Indigenous (In)Justice

Human Rights Law and Bedouin Arabs in the Naqab/Negev

Ahmad Amara, Ismael Abu-Saad, Oren Yiftachel, Ahmad Amara, Ismael Abu-Saad, Oren Yiftachel

• Publisher: Human Rights Program, Harvard Law School
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780986106224
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Civil Law
• Index: Law

The indigenous Bedouin Arab population in the Naqab/Negev desert in Israel has experienced a history of displacement, intense political conflict, and cultural disruption, along with recent rapid modernization, forced urbanization, and migration. This volume of essays highlights international, national, and comparative law perspectives and explores the legal and human rights dimensions of land, planning, and housing issues, as well as the economic, social, and cultural rights of indigenous peoples. Within this context, the essays examine the various dimensions of the "negotiations" between the Bedouin Arab population and the State of Israel. Indigenous (In)Justice locates the discussion of the Naqab/Negev question within the broader Israeli-Palestinian conflict and within key international debates among legal scholars and human rights advocates, including the application of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the formalization of traditional property rights, and the utility of restorative and reparative justice approaches. Leading international scholars and professionals, including the current United Nations Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women and the former United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, are among the contributors to this volume.

CHAPTER 1

Socio-Political Upheaval and Current Conditions of the Naqab Bedouin Arabs

Ismael Abu-Saad and Cosette Creamer

Introduction

The state of Israel discriminates against me negatively, it deprives and neglects me, consigns me to the economic, social and political margins. . . . The state doesn’t show an interest in what I think or feel, or in what I am willing or able to contribute. . . . To my great regret, the Israeli Jews still have not internalized the significance of the far-reaching consequences of the brutal fact that the Palestinian Arabs within the borders of the state, and beyond, are the indigenous inhabitants of this land, and as such, their rights in this place are not subject to denial or appeal. The indigenous Palestinians of this land were not engaged as the temporary custodians of the land for hundreds of years until the Jews would return to it and push them aside.

(Zeidani, 2005:89–90)

Over the past half century, with the formation of nation-states and the encroachment of modernization, Bedouin life throughout the Middle East has changed to varying degrees. This change has been particularly dramatic for the Bedouin Arabs living in the Naqab (Negev) Desert in southern Israel. They are among the indigenous Palestinian Arabs who remained on their lands after the 1948 conflict (Al-Nakba)¹ and who today form a part of the Arab minority in Israel. They have inhabited the Naqab Desert for many generations and were subject at various times to Ottoman rule, the British Mandate government, and after 1948 the State of Israel. Traditionally, the Naqab Bedouins were organized into nomadic or semi-nomadic tribes whose livelihood was based on animal husbandry and seasonal agriculture. They were widely dispersed throughout the Naqab in order to meet the needs of their herds. Extended family and tribal groupings lived in proximity, and some household members would migrate seasonally to seek out pasture for the herds and then return to their home base to tend their fields. Prior to 1948, 90% of the Bedouin population in the Naqab lived as subsistence farmers, while 10% earned their living from raising livestock. In fact, over 2 million dunams (494,200 acres) of the 12.6 million dunams of land used by the Bedouins were cultivated, primarily in the north and northwestern areas of the Naqab.² Today the Bedouins of the region struggle to retain possession of—much less cultivate—386,000 dunams of land.³

Because of their traditional semi-nomadic and pastoral lifestyles, Bedouin communities have been often marginalized and viewed as incompatible with the machinery and planning objectives of modern states. In fact, indigenous peoples around the world who are living in modern states are confronted with assimilation efforts by those states, particularly forced urbanization. These efforts to “modernize” indigenous peoples and integrate them within state structures are often carried out through displacement and land expropriation, resulting in severe disruptions of traditional cultural lifestyles. In the context of the Naqab, this dynamic of forced urbanization has been further complicated by the backdrop of the broader Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Similar to other indigenous communities in modern states, however, the Naqab Bedouins have developed local forms of resistance to the methods of control and assimilation employed by the Israeli state. This chapter explores the socio-political upheaval experienced by the Naqab Bedouin Arabs, the means through which they have displayed their resistance to governmental efforts that have attempted to simultaneously marginalize and assimilate them, and their current living conditions.

Bedouin Arabs under the Ottoman Empire and British Mandate

Bedouin Arab tribes have lived in Palestine since at least the fifth century. They largely controlled the Naqab region during the Ottoman period from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, during which time they enjoyed relative autonomy, freedom of movement, and use of land. Each Bedouin tribe spread throughout the territory where it grazed its flocks, sometimes covering hundreds of square miles, which the tribe as a whole controlled. The extent of the controlled territory depended on the power of each tribe, which inevitably led to territorial tribal feuds. Each tribe selected its own sheikh, but under Ottoman rule, the Turkish authorities had to confirm their selection.

The Ottoman Empire occupied the region in 1519 and initially administered it through Turkish rulers in Jerusalem and Gaza. The Turkish rulers largely ignored the tribal in-fighting until the 1870s, when the Ottoman government began holding tribal sheikhs personally responsible for the outcomes of such feuds. The Ottomans also set the boundaries of tribal territories, and these boundaries remained relatively static until after the 1948 conflict. The two largest tribal confederations—the Tarabīn and the Tiāha—acquired the most fertile territory in the northern regions of the Naqab, while the ‘Azāzmah were located in the arid mountains of the central area and the tribes of the Gubarāt and Hanāgrah confederations were pushed to the coast (al-‘Ārif, 1934:31; Marx, 1967).

In 1900, the Ottoman government built the town of Beersheba, where it established an administrative center in order to better control the Bedouin tribes and to strengthen its presence while engaging in negotiations over the border with Egypt. In an implicit recognition of Bedouin land ownership, the Ottomans purchased land from the ‘Azāzmah tribe in order to build the city of Beersheba. During this period, the Turks also sought to build a separate judicial system for the Bedouins, so as to further administrative objectives, such as tax collection. The creation of this administrative center—in addition to the fixing of tribal land boundaries and the introduction of wage labor into the Naqab economy—effectively began a process of “sedentarization,” which continued during the British Mandate period (Musham, 1959:549).

Great Britain controlled the Naqab region between 1917 and 1948—under a League of Nations Mandate from 1922—during which time British authorities intervened very little in the daily activities of the Bedouin Arabs. Like the Ottomans before them, the British were not particularly interested in developing the Naqab region (Swirksi, 2008:25–45). Still, under British rule, the value of land rose in some areas of the Naqab, as farming increased and tribal sheikhs (primarily though not exclusively) bought and consolidated land on which they employed tribesmen as sharecroppers. The total number of Bedouins in the region during this period ranged from 65,000 to 100,000, with tribes recognizing each other’s lands (Abu-Saad, 2008a).⁴ With respect to agriculture, the 1942 Survey of Palestine reported that the entire northern area of the Naqab was either “cultivated” or “cultivated in patches,” indicating the agricultural use that the Bedouin Arabs had made of almost all the land during this period (Maddrell, 1990:5).

Overall, the British brought a semblance of Western law and administration to the region and created the first formal Western schools for the Bedouins (Abu-Saad, 1991:235). Sedentarization increased during the British Mandate period, as the British military authorities employed some Bedouins, and the Bedouins also intensified their involvement in land cultivation. The Mandate authorities commenced a process of land title settlement in Palestine and enacted a number of land laws, including the 1928 Land (Settlement of Title) Ordinance. This ordinance required residents to register land claims, while promising those who held land under traditional Arab law that their land rights would not be affected (Yiftachel, 2000:9). However, for the most part, the Bedouin Arabs did not register their land holdings, particularly given that there were few challenges to their land rights at the time. In addition, the process of land settlement undertaken by the British Mandate focused more on the northern areas of Palestine than on the southern regions.

Zionist Policy in the Pre-Israeli State Period

The Zionist movement was a colonial venture that began in Europe in the late 1800s with the goal of establishing a Jewish state in Palestine. It was based on the premise that Palestine was a territory that belonged exclusively to the Jewish people due to their presence on the land during biblical times. The Zionist colonial project portrayed Palestine as a “land without a people, for a people without a land” (see Masalha, 1997).

Early Zionists viewed the Palestinian Arabs as a non-European, inferior “other” (Masalha, 1997). For these Zionists, the overwhelming number of Palestinian Arabs in the future Jewish state represented a significant obstacle to their quest to establish a sovereign state of their own. A prominent Zionist leader at the time, Israel Zangwill, wrote in 1920:

If Lord Shaftesbury was literally inexact in describing Palestine as a country without a people, he was essentially correct, for there is no Arab people living in intimate fusion with the country, utilizing its resources and stamping it with characteristic impress; there is at best an Arab encampment. (quoted in Masalha, 1997:62)

Such pronouncements by leading Zionists promoted the notion of an empty territory—empty, as Masalha explains, not in the sense of actual absence of inhabitants, but rather of a “civilizational barrenness.” This notion of empty territory was then used to justify Zionist colonization and the delegitimization of the native population as a people belonging to that particular place (Masalha, 1997; Prior, 1999).

Making this fictional depiction of the country a reality required considerable effort from Zionist leaders, as at the time of the First Zionist Congress in 1897, the Palestinian Arabs, who constituted 95% of the population, owned and cultivated most of the country’s arable land. In contrast, Jews made up only 5% of the population and owned 1% of the land (Prior, 1999:190). In 1930, Britain’s High Commissioner for Palestine, John Chancellor, recommended the total suspension of Jewish immigration and land purchases to protect Arab agriculture, as all the arable land—then in possession of the indigenous Palestinians—could not be sold to Jews without creating a class of landless Arab cultivators (Masalha, 1992; Quigley, 1990:19). This was also true of the Naqab Desert in southern Palestine, which was inhabited and extensively cultivated by Bedouin Arabs, despite the popular Zionist imagery of the Jewish immigrants “making the desert bloom.” By the mid-1940s, the Naqab’s Bedouin Arab population was estimated at 65,000 to 95,000, organized into 95 semi-nomadic tribes (Falah, 1989; Marx, 1967; Yiftachel, 2003), while the Jewish population in the Naqab consisted of 475 persons, living in four settlements (Prior, 1999).

Given extensive Arab presence in Palestine and the need to maintain European and international support for the Zionist project, the leaders of the Zionist movement publicly claimed that the rights of the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine would be protected and upheld. At the same time, they strove to achieve a Jewish majority by promoting Jewish immigration to Palestine and sought to bring about the removal or transfer of Palestinian Arabs from the territory of the future Zionist state.

This Zionist ideology of transforming the people, the land, and the character of Palestine into a Jewish state has played, and continues to play, a defining role in shaping Israeli policies and institutions. One of the last remaining frontiers to be settled, according to the Zionist ideology, is the Naqab Desert in southern Israel, which makes up 60% of the total land area of Israel but contains only 8% of its population (Yiftachel, 2006). The Bedouins continue to represent an anathema to the Zionist colonization project.

The 1948 Arab-Israeli Conflict and the Creation of the State of Israel

The events immediately prior to, during, and after the 1948 Arab-Israeli conflict resulted in the exodus or expulsion of over 80% of the Palestinian Arab population in Israeli-held territory. This included the expulsion of roughly 80%–85% of the Naqab Bedouin Arab population to the surrounding territories or countries (the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Jordan, and Egypt), which reduced their numbers to approximately 11,000 (Falah, 1985a:37).⁵ Of the original ninety-five Bedouin tribes inhabiting the Naqab, only nineteen remained in sufficient numbers to receive official recognition from the new Israeli government.

The 1947 United Nations decision to partition Palestine into two states (Jewish and Arab) had left large sections of the Naqab outside the boundaries of the future Jewish state, including Beersheba and surrounding lands. As a result, Zionist leadership interested in the region made substantial efforts during the 1948 conflict to conquer this area (Swirksi, 2008:26). The Israeli army eventually succeeded, but the government initially had difficulty obtaining international recognition of its possession of the Naqab. It was not until the 1956 war that Israel’s sovereignty over the region was recognized internationally.⁶

During and following the 1948 conflict, Israeli authorities imposed military government on areas of the country with large indigenous populations. The military government served, first and foremost, as a tool for consolidating control over the Palestinian Arab minority, evidenced by the fact that its regulations were not enforced against the Jewish community. While inconsistent with democratic principles, this one-sided enforcement of military rule was fully consistent with furthering the Zionist aim of creating a Jewish state and increasing Jewish (while decreasing Arab) control over the land. To this end, the regulations of the military government typified traditional imperialist attitudes, giving state authorities extensive and extremely rigorous powers. Enforcement of these regulations resulted in the near complete loss of individual freedoms and property rights, and impinged on virtually every aspect of life, from control over freedoms (e.g., freedom of speech, movement, means of transportation, and the press) to the expropriation of property (Jiryis, 1976:17).

Using th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Section 1
• Section 2
• Section 3
• Epilogue
• Afterword
• Contributors