Israel's Policy of Judaization Is Swallowing Arab Towns and Building Synagogues in Their Place - Haaretz Editorial - Haaretz.com
A few hundred meters from the new neighborhood being built in Dimona, roughly 500 Bedouin live in the unrecognized village of Ras Jrabah. That village was built before the state was founded.
Its oldest residents still recall how they helped to build the nearby city. Since then, Dimona has developed and has gradually been pushing them out. Now, it plans to "swallow" the village without leaving a trace. The site should be cleared to make room for a "high-quality population," according to Dimona Mayor Benny Biton.
Dimona Mayor Benny Biton, in 2018.Credit: Ilan Assayag
The plan to evict the residents of Ras Jrabah in order to expand Dimona is an example of the government's crude, arrogant, discriminatory and abusive treatment of its non-Jewish citizens. Everything is permissible in the name of its Judaization policy.
The current government treats the Bedouin even worse than previous governments did. In 2024, there was a 400 percent increase in the execution of demolition orders in the Negev.
In addition, the Ministerial Committee for Bedouin Affairs has agreed that Minister Amichai Chikli's plan to concentrate residents of unrecognized Bedouin villages into a few towns will be expanded to additional parts of the Negev.
Of the roughly 35 unrecognized villages in the Negev, 10 are in immediate danger of being demolished. In some cases, the state plans to build new Jewish communities or expand existing ones on their ruins.
To do so, the government is advancing a plan that would enable transferring thousands of Bedouin to temporary trailer parks that would be built in existing Bedouin towns. But the level of infrastructure in these trailer parks would be lower than is required for permanent towns. If this plan is approved, it might well enable a rapid, forcible eviction of thousands of Bedouin into shantytown neighborhoods with poor living conditions.
- 'We will die here': Bedouin village fights Israel resettlement plan
- As Bedouin Israelis are kicked off their land, they wonder how Jews can live there
- Meet the new kind of Jewish settlers: pushing communities out of the Negev
Sixteen of the 18 communities whose establishment the government has approved over the last decade were intended for Jews. The practical result is that the land available to the Bedouins has shrunk and they have not been able to legalize their villages.
One example is the string of communities planned to run along Route 25 between Be'er Sheva and Dimona. Almost all are slated to be built on or near the lands of unrecognized Bedouin villages.
Instead of working for the benefit of the people living in the Negev, the government is promoting an expensive, unjust suburban solution aimed at people living outside it. The former are Bedouins; the latter are Jews.
Similarly, due to planning and marketing decisions, only about a quarter of the apartments in a new neighborhood of Jisr al-Zarqa – a neighborhood that was supposed to ease the impoverished Arab town's housing shortage – were actually bought by village residents.
The new residents, most of whom are Jews, are now preoccupied with the questions of when a bypass road will be paved and whether it will be possible to build a synagogue in their "unique gated luxury complex," as the developers' marketing material called it.
This planning discrimination against the Arab community, boosted by the nation-state law, is sentencing many of the community's members to poverty-stricken lives with no future. This must stop.
The above article is Haaretz's lead editorial, as published in the Hebrew and English newspapers in Israel.