Goal of Bedouin relocation: To expel as many Palestinians from their land as

possible
Forced relocation plan decrees overcrowding for West Bank Bedouin.
Nearby Jewish settlements, meanwhile, sprawl free.
By Amira Hass
Pages upon pages came out of the fax machine at the Civil Administrations Central
Planning Bureau last week.
They contained objections to the establishment of a Bedouin township to be named
Talet Nueima (in Hebrew, Ramat Nueima) north of Jericho,
which is slated for 12,500 people. This comes on top of objections sent in by
registered mail and email.
The Civil Administration subcommittee that deals with such objections will have to
read more than 200 objections. Opponents of the plan include Bedouin from the
Kaabneh and Jahalin tribes, whom the Civil Administration plans to expel from their
homes and resettle in the township together with the Rashaida tribe which is already
based in the area. Jericho and nearby Palestinian villages object to the plan as well.
The objectors are represented by the Jerusalem Legal Aid and Human Rights
Center; Bimkom Planners for Planning Rights; the Association for Civil Rights in
Israel; and attorneys Sliman Shahin, Basem Karajeh, Tawfek Jabarin and Shlomo
Lecker.
An oft-repeated objection is that the Civil Administration drafted the Talet Nueima
plan without consulting the Bedouin or the Palestinian communities in the area, and
without taking their needs into consideration.
Dozens of private individuals and activists in Israel/Palestine and abroad have also
sent in standard objections to the plan.
The Hebrew standard objection states, among other things, that: The plan
disregards the cultural characteristics of Bedouin society including the division of
the family complex, to which entrance is highly restricted. The objections note that
the families take great care to guard their privacy, and the privacy of women in
particular.
According to this argument: Allowing this part of their culture to exist requires
spatial planning that completely contradicts what the plan contains. Instead of small
two-family lots of a half dunam each, the lots must be much larger and include a
residential portion alongside a large area that will let family members keep their
flocks near their places of residence. This means at least three dunams (0.7 acres),
instead of a quarter dunam, per family.
The plan was preceded by the states decades-old policy of uprooting the Bedouin in
the West Bank (most of them refugees expelled from the Negev after 1948) by
reducing the space available to them, demolishing their shacks and blocking their
access to water and markets. The Civil Administration even considers the tarps that
protect them from the rain illegal construction and confiscates them.

To solve the problem of the Bedouins subhuman living conditions, which as everybody
knows came out of the blue, along comes the compassionate Talet Nueima plan (which
is comprised of four detailed master plans and two additional plans for roads).
In a letter to attorney Shlomo Lecker, Capt. Yaniv Yaari, a consulting officer in the
military legal advisers office in the West Bank, wrote: The plan ... was prepared to
create a suitable planning solution that took the populations needs into account ... in
accordance with proper planning principles .... Contrary to your claim, several meetings
and hearings have taken place in recent years in which your clients and you were given
full opportunity to have your say to present alternative solutions for the areas
inhabitants the members of the Bedouin population.
According to Yaari, As far as we are concerned, the fact that these talks did not
result in agreements is no indication of unwillingness to include the community in the
planning process, but only of the regional authorities position that the rationale and
planning of the proposed programs was preferable to those that you proposed.
The objection by Bimkom reveals significant shortcomings in planning (on top of the
original sin of forced relocation).
Its possible these shortcomings are innocent mistakes such as the assumption that
the Bedouins basic organizational unit is the nuclear, not the extended family, or that
the size of the average Bedouin nuclear family is 5.6 people, not the actual 7.1. Its
also possible that because of human error, there are crude discrepancies in the
various parts of the plan, which also includes the demolition of already-existing
homes of the Rashaida tribe.
Plans lack of sensitivity
But is the planning of a very wide road right through a village, to be used mainly
for military purposes (access to the nearby army base or training ground) a
mistake?
Bimkom says this road embodies the plans lack of sensitivity and brings into sharp
focus the plans functionalist aspect, which justifies the substandard planning that
forces the Bedouin, with their families and flocks, to crowd into closed and narrow
boxes stuck close together, and puts a military road, on which weapons of war will
be traveling, in the middle.
Are the tiny lots allocated for the construction of public buildings a mistake as
well? According to Bimkom experts, the plan allocates 3.4 square meters of
public buildings per person: roughly one-third of the 10 square meters accepted
for ultra-Orthodox Jewish families and ultra-Orthodox and Bedouin families
are about the same size.
By comparison, the new plans for the two settlements in the area has set aside
several times more space for public buildings: 80.7 square meters per person in
Beit Haarava and 449 (!) square meters per person in Almogs new neighborhood.
This mistake reflects the Civil Administrations raison detre and activity in the
West Bank: to expel as many Palestinians as possible from as much Palestinian land as
possible. Then crowd them into as tiny an area as possible to give Jews as much space,
comfort, convenience and quality of life as possible.

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"When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course
of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code
that glorifies it." - Frdric Bastiat