Author: Catherine Weibel

Catherine Weibel meets a Palestinian woman fighting to save her family home from demolition with the help of an Israeli organisation.

Umm Juma talks to a staff member of Oxfam’s partner Bimkom/Planners for Planning Rights, who has come to help her protect her home from being destroyed. Photo: Catherine Weibel/Oxfam

On a calm morning in the south of the West Bank, Palestinian villagers in At-Tuwani are experiencing two very different types of encounters with Israelis.

From the roof of her house, 58-year old Umm Juma’ keeps a wary eye on a group of Israeli settlers who have erected tents not far from the village. The settlers are creating what is known as an “outpost” – an unauthorised, makeshift settlement often inhabited by only a few people. Under international law all Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank are considered illegal, but Israel itself also deems these outposts to be illegal.

“The settlers block the path we use to access grazing land,” says Umm Juma’. “They have already attacked my sons as they were herding our sheep. Now I worry about their safety each time they leave the house”.

At the same time, Umm Juma’ serves tea to a different group of Israelis that she has invited onto her roof terrace. They work for Oxfam’s partner Bimkom/Planners for Planning Rights, and have come to help her protect her home from being destroyed.

Authorities “strangling development”

Bimkom’s architects and planners help Palestinians fight house demolition orders and restrictive building policies that are pervasive in Area C. Home to 150,000 Palestinians and twice as many Israeli settlers, Area C is under full Israeli civil and military control, including deciding on planning schemes and issuing building permits. Bimkom has accused Israeli authorities of strangling development for Palestinian communities in Area C, with building restrictions that prevent Palestinian communities from expanding and building new homes and schools.

According to Bimkom, the ICA approved only 5.6% of all Palestinian applications for building permits between 2000 and 2007. Palestinians are often left with no option but to build without a permit, despite the risk of their houses being demolished, leaving thousands of families homeless. These building restrictions stifle Palestinian economic development, and violate basic human rights.

Umm Juma’s house was built 30 years ago, but she still has to obtain a building permit for the house to be legal in the eyes of the Israeli Civil Administration (ICA), the Israeli military agency that decides whether building are legal in Area C. Umm Juma’s house faces possible demolition, as it lies 100 metres outside of the planning boundaries defined by the ICA. Even if the six room house is not demolished it will still be located outside the boundaries of the plan for the village, which means that Umm Juma’s family of 30 won’t be able to legally expand or renovate the already overcrowded house.

2,450 buildings destroyed

Bimkom’s architects and planners help Palestinians fight house demolition orders and restrictive building policies that are pervasive in Area C of the occupied West Bank. Photo: Catherine Weibel/Oxfam

The villagers of At-Tuwani complain that the ICA serves demolition orders – approximately 2,450 for Palestinian-owned structures without a permit in the last 12 years, according to OCHA – but offers no services. They’ve been asking for their village to be connected to the electrical network for years, but the electrical network serving the neighbouring Israeli settlements still bypasses At-Tuwani.

According to Bimkom, the outline plans drawn by the ICA for Palestinian villages throughout the West Bank are rudimentary at best. Bimkom architect Alon Cohen-Lipshitz explains how two houses were not included in the plan for At-Tuwani, even though they’re located just a stone’s throw away from other houses that were included. “When asked why he decided to leave these two houses outside the plan for At-Tuwani, the ICA planner told us he had mistaken these houses for big rocks. He had never set foot in the village – he drew his plan entirely from an aerial picture.”

Bimkom has filed an official objection to the plan for At-Tuwani, demanding significant revisions. If the objection is rejected and Umm Juma’s house is still outside the plan, the villagers and Bimkom might appeal the decision in front of the High Court of Justice in Jerusalem.

For the time being, Umm Juma’ simply hopes that the house she’s been living in for 30 years won’t be destroyed.

Oxfam in action: crisis in Gaza

Oxfam’s Catherine Weibel reports on the Bedouin tribes of the Negev desert, a people whose semi-nomadic traditions have placed them in legal no-man’s land with the Israeli government.

A precarious situation

The remains of demolished houses can be found in most of the unrecognised villages scattered in the Negev desert. Credit: Catherine Weibel

In Jerusalem, most souvenir shops sell postcards depicting camels crossing the Negev desert, which constitutes most of southern Israel. These cards rarely feature the people who’ve been roaming the desert for centuries alongside these camels, the Arab Bedouin. Many still live in a precarious situation, some 60 years after they were displaced from their lands during the early days of the State of Israel.

Today, the Negev (or “Naqab” in Arabic, as the Bedouin call it) is home to an estimated 160,000 Bedouin, about half of whom are living in villages considered illegal by the Israeli authorities, who have continually pressured the Arab Bedouin to give up their traditional, semi-nomadic ways for a more sedentary life. As Israeli General Moshe Dayan put it in 1963, the goal was to turn the traditional Bedouin into someone, “who would not live on his land with his herds, but would become an urban person who comes home in the afternoon and puts his slippers on.”

Morad El-Sana, a lawyer who worked for eight years with the Oxfam-supported partner organisation Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, explains that historically, the Arab Bedouin are neither rootless, nor landless people. “Each tribe used to have it own specific area in the Negev,” he says. “They led a semi-nomadic life, herding cattle and cultivating the land, with one village for the summertime and another during the winter to ensure their herds had enough grazing lands.”

Unrecognised villages

Unrecognised Bedouin villages present scenes of appalling poverty. Credit: Catherine Weibel.

Today, about half of the Negev Bedouin have left their lands and moved to one of the seven legal, government-built villages. The other half remained on their land in 45 villages that are not recognised by the Israeli authorities and which, as if invisible, do not appear on commercial maps. These unrecognised villages receive little to no services. They lack basic transportation infrastructure, including roads. They have no access to power or water networks and offer few educational or health facilities, even though the Bedouin are Israeli citizens.

Many unrecognised villages are scattered a few minutes drive from modern highways but they still present a scene of appalling poverty, with bare-foot children running amid corrugated iron and wooden huts. The remains of demolished houses can be found in most of the village – the authorities tore the huts down as their inhabitants have not been granted construction permits, even though they have sometimes been living on a particular plot of land for decades.

El-Sana explains that the Negev is said to be “dead land” by Israeli authorities. They rely on an ancient Ottoman law from the 1820s to back up that legal claim. In practice, it means that the Bedouin of 2010 cannot claim ownership of the ancestral lands their families and tribes have been using for centuries.

“Targeted by the authorities”

“Some isolated houses and farms (owned by Jewish-Israeli citizens) in the desert are connected to power and water supplies, so why can’t unrecognised Bedouin villages be?” El-Sana asks, adding that some of these buildings, which house Jewish communities, also lack construction permits. “Yet they are rarely destroyed, while Bedouin houses in unrecognised villages are systematically targeted by the authorities.”

With no construction permit being provided by the authorities to residents of the unrecognised villages, Arab Bedouin families live in constant fear of having their house demolished. Still they are reluctant to leave their land, rebuilding makeshift houses even after they have been taken down several times.

“People know their family home might be demolished but they don’t know whether it will happen in two weeks, two months or two years”, El-Sana says. “Houses can be destroyed without specific, advance warning. Sometimes people are not given enough time to salvage their few belongings before the house is torn down,” he adds.

An inadequate alternative

The seven government-planned towns, which were built without consulting the Bedouin communities, have proven an inadequate alternative due to decaying infrastructure, a lack of consideration for Bedouin family ties and a high unemployment rate. Although the Arab Bedouin do get some benefits from the state, suc

Travel distances to schools are so long that 77% of Bedouin girls reportedly end up dropping out of school. Credit: Catherine Weibel.

h as healthcare and child allowances, it is not enough to help them escape from poverty. Travel distances to schools are so long, for example, that 77% of Bedouin girls end up dropping out of school, according to El-Sana.

The towns are also ill-equipped to handle any influx of new residents and lack the space to accommodate traditional livelihoods such as herding. Some of them look little better than shanty towns. They are a far cry from the shiny, modern cities which have been built recently to house other Israeli communities in the Negev.

“I want to stay on my land”

“I want to stay on my land, which has been passed from one generation to another in my family”, a Bedouin resident of one of the unrecognized villages told Oxfam. “If I leave and I move to one of the legal cities, I will lose any claim on my land and so will my children. I want the state to let us live legally in our house, on our land.”

Oxfam’s partner Adalah brings impact litigation cases before the Israeli courts to promote and defend the rights of the Arab Bedouin in the country, primarily in the fields of land and housing rights, health and education rights. Adalah advocates for an official recognition of the “unrecognised villages” by the Israeli authorities so that the Arab Bedouin living in these villages can stay on their lands and their ongoing forced displacement comes to an end.

Where we work: occupied Palestinian Territories and Israel