John MacLean's List: testlist

• Sheikh Siyah al-Turi, the village head, said the operation had erased all traces of the village. 

  "They destroyed our homes, they uprooted our trees, they took our generators, our cars and our tractors. There is nothing left," he told AFP. "It's as though we were never here." 

  Ibrahim al-Waqili, head of the regional council of unrecognized villages, said it was the first time that the Israeli authorities had gone to such lengths. 

  "This is the first time they have removed the houses and everything that remained in the village," he told AFP. 

  "Usually they destroy seven or 10 houses at once, but this time they bulldozed the roads and anything that would indicate people had lived here," said Waqili. 

  The operation set "a dangerous precedent," he warned, saying it posed a threat to the 45 unrecognized villages in the Negev that are home to some 100,000 Arabs. 

  The Bedouin claim they own hundreds of thousands of dunams (each equivalent to 1,000 square meters) of land in the Negev. 

  But the Jewish state has never recognized such claims and wants the population to move off their land into seven government-planned townships, rights groups say. 

  Such a move would involve giving up their claim to the land -- a step which most Bedouin are unwilling to take. 

  One of the main ways in which the authorities push the Bedouin to leave their land is by not issuing permits for legal construction, forcing them to build illegally. 

  All structures built without permits are then condemned and destroyed by the authorities. 

  Figures provided by the Negev Coexistence Forum show that since 2005 the number of house demolitions has been escalating.

• On the drive out of the modern Israeli city of Beer Sheva, the tin shacks scar the landscape. It is a shanty town as poor and depressing as anywhere in the world.  

    These are the homes of the proud Bedouin Arabs. Once the citizens of the desert, the Bedouin of southern Israel are now the poorest and unhealthiest citizens of the state of Israel.  
• There are around 150,000 Bedouin in the Negev, close to the city of Beer Sheva. Some of the villages claim to have been here for generations. Others sprung up when Israel moved the Bedouin in the 1950s from their ancestral lands they used to cultivate and use to graze their animals.

• The Israeli housing minister, Meir Shitreet, is unapologetic. "The fact is that this land does not belong to them, so they have no license to build on it," he argued.   

    "We are suggesting a very fair solution to each and every one of them. Every one of them can get land, legally, with all the infrastructure legally to build their home. If they want their children to be educated, to grow up in the right environment, with all the culture and services, they cannot live in the desert. "  

• Many of the Bedouin have moved, with government encouragement, to several of these new "townships".  

   They are notorious, crime-ridden slums, partly because of bad planning, partly because these formerly nomadic people have not taken easily to urban life. Many Bedouin prefer to stay in their villages, however poorly provided for. And even in the new townships it is extremely difficult to get permission to build.  

• The Israeli policy seems confused. Nevertheless, Prof Yanni Nevo of Ben Gurion University in Beer Sheva detects a theme:  

    "The policy of Israel in the Negev and in other areas of the country is to 'Judaise' the land, " he said. "It does not mean that others will not exist here at all. It means Jewish settlements are favoured. In the Negev they have established seven townships, not to the liking of the population, against the cultural heritage of the population, and they have tried to concentrate as many Bedouin in those townships in order to vacate as much land as possible for mostly Jewish uses."   

    In its most extreme form, the Israeli policy denies there were any Bedouin here before the State of Israel was established. More usually, Israel resorts to a narrow legalism, the government arguing that the Bedouin have no rights to the land because they cannot produce the necessary documentation.   

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