On Saturday, I went to Rahme, a Bedouin community in the Negev, to help build a fence around a new kindergarten. The main organization involved was the Forum for Coexistence in the Negev, which tries to get Jews and Arabs in the region involved in projects together to build cooperation and trust.
Rahme, pop. 1,200, is near Yeruham, a Jewish town of 9,400. The two names in Hebrew look alike and the Bedouins say the Jews who came in 1951 incorporated the Arabic name into the Hebrew one. They share the R, H, and M and so sound quite similar.
Bedouins are former nomads who have settled into mostly sedentary communities in Israel. However, the nature of where they settle is a thorny issue. Just over half of the 160,000 Bedouins live in seven government-recognized townships, where they get basic services like water and electricity and can plan and build. However, the remainder live in 45 unrecognized villages, which don't get any of these services. Although Bedouins comprise 25% of the Negev's people, they occupy 2% of the land, and Israeli policy points to a desire to keep things that way. To that end, unrecognized village residents have difficulty getting permits to build permanent houses or other structures. If they build without permits, the IDF can destroy their homes. Rahma is an unrecognized village.
Chaya, a middle-aged woman who is one of the main organizers of the Forum drove me, along with a Bedouin university student named Ibrahim, and another middle-aged Israeli woman. We did not go into the residential part of Rahme, which from a distance was a collection of corrugated tin houses. Instead, we pulled off the two-lane road ribboning through the nearly empty desert and took a gravelly track up to a modest white building, built with corrugated metal sides and roofing that loudly rippled in the wind. The school was quite a distance from any homes. Apparently this is the second time the school has been built. The first time, when it was built more centrally, the IDF knocked it down because it was not built with any permits.
Our task was to plant stakes in the ground, wrap wire around them, and then tie metal fencing onto the stakes and wires to make a fence for the school kids. It took us about a half hour to get started because only one person knew what he was doing, as he had recently built a cage for chickens in his backyard.
The rest of us bumbled along, sharing about ten pairs of pliers among the 20 of us. At any given time, there was a handful of earnest volunteers kneeling near the fence and wrapping wires. The rest were wandering off, chatting with each other, snapping photos on digital SLRs, or lurking inside the school waiting for food. Full disclosure: I took all the pictures here while wandering around with a Canon Rebel XtI. Toward the end, some of the Bedouin kids from Rahme came and started helping. They were embarrassingly faster than all of us with the pliers and wire.
Eventually, the fence was up if a bit overstretched in some points and saggy in others. We went inside the school, where the Rahme residents brought over trays heaped with yellow rice and chicken, covered in thin, warm pita bread.
While we ate, we heard from some of the leaders of the community about their issues. The speeches were sad. One man in his 50s, in a long robe and a colorful headscarf, said that even though he had served in the Israeli army, his Jewish friends didn't want to keep in touch after his service was over. Another said that the government was confiscating his land and asked us to come to his court hearing in Beer Sheva two days hence (i.e., today). Another said the kids of Rahme often don't go to school because the closest one is 25 kilometers away.
On the drive back home, the people I rode with commented on badly the State of Israel has bungled its relationship with the Bedouin. These Israeli citizens are so willing to be a part of the state that they voluntarily join the IDF. And yet, Israel has found no real solution for as many as half the Negev Bedouin that will give them a secure and dignified place to live in the land they have been in for centuries.
0 comments:
Post a Comment