...The Bedouin and their supporters have freedom of speech, of course, and are perfectly entitled to claim that they have an abstract right to own the entire Negev, which has belonged to them since the beginning of time...So far as can be ascertained, the Bedouin are not an indigenous people. They do not have any inherent right, official or unofficial, to the enormous territories they wish to claim, let alone the entirety of the Negev desert. Their attacks on Israel’s land laws are unfair and counterproductive. And these attacks are not moral or historic, but exclusively political in nature, designed to undermine Israel’s sovereignty and portray it negatively.
Akiva Bigman..
The Tower..
January '14..
In late 2013, large and sometimes violent protests erupted among Israel’s Bedouin population. They were directed against what has come to be called the Prawer Plan, an extensive blueprint for the development of Israel’s southern Negev desert, which is home to most of Israel’s Bedouin citizens. Although the plan’s intention was to improve the economic and political lot of the Bedouin, its opponents saw it as a direct assault on their community; mainly because the plan called for the relocation of large numbers of Bedouin currently living in illegal settlements unrecognized by the Israeli government. Bedouin activists claim these lands legally belong to them as an indigenous people whose rights are being violated by the Israeli government. Because of the protests, the plan is now in political limbo, impossible to approve or implement.
The protests did not come out of the blue. In recent years, a small but very influential movement has taken shape that calls for granting various collective rights to the Negev Bedouin. Although the Bedouin have enjoyed individual civil rights and equal access to government services since the founding of the State of Israel, this movement wants something quite different, and its proponents have something far more sinister in mind. Its activists and their supporters in academia and various NGOs advocate for what they call the Bedouin’s historical collective rights; in particular, their right to own large sections of the Negev desert.
In this context, the central demand is the recognition of the Bedouin as the “indigenous” people of the Negev. Because the Bedouin are an indigenous people, they theory goes, the Israeli government must recognize their internal tribal laws, particularly those regarding Bedouin land ownership. Accordingly, the Bedouin must be granted their “ownership claims,” and it is morally and legally incumbent to do so.
The issue with those demands is that they claims have no relation to reality, and the motive of those making the demands has less to do with Bedouins than it does with the opportunity it provides to portray Israel negatively.
Nonetheless, such claims have dominated the public conversation on the issue in recent years, and some of them have served as the basis for the deliberation of government committees dealing with the subject, such as the Goldberg Commission and the report that led to the Prawer Plan. These developments illustrate the progress made by Bedouin activists in furthering their claims.
When one examines these claims and, in particular, the evidence behind them, however, one quickly finds that they are extremely problematic. Some of them lack historical and documentary evidence; others are simply incorrect; while still others seem disingenuous and clearly intended to serve political rather than moral or legal goals. In the end, very few of them can stand up to scrutiny.
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