How Muslim Bedouins are losing land to Israel’s ‘Judaisation’ campaign

For Eid Al-Ghanami, a 50-year-old Palestinian Israeli from the desert area of the Negev in southern Israel, talking about his recently demolished house makes him sick to his stomach.

He avoids even thinking about the four-bedroom house because it brings back vivid memories of the place where he spent most of his life and raised his 10 children.

“My seven-year-old daughter keeps asking me, ‘When will you rebuild the house we used to have?’” he tells TRT World.

Al-Ghanami is an Israeli citizen from the Bedouin community, an indigenous and semi-nomadic tribe that settled permanently in the Negev desert in southern Israel during the British Mandate (1923-48).

Even though they have citizenship, most of the Bedouins lost their lands and became internally displaced within the newly carved state of Israel – as Israel moves ahead to ‘Judaise’ the area by making way for ‘legal’ housing settlements, resorts and factories for Jewish people.

Israel claims Biblical ownership over all lands that it considers to be part of the Jewish state and denies any property rights to the Bedouins, who are mostly Muslim.

While Tel Aviv has intensified its home demolition drive in Bedouin villages in recent years, the campaign has taken a different dimension since the start of the Gaza war.

The number of home demolitions in Muslim-majority areas within Israel “tripled” in 2024 as the Zionist state rained deadly bombs across Gaza, killing nearly 47,500 Palestinians.

At the same time, Israel has continued its land-grabbing spree in the occupied West Bank and the Golan Heights by building new Jewish settlements on Palestinian territories at a faster pace than before.

Earlier, Israeli authorities had to run every order for the demolition of a Bedouin home in Israel’s Negev area by the court – a process that often resulted in appeals and hearings, which afforded the villagers a shot at resisting land confiscation.

But under the Kaminitz Law enacted in 2017, the government frequently issues demolition orders bypassing the judicial system at the initial stage at least.

What tears at the heart of Al-Ghanami is the fact that he had to knock his house down himself at short notice. Otherwise, Israeli authorities would have brought in bulldozers to demolish the structure and then billed him for thousands of dollars in expenses.

Since June 2024, his family has been living in a tent on the same plot of land in the ‘unrecognised’ village of Umm Matnan, where his house stood for decades.

“The Israeli authorities plan to build farms for Jewish people on our land. I still have a copy of the map showing the house of my father back in the 1980s. He lived here, and so did my grandfather, on the same plot of land,” he says.

Today, roughly 325,000 Bedouin citizens of Israel live in the Negev. The Bedouin community exists mostly insulated from Israeli society as it battles the constant erasure of its traditional way of life.

Two in every three Bedouin citizens in the Negev live in poverty, a rate three times higher than that for Israel’s general population.

Their access to state services and the justice system remains limited as they face mobility restrictions, forced displacements, land confiscation, denial of building permits and a general lack of law enforcement in response to settler violence, according to the United Nations Development Programme.

‘Recognised’ and otherwise

The Bedouin population currently lives in three types of housing. About 200,000 people live in seven townships built by the government between 1969 and 1989 specifically to move the community out of its ancestral land.

Another 35,000 Bedouins live in 11 villages that the government ‘recognised’ post-1999 following a decades-long legal fight put up by the community. Yet the people in these so-called recognised villages continue to face home demolitions while struggling to get even rudimentary building permits.

Most of the population in these ‘recognised’ villages continues to live without adequate infrastructure like drinking water, electricity, sewage disposal and roads.

But the worst conditions are faced by about 90,000 Bedouins who live in 37 ‘unrecognised’ villages in the Negev.

Official Israeli maps don’t acknowledge their presence, even though many of the villages predate the 1965 Planning and Construction Law that categorised them as illegal.

Marwan Abu Frieh, a lawyer for the Haifa-based human rights organisation Adalah, tells TRT World that Israeli authorities bulldozed as many as 3,280 homes in ‘unrecognised’ villages.

“I think the number of home demolitions (for 2024) will be more than 7,000.”

The Adalah lawyer says he receives distress calls from families fearing immediate demolition of their homes nearly daily.

“They say, ‘Marwan, they brought a demolition order, they’ll come tomorrow’,” he says, adding that he can only try to get the execution of the order delayed using legal means. Getting a demolition order reversed, he says, is next to impossible.

“All these 90,000 Bedouin have Israeli passports, Israeli citizenship, but no rights. Illegal buildings, illegal houses and illegal villages. Illegal men, illegal women and illegal people,” says Frieh, who is representing 1,600 Bedouins from three ‘unrecognised’ villages in court.

Israel set up a dedicated police unit called Yoav in 2011 to stop what it calls ‘unauthorised’ construction in Bedouin localities in the Negev. “For years, the government has been telling the Bedouin, ‘If you want rights, you need to move’.”

After selecting a property for demolition, Yoav officials call the owner and tell him to either raze the structure himself or wait for the authorities to bring in earth-moving machinery.

In most cases, the owner decides to tear down his home himself.

“If you say you’d demolish your house yourself, you need to send them a photo by WhatsApp. Otherwise, they arrive with police and bulldozers, give you 15 minutes to take your things, and demolish the house. After two weeks, they send you a bill for $10,000 to $20,000,” Frieh says.

The Israeli government wants to make room for new Jewish settlements in the Negev by cramming the Bedouin living in the 37 ‘unrecognised’ villages into the seven townships and the 11 ‘recognised’ villages, he says.

More specifically, Israel’s Bedouin Settlement Authority seeks to relocate the Bedouin to expand military training areas, extend Highway 6, which is Israel’s main north-south road, open a weapons testing facility and develop a phosphate mine.

“The Bedouin know one thing: to save our lands, we need to stay, be it without any service, without any infrastructure… we will stay, we will pay (the price),” says Frieh, who also belongs to the same community he serves as a lawyer.

Enough land for everyone

Hassan Al-Hwashleh, a 40-year-old father of three from the Bedouin village of Ras Jrabah, says the authorities demolished the homes of his brother and neighbour years ago and have since been refusing to let them build a new structure.

Teams patrol the area every day to keep a check on new developments while aerial photography is used at least once a month to ensure full compliance with the no-construction policy, he tells TRT World.

“We’ve been living here since before the creation of Israel. They built the city of Dimona on our ancestral land,” he says about the nearby Jewish city that the authorities plan to expand by taking up the land of the Bedouin village of Ras Jrabah.

Turning down the appeal of Adalah last year, a court has ordered the forced displacement of the entire village population of over 500 people. Residents are supposed to demolish their homes themselves and evacuate to the ‘recognised’ township of Qasr Al-Sirr.

Hwashleh says the mayor of Dimona has the authority to let his family be. “The mayor knows my family very well. He knew my father, who worked in the city (of Dimona) for more than 25 years. But he keeps ignoring us. He knows he’s sitting on the land of our tribe.”

He says he does not want to move to the city. The mayor can build the neighbourhood if he wants but let the Bedouin stay on their land, he says.

“We don’t mind sharing the land. There is enough space for everyone. So why do they want to uproot us?”