Daily Times

“In public life…from the standpoint of patriotism, when these things are done for the greater glory of the State, for the preservation or the extension of its power, it is all transformed into duty and virtue. This explains why the entire history of ancient and modern states is merely a series of revolting crimes; why kings and ministers, past and present, of all times and all countries — statesmen, diplomats, bureaucrats, and warriors — if judged from the standpoint of simple morality and human justice, have a hundred, a thousand times over earned their sentence to hard labour or to the gallows. There is no horror, no cruelty, sacrilege, or perjury, no imposture, no infamous transaction, no cynical robbery, no bold plunder or shabby betrayal that has not been or is not daily being perpetrated by the representatives of the states, under no other pretext than those elastic words, so convenient and yet so terrible: ‘for reasons of state’.” — Mikhail Bakunin.

The entire world or nearly the entire world knows about the Israeli injustices against the Palestinians but very few, if any, know about the Negev Desert Bedouins’ plight. Historically, Bedouins have primarily engaged in nomadic herding, agriculture, raiding, and sometimes fishing. Their nomadic life is a consequence of scarcity of water and permanent pastoral land. Having intimate knowledge of the desert, they earn income by transporting goods and people across the desert. They had the monopoly of guiding pilgrim caravans to Makkah and selling them provisions but after the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, their role was reduced. Their worst problems began with the formation of Israel and the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. A vast majority of the 65,000 Bedouin that lived in the Negev region fled to Egypt or Jordan; only 11,000 remained behind. The Israeli government relocated them to a restricted zone called the Siyagh, made up of relatively infertile land in 10 percent of the Negev Desert in the northeast.

In 1950, the Israelis replaced Arabic names on official maps with Hebrew names. David Ben-Gurion justified it thus: “We are obliged to remove the Arabic names for ‘reasons of state’. Just as we do not recognize the Arabs’ political proprietorship of the land, so also we do not recognize their spiritual proprietorship and their names.” This is how oppressive colonialism tries to obliterate the cultural and linguistic identity of the colonized. Urdu in Pakistan is also an apt example.

In 1979, Ariel Sharon declared a 1,500 square kilometre area in the Negev a protected nature reserve, rendering its major portion almost entirely out of bounds for Bedouin herders. This reserve is used by the military and 85 percent of the desert is off-limits for civilian purposes. Between 1977 and 1981, Bedouin encampments and goatherds reduced by more than one third. Consequently, the black goat is nearly extinct and the Bedouin do not have enough goat hair to weave their traditional tents.

Last year Israel, not content with the already harsh cultural, political and economic suppression of Bedouins in the Negev, decided to forcibly remove 30,000 Bedouin Arabs from their homes. Human rights groups have condemned the move as “cruel and discriminatory”. These 30,000 of the total of 180,000 Bedouins live in more than 30 makeshift encampments that are not recognised by Israel as legal villages. They will be relocated to larger Bedouin communities residing in the seven officially recognised towns in the northeast Negev Desert where the inhabitants are already in a crisis.

The Bedouin infant mortality rate is the highest in Israel. In 2003, among Bedouin citizens it was 13.3 per thousand, more than three times higher than the 3.9 per thousand among the Jewish population. In these urban townships, access to water is also an issue as the allocation to Bedouin towns is 25-50 percent of that to Jewish towns. Bedouins suffer from extreme rates of joblessness and endure the highest poverty rate in Israel. According to a 2007 comparative study, the poverty rate is 25 percent in the general Israeli population while it is 66 percent for the Negev Bedouin; as a whole 80 percent of the population lives under the poverty line in unrecognised Bedouin villages. According to a 2003 Ben-Gurion University study, 71 percent of Bedouin citizens suffer from hunger and 87 percent of children are in danger of starvation.

Bedouin advocates argue that the main reason for the transfer of the Bedouin into townships against their will is demographic. The Bedouin with an annual growth rate of 5.5 percent are seen as a demographic threat to the maintenance of a Jewish majority in the Negev region. The Israelis intend to build Jewish settlements, housing as many as 10,000 Israelis in 2,400 units in one of the evacuated villages. It is noteworthy that the Bedouin villages are considered illegal because the Israeli government does not recognise them. The discrimination against the Bedouin encampments is similar to that practiced against the Palestinians in the West Bank. Everywhere colonists engineer demographic changes that are favourable to them and conveniently nullify original inhabitants land rights ‘for reasons of state’.

The plight of the Bedouins is a harsh reality but it has been sidelined by the larger conflict in the Middle East. Moreover, their docile acquiescence in their fate is also responsible for their plight being overlooked. All those who submit unquestioningly to suppression invite harsher suppression. The Negev Desert Bedouins’ plight illustrates how submissiveness relegates genuine problems of a people to obscurity. Oppressors have never had and never will have compassion for the sufferings of the oppressed. Salvation for the oppressed people lies in struggle and defiance. Both, the prize and the price, of struggle and defiance are ultimate. If people are ready to pay the price, the prize will not elude them.

The Balochistan issue too would have been marginalised by the war in Iraq, Afghanistan, Taliban and al Qaeda, had not the tremendous sacrifices by the Baloch kept it alive. The Baloch after a persistent six-decade plus struggle against the Pakistani state’s intransigence have captured world attention. Their struggle for dignity and honour has paid dividends, albeit at a huge cost. The fate of the Baloch would have been no different from the Bedouins if they had not resisted the cultural, political and economic annihilation by the Pakistani state. If Pakistan were to have its way, all the Baloch would have been sitting in settlements in some barren part of Balochistan ‘for reasons of state’.

The writer has an association with the Baloch rights movement dating back to the early 1970s. He can be contacted at mmatalpur@gmail.com