Middle East History

It Happened In March

Nearly All Bedouins Driven by Israel From Their Grazing Grounds

By Donald Neff

It was 43 years ago, on March 17, 1954, that 11 Israelis riding in a bus were killed in an ambush at Scorpion Pass in Israel's eastern Negev desert. The slaughter caused intense outrage and anti-Arab hatred inside Israel. Arabs and Palestinians were widely suspected and there was hot talk about revenge. It was only later that investigators discovered the attackers had been Bedouins nomads retaliating because Israeli troops had driven them from their traditional Negev grazing grounds.

Although the plight of the Bedouins had been largely ignored, their treatment by Israel has been no Kinder, and no less systematic, than the dispossession of the Palestinians. When Israel came into being in 1948, there were 108 Bedouin left villages and localities with a population of about 135,000. By 1961, only 22,578 Bedouins remained inside Israel in 41 villages and localities. Today there are only a few thousand scattered Bedouins left in the Negev.

In their place are 280,000 Jews living in 114 villages and towns. Before 1948, there were at most around 4,000 Jews in the large Beersheva-Negav southern districts.

Israel's campaign to rid the Negev of the Bedouins began the same year the Jewish state came into being. By the time the fighting ended in late 1948, Israel had destroyed 67 Bedouin villages and localities and routed hundreds and perhaps thousands of the nomads from their grazing areas-as it had dispossessed three-quarters of a million Palestinians. The next year 500 Bedouin families were chased out by Israeli troops from an area south of Hebron, just north of the Negev. In 1950, Egypt complained to the United Nations that 4,000 Bedouins had been driven from their homes in the Negev into its territory, Egypt charged that atrocities had been committed against the Bedouins' herds of goats had been killed.

While Israel's major concern was to get rid of the Bedouins and take their land, there were strategic military considerations as well in moving some of the nomads. This was noted at the time by the chief of stall of UNTSO, the U.N. Truce Supervision Organization, Lt. Gen. E.L.M. Burns. He reported that 3,500 of those expelled in 1950 were from the Azazme tribe who were the original inhabitants of the El Auja demilitarized by Israel as Nitzana. It was a strategic 145-square-kilometer juncture between Israel and Egypt at the western Negev-Sinai frontier that had been demilitarized in the 1949 armistice between Egypt and Israel because it was a major invasion route along the Cairo-Beersheva-Jerusalem axis.

When members of the Azazme tribe drifted back to El Auja they attracted the fiery attention of Ariel Sharon, at the time the commander of Israel's terrorist Unit 101 and later a defense minister. Sharon led the unit in September 1953 in an attack on the Bedouins in the demilitarized zone. An unknown number of Bedouins were killed. Israel eventually took over much of the zone by hook or crook, and used it to considerable advantage in two wars against Egypt when the Jewish state launched surprise attacks across the Sinai in 1956 and 1967.

Israel's campaign against the Bedouin reached a new height of brutality in 1959 when troops forcibly drove out 350 Bedouins from the Negev. On Oct. 6, the United Nations Egyptian-Israeli Mixed Armistice Commission condemned Israel for the action. The commission accused the Israelis of Killing some Bedouins, burning their tents and taking their property including camels, donkeys and sheep.

Such brutal behavior eventually achieved Israel's aims. Israeli anthropologist Clinton Bailey reported at the end of 1993 that during the past four decades Israel had forced 99 percent of the Bedouins off their lands and confiscated their herds. Now, he wrote, Israel was conducting a "discriminatory policy designed to get all the Bedouins off the land … the last 1 percent of the Bedouins still living in their native area in the central Negev are in the central Negev are fighting expulsion".

In order to escape criticism for driving the Bedouins into Egypt or Jordan, Israel over the years also had attempted to gain their land by congregating them in seven development towns in northern Negev. But, according to Bailey, "most never got beyond the sprawling desert slums of shanties and ragged tents around Beersheba, because Israel has never provided the necessary finances to develop the townships … Many in the townships are unemployed, and some have become dependent on welfare and turned to drugs."

Bailey added: "To cover up its land-grabbing, the government presents the expulsions as benevolent. The Bedouins, it says, must be brought into the 21^st century. If they are concentrated in the townships, the argument goes, they will have access to proper schools and medical care … And if critics say that benevolence alone doesn't justify the expulsions, the government trots out the sacred cow: the army needs all the land for training.

"The cynicism is clear. No one asks whether Hasidic Jews are ready for the 21^st century, so why ask it about Bedouins?".

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