Bedouin camp
WILLACY: In the wilderness of the Negev Desert, the Bedouin have thrived for seven centuries. Loyalty to the land is the central code of honour to these tribal people. The Bedouin survive by growing cereal crops and herding livestock, but this traditional way of life is about to end for these desert-dwellers.
00:16
Israel claims this camp doesn’t exist. It’s a so-called “unrecognised village”, one of forty-five earmarked for destruction.
00:41
WILLACY: This is the story of one nation’s quest to urbanise a nomadic people. It’s part of a move to take land from some citizens to give to others. The Bedouin of Israel pay taxes, serve in the army, most even speak Hebrew, but because of what’s happening here, they feel like outcasts in their own country.
01:07
Israel sees the Negev Desert as its new frontier, a sparse landscape it can settle with Jewish immigrants, but in the way are some of its own citizens – the Bedouin.
01:32
Super: Ehud Olmert Deputy Prime Minister, Israel
EHUD OLMERT: You warn them, give them an extension of time, but at some point you just have to remove them from that particular piece of land which is not theirs.
01:45
WILLACY: I’ve come to the northern Negev and to the home of the al-Azazmeh family. They’re from one of the seven main Bedouin tribes here. Sheikh Salama Al-Azazmeh can’t tell me his age but he was certainly here before the State of Israel was created in 1948.
02:19
SHEIKH SALAMA AL AZAZME: I had camels and sheep and used to milk them for drinking. We had the best life --no one ever told us to leave or to move. It’s only in the time of Israel rule that we've been told to move from one side to another.
02:47
WILLACY: Four generations of the family live here. The women tend to the cooking and look after the camp, but soon they’re on the move. Israeli officials told them they want this land for a military firing range and the Al-Azazme’s have been served with an eviction order.
03:16
The Bedouin are sceptical of the government’s motives. Just a couple of hundred metres from their camp is a new Israeli built chicken farm.
03:40
WILLACY: The Bedouin of the Negev were granted title to this land under the British administrators and the Ottoman Turks before them. Now the State of Israel wants them out, in a campaign supervised by its Deputy Prime Minister.
03:57
EHUD OLMERT [Deputy PM]: The Bedouins live in the Negev, however over the years they have spread into lands which is not theirs in the first place. It is land owned by others, either by the government or by others, and they don’t behave according to the traditional rules that govern all of us.
04:23
WILLACY: The Al-Azazmeh family is exercising its right as Israeli citizens to fight eviction in the courts, but the family knows that not one Bedouin has beaten the State.
04:46
SHEIKH SALAMA AL AZAZMEH: I will never go to the city. When I die, they can bury me here and this way I will stay in this land.
04:59
WILLACY: This is Israel’s Bedouin policy at work. It’s dole day in Rahat, a crowded township of forty five thousand people. Hours before the town’s only bank opens, Israeli Bedouin queue for their welfare money. These dignified people use to be herders and crop farmers.
05:18
WILLACY: Rahat is one of seven special townships established by Israel in its push to urbanise the Bedouin. This is Israel’s most disadvantaged community. Crime is rampant. Seven out of ten adults don’t have a job and the children roam the streets instead of going to school.
05:59
Ahmed Al-Kranowi was one of the first Bedouin to move to Rahat and he found it difficult to shake his farming past. Keeping sheep in his backyard has made him unpopular with his neighbours and the authorities.
06:25
AHMED AL-KRANOWI: The relations are not at all good. It’s like a prison. You can’t even open a window here to get some air. If you open a window, there’s someone looking in at us.
06:42
WILLACY: Ahmed is more comfortable lighting a campfire in the backyard then he is sitting inside his house. His tents are a reminder of his family’s heritage. He, like most others in Rahat relies on the dole.
06:57
AHMED AL-KRANOWI: It’s a heartache. Sometimes I go back to people who live in the desert, to the peaceful relaxed life, the good wind, even the fresh air. I miss it. We look for it. Here every thing is wrong, even the air – it’s not clean.
07:14
WILLACY: Ahmed’s suburban block cost him the equivalent of ten sheep. Israel is luring Bedouin to towns with the promise of water, electricity and land that it practically gives away.
07:33
KOLET AVITAL [Labour MP]: I think that we should be ashamed of some of the treatment. I believe that they are lacking citizen rights.
07:53
WILLACY: There are some in Israel’s parliament who don’t like the way the government is treating its own people. Kolet Avital leads a block of opposition MP’s in the Knessett defending Bedouin rights.
KOLET AVITAL: Every citizen in Israel is by law compelled to send children to school, education is compulsory.
07:58
Avital. Super: Kolet Avital Opposition MP, Israel But the fact that we do not allow those Bedouins to have their own schools or not enough schools in their own settlements, means that we do not observe the law, we ourselves, so I think that what we have to fight for is that Israel should abide by its own laws.
08:21
EHUD OLMERT [Deputy PM]: What are you talking about? Of course we provide electricity and services to those in the Negev, in the townships, but you can’t build an independent separate infrastructure for every tent in every corner in the Negev.
08:37
WILLACY: Israel believes there’s good reason for freeing up the Negev. It plans to pull thousands of Jewish settlers out of the nearby Gaza Strip and re-locate as many as possible in the desert. At the same time the government wants to make living in the Negev desert illegal for its Bedouin citizens.
09:01
Flattened Bedouin homes What happened on this rise is typical of Israel’s determination to enforce its townships policy. It was a summer’s day in July. The ten members of the Al More family were tending their herd when a notorious Israeli paramilitary unit, known as the “Green Patrol” arrived unannounced. Using tractors, they flattened the Bedouin’s flimsy homes. The Al More family could only watch as their desert lifestyle came to an end.
09:21
WILLACY: In the last two years Israel’s tactics have become even more drastic. The most extraordinary claim is that the government used aircraft to spray poison over the crops of Bedouin farmers.
09:59
WILLACY: But you do spray crops where there are women and children?
EHUD OLMERT [Deputy PM]: I don’t know about that. No I don’t think it’s true.
10:17
WILLACY: It is true and the Deputy Prime Minister heads the department behind the operation.
10:25
EHUD OLMERT [Deputy PM]: There have been reports, you know how many times reports can be inaccurate particularly on these issues but probably the Bedouins claim that this was done but certainly this is not a policy of the Israeli Government.
10:35
WILLACY: A fortnight before that interview, Israel’s own High Court acknowledged that aerial spraying had taken place. It ordered the practice to stop.
10:50
WILLACY: So Minister Olmert, do you think he’s being a bit disingenuous by saying he doesn’t know what’s going on?
11:01
KOLET AVITAL: I hope that as a Minister he should know better, maybe, I trust that the man doesn’t usually say something which is not true. But basically I’m sure and convinced that he doesn’t have all the facts and I would be more than glad to provide him with those facts.
11:07
WILLACY: I’m crossing the so-called “green line” from Israel into the Palestinian territory of the West Bank. I’ve come to see how other Arab farmers fare. These people are under military occupation. This land was seized in the 1967 war. Since then, Israel has tightened its grip, building Jewish settlements that sit like fortresses on dozens of hillsides.
12:18
Israel still regulates every aspect of life here, despite promises of Palestinian autonomy. Like the Bedouin, Palestinian farmers have worked their land for generations.
12:53
At the village of Mufagara in the Hebron Hills, families are literally digging themselves in. The Israelis have threatened to demolish any external man made structures. Mahmoud Hussein Hamamdi, like others here, is a cave dweller. I paid him a visit as he was extending the family home.
13:16
MAHMOUD HUSSEIN HAMAMDI: I am enlarging the cave, since I am raising eleven kids now and with me and my wife that’s thirteen, and my son’s wife that makes fourteen.
13:46
Mahmoud There is insufficient space to sleep -- we all sleep together. We sleep here, and the sheep sleep over there.
14:01
WILLACY: Mahmoud Hussein Hamamdi doesn’t have mains power or running water but thanks to a nearby Jewish settlement he has phone coverage. It means he can talk to his lawyer about the eviction notice the Israelis have served.
14:14
MAHMOUD HUSSEIN HAMAMDI [to his lawyer on the phone]: We’re not leaving, No, no, no we’re not leaving. We have nowhere to go.
14:32
WILLACY: The Israeli occupied West Bank is also home to more than two hundred thousand Jewish settlers. Each year their numbers swell and their hold on the hilltops strengthen. The squabbling over land in the Hebron Hills is a microcosm of the seemingly intractable conflict, which is the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.
14:49
At the Arab village of Tuani, the army has been called in by Palestinian farmers. They claim their children are stoned and harassed as they walk to school each day, along a road that passes the Jewish settlement. When we tried to speak to the settlers to get their side, they declined in no uncertain terms.
15:26
MAN FROM SETTLEMENT: Go away. Nobody wants you people. You’re trouble that’s all you are. You came to stir up the pot. Every place you go you bring anguish to people. Go home. Don’t come back.
15:57
WILLACY: Next door to the government sanctioned settlement of Ma’on, a group of Israeli renegades has set up home in caravans amongst the trees. While the government regards this outpost as illegal, nothing is being done to remove it. Palestinian farmers complain their Jewish neighbours destroy their crops and poison their wells. Many Israelis too are outraged by what they’ve seen.
SALOMKA DUNAEVSKY: They are fellow citizens but unfortunately those fellow citizens make my life and the life of everybody else here quite miserable I believe.
16:47
WILLACY: Salomka Dunaevsky works with Ta Ayosh, an organisation trying to bring Israelis and Palestinians together. It was on this windswept hill below the Jewish outpost that she saw how the settlers treated their Palestinian neighbours.
16:57
SALOMKA DUNAEVSKY: All of a sudden while drinking tea we heard shouting. We didn’t know what it was. We understood that the settlers are attacking. He had a gun and he was shooting those Palestinians standing not far, a few metres from him and they were shouting, arguing, and he was shooting at his legs and around his legs.
17:30
I got a wound from the shrapnel at the bottom of my hand and it bled quite a bit but it wasn’t quite a serious wound fortunately.
17:58
Salomka Dunaevsky Peace Activist: Israel is trying to make a mild ethnic cleansing. She wants the land here. It is very close to the green line and she wants as much land with less Palestinians as possible on this land.
18:31
WILLACY: Both Arabs and Jews trace their heritage to the land which lies between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. The conflict over that territory lies at the very heart of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute but it is increasingly becoming a population war, with Israel concerned that within a few years, Arabs will outnumber Jews.
18:34
Forty years ago Israeli war hero and politician Moshe Dayan set the agenda for what’s happening today. He said Israel and all its citizens had to modernise or perish.
19:09
Moshe Dayan had a vision. He said we must turn the Bedouin into urban labourers who come home in the evening and he puts on his slippers. Does your government share that vision?
19:31
EHUD OLMERT: Well you know if they don’t want to use the slippers I think we can compromise on that, but basically you know coming to your home, yes not having four wives – yes and so on so you know -- we know that they are accustomed to a different living but we also know that in the long run it has to change, and I think what we try to do is to help them change in a very careful and a very tolerant way.
19:40
Kolet Avital Opposition MP, Israel
KOLET AVITAL: Those people who are loyal citizens of the State of Israel who serve in the army, who have always maintained good citizenship, who are paying taxes, we risk to turn them into enemies and this is not a very clever policy.
20:32
WILLACY: It’s been said that the Bedouin sees bounty when everyone else perceives barrenness.
WILLACY: Now Israel sees the desert in the same light. The World Zionist Organisation wants to settle another three hundred and fifty thousand Jewish immigrants in Israel by the end of the decade. This desert has never looked more like a promised land to so many people.
Reporter: Mark Willacy
Camera: Louie Eroglu
Editor: Simon Brynjolffssen
Research: Ayelet Cohen
Producer: Trevor Bormann
WILLACY: In the wilderness of the Negev Desert, the Bedouin have thrived for seven centuries. Loyalty to the land is the central code of honour to these tribal people. The Bedouin survive by growing cereal crops and herding livestock, but this traditional way of life is about to end for these desert-dwellers.
00:16
Israel claims this camp doesn’t exist. It’s a so-called “unrecognised village”, one of forty-five earmarked for destruction.
00:41
WILLACY: This is the story of one nation’s quest to urbanise a nomadic people. It’s part of a move to take land from some citizens to give to others. The Bedouin of Israel pay taxes, serve in the army, most even speak Hebrew, but because of what’s happening here, they feel like outcasts in their own country.
01:07
Israel sees the Negev Desert as its new frontier, a sparse landscape it can settle with Jewish immigrants, but in the way are some of its own citizens – the Bedouin.
01:32
Super: Ehud Olmert Deputy Prime Minister, Israel
EHUD OLMERT: You warn them, give them an extension of time, but at some point you just have to remove them from that particular piece of land which is not theirs.
01:45
WILLACY: I’ve come to the northern Negev and to the home of the al-Azazmeh family. They’re from one of the seven main Bedouin tribes here. Sheikh Salama Al-Azazmeh can’t tell me his age but he was certainly here before the State of Israel was created in 1948.
02:19
SHEIKH SALAMA AL AZAZME: I had camels and sheep and used to milk them for drinking. We had the best life --no one ever told us to leave or to move. It’s only in the time of Israel rule that we've been told to move from one side to another.
02:47
WILLACY: Four generations of the family live here. The women tend to the cooking and look after the camp, but soon they’re on the move. Israeli officials told them they want this land for a military firing range and the Al-Azazme’s have been served with an eviction order.
03:16
The Bedouin are sceptical of the government’s motives. Just a couple of hundred metres from their camp is a new Israeli built chicken farm.
03:40
WILLACY: The Bedouin of the Negev were granted title to this land under the British administrators and the Ottoman Turks before them. Now the State of Israel wants them out, in a campaign supervised by its Deputy Prime Minister.
03:57
EHUD OLMERT [Deputy PM]: The Bedouins live in the Negev, however over the years they have spread into lands which is not theirs in the first place. It is land owned by others, either by the government or by others, and they don’t behave according to the traditional rules that govern all of us.
04:23
WILLACY: The Al-Azazmeh family is exercising its right as Israeli citizens to fight eviction in the courts, but the family knows that not one Bedouin has beaten the State.
04:46
SHEIKH SALAMA AL AZAZMEH: I will never go to the city. When I die, they can bury me here and this way I will stay in this land.
04:59
WILLACY: This is Israel’s Bedouin policy at work. It’s dole day in Rahat, a crowded township of forty five thousand people. Hours before the town’s only bank opens, Israeli Bedouin queue for their welfare money. These dignified people use to be herders and crop farmers.
05:18
WILLACY: Rahat is one of seven special townships established by Israel in its push to urbanise the Bedouin. This is Israel’s most disadvantaged community. Crime is rampant. Seven out of ten adults don’t have a job and the children roam the streets instead of going to school.
05:59
Ahmed Al-Kranowi was one of the first Bedouin to move to Rahat and he found it difficult to shake his farming past. Keeping sheep in his backyard has made him unpopular with his neighbours and the authorities.
06:25
AHMED AL-KRANOWI: The relations are not at all good. It’s like a prison. You can’t even open a window here to get some air. If you open a window, there’s someone looking in at us.
06:42
WILLACY: Ahmed is more comfortable lighting a campfire in the backyard then he is sitting inside his house. His tents are a reminder of his family’s heritage. He, like most others in Rahat relies on the dole.
06:57
AHMED AL-KRANOWI: It’s a heartache. Sometimes I go back to people who live in the desert, to the peaceful relaxed life, the good wind, even the fresh air. I miss it. We look for it. Here every thing is wrong, even the air – it’s not clean.
07:14
WILLACY: Ahmed’s suburban block cost him the equivalent of ten sheep. Israel is luring Bedouin to towns with the promise of water, electricity and land that it practically gives away.
07:33
KOLET AVITAL [Labour MP]: I think that we should be ashamed of some of the treatment. I believe that they are lacking citizen rights.
07:53
WILLACY: There are some in Israel’s parliament who don’t like the way the government is treating its own people. Kolet Avital leads a block of opposition MP’s in the Knessett defending Bedouin rights.
KOLET AVITAL: Every citizen in Israel is by law compelled to send children to school, education is compulsory.
07:58
Avital. Super: Kolet Avital Opposition MP, Israel But the fact that we do not allow those Bedouins to have their own schools or not enough schools in their own settlements, means that we do not observe the law, we ourselves, so I think that what we have to fight for is that Israel should abide by its own laws.
08:21
EHUD OLMERT [Deputy PM]: What are you talking about? Of course we provide electricity and services to those in the Negev, in the townships, but you can’t build an independent separate infrastructure for every tent in every corner in the Negev.
08:37
WILLACY: Israel believes there’s good reason for freeing up the Negev. It plans to pull thousands of Jewish settlers out of the nearby Gaza Strip and re-locate as many as possible in the desert. At the same time the government wants to make living in the Negev desert illegal for its Bedouin citizens.
09:01
Flattened Bedouin homes What happened on this rise is typical of Israel’s determination to enforce its townships policy. It was a summer’s day in July. The ten members of the Al More family were tending their herd when a notorious Israeli paramilitary unit, known as the “Green Patrol” arrived unannounced. Using tractors, they flattened the Bedouin’s flimsy homes. The Al More family could only watch as their desert lifestyle came to an end.
09:21
WILLACY: In the last two years Israel’s tactics have become even more drastic. The most extraordinary claim is that the government used aircraft to spray poison over the crops of Bedouin farmers.
09:59
WILLACY: But you do spray crops where there are women and children?
EHUD OLMERT [Deputy PM]: I don’t know about that. No I don’t think it’s true.
10:17
WILLACY: It is true and the Deputy Prime Minister heads the department behind the operation.
10:25
EHUD OLMERT [Deputy PM]: There have been reports, you know how many times reports can be inaccurate particularly on these issues but probably the Bedouins claim that this was done but certainly this is not a policy of the Israeli Government.
10:35
WILLACY: A fortnight before that interview, Israel’s own High Court acknowledged that aerial spraying had taken place. It ordered the practice to stop.
10:50
WILLACY: So Minister Olmert, do you think he’s being a bit disingenuous by saying he doesn’t know what’s going on?
11:01
KOLET AVITAL: I hope that as a Minister he should know better, maybe, I trust that the man doesn’t usually say something which is not true. But basically I’m sure and convinced that he doesn’t have all the facts and I would be more than glad to provide him with those facts.
11:07
WILLACY: I’m crossing the so-called “green line” from Israel into the Palestinian territory of the West Bank. I’ve come to see how other Arab farmers fare. These people are under military occupation. This land was seized in the 1967 war. Since then, Israel has tightened its grip, building Jewish settlements that sit like fortresses on dozens of hillsides.
12:18
Israel still regulates every aspect of life here, despite promises of Palestinian autonomy. Like the Bedouin, Palestinian farmers have worked their land for generations.
12:53
At the village of Mufagara in the Hebron Hills, families are literally digging themselves in. The Israelis have threatened to demolish any external man made structures. Mahmoud Hussein Hamamdi, like others here, is a cave dweller. I paid him a visit as he was extending the family home.
13:16
MAHMOUD HUSSEIN HAMAMDI: I am enlarging the cave, since I am raising eleven kids now and with me and my wife that’s thirteen, and my son’s wife that makes fourteen.
13:46
Mahmoud There is insufficient space to sleep -- we all sleep together. We sleep here, and the sheep sleep over there.
14:01
WILLACY: Mahmoud Hussein Hamamdi doesn’t have mains power or running water but thanks to a nearby Jewish settlement he has phone coverage. It means he can talk to his lawyer about the eviction notice the Israelis have served.
14:14
MAHMOUD HUSSEIN HAMAMDI [to his lawyer on the phone]: We’re not leaving, No, no, no we’re not leaving. We have nowhere to go.
14:32
WILLACY: The Israeli occupied West Bank is also home to more than two hundred thousand Jewish settlers. Each year their numbers swell and their hold on the hilltops strengthen. The squabbling over land in the Hebron Hills is a microcosm of the seemingly intractable conflict, which is the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.
14:49
At the Arab village of Tuani, the army has been called in by Palestinian farmers. They claim their children are stoned and harassed as they walk to school each day, along a road that passes the Jewish settlement. When we tried to speak to the settlers to get their side, they declined in no uncertain terms.
15:26
MAN FROM SETTLEMENT: Go away. Nobody wants you people. You’re trouble that’s all you are. You came to stir up the pot. Every place you go you bring anguish to people. Go home. Don’t come back.
15:57
WILLACY: Next door to the government sanctioned settlement of Ma’on, a group of Israeli renegades has set up home in caravans amongst the trees. While the government regards this outpost as illegal, nothing is being done to remove it. Palestinian farmers complain their Jewish neighbours destroy their crops and poison their wells. Many Israelis too are outraged by what they’ve seen.
SALOMKA DUNAEVSKY: They are fellow citizens but unfortunately those fellow citizens make my life and the life of everybody else here quite miserable I believe.
16:47
WILLACY: Salomka Dunaevsky works with Ta Ayosh, an organisation trying to bring Israelis and Palestinians together. It was on this windswept hill below the Jewish outpost that she saw how the settlers treated their Palestinian neighbours.
16:57
SALOMKA DUNAEVSKY: All of a sudden while drinking tea we heard shouting. We didn’t know what it was. We understood that the settlers are attacking. He had a gun and he was shooting those Palestinians standing not far, a few metres from him and they were shouting, arguing, and he was shooting at his legs and around his legs.
17:30
I got a wound from the shrapnel at the bottom of my hand and it bled quite a bit but it wasn’t quite a serious wound fortunately.
17:58
Salomka Dunaevsky Peace Activist: Israel is trying to make a mild ethnic cleansing. She wants the land here. It is very close to the green line and she wants as much land with less Palestinians as possible on this land.
18:31
WILLACY: Both Arabs and Jews trace their heritage to the land which lies between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. The conflict over that territory lies at the very heart of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute but it is increasingly becoming a population war, with Israel concerned that within a few years, Arabs will outnumber Jews.
18:34
Forty years ago Israeli war hero and politician Moshe Dayan set the agenda for what’s happening today. He said Israel and all its citizens had to modernise or perish.
19:09
Moshe Dayan had a vision. He said we must turn the Bedouin into urban labourers who come home in the evening and he puts on his slippers. Does your government share that vision?
19:31
EHUD OLMERT: Well you know if they don’t want to use the slippers I think we can compromise on that, but basically you know coming to your home, yes not having four wives – yes and so on so you know -- we know that they are accustomed to a different living but we also know that in the long run it has to change, and I think what we try to do is to help them change in a very careful and a very tolerant way.
19:40
Kolet Avital Opposition MP, Israel
KOLET AVITAL: Those people who are loyal citizens of the State of Israel who serve in the army, who have always maintained good citizenship, who are paying taxes, we risk to turn them into enemies and this is not a very clever policy.
20:32
WILLACY: It’s been said that the Bedouin sees bounty when everyone else perceives barrenness.
WILLACY: Now Israel sees the desert in the same light. The World Zionist Organisation wants to settle another three hundred and fifty thousand Jewish immigrants in Israel by the end of the decade. This desert has never looked more like a promised land to so many people.
Reporter: Mark Willacy
Camera: Louie Eroglu
Editor: Simon Brynjolffssen
Research: Ayelet Cohen
Producer: Trevor Bormann