Sprung from Egyptian jail, Bedouin finds his new home to be razed by Israel

Planning authorities have slapped a demolition order on the makeshift home of a Bedouin Israeli who was released four months ago from an Egyptian prison after serving 15 years on charges of spying for Israel.

Ouda Tarabin was returned to Israel in December 2015 amid much fanfare following intense diplomatic efforts between Jerusalem and Cairo to secure his release.

After his release, Tarabin, who denied spying for Israel, enjoyed a well-publicized audience with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who said he had intervened on the Bedouin’s behalf with three Egyptian presidents — Hosni Mubarak, Mohammed Morsi and the current leader, Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi — and had even sent his personal representative, Yitzhak Molcho, to ensure Tarabin’s release on the date the Egyptians had promised.

“The State of Israel looks after all its citizens, without exception,” Netanyahu said at the time.

Since then, Tarabin has been living with his parents in an unrecognized Bedouin village in the northern Negev Desert, and recently began building a corrugated metal house for himself close to a nearby landfill.

But he told the Walla news website that authorities had deemed the structure illegal.

“They came to me about 15 days ago with the order to demolish the house, which I started to build a month after coming back from prison,” Tarabin explained to Walla, adding that he spent some NIS 60,000 ($15,900) on the roughly 100-square-meter (1,075-square-foot) structure.

“They should be ashamed,” Tarabin said Tuesday.

“I’m furious. I have no house to sleep in, I’m currently sleeping at my parents’ home, aren’t they ashamed to destroy my house?”

The authorities told him the house was considered illegal because he had not built it close enough to his parents’ home, he said.

Tarabin, who has postponed his upcoming wedding until he finds an alternative home, said he contacted the Prime Minister’s Office to sort out the problem, explaining that he was about to marry and that the hut was temporary as he was buying a plot of land in the officially recognized nearby Bedouin city of Rahat.

Members of Tarabin’s clan say they were moved by Israel in 1956 to their current location, a patch of land in the Negev flanked on one side by fences of the Dudaim dump, created in the early 1990s.

Israel insists their presence there is illegal, but efforts to relocate the extended family have so far failed.

Israel regularly razes homes of Bedouins, other Arab Israelis, and also Jews who are found to have zoning or code infractions, and the Israeli Arab leadership says they plan to embark on a major campaign against the practice.

Critics say Arabs are forced to build illegally by discriminatory planning practices that favor the state’s Jewish residents.