As peace talks begin afresh with Palestine, Israel are facing new opposition, this time from the Bedouins. As the Israeli state prepare to 'relocate' tens of thousands of people from their ancestral homes to 'modernised' areas of 'better infrastructure', protests have been breaking out across the country as the Bedouins challenge the controversial 'Prawer Plan'.
The Bedouins are an Arab minority who have been living in the Negev area and throughout the North, for thousands of years, however, following the Israeli Declaration of Independence in 1948 it has been part of Israel. Despite the fact that the Bedouin people have been living in the area for an impossibly long time, in old villages they love and do not want to leave, Israel has sparked worldwide controversy by declaring the villages as 'unrecognised' and 'trespassers on state land'.
Throughout the country, people have been protesting against the 'Prawer Plan', the name given to the 5 year relocation initiative. Recently, in the town of Wadi Ara people from across the country descending on a public park protesting against the proposed law and is reported to have included a number of Palestinians. One protester, Fatima Birro, told a reporter "the Prawer law is denying our right to be in our homes. We are being treated like second-class – no, fifth-class – people in our own land.'"
Like many throughout the country, Birro believes the action to be one of oppression, a bid to rid Israel, including Palestinian territories, of the Arabic people as she continues to tell the reporter 'The law to remove the Bedouin, who have been there for thousands of years, is all part of the same policy of ethnically cleansing this land of the Arabs. It’s the same with the way the Palestinians are treated in the West Bank... Where are we supposed to go?"
The law to enforce the controversial law has passed through one of three stages of Israeli Parliament back in January and went largely unnoticed by the average joe of the international community. However, Navi Pillay, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights has noticed it, and has in fact condemned the law who has said it "legitimize(s) forcible displacement and dispossession" which the Israeli foreign minister called a 'display of ignorance.' Because a U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights would naturally be in the habit of making general statements without properly checking all the facts first...
The Bedouins are originally a nomadic group and are happy living in small communities; favouring a traditional lifestyle which still incorporates modernity. For these people, to be forced from the land of their ancestors, leaving behind the freedom and space of the Negev desert, and into purpose built towns where people from all different communities live on top of each other, is never going to be productive and could easily spark a conflict similar to that of Palestine.
Whilst war between East and West continues to ravage neighbouring countries, we cannot be allowed, nor indeed allow ourselves, to forget the dispossessed; the Palestinians, and soon the Bedouin people too.
Lora
Please note, quotes from Fatima Birro were obtained from http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/this-is-our-land-protests-at-plan-to-remove-bedouins-from-ancestral-villages-8748966.html a highly recommended read from Alistair Dawber, a correspondent to my favourite newspaper The Independent
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