Israel’s proposed Prawer plan refers to the “demographic threat” represented by the Bedouin community’s “accelerated rate” which is “sprawling uncontrollably … in the northern Negev.”
Under this plan 30,000 of the 100,000 Bedouin who live in squalid and illegal encampments will be forced to relocate to developed lots in nearby farming, suburban or urban communities, with compensation. According to the authors of the plan, half of these residents (15,000 Bedouin) need to move for their own good, because they’re squatting in the toxic waste dump.
Supporters of the plan say that the sedentarization of the Bedouin people is the only alternative to poverty, crime and illness, and that “the state also has to protect its most limited natural resource — land — through organized planning”. MK Meir, who was interior minister and led negotiations with the Bedouin on land issues during Ehud Olmert’s premiership, commented: “The goal here is to regulate the land and find the best solution for the Bedouin community as a recognized community.”
To outsiders this is yet another creepy move towards an apartheid society. You cannot suppress the Arab population, take their ancestral land and remain a democracy. Of course, if you are greedy for land you don’t care.
Epicureanism stands for compromise, decency, respect for others and a willingness to get along with people, even if you don’t like them. Not much Epicurean news is coming out of Israel of late.
Sheikh Abu Aziz on I what the Prawer-Begin plan would mean for the Bedouin communities of the Negev:
I have lived in my village, Al Araqib, my whole life. The Israeli government says my village is “unrecognized” – and so has bulldozed everything more than 50 times.
What does “unrecognized” mean? Of course they see the buildings, the olive trees, and the men, women, and children living here. You do not send bulldozers, helicopters, and soldiers to destroy something that you cannot see.
It does not mean they do not recognize the suffering it causes us. You cannot see people screaming and crying each time you remove them from their homes, and think it has no impact.
What it means is they do not recognize our legitimate rights as human beings to live in peace and dignity where we have always lived. It means they do not recognize that we are fully human.
Their insistence on destroying Al Araqib means they do recognize one thing: that much more than Al Araqib is at stake. Why go to all the trouble over one village, otherwise?
What the Israeli Government understands is that its power – I do not say legitimacy, I say power – comes from the refusal to recognize any opinion, any view of history, other than its own. If they demolish Al Araqib again and again, they will do the same to dozens of other Bedouin villages in the Negev as part of the Prawer Plan. They will not stop at the Negev. Why not Susiya in the Occupied West Bank? They refuse to let us live in our own land.”