The Israeli Knesset’s approval to forcibly remove 30,000 Palestinians from the Naqab has been met with anger and concern by Palestinians around the world.
Palestinian Return Centre expresses its deep concern over Israeli practices aimed at expelling Palestinians out of their lands.
While global attention is focused on the UN bid, Israel is quietly taking steps for another ethnic cleansing. In broad daylight, Israel is planning the eviction of 30,000 Palestinians living in 14 villages in Beer Sheba (Naqab).
Despite the expulsion and decimation of Palestinian villages in 1948 there still remains an estimated 200,000 Bedouins living in, what Israel classifies as unrecognized villages. These are Bedouin villages in the Naqab which Israel does not recognize as legal; the villages are deprived of basic services like housing, water, electricity, education and health care.
Israeli’s treatment of Bedouins is another example of Israel’s inability to reconcile with the indigenous Palestinians and basic principles of human rights. After 1948, military rule was imposed on Bedouin villages for more than 18 years. Despite the end of the military rule in 1967, the story of dispossession continues until today. One village, Al Araqib, was demolished 29 times as residents continued to rebuild their homes. Almost all their land was seized by the state using a set of legal maneuvers such as the absentee property law and the land acquisition laws of 1953.
“The Bedouins struggle against Israel in historic Palestine is about a state that is hell bent on judaizing the land of Palestine”, Said Majed Al Zeer, General Director of PRC. “Israel has dispossessed millions of Palestinians from their land and continues to do so. These villages have been in existence before Israel and they have a moral and legal right to remain in their historic land”.
The land grab from the indigenous Bedouins started as early as 1949. By the 1950s, the majority of the remaining Bedouin was expelled from the western part of the Naqab into a small enclosed military reservation north east of Beersheva and later became “internally displaced” citizens.
The rightful Indigenous populations are not willing to give up the claim to their land despite the continued weekly house demolition. No state can claim legitimacy by denying human rights to the indigenous population.
