A Settler Colonial Plan in the Naqab

Parts of this text are borrowed and adapted from our first hand reporting and from Adalah.

Our delegation joined Bedouin residents of Al-Fura’a village and other human rights organizations at the Israeli Supreme Court for the latest stage in the battle against a planned phosphate mine in the Naqab (Negev) in southern Israel that will displace their entire village to an urban ghetto - an urbanization plan.

This is part of the larger racist settler colonial plan of Israel to take as much land as possible for Israeli Jews and isolate/segregate the Arab population on as little land as possible. The plan is to remove all Palestinian Bedouin citizens of Israel from their ancestral lands and push them into less than 1% of that land. It’s a land grab and further meant to erase Bedouin identity and culture.

Israel’s Bedouin Settlement Authority has announced details of this plan to forcibly transfer 36,000 Arab Bedouin citizens of Israel in order to expand military training areas and make way for ‘economic development’ projects. Economic interests of corporations are placed over the humanity of the Bedouin.

The implementation of the plan is slated to commence in the coming year and will be carried out over the course of several years. The plan provides clear confirmation that Israel’s Authority for the Development and Settlement of the Bedouins in the Negev overtly discriminates against the Palestinian Bedouin population, and considers them an obstacle that must be removed from the landscape in order to clear a path for Israeli Jewish settlement and "development".

The government of Israel plans to move these citizens to poverty-stricken, government-planned townships in other areas of the Naqab.