This diary is crossposted from Daily Kos by permission of yeela, its author. Yeela works with Bedouin people in the Negev desert of Israel. It was published on Wednesday, April 04, 2007.
To find out what is happening to the Bedouin people of Israel, watch the video from Google down below.
This documentary tells you about what is happening to them. It has been going on for a long time. The Israel government wants the Bedouin to leave their villages and lands and way of life. Why? Just to make room for Jewish settlers to move in and take their lands and build their own towns in place of the Bedouin. The Bedouin are Arab. Some have been forced to move into Bedouin only towns. The towns are poor and most of the people there give up their way of life and work as cheap labor. Those who refuse to move stay in “unrecognized” villages. The government acts like they don’t exist. They go without water, schools, clinics, and basic services. Often their homes are bulldozed.
This is all told in the video.
“The Unrecognized is a short documentary which highlights the plight of Palestinian Arab Bedouin citizens of Israel living in the Naqab (Negev) desert, many of whom were forced off their lands following the establishment of the state in 1948. Approximately 70,000 now live in the poverty of `unrecognized villages’, where they are denied essential public services and face fundamental human rights violations due to institutionalized discrimination.”
http://www.theunrecognized.org/
Please click and watch at Google. It is only 20 minutes.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8925884404226108533&q=unrecognized&hl=en
Thank you.
I feel like I have only half a computer with my dial-up….can’t watch ‘youtube’ or videos like this..
What has happened and is happening to the Bedouin’s seems plain evil pure and simple. The destruction of a group of people, the bulldozing over/over of their homes when they try to rebuild is such a sick, twisted and inhuman policy that it really can’t be called anything but evil…and I hesitate to use that word to freely or it loses it’s meaning but what else can you call this?
There is so much more to Israeli politics than we hear discussed in this country. Thanks for bringing this aspect to our attention.
It’s been well known for some time that the push for divesting Gaza and the West Bank came not from some recognition of Palestinian rights, but from the very real differences in birth rates. Israelis can add, and they realize that their homogeneous population is becoming more diverse every year.
There are also many positive things. Rumor today has it that Israel not only condoned Nancy Pelosi’s trip to Syria today, but sent messages of peace. And of course, the big rumor–that Pelosi’s trip to Syria was what actually got the Brits released from Iran. Now that would be a coup.