Israel’s Palestinian Population Still Struggling for Equal Rights, Recognition of Their Towns and Villages

By Maureen Meehan

The mosque minaret, stone houses and winding road that leads to the hilltop village of Ein Hod becomes immediately visible from several miles away as one exits the main coastal road about 10 miles south of Haifa.

The approach by car to the Palestinian village, however, becomes somewhat confusing as we draw closer. At the base of the hill upon which Ein Hod is perched, a large sign suddenly appears in English and Hebrew, welcoming visitors to the “Artists’ Village” of Ein Hod. In the lead car, Mohammed al-Haija drives past the scenic village’s open entrance gate through which large sculptures, murals and old Arab houses can be seen. He indicates with his arm out the window to keep following him another hundred meters or so, then stops to explain.

The Arab village of Ein Hod was captured and depopulated by Jewish forces during the war of 1948, he says, when the village’s 900 Palestinian residents were expelled with only what they could carry on their backs. Mohammed’s grandfather, along with 25 members of his family, headed for the hills but, by design, didn’t get very far. In fact, they got only a half-mile.

“They decided to hide right up there,” explained Mohammed, pointing up the hill and across the small valley to his own village of Ein Hod. “They stayed in the shelters that were up there for their cows and sheep, and they also set up tents. In 1951 they began to build makeshift homes, and Ein Hod was re-created.”

On the outskirts of the “artists’ village Ein Hod, just past a well-cared-for cattle farm, the paved road ends and a rocky road begins. The road is wildly circuitous and cars cannot drive more than five miles per hour because of the rocks and deep crevices. Mohammed still leads the way, which seems endless at such a slow pace over treacherous terrain.

Finally we reach “re-created” Ein Hod and are advised not to drive in as the roads in town are really just pathways that run between the 30 or so houses. The village, however, is charming, clean, and well-organized.

Almost anywhere one looks, colorful gardens, potted plants on balconies and rooftops and well-pruned fruit trees can be seen—not to mention the entire valley and Mediterranean Sea in the distance. The town park, which is in back of Mohammed’s home, is an elaborate garden of stone sculptures surrounded by extraordinary flowers and bushes. Indeed, artists appear to live here as well.

Mohammed, director of the Association of Forty, explains that Ein Hod, along with at least 40 other Palestinian villages in both northern and southern Israel, is “unrecognized” by the Israeli government and therefore receives no municipal or state services such as electricity, running water, access roads, health and educational facilities, sewage and communications services.

Many of these villages came into being as a result of the Israeli “present/absent” law, passed in the early 1950s, whereby all Palestinians expelled from their homes in 1948 were prohibited from returning to them after having been “absent” for more than one month.

Of the nearly one million Palestinians uprooted from their homes in 1948, some 150,000 remained within the boundaries of Israel. Because many of the villages from which Palestinians fled were subsequently razed to the ground and deliberately obliterated from maps of Israel, Palestinians who remained in Israel after 1948 in many cases have been forced to rebuild their homes and re-establish villages illegally, but on land that was once theirs. Thus the “unrecognized village” phenomenon.

The Association of Forty, which lobbies for recognition of unrecognized villages and equal rights for their inhabitants, was formed 10 years ago in Ein Hod in response to an Israeli government decision to adopt recommendations laid out in the officially-sponsored Markovich Report, which suggested the government impose high fines, demolition orders and imprisonment on Arab Israeli citizens in order to put a stop to unlicensed construction.

Today there are some 200,000 displaced Palestinians (out of a total Palestinian population in Israel of 900,000—comprising nearly one-fifth of Israel’s population), living in Israel with no right to return to their villages or to build proper homes and towns. Of the displaced Palestinians, some 70,000 live in villages or towns that are not recognized by the Israeli authorities.

The towns are excluded from official plans and maps, as though they do not exist. All construction of any type, including repairs to existing buildings, is regarded as illegal and can be demolished at any time.

Thousands of structures in these villages have indeed been served with demolition orders, which are administrative and therefore do not pass through the courts, although offenders face prosecution in the courts where, in addition to heavy fines and sometimes imprisonment, they are periodically ordered to demolish their own homes.

In Ein Hod, Mohammed and others from among its 250 residents (all of whom are descendants of the original Mohammed Al-Haija and therefore all related) described their lives in a village where there are no social services or utilities.

“We use generators, mobile phones, solar power and the water, well, we buy and run a small amount up from the artists’ colony,” said Bassim al-Haija, who works as a gardener at a nearby Orthodox Jewish school. He described Ein Hod’s one-room school that goes up to fifth grade, after which time children must travel to a nearby Arab town.

“The problem is the road in and out of the village gets washed out and muddy in the winter and it takes so long to get in and out under normal conditions,” he said, adding that two people in need of emergency medical care have died while being transported on the snaking road.

“But we are not intending to leave here and we hope our children will feel the same way,” said Bassim. “Our grandfather, the grandfather of everyone here, died in 1986 after a long struggle to maintain his home and family here.”

Mohammed, founder of the Association of Forty, says that in addition to the struggle for recognition and services, another goal of the group is to gain recognition of the Arab community in Israel as a national minority and to be treated as citizens with equal rights.

“Israel’s racism is reflected in its own definition as a Jewish state and manifested in the Law of Return [which gives the right to Jews anywhere in the world to obtain Israeli citizenship] while we are uprooted and prohibited from returning to our homes or even owning land and homes,” he said. “Israel’s insistence on being a Jewish state to the exclusion of equal rights for its non-Jewish citizens threatens the very security it claims to need. After all, Israel is in the minority in the Middle East.”

Arab Bedouin in the Negev Desert

The Negev desert, where the majority of unrecognized villages are located, was inhabited almost exclusively by semi-nomadic Bedouin tribes for the past five centuries until 1948, when Jewish fighters expelled an estimated 80,000 of the 90,000 Negev Bedouin, says Sheikh Jaber Abu Kaf of the unrecognized Abu Kaf village—again, a village formed by the tribe’s patriarch as a result of displacement three generations ago.

Sitting on the floor upon colorful embroidered cushions, Sheikh Abu Kaf described to the Washington Report how nearly every structure in the sprawling village has a demolition order on it, including the cement building in which we were sitting, which offers a break from the searing desert sun. “We use plastic or tin to build—rarely cement—because we never know when they will decide to carry out the [demolition] order,” he said. “But we must keep building and when they come to destroy, we resist them.”

He explained that when Bedouin agree to or are forced to move into planned development townships, ostensibly offered by Israel for the purpose of civilizing, organizing and modernizing these descendents of Arab nomads, “we lose our land automatically. So we must stay on it even though we receive no basic services like roads, water and schools.”

“We are all legally Israeli citizens, but only on paper…the Israeli government still makes every effort to get rid of us while building [Jewish settlements] around us as if we don’t exist and have no needs,” said Sheikh Abu Kaf. “We live here in shacks and tents, like refugees on land that was once our ancestral home.”

Abed Karim al-Ataiga, Association of Forty representative in the Negev, explained that the development towns provide no land or space for maintaining livestock or for farming, nor do they provide any other source of employment. “They are an insidious effort to strip the Bedouin of their traditional lifestyle and to destroy our future as a people.” He added that of the seven development towns, only one has a Bedouin mayor. All the rest are Jewish appointees of the Israeli government.

It is worth noting that the land upon which the planned townships are located belongs to the state of Israel—through the Jewish National Fund and Jewish Agency as does 93 percent of the land in Israel—and under JNF and Jewish Agency rules cannot be given or sold to a non-Jew.

A drive through a development town with Abed revealed that, though they were set up over 12 years ago by Israel to “modernize” the Bedouin, not one of the townships has a municipal sewage system, and many still lack roads, clinics, electricity and telephone service. Only one of them, Rahat, the one with the Bedouin mayor, has a bank and a post office. Abed pointed out that while Rahat serves two and a half times as many citizens as the nearby Jewish town of Ofakim, it gets less than half as much funding as does the Jewish town.

Seventy-year-old Hassan Faraj al-Assad, looking out over the endless desert view (and past what remains of his modest stone house that was demolished five years ago), says he and his family could never live in a development town.

“We’re not used to living cooped up side-by-side in cement houses with nowhere to graze our animals and raise our children, to let them run,” he said as he waved his hand disdainfully at the development town just down the hill.

“I was asked to move there many times by the Israeli government,” he continued. “They thought destroying my home would convince me and my family to accept the offer. They don’t know the Bedouin people...and it seems they’re not wise enough to learn.”

Maureen Meehan is a free-lance journalist who covers the West Bank and Jerusalem.

SIDEBAR

LABOR’S YOSSI BEILIN SAYS HE’LL GO TO BAT FOR UNRECOGNIZED VILLAGES IN ISRAEL

Labor Party dove Yossi Beilin told the Washington Report that all demolition orders hanging over homes and buildings in Israel’s 40 or so unrecognized villages should be frozen. Referring to the Negev in southern Israel where some 60,000 Bedouin live in numerous villages and communities without basic services, Beilin suggested that people move closer together to make it easier for the government to provide services.

He disagrees with the concept of forcing people to live in places they don’t want to be, like the so-called development towns, but he says the Israeli government may not be prepared to spend the hundreds of millions of dollars necessary to provide basic services and infrastructure.

“The solution lies in a compromise. Not all unrecognized villages will be recognized, but no one should be denied the essential services nor treated like second-class citizens,” said Beilin. He recognizes that the Negev Bedouin “have it really bad. It will take at least four to five years of a comprehensive program to put them on an equal footing with the rest of Israel.”

He admits there is a problem with the ability of the Bedouin to prove they own the land upon which they are living and grazing their flocks. “The government says ‘prove it,’ and of course they cannot, but they say ‘we’ve been living here for hundreds of years.’”

While Beilin, Prime Minister Barak’s point man among Israel’s Arab population during the recent electoral campaign, genuinely appears concerned for the Bedouin and abhors the legal discrimination against Israel’s Arab population, he defends the idea of a Jewish state.

“The basis of our democracy lies in the fact that it is a Jewish state, but there should never be a second-class citizen. We should continue as a Jewish state so long as non-Jews are treated equally,” says Beilin, “but at the moment there are many faults in that concept.”

When asked how equality in land and housing rights can be achieved, considering the existence of the Jewish National Fund and other such agencies that administer more than 93 percent of the land in Israel, and whose charters state that the land can be lived upon, worked upon and owned only by Jews, Beilin is quick to call for the abolition of the JNF.

“The original idea of the JNF was to buy land from Arabs and give it to Jews, but now the JNF must stop taking land from Arabs and handing it over to Jews,” he said. “In fact, the JNF should be abolished. It is totally redundant and no longer necessary. We need a legal way to put an end to its work.”

Mohammed al-Haija, director the Association of Forty who is a personal friend of Yossi Beilin, believes the idea of abolishing the JNF is fine but the fact that land in Israel has already been taken out of the hands of its Arab population makes the abolition of the Fund a moot point.

“Laws, attitudes and legalized discrimination and racism have to be changed for there to be any real coexistence here,” said Mohammed.—M.M.