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"Instead of coming and destroying, find a solution"

Following the wave of evictions in the Negev, we spoke with residents of unrecognised villages, and with their allies in the fight against displacement and dispossession. [A second article in a series about the displacement Bedouin communities in the Negev.]

By Rosa Media

Research assistant Shany Payes

Editor Maayan Galili

Translation by Avi Bram

Date of original publication: 9/1/2025

Original Hebrew text: https://www.rosamedia.org/episodes/articles/64

Yesterday (Wednesday), the Negev [see comment below] was struck by the terrible news of the recovery of the bodies of Hamza and Yousef al-Zaydana, who were kidnapped by Hamas and taken to Gaza on 7th October 7. According to an article in Haaretz, it is possible that Hamza and Yousef were killed by IDF bombings. The news briefly recalled the [experience of the] 7th October massacre, which did not distinguish between Jews and Arab citizens of Israel. As a result, for a moment it seemed that the common fate was strengthening the solidarity between Jews and Bedouin residents of the Negev. Bedouin were kidnapped and murdered on October 7, and public attention was also drawn to the heroic stories of Bedouin citizens such as the minibus driver Yousef al-Zaydana, a relative of Yousef and Hamza, who, under fire, saved 30 young Jewish men and women at the music festival in Re'im. A joint Bedouin-Jewish task force was established in Rahat, which provided material assistance to the victims of the war in the Gaza Strip and in the unrecognised villages [see comment below]. However, for the residents of the unrecognised villages, solidarity quickly turned to terror, as the zoning plan to "regulate" settlement in the Negev led by Minister Amichai Chikli was expanded, and the rate of house demolitions was increased by 400 per cent during 2024, a figure that the right-wing government sees as a source of pride.

In the previous article [in this series], published last week, we discussed the political and historical background of the effort to uproot the [Bedouin communities residing in the] unrecognised villages. This article deals with the struggle of the residents of the villages against their displacement. We spoke with Musa al-Hawashleh, head of the council of the unrecognised village of Ras Jraba, east of Dimona, which is currently struggling against eviction. The village was scheduled for demolition by the end of 2024, but a few days before the end of the year, the High Court of Justice ordered a 30-day delay in its eviction.

Musa, tell us about the village and your struggle.

"We have lived in this village since before the establishment of the State of Israel. I am now about 58 years old. My father lives here, my grandfather lived here. In 2018, they [the State] told us that we intruded onto the State's lands. We did not intrude, we were born here. They want to expand Dimona at the expense of our village. We asked the State and Dimona municipality to [turn our village into] a neighbourhood in Dimona, and they did not agree."

"The State claims that there are areas in the [Bedouin] village of Qasr al-Sir, west of Dimona, to which we are supposed to move. The Bedouin authority [a state authority dedicated to handling the affairs of the Bedouin community] says that the lands [meant for resettlement] belong to the State. On the other hand, the people who live there [i.e. on the lands meant for resettlement] call and tell us that the lands are theirs, and threaten us not to settle there. When they [the State institutions] evict us, they come with the army and Ben Gvir's police [see comment below]. Now we have nowhere to go. 500 people." Because of the existence of the proposed "solution" in Qasr al-Sir, the authorities claim that the residents of Ras Jraba are refusing to be resettled.

"There's a guy here called Faraj, 86 years old, he helped people in Dimona when there were just two shacks there in 1958. He gave them bread, water, everything. He worked in the Dimona municipality for 23 years, like a lot of young people who live here, who shop and work in Dimona. In the meantime, we're here. Waiting for the bulldozers to come. Unless the Supreme Court stops this. Instead of coming and destroying, find a solution."

Instead of coming and destroying, find a solution.

The obvious solution is to recognise the unrecognised villages. All the unrecognised villages are much larger than the minimum size threshold for a settlement according to the criteria of the Israeli planning system. As early as 2012, a master plan was published for recognising the unrecognised villages in the Negev. The plan was written by the Regional Council for the Unrecognised Villages in the Negev [an NGO advocating for the unrecognised villages] together with the NGO ‘Bimkom’ – Planners for Planning Rights, and Sidreh association, an association of Bedouin women in the Negev. The plan proposes a process for recognising the Bedouin villages in their current locations, which would allow them to be provided with infrastructure and services like all citizens of the country. The rationale is simple: “Recognising the villages in their current locations is preferable to the current government plans, which are based on the transfer of tens of thousands of people, because [it] is based on the strong historical connection of the villages to their lands and places of residence… The plan would also save on the vast resources needed to change the regional geography, and on enforcement measures, and would prevent the aggravation of the conflict between the State and the Bedouin.” Of the 46 unrecognised villages, 11 were recognised and the rest remained “unrecognised”. In the Galilee, most Bedouin communities were recognised by the State between 1994 and 2007.

According to Prof. Oren Yiftachel, lecturer in Geography and Urban Planning at Ben-Gurion University, "this so-called conflict is actually not a conflict. The conflict was imposed by the State, which is claiming the land of the Bedouin. The Judaisation of the lands in the West Bank is based on the experience gained in the Negev. In the Negev, [the State] tells the Bedouin [‘your land isn’t] expropriated because this land was never yours’. And that is a very, very stinging insult. [The State says ‘] True, you have been here for centuries, but you are squatters, you are thieves, because [the land] was never yours’.

"The comparison [with Jewish communities] is also outrageous. They say to the Bedouin, ‘Your settlements are too small’, and at the same time Israel enacted a special law in the Knesset to approve ‘individual farms’, where one or two families live, so that they would be provided with infrastructure, electricity, water, transportation. I am not against individual farms, the problem is discrimination. If there were individual settlements for the Bedouin as well, it would solve a great many problems for [communities of] small clusters [of families]. There is room in the Negev for everyone, for Jews and Bedouin."

"I believe that such a struggle can save the villages"

Dr. Kais Nasser, a faculty member at Tel Aviv University Law School and a lawyer for planning and construction in relation to human and civil rights, has been representing Bedouin villages against enforcement authorities for 12 years. Nasser believes that the dispossession of Bedouin in unrecognised villages is an extreme example of the harsh use of legal tools designed to bring about as many house demolitions as possible and the evacuation of residents. According to Nasser, "At the level of local government and planning policy, the Bedouin Authority and the State want as many Bedouin as possible confined to as little space as possible."

How is the evacuation being conducted?

"The Bedouin Authority decides unilaterally that hundreds of [community] clusters should resettle in certain neighbourhoods in certain localities. The authority does not consult with the families at all and does not receive consent. And there is not even clear documentation of the authority's decisions. This is a public authority that is supposed to act according to law: to document decisions, and discussions, and to consult with stakeholders. This never happens. For example, the Abu Assa family in Wadi al-Khalil, whom I represented in The Supreme Court. They decided to move them to one neighbourhood in Umm Batin. There is no documentation. An official simply comes and decides to move them there. This happens with every resettlement. Someone decides, there is no weighing of alternatives. The ABCs of administrative law are not carried out. There is not even transparency in regards to any decision-making process."

What happens to those who oppose the Bedouin Authority's proposal?

"If you don't accept [the Bedouin Authority's orders], enforcement agencies come. The Authority goes directly to the Attorney's Office, claims the residents don't agree to resettle to proposed locations, and asks to issue [the communities] demolition orders. Section 239 of the Kaminitz Law [see comment below] allows for quick demolition in cases where the owner of the building is not alive, legally incompetent, or abroad, and allows the State to ask the court for a judicial demolition order even without an indictment. In these demolition orders, it is written that the recipients are ‘unknown’. How do they convince the courts? They send the developers of the Land Authority [which manages all public lands] to that community, [they] come with police forces, [create] a state of panic and terror, [and] post demolition notices, warnings, and don't talk to anyone [of the residents]. The notices say something like this: 'Mr. Unknown, you built an illegal building, you must come to the Land Authority for an investigation.' People whose names don't even appear on the notice don't come to the ominous-sounding investigation. Then they submit statements to the courts, [that when] they came to the community, ‘we arrived, we weren't able to talk to anyone’. I once cross-examined [an official]. I asked, did you knock on the door? They told me: Our procedures are not to knock on doors. It's [i.e. the notices and investigations] simply false representation [of the facts]. The State can locate [the residents and owners], [the State] even knows them, by name, by families. They come to court with the false representation and receive the demolition orders. The prosecutor's office and the court turn a blind eye and cooperate."

From the moment the court ruled in 1984 that the Bedouin in the unrecognised villages did not own the land, was their fate decided?

"The situation of the Bedouin is a test point for our legal system. It cannot cooperate in this way with the ethnic cleansing of the Bedouin in the Negev. For example, the way the law is being used to evict the Bedouin so aggressively. The court does not review the Bedouin Authority's procedures, and does not review my complaints as a citizen, so how can we call this a democratic state? Its [i.e. the court] role, by virtue of the separation of powers, is to review the executive

branch. If it does not do its job, then there is no need for courts at all. It bothers me. I appear in dozens of petitions in courts, from their [i.e. the State] perspective, all the petitioners are squatters. Apart from one exceptional case in which the Minister of Social Affairs in the Bennett-Lapid government, Meir Cohen, intervened, the court rejected almost all the petitions of the Bedouin who approached it."

When the government is determined to evict them and the courts are not on their side, what is left for the Bedouin to do?

"Israel dispossesses the Bedouin because, from its perspective, their rights to the land are informal. This is an approach that is not accepted in the world. The approach today is to give people rights based on their being people, not on their being property owners."

Even if I accept the approach of the State that the Bedouin have no rights to the land, don't they have planning rights? rights regarding their future? their family? If I don't have the right to own property, then am I already a person without rights? Am I a bag of vegetables that can be moved from here to there? This approach is not accepted in the world, certainly not regarding an indigenous population, which has privileged rights in the place where it lives. As a lawyer, I feel lost. The State tramples on us as lawyers within the local legal system, but they do worry when American or international institutions examine the situation regarding human rights. There was once a meeting of the Swedish government to discuss the rights of the Bedouin society, and it made waves here in Israel. When someone examines them [i.e. the State’s institutions], they act more restrained. The State of Israel has no official decision that it does not recognise the rights of the Bedouin. Ostensibly, it has frozen the situation, except in exceptional cases, so that the government does not have to declare that it is evicting 300,000 residents, but in the meantime, the Bedouin Authority is evicting. This is a point that we need to use to wage a struggle, which will lead to a public and international [awareness of] the issue. They are trying to break down the Bedouin narrative into individual cases, we need to publicise the collective story. I believe that such a struggle can save the [unrecognised] villages."

Translation notes: