Rahat mayor, other local Bedouin leaders demand police end practice of blocking entrances to towns

Rahat mayor Talal Alkernawi sends a letter to senior police officials demanding law enforcement stop placing roadblocks at the entrances to Bedouin villages, calling the new practice a form of “collective punishment.”

Alkernawi, the mayor of Israel’s largest Arab city, heads the Forum of Bedouin Authorities in the Negev and sends the letter on behalf of the organization.

The letter — addressed to Negev region commander Amir Klein, Southern District commander Haim Bublil and Chief Commissioner Danny Levy — says the practice of erecting cinderblocks at the entrances to Bedouin towns lacks any legal anchoring. It urges police to “act using legal, measured and focused means, while communicating and coordinating with the heads of local councils.”

Alkernawi and other Bedouin council heads held an emergency meeting on Monday with Ra’am chairman Mansour Abbas and his fellow party member MK Waleed Alhawashleh to address the matter. The politicians convened in Tel Sheva, a Bedouin town whose entrance was blocked off for hours by police last week during a raid.

Police over the past month have been conducting army-style raids in an effort to fight surging crime in the Bedouin sector; however, local politicians have opposed the measures, saying the operations have done nothing to stem violence in their communities.

“We aren’t occupied towns, we are Israeli towns, the police cannot treat us like we are occupied. We aren’t in the West Bank, we aren’t in Gaza,” Alkernawi tells The Times of Israel.

“If the police want to conduct searches [in Bedouin towns], they should enter and conduct searches; if they want to fight crime, then they should fight crime. We are on their side,” he says. “But to come and close an entire village with cinderblocks? This is unacceptable to us; it’s collective punishment and we won’t be silent about it.”

He adds that the roadblocks harm law-abiding citizens who have to leave for work in the morning by keeping them stuck in traffic for long hours.

He says that National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, who declared the sweeping police operation last month, is “constantly pushing us into a corner to a situation that, God forbid, might lead to tensions between Bedouin and Jewish sectors.”

“It is hard for me to believe that the [Southern] district commissioner is at peace with police placing these roadblocks,” he says, claiming that the new policy is being advanced at the behest of Ben Gvir, rather than local law enforcement.