Aletho News

New Settlement Built in Negev to Judaise Area, Displace Indigenous Bedouin Communities

The first housing plots in the new Negev settlement of Carmit went on sale this week.

A representative of the Or Movement, which promotes settlement construction in the Negev and the Galilee, said Carmit is being advertised as a town for “affluent immigrants from English-speaking countries.”

“There are 80 families of British, Americans and South Africans who are coming,” Roni Flamer, the movement’s co-founder, stated in March 2010.

Israel’s District Planning and Building Commission of the Southern Region approved the construction of 739 housing units for Carmit’s Phase A, back in 2005.

The new settlement has a wide collection of funders and supporters, including the Jewish Agency, the Metar Local Council, the Jewish National Fund, JNF – USA, JNF – UK, the Ministry of Construction and Housing, the Israel Land Administration, the Ministry for the Development of the Negev and Galilee, the American Evangelical group John Hagee Ministries, the OR Movement and various private donors.

Jewish National Fund chairman Effie Stenzler remarked that his organization “maintains that the first priority in Israel is the development of the Negev and Galilee, and that is why we have joined forces in the establishment of Carmit. The goal for the establishment of this community is to bring hundreds of new immigrant families, along with young native Israelis from central Israel.”

The first 116 plots are now on the market, and residents are expected to move into the first neighborhood during 2013. The settlement is intended to comprise over 2,500 housing units, each on an area of 1.5 acres.

“Marketing the plots for detached houses in the new community of Carmit is the next step in increasing the supply of land for residential purposes in the sought-after area of the northern Negev,” Construction and Housing Minister Ariel Attias said in a statement.

The JNF, whose slogan is “Caretakers of the land of Israel for over a century,” has a $600 million campaign to “revitalize” the Negev Desert, acting on the words of Israel’s first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, who said, “The Negev will be the test of the creative ability and pioneering valor of Israel.” The group is claiming property rights to el Araqib in order to plant a “peace forest.”

They continue on to say, “JNF’s major initiative to revitalize Israel’s southern region is called Blueprint Negev – a name that describes the far-reaching and visionary plan to increase the area’s population and improve living conditions for all of its inhabitants.”

Their plan to “improve living conditions for all” excludes the area’s indigenous Bedouin community.

Carmit, for example, is located next to the Cramim Forest in the northern Negev, near the location of the future Israeli army Intelligence center base, and is surrounded by Bedouin villages.

While the JNF acknowledges that there are currently 160,000 Bedouin residing in the Negev, half of those in villages unrecognized by Israel, the group claims on its website that Bedouin’s “nomadic existence ceased in the 1950s.”

In November 2005, the Israeli government adopted the “Negev 2015” plan, a $3.6 billion 10-year scheme aimed at increasing the Jewish population of the Negev by 200,000, by developing upscale residential neighborhoods, fast transportation networks for commuters, high tech establishments, and better educational facilities, for recognized residents only of course.

In recent months the JNF and the Israel Land Authority (ILA) have been working to “encourage” the remaining nomadic Bedouin communities to settle in cities and stay off the land they want to populate. The encouragement has come in the form of regular demolitions of Bedouin villages, like El Araqib, which has been destroyed 12 times.

Bedouin land expropriation must stop. Foreigners purchasing houses in the Negev must realize they are kicking others out of theirs. Israel must recognize that the Bedouin have a right to their traditional way of life, that they have been on the land since before the existence of the State of Israel, and that the psychological tactics of destruction and non-recognition cannot continue.

February 7, 2011 - Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular