The Prawer Plan: Implications for Palestinian Bedouin in the Naqab

Dr. Morad Elsana: Good afternoon everybody and thank you, Yousef. I would like to thank The Palestine Center today for the opportunity to let us talk about this important issue, the Prawer Plan. It’s really important for us not only to keep the matter of our presentation as only a formative presentation but we would like to have you raise your voices and say your words and be ambassadors for all Palestinian issues here in America and to be vocal and talk about the issues that Palestinians in general and the Bedouins in the Negev are facing today.

The Prawer Plan, as some of you might have heard that the government last month declared that they’re going to suspend the plan so people cheered up and the Bedouins were happy. They thought the government was going to give them back their lands but as we know the Israeli Government never gives up taking Palestinian land. It is one of the issues that as we know is built into the colonial system and Israel, as a state has been established under this system, can never give back their lands as part of Palestinian land. Today I’m going to talk a little bit about the Prawer Plan, what the plan is and what it does for the Bedouin themselves, and then why this plan is important and at the last part we’ll see how the plan affects the Bedouins and what the outcome of the plan is for the Bedouins in the Negev.

We’re talking about the Bedouins in the Negev near Beersheba as part of the Palestinians in Israel. I want to make this clear because many have heard of the Bedouins and during the 60 years of the state of Israel they tried to disconnect the Bedouins from the Palestinian people in Israel and they tried to make the Bedouin a nationality by itself, which is wrong. I want to make sure that if I say Bedouins without saying Palestinians doesn’t mean that they are different. The Bedouins usually hate the government; they don’t like the state. Not only the Israeli government and the Israeli state but they didn’t like the British, they didn’t like the Ottomans, they didn’t like governments at all. They wanted to live their lives and their freedom in the desert and they told their governments, “Don’t come to us, we don’t want to deal with you. Just leave us, don’t give us anything. Just don’t take what we have.” Usually they do not protest and demonstrate against government actions or policies so we don’t hear a lot about Bedouins in the media. But in the recent years, especially in recent months, we started to see more of a presence for the Bedouins in the national and international media, which was unusual. Bedouins never go out to protest but this time they went out to protest very hard against these things, against the Prawer Plan, trying to deliver the message “We are reaching our red lines here we cannot go back anymore”.

We have seen pictures like this one [refers to slide]. When I saw it the first time, I said to myself, “There must be something wrong with the newspaper. They might have taken this picture from the West Bank, the Occupied Territories or some other place”. But that wasn’t the case. We can see that the Bedouins are starting massive demonstrations against the government, asking to suspend the Prawer Plan. Many of them were arrested during these demonstrations and were put in jail for a long time. That couldn’t stop them from going out.

Back to the geographical locations, we’re talking about the Bedouins next to Beersheba and you can see Bedouins around Beersheba; there is only Beersheba, there are no villages. Even the big city which is called Rahat, you cannot see here in the Israeli maps, which is normal because of what Israel tried to do to the Bedouin for 60 years, which is to make them invisible. So the Bedouins do not appear in the official maps; there are no maps that show the Bedouin villages. Some of the maps today start to show some of the new cities and villages but traditionally, Bedouins do not appear in the state’s official maps, so you can’t see them there. Also, Bedouins do not appear in the national census of the state, so if you go to the national census in Israel, you will see the numbers of the Jewish cities, the towns, and some of the recognized villages. But the Bedouins in the unrecognized villages do not appear on the census, like they do not exist, which brings us to another issue of these people: their addresses.

These people do not have ID’s so they do not have addresses and this makes it a problem for telephone services, for people to get their rights. Many of these people do not have the right to vote in the only democratic state in the Middle East. These things are important to know about the Bedouins. Since the state of Israel did not put them in the official maps, they went by themselves and said, “Ok, you don’t want to recognize our villages, we will make ‘The Regional Council for the Unrecognized Villages’.” They established their council and they started to issue their own maps, like this one. It’s the only map that we have and we see the blue dots, all the unrecognized villages, there are about 45 unrecognized villages in the Negev, and in these 45 villages, there are about 100,000 people. These numbers are controversial because the state of Israel claims that there are not 100,000 people living there, instead that there are 50,000 or 40,000. There is a reason for these claims because the state does not want to budget for 100,000 people, they want to give a budget to 40,000 people and the state does not want to show that this is a big issue.

The state is trying to diminish and reduce the number of Bedouin living in the unrecognized villages while increasing the number of Bedouins who are living in the recognized ones. Why is that? The state is trying to show they are settling the Bedouins in the recognized villages, that the majority are trying to go to the settled villages because they like it and only a small number of them stay in the unrecognized villages.

What is the Prawer Plan exactly? The plan is, I’m sorry for the description, the final solution of the Bedouin settlement in the Negev. Through this plan, the government wants to evict the population of about 40 villages, about 30,000 to 40,000 people in the unrecognized villages to move them to the recognized villages. What this means is house demolitions for 40,000 people, about 4,000-5,000 houses will be destroyed. The businesses for 40,000 people will be destroyed and the majority of these people will lose their land, their traditional land. Many of these people rely on their land to have an income, a monthly income for men and women. The issues here are a massive wave of home demolitions, a massive wave of evictions, forced evictions, and the destruction of the traditional economy.

Recently we started to hear that many started to say that it’s not bad to settle the Bedouins in the modern villages, it’s not bad to give them health services, it’s not bad to send their kids to school, and it’s not bad for them to have streets, internet, electricity, running water, and all these things. I want to make it clear to you that Bedouins do not oppose modernity. Bedouin would love to go and participate with the rest of the world in these journeys and to become part of the people. The problem is that this Prawer Plan is not built to develop the people as the state is trying to claim. This problem is part of a national plan for development in the Negev. It’s called the National Strategic Plan for the Development of the Negev. And when you hear the word national, you have to know that it’s for the Jews, not for the Arabs. The plan is to develop the Negev for the Jews, it’s not to develop it for the Arabs. The roots of this plan came from Jewish organizations that started to claim what they called the theft of land, that the Bedouins are thieves trying to steal the state land, Bedouins who have been living on their traditional land for centuries. Because the state is not recognizing their lands, Israeli newspapers are starting to issue each week, or at least every two weeks, articles which are saying, “Watch what the Bedouins are doing, they are occupying all the state lands.” They bring pictures and people who talk about these things to show the Bedouin villagers as people who are trying to occupy the state’s land and there’s going to be no land for the Jewish majority and after a while they won’t be able to establish any of the state projects.

At the same time while the state was trying to develop the Negev and to establish new towns and villages for the Jewish majority, it forgot about the Bedouin villages. In all these plans, the Bedouin villages do not exist so if you go to the planners who work on these things, they take the map that we just showed, they look at it and say, “Beersheba okay we’re going to establish a Jewish city in this area,” so here there is nothing for the plans. They will say this area is clear and that there is no problem to start making the plans and to start anything. But when they came to the grounds, they found that there are villages, there are people. Some of the plans and the planners were saying that these things do not appear in the state maps. And in one of these plans if they saw a piece of writing that said there is an Arab or Palestinian or Bedouin here, they write there is a minor obstacle. So the village of 2,000-3,000 people is a minor obstacle. That’s how they describe the Bedouins, as part of the policy for the invisibility of the Bedouin.

As part of the plan, they wanted to get rid of the Bedouins who are in the area and they said, “Ok, there is no way but to evacuate all these people and destroy all these villages”. But they wanted to make it look like a human act and not a violent act. In the end, these are state citizens, these are not Palestinians in the Occupied Territories to send to the army to deal with. These are Israeli state citizens with Israeli ID’s and Israeli passports, with full rights and access to the political system to the Knesset, the Parliament, to the Supreme Court in Israel. During this time, the human rights organizations, both in Israel and internationally, started to write reports about the evictions, about discrimination, about the lack of services for the Bedouin. The international media started to pay attention to the Bedouin issue. And the stronger issue is that these organizations, especially Palestinian and Israeli organizations, started to submit petitions to the Israeli Supreme Court against the state acts, against the state deprivation of lands, against the state efforts to abolish Bedouin houses. In the majority of the petitions, the Supreme Court wasn’t happy about the state acts and the state policy against the Bedouins. Many of them criticized the government’s right wing policy in the Negev. Although the majority of the Supreme Court did not issue written decisions stating that the government acts are not legal, the Supreme Court took a moderator role and forced the Governments to supply rights to the Bedouins.

For example, in 1995 we submitted a petition asking for electricity for the schools in the Negev. You have to understand that for a population of 100,000, there are about 10,000 students in the unrecognized villages that have about 25 schools. Until 1995, none of these schools were connected to electricity. When the kids got into the school, there was no light, there was no air conditioning, there was nothing, only the building, it’s like in the eighteenth century. We submitted the petitions and the Supreme Court accepted our petitions. The Supreme Court wrote, “It’s a shame, in a democratic state, in the twentieth century to have schools without electricity.” Instead of connecting the school to the State General Electricity Net, they brought generators to the Bedouin schools, they still don’t deserve regular electricity, generators are enough for the Bedouin. They connected the schools to the generators. The generators are another shame because these generators could not set up air conditioning, heat or labs for the schools. These generators were only for the light at the schools. The generators continued to be attached to the schools until 2008 or 2009. We sent another petition stating this is discrimination against the Bedouin schools and only that time the state agreed.

Back to the story about the Prawer Plan, which as I said, is part of the strategic National Development Plan for the Negev. They call it the Negev 2015 Plan. As part of that plan in 2007, the state established what we call the Goldberg Committee. The state wanted another plan as part of the Negev Plan specifically for the Bedouins. They wanted to deal with the Bedouin issue so they established the Goldberg Committee. At the beginning when they established it, it consisted of 7 members, none of them were Bedouin. None of the committee members dealing with the issue were Bedouin. Only after we sent several letters and we protested against this act, the state agreed to add another two Bedouin members. Unfortunately, neither of these two Bedouins were from the line that supported Bedouin rights. They were not from the Bedouins who work in the NGOs; they were not from the Bedouins from the dealership that supports federal rights. Both of them were affiliated with Jewish-Zionist political parties when they got into this committee. I don’t want to say a lot about this because this will create trouble between the Bedouin themselves if you say this about somebody. By the way, the majority of the Bedouin boycott the Goldberg Committee because of these things. They say the committee does not represent the Bedouins and do not represent the Bedouin interests. And we do not see any hope that this committee is going to issue reports or recommendations to recognize Bedouin rights.

When we talk about Bedouin rights, there are two or three major things. First are their land rights, their traditional land rights. Second is the recognition of their villages, the unrecognized villages. Third is services for the unrecognized villages, these are the three things the Bedouin are asking the state to recognize. In 2009, the Goldberg Committee issued a report and the state established another committee to give the state another recommendation on how to apply these recommendations, the Prawer Committee, headed by Ehud Prawer.

Who is Ehud Prawer? He is the Deputy Chairman of the National Security Council; the Bedouin issue belongs to the National Security Council, they do not belong to the Ministry of Infrastructure. The issue is seen as part of the national security industry. That is how the state of Israel looks at the Bedouin issue.

The Prawer Committee started to issue recommendations and later established what we know today as the Prawer Plan. It’s interesting also to see what the government asked this plan to do, to issue a recommendation about three issues: land settlement, planning of towns for the Bedouins, and enforcement of the law regarding Bedouin illegal constructions. Construction means houses and businesses for the Bedouins. It’s very interesting to look at what they mean by enforcement of the law regarding the Bedouin illegal construction. This means they want the committee to issue recommendations how to demolish and get rid of Bedouin houses. They want to evict 40,000 people. That’s what they mean by the enforcement of the law. As we said, in May 2011 the committee submitted its recommendations in a report known as the Prawer Report. The report states that the goal of the plan is to bring better integration for Bedouin society and reduce economic and social gaps for Bedouin populations in the Negev society. It’s a very good statement. All the Bedouin pray for better integration and the reduction of economic and social gaps between the Jews and the Bedouins.

But the reality is not like that. The Bedouin do not oppose these things to bring better integration for themselves or a reduction of the gaps. The Bedouin have been practicing a different lifestyle for a long time. Bedouin have been deprived the right of very basic things, such as the right to water. Imagine you have a population of 100,000 that doesn’t have running water, there’s no water for drinking. They have been submitting petitions to the courts, to the government, to the Parliament, and they even reached the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court itself denied the Bedouin the right to water. We’re not talking about internet, we’re not talking about universities, we’re not talking about economic facilities. It’s water. So Bedouins are still using their traditional wells that fill up each year from the rainwater and have been using these types of wells for over 100 years. Unfortunately, part of this policy was used against the Bedouin as a punishment for the people who continue to live in the unrecognized villages. For those who agreed to the state settlements and agreed to move to the recognized villages, they got their water. Those who stayed in their lands and opposed the state plans to evict them and confiscate their lands, these people still have to drink dirty water from the well.

The Bedouins have been deprived of basic needs. Very, very basic needs like water. Okay? They don’t have water. Imagine you have 100,000 population that they don’t have running water.  There is no water for use, there is no water for drinking. They have been submitting petitions to the courts, to the government, to the parliament, and they even reached the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court itself in Israel denied Bedouins the right to water. We are not talking about Internet, we are not talking about universities, we are not talking about economic facilities, okay? We are talking about water. So Bedouins are still using their traditional wells that are filled each year with rainwater and using these tins. Unfortunately, part of this policy was used against the Bedouins as a punishment, for these people who continue to live in the unrecognized villages.  For those who agreed to move to recognized villages, they got their water even though they lost their land. Those who remain steadfast to their land and are opposing state plans to evict them or confiscate their land, these people still have to drink from their wells.

The other issue is electricity. All of the Bedouin villages do not have electricity. As we said, the schools did not have electricity until 1995, when the Supreme Court gave them electricity, but the villages continue to lack electricity. They have to use generators or solar energy. One of the cases we submitted to the Supreme Court involved a girl named Inas; she was seven years old with cancer. The doctors recommended she stay on a special medical machine that needs electricity. We took the case to the Supreme Court hoping to have her house connected to the electricity. But when it reached the Supreme Court, it was denied. The Supreme Court said that if she wants electricity she should move to the city. At the same time, if you go to the Kibbutz that is two kilometers, less than a mile away from her village, which is Hura. Not in the kibbutz itself… The kibbutz is an agricultural place, and there is the agricultural facility around. These facilities are connected to the electricity. Inas’s house was denied electricity not only by the government itself, but by the Supreme Court of Israel. These issues are important in order to show the discrimination policy against the Bedouin in the Negev, and how hard and difficult it is for them to advocate their rights. And it is not easy for you to reach the Supreme Court, by the way, in Israel. This is very hard work, and you need a high-caliber set of lawyers to take your case to the Supreme Court.

The other thing the Bedouins have been fighting for is a better life for a long time, and this picture might be better than 1,000 words [refers to slide]. You will see how the Bedouins live, and how their neighbors, the Jews, live. In many places you will find that the Bedouin, are denied rights to house permits, so that they cannot build any more houses. At the same time, 200 meters from that place they will start to plan Jewish villages, and often they have legal permits for houses, and they get municipal services.  And the Bedouin are denied any rights because they are not, they do not agree to leave their land and move to the city. They are refusing to leave their historical land and move to recognized villages based on the government plans.

Actually, as we see, this is not a development plan for the Bedouins. This is a concentration and confiscation plan. That means the state of Israel want to concentrate all of the 200,000 Bedouins, as we said 100,000 in recognized villages, and the other 100,000 in the unrecognized villages. The state wants to concentrate all of them in a limited number of villages and towns, and the main goal of the state is to have the land reserved for Jewish settlement. The state sets a specific amount of villages and want to settle all the Bedouin in these villages. The state started in the 1950s and the 1960s with three villages, and asked the Bedouin to leave their villages, to leave their land, to come and live in these villages. After ten years, the State understood that it was impossible, so they recognized another for villages. Until 1992, there were only seven villages. If you want to get a house, if you want to get electricity, and running water, and to have schools for your kids, you have to move to one of these seven villages. If you are out, you are not getting anything, you are invisible, denied the right to water, electricity, education, health, anything. And even an address, which doesn’t cost the government anything, was denied to these people. A short reminder for you about the context of this plan, which is, as we say, the context of the plan is that it is the general context of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in the land of Palestine. As we remembered, the Zionist movement has been always dreaming to establish a national home for the Jews in Palestine.

At the beginning, they started by buying some of the land from the Palestinians, the Zionist movement believed that the land was an essential element for the development of the state. After the establishment of the state, this ideology continued to be not the thinking of the Zionist movement, but now began to be the thinking of the state of Israel, that the land should be reserved for Jewish settlements. Jews continued to come from Europe, from Russia, from everywhere and the state want to settle them in these lands and to deprive the Palestinians of their land; that’s why the state policy began to change.  The state passed a new law that enabled it to confiscate land. Palestinians began to take their cases against land confiscation to the Supreme Court or to the general courts in Israel. They found that the courts adopted the same type of thinking, and enabled the same acts to happen against their land. It is a good reminder here to talk about the example of the Absentee Law. The State enacted in the 1950s a law that stated that every Palestinians who was not present on his land between 1949 and 1952, his land was confiscated. In this way, about 90 percent of Palestinian land became state land. The Land Acquisition Law is another law that enables the confiscation of their land to the state of Israel. As I said, even the judicial system played an additional role in Arab land dispossession. Courts subjugated the legal policy and interpretation of the law for further Arab dispossession.

A good example about the injustice the Israelis committed when it comes to land issues is the Bedouin case. The Bedouin, before the establishment of state, owned about 11 million dunams in the Negev. 11 million dunams. After the establishment of the State, 90 percent of Bedouin were evicted out of the state. The majority of them left for Jordan, or to the West Bank, or to Gaza, and only ten percent of them remained, about 10,000 Bedouins remained in the Negev. These 10,000 submitted a claim on one and a half million dunams. About half a million dunams were confiscated for military reasons; and the remaining million, they submitted about 322 land claims. From these 322 claims, not one claim was successful in Israeli courts. Not one claim. All of them were denied. This tells you how the state deals with that issue. There are offers of compensation, but these are unjust. It means that if your land is worth 100,000 dollars, they will only give you 1,000 dollars, keep it or leave it. It’s not like if you don’t want it, you can keep your land. It you don’t want it, that’s it, they will take the land. And they will maybe put the money in a bank account. The legal documentation for the Bedouin land is part of the problem here.

Traditionally, or historically, if you like, the Bedouin—they never adjusted their lands. Actually, the registration of the land in the Middle East started only during the late Ottoman Empire, and when the British came to Palestine, to Jordan. Before that, people were using customary law. So if I know this is your land, and all the people here know this is your land, if we go to any court, they will recognize that it is your land based on customary law. Customary law was recognized in Israel during the British Mandate, because they understood that the Bedouin tribes refused to register their lands. As I said in the beginning of my lecture, the Bedouin do not want to deal with the state, the government.
But when the state of Israel came and refused to recognize these rights and tried to ask for titles, deeds, which are not existent for Bedouin.

The state of Israel has been confiscating Bedouin lands for 60 years, so why did the Bedouin wake up now? The answer for this one is that this plan is introducing for the first time, a massive plan for village and house destruction. The state of Israel never before destroyed this number of houses based on one plan. So we are talking about destruction of about 45,000 houses and the eviction of 40,000 people from their villages. The other thing is the Bedouins today, many of these people have been living in these villages for 60 years, many of them have been living in the villages even before the establishment of the State and they are rejecting even these villages. As we have seen recently, there is a lot of confrontation in Tel Aviv, and they might lead to dangerous confrontation in the state of Israel. And the third issue is that this plan means for the Bedouins the extinction of the Bedouin culture in Israel. That means all Bedouins leave their traditional way of life and move to the modern villages. There will be no Bedouin life in the Negev in Israel. The last issue is that it’s for sure going to destroy the chances for the co-existence between the Bedouins and their Jewish neighbors and we don’t want that to happen.

Prior to his doctorate studies from 2001- 2009, Elsana served as a Lawyer and director of Adalah – The Legal
Center of Arab Minority Rights – the Naqab (Negev) Office. Elsana also worked as a legal advisor for Genesis Community Advocacy Organization in Beer Sheva and as pro bono legal advisor for the Regional Council for Unrecognized Villages in the Naqab (Negev).

Elsana holds several academic degrees: Master of Law from the American University, Washington College of Law (USA) 2007; Master of Social Work in Social Advocacy and Community Development from McGill University; and a Bachelor’s in Law from Tel Aviv University.