Published: 26 June 2020
Last updated: 4 March 2024
THERE’S A WAR GOING ON in the Negev, and its current front is the Bedouin village of Bir Hadaj. A confrontation there on May 31 between residents and two officers from a nearby army base – an encounter that came close to turning violent – provided an opportunity for a crackdown on the village by government agencies, activists say, with officials pouring in 10 days later to seek out and shut down a wide range of illegal activities, most of them unrelated to the earlier showdown.
The right-wing Yamina party took advantage of the occasion to conduct a provocative “fact-finding” tour of the area, during which one of its leaders described the Negev as a no-man’s-land where there is “no sovereignty, no state, only Bedouin wildness and grabbing of state lands.”
In Bir Hadaj, and among the roughly 250,000 Bedouin of the Negev in general, they certainly don’t feel they have the upper hand. A standoff for over 15 years with the state over a disputed master plan means that any and all construction in the village – situated some 40 kilometres southwest of Be’er Sheva – is by definition illegal.
And the fact that large swathes of the Negev are officially reserved for military use means that, according to one former leader of the local governing council, “You can’t walk more than 10 metres outside the village’s borders without stepping into a military zone”.
FULL STORY War of the Negev: The Bedouin village at the centre of a storm with right-wingers (Haaretz)
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Photo: The Bedouin village of Bir Hadaj in the Negev, southern Israel (Eliyahu Hershkovitz)
