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Introducing Anika Rehan.
She is a former next leader.
A former next leader at the Institute for Policy Studies.
Okay, she's over there with Jon Pfeffer at Foreign Policy in Focus, fpif.org, and she's a member of Students for Justice in Palestine at George Washington University.
You can learn some economics there.
She's currently traveling in Israel and Palestine.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing, Anika?
Thanks.
It's good to have me on the show.
Thanks so much.
Appreciate you joining us here.
Love the title.
Caught my eye right away.
We ran this at antiwar.com last week.
A Beginner's Guide to the Unrecognized Villages of Israel.
And this is about specifically Bedouins.
But as I think most people probably know, other than the occupied Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, there are also, I guess, about 20% of the population of so-called Israel proper within the 67 borders are Palestinian, Arabs, Muslims and Christians.
And I don't know if the Bedouins are a different ethnicity than the Arabs.
Is that it?
Them too?
No, it's like, it's a different culture in many ways.
They are, Bedouins are actually spread out all across Egypt, present-day Israel, Syria, and even further east of that.
So it's just a different culture.
They're, they're agrarian culture, but they are still Arabs.
And they, you know, they just, I mean, they're Palestinians.
They're just considered differently because the way that Israel interacts with them separates them from other Palestinians.
I see.
All right.
So now I guess I've heard it said in some cases, well, you know, we've had some guests on the show to talk about this, I guess, that the, the Arab Israelis or the Palestinian citizens of Israel, as they're sometimes called, are treated as second-class citizens.
But in your article here, these sound like they're treated like they're not citizens at all.
How many different classes of citizenship are there?
And, and at what level do the Bedouins subsist?
You know, it would be hard to say how many classes there are.
I've actually been here about a month and a half, and it's just, it's just crazy how, how many different like manifestations of occupation there are.
So I'm living right now in Haifa, and Haifa is, you know, as good as it gets.
But then when you look at what's happening to the Bedouins, I mean, they're lower than second class, for sure.
And they are citizens.
That's the thing that's crazy about all of this.
They do have Israeli passports, they do have citizenship, and they're still treated so horribly, as you'll hear.
All right.
So yeah, take us through it, then.
The beginner's guide.
I sure need one.
I needed one too, which is why I wrote this article.
So I really didn't know too much about the Bedouins and about what was happening in the desert.
It's not really a part of the country that's talked about a lot.
It's, you know, sparsely populated compared to places like Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
But I went down there and I met with a guide from Adala, which is a leading human rights and legal organization that represents Palestinian, you know, all types of Palestinians.
And yeah, I met with the, with the Bedouin, the Bedouin person who took me through a few villages and talked to me about what problems they're facing.
And it's just really, I mean, it's, it's eye opening.
So essentially, the Bedouins, when, when the state of Israel was created, they were a agrarian group, they were semi nomadic, so they moved, but they still had homes, you know, they still had communities.
And they were essentially resettled, kind of like Native Americans in the US.
They were resettled, they were moved, and they were forced to create these very intentional villages.
So Israel created seven villages for them, and another 11 were later recognized that had been created.
But of course, that didn't, you know, not everyone moved, not everyone wanted to.
And so there are something like 46 unrecognized villages spread out throughout the desert, which is the entire southern half of Israel.
And these villages, even though many of them were created, because of these resettlement policies, many of them were created, like, you know, under the direct supervision of the Israeli authorities, they were never connected to the grid.
So they don't have power, they don't have sewage, they don't have cable or electricity or anything, water.
And so, you know, these people are living in tents and shacks in the middle of the desert, and they're citizens, and the state isn't looking out for them at all.
And beyond not looking out for them, their houses are under constant threat of demolition.
There's one village that's been demolished 130 times, you know, and these people just keep rebuilding, because this is their home, this is their way of life.
And it's just, the struggle has been, you know, ongoing for at least 70 years now, and it doesn't really show any signs of getting better.
Well, okay, but so I don't understand why the constant demolition.
I mean, the costs of putting some sewage and some electric lines out there are more or less minimal in the 21st century, you know, for a powerful state like Israel.
And it doesn't, is it just that they plan on settling that whole Negev Desert too?
Like it's the West Bank or not?
Yeah, I mean, the Negev Desert is considered part of Israel, right, within the Green Line.
And there are increasing numbers of Jewish, I guess, settlements, you could call them, Jewish cities and towns popping up and being built.
And so part of it is definitely that they want to settle that land.
But the other part is they want to use that land for other purposes.
So there are areas that are closed off for industrial purposes.
There are areas that are closed off because they're military firing zones.
And people live in these areas, right?
So there are military trainings and unexploded ordinances just littered throughout the entire southern half of Israel.
There are areas that the Jewish National Fund is intent on building forests and other beautification projects in.
There are highways that they want to build, there are roads, you know, they want to expand Beersheba, which is the biggest city in the area.
I mean, there's so much that they can do with this land.
And the Bedouins are just, you know, in their way, essentially, that's the way that they're thought of.
Mm hmm.
Well, and then, I guess, as you explained in the article, too, that it's not just that they're agrarian, but they're kind of mostly nomadic, too, or they're kind of half and half.
So they don't really want to go ahead and, you know, move into even the outskirts of an established village and raise crops because they'd rather be free to move around.
Is that it?
Yeah, I mean, they're nomadic, but they're seasonally nomadic.
So something that's a really common misconception of these people is that they have no attachment to the land.
So, you know, what's the big deal if we take some land?
They'll just go somewhere else.
And that's not the case.
They do have established clans and tribes and villages.
Well, that's a whole other question of whether you have the right to force them to migrate somewhere or not.
Right.
Yeah, I can see that being invoked as an excuse, though.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And that's something that's been spread since, you know, before the creation of the State of Israel.
But these people, they're seasonally nomadic.
That does not mean that they don't have a connection to the land that they, you know, that they raise their families on, that they raise their crops on.
The only real comparison I could think of was like winter birds, you know, like old folks in the U.S. who move in the winter and then come back in the summer.
And it's different because those people, you know, they move out of luxury.
Right.
Whereas the Bedouins move because this is their culture.
But either way, like just because someone moves from Florida to New York every few months does not mean you can demolish their land in either of those places.
Right.
So the Bedouins, they're they're more nomadic than than other Palestinian groups.
But that doesn't mean that they don't, you know, they've been on this land uninterrupted for centuries and centuries and centuries.
So, you know, by any real standard, it is their land.
So is it right then that that because they're kind of partially nomadic, that's why they would rather live in these sort of outlaw villages rather than go ahead?
Because as you say, they are citizens.
So why not just go ahead and, you know, live even on the outskirts of one of the towns where they can still do farming and and whatever have have bigger plots of land for cheap that they can still work and that kind of thing?
Well, it's just it's not part of their culture.
You know, these people are very connected to their families, their tribes.
They have regional councils.
You know, they have this whole organizational system and it's really difficult to just pick up and move this whole community, you know, that's complex and tangled together and put it in a city where everyone is crammed together and there's no room for the kind of livelihood that they're used to.
So it's not really an option for them to move into the villages and the towns that have been established and keep their way of life.
And the way that Israel talks about this is, oh, we want to help them modernize.
But these people, they don't want to modernize.
I mean, obviously they want, you know, modern medicine.
They want some of the benefits, but they don't want to give up their way of life.
And why should they?
Right.
Well, and and so then the Israeli state never builds electric lines out there or sewage or water.
They never take care of these basic utilities.
They do for the seven towns and cities that they established right, right at the beginning.
So those towns have access to basic services, which is not a huge step up.
I mean, I was just before you called.
I was looking into the unemployment and the criminal rates in the in these Bedouin cities, and they're still unbelievably high, less than 50 percent graduate from high school.
So just because you have access to water and electricity doesn't mean everything is great.
But other than those seven towns, they have recognized 11 to 13 other villages, which I mean, those villages don't even have access to basic services.
They just never built the grid.
So I don't even know at that point what the difference is between unrecognized and recognized.
And then there's 40 something totally unrecognized villages that have just nothing, no roads, no signs on the highway.
You know, if you if you didn't if you weren't with someone who is from that village, you would never even know it existed.
You just see a bunch of tents on the side of the road and it looks like Burning Man.
You know, it doesn't look like a place where people can can live full lives and they have nothing.
They have no sewage, no garbage, no electricity in their schools, no water.
And they have to get really, really creative just to be able to live with some level of dignity.
All right.
Hang on just one second again.
All right, you guys.
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All right, now, as you say in the article, you know, the outright siege against the people of Gaza and the military occupation and mistreatment of the people in the West Bank, you know, gets all the coverage.
And so then that means they get all the activism, too.
And I guess I wonder whether anybody's really paying attention to this specific issue, if there are any, you know, groups that international groups that really focus on this.
Yeah, I mean, not that I know of.
Adala is really doing amazing work.
And if anyone is interested in reading more about this, it's adalah.org.
They have just an incredible number of resources on their website and they document everything and they have these court cases ongoing, you know, to try to save these villages.
But they kind of seem to be the only ones, you know, in their regional councils run by Bedouins.
But it's really not getting as much attention as it deserves.
And the situation is getting worse.
In 2015, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that the state had the right to demolish a village that I wrote about called Emil Haidan to build a new Jewish settlement right on that spot called Haidan.
And that was a big deal.
That was the first time that that kind of decision was made.
And that paves the way for the next 46 villages to also be demolished to make way for Jewish settlements.
So this problem is getting worse.
And I really haven't seen any significant international attention focused on it.
Yeah, that is kind of an interesting little side note, the way they pretend that this is all lawful under some construct that you can just evict the people who live somewhere from their property and build someone else's settlement right on it.
And the new people are the ones with the right and the old people are the ones without.
I mean, under what sophistry?
I mean, they don't outright invoke, you know, 3000 year old mythology in the court case, right?
So what's their excuse?
I mean, you know, they say things like, how can we know for sure that these people own the land?
There's no proof because these people don't have, you know, deeds.
But these weren't a part of their culture.
You know, when when Israel showed up in 1947 and decided, you know, show us your deed or you're going to get kicked off the land.
Of course, they didn't have deeds.
That wasn't a thing that they had.
And there have been times really where where villages have gained recognition or parts of villages have gained recognition because certain parts of the legal system, you know, certain people in certain positions have recognized that the Bedouins have an uninterrupted right.
You know, they've been on this land for centuries.
And then a year later, two years later, suddenly that'll get revoked.
You know, the state pressures those individual agents who even give them a little bit of leeway to take it back, you know, and to find a way to to kind of twist the law, you know, to to be in Israel's favor.
And the strongest weapon I think they have is being able to declare land that doesn't have a specific document attached to it, which is most of the land in the desert, state land or military zone or industrial land.
You know, that's theoretically in the in the capacity of what the state can do.
And once it's state land, you know, who who can tell you otherwise?
And it's up to the state what they get to do with it and whether they decide to build a forest there or a new Jewish settlement.
That's their call once it's their land.
Hmm.
Well, and how are they supposed to irrigate a forest in the desert?
You know, they are trying.
There's a lot of water being diverted to these forests and whole villages have been demolished to make room for trees, which I think is it's just a ridiculous idea.
And the whole thing is a PR stunt, right?
On one hand, they get to say, look, we made the desert bloom, ignoring the fact that it's water that they stole from the Palestinians.
And that there used to be a village there, wherever all those trees are, that that's, you know, a cleansing project in itself, historical cleansing.
The people have already been moved.
But now we're going to pretend that there never was a village here.
This is a pine forest.
Right.
And this is this is a whole new article, right?
You could write a million articles about this alone.
But the economic impact of diverting all of this water to create these completely unnatural forests, you know, with invasive species in the middle of the desert, it's devastating and it has far reaching effects.
You know, not just in the desert, but in the West Bank, there are farmers who can't irrigate their crops.
You know, in Gaza, obviously, there's a huge issue with people being able to get enough clean water to drink.
And a lot of that is because so much clean water is diverted to these ridiculous and unnatural projects that are, you know, purely beautification.
And Americans are drawn into this, too.
I met someone recently who grew up, you know, Jewish, kind of invested in Israel, not really understanding the whole issue, who went on a Jewish National Fund, quote unquote, environmental trip to plant trees in the desert.
Obviously, as a teenager, she had no idea that that was being done intentionally to displace Palestinians.
So they're using, you know, Jewish teenagers, Jewish Americans, people who have, you know, this this tendency to want to beautify things, to want to plant trees.
And they're using them as weapons against Bedouins.
Yeah.
You know, if I remember right, I mean, this is part of what radicalized Max Blumenthal was that he was used and lied to in that very same way.
And, you know, that he resented that so much that he had been part of that without understanding the context in which it was really taking place when he was young.
Yeah.
I mean, how could you understand the context?
You know, when you're when you're brought here and you're being told you're going to plant trees and it's going to be beautiful and you're going to connect with the land of your ancestors and then you get here.
And, you know, you see some encampments in the desert, but your guide is telling you, oh, don't worry about them.
They're nothing.
They're, you know, just backwards primitive people.
We're trying to help them modernize.
There's no signs on the road.
There's no, you know, plaques.
There's nothing.
There's no one brought in to talk to you about what's really happening.
They're like, how on earth would you know?
Right now.
So now, as compared to the West Bank, is it is it occupation troops of the IDF or it's just the shin bet?
You know, basically the FBI, national police force there that they have to deal with or both.
Yeah, it's not it's not the idea of the idea of it's just in the occupied territories.
It's partially Israeli police, especially like the, you know, the Beersheba district police.
And it's partially the Nature Authority, which is also one of those things, you know, the Green Patrol, they call them, which is another one of those things that it's just I mean, it makes things more confusing for outsiders.
And it makes things look better.
You know, it's hard to say, well, there's ethnic cleansing happening or there's displacement happening when it just looks like a beautiful forest or it looks like park rangers, you know, like they want to make this resettlement process look as good as possible from the outside.
Yeah, I like that.
The park rangers.
Hey, you know what?
The Interior Department in most countries is a secret police force.
It's only in America where it's, you know.
No, really, we're just park rangers.
You know what I mean?
But yeah, no, I mean, people ought to see right through that because that's the norm on Earth.
Right.
So.
But yeah, no, that's really something else.
All right.
So now tell me about this boycott, divestment and sanctions movement.
OK, a little bit of a kind of change of pace.
The BDS movement, I'm sure that you've talked about it on the show before, was a call to action issued in 2005 by a really, really broad coalition of Palestinian civil society and NGOs and political parties.
And it's modelled after the anti-apartheid movement that was really successful in South Africa and around the world.
And essentially it calls on individuals, institutions and governments to to disinvest from Israeli occupation, you know, to put pressure on them from outside.
Because if they're not going to comply with international law through some kind of intrinsic motivation, we can pressure them from the outside.
So for individuals, this means boycotting products that were made in settlements, boycotting, you know, companies that aren't Israeli, but that do work in settlements, things like that.
For institutions, it means not working with the Israeli government or Israeli academic institutions.
Artists can choose not to go and perform in Israel.
I mean, there's so many ways to take part in the BDS movement.
But from having been here and from having talked to people about it, it seems like, you know, it's kind of the best hope that people have for bringing about change.
Yeah, I really think so, too.
I think it really, for no other reason, just because it raises questions of why would there be a movement to boycott Israel?
I thought everybody loves Israel.
And it can't be because, well, geez, I mean, once you start really learning about it, it can't be that, you know, this huge number of American liberals, including a lot of Jews, are anti-Semites who just have a grudge against Israel for no good reason.
So what is it then?
Oh, I see.
It's the story they never, ever told me on TV a single time ever about the theft of Palestine from the people who lived there and who still live there.
That's what it's all about.
Yeah.
And it's and it's working.
I actually noticed a couple of days ago I was on the Jerusalem Post website, you know, which is pretty right wing, pretty establishment Israeli media.
And they have all their subheadings, right?
They have like Arab-Israeli conflict, you know, interior issues, whatever.
And then in like bold red, they have the BDS threat, you know, like Israel is really, really scared, really feeling the effects.
Which, again, just makes you question, you know, why are they so threatened by this nonviolent, you know, kind of plucky movement?
You know, it's like it's a scrappy underdog movement that's really, really making a difference.
And it's really scaring the Israeli establishment.
Just simply forgetting the truth.
It's not like they're really going to.
I mean, I don't know how close they are yet or what.
I shouldn't I shouldn't downplay it because I really don't know the economic effect of this.
But it seems like they're not, you know, as long as they're on Uncle Sam's dime, it's not like they're going to go out of business or anything.
But I think it's back to the just the whole public relations of it, the comparisons to South Africa all the time, the use of the term apartheid and the very fact of the existence of the movement.
They're terrified because it paints them as the bad guys, which they are.
They're the ones with all the power, lording it over those with none.
So it's pretty clear, you know, who are the aggressors and who are the victims.
And so if Palestinians are humans and they have rights just like everybody else, then what's happening to them is wrong.
Full stop.
Shrug.
Anybody.
All seven billion people in the world and every state in the world recognizes that even the U.S. Right.
They just don't act that way.
But officially they say that this has got to end.
They have.
This has been their position all along.
Yeah.
I mean, the U.S. has been saying since since what?
Since Nixon, since Reagan, that we don't support the settlement project.
And yet the settlement project is constantly ongoing, constantly expanding.
And yet we continue to give Israel literally billions of dollars.
And just Obama was the president who had the least friendly relationship with Israel and with Netanyahu.
And he signed the arms deal of three point eight billion dollars over 10 years.
I think the biggest arms deal we've ever signed with anybody.
Yeah.
Per year, over 10 years.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's you know, it's one thing to to, you know, have this official State Department stance that we don't support this constant expansion.
You know, we want a two state solution.
Whatever.
I mean, do we, you know, do our actions show that we want that?
No.
All right, everybody.
That's Anika Rehan.
She is a former next leader at the Institute for Policy Studies and a member of Students for Justice in Palestine at George Washington University.
She's currently traveling in Israel and Palestine.
And she wrote this one for John Pfeffer and the guys over at Foreign Policy in Focus.
It's called A Beginner's Guide to the Unrecognized Villages of Israel.
Thanks a lot for coming on the show.
Appreciate it.
Thanks for having me.
All right, you guys.
That's the show.
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