Desert storm
By Aryeh Dayan
Haaretz, December 17, 2004
Yeruham council head Baruch Almakayis plans to build a neighborhood for the Zanoun Bedouin, who live within the boundaries of the town. The Interior Ministry is furious, and other council heads in the Negev are worried
The children of the Zanoun faction of the Al-Azazma tribe only start attending school at age 10. Even though five decades have passed since the state gave them permission to settle next to the town of Yeruham, the state has still not recognized the legality of their settlement there, and so has not built a school for them. The nearest Arab schools, which were built for other, larger factions of the Al-Azazma tribe, are dozens of kilometers away from the small, meager tent encampments of the Zanoun. The Zanoun children do not go to school until they are 10 because their parents refuse to send them so far away before then. The result: 10-year-olds who ought to be in fourth grade end up having to learn with 6-year-olds, in first grade. Not surprisingly, this dismal situation has a severe impact on their academic achievements.
In June of last year, in response to one of dozens of letters sent by the Bedouin to the authorities, begging for permission to open their own school, they received a letter from David Cohen, who shortly before had taken over the position of Southern District Director in the Interior Ministry. The lands on which you live, Cohen explained, are under the municipal jurisdiction of the Yeruham local council. Therefore, your inquiries about a school should be addressed to the council.
The Bedouin appealed to the Yeruham council, interpreting Cohen's response as an attempt by a senior official to shirk responsibility for resolving the problem. But the Zanoun are now seeing quite an unexpected result: an unusual local initiative to find a partial solution to some of the problems of the Bedouin in the Negev. Not only did Baruch Almakayis, head of the Yeruham local council, express his willingness to build a school for them, he also took another, much more far-reaching step. In agreement with the Zanoun, he is currently seeking to have them registered in the census as residents of Yeruham and to build for them, in their present location, a residential neighborhood. The new houses would replace their tin shacks (and some tents) and become part of Yeruham.
Almakayis is putting forward his proposal regardless of the fact that it runs completely counter to the government's policy, which seeks to concentrate the majority of the Bedouin in seven Bedouin towns scattered throughout the Negev. He is also disregarding a years-long legal struggle being waged by the state to obtain an injunction that would enable it to clear the Zanoun off the land where Almakayis wishes to build the new neighborhood.
Widespread opposition
Almakayis was first elected head of the Yeruham local council in 1983, knocked out of the job 10 years later and elected again last year, after a stormy election campaign in which he defeated his sworn rival, Motti Avitzror, by a very slim margin. He has always been considered a non-conformist and a controversial leader. His proposal to add to Yeruham the 300 Bedouin families (a total of about 1,200 people) certainly fits this perception. With this proposal, Almakayis is breaking several deep-rooted taboos and arousing vehement opposition from most of the official bodies. The question of whether he is advocating it in order to realize the ideal of Jewish-Bedouin coexistence in which he has always believed - as he repeatedly insists - or whether he is taking this action for the sake of personal and political interests will surely continue to occupy the political scene in the Negev for quite some time. Either way, Almakayis is clearly setting himself apart.
In past decades, many Jewish public figures in the Negev have talked about the need to deal with "the Bedouin problem." Most of the proposals they put forward were based on combative, sometimes also racist, consensus-enjoying ideas, for example: "the Bedouin must be prevented from taking over State lands" or from "turning the Negev into a region with an Arab majority." Some of these leaders advocated firm action against illegal construction; others pushed for accelerating the process of concentrating the Bedouin population in the towns, a process that almost all the Bedouin oppose. Not one of them ever suggested, as Almakayis has, that the problem be solved by making the Bedouin part of the Jewish development towns near the places where they live. It's no wonder, therefore, that the government establishment in the Negev is working to thwart his plan. Incidentally, one of those spearheading the fight against it is David Cohen, whose letter to the Zanoun led them to approach Almakayis in the first place.
Among Yeruham residents, opinions about the plan are more varied. A minority is opposed for national-religious reasons, and another minority supports it in the belief that it will promote coexistence in the area. Between these two minorities lies the majority, which is mainly reacting with indifference to the plan, since it sees the Zanoun as already well integrated into the town's life. The 300 families who are supposed to become residents of Yeruham are indeed totally integrated in the town - they shop in its stores, they use its postal and banking services, they deal with the National Insurance Institute branch there and are registered in the various health maintenance organizations there.
Until the military administration demanded that they move to their present location, they lived near Mitzpeh Ramon. In 1954, when they were transferred to the Yeruham area, Yeruham was a transit camp and home to just a few hundred new immigrants. Since then, Yeruham has developed into a town of about 10,000 residents, and the living area of the Zanoun has also expanded. The distance now separating their tin shacks and the center of Yeruham is no more than half a kilometer.
"We're part of Yeruham, but we live under totally different conditions from Yeruham residents. Aside from trash cans, we don't receive any municipal services from the Yeruham council," says Awda Zanoun, who was chosen by his tribe to handle the negotiations with the Yeruham council regarding the construction of the neighborhood. Two years ago, Zanoun retired from the army after close to 30 years of regular service in the IDF. Many of the heads of the families he represents are serving or have served in the security forces. The others mostly make a living from farming or sheep herding.
"Nowhere else in the Negev will you find such good relations between Bedouin and Jews, as between us and Yeruham," says Zanoun. "There is no violence here or complaints about theft. What we have here, instead, is Bedouin and Jews serving together in the Civil Guard." The idea that he and Almakayis wish to promote is "a residential neighborhood that will be part of Yeruham and in which we will be able to preserve Bedouin tradition. Not apartments in high-rises, but houses that we can live in and so keep working our lands and raising our sheep. We are interested in a legal and neatly planned neighborhood, because we're fed up with the illegal construction," he adds. "We'll pay arnona (municipal tax) to the Yeruham council, and we'll receive services from it like any other citizen."
According to the plan, the neighborhood will be called "The Shepherds' Neighborhood of Yeruham" (shekhunat haro'im shel Yeruham) and will include an educational tourist site where schoolchildren and others can come to hear lectures about the Bedouin lifestyle.
`It will blow up'
Zanoun first brought the idea of building a Bedouin neighborhood in Yeruham to Avitzror more than a year ago, but Avitzror didn't like it. Only after the election, when Almakayis replaced him, did the council begin to promote it. "I thought about a similar idea 22 years ago, when I was first elected as council head," Almakayis syas. "Back in 1983, I went to the late Eli Hilleli, who was the mayor of Dimona, and I proposed that Yeruham and Dimona be united into a single municipal authority that would also include a community for the Bedouin who live between them. Unfortunately, in Dimona they weren't interested in the idea."
In the subsequent two decades, poverty in the region has increased, Almakayis adds. "The Bedouin now comprise 25 percent of the population of the Negev, but the state doesn't take any interest in them," he says. "Even though these are people who were living in this area before I was born, the state doesn't treat them as citizens, but as lawbreakers. If this government insensitivity continues, it's all going to blow up in our faces. Then we'll have an intifada that will make all other intifadas pale in comparison."
Almakayis believes that the state has to abandon "its stupid plan" that seeks to concentrate the Bedouin in seven towns of their own and argues that integrating the Bedouin into the Jewish communities is the only way to prevent the outbreak of a Bedouin intifada. "The Negev should adopt the model of Ma'alot-Tarshiha," he says. "A Jewish town and an Arab village in one municipality. There's no other way."
This idea, which contradicts the government policy that is trying to displace the Bedouin, has made Almakayis the biggest enemy of the governmental establishment in the Negev (which is composed primarily of the Bedouin Administration in the Israel Lands Authority and the district administration in the Interior Ministry) as well of his colleagues, the heads of the Jewish local authorities. Yaakov Katz, the head of the Bedouin Administration, sent him an angry letter in which he reminded him that the state is waging a legal battle to evacuate the Zanoun from the lands they are currently on, and that his plan to build a neighborhood for them on these lands is thus contrary to the state's legal position. In a conversation a month ago, David Cohen reproached Almakayis for trying to use the Bedouin to increase Yeruham's population so that the Interior Ministry will have to allow him to appoint another salaried deputy council head.
Council heads in Dimona, Arad, Ofakim and elsewhere in the Negev are concerned that Almakayis' initiative will serve as a precedent; that after the construction of the Bedouin neighborhood in Yeruham, they will be compelled to follow suit. It's no wonder that some of them, especially Shmuel Rifman, head of the Ramat Hanegev regional council, which includes Yeruham, are already accusing Almakayis of seeking to subvert the aspiration to sustain a Jewish majority in the Negev.
"I'm being demonized, but it doesn't faze me," he responds. "They said I just wanted a salaried deputy, that I want the Bedouin vote in the next elections, that I want the Bedouin to marry Russian women, that I want mosques and mixed schools in Yeruham. They can say whatever they want. When I see people right next to me stuck in tin shacks, without electricity or water or a school, I'm not going to sit by quietly. If the state wants to turn a blind eye and ignore the reality, I won't cooperate, because turning a blind eye will turn all the Bedouin into extremists. In the end, we'll be a small Jewish island in a sea of Bedouin extremism. I'm telling them that it doesn't matter what they say. Like it or not, I'm going to build a Bedouin neighborhood in Yeruham."
