For days on end I have spent my time with countless Bedouins in the Negev, brought there by various NGO activists who wanted me to see how badly the Bedouins are treated by the Israeli Jews, and now I feel it’s time I meet a Bedouin who loves to represent himself, and his people, without…
A focus of this year’s U.S. State Department human rights report on Israel was Bedouin rights. The report issued Thursday noted the Bedouin in its introduction, which it did not previously, and examined at length the demolition of Bedouin dwellings in 2013, a result of Israel’s relocation policies. “While Arab communities in the country generally…
This four-decade-old city was meant to kick-start an urbanization of Bedouin life that would lead to a new prosperity in the Negev. But if the Israeli government is hoping to use Rahat as a model for its current push to forcibly settle other Bedouins in urban developments, they have a struggle ahead. The reality check…
(JTA) — This past May, I made a YouTube video with the Israeli NGO Rabbis for Human Rights that drew a parallel between my role as Tevye in “Fiddler on the Roof,” in which the Jews in Sholem Aleichem’s tale faced expulsion from the Russian shtetl of Anatevka, and a Knesset proposal to forcibly displace…
(JTA) — In this unofficial Bedouin town of 14,000 not far from Beersheva in the Negev Desert, families live in clusters of shanties with intermittent electricity provided by generators or solar panels. A communal structure has soft plastic walls and dirt floors, with a small pit at one end for an open fire that provides the…
The Israeli government is shelving a proposal to resettle tens of thousands of Bedouin residents of the Negev that had drawn fierce criticism. One of the proposal’s main architects, Benny Begin, told reporters on Thursday that the so-called Prawer-Begin Plan would be revised. He said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had approved delaying presentation of the…
(JTA) — They can’t agree on the project’s goal. They can’t agree on who supports it. They can’t even agree on its name. But when it comes to the Israeli government’s plan to relocate 30,000 Negev Bedouin, representatives and allies of the Bedouin community agree with the right wing on one thing: the Prawer plan must…
Nelson Mandela with wife Winnie Mandela and Jewish comrade-in-arms Joe Slovo, May 1990 / Getty Images When I heard on Thursday afternoon about the death of Nelson Mandela at age 95, my mind was a jumble of complicated thoughts. I thought about the day I first learned about the South African freedom struggle, in the…
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