Border Police and Green Patrol destroy 52 homes in the Negev

Yesterday morning the authorities destroyed 52 homes - eradicating all the tents and temporary structures of the unrecognized village of al-‘Araqib, in which the al-Turi and al-‘Uqbi tribes were living just south of Rahat in the Negev.[1] The Green Patrol, an environmental paramilitary unit created by Ariel Sharon for Negev security, arrived armed with truncheons and tear gas at seven o’clock in the morning under the close supervision of the Border Police and circling aeroplanes. First blocking all entrances to the village, they found mostly women and children present. Eleven people were arrested to for resisting the demolitions and obstructing the police, of whom seven have been released on the condition of not returning to the area for 7 days, and 3 will remain in prison until tomorrow.[2]

This is the second time in a month that the village has been razed, and three months ago the crops of the people of al-’Araqib were sprayed with pesticide from the air, in order to render the land un-farmable.

The al-Turi tribe were moved from their land in 1956, and concentrated in Rahat as part of the strategy of sedentarisation and ‘modernisation’ of the Bedouin under the military government of that time. Their return was prohibited, but the failure of the new suburbs of Rahat which then Interior Minister Ariel Sharon created, but which did not receive further planning permission, have led them to that return. Rahat was 201^st out of 201 recognised localities in Israel in the 1995/6 National Insurance Institute report on prosperity, and has stayed near the bottom ever since. The “real rate [of unemployment] is close…to 60%”[3].

“We should transform the Bedouin into an urban proletariat...a radical move which means the Bedouin would not live on his lands with his herds, but would become an urban person who comes home in the afternoon and puts his slippers on...The children would go to school with their hair properly combed. This would be a revolution, but it may be fixed in two generations. Without coercion but with government direction...

...this phenomenon of the Bedouins will disappear.”[4]

Moshe Dayan

Contacts for further information:

Adalah the legal centre for minority rights in Israel.

Negev Office

28 Reger Ave

Room 35

Beer Sheva

Tel: 08-665-0740

Fax: 08-665-0853

http://www.adalah.org/

Regional Council for the Unrecognised Villages in the Negev

Kayran Haysud 29/29

PO Box 10002

Beersheva

Phone: 08 628 3043

Fax: 08 6283315

The Association for Support and Defence of Bedouin Rights in Israel

PO. Box 5212

 Beersheva

Tel: 08 623 0289

The Association of Forty

Ein Hod, near Nir Etzion,30808

Tel: 04 - 836 2381, 836 2382

Fax: 04 - 836 2379

http://www.assoc40.org/