Bedouins Are Unmoved by Israeli Offer

In fine Bedouin tradition, the Faiyun family was celebrating a wedding. Women in intricately embroidered black robes sat on carpets, sang and ululated, while the groom spruced up the tiny three-room house next door that he would soon share with his bride.

The uninvited guest was the memory of the government inspector.

In the middle of preparations a day earlier, he had arrived to demand that the family tear down the bridal home.

It was a new shack of shiny corrugated tin and well-patched concrete floors--and, like most of the structures in this and 44 other Bedouin villages, illegal in the eyes of the state of Israel.

“Should we tear it down? Should we wait to see if the inspector comes back? You take a chance, you risk the fines,” said Atteah Assam, one of 2,500 Bedouins living in Abu Tlul, deep in Israel’s southern Negev Desert.

Assam is also head of the Regional Council of the Unrecognized Bedouin Arab Villages of the Negev, an ad hoc group that is fighting to upgrade the status of Bedouin settlements.

The council claims to represent more than 63,000 Bedouins--just over half the entire Arab population of the desolate Negev--who live in 45 jumbled encampments that dot the sands south and east of the city of Beersheba.

Descendants of the once-nomadic tribes that roamed the region’s vast deserts, the Negev Bedouins have lived in these villages for 50 years or more and have long laid claim to desert lands. Yet the state refuses to recognize the settlements as legal.

Consequently, they have only the most rudimentary of services: a trickle of running water, a flicker of electricity. There are a handful of state clinics and elementary schools but no garbage collection. New construction is technically outlawed.

The government wants to place these Bedouin families in five proper towns, with traditional housing and the full range of city services. Seven such towns already exist, although they are among the poorest in Israel.

“If a people want to have modern services, and a modern way of living, and to use modern infrastructure, they cannot be scattered the way they are now,” said Dan Stav, deputy manager for planning and development at the Israel Land Authority.

But the Bedouins refuse to budge. Instead, they want their present villages to be granted legal recognition and the services that go with it.

The Regional Council, backed by the Tel Aviv-based Jewish-Arab Economic Development Center, plans to submit within a month a plan to create a municipal authority that would legalize and develop the 45 villages.

Traditionally among the most loyal of any Arab population still residing in Israel, the Bedouins object to moving to the government towns because they would have to relinquish their claims to the land--claims that Stav and others in the government argue are weak to begin with.

They also fear the social and economic upheavals likely to accompany a shift from their tradition-bound rural way of life to a semi-urban setting.

“They want to cancel out our culture and send us to the Wild West,” Assam said. He believes that the government wants to concentrate the Bedouins so it can use the land for its own purposes.

Hussein Hawashli, 58, is head of a clan in another unrecognized village, Ksar Alsir, up the sand dunes from Assam’s camp. He lives with two wives, 16 children and, he said, more grandchildren than he can count. His people have occupied these lands, he said, since the times of the Turks.

“Today we are citizens of Israel,” he said as he surveyed the river of raw sewage that crosses his land. “Don’t we deserve to live like any other citizen, to at least have a town of our own and the minimum of services?”