- Moderator
- #141
Going back to the OT - there is merit to the compliant. From the NYT article linked to in the OT:
...Mr. Qian and the other members of some 70 Bedouin families are likely to be evicted soon from their homes in the hamlet of Umm al-Hiran, where they have been living since the 1950s. In their place, the Israeli government plans to build a community with nearly the same name, Hiran — but its expected residents will be religious, Zionist Jews.
The government says Umm al-Hiran is on state-owned land that it would like to develop, and it has fought a long legal battle to have the Bedouin families, about 1,000 people, relocated. This month, the Supreme Court ruled in a 2-1 decision that the families would have to leave. The court gave no date for when evictions could begin, and residents intend to appeal the decision.
The Bedouins say they do not want to leave land on which they have been living for more than half a century after being resettled there by the Israeli military. The government has promised compensation in the form of cash and land elsewhere, but the Bedouins say the decision to move them reflects discriminatory policies.
The land is "state-owned". They want to develop it. Ok. Why don't they develop it for the residents currently there? After all - the Israeli military settled them there in the first place. Or, why not develop up it to be a mixed community?
The policy certainly seems not only discriminatory but something from another era - like the way we used to "re-locate" Native Americans when we decided we wanted their land or decided their "reservation" was suddenly needed for white Christian expansion so we'd move them to yet another reservation (usually crappier).
For advocates of the future Jewish town of Hiran, the evictions are a matter of law and order.
“We are talking about state-owned lands on which people knowingly built on illegally,” said Liad Aviel, a government spokesman on Bedouins. “These people who built illegally on land that belongs to the state need to get off this land.”
But he added: “The court is very humane. They will not be kicked out of their homes without them having a solution.”
How is it "illegal" when the Israeli Military itself settled them there?
But supporters of the Bedouins view moving as acquiescence to a racist policy. The residents of Umm al-Hiran also say that the land the government has offered them in nearby Houra is already crowded and unsuitable for resettlement.
“This is a fight over our existence,” said Talab Abu Arar, a Bedouin member of Israel’s Parliament.
“The Israeli state sings to the world that it is a democratic state of Arabs and Jews,” he said, but “an Arab resident is prevented from his rights, while Jewish residents are given all their rights and more.”
Hassan Jabareen, chief attorney at the Arab legal rights group Adalah, which is representing the village, said that it was the first time the courts had ordered the evacuation of an entire hamlet, and that the reason for doing so — to build a Jewish community — set a dangerous precedent.
It sounds like they are trying to force them into ever more crowded and impoverished "reservations".
Clinton Bailey, an Israeli scholar who has studied the Bedouins for 45 years, said the military had concentrated them into one part of the Negev. Later, when Israel passed an absentee property law in 1953, Bedouins lost the rights to the land they used to live on, which had already been tenuous because most of them did not have deeds, just tribal acknowledgment of their territories, he said.
The Bedouins are the poorest and fastest-growing group in Israel, partly because of large, polygamous families. Some 70,000 Bedouins live in 35 communities that are off Israel’s planning grid, with no running water, power, roads, health care or education.
A $2 billion plan to resolve the Bedouins’ long-contested ownership claims to lands in the Negev was shelved in December 2013. It would have forced thousands of people to relocate, generally to smaller plots of land in government-built towns.
But Umm al-Hiran is unique among the Bedouin communities, its advocates say, because the Supreme Court acknowledged in its May 5 ruling that the residents were not trespassers. The government leased them land there until the 1980s, according to Adalah, the legal group. And Hiran will be built where Umm al-Hiran lies, suggesting that the government could also provide infrastructure for the Bedouins.
Hiran was part of a 2002 government plan to create several Jewish communities in the Negev to populate the sparse region, particularly contentious border areas like Umm al-Hiran, which is just miles from Israel’s de facto border with the West Bank.
The government said Umm al-Hiran’s residents could purchase plots in the future town, but Mr. Qian said they wanted to stay together as a community. He said they had asked to have their community recognized and to have a Jewish community built alongside theirs, but had received no response.
Again. Bedouin are Israeli citizens, yes? They have the same rights?
Do citizens in any normal country have only rights?
What do you mean?
I mean, do people have only RIGHTS in a normal state, or do they also have duties?
Ok, I see what you mean. Certain rights aren't contingent upon duties - they are inherent. Citizenship incurs duties and responsibilities though.