It's been more than a week since Palestinian and Israeli activists protested against an Israeli plan to forcibly move tens of thousands of native Bedouins from the Negev, south of the occupied Palestinian territories. The demonstrations were met with violence by the Israeli police, making a few headlines before slipping into oblivion. In a region mired by dramatic changes since the 2011 uprisings, the Palestinian question has been largely forgotten, much to Israel's advantage. As illegal Israeli settlement expansion continues unchecked in the occupied West Bank, practically obliterating hopes for a future Palestinian state, plans to resettle the indigenous population of the Negev are now underway. In June, the Israeli Knesset (parliament) approved the Prawer-Begin Bill that will evict nearly 70,000 Bedouins and destroy 35 unrecognised Arab Bedouin villages. The bill is expected to get final approval by the end of this year. The Prawer Commission was set up in an attempt to address the problem of unrecognised Bedouin villages in the Negev desert of southern Israel. Chaired by Ehud Prawer, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's director of planning, it published its recommendations 2 June 2011. The proposal was formulated without any consultation with the Bedouin community and rights groups slammed it as a major blow to Bedouin rights. If fully implemented, the plan won't just be the biggest act of displacement of Palestinians in decades; it will destroy the communal and social fabric of the Bedouins, condemning them to a future of poverty and unemployment in the words of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel. Israel refuses to recognise 35 Bedouin villages in the Negev, which collectively house nearly 90,000 people. Consequently, they're denied access to basic services and infrastructure, such as electricity and running water, and the Israeli government refuses to place them under municipal jurisdiction. Various Palestinian NGOs have challenged the Prawer Plan in Israeli courts, to no avail. According to Israel, the aims of the Prawer Plan are economic development of the Negev desert and the regulation of Palestinian Bedouins living in villages not recognised by the state. The Bedouins will be moved to towns designated for them by Israel, while Jewish settlements and military zones will be established in their place. Yousef Munayyer, a US-based political analyst, described the plan as an extension of the Nakba, or Catastrophe, of 1948 when Israel was created on Palestinian land and when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were driven out of their homes and lands by Zionist gangs. “The Prawer Plan is nothing more than the continuation of the Nakba in another phase,” he wrote on The Daily Beast website in July. “In Israel, if you are a Palestinian, where you are from is subject to the approval of the state. If the state chooses not to recognise where you are from, well, then you are no longer from there and can be forcibly removed.” The Prawer law puts into motion a plan to “meet a long sought after objective”, he wrote. “For decades, the State of Israel has attempted to squeeze the Bedouin life out of these villages... Of course, an isolated and hard-to-reach Israeli colony deep inside the West Bank will surely receive state subsidised utilities and military protection. This distinction in the allocation of both resources and infrastructure highlights the broader agenda of the state, to demographically engineer the entire land with one single solitary principle in mind since the beginning of the Zionist movement: secure maximum Palestinian geography with minimum Palestinian demography.” Adalah, the legal centre for Arab minority rights in Israel, describes the Bedouin of the Negev as the most vulnerable community in Israel. “For over 60 years, the indigenous Arab Bedouin have faced a state policy of displacement, home demolitions and dispossession of their ancestral land.” More than 1,000 Bedouin houses were demolished in 2011 alone. On Monday, the independent Israeli #972 web magazine published what claimed to be the first map of the Prawer Plan — never made public before — distributed in the Knesset by a member in the Interior Affairs Committee. It was not clear whether the map was “merely an explanatory document meant to swing votes in the Knesset or an actual working document for the eventual implementation of Prawer”, said the website, pointing out that other Knesset members suspect that the original plan has not yet been revealed. The published map shows planned Jewish towns in light blue and land to be expropriated by the state in purple, both scattered across the Negev with tiny green lines marking the “unrecognised” Bedouin villages.
