NAZARETH, ISRAEL // About 35,000 Bedouin residents of Israel’s
southern Negev have been denied the right to hold their first local council
election after the Israeli parliament passed a law at the last minute to cancel
this month’s ballot.
The new law gives the government the power to postpone elections
to the regional council, known as Abu Basma, until the interior ministry deems
the local Bedouin ready to run their own affairs.
Legal and human rights groups say the move is an unprecedented
violation of Israel’s constitutional principles. Taleb a-Sana, a Bedouin member
of Israel’s parliament, has written to its speaker warning that “it is not
possible to have democracy without elections”.
The vote in Abu Basma was scheduled to take place six years after
the council was established under the transitional authority of a panel of
mostly Jewish officials appointed by the interior ministry.
Critics say the government changed the law specifically to avoid
bolstering the position of the Bedouin residents, who are engaged in a legal
battle with the state for the return of ancestral lands confiscated decades ago.
“The Bedouin have a claim on a large area of the Negev and the
government wants someone ruling the council who is on its side until the case is
settled to the state’s advantage,” said Thabet Abu Ras, who was head of an
empowerment scheme for Abu Basma’s residents until 2007.
The residents of Abu Basma are among 90,000 Bedouin in the Negev
desert who have been denied any local representation since Israel’s founding in
1948. For most of that time the state has refused to recognise any of their
villages.
According to officials, the Bedouin are living illegally on state
land and must move to a handful of locations in the Negev approved by the
government.
Bedouin leaders counter that their villages predate Israel’s
creation and that the approved locales are so tightly confined that they cannot
maintain their traditional pastoral way of life.
Israel has faced mounting criticism for its treatment of the 45
so-called “unrecognised villages”, which are denied all public services,
including electricity and water. The inhabitants are invariably forced to live
in tents or tin shacks because concrete homes are subject to demolition.
Instead, since the 1970s Israel has established a half dozen
“townships”, to which the Bedouin in the unrecognised villages were expected to
relocate. But the townships, whose rates of unemployment and poverty are the
highest in the country, have attracted only half of the Negev’s 180,000 Bedouin,
mostly those without any claim to land.
In what many Bedouin hoped was a change of tack, however, the
government of Ariel Sharon launched a plan in 2003 to begin a process of
recognising nine of the larger villages, home to 35,000 Bedouin.
They were grouped into a new regional council called Abu Basma,
with the goal of encouraging the inhabitants of the other unrecognised villages
to move into its jurisdiction.
Under the regional councils law, the interior ministry was
allowed to appoint a panel of officials to oversee local services for four years
while the residents prepared to run the authority themselves, said Gil Gan-Mor,
a lawyer with the Association of Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI).
He added that the interior ministry then sought, under
extraordinary powers, two year-long extensions. But shortly before the deadline
for staging elections was reached this month, the government pushed through an
amendment to postpone elections indefinitely.
“The aim is to continue controlling the lives of the Bedouin,
treating them as though they cannot look after themselves.”
ACRI and another group, Adalah, a legal
centre for Israel’s Arab minority, will challenge the law in the Supreme Court
next month.
Alaa Mahajneh, a lawyer with Adalah, said
the regional council’s current panel was dominated by Jewish officials and
headed by Amram Kalaji, a former director general of the interior ministry
identified with the right-wing Orthodox religious party Shas.
Mr Abu Ras, a geography professor at Ben Gurion University in
Beersheva, said it was impossible to separate the postponement of the elections
from the wider issue of Bedouin land claims.
Abu Basma is the only one of 47 regional councils in Israel that
does not have territorial continuity, he said. “The council’s jurisdiction is
restricted to the built-up area of each village and does not include the lands
between the villages or the surrounding land. Despite the Bedouin way of life,
Abu Basma has not been allocated any agricultural areas.”
He added that the chief concern of Israeli officials, although
unspoken, was that the Abu Basma region was the only territorial buffer between
the West Bank and Gaza. “If there is a Palestinian state, Israel does not want
the Bedouin controlling lands that connect those two Palestinian territories. It
would rather the Bedouin were concentrated in as small a space as possible.”
According to Nili Baruch, an Israeli planner, Abu Basma has been
starved of land compared to its Jewish counterparts. Its jurisdiction extends to
only 3,400 hectares, making it the most densely populated regional council in
the country.
By contrast, the 10 other regional councils in Israel’s south –
home to a total of 45,000 Jews – have jurisdiction over a vast swath of rural
land, nearly 1.2 million hectares.
Yeela Ranaan, a lecturer at Sapir College
in Sderot and spokeswoman for the Regional Council for the Unrecognised
Villages, an unofficial Bedouin advocacy group, said the creation of Abu Basma
had been a “partial victory”.
Recognition meant those homes of Bedouin living in the centre of
the villages were no longer under threat of destruction, roads could be paved,
and schools opened, she said. But the planning process in all the villages was
stalled and land claims were not being addressed.
The Bedouin’s land dispute with the government is more than
80,000 hectares. Mr Abu Ras said he believed the government hoped to force an
evacuation of all the unrecognised villages over the next three years, forcing
the inhabitants into the already confined areas available to Abu Basma.
Tal Rabina, a spokesman for Abu Basma
council, said the criticism that Bedouin rights had been violated by the law
change reflected a “political agenda”.
“At this stage, when there are still many disputes between
villages and families, most of the residents prefer that someone outside the
community makes decisions. The current leadership brings a great deal of
experience and professionalism to the task.”
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