Unrecognised Villages

The Bedouin of the Naqab were not all displaced in 1948, but almost all were. Adalah’s primer on Bedouin citizens of Israel puts the pre-1948 Naqab Bedouin population at 90,000 and the number who remained after the war at 11,000; the Negev Coexistence Forum, working from a wider range of estimates, gives roughly 65,000 to 100,000 before the war and the same figure of 11,000 after it. Most of those who stayed lost their land and were internally displaced. During the 1950s the military government concentrated them in a closed zone between Bir al-Saba, Arad and Dimona known as the siyaj — often on land belonging to other tribes, and always away from the land they had used before. From the late 1960s the state built a series of planned townships, beginning with Tel al-Sabe and Rahat, and pressed the Bedouin to move into them and give up their land claims. Roughly half did. The other half stayed where they had been put, or returned to where they had come from, in communities that the state has never recognised. Thirty-five of them remain, home to some 70,000 to 72,000 people out of a Naqab Bedouin population Adalah puts at 258,000.

Non-recognition is a planning status with total consequences. The Planning and Construction Law of 1965 zoned much of the Naqab as agricultural land, which made every structure standing on it — house, school, animal pen, mosque, water tank — unlawful by definition and liable to demolition. The village cannot be connected to the national water grid or the electricity grid; residents run generators and solar panels and haul water in containers, sometimes over many kilometres. There are no paved access roads and no rubbish collection; the Negev Coexistence Forum counts primary schools in only sixteen of the villages and health clinics in only ten. The village appears on no official map, which is the point: a place that does not exist administratively cannot claim services.

The state’s justification is that the Bedouin are trespassers on state land, that their claims were never registered, and that concentrating them in townships is the efficient way to provide services. Their answer is that the land was held under customary tenure long before Israel existed, that most claims were duly filed with the settlement officer in the 1970s and have never been adjudicated, and that they were removed from their lands by a military government that promised the removal would be temporary — as at al-Araqib, evacuated in 1953 for six months of army training and never permitted to return.

The Prawer Plan, approved by the Israeli cabinet in September 2011 and passed by the Knesset in first reading in June 2013 by 43 votes to 40, would have destroyed the unrecognised villages and displaced up to 70,000 Bedouin citizens, with compensation conditioned on abandoning land claims. Mass protests, including a “Day of Rage” in November 2013, led to its shelving. The demolition policy it codified did not stop, and the numbers are a matter of published record. Adalah reports that demolitions reached 2,220 structures in 2017, over seventy percent of them carried out by Bedouin citizens themselves under pressure from the authorities. The Negev Coexistence Forum counted 2,568 structures demolished in 2020, a record 3,004 in 2021, and 2,850 in 2022 — 5,584 across those last two years alone. Self-demolition, the Forum notes, is a product of the intimidation exercised by the Bedouin Authority and the enforcement bodies that work with it.

Sources

• On the Map: The Arab Bedouin Villages in the Negev-Naqab — Negev Coexistence Forum (Dukium)
• Demolition and Eviction of Bedouin Citizens of Israel in the Naqab (Negev) — The Prawer Plan, Adalah
• Bedouin Citizens of Israel in the Naqab (Negev): A Primer (PDF) — Adalah
• Home Demolitions in Bedouin Communities, Negev-Naqab, Israel 2021–2022 (PDF) — Negev Coexistence Forum
• Neglected Voices: Human Rights Violations in the Bedouin Community of the Negev/Naqab, 2023–2024 (PDF) — Negev Coexistence Forum