The government demolishes Bedouin homes based on discriminatory laws and rules, and without respect for the Bedouins’ dignity or the country’s human rights obligations, Human Rights Watch said, adding that the government should also withdraw proposed legislation that would discriminate against Bedouin with harsh rules on land and property rights and authorize large-scale displacement of Bedouin from generations-old communities, while severely restricting their ability to appeal.

Government officials have estimated that implementing the law would displace 30,000 Bedouin, while Israeli rights groups say the figure could be 40,000 or more.

“Israel has been shoving Bedouin out of their communities and into ever-shrinking space while encouraging and even helping Jewish Israelis to move in,” said Joe Stork, acting Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “Prime Minister Netanyahu should end the appalling discrimination against Israel’s Bedouin citizens, not support legislation that enshrines it.”

According to government figures, 200,000 Bedouin live in the country’s southern Negev region, the majority in 7 government-planned townships, and several thousand more in 11 Bedouin communities that the government is in the process of “recognizing.”

However, Israeli state planning documents and maps exclude 35 “unrecognized” Bedouin communities, where the government estimates that 70,000 to 90,000 people live.

Israel demolishes Bedouin homes in the Negev on the basis that they were built without permits, often in unauthorized communities. Israel has for decades refused either to legally recognize these communities or to allow their residents to gain title to ancestral land. The Israeli government has rejected or delayed discussion of proposed plans submitted by groups seeking authorization for Bedouin communities, making it impossible for residents to obtain building permits.

In contrast, the government takes an active role in planning and expanding Jewish communities in the region, and has retroactively authorized construction there by Jewish citizens. 

Bedouin have ancestral claims to lands on which their families have lived for generations.

However, Israeli authorities do not recognize Bedouin land claims without official ownership documents, which few have. Israel claims state ownership of Negev lands that are not registered to individual owners. While Israel has frequently granted Jewish communities and individual Jewish farmers long-term leases to use “state lands,” including lands expropriated from Israeli Bedouin, it has largely refused to grant Bedouin similar use.

Human Rights Watch has long documented the Israeli authorities’ discriminatory practices toward Bedouin and the discriminatory demolition of their homes.

Since March 2013 Human Rights Watch has documented demolition of 18 Bedouin homes and 11 other structures, including 8 tents where victims of previous demolitions were living.

The government should fully compensate Bedouin whose homes and property it has destroyed in violation of the right to housing and non-discrimination, Human Rights Watch said.

“The prime minister’s office has led the drive to push through this law that will forcibly displace thousands of Bedouin families,” Stork said. “Israel’s allies should tell the prime minister in no uncertain terms to shelve this discriminatory law.”

The joint UNRWA-Bimkom report analyses the consequences of the relocation which started in 1997 in order to expand the Ma’ale Adummim settlement, which, like all settlements is illegal under international law.

The study highlights the deterioration of the social and economic conditions of the Bedouin refugees transferred to Al Jabal village. The move to one central urban location has deprived these mobile pastoralist communities of social cohesion and is destroying their social fabric and traditional economic base.

According to UNRWA Spokesperson, Chris Gunness, “the Israeli authorities are currently considering plans to create a second centralised Bedouin village in the occupied West Bank”. “However”, says Gunness “the stark conclusions of this report may lead to a reassessment of this policy”.

The rural communities targeted to be transferred to the second village reject the move, stating it will irreparably damage their social fabric and their traditional economy, as in the case of Al Jabal. If implemented, such a move may amount to individual and mass forcible transfers and forced evictions contrary to international law.

Planning NGO, BIMKOM contends that the type of urban plans developed by the Israeli authorities for Al Jabal are not an appropriate solution: “The allocation of a small parcel for each family and the connection to minimal infrastructure can lead to significant harm to human rights. An appropriate plan should take into account socio-cultural aspects, provide subsistence and development opportunities, be developed with the villagers themselves and must be acceptable to them.”

Al Jabal village is next to the largest rubbish dump in the West Bank, where 700 tonnes of waste are disposed of each day. According to recent environmental studies, there are “high levels of toxic gases, which pose an immediate health threat to residents, but also cause internal and surface combustion at the dump site leading to explosions, land subsidence, surface fires and other safety hazards. High numbers of pests thriving off the site and its surroundings include rats, packs of dogs, cockroaches and flies, all of which pose significant health threats to livestock, the young and those of less robust health.

If the plan being considered by the Israeli authorities to relocate all remaining rural refugee Bedouin communities from the Jerusalem periphery to a second location – or other sites in the future – goes forward, the number of displaced people would be four times higher than the number relocated to Al Jabal. UNRWA remains concerned that more than six decades after they were first displaced from their homes, Palestine refugees continue to face the threat of displacement and loss of livelihood.

The draft “Law for Regularizing Bedouin Habitation in the Negev – 2012”, approved by the previous government, threatens at least 30,000 Bedouin in the country’s southern Negev/Naqab desert with forced eviction from their communities, which have never been officially recognized by the Israeli government.

“Forcibly evicting tens of thousands of Bedouin from communities where they have lived for generations cannot be justified in the name of economic development or any other reason – Israel’s new leaders must have the courage to venture where previous governments have ignored human rights standards,” said Ann Harrison, Middle East and North Africa Deputy Director at Amnesty International.

“What the proposed law does is send the Bedouin communities into a human rights desert by stripping already vulnerable citizens of legal safeguards against house demolitions and forced evictions. This blatantly violates international law.”

The proposed law is still on the table despite a chorus of objections to the plans raised during consultations with Bedouin communities and local human rights organizations, as well as in two letters from Amnesty International which have gone unanswered.

Bedouins in Israel face endemic discrimination and traumatic house demolitions have been taking place for years, resulting in forced evictions. If the law is passed it will open the doors to much more of the same.

But instead of scrapping the eviction plans altogether, the law merely proposes to stagger the implementation of demolition orders.

“Far from giving Bedouins a legal safeguard, this proposal just adds insult to injury,” said Ann Harrison.

The officials responsible for the eviction plans repeatedly highlighted the case of the excluded village of Wadi Na’am as an example of how the Bedouin would benefit from relocation under the proposed law. Residents of Wadi Na’am are willing to leave their village due to the dangerous conditions caused by a nearby chemical factory and other industries. But they are still eager to preserve their agriculture-based lifestyle.

The first Wadi Na’am residents moved there in the 1950s after being expelled from their ancestral lands in the southwestern Negev/Naqab desert.

Residents of the village have told Amnesty International that they explicitly object to the government’s plan to relocate them to Segev Shalom, to a location within range of the chemical factory, where they would be unable to continue tending livestock. Their preference would be to return to their ancestral lands.

Wadi Na’am is just one of dozens of Bedouin villages which would be affected under the proposed development plans.

“If the relocation of Wadi Na’am residents is being offered as the government’s best-case scenario, what must we fear for the other excluded villages?” said Ann Harrison.