Bedouins vs Bulldozers

The Bedouin still smile, although their village has just been bulldozed. They laugh and cajole, slapping each other’s shoulders. The government destroys their houses, they rebuild.

Yesterday at dawn, 1000 Israeli police appeared in the hamlet of El-Araqib in the Negev to watch over the destruction of 40 structures, evicting 300 people. There are many of these (unrecognized) villages in the Israeli desert, and although the Bedouin often have rights to the land, in most cases they do not get permission to build. Hence the bulldozers.

In El-Araqib, which is a couple of kilometres off Route 40 between Rachat and Be’er Scheva, the structures which used to be their homes are now huge piles of debris growing out of the encompassing dust. I say structures because they are very make-shift. Chicken and pigeons, whose scoops have been destroyed, were clutching to some iron sheet, as a Bedouin family was trying to clear the site, loading broken poles on their pick-up truck.

I start talking to a Bedouin, Juma El-Turi, 41. He seems unfazed by all this, puffing on a cigarette and looking at me through the glasses of a Ray Ban. He tells me that this land is his grandfather’s land and that they are never going to leave it. A couple of buddies are surrounding him, who apparently came for support from other villages.

The situation for the Bedouin in the Negev is dire. Their traditional lifestyle is threatened, as the Israeli governement tries to force them into cities, fixed urban dwellings. It is quite reminiscent of how the native americans had to give up their ways. Many react radically.

Looking at the landscape surrounding Juma and the village, I wonder what keeps them here. But for them there is no doubt: “It is a good life here”, Juma says. “We drink tea, we drink coffee. We look at the land.”

It is certainly a different connection to the soil, one that is probably unfathomable for people who grew up and lived in cities. I ask what they do now, with the village destroyed. But Juma just says that they do what they always do: “The government destroys. We rebuild.”

In the following barrage against the government, though, he makes a very clear destinction. “It is the government that is bad. Not the Jews.”

In the morning while the destruction began, I was reading of men who wept upon seeing their homes destroyed. But now the situation presents itself differently. Maybe there were some cries; I don’t know. Now they are smiling, which strikes me as a very odd reaction to the bulldozing of your home.  Maybe it is the defiance that they stand up to the Government that infuses even more pride. Houses are destroyed, they rebuild. They slap their shoulders and celebrate the simple fact that it takes more than bulldozers to scare them off their grandfather’s land.

All photos in this post by svenjakleinschmidt.com

Find some further reading in the form of an eyewitness account of the morning hours over at Tikun Olan. And the guardian now has a video of the destruction.