If there is one thing Israel
fears more than anything it is delegitimisation. That is why Israel hates BDS
because it challenges the legitimacy of the Israeli state.  All political parties in Israel know that,
despite pretensions and its claims to be the only democracy in the Middle East,
it is an outpost of the West in the Orient.

Israel is different from
any ‘normal’ bourgeois democratic state in the West because it is a state based
not on all of its inhabitants but on the Jewish part.  It is an ethno-nationalist state.  That is why the Jewish State Bill is so
important to Netanyahu because he wants to make it explicit in the Israeli equivalent
of a constitution, a Basic Law. 

When states recognise Israel
as a Jewish state they are automatically recognising that it is an Apartheid
state, a state not of all its citizens but its Jewish citizens.

Most states in the West
like the UK have some form of equalities legislation.  Indeed equalities is written into European law.  But in Israel the whole state is based on ethnic
discrimination.  Being Jewish is not a
religious identification so much as a national/racial one.  In the Israeli ID card you can be Jewish on
the basis of both nationality and religion.

Of course within the Jewish
tribe there are numerous differences, not least because the definers of who is Jewish,
the Chief Rabbinate, will not accept anyone who is converted by non-Orthodox
rabbis.  So you can immigrate to Israel under
one definition of being Jewish but once there you will not be recognised as Jewish
by those who define personal matters, the Chief Rabbinate for purposes of
birth, marriage and death.

There is therefore in Israel,
just like in Nazi Germany, which was based on the Aryan race, a mixed race – Jewish
bastards, mamzerim, half Jews or in Nazi Germany, Mishlinge.  Israel has come to resemble nothing so much as
the State that was responsible for the decimation of some third of world Jewry. 

Despite claiming its
legitimacy from the Holocaust Israel uncannily resembles Nazi Germany’s racial
structures.  It was this observation by
Hannah Arendt, in her seminal book Eichmann
in Jerusalem – the Banality of Evil which led to her ostracisation and demonization
by the Zionist movement.  She noted,
amongst other things that the condemnation of the Nazis’ Nuremburg Laws during
the Eichmann Trial, which prevented marriage between Jews and non-Jews was
ironic in view of the fact that Jews and non-Jews couldn’t marry in Israel too.

Israel has to keep up
pretensions which was why it passed a Law against racial discrimination when
the Jewish Nazi Rabbi Meir Kahane was elected to the Knesset in 1984.  However the law had to exempt discrimination on
the grounds of religion which meant that racism, in effect was legalised in Israel.  As a result Kahane voted for it!

The unrecognised villages
of Israel are the living proof that Israel, even today, sees its Zionist role
as the colonisation and settlement of the land with Jews and the uprooting and
dispossession of Arabs.  In those Arab
villages and towns which are recognised, planning laws prevent their
development.  No extra land, because 93%
of Israel is ‘Jewish’ land is allocated to the expansion of Arab lands.  Despite their population having increased
over 10 fold since the Israeli State was founded, the land allocated to Israel’s
20% Arabs has not increased.  If anything
it has been subject to further confiscation. 
That was the purpose of the Absentee Property Law which was passed by
the Israeli Labour Party government in 1950.

Despite the wilful
refusal of western leaders to recognise it, Israel is the world’s last
apartheid state.

Tony Greenstein 

Thousands of Arab Bedouins in Israel’s Negev desert
are denied power, water, sewage, and roads by the state. And their villages are
under constant threat of demolition.

It’s no secret that there is an occupation happening in and around
Israel.

Most people agree that the West Bank and Gaza Strip have been occupied
since 1967. Much less thought and literature is dedicated to the treatment of
Palestinians living inside modern-day Israel proper. I decided to head over
there and see for myself.

It is commonly believed that Palestinian citizens of Israel — officially
known as Arab Israelis — enjoy full equality in the Jewish State. There are
Arab members of parliament, the Arab population in Israel has been growing
steadily for decades, and the Arab cultural scene is thriving in places like
Haifa. While all of these statements are true, Palestinians insist that
occupation still exists inside the state of Israel, and nowhere is that
fact more apparent than in the unrecognized Bedouin villages of the Negev
desert.

Before the creation of modern Israel, the Negev desert, which
constitutes the southern half of the country, was almost entirely populated by
Arab Bedouins. Nearly 90 percent fled during the Nakba of 1948.
11,000 Bedouins remained, a population which has now grown to over 200,000.

Of the Bedouins still living in the Negev, half live in
government-designated towns and cities, much like Native reservations in the
United States, and the other half live in unrecognized villages. The Bedouin
are Israeli citizens, but because their villages aren’t formally recognized by
the state, they have no access to state services including water, electricity,
telephones, sewage systems, and roads.

Today, the unrecognized villages of the Negev desert have the highest
unemployment and poverty rates in Israel. I visited three villages to
understand the effect of occupation.

Be’er Sheva is the largest city in the Negev desert. It is home to
205,000 people, about 10 percent of whom are Palestinian citizens of Israel.

Originally founded in 4,000 BCE, Be’er Sheva has been at times a Bedouin
encampment, part of the Ottoman Empire, and now, the fourth most populous
metropolitan center in Israel. It is a thriving college town, a growing tech
hub, and interestingly, the chess capital of the world.

Less than 5 miles away are unrecognized villages where people live in
tents and tin shacks.

The largest of the unrecognized villages is Wadi an-Na’am. It was
established in the 1950s by internally displaced Bedouins from surrounding
villages who’d been forcibly removed from their homes and lands, but it’s never
been officially recognized.

In the 1970s, Israel built Neot Hovav, the country’s primary toxic waste
disposal facility, in Wadi an-Na’am. Since its establishment, the facility has
experienced frequent accidents, fires, explosions, and leaks, resulting in
birth defects and long-term health problems in the Bedouin community.

The village is also surrounded by military firing zones, where the
Israeli Defense Forces carry out military drills and trainings using live ammunition.
Unexploded shells are often left behind from these exercises. The last
accident killed two children aged 8 and 10.

An electric power plant is clearly visible from the village.

This plant generates electricity for Be’er Sheva and surrounding
localities, but not for Wadi an-Na’am or the 45 other unrecognized villages
like it. People in the villages depend instead on an inconsistent combination
of solar panels and generators. Adalah, a human rights and legal organization, currently has three open cases
regarding elementary schools in Wadi an-Na’am that lack electricity.

Israel recently announced its intention to relocate the residents of
Wadi an-Na’am to the nearby town of Segev Shalom. The villagers oppose this
plan because it would destroy their agrarian lifestyle. In 2015 the Association for Civil Rights in Israel presented two alternative options, both of which
would allow the villagers to maintain their way of life, but the relocation
will move forward as originally proposed.

I also visited Umm al-Hiran,  an unrecognized village on the verge of demolition. Like Wadi an-Na’am, Umm
al-Hiran was established in the 1950s by order of the Israeli military governor
as part of a state-sanctioned effort to relocate and concentrate the Bedouin.
Half of the village was briefly granted recognition in 2008, but the decision
was reversed two years later.

The state has marked Umm al-Hiran as the site of a future Jewish
development to be called Hiran, a project that necessitates the demolition of
the entire village. Residents filed appeals and fought back in court, but in
2015, the Supreme Court of Israel rejected a petition to prevent demolition of
the village. Construction was briefly halted following protests led by Adalah,
but is expected to continue soon.

At 3 a.m. on January 18 of this year, Israeli police arrived at Umm
al-Hiran to conduct home demolitions. A local teacher named Yacoub Abu
Al-Qia’an got in his car and began to drive away, but was shot at by the
police.

One of the bullets hit his right knee, causing him to lose control of
his vehicle and accelerate into a group of officers. One officer was killed, as
was Yacoub. Israeli authorities initially declared him a terrorist connected to
ISIS, but retracted when video evidence surfaced proving that he was shot
before his car accelerated.

A memorial stands at the scene of the shooting.

And finally, I visited the most notorious of the unrecognized villages,
al-Araqib. This village, which was once home to 600 people, has been demolished
119 times. Now, only 5 tents and a tribal cemetery remain. There are more
graves than villagers.

Amazingly, the demolitions aren’t even the worst past: Perhaps the most
unsettling aspect of this years long tragedy is the government’s
demand that the residents of al-Araqib pay for the cost of demolishing their
homes.

I have been part of the movement for Palestinian justice for a year and
a half now. I have spent hundreds of hours reading about the blockade of Gaza,
the murders of Mahmoud Shaalan and Rachel Corrie, the intifadas, the
checkpoints, the BDS movement, and more, but I was still shocked by what I saw
in the Negev desert. The Bedouin are continually displaced and disenfranchised
by the state — and too often, they are also erased from the mainstream
Palestinian narrative.

This is occupation, pure and simple, and it is 70 years past time the
world recognizes it.

Aniqa Raihan is a former Next Leader at the Institute for Policy Studies
and a past member of Students for Justice in Palestine at George
Washington University. She’s currently traveling in Israel-Palestine.