Bedouins Forced to Wander Once More

A shoeless girl with tiny legs and a dirty face trips on the hard gravel, cries and races off to find comfort in a helter-skelter arrangement of corrugated tin shacks, bleating animals and threadbare tents.

This Bedouin Arab child has an ever-shrinking refuge. All around her encampment, bulldozers, dump trucks and excavators relentlessly chew through the hillside to expand a booming model city for Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank. The dust from their construction mats the hair of the children and settles on the surface of the sweet tea that is offered to every visitor.

The builders are erecting townhouses of imposing white stone up and down the Judean hills on the outskirts of Jerusalem--edifices whose perfect straight lines and neat flower beds have put off limits the grazing land on which the girl’s Jahalin tribe relied.

These Bedouins--descendants of the wandering desert tribes of the Arabian Peninsula--feel they have become an inconvenient obstacle to the Israeli government’s objective of a continuous band of Jewish settlements encircling Greater Jerusalem. In two weeks, the last 50 Jahalin families are to be pushed off the land they say they have inhabited for more than four decades, since before it was seized by Israel.

Authorities want the Bedouins’ patches of land in order to make room for $200,000 townhouses, and they have ordered the tribe to move to a rocky hillside about a mile away, adjacent to the huge landfill that serves Jerusalem and West Bank cities.

Human rights activists have rallied to the tribe’s defense, although they express little hope of forestalling the eviction. They cast the battle as an important test of the new Israeli government’s willingness to treat its most powerless neighbors humanely.

“They call it the most democratic country in the Middle East, but between Jews and Bedouins I see no democracy at all,” tribe member Mohammed Hirsh said. “All we ask is that we be left to live as human beings, with our own way of life.”

The Jahalin arrived in the desert hills between Jerusalem and the Dead Sea in the early 1950s from the Negev Desert to the south. Intimidation and attacks by soldiers during the hot-blooded early years of the Israeli state, they say, are what drove them across the border into what was then Jordan.

They settled on the brown mounds east of Jerusalem as tenants of Palestinian landowners, bartering milk, cheese and meat from their large goat herds for the use of the land.

Their situation changed radically after the 1967 Middle East War. Israel seized East Jerusalem and the West Bank, and the Israeli military became the civil authority. The Israelis declared empty land separating Arab villages and farms to be government land, military areas or “nature reserves” unless owners could prove otherwise.

According to Lynda Brayer, a lawyer for the Jahalin, establishing ownership was almost impossible because the Israelis did not recognize the land titles, maps, tax records and testimony of neighbors that constituted proof under the Jordanians, and before them under the British and Turks. Israel required as proof, Brayer said, that the land had been plowed for 10 consecutive years--a laughable demand in the arid grazing land used by the Jahalin.

Tribe members were considered squatters and trespassers in the tents where they were born.

The first removal of the Jahalin came in 1982, when construction began on Maale Adumim. At that time, about 50 families were evicted. Maale Adumim has since grown to more than 25,000 residents, with shops, restaurants, schools, parks, swimming pools and cultural centers, making it the largest Israeli community in the West Bank.

Israelis no longer think of Maale Adumim as a “settlement”; it is legally a city--practically a model community of apartments and townhouses--within a 25-minute commute of Jerusalem. And thanks to government subsidies and cheap land, homes cost $150,000 to $250,000, or about half what similar dwellings cost in Jerusalem.

Benny Kashriel, the mayor of Maale Adumim, shrugged off a question about the city having been built on occupied land claimed by Palestinians. “Here, there are no ‘green lines,’ ” he declared, referring to the frontier between the West Bank and Israel’s pre-1967 border. “Not on our maps, and not in our minds.”

In fact, Maale Adumim was a “strategic” settlement for successive Israeli governments. The existence of such a large Jewish population just east of the city sandwiches mostly Arab East Jerusalem between Israelis, cementing the Israeli hold on the city.

In 1993, authorities told the remaining Jahalin that they would have to leave. Since then, tribe members have been engaged in legal battles to stay--contending that they have a right to remain on the land, or to be allowed to return to the Negev, or to be awarded another suitable area to inhabit.

On May 28, the High Court turned down their last appeal and ordered the land vacated by Aug. 28. The 400 or so Bedouins remaining (others have quietly moved off) plan a show of resistance, but they admit that they will be no match for the bulldozers and police.

“They are building houses and making room for immigrants from Russia and Ethiopia. Give us a place as well--just a little village with water, electricity and permission to build our own homes,” said Hirsh, 42, receiving visitors in a structure made of wood and corrugated metal where a sword in a brass scabbard hangs to remind him of his Bedouin heritage.

The site offered by the government is a steep, rocky hillside overlooking the municipal dump. Windblown trash lines the narrow lane leading to the landfill. Brayer said 700 garbage trucks rumble past every day and there is nowhere for the Bedouins’ goats to graze.

“It’s all rocks and stone. You can’t pitch a tent,” Hirsh said. “They don’t want to terrace it, they don’t want to clean it, and they don’t want to divide it.”

Uncertainty over the tribe’s fate is a particular source of anguish for elderly members.

Tears filled the eyes of 85-year-old Turfa abu Ghalia when she recalled the semi-nomadic existence the tribe had in the Negev. “A nice life,” she called it. “We could graze where we wanted, camp where we wanted. There were pastures, and we could come and go as we pleased. . . .

“Now, here, someone comes to us almost every day and tells us we have to move on: ‘Why didn’t you move yet?’ ”

At one time, each family here could boast 200 goats, enough to provide a good living. Without grazing land, the average is 30 per family today, and the men have had to take jobs helping to build the very city that is strangling their way of life.

“We are losing our traditions and our heritage,” said Moussa Ghalia, a 26-year-old member of the Jahalin, speaking in a goat-hair tent over the din of construction. “Before, we used to not have to work for wages--we depended on our goats. Now, if you don’t go out to work, you won’t survive, and the goats won’t survive.”

Kashriel, the mayor, said the Bedouins have no claim to his municipality’s land. “They have never had a permanent camp here,” he said. “They only started to settle down after Maale Adumim was established.”

He contends that the Bedouins would have moved on earlier but have lingered because the people of Maale Adumim give them work and the municipality provides them water from a pipe.

“Bedouins never owned land, because it was against their principles,” he said. “Whatever they say is untrue.”

Brayer said arguments that the Bedouins arrived only after Maale Adumim are easily disproved. “I’ve got even statements from the schools. The adults . . . went to school here 30 years ago,” she said.

“They want to put us by the rubbish dump,” Hirsh said. “They are saying that we are rubbish.”