WRITTEN BY REGAVIM ON DECEMBER 16, 2013. POSTED IN BEDOUIN MYTHS, NEGEV, NEWS, NEWSLETTER
In the past few years,
the Bedouin of the Negev and extreme left Non-Government organizations (NGO’s)
have repeatedly claimed that most of the Bedouin villages are “historical” and
that Bedouin have inhabited these villages since before the creation of the
State of Israel. Take, for example, the Joint Position Paper: Bill on
Arrangement of Bedouin Settlement in the Negev, of May 2013, sent by the
Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) and Bimkom, to the Ministerial
Committee for Legislation regarding the proposed Law for the Arrangement of
Bedouin Settlement in the Negev, 5773-2013.
“About half of the
Bedouin population in the Negev, around 90,000 people, live in close to 46
Bedouin villages, the majority of which (around 35 villages) the State of
Israel refuses to recognize and arrange for their planning and/or
municipalities. The majority of
these villages existed before the birth of the State of Israel,
and a number of them were established in the 1950’s, a time when the agencies
of the State moved the Bedouin population from their ancestral territory under
their ownership and/or control, to a smaller area in the northeastern Negev,
termed a restricted area. In contradiction to the impression widespread among
the Israeli public, the Bedouin are
not intruders, but are rather the original inhabitants of the Negev, and they
have the rights of ownership to the lands that they have worked and occupied.
Among them are people who continue to live on their lands where they have lived
for a long time before the creation of the state, and similarly are the
internally displaced, who have been transferred from their historical lands to
the restricted area by the State, as was stated. It may be emphasized that the Ottoman Empire as well as the British Mandate recognized the
ownership rights of the Bedouin and the traditional methods by which they
transferred ownership. Commensurate with this and based
on this method of acquisition, lands were bought, and Jewish settlements were
created in the Negev, such as Be’er Sheva, established on lands that were
bought from the Bedouin in official transactions. (Emphasis added)
The Bedouin’s claim of
"historical villages" is proven to be a myth by the use of historical
aerial photographs. Tens of aerial photographs of these so-called “historical”
villages have been examined. Below are examples of aerial photos used to examine
this “historical” claim for 5 Bedouin villages.4
No one is denying that
there were nomadic tribes living in the Negev prior to 1948, however due to the
nature of these tribes, no permanent residences were established. There are
signs of cultivation in the aerial photography that was examined but the form
of farming used was seasonal, not long term, in order to supply feed for their
herds as they moved from place to place.
4 The aerial
photographs taken prior to the establishment of the State of Israel were done
by the British Authorities, and then transferred to the Government Center for
the Mapping of Israel, which is the source for all aerial photographs contained
herein.
The
Village of Al Araqib
The illegal village of
Al-Araqib is situated on state lands managed by the Israel Land Authority
(ILA), about ten kilometers north of Be’er Sheva. This village has been
mentioned in numerous headlines, when Bedouin families who claim ownership of
the land, repeatedly trespassed into the area from which they had been evicted
tens of times by the authorities. According to Bedouin from the A-Turi tribe,
they have lived in the area since the Ottoman period, and were evicted from the
area after the War of Independence by the Israeli Army, with a promise that the
eviction was only temporary. As evidence of the villages’ long history they
point to a cemetery that they claim is “ancient”. The series of aerial
photographs below, dating from 1945 to 2010, indicates that the reality is
completely different. From a photograph taken in 1965, it is indeed possible to
see the cemetery in its first stages, yet there is neither a village nor
anything that looks like a village visible. In a photograph from 1956, the
cemetery does not exist at all. So too the imagery from 1945, 3 years before
the establishment of the State of Israel.
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Al-Araqib 2010 – Cemetery and village.
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Al-Araqib 1989 – Cemetery, no village.
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Al-Araqib 1965 – No cemetery, no village
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Al-Araqib 1956 – No Cemetery, No village
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The area where Al-Araqib is today, in 1945 no
village or cemetery whatsoever.
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Conclusion: The “historic” village Al Araqib, which the Bedouin claim was
established during the Ottoman period, was built in the end of the 1990’s and
thereafter. The aerial photos from 1956 & 1945 has disproved the
claim of the A-Turi clan that this location was a village prior to 1965.
The Beersheba district
court accepted Prof. Ruth Kark’s analysis to this end during the trial of Al
Araqib.
Some
other examples of so-called” historic” Bedouin villages.
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The village of Al Sira in 2003
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In 1945 – no village
of Al Sira
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Bir Al-Meshash 2012
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Bir Al-Meshash 1945
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Conclusion:
The above aerial
photos speak for themselves, without the need for further explanations. It is fairly
easy to identify the land described in the photographs when set side by side,
in order to understand simply that the claim voiced day and night that
"our villages were here even before the founding of the state”, is an
ongoing falsity.
1 comment:
sowhere did they come from?
barry
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