Much of the Sinai is now ruled by criminal gangs who capture Eritrean refugees, hold them for ransom – and rape and torture them, either to exert pressure on families, or because they can. Those who escape and cross the Israeli border are then automatically imprisoned for 3 years as ‘infiltrators’. Lucy Newman calls for a change of mind in Israel; reports from Human Rights Watch and Jadaliyya. Sign the petition!

The Bab al-Shams encampment in its brief life inspired and enthused people in Palestine and round the world. Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad praised the activists saying that “the Palestinian steadfastness make the most important part in resisting the occupation and settlement.” PA personnel including Saeb Erekat and Hanan Ashrawi were prevented from reaching the ‘village’. The protesters were removed on the orders of Netanyahu/Civil Administration, but as a form of resistance which does more than say no, the image has taken wing.

Local affairs in Israel are run by regional councils, required by law to hold elections every 4 years. One of just 3 non-Jewish councils is Abu Basma, representing the Bedouin of the area. Except it doesn’t represent them. A 2009 amendment allows the Interior Ministry to postpone elections – which it has done. The Supreme Court has ordered elections. They still haven’t taken place.

ACRI’s annual report covers all people in Israel and the OPT, noting, e.g., the threat to Israelis’ right to protest and the effect of privatisation of police services. We post here the section on the Arab minority. It deals with the everyday aspect of rights, such as the power of planning rules, to which Arabs have no access, and the refusal to accept that Arabic is the other national language in Israel.

Research in the Istanbul Archive has found petitions on all matters sent to the Ottoman rulers of Palestine. Amongst much else they reveal the profound difference towards property between the European Jews, for whom it could be bought and sold, and the Arab villagers, for whom right to land usage was customary.

‘The term “Bedouin” means, “those in bādiyah” or “those in the desert”. Which is exactly where Israeli authorities have decided they shall not live, fearing that the Bedouin would constitute a solid Arab belt. Ben White describes the relentless drive to force Arabs out of the Negev.

One lot of Israeli citizens is to be expelled from its village in the Negev to make way for another lot of Israeli citizens. The first is made up of Bedouin who cannot get building permits and whose village is to be demollshed. It will be replaced by a new-build settlement for Jews. Adalah’s appeal against the decision by the National Council of Planning and Building was rejected. Reports from Ynet and Adalah.

The Israel Land Administration ordered the demolition of an ‘unprecedented’ number of Bedouin homes last week (including El Araqib for the 41st time). It will band together with the Ministry of the Interior and police to speed up demolitions and evacuations of Bedouin villages in the coming weeks. AIC keeps count.

In a text-book case of how to exterminate a way of life, settlers and the IOF have taken the water storage tanks as well as most of the land, killed sheep and ‘confiscated’ the cattle on which Bedouin people have susbsisted for hundreds of years. The occupiers no longer bother to hide their aim. “The soldier looked at me and said: ‘You can leave’.” Three news items.

Once upon a time, generous American Jews gave unstintingly to the Jewish National Fund who would use their money to make Palestine – an imagined barren, unpopulated desert – bloom. Now it is clear that the clearance of people, flora and fauna and over-use and abuse of fresh water, has created massive degradation of land and water as well as Arab displacement. Ben Lorber provides a shocking account.

Posted here is the whole of Adalah’s new campaign to raise support to block the Prawer Plan – the programme to move tens of thousands of Bedouin from their unrecognised – by the Israeli state – homes in the Negev to concentrations in set areas. JfJfP supports the rights of the Bedouin to stay in their traditional homes.

Three Bedouin families living in the Jerusalem area again lost everything when the army evicted them from their caravans and tossed away all their belongings on Sunday night. Their previous built homes were demolished last November. They were instructed to move their caravans to an unspecified somewhere else – but a legal challenge is being prepared.

The Bedouin way of life – nomadic and pastoral – is gradually being destroyed in Israel as land-use authorities (in effect, the national government) decree that these Palestinians must leave the West Bank – and set up camp on Israel’s waste spaces. Fresh air and freedom of movement, central to the Bedouin tradition, are thus destroyed. Yet they are touted as a tourist attraction for their romantic freedom. Plus link to ‘Nowhere left to go’, a film from the Jahalin Association.

In pursuit of its once-proud dream of making the desert bloom the JNF (Jewish National Fund) has started forestation work in southern Israel. In the way of the dream is reality: there are villages in many places in the desert, the traditional homes of the Beduoin. The village al-Arakib has just been destroyed yet again. Support for Bedouin rights is a primary campaign of JfJfP. +972 and Meretz USA.

The indigenous peope of the Negev, the Bedouin, face massive displacement and dispossession by the Israeli state. JfJfP is committed to speaking up for their rights. One way anyone can do this is to sign the petition set up by Care2, an online network to help connect activists and causes. anywhere in the world.

Long before Israel was created, the Bedouin had a way of life that enabled them to survive in the harshest of habitats. Now they are faced with military deportation to desolate townships, while settlers get water-fed gated communties in the Negev. Catrina Stewart reports

The Bedouin are in Israel’s sights. After sustained attacks on the Bedouin of the Negev (see e.g. Israel’s war on its Bedouin citizens at http://jfjfp.com/?p=21672) it is now the turn of those on the West Bank who stand in the way of the expansion of the illegal settlement at Maale Adumim. This report by Jillian Kestler-D’Amours expands on Amira Hass’s , carried a while back (see http://jfjfp.com/?p=25422).

Many Bedouin have lived in the Negev for centuries, with clear ownership rights. But these are not recognised by Israel which wants the land as an agricultural resource. The Bedouin are thus being evicted and deported to towns, with predictable consequences. Dr. Awad Abu Freih of ‘Recognition Now’ and others speak at venues across Britain

The Israeli government has a ‘master plan’ for Area C, West Bank, and the Negev – which does not include many of the villages of the traditional inhabitants, the Bedouin. Two reports of these decisions are followed by two extracts from a position paper on how to ‘recognise’ Bedouin habitations in the Negev published by ACRI last May

Treated as outlaws under Mubarak, the Bedouin of the Sinai have acted as entrepreneurial smugglers for the Gazans, shifting anything from a tiger to fuel – but not suicide bombers. With Al Qaeda trying to recruit them, reports Mohamed Fadel Fahmy, only Egypt can bring them in from the wilderness.