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Ongoing Resistance in the Naqab with Riya Al-Sanah
94 Plays3 years ago
Riya Al-Sanah joins host Yara Hawari to discuss the latest escalation by the Israeli regime against Palestinian Bedouin communities in the Naqab, and to situate it within the context of ongoing settler-colonial ethnic cleansing across colonized Palestine.
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Transcript
Palestinian Bedouins' Resistance to Urbanization
00:00:00
Speaker
Palestinian Bedouins will determine the lifestyle that they have. They don't want to live in cities and towns. We are agricultural communities. They have an intimate relationship to the land and they want to keep that and they will fight to keep that. And for Israel, that is really scary because it means that it has lost the ability to exert complete and total control.
00:00:28
Speaker
This is Rethinking Palestine, a podcast from Ashabaka, the Palestinian Policy Network. We are a virtual think tank that aims to foster public debate on Palestinian human rights and self-determination. We draw upon the vast knowledge and experience of the Palestinian people, whether in Palestine or in exile, to put forward strong and diverse Palestinian policy voices. In this podcast, we will be bringing these voices to you so that you can listen to Palestinians sharing their analysis wherever you are in the world.
Historical Context of Bedouin Displacement
00:01:04
Speaker
The Nakab, also commonly known in English as the Negev, has faced unrelenting colonisation since the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 on top of Palestine.
00:01:14
Speaker
It is Palestine's largest district, covering over 13,000 square kilometres, half of colonised Palestine. Now following the ethnic cleansing in 1948, 90,000 Palestinian Bedouins were forcibly displaced, leaving only 13,000 or so behind. Since then, this surviving community has been crammed into specific areas, refused building permits,
00:01:35
Speaker
have had their land continuously appropriated, been deprived of basic services, incarcerated and much more. As of mid-January, there have been escalated attempts by the Israeli regime to seize Palestinian Bedouin land and transfer it to the Jewish National Fund. Rather provocatively, far-right Israeli politicians have been photographed planting trees on the stolen land, promoting the racist trope that Israel is making the desert bloom.
00:02:00
Speaker
Palestine Bedouins have not been passive and have been resisting and protesting with their bodies. In return, they have faced violent crackdowns by the Israeli regime forces and many young people have been arrested and beaten.
Current Living Conditions in the Nakab
00:02:12
Speaker
To discuss this latest escalation from the Israeli regime and to situate it within its context of ongoing settler colonial erasure is Raia, the director of Who Prophets Research Center and an activist from Laguia Village in the Nakab. Raia, thank you so much for joining me on Rethinking Palestine.
00:02:27
Speaker
Thank you for having me. So perhaps we can start by talking more generally about the Nakab, its importance and situation within the Palestinian struggle for liberation. So the Nakab is the southern part of Palestine. It occupies a huge amount of Palestinian land. It represents around 60% of the land of historical Palestine.
00:02:53
Speaker
The majority of the Nakab's Palestinian population were forcibly displaced in the Nakba in 1948, but today there are around 300,000 Palestinian Bedouins that live in the Nakab region and there are different residential arrangements for Palestinians in the Nakab. With the lifting of Israel's military rule in 1966, Israel established seven
00:03:19
Speaker
townships to which it tried or attempted to concentrate the whole of the knockups Palestinian population. Many of the knockups Palestinians resisted this kind of forced urbanization and remained steadfast on their land. And since the year 2000, there have been recognition
00:03:42
Speaker
of 11 other villages that weren't recognized until then. And so the 200,000 Palestinian Bedouins live in those seven townships or in the villages that were partially recognized. And we can talk about what recognition since the year 2000 for those villages has actually meant. But this left
00:04:07
Speaker
35 Palestinian Bedouin villages that many would know as the unrecognized villages, i.e. these are villages that have not been recognized as legal residential areas.
00:04:20
Speaker
by the Israeli state. 31 of these villages existed prior to the establishment of the Israeli state, and the rest were forcibly moved into that area as part of the Nakba in 1948. And those 35 villages have around 100,000 residents. What
Unrecognized Villages and Forced Displacement
00:04:40
Speaker
does it mean to be an unrecognized village in the Nakba?
00:04:43
Speaker
It means that you are deprived of any form of basic services, water, electricity, school, health care, health facilities and so on. But it also means that Israel has a policy and a plan
00:04:59
Speaker
to completely erase those villages. So in terms of Israel, their existence is temporal and their residents will be moved forcibly displaced at one stage or another. And the plan is to push these people and the residents of the unrecognized villages into the seven townships or into villages that have been
00:05:27
Speaker
partially recognized since the year 2000.
00:05:31
Speaker
Israel has systematically worked since the lifting of the military rule, and during the military rule, that was one of the impetus and the reasons for the military rule, to fragment the Palestinian population politically, socially, and economically. And it has systematically worked to drive a wedge between the Palestinians in the niqab and the rest of the Palestinian people.
00:05:58
Speaker
particularly the Palestinians in the knockup and the rest of the Palestinians in 1948 or many would know as the settler state that is Israel. And so it has classified or tried to treat or engage with the Palestinian Bedouin community as distinct from the whole of the Palestinian people, kind of developing narratives of nomadism and of other people.
00:06:25
Speaker
that have not been connected to the Palestinian national struggle historically and so on. And of course, for the people of the region and for the Palestinian people as a whole, we know that this is a farce. Palestinians in the region were part of the resistance movement in 1948. They were very much involved
00:06:46
Speaker
in kind of processes against selling land to the early Zionist pioneers prior to the establishment of the Israeli state. The way that the communities organize is also organized around tribes. And my grandma and the old generations often talk of a very pivotal moment where the heads of all of the tribes and the knock-off met in my grandfather's kind of communal area
00:07:15
Speaker
and they all signed on a paper, this was back in the 30s, all of them signed on the paper committing not to sell any land to the Zionists and that anybody that would sell land to the Zionists would be killed and that they could be expelled from the region.
00:07:35
Speaker
and dishonored from the families. And so despite kind of the attempt to break away or to paint a picture of the Nakab as not connected or not parcel of the Palestinian struggle against Israeli colonization, the facts on the ground, historical and current, tell a very different story.
00:07:58
Speaker
And Raya, of course, part of that fragmentation process has been this attempt, as you mentioned, to make Nokla Bedouins distinct from the Palestinian people. And some of those attempts have strangely included using the concept of indigeneity, but not as in relation to the settler colonial state, but as a way to place Palestinian Bedouins
00:08:20
Speaker
in the past to siphon them off as this sort of traditional group of people, orientalizing them, fetishizing them, and to make them very distinct from the rest of Palestinians. Israel has long pursued this narrative of Bedouinism as a way to say Bedouins are nomads, they have no connectivity to the land, so therefore they cannot be part of this Palestinian body politic and they have
00:08:49
Speaker
reverted to racist orientalist terminologies to do that. But that terminology is also one of the underpinnings of the Zionist colonial project. This is very much used to claim that Bedouins have no ownership of land. So the Israeli state and the Zionist project as a whole
00:09:08
Speaker
continuously says that Bedouins have, there is no concept of private land ownership within a Bedouin community. So the struggles that we see today of people say, no, this is actually our land. It is privately owned land. The state constantly comes with this narrative of no,
00:09:26
Speaker
you are nomads, you are Bedouins, and land ownership and the ownership of private property isn't part of the ethos of the society. And so those tropes of kind of racist and orientalist understanding of this community and paintings of this community have worked twofold, both to kind of break the community from the Palestinian body politic as a whole, but also to further entrench
00:09:53
Speaker
Palestinian dispossession and justify it also in the legal frameworks that, of course, when we're talking about land and ownership and the legal frameworks around that, Israel very much relies on British colonial legal frameworks as well. And so these understandings and the kind of the racism that the Bedouin community and the knockup is facing now
00:10:17
Speaker
was structured back at the time of British colonialism. So it's not necessarily new, but Israel is constantly building on that and developing it further.
Al-Atrash Village Conflict
00:10:27
Speaker
So what has been happening in the nukkah over the last few weeks?
00:10:32
Speaker
So over the last few weeks, we have seen an intensified Israeli attack against Al-Atrash village. It was a big village composed of a number of smaller residential areas or villages. And we saw members of the Jewish National Fund with the Israeli Land Authority that are of course accompanied by
00:10:59
Speaker
Israeli police and special patrol units that only operate in the Nokob, who are armed to the teeth, coming to prepare the land for JNF tree planting. The land is agricultural land. It is a land that belongs to an Atrash family from a setaway village, an unrecognized village. There has been work on this land
00:11:28
Speaker
before and after that the family set up a protest tent in the land. This time the Israeli security and JNF and land authority came, destroyed the protest tent and started working on the land. The members of the family
00:11:48
Speaker
rose up in protest in defense of their land, because it's important to understand that this is a misconception about the knockup, that the knockup has no agricultural area. The Israel has constantly tried to paint the picture of the knockup as a desert, that it's kind of making bloom. So the whole kind of narrative of Zionism is that they're going to the desert to make it bloom.
00:12:12
Speaker
But the Nakab has a huge amount of fertile area. The northern part of the Nakab was a very fertile area. Before 1948, people used to grow huge amounts of wheat in this area and actually export it internationally through the port in Reze. And so the Al-Adrash family live off this land. So people are not just living in these areas. They're not just residential areas, but these are the people are making a living and a livelihood
00:12:42
Speaker
from this land. And so people rose up in protest because they also understand that not only is their livelihood has been taken away from them, but also that this is a precursor for the displacement of the whole community. So they rose up in protest and of course others from the area joined them in protest because
00:13:09
Speaker
Again, everybody around them in the other villages and in the other towns are facing the same fate. Al-Adrash and As-Siaway are not unique in their experience. And others have been feeling and facing the raft of Israeli force displacement policies as well. In 2020,
Impact of May 2021 Uprising on Bedouin Community
00:13:30
Speaker
there was a 13% increase in house demolitions in the Nokub in unrecognized villages as well as recognized residential areas. So there has been an escalating attack against the Palestinian Bedouin community in general and in particular to the residents of the unrecognized villages. And this also comes in the context of the post-May 2021 uprising where Palestinians in the Nokub
00:14:00
Speaker
rose up in protest, along with all of the Palestinians across the whole of a whole of historic Palestine. And for the Israeli establishment, this was a really troubling moment because it has systematically tried to work to eliminate kind of a sense of political identity in the Nakab. Any form of political activism has been punished. People have been arrested en masse.
00:14:27
Speaker
You know, there has been a very strong concentrated campaigns to recruit individuals to the police, to recruit individuals to the army, although definitely this is a strategy that hasn't succeeded as much as kind of thought. But there has been a concentrated strategy to do that. And the participation of Palestinians in May 2021
00:14:51
Speaker
was a surprise, but it also shook the Israeli regime to the core. And since then, there has been a calculated campaign of vilification of the Palestinian Bedouin community, of claiming that the community is a criminal community, that there's a rampant criminality, that it is a community of people that are just harassing the Jewish Israelis
00:15:17
Speaker
in the area, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And Israel has been framing this as that it is launching a campaign to reinsert sovereignty in the Nakab. And this really tells us a lot because it means that the assertion of Palestinian Bedouins to remain steadfast on their land, but also the assertion
00:15:44
Speaker
that they will determine the lifestyle that they have. They don't want to live in cities and towns, we are agricultural communities, they have an intimate relationship to the land and they want to keep that and they will fight and they will fight to keep that. And for Israel that is really scary because it means that it has lost the ability to exert complete and total control. And so
00:16:07
Speaker
What's happening in in Sahrawi comes as part of this context of an accelerating attacks on the community from all sides, be it kind of an accelerated attack and attempts to forcibly displaced Palestinian Bedouins in those quote unquote unrecognized villages, but also the vilification of the community more generally. And this has shaped the nature of Israeli response
00:16:33
Speaker
to the protests that were taking place against forced displacement and dispossession.
00:16:38
Speaker
It is important to situate the current project. So there is this whole mega project that Israel is leading in the niqab of afforestation that is led by the Jewish National Fund and the Israeli Land Authority. But this project is not an isolated one. What we see is that Israel, rather than pursuing a strategy which it pursued before and which gave birth to the anti-Prawer plan protests,
00:17:08
Speaker
where the Prowar plan was about kind of an immediate collective forced displacement for the majority of the unrecognized villages. The strategy of forced displacement since then and the toppling of the Prowar plan as a result of a mass popular movement in the Nakaban across the whole of Palestine 48 forced Israel to shift strategy a little bit. And that shift in strategy
00:17:33
Speaker
meant that they weren't going to pursue mass force displacement for a number of villages or all the villages, you know, kind of a mass of villages at the same time. What they're going to do is that displacement would be connected to, quote unquote, the national developmental projects. What that means is that
00:17:57
Speaker
Israel would develop and pursue national development projects. This would include industrial projects, it would include infrastructure projects, but it would also include increasing military facility in the Naqab region. And this would all do two things. It would develop the region economically, so it would incentivize
00:18:22
Speaker
the Judaization of the region, so the movement of Jewish Israelis from the center of Israel to the Nakab, and at the same time, through these national development projects, Palestinian Bedouin unrecognized villages can be forcibly displaced.
00:18:39
Speaker
rather than saying we're just forcibly displacing you now. Now what they're saying is we're forcibly displacing you because we're developing a project of national interest, which is the laying of a railway.
00:18:52
Speaker
from Bir Sheva to Arad, for example, or from Arad to Yeruham, or the expansion of Israel's main highway, Road Six. So they have developed this highway that runs from the north of historic Palestine, and it now ends in Shokit, so that's just north of Bir Sheva, and they want to expand it to the south, and its expansion to the south necessitates or
00:19:22
Speaker
is contingent on the displacement of Palestinian Bedouin villages. And so this project of afforestation is not unique in the sense of how tree planting has been used historically in Palestine, but it's not the only kind of project that has been advanced. It's important to see it as part of a multitude of projects that are currently being developed that all work towards
00:19:51
Speaker
the forced displacement of Palestinians in the region. So with every project, the community is facing a different Israeli kind of ministry. So now
Call to Action: Support Ashabaka
00:20:01
Speaker
it's the Land Authority and the JNF. In other instances, the community would be facing the Israelis Transport Ministry or the Israeli Ministry of Defense and so on. If you are enjoying this podcast, please visit our website
00:20:16
Speaker
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00:20:28
Speaker
As you've clearly laid out, this is clearly not an isolated event. It's part and parcel of the Israeli strategy of Palestinian displacement and theft of land that we see from the Galilee and the far north of colonized Palestine, right down to the tip of the nokab and across the so-called Green Line. I want to go back for a minute and discuss
00:20:50
Speaker
the rising up that you mentioned by Palestinians in the Nakab. We've seen many young, particularly young Palestinians, literally putting their bodies on the line to defend their land. What has been the reaction by the Israeli regime? How have these mostly young people been treated?
Youth-Led Protests and Police Violence
00:21:08
Speaker
So it's important to know that the mass majority of the Nakab's population is under the age of 18. The demographics are incredibly young.
00:21:18
Speaker
And this was really apparent and very clear on the demonstrations. And again, for Israel, seeing such a young population so determined to defend its land, to remain on its land, so determined to also preserve their lifestyle and they're not kind of hinged or they're not bothered with this kind of framings of modernity and so on, they are
00:21:46
Speaker
part of the modern world, but they're just trying and choosing to live a different life. And that life is intrinsically linked to their connectivity to the land. So the demonstrations were incredibly young and incredibly vibrant and incredibly resilient. There's people have probably noticed from the photos of very strong presence of women on the front lines.
00:22:11
Speaker
who are leading in chants, who are leading in protest and it's kind of a despite all the violence that is that kind of we face during these demonstrations
00:22:23
Speaker
Being in those demonstrations and participating in an act of resistance is really empowering. And it is true that it's in the moment of struggle where also social norms and political norms are confronted and they are changed. And that has been very strong and very powerful to see in practice. But Israel has responded with extreme violence. The Bedouin community
00:22:47
Speaker
generally faces a very acute level of violence by the Israeli police. There are special units that only operate in the knock-off
00:22:59
Speaker
special units that were set up by Ariel Sharon back when he was the Minister of Agriculture with the whole purpose of displacing Palestinian Bedouins of the land. Back in the 70s, they used to chase herders and their cattle from the land, and actually there are novels about these incidents.
00:23:19
Speaker
But now they are equipped with modern technology, like all the Israeli security forces across the board. And during the demos, we saw those units, along with the general normal Israeli police, on horses, on foot, on kind of off-road jeeps, all attacking the protesters. Huge amounts of rubber bullets were used, tear gas,
00:23:47
Speaker
that was used in an insane amount, the level that you're in the open air, but you're suffocating.
00:23:56
Speaker
from the tear gas because they used something that they've only used in Reze during the marches. The march is there and in Beta, which is the dropping tear gas by drones on protesters. And during the national demo that was called on the 13th of January,
00:24:19
Speaker
Three people were directly hit by rubber bullets in the face. Two of them had to undergo surgery because their jaws were broken and one of them was hit in the head and is currently in a coma. We've also seen a huge amount of arrests. So since the 10th of January, since everything started, there's been over 150 people arrested last night and this morning alone, over 40
00:24:46
Speaker
people have been arrested. And what we see is that they are targeting minors. The mass majority of people arrested are younger than 18 years old. And again, this is a calculated Israeli strategy to punish people for resisting, but to also subdue struggle. And of course, the majority are minors, but it's across the gender-wise, it's across the board. It's women and men that are being picked up and arrested.
00:25:16
Speaker
And what we see is that the interrogations have been extremely violent, but also the legal proceedings are extremely politicized. Israel always claims that, you know, kind of it has a legal system where people can have equal legal proceedings or go through a due process and so on. But actually what we're seeing in courts is that there has been a political decision has been taken to punish
00:25:45
Speaker
those who have participated and to discipline those who have participated in resistant to dispossession and forced displacement. And even though there's a judgment to release protesters, the state and the police constantly appeal those decisions.
00:26:00
Speaker
This is both is exhausting for the legal teams, but it's also very much an indication of the determination of the Israeli state as a whole to punish and discipline Palestinian Bedouins in the knockup. And so you see cases of minors, people who are 14 years old, and their detention has been extended
00:26:19
Speaker
three or four times even after the court is ruled. It's been appealed by the police even when there's a kind of a decision to release them. Out of those arrested this morning, 80% are below the age of 18. You mentioned the
Role of JNF in Colonization
00:26:37
Speaker
JNF, the Jewish National Fund, this
00:26:40
Speaker
a quasi-governmental agency that is behind the so-called tree planting project in Menachem. But perhaps you can tell us a bit more about this organization for some of the listeners who are not so aware. The Jewish National Fund describes itself as a non-profit organization, and it's important for people to understand and be aware that the JNF was an organization that was set up by the Zionist movement prior to the establishment of the Israeli state. It was set up in
00:27:08
Speaker
1901 and it was one of several institutions that were set up by the Zionist movement before the Nakba in 1948 to prep and lay the land
00:27:21
Speaker
for the establishment of the Israeli state and the colonization of Palestine in 1948. So the JNF describes itself as kind of this environmental organization that is about setting up or planting trees and so on and who in this day and age of climate change doesn't want trees to be planted. But this organization has a very political motive.
00:27:42
Speaker
One, it used to buy land, but at the moment the projects that the JNF leads are precisely like the ones that we see happening in the Nakab now, i.e. dispossessing Palestinian land. But they've also historically planted trees to change the lay of the land of the area and to hide the previous presence of Palestinian villages in those areas. So a lot of the Palestinian villages that were displaced
00:28:07
Speaker
They have now the JNF plants, trees in those areas as a way to kind of erase the Palestinian presence of the past. But what we see today and what is happening, continuously happening, is that it's not just a question of the past, it's an ongoing process.
00:28:23
Speaker
as well as what the JNF is doing in the knock-up, for example. It's also trying to buy land in the West Bank, particularly in Area C, to develop parks and so on. So the Jewish National Fund is a pillar of the Israeli Zionist Hitler colonial project. No matter what it tries to say about itself, this is its fundamental role.
00:28:46
Speaker
I know we've jumped around a bit in this episode, but I do want to end on an important point that you made a bit earlier. You mentioned that in the unity and father that started in May 2021, Palestinians in the naka were an undeniable part of this uprising.
00:29:03
Speaker
Now, at the moment, we're also seeing an escalation in the ethnic cleansing of Sheikh Shabran, Jerusalem. Mainstream media lacks the nuanced analysis that this is part of the same struggle. And I think this is a clear outcome of the enforced fragmentation that the Israeli regime has relentlessly pursued. Yet we've also seen a refusal of this fragmentation by Palestinians themselves, Palestinians in
00:29:28
Speaker
in Haifa and Jerusalem, in Yaffa, have all been standing in shared struggle with the Nakab, and many considering this a continuation of the unity in Tafada. May
Nakab's Role in Palestinian Unity
00:29:41
Speaker
2021 changed the terrain of struggle in Palestine, full stop. We cannot understand or
00:29:49
Speaker
There is no way of analyzing what is taking place at the moment in the Naqab, indistinct from May 2020, 2021. That was a moment of breaking the political way of operating on a number of levels. One, the level of collective agency, Palestinian collective agency in resistance to the Israeli state. And I think it kind of broke that whole notion and narrative
00:30:15
Speaker
of citizenry, of struggles of Palestinians in Palestine 48, of being distinct from the struggles of the whole Palestinian people. That's on the one level. But on the other level, I think what it did is that local struggles ceased to be understood and seen as only relevant on that particular local level. And so
00:30:42
Speaker
For example, what was happening in Sheikh Jarrah, forced displacement was an issue particularly in Sheikh Jarrah. But for Palestinians across the board, it resembled forced displacement policies across the board and how and kind of our collective living and struggle against Israeli settler colonialism. And I think that's also happening at the moment in the niqab, although the struggle is local.
00:31:06
Speaker
people are coming from across Palestine 48 to participate in struggle and in resistance in Sahway itself. But also we saw demonstrations happening across different communities, not in solidarity, but in resistance to what is taking place in the mukop. So we saw demonstrations in Nazareth, in Haifa, in Yafa, in Amul Faha'im, in Khufar Qana,
00:31:35
Speaker
and led as well in protest against Israeli policies of forced displacement and dispossession in the knockup. And I think being on the ground, there is a different feeling. And I think it's important to also know there's a kind of a generational struggle as well that is taking place. And it's very apparent during the demonstrations. It's very apparent during the daily demonstrations that we have in front of the courts in Beersheva.
00:32:01
Speaker
where you see a younger, more politicized, a more daring and a more critical generation facing an older generation that is the kind of the Oslo years generation of the assimilation and the citizenry.
00:32:20
Speaker
the generation of the citizenry discourse. And that is very clear. And I think the generation that situates itself as part of the broader Palestinian body and in resistance to Israeli settler colonialism, despite this kind of tag of citizenship, is also a marker of something that also emerged in post-May or during May of 2021.
00:32:50
Speaker
They're very much connected and there's a continuation in that. And I think another interesting anecdote that kind of relates to May as well in some way is that in 48, during the kind of ethnic cleansing of Palestine,
00:33:05
Speaker
And a lot of the Palestinian Bedouin community in the knockup were displaced, became refugees in Reza. And so there's a lot of Palestinians from the knockup that are now refugees in Reza. And we have seen them, those communities and those families also come out in protest over the past few days. And I think that is, again, something that we saw in May 2021.
00:33:30
Speaker
of sharing the burden of struggle and of resistance and making those connections as an active, active resistance that defined May 2021. And I think we'll continue defining the struggle in Palestine as a whole, as we go forward. Raia, I think we'll end there. Thank you so much for joining me on Rethinking Palestine. Thank you very much for having me. Thanks a lot, Yara.
00:34:00
Speaker
Thank you for listening to Rethinking Palestine. Don't forget to subscribe and leave us a review. For more policy analysis and to donate to support our work, please visit our website www.al-shabaka.org. You can also follow us on Facebook and Twitter.