Tens of thousands of Palestinian Arab Bedouin, the indigenous inhabitants of the Negev region, live in informal shanty towns, or “unrecognized villages,” in the south of Israel. Discriminatory land and planning policies have made it virtually impossible for Bedouin to build legally where they live, and also exclude them from the state’s development plans for the region. The state implements forced evictions, home demolitions, and other punitive measures disproportionately against Bedouin as compared with actions taken regarding structures owned by Jewish Israelis that do not conform to planning law. [...]
The state controls 93 percent of the land in Israel, and a government agency, the Israel Land Administration (ILA), manages and allocates this land. The ILA lacks any mandate to disburse land in a fair and just fashion, and members of the Jewish National Fund, which has an explicit mandate to develop land for Jewish use only, constitute almost half of the ILA’s governing council, occupying all the seats not held by Israeli government ministries. While the Bedouin were traditionally a nomadic people, roaming the Negev in search of grazing land for their livestock, they had already adopted a largely sedentary way of life prior to 1948, settling in distinct villages with a well defined traditional system of communal and individual land ownership. Today they comprise 25 percent of the population of the northern Negev, but have jurisdiction over less than 2 percent of the land there.
Planning in Israel is highly centralized, and state planners fail to include the Palestinian Arab population, especially the Bedouin, in decision making and in developing the master plans that govern zoning, construction, and development in Israel. Even though Bedouin villages in the Negev pre-date Israel’s first master plan in the late 1960s, state planners did not include these villages in their original plans, rendering these longstanding communities “unrecognized.” As a result, according to Israel’s Planning and Building Law, all buildings in these communities are illegal, and state authorities refuse to connect the communities to the national electricity and water grids, or provide even basic infrastructure such as paved roads. Israeli policies have created a situation whereby tens of thousands of Bedouin citizens in the Negev have little or no alternative but to live in ramshackle villages and build illegally in order to meet their most basic shelter needs. [...]
Since the 1970s Israeli authorities have demolished thousands of Bedouin homes in the unrecognized villages, many of them comprising no more than tents or shacks. In the past year alone Israeli officials have demolished hundreds of structures, and placed warnings of intended demolition on hundreds more. Israeli officials contend that they are merely enforcing zoning and building codes, but the state systematically demolishes Bedouin homes while overlooking or retroactively legalizing illegal construction by Jewish citizens. [...]
Planning officials carry out “administrative” home demolitions without any judicial oversight. Even in cases where, by law, officials must obtain a judicial warrant for demolition, judges issue the warrants during court proceedings without the presence of the Bedouin home owner, who is almost never identified or notified of the proceedings. In recent years, most Bedouin have given up any attempt to appeal home demolition orders in court since historically no Israeli judge has overturned a home demolition order in the unrecognized villages. Bedouin and their lawyers claim that they have no effective right to appeal: bringing such court cases is costly and futile, they say, and judges may add criminal charges for building or maintaining an “illegal” dwelling that can have consequences such as jail time or a hefty fine for the homeowner. Some Bedouin have demolished their own homes in an attempt to avoid such charges and to salvage as much as possible from their homes. [...]
