Unrecognized Bedouin villages in Israel are rural Bedouin communities in the Negev and the Galilee which the Israeli government does not recognize as legal. They are often referred to as "unrecognized villages".
General data
Number of the villages The exact number of unrecognized Bedouin villages is unknown. Different bodies use different definitions of the term "village". As a result, numbers offered by them differ, but there is an increase in the last decade, in spite of a slow recognition process of some of these communities.
According to Maha Qupty, representing the Bedouin advocacy organization RCUV, in 2004 there were 45 unrecognized Bedouin villages in the Negev. According to the Human Rights Watch report based upon the 2006 statistics offered by the Adva Center,Shlomo Swirski and Yael Hasson, "Invisible Citizens: Israeli Government Policy Toward the Negev Bedouin", "Adva Center – Information on Equality and Social Justice in Israel", February 2006 approximately half of Bedouin citizens of Israel (85,000 out of 170,000) live in 39 such villages.
According to another Bedouin advocacy organization The Association of Forty, in 2013 there were about 92 unrecognized villages in Israel, 59 of them were Bedouin villages in the Negev.
According to the head of the Bedouin Administration, Yaakov Katz, and geographer Arnon Soffer, in the Negev area alone, there were about 1000 illegal Bedouin concentrations with over 64,000 homes in 2011,Prof.Arnon Soffer, Government resolution regarding the Bedouin dating 27 January 2013Arnon Soffer, Bedouin coming to Tel Aviv, Channel 7, 29 March 2011 with about 2200-2000 new buildings adding every year. For comparison, in 2008 the Goldberg Commission stated that there were 50,000 illegal buildings in the Negev, and about 1,500 to 2,000 more were built every year.Aviad Glickman, Report: State should recognize Bedouin villages, Ynetnews, 11 December 2008
Testifying before the Goldberg Committee in 2010, Israeli right-wing NGO Regavim reported 2,100 separate concentrations in Negev of 3–400 constructions each, covering over 800,000 dunams.Ari Briggs, Tower and Stockade settlements – Version 2.0, Jerusalem Post op-ed, 5 September 2012The Regavim movement has a solution, Regavim, 1 January 2011
Size of the area According to the Israel Land Administration, Negev Bedouin claim area 12 times bigger than that of Tel Aviv.
According to Arnon Sofer, the Bedouin make up about 2% of the Israeli population, but the unrecognized Bedouin communities spread on a vast territory and occupy more than 10 percent of Israel – north and east to Be'er Sheva. According to him, the Negev Bedouin have also started to settle west of Be'er Sheva and close to Mount Hebron. Their communities spread south to Dimona and towards the Judean Desert. They occupy large spaces near Retamim and Revivim and get close to the Gaza Strip, occupy land in the central Negev near Mitzpe Ramon, and even close to the central area. In 2010 alone about 66 illegal Bedouin settlements were established in the area of Rehovot and Rishon LeZion.Regev Goldman, Lowland Bedouin invaders? War here. NRG, 02.01.2012Gil Bringer, Solution for every invader. Makor Rishon, 15 April 2011Prof. Arnon Sofer, Following the Goldberg Committee. Did Israel lose the northern Negev , Chaikin Geostrategy, March 2009, University of Haifa According to Sofer, the Bedouin expansion continues rapidly in all directions and occupies spaces that Israel did not know before.Uri Hudi, Arnon Sofer: Bedouin Arab communities and strangle the country, 15 December 2011, Globes
Number of residents Between 1994 and 2007, Israel recognized 21 Arab townships with a similar illegal status until then. In the Galilee, most of the illegal villages were regulated and recognized, and from a population of 90,000 Bedouin in the north, a few hundred still live in unrecognized villages.Prof. Arnon Sofer, Because of lack of governance the new guard is born, March 2011, On new guard In the south, it is estimated that about 90,000 residents live in unrecognized Bedouin villages; these Bedouin comprise 45% of the total Bedouin population.According to a survey of Association of Forty
Status
The unrecognized Bedouin villages were either built without authorization from the Israeli state or predate either the state itself or the "Planning and Construction Law" passed in 1965. As the state considers them a menace, they remain ineligible for municipal services, such as connection to the electrical grid, water mains or trash-pickup, and they cannot elect government representatives.
These communities dot the Northern Negev, with military fire zones, natural reserves and landfills often being built around them. For example, in the 1950s, the 'Azazme were forced off their grazing grounds and settled in Wadi al-Na'am. Since then, an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) munitions factory and military fire zone, the Efrat Oil Terminal – an oil-storage site, the Israel Electric Corporation and Mekorot – the national water carrier site have come to surround the village.Am Johal, "Powerless" Bedouin Village Still Seeking Health Care
According to a report by the Israeli NGO Adva Center, "The Bedouin living in the Negev constitute the only group of Arab citizens of Israel that still has a large-scale hold on the land, a hold that the state officially denies in principle, while recognizing in practice."
According to the Israel Land Administration (2007), some 60 per cent of the Negev Bedouin lived in seven permanent state-planned townships, such as Rahat, Tel as-Sabi, Shaqib al-Salam (Segev Shalom), Ar'arat an-Naqab, Kuseife, Lakiya and Hura, while the rest (40 per cent) – "in illegal homes spread over hundreds of thousands of dunams".Bedouin information , ILA, 2007
Since 2003 a number of previously illegal Bedouin communities were recognized by the state (such as al-Sayyid), and several new ones were built (such as Tirabin al-Sana) totaling 12 (not including the previous seven townships).Patricia Golan, Built on sand , Jerusalem Report, 26 June 2012 They were united under Abu Basma Regional Council that was split on 5 November 2012 into two newly created bodies: Neve Midbar Regional Council and al-Kasom Regional Council.Information for the citizens , Abu Basma Regional Council official site (Hebrew) As of July 2013, there are no updated official statistics on the number of Bedouin living outside the government-planned and officially recognized communities.
History
The Ottoman Empire During the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, the semi-arid region of the Negev was inhabited mostly by semi-nomadic Bedouin tribes.Rebecca Manski, [Criminalizing Self-Subsistence], News from Within, Summer 2006
In 1858 the Turks enacted a law stating that all landowners names must be officially documented as a means of regulating matters relating to land in the Ottoman Empire. Most of the land in the Negev was classified as muwat (موات, dead land, wasteland unsuitable for cultivation).
The Bedouin did not create a written record of their connection to the land, and some argue that even opposed to it, since it would make them subject to the Ottoman Empire, what would require them to pay taxes and serve in the Ottoman army. Also, when the publication of the Ottoman Lands Ordinance, the Negev area had no permanent settlement.
By the year 1896 Negev Bedouin lived almost completely independently of the state. The Ottomans were not interested and did not intervene in the Negev and the Bedouins. According to Yosef Ben-Dor, only after a tribal war, the Turkish government marked tribal boundaries, but did not give the Bedouins in this agreement "ownership" of tribal territorial lands.Goldberg Commission's recommendations, RCUV, p.6
British Mandate The British government adopted the Ottoman land laws, and added to them the Land Ordinance, intended to prevent squatting and recognition of unauthorized takeover of land.
In 1921, the government of the British Mandate issued an order for all the Negev residents to register their land. According to the Land Ordinance of 1921, any Bedouin who cultivated and improved a "mewat" (dead) land received a confirmation of ownership on that same land. Although the Bedouin were granted with a special extension of two months to register their land, they have never done so, and the land remained unregistered.Joseph son of David. [Bust Negev Bedouin, Jews, land, fresh: Center for Arab society in Israel], 1996
Mandate authorities also conducted a preliminary registration of land and since 1934 began to collect land taxes. Mandatory maps show the location of the Bedouin tribes, however, the maps never marked the boundaries of each tribe.
The 1947 report of the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine estimated the number of bedouins in the Beersheba district to be about 90,000.UNSCOP Report, Vol II. , Chapter 2, Para. 21. In preparation for a 1946 census of Palestine that was never carried out, the British government surveyed all the tribes in situ and concluded that the number of bedouin in the Beersheba district was about 92,000 out of 127,000 in the whole country. It also reported that they "cultivated about two million dunums of cereal land and that aerial photographs of the northern Beersheva taken by the Royal Air Force revealed the existence of 3,389 houses and 8,722 tents." The same figure of two million dunams appeared in a 1944/5 book of Yosef Weitz, but in contrast "Shimoni and Tartakover estimate the area cultivated by Bedouin in the Negev at only 60,000 dunam."Goldberg Committee recommendations, quoting a 1982 paper of Aharon Zohar.
According to Sasson Bar Zvi, a cultural researcher of the Negev Bedouin, and Arie Efrat who served as director for the Arab villages in the south, the lack of water in the Negev area did not allow its residents to revive the land and therefore they preferred nomadic life and shepherding to an organized and rental land cultivation, and this is why the land remained a desolate area.Salim Ali Agdia to Hawashla and others vs. State of Israel, Civil Appeal No. 218\74]
According to the Bedouin, although they did not document land ownership, the Turkish government and the British recognized the rights of ownership of land in which they roamed, and this recognition was expressed when the Bedouins sold land to the Zionist movement during the British Mandate, and the sales were recognized and recorded in the Tabu (land registry). In contrast, Yosef Ben-David explains this fact by claiming that the Ottoman and British authorities saw a blessing in transferring land from the Bedouin to the applicant for registration, because they will be likely to use land intensively, without the authorities taking into consideration any legal rights the Bedouins had to the land recognized by either government.
Furthermore, Jews who dealt with redemption of lands in the establishment of Israel gave ex gratia funds to the Bedouin to enable the rapid registration of Israel lands in the land registry, and not because legal recognition of ownership of the Bedouin on the land. Since the beginning of the 1930s and until the establishment of the State of Israel, the Bedouin sold almost 765,000 dunams of land, of which about 180,000 sold to JNF representatives and about 45,000 dunams to private Jews. The rest 545,000 dunams, were sold mainly to Arab peasants from the Gaza Strip.Daniel Center for Strategic Dialogue, , Netanya Academic College, January 2013
Israel