While Prawer is Frozen...

When news spread last December that Minister Benny Begin had recommended, and Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu had accepted, to halt the legislative process of the Prawer-Begin bill, neither the Palestinian community, nor their advocates and allies could contain their overwhelming relief, pride, and elation.  Though there was no illusion that the freeze would reverse the Israeli government’s overall displacement policy in the Naqab (Negev), that the implementing legislation of the Prawer Plan was stalled was and remains a tremendous achievement.  The government’s decision demonstrated the combined strength of a community-led popular struggle, creative advocacy, and strategic legal and international interventions to disrupt the status quo.  The coordinated movement placed the rights of the Bedouin community onto the local and international agenda, and positioned the fight against displacement in the Naqab within a larger Palestinian struggle.  So still, we celebrated.

Though we weren’t surprised when within weeks the government had changed its mind and vowed to continue pursuing the Prawer Plan, albeit within the Ministry of Agriculture and under the supervision of Minister Yair Shamir.  In January 2014, Shamir requested one month to review the Prawer Plan and its implementing Prawer-Begin bill.  Since then, the legislative process has remained stalled.  Yet, demolitions of Bedouin homes in the Naqab remain a daily reality, and the state continues to approve and implement its development projects on top of Bedouin villages. 

To understand how this can happen while the Prawer Plan is frozen is to recognize that the Prawer Plan was (is) merely a tool for the government to legitimize the ongoing and planned displacement of the Bedouin community.  The Prawer Plan sought to facilitate an Israeli government policy that has remained relatively unchanged since the Nakba in 1948.  To do so, the plan did introduce novel tactics to accelerate forced displacement in the Naqab, such as suspending the constitutional rights of Bedouin citizens by removing judicial oversight of home demolitions, and devising complicated processes to permanently and quickly strip the Bedouin of ownership over their ancestral land.  But the dangerous legal framework proposed by the Prawer Plan should be understood not as a new system in the Naqab, but rather, as an attempt by Israel to drape a veil of legality over an unjust system that has long been approved, and that is consistently being pursued.  Without the veil, the system of demolition and displacement, of eviction and concentration, nonetheless continues; and while piercing the veil is critical, it cannot alone dismantle the system. 

Today, the underlying system in the Naqab is best distilled by the discriminatory Regional Master Plan for the Be’er Sheva Metropolitan Area, which was approved by the government in August 2012 despite outstanding objections by the Bedouin community.   The Master Plan sets out the state’s development plans for the Be’er Sheva Metropolitan area, and outlines in concrete terms the eviction and destruction of most of the 35 unrecognized villages.   For example, the Master Plan foresaw that the rolling hills of the village of Al-Araqib would be cut into deep trenches to make possible the planting of hundreds of thousands of saplings in the Jewish National Fund’s Ambassadors and God-TV Forests.  The Master Plan has given a green-light to the construction of “Intelligence City” on the lands of Awejan and El-Mokaymen; and maps out the extension of Route 6, the major toll road in Israel, which will soon trample and divide the villages of El-Masadiya, El-Qrin, Khirbat Al-Wattan, Bir Al-Hamam, Khashem Zane, Wadi el-Naam and Wadi el-Mashash.  In Umm el-Hieran, the state plan has approved that the a new town of “Hiran” will be established in its stead; and in neighboring Atir, the Yatir Forest will soon be expanded over top of Bedouin village. 

The Master Plan sets the framework for achieving what began over six decades ago, and one that each successive government plan in the Naqab, and indeed throughout historic Palestine has aimed to secure — control over maximum land for the Jewish people with the minimum amount of Palestinians.  The depth of this deliberate policy explains how the Naqab landscape can be changing so quickly even though the latest government plan is “frozen”, and how efforts to challenge individual elements of the overall strategy will continue to fall short. Stakeholders must rise to that depth and engage in a more honest and more productive conversation that calls for the immediate recognition of the unrecognized villages as outlined by the Bedouin community’s Alternative Plan, and an end to the devastating home demolitions and systemic denial of basic services.  Though we should welcome any reprieve from the flames of oppression and discrimination, however brief or symbolic, our target must be to permanently extinguish the systems and structures that for 66 years have denied all Palestinians their rights to equality, dignity, and freedom.