TEL AVIV: According to +972 Magazine, Israel's National Council for Planning voted last week to demolish Bedouin village Umm al-Hiran in the Negev desert. In its place, state authorities are planning to establish a Jewish settlement for “national-religious families." Umm al-Hiran and its 500 residents are situated in the northeastern flank of the Negev. It is one of over 40 “unrecognized" Bedouin villages compromising 70,000 Bedouins who are citizens of Israel. Although the land was given to the families of the present inhabitants as compensation for the mass land confiscation that followed the 1948 war, the Israeli government has deemed their homes, buildings, and presence illegal for lacking official permits. Residents of “unrecognized" villages generally lack basic utilities and state services, including water, gas, and electricity. The Israeli government seeks to relocate Bedouins into seven townships and build 10 Jewish settlements on their current villages. “We can live alongside Jews," one resident told Israeli news site YNet, but it is racism to “just take an Arab and put a Jew in his place." The government has suggested that Umm al-Hiran's residents move to Horah, a nearby Bedouin village. “Nakba is not something that happened and ended," Ali, a Palestinian Israeli medical student at Tel Aviv University, told Bikymasr.com. Nakba, the Arabic word for catastrophe, generally refers to the 1948 events that led to the establishment of the State of Israel and the displacement of an estimated 700,000 Palestinians. “Every time an Arab faces discrimination in Israel simply because he's Arab, when we, as citizens of the state, are removed from our homes—this is ongoing Nakba. When a Bedouin village is destroyed in the Negev, this is ongoing Nakba."
