Arab MKs to Kerry: Bedouin relocation a crime against humanity
‘Prawer plan constitutes ethnic cleansing under international law,’ charges former MK after week of tensions over resettlement plan
Haviv Rettig Gur is The Times of Israel's senior analyst.
Several Arab Members of Knesset accused Israel of “ethnic cleansing” and “a crime against humanity” in a harsh letter to US Secretary of State John Kerry on Thursday, protesting the government’s plan to relocate some 40,000 semi-nomadic Negev Bedouin from unsanctioned tent encampments to nearby planned towns.
The plan, conceived in the Prime Minister’s Office Planning Directorate by its director Udi Prawer, would consolidate a number of sprawling, unregulated tent cities into towns with modern infrastructures and government services. Some 40,000 members of the southern Bedouin population of 220,000 are slated to be relocated to the new towns.
The scheme has come under fire domestically and abroad. A “day of rage” on Saturday saw a number of protests against the plan around the world, including several within Israel that turned violent.
The letter, sent to Kerry during his visit this week to Israel, insists that the so-called Prawer Plan amounts to “ethnic cleansing by Israel that must be stopped,” and asked for his “immediate intervention [to stop] the dispossession of thousands from their lands.”
The letter notes that some of the Bedouin villages had existed “since before the founding of Israel, but Israeli governments have refused to recognize the settlements and have neglected them,” reads a Hebrew-language version of the letter.
The current plan “seeks to ‘resettle’ them by force in an environment that is opposed to their way of life,” the MKs wrote.
“This letter is part of the struggle of the Higher Coordinating Committee of Negev Arabs to bring international pressure to bear on the Israeli government to cancel the implementation of the Prawer Plan,” former Ra’am-Ta’al MK Taleb A-Sanaa, a Negev Bedouin, told Channel 10 News on Thursday.
Activists have said implementation of the plan would disrupt the Bedouin’s traditional lifestyle and abandon them to urban slums and systemic poverty, and complain that the Bedouin were not sufficiently consulted as the government developed the plan. Some have called the plan racist.
The government has dismissed the opposition to the plan, saying the status-quo of fast-growing unregulated tent-cities cannot be allowed to continue indefinitely.
“The Prawer plan is a flagrant violation of international conventions Israel has signed, especially the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights which enshrines the right to housing, and the Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention,” A-Sanaa accused.
“Israel must obey international law and stop the implementation of the [Prawer plan], which constitutes ethnic cleansing and is a crime against humanity according to international law,” he said.
Several hundred demonstrators gathered outside the Beersheba Magistrate’s Court Thursday in the latest protest against the plan. The demonstrators called for the release of over a dozen activists arrested last Saturday for alleged rock-throwing during a demonstration near the tent village of Hura against the plan.
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