Demolitions and Amendments: Coping with Cultural Recognition and Its Denial in Southern Israel

Abstract

This article examines how social preferences, in the form of cultural politics, become concretised in land laws. In Israel, Bedouin Arabs in unrecognised villages and Jewish farmers of individual farmsteads each faced governmental eviction orders and responded by seeking recognition of their land-use practices as legal. However, whereas Jewish farmers successfully mobilised place-based identities to gain legalisation, Bedouin Arabs' dwelling practices were not recognised as the legitimate basis for land claims, and their attempts to assert place-based identities have been denied. Instead, Bedouin Arabs faced pressures of 'de-cultural accommodation' and continued evictions. Ethnographic comparison of these two cases of 'illegal' settlement demonstrates how cultural identities -as former nomads or pioneer farmers -matter for land claims.They were called to go to the Negev not in order to expel Bedouins, but to settle the land as we did throughout this whole state. And even if it doesn't seem so to you, we need to settle the land. This is why I came from Morocco to here, to settle the land.(Knesset member Yaakov Edri, during Knesset debate of legislation to retroactively legalise Jewish farmsteads in the Negev, 26 October 2009) Why do we run to answer by law to 59 individual settlers and ignore 81,000 residents who live in forty settlements, that don't have drinking water and have no roads? They have children and have no schools, no education and no welfare. Is this because these are Jews and those are Bedouins? Is this policy right? Is an individual Jew more important than tens of thousands of Bedouin residents?(Knesset member Talab al-Sana, during same proceedings)NOMADIC PEOPLES 19 (2015): 95-119.