al-Araqib

al-Araqib lies in the northern Naqab, six kilometres from the city of Rahat. Around 400 people lived there before the state began its repeated demolitions in 2010; today only a few dozen remain, in the vicinity of the cemetery, still contesting its destruction. It was established in the Ottoman period, and its inhabitants bought the land they live on during the twentieth century. Within the village area are ancient cisterns, several earth dams, old huts, and a cemetery founded in 1914 — the kind of evidence of continuous habitation that the state’s case against the village requires it to ignore.

In 1953 the military government told the villagers to leave for six months so the army could train on their land. They moved to nearby areas and waited. After six months the authorities delayed their return, and then informed them that they could not come back at all. The residents’ own account has never conceded the point: they say they never left al-Araqib, that they went on cultivating the fields, grazing their herds and burying their dead in the family cemetery. In the 1970s they filed land-ownership claims with the settlement officer; those claims are still being litigated.

In 1997 Jewish National Fund crews began work on al-Araqib’s land; the residents protested that the land was under claim and the JNF withdrew. From 2000 the villagers ploughed and sowed the fields again, and the state responded by spraying the crops with herbicide and ploughing them under. In the early 2000s members of the Abu Madigem family, one of those displaced in 1953, moved back permanently onto their land.

On 27 July 2010 the state demolished the entire village. Security forces have returned to demolish it again more than 181 times since, by the Negev Coexistence Forum’s count; the Forum’s report on house demolitions in 2021 and 2022 records the destruction of al-Araqib for the two hundred and tenth time. On 12 June 2014 most of the buildings in the village’s cemetery compound, where families had been living, were demolished. In the summer of 2019 enforcement authorities accompanied by the Green Patrol and the “Yoav” special police unit carried out demolitions, tours and arrests on a daily basis for two months; those detained included men, women, minors and Jewish and Arab activists present on the scene in solidarity with the village’s struggle. The state has also sued the villagers for the cost of the first eight demolitions, and prosecuted the leaders of their struggle.

al-Araqib is one of the unrecognised villages of the Naqab: communities the state does not acknowledge on any map, which receive no health or education services, no connection to the electricity grid — residents use generators and solar panels — and no water supply, so that water must be carried in containers from eighteen kilometres away. The Prawer Plan of 2011–2013, which would have relocated tens of thousands of Bedouin citizens and demolished dozens of such villages, was shelved after mass protest, but the demolition policy it codified continues. What al-Araqib’s residents ask for has not changed: recognition of the village where it stands.

Sources

• al-ʿArāgīb — On the Map: The Arab Bedouin Villages in the Negev-Naqab, Negev Coexistence Forum (Dukium)
• On the Map: The Arab Bedouin Villages in the Negev-Naqab — Negev Coexistence Forum
• Demolition and Eviction of Bedouin Citizens of Israel in the Naqab — The Prawer Plan, Adalah
• Home Demolitions in Bedouin Communities, Negev-Naqab, Israel 2021–2022 (PDF) — Negev Coexistence Forum