Who cares about the Negev Arabs?
BONHEUR SATTE MALHEUR LICHIEN — Mauritian Creole proverb
What’s good for the cat is bad for the dog, but it sounds better in the original. History is overflowing with examples of how the colonising cat has exploited the unaware dog for its own advancement, and the detriment of the latter. It happened in America with the white man and the Indians, in Australia with the Aborigines, but there are hundreds of other examples.
The whole world knows, specially after the Gaza massacres, about Jews and Palestinians, but the treatment of the Negev Arabs, or Bedouins by the Jewish invaders is no less shameful. However, because they were dispersed over 22,000 square kilometres, and lived in smaller communities, they were easy to handle and control, making their fate kept in the dark. At one time, they numbered between 200,000 and 220,000 living the nomadic life, moving across thousands of kilometres when necessity demanded. Like the Aborigines, it was not in their tradition to “own land”. Something which first the Turks of the Ottoman Empire, then the newly created Israel exploited to their advantages, and to their victims’ detriment. The Palestinians fighting their ineffectual campaign against, first partition, then invasion, were unable to do much about the Negev, and it changed hands almost without a single shot being fired. Once the new country was created, it felt free to pass the laws permitting it to deal with the Bedouins as it thought fit. The UN, which had overseen the creation of the new country looked the other way.The Bedouins had no paper titles to the land, although there was always the tacit understanding between the hundreds of tribes, and there was no one to stop the Knesset passing a law enabling the IDF to seize land fifty times the size of Tel-Aviv for “military purposes”. The government arbitrarily defined all but 11 of the 45 Bedouin villages in a region as “unrecognised”, therefore subject to the good old Israeli practice of bulldozing habitations. Ben-Gurion loved to tell the world that he meant Israel to make a name for itself, as an example of a country living by the moral teachings of the Torah, and not by military superiority, but he was instrumental in forcing the Negev Arabs out, into Egypt, Jordan and elsewhere. He ordered the stoppage of water and electricity, collection of garbage, and introduced the Black Goat Law, forbidding the Bedouins use of good pastures for their herds. He began by relocating thousands to Sinai or Jordan, promising them that he would facilitate their return in due course. He later reneged on this undertaking. He was well-known for this. He prided himself that he knew how to use the fait accompli as his trump card.
Moshe Dayan openly spoke of his plan to spread the desert Arabs all over Israel, with utter contempt for them and their traditions and culture:
“We should transform the Bedouin into an urban proletariat — in industry, services, construction, and agriculture. 88% of the Israeli population are not farmers, let the Bedouin be like them. Indeed, this will be a radical move which means that the Bedouin would not live on his land with his herds, but would become an urban person who comes home in the afternoon and puts his slippers on. His children will get used to a father who wears pants, without a dagger, and who does not pick out their nits in public. They will go to school, their hair combed and parted. This will be a revolution, but it can be achieved in two generations. Without coercion but with governmental direction … this phenomenon of the Bedouins will disappear.” DAYAN
Ben Gurion had a dream that the arid Negev would one day become a thriving part of Israel, with lebensraum for new immigrants, and indeed it has evolved in this direction, with prosperous new developments, turning for example Bershe’eba into modern city. Making nuclear bombs in
Dimona, with modern airports, hospitals, kibbutzes, and state-of-the-art facilities. But of the quarter of a million Bedouins who roamed the sands,, only 11,000 are left.
