'Tens of thousands of Palestinian Arab Bedouin, the indigenous inhabitants of the Negev region, live in informal shanty towns, or "unrecognized villages," in the south of Israel. Discriminatory land and planning policies have made it virtually impossible for Bedouin to build legally where they live, and also exclude them from the state's development plans for the region. The state implements forced evictions, home demolitions, and other punitive measures disproportionately against Bedouin as compared with actions taken regarding structures owned by Jewish Israelis that do not conform to planning law.
In this report, Human Rights Watch examines these discriminatory policies and their impact on the life of Bedouin in the Negev. It calls on Israel to place an immediate moratorium on home demolitions in the Negev and establish an independent mechanism to investigate the discriminatory and often unlawful way in which land allocation, planning, and home demolitions are implemented.
The state controls 93 percent of the land in Israel, and a government agency, the Israel Land Administration (ILA), manages and allocates this land. The ILA lacks any mandate to disburse land in a fair and just fashion, and members of the Jewish National Fund, which has an explicit mandate to develop land for Jewish use only, constitute almost half of the ILA's governing council, occupying all the seats not held by Israeli government ministries. While the Bedouin were traditionally a nomadic people, roaming the Negev in search of grazing land for their livestock, they had already adopted a largely sedentary way of life prior to 1948, settling in distinct villages with a well defined traditional system of communal and individual land ownership. Today they comprise 25 percent of the population of the northern Negev, but have jurisdiction over less than 2 percent of the land there.
Planning in Israel is highly centralized, and state planners fail to include the Palestinian Arab population, especially the Bedouin, in decision making and in developing the master plans that govern zoning, construction, and development in Israel. Even though Bedouin villages in the Negev pre-date Israel's first master plan in the late 1960s, state planners did not include these villages in their original plans, rendering these longstanding communities "unrecognized." As a result, according to Israel's Planning and Building Law, all buildings in these communities are illegal, and state authorities refuse to connect the communities to the national electricity and water grids, or provide even basic infrastructure such as paved roads. Israeli policies have created a situation whereby tens of thousands of Bedouin citizens in the Negev have little or no alternative but to live in ramshackle villages and build illegally in order to meet their most basic shelter needs.
While the Bedouin suffer an acute need for adequate housing and for new (or recognized) residential communities, the state rarely provides these opportunities. Meanwhile, even though some of the more than one hundred existing Jewish rural communities in the Negev sit half empty, the government is developing new ones. While in theory anyone can apply to live in these rural Negev communities, in practice selection committees screen applicants and accept people based on undefined notions of "suitability," which exclude Bedouin. The ILA recently defended the role of the selection committees, saying " social cohesion in small communities is important." <1>
Israel's planning authorities have taken this discriminatory logic to an extreme with the creation of 59 individual farms in the Negev over the past 10 years. The state has allocated vast land tracts almost exclusively to individual Jewish families and fenced off the land at government expense in a bid to "preserve state land." Often, government ministries and the ILA allow individuals to establish the farms before they have secured building permits, on land zoned for other purposes, and local authorities connect these illegal outposts to water and electricity grids without hesitation. Meanwhile, the same officials claim that they cannot provide unrecognized Bedouin villages, with hundreds or even thousands of residents, with utilities because the villages are built illegally and the population is too dispersed. Several Bedouin told Human Rights Watch that the state had allocated their ancestral land to individual farms. Mohamed Abu Solb, an Israel Defense Forces veteran, took Human Rights Watch to the site of the village where he had grown up, from which the authorities had evicted him and his family in 1991, ostensibly for military purposes. Sixteen years later there are no signs of the army, but one of the individual farms, a lush cactus ranch, prospers on this confiscated land next to the Abu Solb clan's destroyed village of Kornub.
Since the 1970s Israeli authorities have demolished thousands of Bedouin homes in the unrecognized villages, many of them comprising no more than tents or shacks. In the past year alone Israeli officials have demolished hundreds of structures, and placed warnings of intended demolition on hundreds more. Israeli officials contend that they are merely enforcing zoning and building codes, but the state systematically demolishes Bedouin homes while overlooking or retroactively legalizing illegal construction by Jewish citizens. According to Ministry of Interior records, in January 2005 all 242 outstanding judicial demolition orders in the southern region of Israel were against Bedouin structures. Israel denies security of land tenure to the Bedouin and then exploits this insecurity to destroy their homes.
http://www.hrw.org/en/node/62284/section/2
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