How not to solve the Bedouin problem

[Jefferson23]

As in the West Bank, the government's legal firepower has been tasked not with helping citizens or getting at the truth, but with keeping land out of Arab hands by any means possible.

By Don Futterman

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's recent order to Justice Minister Yaakov Neeman to find ways to retroactively legalize illegal outposts on privately held Palestinian land should surprise no one familiar with the coalition's contempt for Palestinians and our legal system: If we can't have Greater Israel, at least we can have Lesser Palestine. But the government's legal arsenal is also being deployed against another target - Israel's Bedouin citizens in the Negev.

Every few years, Israeli leaders decide to solve the Bedouin problem once and for all. There are no shortage of challenges in Bedouin society that could benefit from government intervention: poverty; lack of government services; grossly inadequate education; a sky-high birthrate; polygamy; involvement in smuggling, trafficking and car theft; and officially unrecognized shantytowns that keep spreading as Bedouin continue to be refused legal building permits.

But the problem that bothers our government is Bedouin land claims.

The Bedouin claim they own a portion of the Negev - about 640,000 dunams (160,000 acres ), or 4.9 percent of the Negev's total area - because these are their traditional tribal lands. The government argues that this figure is misleading, because the Bedouin want a much higher percentage of the choice areas centered around Metropolitan Be'er Sheva, conveniently forgetting that many Bedouin were forcibly relocated to this area by previous Israeli governments. The government believes this land must be kept in trust for Jewish settlement, based in part on trumped-up security fears, to prevent a band of Arab settlement connecting Gaza and the West Bank.

remainder: http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/how-not-to-solve-the-bedouin-problem-1.392403