Would They Have it So Bad in Rahat?

By Aryeh Dayan, Haaretz Correspondent

'The area where you live is known as a military area that was acquired by the state in 1980 and is earmarked for the construction of a military base.'

According to the story passed from generation to generation in the Bedouin village of Al-Sira, the village was founded during the Ottoman period following a conflict in the early 20th century among the families of the tribe, al-Nasasra and al-Amour, and the neighboring al-Hassouni clan. The argument revolved around several hundred dunams that the al-Nasasra and al-Amour families had purchased southeast of Be'er Sheva. The sheikhs of the two tribes went all the way to Jerusalem to ask the Ottoman court to decide. The court ruled in their favor, and the lands of Al-Sira were registered in their names in the Turkish land registry.

"Our families have been living peacefully in this village for almost 100 years, without bothering anyone and without anyone bothering them," says Halil al-Amour, a member of the village residents' committee and a teacher of mathematics and computers in the high school in Keseifa, the adjacent town.

The lands of Al-Sira, which over 100 years ago lay in the middle of the desert, are today located in a bustling region: they border on the north with the highway connecting Arad with the Shoket junction, on the south with the Israel Air Force base in Nevatim, and on the east with the road connecting the base and the highway.

Only few of the Bedouin tribes who lived for years in the region have survived the changes in government as they have, without having to leave their lands. The British, who arrived a few years after that legal proceeding in Jerusalem, honored their ownership of the land and even built a clinic, a school and a flour mill for them in nearby Tel Malhata. The Israeli government, which replaced the British 30 years later, did the same.

The residents of Al-Sira received citizenship in the new state and were allowed to remain on their land. The village did not receive official recognition (and therefore has yet to be linked up to the electricity and telephone grids) but its residents remained in place. The clinic, the school and the flour mill continued to operate, now under Israeli administration.

The residents of Al-Sira stayed put even in the early 1980s, when the evacuation of Sinai in the context of the peace treaty with Egypt led to the construction of the airport in Nevatim and a law that transferred all the lands of Tel Malhata and its environs to state ownership.

About 5,000 Bedouin were forced at the time to evacuate the villages surrounding Al-Sira and move to Keseifa, Arara and Segev Shalom, three of the towns where the State of Israel has been trying since then to concentrate the majority of its Bedouin citizens. The residents of Al-Sira claim that nobody bothered to tell them, for over 25 years, that according to the map accompanying the law, their village also lies in the expropriated area.

During all those years they avoided asking questions about their good fortune, they lived their lives and maintained good relations with their Israel Airforce neighbors. Every new base commander is invited to a festive meal in the village, and the soldiers and village residents often give each other lifts. A relatively recent local legend tells how a soldier on a navigational exercise fell into a village cistern, and his life was saved thanks to the resourcefulness of a village elder.

Planes and helicopters take off and land over the heads of the residents almost 24 hours a day, but they don't complain. "We've become used to the noise," they explain, "and we no longer hear it." This, taken with the fact that no government official has ever intervened in village affairs, led them to conclude that in spite of the absence of official recognition, the state had decided to treat their little village of about 350 souls as a permanent fact. "When they built the IAF base, most of our families still lived in tents," says Ahmed al-Nasasra. "During the 1980s we slowly began to move into huts, and during the past 15 years everyone has built stone houses. We knew that we weren't a recognized village, but we made sure not to exceed our land boundaries by even a meter." Al-Nasasra was born in the village 47 years ago, and claims that "from the day I was born until last May not a single representative of the state ever told us that these lands are not ours and that we were not allowed to build on them."

Last May government representatives suddenly informed them that they intended to destroy seven of the village homes; early in September they announced that they planned to destroy all 45 remaining houses.

At about 9 A.M. on May 10, several Interior Ministry supervisors entered the village, accompanied by dozens of policemen armed with rifles and bludgeons. "Without speaking to anyone and without explaining anything," says Amour, "they posted warning notices on the doors of seven houses prior to issuing the demolition orders and left."

The residents reacted quickly: That same day they met and elected a committee to handle the problem. Halil al-Amour and Ahmed al-Nasasra, who were chosen to head it, immediately turned to the Interior Ministry and asked to meet with David Cohen, in charge of the Southern
district.

The letter they sent to Cohen clearly demonstrates that they were convinced that the authorities would weigh their arguments practically. "In the absence of approved construction plans for the village, the residents are forced to build without a permit," they explained, asking to meet with Cohen "in order to find a solution to the problem."

Cohen refused their request. He sent them to Ilan Sagi, in charge of construction supervision in the district. Sagi promised them to freeze the demolition orders for three months, on condition that they would begin negotiations with the Bedouin Administration about abandoning the village and moving to another community. This condition made the bitter reality clear to them: the Interior Ministry was not interested in enforcing the construction laws in the village, but in erasing it entirely.

A letter from David Cohen also informed them for the first time of what nobody had told them until then: "The area where you live is known as a military area that was acquired by the state in 1980 and is earmarked for the construction of a military base."

After consulting with the village residents the committee decided nevertheless to turn to the Bedouin Administration to find out exactly where the State of Israel planned to transfer them.

Yaakov Katz, the administration director, refused to meet them, and sent them to Eli Yifrah, "director of the Keseifa region in the administration." Yifrah offered them two problematic solutions: moving to a neighborhood that is slated to be built in the future in the city of
Rahat, and whose planning has yet to begin, or moving to Marit, a Bedouin community that does not yet exist and whose future is uncertain. When Amour and Nasasra asked Yifrah about the amount of financial compensation they would receive from the state, Yifrah sent them to the
Israel Lands Administration Web site.

"We understood from Yifrah that the state has nothing to offer us, and that it simply wants to expel us from our land without proposing any alternative," says Amour.

Moving to Rahat, he adds, is unthinkable. "Rahat, like all the towns built by the state in order to concentrate the Bedouin in them, long ago became a hotbed of unemployment, with a poor quality of life," says Nasasra. "There's no education, there are no services, there's no law, there's nothing there. Under no circumstances will we agree to move to Rahat."

They turned once again to Katz, who this time agreed to receive them. They told him that they would be prepared to leave the family lands, but they wanted government assistance for building an agricultural village in another area. Amour says Katz dismissed this idea, saying, "You don't know anything about agriculture."

After this disdainful and insulting reply, they once again asked to meet with the district director in the Interior Ministry. He refused, and instructed the ministry legal advisers to turn to the Be'er Sheva Magistrates' Court with a request for demolition orders for the seven houses on which the warnings had been posted. Judge Yisrael Axelrod acceeded to the request in the presence of only one party, i.e. without hearing the villagers' viewpoint at all.

Early in September the Interior Ministry supervisors once again visited the village, again accompanied by a large contingent of police. This time that had come to post demolition notices on all the other 45 buildings.

Implementation of the orders has been frozen for now, because attorney Suhad Bashara from Adalah (The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel), which is now representing the residents, turned to the court with a request to abolish the orders issued in the presence of
only one party, but the story is far from over.

Amour and Nasasra wonder what caused the government to initiate the evacuation of the village now of all times, after refraining from such expropriation for 26 years? How can a judge order a wholesale demolition of houses without examining the circumstances of their construction,
and even without knowing who lives in them? Is the state really in need of this land, or does it simply want to take it away in order to promote a policy of pushing the Negev Bedouin into a corner?

They base their questions on facts hidden in the few documents in the legal file. The Interior Ministry's request to the Be'er Sheva Magistrate's Court for demolition orders says that "the land was expropriated for the purpose of (building) military bases"; a similar claim was made by the regional director in his letter to the village committee. Although the IDF does, in fact, have a plan to expand the Nevatim base, it is supposed to expand southward rather than northward towards the Al-Sira lands.

The Interior Ministry claims that the village lands are needed for a military base also seems to have been concealed by the ministry itself. The request for demolition was accompanied by a map showing the exact location of the houses to be demolished. The area on which they are built is called "Kidmat Negev" on the map. That is the name of a 15-year-old government plan, which has apparently been shelved, to build industrial zones and residential neighborhoods for hundreds of thousands of new immigrants from the former Soviet Union, who were arriving at the time.

The decision to evacuate the village may have no connection to government plans for the lands, according to one of the documents. In one of the requests for cancellation submitted by attorney Bashara, Ilan Sagi is quoted as saying that "the warnings were issued in order to apply pressure on the village residents" so they would agree to move to one of the Bedouin towns, in accordance with government policy for the Negev Bedouin.

"If the government representatives were to come and convince us that the state needs our village lands in order to build a base that would help it fight Iran, we would agree to leave," says Ahmed Nasasra. "But under no circumstances will we agree to leave in order to help the government promote its racist policy toward the Bedouin."

An Interior Ministry spokesman refrained from replying about government plans to build a military base or residential neighborhoods and industrial zones on Al-Sira lands. But he said that "already in the 1980s the residents were told that the area was acquired by the state in 1980, and that they would have to evacuate at some point." He added: "The residents ignored the law and instead of evacuating the area built many houses, and recently even upgraded construction by using hard materials. Moreover, we know that the Bedouin Administration in the Israel Lands Administration offered them housing solutions in two permanent communities, but they are refusing for their own reasons."

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