 Twail Abu-Jarwal can hardly be called a village.
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Home to some 450 Beduin, members of the al-Tlalka tribe, the clusters of tents and tin shacks are sprawled over several barren wadis in the northern Negev. Reached by turning onto a dirt road off route 40 north of Beersheba, the community - or what remains of it - is barely accessible. This is Beduin country. Like dozens of similar shantytowns and makeshift encampments that dot the landscape around Beersheva, Twail Abu-Jarwal does not appear on any map. According to the State of Israel, it doesn't officially exist. Twail Abu-Jarwal is what is popularly known in Israel as an "unrecognized village," one of 35 such villages in the Negev area. Since neither the government nor the regional or municipal authorities acknowledge the existence of these settlements, their residents have no rights to municipal services such as running water, electricity, sewage or garbage collection. And since they do not officially exist, the authorities refuse to draw up statutory plans for them, so anything constructed in the region - tents, huts, stone structures - is illegal and subject to demolition. Over the last three years Twail Abu-Jarwal has been destroyed 11 times by the Israeli authorities, most recently in October 2007, when police forces arrived at the village and demolished the structures, including the tents. Among the piles of stones and rubble that is Twail Abu-Jarwal, chickens peck, a few sheep wander, black-robed women do their chores, and a group of children, unkempt and barefoot despite the cold, play aimlessly. The grainy sides of the wadi are sparsely covered with low mesquite trees planted by the Jewish National Fund a few years ago, when the government first designated this arid area as a forested region. In the wadi just to the west, energetic construction proceeds for the dual-track railway between Tel Aviv to Beersheba. All the stone structures have been destroyed in the last two years, including the school, built by the residents themselves, although the village cemetery with its mix of old and new headstones remains. The residents, who insist that this is their land and argue that they have no where else to go, rebuild after each demolition. The state wants the Negev Beduin to live in government-developed, planned communities. The government contends that the Beduins' decision to make their homes wherever they like is unacceptable in a modern state. While about half of the estimated 160,000 Negev Beduin have moved to government-built Beduin townships, the rest have preferred to stay, even under impoverished conditions without basic services, rather than moving into towns with diverse tribal groups. They view town life as a threat to their traditional lifestyle and demand title to the land that they claim they and their nomadic ancestors have inhabited for generations. The Beduin are Israeli citizens; many volunteer for the army. Yet, they contend, they are being discriminated against on racial grounds, systematically denied the services provided to Jewish communities. The results of the absence of planning and agreed-upon arrangements for the Beduin population can be seen in the chaotically expanding jerry-built collections of shacks and piles of refuse that are visible along the highways of the Negev; what was once a striking desert landscape has become an eyesore. The results can also be seen in the abject poverty and social neglect in which most Beduins live and in the growing alienation and rage that have gripped the Beduin community. The situation has become an intractable, ethnic civil standoff. In July 2007, the Interior Ministry published the long-awaited Plan No. 4/14/23, the Outline Plan for the Beersheba Metropolis (which includes Dimona and Arad). The plan calls for doubling the total population in the Negev from 500,000 today to one million by the year 2020. (By this time, the Beduin population is expected to double from it current 160,000 to more than 300,000, 54 percent of them expected to be children.) The plan recognizes two villages that were formerly unrecognized. But according to Beduin leaders and Israeli organizations lobbying for Beduin rights, the proposed plan ignores the needs of the Beduins living in the rest of the unrecognized villages and is blatantly discriminatory. The government, they point out, is providing Jewish residents with the choice of living in any of more than 100 southern communities, including agricultural settlements, and even single-family farms, but Beduin citizens do not have this opportunity. The government first attempted to impose statutory order in the Negev in 1996. In 2000 the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) and a broad coalition of Jewish and Beduin groups filed petitions to the High Court of Justice against that plan, charging that it completely ignored the Beduin living in the area, relating to the land where 45 unrecognized settlements were then located as if it were uninhabited. (Authorities subsequently adopted a program to recognize some of the settlements and the state had incrementally recognized nine villages in the greater Beersheba area known as the Abu Basma region - see box, page 14.) The petitions claimed that the plan was part of a longstanding policy to evict the Beduin from their villages and concentrate them into the townships built by the state in the 1970s and early 80s. The petitioners demanded that the master plan be amended to ensure the planning of agricultural villages for the Beduin population of the Negev.
While not ruling on the petition, the High Court brokered an agreement in which the planning authorities would recommend solutions for the problem of Beduin settlement in the Beersheba metropolis region (which has a 25% Arab Beduin population). In response, the authorities agreed to revise the plan accordingly and the planners also promised the court that they would meet with members of the community and obtain their input in the planning process. Read more of this story
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