{"id":35007,"date":"2013-10-14T12:57:19","date_gmt":"2013-10-14T11:57:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=35007"},"modified":"2015-05-05T22:21:22","modified_gmt":"2015-05-05T21:21:22","slug":"the-desert-of-israeli-democracy-a-trip-through-the-negev-desert-leads-to-the-heart-of-israels-national-nightmare","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2013\/10\/the-desert-of-israeli-democracy-a-trip-through-the-negev-desert-leads-to-the-heart-of-israels-national-nightmare\/","title":{"rendered":"The Desert of Israeli Democracy: A Trip Through the Negev Desert Leads to the Heart of Israel\u2019s National Nightmare"},"content":{"rendered":"

From the podium of the U.N. General Assembly, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seamlessly blended<\/a> frightening details of Iranian evildoing with images of defenseless Jews \u201cbludgeoned\u201d and \u201cleft for dead\u201d by anti-Semites in nineteenth century Europe. Aimed at U.S. and Iranian moves towards diplomacy and a war-weary American public, Netanyahu\u2019s gloomy tirade threatened to cast him as a desperate, diminished figure. Though it was poorly received in the U.S., alienating<\/a> even a few of his stalwart pro-Israel allies, his jeremiad served a greater purpose, deflecting attention from his country’s policies towards the group he scarcely mentioned: the Palestinians.<\/p>\n

Back in November 1989, while serving as a junior minister in the Likud-led governing coalition of Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, a younger Netanyahu told an audience at Bar Ilan University, \u201cIsrael should have taken advantage of the suppression of demonstrations [at China\u2019s Tiananmen Square], when the world\u2019s attention was focused on what was happening in that country, to carry out mass expulsions among the Arabs of the Territories. However, to my regret, they did not support that policy that I proposed, and which I still propose should be implemented.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now the country\u2019s top official, Netanyahu has updated the smokescreen strategy. While the prime minister ranted against Iran in New York City and in a meeting<\/a> with President Obama in the Oval Office, his government was preparing to implement the Prawer Plan, a blueprint for the expulsion of 40,000 indigenous Bedouin citizens of Israel from their ancestral Negev Desert communities that promised to \u201cconcentrate\u201d them in state-run, reservation-style townships. Authored by Netanyahu’s planning policy chief, Ehud Prawer, and passed by a majority of the members of the mainstream Israeli political parties in the Knesset, the Prawer Plan is only one element of the government\u2019s emerging program to dominate all space and the lives of all people between the river (the Jordan) and the sea (the Mediterranean).<\/p>\n

Expulsions in the Desert<\/strong><\/p>\n

On September 9th, I visited Umm al-Hiran, a village that the state of Israel plans to wipe off the map. Located in the northern Negev Desert, well behind the Green Line (the 1949 armistice lines that are considered the starting point for any Israeli-Palestinian negotiations) and inside the part of Israel that will be legitimized under a U.S.-brokered two-state solution, the residents of Umm al-Hiran are mobilizing to resist their forced removal.<\/p>\n

In the living room of a dusty but impeccably tidy cinderblock home on the outskirts of the village, Hajj al-Ahmed, an aging sheikh, described to a group of colleagues from the website Mondoweiss<\/a> and me the experience of the 80,000 Bedouin living in what are classified as \u201cunrecognized\u201d villages. The products of continuous dispossession, many of these communities are surrounded by petrochemical waste dumps and have been transformed into cancer clusters, while state campaigns of aerial crop destruction and livestock eradication have decimated their sources of subsistence.<\/p>\n

Although residents like al-Ahmed carry Israeli citizenship, they are unable to benefit from the public services that Jews in neighboring communities receive. The roads to unrecognized villages like Umm al-Hiran are lined with electric wires, but the Bedouins are barred from connecting to the public grid. Their homes and mosques have been designated \u201cillegal\u201d constructions and are routinely marked for demolition. And now, their very presence on their own land has been placed in jeopardy.<\/p>\n

Under the Prawer Plan, the people of Umm al-Hiran will be among the 40,000 Bedouins forcibly relocated to American-Indian-reservation-style towns constructed by the Israeli government. As the fastest growing group among the Palestinian citizens of Israel, the Bedouins have been designated as an existential threat to Israel\u2019s Jewish majority. \u201cIt is not in Israel\u2019s interest to have more Palestinians in the Negev,\u201d said<\/a> Shai Hermesh, a former member of the Knesset and director of the government\u2019s effort to engineer a \u201cZionist majority\u201d in the southern desert.<\/p>\n

According to<\/a> the website of the Or Movement, a government-linked organization overseeing Jewish settlement in the Negev, residents of the unrecognized villages will be moved to towns constructed \u201cto concentrate the Bedouin population.\u201d In turn, small Jews-only communities will be constructed on the remnants of the evicted Bedouin communities. They will be guaranteed handsome benefits from the Israeli government and lavish funding from private pro-Israel donors like the billionaire cosmetics fortune heir Ron Lauder. \u201cThe United States had its Manifest Destiny in the West,\u201d Lauder has declared. \u201cFor Israel, that land is the Negev.\u201d<\/p>\n

When I met al-Ahmed, he described a group of 150 strangers who had suddenly appeared at the periphery of his village the previous day. From a hilltop, he said, they had surveyed the land and debated which parcels each of them would receive after the Prawer Plan was complete. Al-Ahmed called them \u201cthe Jews in the woods.\u201d<\/p>\n

Several hundred meters east of Umm al-Hiran lies the Yattir Forest, a vast grove in the heart of the desert planted by the para-governmental Jewish National Fund (JNF) in 1964. The JNF\u2019s director at the time, Yosef Weitz, had headed the governmental Transfer Committee that orchestrated the final stages of Palestinian removal in 1948. For Weitz, planting forests served a dual strategic purpose: those like Yattir near the Green Line were to provide a demographic buffer between Jews and Arabs, while those planted atop destroyed Palestinian villages like Yalu, Beit Nuba, and Imwas would prevent the expelled inhabitants from returning. As he wrote in 1949, once Israel\u2019s Jewish majority had been established through mass expulsion, \u201cThe abandoned lands will never return to their absentee [Palestinian Arab] owners.”<\/p>\n

As darkness came to the desert, I set out with my colleagues into the piney woods of Yattir.\u00a0 In a small car, we wound along its unlit roads until we reached a gate bristling with barbed wire. This was the settlement-style village of Hiran — \u201cthe Jews in the woods,\u201d as al-Ahmed had put it. We called out into the night until the gate was opened. Then we parked in the middle of a compound of trailer homes. Like a shtetl in the Pale of Settlement, the hard-bitten Imperial Russian territory once reserved for Jewish residency, the place exuded a sense of suspicion and siege.<\/p>\n

A bearded religious nationalist stepped out of an aluminum-sided synagogue and met us at a group of picnic benches. His name was Af-Shalom and he was in his thirties.\u00a0 He was not, he said, permitted to speak until a representative from the Or Movement arrived. After a few uncomfortable minutes and half a cigarette, however, he began to hold forth. He sent his children, he told us, to school over the Green Line in the settlement of Susiya, just eight minutes away on an Israelis-only access road. He then added that the Bedouins were \u201cillegals\u201d occupying his God-given land and would continue to take it over unless they were forcibly removed. Just as Af-Shalom was hitting his stride, Moshe, a curt Or Movement representative who refused to give his last name, arrived to escort us out without a comment.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe World\u2019s Biggest Detention Center\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

Only a few kilometers from Umm al-Hiran, in the southern Negev Desert and inside the Green Line, the state of Israel has initiated another ambitious project to \u201cconcentrate\u201d an unwanted population. It is the Saharonim detention facility, a vast matrix of watchtowers, concrete blast walls, razor wire, and surveillance cameras that now comprise what the British Independent<\/em> has described<\/a> as \u201cthe world\u2019s biggest detention center.\u201d<\/p>\n

Originally constructed as a prison for Palestinians during the First Intifada, Saharonim was expanded to hold 8,000 Africans who had fled genocide and persecution. Currently, it is home to at least 1,800 African refugees, including women and children, who live in what the Israeli architectural group Bikrom has called<\/a> \u201ca huge concentration camp with harsh conditions.\u201d<\/p>\n

Like the Bedouins of the Negev\u2019s unrecognized villages, the 60,000 African migrants and asylum seekers who live in Israel have been identified as a demographic threat that must be purged from the body of the Jewish state. In a meeting with his cabinet ministers in May 2012, Netanyahu warned<\/a> that their numbers could multiply tenfold \u201cand cause the negation of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.\u201d It was imperative \u201cto physically remove the infiltrators,\u201d the prime minister declared. \u201cWe must crack down and mete out tougher punishments.\u201d<\/p>\n

In short order, the Knesset amended the Infiltration Prevention Act it had passed in 1954 to prevent Palestinian refugees from ever reuniting with the families and property they were forced to leave behind in Israel. Under the new bill, non-Jewish Africans can be arrested and held without trial for as long as three years. (Israel\u2019s Supreme Court has invalidated<\/a> the amendment, but the government has made no moves to enforce the ruling, and may not do so.) The bill earmarked funding for the construction of Saharonim and a massive wall along the Israeli-Egyptian border. Arnon Sofer, a longtime Netanyahu advisor, also urged<\/a> the construction of \u201csea walls\u201d to guard against future \u201cclimate change refugees.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe don\u2019t belong to this region,\u201d Sofer explained.<\/p>\n

In that single sentence, he distilled the logic of Israel\u2019s system of ethnocracy. The maintenance of the Jewish state demands the engineering of a demographic majority of nonindigenous Jews and their dispersal across historic Palestine through methods of colonial settlement. State planners like Sofer refer to the process as \u201cJudaization.\u201d Because indigenous Palestinians and foreign migrants are not Jews, the state of Israel has legally defined most of them as \u201cinfiltrators,\u201d mandating their removal and permanent relocation to various zones of exclusion — from refugee camps across the Arab world to walled-off West Bank Bantustans to the besieged Gaza Strip to state-constructed Bedouin reservations to the desert camp of Saharonim.<\/p>\n

As long as the state of Israel holds fast to its demographic imperatives, the non-Jewish outclass must be \u201cconcentrated\u201d to make room for exclusively Jewish settlement and economic development. This is not a particularly humane system, to be sure, but it is one that all within the spectrum of Zionist opinion, from the Kahanist right to the J Street left, necessarily support. Indeed, if there is any substantial disagreement between the two seemingly divergent camps, it is over the style of rhetoric they deploy in defense of Israel’s ethnocracy. As the revisionist Zionist ideologue Ze\u2019ev Jabotinsky wrote in his famous 1923 \u201cIron Wall\u201d essay<\/a> outlining the logic of what would become Israel\u2019s deterrence strategy, \u201cthere are no meaningful differences between our \u2018militarists\u2019 and our \u2018vegetarians.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

During the Oslo era, the time of hope that prevailed in mid-1990\u2019s Israel, it was the \u201cdovish\u201d Labor Party of Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Barak that began surrounding the Gaza Strip with barricades and electrified fencing while drawing up plans for a wall separating the West Bank from \u201cIsrael proper.\u201d (That blueprint was implemented under the prime ministership of Ariel Sharon.)<\/p>\n

\u201cUs over here, them over there\u201d was the slogan of Barak\u2019s campaign for reelection in 1999, and of the Peace Now camp supporting a two-state solution at the time. Through the fulfillment of the Labor Party\u2019s separationist policies, the Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank have gradually disappeared from Israel\u2019s prosperous coastal center, consolidating cities like Tel Aviv as meccas of European cosmopolitanism — \u201ca villa in the jungle,\u201d as Barak said.<\/p>\n

With the post-Oslo political transition that shattered Israel\u2019s \u201cpeace camp,\u201d ascendant right-wing parties set out to finish the job that Labor had started. By 2009, when Israel elected the most hawkish government in its history, the country was still full of \u201cinfiltrators,\u201d the most visible of whom were those African migrants, deprived of work permits and increasingly forced to sleep in parks in south Tel Aviv. According to a report<\/a> by the newspaper Haaretz on a brand new Israel Democracy Institute poll on Israeli attitudes, \u201cArabs no longer top the list of neighbors Israeli Jews would consider undesirable, replaced now by foreign workers. Almost 57% of Jewish respondents said that having foreign workers as neighbors would bother them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Unrestricted by the center-left\u2019s pretensions to tolerance, rightist members of the government launched a festival of unprecedented racist incitement. Interior Minister Eli Yishai of the Shas Party (replaced after the 2013 election), for example, falsely described<\/a> African asylum seekers as infected with \u201ca range of diseases\u201d and lamented that they \u201cthink the country doesn\u2019t belong to us, the white man.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cUntil I can deport them,\u201d he promised<\/a>, \u201cI’ll lock them up to make their lives miserable.\u201d<\/p>\n

At a May 2012 anti-African rally in Tel Aviv, on a stage before more than 1,000 riled up demonstrators, Knesset member and former Israeli army spokesperson Miri Regev proclaimed<\/a>, \u201cThe Sudanese are a cancer in our body!\u201d Incited into a violent frenzy, hundreds of protesters then rampaged through south Tel Aviv, smashing the windows of African businesses and attacking any migrant they could find. \u201cThe people want the Africans to be burned!\u201d they chanted.<\/p>\n

As during other dark moments in history, eliminationist cries booming from an urban mob against a class of outcasts signaled a coming campaign of ethnic purification. And following the night of shattered glass, the cells of Saharonim continued to fill up.<\/p>\n

Going South<\/strong><\/p>\n

Just as Western media consumers will find details about the Prawer Plan and the Saharonim camp hard to come by, casual visitors to the Negev Desert will find little evidence of the state\u2019s more disturbing endeavors. Instead, highway signs will direct them to a little museum at Sde Boker, the humble kibbutz that Israel\u2019s first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, called home.<\/p>\n

In Ben Gurion\u2019s memoirs, he fantasized about evacuating Tel Aviv and settling five million Jews in small outposts across the Negev, where they would be weaned off the rootless cosmopolitanism they inherited from diaspora life. Just as he resented the worldly attitude of Jews from Tel Aviv and New York City, Ben Gurion was repelled by the sight of the open desert, describing it as a \u201ccriminal waste\u201d and \u201coccupied territory.\u201d\u00a0 Indeed, from his standpoint, the Arabs were the occupiers. As early as 1937, he had plans for their removal, writing in a letter to his son<\/a> Amos, \u201cWe must expel Arabs and take their places.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ben Gurion\u2019s house is an austere-looking, single-story structure, sparsely furnished and poorly lit. The separate, spartan bedrooms he and his wife slept in are impeccably preserved, as though they might return home at any time. Nearby is a compact, somewhat shabby museum commemorating his legacy in a series of exhibits that do not appear to have been updated for at least a decade.<\/p>\n

The site is a crumbling remnant of a bygone era that the country has left in the dust. The enlightened public of Israel\u2019s coastal center has turned its back on the desert, preferring instead to face toward the urbane capitals of Europe, while the rest of the country draws increasing energy from the religious nationalist fervor emanating from the hilltops of the occupied West Bank. In the Negev, perhaps all that endures of Ben Gurion’s legacy is the continuous expulsion of the Bedouins.<\/p>\n

On a gravelly path leading towards his home, a series of plaques highlight tidbits of wisdom from that Israeli founding father. One quote stands out from the others. Engraved on a narrow slab of granite, it reads, \u201cThe State of Israel, to exist, must go south.\u201d<\/p>\n

________________________<\/p>\n

Max Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in the <\/em>New York Times, the <\/em>Los Angeles Times, the Daily Beast, the <\/em>Nation, the Huffington Post, the Independent Film Channel, Salon.com, Al Jazeera English, and other publications. He is the author of the bestselling book <\/em>Republican Gomorrah.\u00a0His new book, just published, is <\/em>Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel<\/a> (Nation Books)<\/em><\/p>\n

Copyright 2013 Max Blumenthal<\/i><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 tomdispatch.com<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Join the BDS-BOYCOTT, DIVESTMENT, SANCTIONS<\/i> <\/b><\/span>campaign to protest the Israeli barbaric siege of Gaza, illegal occupation of the Palestine nation\u2019s territory, the apartheid wall, its inhuman and degrading treatment of the Palestinian people, and the more than 7,000 Palestinian men, women, elderly and children arbitrarily locked up in Israeli prisons.<\/p>\n

DON’T BUY<\/b> PRODUCTS WHOSE<\/b> BARCODE<\/b> STARTS WITH<\/b> 729<\/b>, which indicates that it is produced in Israel.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 DO YOUR PART! MAKE A DIFFERENCE!<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

7 2 9: BOYCOTT FOR JUSTICE!<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

While the prime minister ranted against Iran in New York City and in a meeting with President Obama, his government was preparing to implement the Prawer Plan, a blueprint for the expulsion of 40,000 indigenous Bedouin citizens of Israel from their ancestral Negev Desert communities that promised to \u201cconcentrate\u201d them in state-run, reservation-style townships.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35007","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-palestine-israel-gaza-genocide"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35007","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35007"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35007\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35007"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35007"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35007"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}