The Invisible Occupation

Israel's Negev Bedouins

Beersheba and surroundings.. Sheik Hammad es Sànea, Sheik of the Tarabin tribe (Library of Congress) 1920s-30s

There was only one serious injury from Iran’s April 13 missile attack on Israel: Amina al-Hasoni, a 7-year-old girl Bedouin girl, wounded when shrapnel from an intercepted missile fell on her family’s home in a town near Arad in the southern Negev desert. The first rockets fired by Hamas on October 7 killed a 5-year-old Bedouin boy in Hura, near the city of Beersheba. Subsequent rockets would kill six more Bedouins, including four children, in the surrounding vicinity.

These fact that these casualties came among the Bedouin is not a mere coincidence. Some 35 to 40 percent—and possibly as many as half—of Israel’s Bedouins live in so-called “unrecognized villages,” settlements that receive no infrastructural support from the government. They lack sewage, electricity, running water, and garbage collection services. The buildings are subject to seizure and demolition by Israeli authorities. And most crucially in wartime, the settlements lack the shelters built by the state in other Israeli communities. The Iron Dome system, which is able to intercept the intercept the vast majority of rockets and missiles lobbed at Israel, does not cover areas with unrecognized Bedouin villages: they are marked as “open areas” by its targeting system. “They are the most vulnerable population in Israel,” Nati Yefet, communications director of the Regional Council for the Unrecognized Villages in the Negev, told me.

The Negev, or Naqab, the southern desert region that covers about half of Israel and Palestine, is home to some 300,000 Bedouins. In case you are not familiar with the ethnonym, “Bedouin” comes from the Arabic word badawi, meaning “desert dweller.” For centuries, like the other Bedouins in the Arab world, the tribes of the Negev lived a traditional pastoral and nomadic lifestyle, without any heed of territorial or administrative boundaries. Under Ottoman rule and the subsequent British Mandate, the Negev Bedouins began a process of “sedentarization,” becoming semi-nomadic. Both the Ottomans and the British attempted to regularize a system of land ownership in the Negev with mixed success: local custom butted tenaciously up against the limits of imperial bureaucracy. To make a long and complicated story short, much of the Negev was declared to be empty or state land, an administrative categorization that continues to have fateful consequences to this day.

During the 1948 war, the vast majority of the Negev Bedouin population, which had then reached 65,000 to 100,000, either fled or were deliberately driven from the land, leaving only 11,000 members of various tribes. Tribes that attempted to return to from Jordan, the Sinai, or Gaza to their lands were prevented from doing so by the IDF. Israel adopted the Ottoman and British legal regime with respect to land ownership, which meant that without specific, documentary proof of ownership—something that few Bedouins possessed to the courts’ satisfaction since their occupancy was traditional—land would revert to the state. And most of that land would be reserved for Jewish settlement. The army concentrated the remainder into an enclosed area made up of less than 10 percent of the former land known as the Siyag, “the fence” in Arabic, where they were subject, like all Arabs in the new state, to strict military rule. Beginning in the late 1960s, Bedouins were settled into townships built by the Israeli government. These townships mostly lacked proper planning and infrastructure and have been compared to the Bantustans of apartheid South Africa. “Israeli policy has always been as few possible Arabs on as little possible land,” Yefet told me.

Still, the Negev Bedouins have resisted Israel’s efforts to dispossess them. There are thousands of ongoing legal battles over land in the Negev. The total area under dispute is more than 500,000 dunams. (A dunam, the old Ottoman measurement of land, is about 900 square meters.). The state has mixed total denial of land claims on the basis of Bedouin’s past nomadism, varying offers of monetary compensation, and sclerotic recognition of illegal Bedouin settlements. In 2013, in an effort to “solve” the Bedouin question, the government adopted the Prawer-Begin plan, named for Ehud Prawer and Benny Begin, the son of Menachem Begin, which would combine limited compensation with intensified enforcement of demolition and resettlement. The proposal would have resulted in the displacement of between 40,000 and 70,000 Bedouins. After significant protest in both Israel and abroad, the plan was shelved.

In the midst of these patterns of discrimination and dispossession, Israeli Bedouins have a complicated relationship to the country as a whole. Some do not call themselves “Bedouin” at all anymore, since the name refers to a nomadic lifestyle they have abandoned. But there is still a widespread attachment to a distinct Bedouin, rather than Palestinian, cultural identity. Unlike Jews, Druze, and Circassians, Israeli Arabs and Palestinians are not required to serve in the IDF. But some Bedouins volunteer for the army, with most serving as scouts and trackers in the elite Desert Reconnaissance Battalion. This unit is often tasked with patrolling the borders of Gaza or Lebanon, an extremely dangerous assignment. The number of Bedouin volunteers for the IDF has dropped in recent years as the community increasingly perceives the state to be hostile to its concerns. The testimony of Abed, a member of Tiaha tribe, as reproduced in Deborah F. Shmueli and Rassem Khamaisi’s Israel’s Invisible Negev Bedouin: Issues of Land and Spatial Planning, provides a vivid illustration of this trend:

I have served this country for years as a scout in the army but today I was in court to defend myself against a criminal offense. What is this crime? It is having built my house without having been issued a building permit, since state regulations had forced me to do so. I had asked the District Engineer to secure a building permit for me in accordance with the law. Without such a permit my home is scheduled for demolition. The engineer replied that he could not issue a building permit. When I asked why, he answered that there were two main reasons: the first is that I had built on state land which is still zoned as agricultural according to the Regional Plan; and secondly there is no authorized local outline plan which permits the issuance of a building permit. So I live under the constant threat of having my house demolished. My family and I are caught in a vicious circle as we try to survive in the face of many restrictions. We are not alone—there are thousands of Bedouin families such as mine here in the Negev who are waiting for solutions. Many government representatives have approached us with promises—none of which are fulfilled. My family and I no longer have faith in the government. My children do not see themselves as serving the country, as I have done, since it doesn’t recognize our rights.

As I noted, on October 7th, Bedouins were some of the first victims of Hamas’s attack. Bedouins often find employment as workers in the kibbutzim and moshavim in the Gaza envelope. Twenty-one Bedouins were killed and six taken hostage. In the wake of the attacks, stories of Bedouin heroism emerged in the Israeli news media, which customarily portrays Bedouins as nuisances and criminals or ignores them entirely. There was the story of Amer Abu Sabila, a 25-year-old construction worker, who was killed attempting to rescue two young girls after their father was shot and killed. And then there was Yussef Alziadna, a Bedouin minibus driver who rescued 30 people by driving them to safety under fire. These stories and a post-October 7 pause in house demolitions raised hopes in the Bedouin community of increased recognition in Israeli society. However, in January, house demolitions resumed under the authority of Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir, according to Nati Yefet of the Regional Council for the Unrecognized Villages. And some Bedouins, afraid of “lynches” as they are called in Israel, have not returned to their previous employment in Jewish areas. Bedouins are also hesitant to protest, fearing that the state will wield its power over unrecognized settlements to punish dissent. “Anything you do the state doesn’t like can result in a demolition,” Yefet explained to me. And, as in the Occupied Territories, police and military authorities often turn a blind eye to Jewish violence against Bedouins and participate in abuses themselves.

On April 14, Ha’aretz reported that the father of the little girl wounded in Iran’s attack had received a demolition order for his home shortly before the attack: "They told us that we had ten days to demolish the house, they are calling me and telling me to demolish it. I have to deal with all this when my child is in critical condition. No one is helping us. We have no protection, no rights. They want to demolish the only home we have."