover, as the national foresters for the State of Israel, JNF does not decide where a forest should be planted. It executes the forestation policy of the State of Israel according to Master Plan #22. Therefore, as JNF had no role in this, any concerns should be addressed to the State.
JNF does understand that the issue of land ownership in the Negev is a complicated and painful subject for which a solution has yet to be reached in spite of infinite attempts by numerous organizations, agencies and other bodies. But the Regional Council for the Unrecognized Villages’s (RCUV) is wrong to drag JNF into the argument.
JNF has and continues to work extensively on behalf of the Bedouin population. As part of its Blueprint Negev campaign and in collaboration with the Hura Municipal Council and the New York-based Sustainability Laboratory, JNF is supporting Project Wadi Attir, an innovative initiative to develop a model for sustainable, community-based agricultural enterprise adapted to a desert environment. It is designed to combine Bedouin aspirations, values and experience with sustainability principles, modern-day science and cutting-edge technologies.
In addition, JNF has developed parks, water treatment plants, and reservoirs in Bedouin communities.
Israeli Bedouin have full medical and educational benefits. Around 30 percent were literate a few decades ago. Now there are Bedouin teachers, doctors and other professionals serving in their own communities. They are respected in Israel. Beduoin have been active in the IDF since it started.
Spindok
http://www.jpost.com/Israel/Article.aspx?id=182848
Israel is currently building 13 new villages or towns for the Negev Bedouin.
The government of Israel has allocated more than NIS1 billion for the benefit of this population.
The State of Israel is offering far-reaching benefits to Bedouin who leave the dispersion and move into permanent villages.
On January 2, 2006, I visited the newly recognized village of Ain Hod and ate at the Albeit Restaurant. One must leave the smooth settler’s roads and embark upon a narrow winding rocky unpaved way that edges a cliff with a 300 foot drop to get to the village of Ain Hod, which was only recognized by the Israeli government a few months prior.
In 1948 when most of the indigenous population fled their homes and property, some citizens held their ground, dug in and have nonviolently endured being treated like sub-human beings.
The Unrecognized Villages are not on any Israeli map but yet these people all have Israeli citizenship, pay taxes but receive no services.
The Israeli government deemed these scattered villages as military zones and agricultural areas so homes were demolished, and the tax paying people live without water, electricity, schools or medical care.
Yet the settlers 400 meters away have swimming pools and every comfort known to man.
On the fortieth anniversary of The Declaration of Human Rights in 1988, the “Association of 40" was established in Ain Hod and worked through the Israeli court system to be recognized, to receive water, electricity, roads and human rights.
Looking back to where I have been @
http://wearewideawake.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1761&Itemid=234
Beduin are/were nomads. There are/were other nomads throughout history. Roma I met and knew in The Netherlands had long moved into regular settled housing, went to regular jobs, and still held on to their culture. Wives and children, for example, were trading on fairs during summer vacations. Roma also did get together periodically for other occasions. Appears that a move is going on to integrate Beduin more solidly into the Israeli fabric, and that will give them all the advantages taxpaying citizens have. Persons who insist on camping out in undeveloped areas usually do not have such advantages. When I camped out in a tent in the sixties and seventies in Arizona, there were no utilities and other services available on the campgrounds I chose.
"They would be treated worse somewhere else, so quit complaining."
BTW-- Where did Israel house these displaced people, and their herds, until the villages are completed?
Palestine is for Palestinians, Jews, Christians and Muslims.
The indigenous Palestinians, not immigrants.
It doesn't matter that the state has moved the el-Arakiv bedouin from place to place over and over again."
Aren't the Bedouins traditionally nomadic?
I'm just asking.
Story here: http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2010/07/2010727133151458970.html