by Jo Roberts
To get services you need a licence, and we cannot get a licence, because to get a licence you need the owner of the land to sign for you, on the master plan. They confiscated the land in 1959, and the land is owned today by the government, and the government will not sign for any house unless we pay rent for one hundred years — about $200,000 for five hundred square metres of land. Not for houses, for land.
The villagers don’t have access to that kind of money. So they make do as best they can, and have perforce been experimenting with alternative technologies.
We have electricity, we connected four houses to the electricity company [in 2007]. But we cannot connect all the other houses from these — it’s illegal. Water we got five years ago from the government company, a pipe of water to the beginning of the village, and we connected the houses, but it is illegal. Sewage: we still have no sewage. The road to the village: the government began to make it one and a half years ago, they worked for one or two months, and then they stopped.
Muhammad says that he is patient, but he clearly has little hope that Ayn Hawd will receive the services other Israeli citizens take for granted. “We are in negotiations with them. I don’t think we will achieve an agreement in my generation.” He lights another cigarette. “For us, we are living here, we are Israelis like everybody, I believe that we have to get our rights equally.” There is a deep weariness about him as he says, “I believed that I am equal. Today I know that I am not equal.”
Thirty-five villages in Israel are still unrecognized by the state, and all of them are in the Negev.[44] I took the train down south, watching the fields slowly disappear into desert. Once pastured by the Bedouin, this sparse land is now dotted with Jewish towns, kibbutzes, and farms. Most Bedouin were expelled during the 1948 War, or later forced at gunpoint to cross into neighbouring Egypt or Jordan; expulsions into Jordanian territory continued until the early 1950s, when Jordan closed the border. Then, under the military administration, the Bedouin were corralled into a northeastern, particularly infertile region of the desert, known in Hebrew as the Siyag, or reservation. When martial law ended, state planners decided to build seven new towns in the Siyag, close to Be’er Sheva, to sedentarize the Bedouin population.¶¶
Those who moved found themselves cut off from the desert lands that had always shaped their culture and way of life, with little opportunity for work. In the towns, around 40 percent of men are unemployed, and 90 percent of women. With most of the Negev now declared a closed military area, the traditional semi-nomadic lifestyle of the Bedouin was effectively terminated. Those who refused to leave their lands now live in deep poverty in hamlets that the state will neither acknowledge nor service. Some 190,000 Bedouin live in the Negev, and around half of them are in unrecognized villages.
The Negev has long fascinated the Zionist imagination. The first Sabras admiringly perceived the Bedouin as fearless desert warriors in harmony with nature, living echoes of the ancient Hebrews.[45] As Israel’s population grew, so did the need for fertile land, and David Ben-Gurion, who chose to retire to a Negev kibbutz, encouraged Jewish Israelis to take up the challenge of that arid landscape, believing that “It is in the Negev that the creativity and pioneer vigor of Israel shall be tested.”[46] Jewish Israelis who live on ranches in the region are well aware of its mystique. “They see themselves as frontier people,” Yeela Raanan, who lives in a moshav near Be’er Sheva, told me:
The cowboys of the south. They walk around in cowboy hats and boots. They believe they are doing Zionism, and Israel views them that way, too. But in order to get a ranch, you need to have friends in high places. To be able to live on a thousand acres of land in Israel is amazing; plus you get subsidized water and a road. In Canada and England, [for example,] there are still plenty of small farms — we don’t have that, except for here in the Negev. And the reason these single-family ranches are there is to stop Bedouins from using the land for seasonal pasture.
It’s a very strong part of the Israeli Jewish Zionist dream, to make the Negev bloom. That’s what these single-family ranches are doing, they’re redeeming the land.[47]
But that modern-day redemption is happening at the Bedouin’s expense. While dozens of “squatter” ranches have been retroactively made legal, the government now plans to relocate most of the residents of the unrecognized villages into towns.[48] The relocation, proposed by the Prawer Commission, is to take place within five years, and can be enforced by home demolitions and imprisonment. The commission’s plan includes meagre land and monetary compensation — compensation is higher for those who can persuade family members to agree to the deal — and comes with strict conditions. No Bedouin were consulted during this process,[49] but most will lose most if not all access to their traditional land, and thus their agricultural livelihood.
Suliman Abu-Obiad works with Yeela for the Regional Council for Unrecognized Villages in the Negev (RCUV), a small NGO in Be’er Sheva. He took me to visit al-Sir, a village in the Siyag just south of the city. We turned off the highway and drove across the sand towards a loose cluster of buildings. The village had a fragile, tentative feel to it; torn canvas flapped beneath corrugated iron roofs, and scrap metal was stored in piles around the houses. Black plastic hosepipes brought water into the village from the one water tap, back on the highway. “In 1951–2, the government asked people to move to the Siyag,” Suliman told me.[50] “They said, ‘We need the land for military exercises for six months, then you can return.’ But the six months continue.” He looked around him. “Now the government wants people to move to the towns,” Suliman said. “In 2006, more than three hundred homes here were demolished, and a hundred more in 2007. People have to rebuild. Some have lost their homes more than once.”
We drove on into the desert, to Wadi Anni’am, a village of six thousand people that straggles in tiny settlements across several miles. Several heavy industry complexes have grown up next to Wadi Anni’am, now sandwiched inside the Ramat Hovav Industrial Zone with nineteen chemical factories, a toxic waste facility, and a power station. But the wires buzzing overhead between giant pylons are not connected to the village. A few scrawny sheep were tethered behind a shack, and laundry dried in the afternoon heat; a chemical plant loomed five hundred metres behind them. Cancer, asthma, birth defects, and miscarriage rates in the area are high: mortality is 65 percent higher than elsewhere in Israel.[51] The villagers, resettled here in the early 1950s, have so far been unsuccessful in their demands for relocation to a less contaminated part of the desert.
Evening came on and Suliman turned north again, heading homeward — he’d invited me to supper. He lives with his wife and children in a comfortable middle-class home on the outskirts of the government township of Lakiya. Suliman bought land from the government to build his house in 1978, but the area falls outside Lakiya’s master plan, which was drawn up a few years later. We drove through the town, and as we turned up the hill towards Suliman’s neighbourhood the road and the streetlights abruptly ended. There is no provision of sewage disposal or water. Suliman digs a new sewage pit outside the house each month, and a small pipe brings water from the recognized part of the town. “Often we don’t have water because we don’t have enough pressure,” he told me. The shower is makeshift, and odd corners of their otherwise well-appointed house remain unfinished, awaiting proper wiring. He’s hooked up electricity from a house five hundred metres away: it’s weak, and the family juggles which appliances to run. “The government says the town is recognized, so what’s the problem?” But, like the residents of al-Sir and Wadi Anni’an, the Abu-Obiads live with the threat of suddenly losing their home to a government bulldozer.
At the RCUV’s little office in Be’er Sheva, Suliman commented that if the Israeli state hadn’t left the villages unrecognized, Bedouins wouldn’t know there was a “Nakba.” The population transfers that happened in the Negev during and after the 1948 War were not so unusual, given the history of conflicts among different nomadic Bedouin groups, and after
the war, many Bedouins joined the IDF. “When Israel became a state, quite early on, the Bedouins, many of them, became soldiers of Israel — it was no big deal,” Yeela added, picking up on on what Suliman had said:
It’s the continued policies of Israel, which are racist and discriminatory and hurtful to the Bedouins, which make them much more politically aware of a date and situation in which things changed. If they could have had these villages recognized and flourishing thirty years ago, nobody would remember there was a Nakba. But what’s going on now makes it meaningful, the fact that there was a war and they’re under the rule of a Jewish state. So, in many ways, Israel is not erasing the memory but rather making this a memory of importance — by writing it in the body of the Bedouin community, by having these villages unrecognized.
“[T]he after effects — the hauntingly possessive ghosts — of traumatic events are not fully owned by anyone and, in various ways, affect everyone,”[52] writes historian Dominick LaCapra. Myriad individual experiences of political trauma together create the interdependent web of collective experience. Even for those born generations after the Nakba, its memory lingers, occupying the collective psyche of Israel’s Arab community. In the tug-of-war between being Israeli and being Palestinian, everyone finds his or her own way of accommodating the tension, and while many younger Palestinian Israelis commemorate the Nakba as a founding aspect of a national identity, others, especially those of the first and second generation, remain silent. Lauded young novelist Ayman Sikseck commented to Haaretz on how Palestinian Israelis have responded to the Nakba: “Instead of an obsessive project of commemoration and keeping the memory alive, there is an implicit tradition of repression deriving from a need to integrate. And also perhaps internalizing that you are the losing side.”[53]
Sami Abu Shehaheh’s childhood experiences certainly bear this out. “In my childhood I was totally blind about the Nakba,” he told me; “I never heard about it, never noticed it. My family used to go to some of the forests on weekends, for barbeques. I used to see ruins, of a cemetery or of houses, and I used to play on them. It never entered my head that this had been a village. The adults in my family never talked about the Nakba — it was a taboo. And in my school, there was no Nakba. I studied about Israel’s War of Independence. There were no Palestinians in my history lessons.” In his late teens, Sami and his friends began piecing together their history; learning, he says, was “a process — each time you know a little more, your eyes are more open.” The suicide bombings of the early 2000s pushed Ayman into the same trajectory: “On the one hand, I was afraid for my life; on the other hand, I noticed that the fear of my Jewish friends was different, and I began to wonder what we hadn’t been told.”[54]
For Sami, it isn’t possible to engage fully with the political situation of Palestinian Israelis without coming to terms with the Nakba. But, he tells me, “I still have the feeling that the vast majority of the people I’m a part of don’t know about the Nakba. They might have heard the term ‘Nakba,’ they might have read or heard something about it, but the vast majority have not taken in the full meaning of it: how big a catastrophe it was, and its political and cultural meanings.”
Despite the growing popularity of the marches of return, many Palestinian Israelis shy away from taking any position that can be seen as political. Filmmaker Ibtisam Mara’ana remembers being spanked as a child for drawing a Palestinian flag on her hand. Growing up in the coastal village of Fureidis (Paradise), she was haunted by what happened in 1948 at nearby Tantura. That silenced memory hung heavy over Fureidis. Tantura, she says, “is where my father’s silence began, a silence that made me want to talk.”[55] In her autobiographical documentary film, Paradise Lost, she comments: “What frustrates me about Fureidis is their lack of co-operation, they don’t share anything with us, the young generation… about the history. I think that knowing the history enables us to live the present and the future. That’s why we always have a sense of emptiness. I always feel that, inside, I’m an empty person, I’m a frustrated person, because I don’t know anything.” But to the villagers, burdened by the memory of the bodies they’d buried, “Talking about the past is politics. Talking about the present is politics. Talking about the future is politics,” says Ibtisam.
Growing up in the Arab town of Kfar Yasif in the 1980s, Raneen Geries knew nothing of her family’s history. “My grandmother was internally displaced, she was expelled from Haifa to Nazareth and then from Nazareth to Acco and then to Kfar Yasif. I learned her story only when I was twenty-four or twenty-five.”[56] Raneen now collects testimonies from aging refugees to preserve the memories that will be lost when the first generation passes away. Bringing the past to light is something Raneen feels she needs to do, both for her community and for herself.
The second generation took in the trauma of the Nakba, it passed from the first to the second generation. Another thing was the military rule — they lived through that, they were not allowed to go out from their villages. And things like the Kfar Kassem massacre happened. My parents still live under fear and stress. The authorities arrested so many people. My father was one, when he was studying at Haifa University. He was an activist as an Arab student, and they arrested him for a few days. My parents, even now, do not agree with what I do, they prefer that I not be involved in politics because they are very afraid. But our generation is after the Nakba.
Like Sami, Raneen heard nothing at school about the Nakba.
I went to the Arab high school in our village, and they told us nothing about our history. One history book was about the first and the second waves of Jewish immigration. The other book was about Hitler and the Shoah, the Second World War, and then suddenly there is a Jewish state. Nothing about what happened in between. Nothing. I asked my teacher, “Where did Arabs come from? Did we come from Germany as well?” And it’s still that way today.
Raneen’s friend Rawda Makhoul, a high-school teacher, agrees. “Where I teach now, none of the teachers, except for two of us, speak of the Nakba with the pupils. They are afraid. When I officially requested in the general teachers’ meeting that the school hold ceremonies or special activities on the Nakba, someone said ironically: ‘Do you want us all in jail?’”[57] Prison may not be a potential outcome of teaching the Nakba, but getting fired is. The Arab school system has long been monitored by the Israeli security services,[58] and teachers can be ousted for political activity. “None of the teachers responded out loud, but they talk secretly in the teachers’ room about their frustration,” Rawda continued. “They teach their sons and daughters and younger relatives about our version of the Nakba, but they do not want to lose their jobs so they prefer to be silent.”
Over half of Israel’s Arab population lives under the poverty line, compared to 15 percent of Jewish Israelis.[59] This stark economic disparity is showcased in the funding of the two separate school systems, a fact that isn’t lost on students. “I went to a very poorly developed and very poorly resourced high school that provided us with such limited, second-class opportunities for the future,”[60] one told researcher Ismael Abu-Saad. “Every day for three years we were bused past a wealthy Jewish suburb — built on our land — and we watched the construction of a beautiful, modern, state-of-the-art high school for that community. In ways like this, the State has planted bitterness in our hearts. We weren’t born with this feeling; it is the harvest of the discrimination we’ve experienced.”
Living with this level of inequality affirms what Ayman Sikseck referred to as “internalizing that you are on the losing side.” It feeds the almost subconscious norms of second-class citizenship that Sami sees exemplified daily on the streets of Jaffa:
You see these stores here on Yefet Street: most patrons are Jews who think it’s legitimate to ask us for certain political behaviour. They want us not to be Palestinian, they want us to be part of the Jewish population in our political thoughts and aims. If you are different from what they want, they punish you — they don’t come
to buy from your business. And if they don’t come to buy from you, you will probably close your business. This affects people’s daily behaviour. You will not find any signs in Arabic on our businesses, on the length of Yefet, not even in two languages. All business signs are in Hebrew, even for those stores that build their businesses totally on Arab clients.
If I go into a store, and a Jewish client comes in, without thinking about it, they will first ask the Jewish client what he wants. Even if I live next door and spend a lot more money.
When being Arab carries a stigma in Israel, it’s not surprising that many people reject that aspect of their identity, just wanting to fit in. Sikseck recounts the horror of his fourteen-year-old niece when he tried to reset the language of her cellphone from Hebrew to Arabic. Hebrew is cool, Arabic isn’t, even at her Arab high school. But when assimilation means losing one’s roots, there’s a high price to pay. Law professor Raef Zreik described the dangers he sees for his community. “You live for mere survival,” he writes. “You are a slave to the tyranny of the present, and are, essentially, given to consumerism. You have no sense of the past to lean against, and no confidence in any kind of future.”[61] His words echo in the persona created by Sayed Kashua, who writes a column for Haaretz and has published two successful novels in Hebrew. His wry, self-absorbed Arab narrator is obsessively preoccupied with making it in Jewish-Israeli society. But however hard he tries, he can never feel secure in the world he desires so much to be a part of. Kashua cuts to the heart of his protagonist’s Sisyphean struggle: “… the Jews can give you the feeling that you’re one of them, and you can really like them and think they’re the nicest people you’ve ever known, but sooner or later you realize you don’t stand a chance. For them you’ll always be an Arab.”[62]