On Thanksgiving I went to the Naqab

This double rainbow greeted Haifa Thursday morning after the rainstorms. It stretched up from Haifa University and touches down here, in the middle of the chemical plant from which waft carcinogenic fumes for the noses of all who drive by. This was actually a Hezbollah target during the war in 2006- if a rocket hit here a lot of people would die from poisoning. Makes you wonder what they're manufacturing.

Naqab is the Arabic word for the Negev Desert. I was taken on a driving tour Thursday of a few of the 47 unrecognized Bedouin villages, the majority of which are located there. The people living here are the remainder of the indigenous Bedouin Arab population that somehow avoided expulsion in 1948 to Gaza, the West Bank, or Jordan. They have Israeli citizenship, many serve in the army, and they pay taxes. About 76,000 people are currently living in the unrecognized villages, any of which has more residents than your average Kibbutz. To be unrecognized by the State of Israel means that you do not have the services that people whose existence is recognized are entitled to- water, electricity, schools, health centers. Ambulances even don't go there- they just stop on the highway.

It was the proximity that surprised me. These people aren't out in the boondocks. Far from it. Five minutes outside of Beer Sheva, a thriving university town, we passed the first tin shacks that serve as family homes. The shacks were yards from the city water pipe emerging from underground, and underneath electric lines, but forbidden to connect to either.


Wadi Al Na'am:
In this village, just outside of Beer Sheva, 8,000 people live in a small sea of tin shacks, next to an electricity generating plant. They are not allowed to access the electricity. They have to bring their own water from elsewhere in tanks that aren't inspected and may not be clean. A strong chemical smell hung in the air around the plant. Wadi Al Na'am has one of, if not THE as I was told, highest cancer rates in the entire country. If you didn't see the numbers, you could just feel in the place that it wasn't good for your health. Every breath had that smell to it. Then, a BOOM made us all look around to a mushroom of smoke about 3/4 of a mile to our left, on the other side of the sea of shacks. The military was conducting a test. (In the Negev, where no one lives, of course!) The thing about Wadi Al Na'am is that people KNOW they are getting sick from living there, and they have told the government that they want to leave. Now that they want to leave, the government is telling them wait. When we left to the highway, yards from the last house, the sign for the turnoff was for the electric plant only. No sign for the village of 8,000. [I grew up in a town of about 4,000 and we had a lot of signs and also three stoplights and a McDonald's.]


A note on signage: our driver stopped by one of those electric grid things that come out of the ground that was surrounded by fence and on the fence there were signs warning of mortal danger- only in Hebrew. This is in a place surrounded by 8,000 people who speak Arabic.

Bir Haddaj:
One day, 3,000 people from Wadi Al Na'am decided they weren't going to take it anymore. On this particular Friday morning in the 1980s, the state woke up and there were more than 1,000 tents housing 3,000 people in the area now known (and recognized!) as Bir Haddaj. What to do what to do?! It's not very easy to just remove 3,000 people! The people of Bir Haddaj gave the government ultimatums. They said, if you don't give us another place to live, in 6 months we will build tin houses. After another 6 months, if you still don't give us a place that you recognize, we will build proper houses. Now, the village is recognized. (And as such, they have a school, a mosque that has an actual minaret, and of course the black water lines snaking across the ground and electricity that mark the 'recognized.')


There is a major problem with the way the government tries to settle the Bedouin in towns that they set up for them. The Bedouin know how to live a rural lifestyle, cultivating and herding animals. When they are crammed together in a place where the houses are all in single square lots, they suffer from an increase in poverty and there is a rise in all different kinds of diseases. But as it is with land in all of Mandate Palestine, if you don't have the power then you don't have access to the land. The guide pointed out that Jewish people can choose to live wherever they want- in Haifa, Jerusalem, Beer Sheva, or even Nablus or Hebron. But the Bedouin are stuck in places like Wadi Al Na'am breathing carcinogenic fumes that get into their food and water.

The story of Bedouin land ownership pre-1948 is also indicative of the greater history of land confiscation, whereby the state would prevent farmers from cultivating their land, and then declare it unused and usurp it. The 1950 law was used not only to bring absentee property (that of refugees who'd fled) under state ownership, but it also was used to take Bedouin land even if the owners hadn't fled. Under the British, if you made a land sale, you would have had to travel all the way to Tel Aviv to register the transaction with the colonial authority. That cost time and a lot of money. So, people settled on written contracts between themselves. Then come Israel. Since the person whose name the land is under on the books can't be found, the land MUST be absentee property that is for the State of Israel now (even though there are people farming it- just a small snag, nothing major).

For more on the unrecognized, I recommend THIS FILM by Adalah.