{"id":49909,"date":"2013-07-12T22:49:41","date_gmt":"2013-07-12T21:49:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/israels-indigenous-invaders\/49909\/"},"modified":"2013-07-12T22:49:41","modified_gmt":"2013-07-12T21:49:41","slug":"israels-indigenous-invaders","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/israels-indigenous-invaders\/","title":{"rendered":"Israel\u2019s Indigenous Invaders\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

On June 24th the \u201cPrawer Plan for the Arrangement of Bedouin-Palestinian Settlement in the Negev\u201d passed its first reading in the Israeli parliament. If implemented, the Plan will constitute \u201cthe largest single act of forced displacement of Arab citizens of Israel since the 1950s,\u201d expelling an estimated forty thousand Palestinian<\/a> Bedouin<\/span> from their current dwellings.\u00a0<\/span><\/b><\/p>\n

The Plan\u2019s ultimate objective is to Judaize the Israeli Negev. In order to do this, however, seventy thousand<\/a> (out of 200,000) Bedouin who currently live in villages classified as \u2018unrecognized\u2019 by the Israeli government must be moved. The government already forbids them from connecting to the electricity grid or the water and sewage systems. Construction regulations are also harshly enforced, and in 2011 alone about a thousand Bedouin homes and animal pens\u2013usually referred to by the government as mere \u201cstructures\u201d\u2013were demolished. There are no paved roads, and signposts from main roads to the villages are removed by government authorities. The villages are not shown on maps, since as a matter of official geography, the places inhabited by these second-class citizens of Israel do not exist.<\/p>\n

The government has, for years, argued that because these people live in small villages scattered across a relatively large area, it cannot provide them with basic services and therefore its objective has been to concentrate them in a few townships. Consequently, in 2009 Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu appointed his planning policy chief, Ehud Prawer, to liberate the \u201cJewish land.\u201d Prawer\u2019s main task was to relocate these seventy thousand Bedouin who have refused to sign over their property rights to the State and have continued living in their \u201cunrecognized villages.\u201d<\/p>\n

The logic informing the plan is actually best expressed in two reports Silent Conquest<\/a> and There is a Solution<\/span><\/i><\/a> published by a settler NGO called Regavim (The National Land Protection Trust), which has been working in conjunction with several government agencies. The NGO maintains that the Negev\u2019s Bedouin inhabitants \u201crob\u201d the Jewish people \u201cof the Land of Israel\u201d \u201cever so quietly, without the roar of battle and clamor of war.\u201d \u201cOn this battlefield,\u201d the organization continues,<\/p>\n

\n

cement mixers have replaced tanks,\u00a0plows replace cannons and innocent-looking civilians replace uniformed soldiers\u2026. \u00a0Acre after acre, house after house, buying, squatting, illegally cultivating the soil that is not theirs, sometimes with guile, other times with violence, with\u00a0huge sums of money and firmly backed by anti-Zionist organizations in Israel and abroad \u2014 Israel is losing its hold on the Jewish people\u2019s lands.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Regavim further maintains<\/a> that Israel has until now \u201coffered the Bedouins \u2018carrots\u2019 \u2014but never a \u2018stick,\u2019\u201d claiming that through their \u201ccriminal activity\u201d these Beduin are colonizing the land and thus threatening to \u201cput an end to the Jewish future of the Southern region.\u201d<\/p>\n

Citing Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion\u2019s famous declaration that \u201cThe Negev is the test of the nation in Israel,\u201d Regavim offers a four stage solution to counter this threat, which includes: curbing \u201cillegal Bedouin construction,\u201d preparing the population for removal, evacuating all the \u201cillegal populations\u201d and then transferring them to legal settlements. Finally, the government must prepare for \u201cthe day after\u201d and not allow \u201cmatters to return to their original state.\u201d \u201cOriginal state\u201d refers to the existing situation, which in Regavim\u2019s view is characterized by the invasion of Jewish space by Palestinian \u201cillegal populations.\u201d According to this narrative, space is, by definition, Jewish and therefore non-Jewish presence is a form of contamination\u2013and the stake of Ben-Gurion\u2019s test.<\/p>\n

The transformation of the indigenous into an invader or a \u201cPalestinian settler\u201d \u2014 to borrow the phrase recently used by Deputy Defense Minister Danny Danon<\/span><\/a> (Likud)\u2014 is key to understanding not only the Prawer Plan, but also the very logic of the State of Israel. In a context in which Palestinians have been systematically alienated and elided from history and geography, the constitution of the Palestinian native as an illegal subject or foreign invader serves as the condition of possibility for Judiazing the land. The ethos in which all this is being played out is grounded in Israel\u2019s ethnocratic commitment to dispossess the non-Jews, which is cynically elevated to an act of self-defense and, ultimately, justice.<\/p>\n

Neve Gordon<\/b> is a member at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and the author of <\/em>Israel\u2019s Occupation<\/a><\/em>. He can be reached through his website<\/span><\/a>.<\/p>\n

Nicola Perugini<\/strong> is a member at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and teaches anthropology at the Al Quds BARD Honors College, Jerusalem.<\/em><\/p>\n

A version of this article was first published in\u00a0Al Jazeera<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Republished with permission from: Counterpunch<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On June 24th the \u201cPrawer Plan for the Arrangement of Bedouin-Palestinian Settlement in the Negev\u201d passed its first reading in the Israeli parliament. If implemented, the Plan will constitute \u201cthe largest single act of forced displacement of Arab citizens of Israel since the 1950s,\u201d expelling an estimated forty thousand Palestinian Bedouin from their current dwellings.\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-49909","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-breaking-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49909","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=49909"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49909\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49909"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49909"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49909"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}