Bedouin village in Negev to be destroyed, Jewish settlement to be built on site
Umm Al-Hiran is one of roughly 40 unrecognized Bedouin villages, some of them predating the state itself. Those villages are deprived of basic government services, like running water and electricity; they are not entitled to zoning plans, such that every house built in these villages is at risk of demolition.
As it happens, Umm al-Hiram stands on the site of one of 10 new Jewish settlements the Prime Minister’s Office seeks to build in the area. In 2010, a state zoning committee recommended recognizing Umm al-Hiran, but Prime Minister Netanyahu’s office overruled that decision. The new settlement, called Hiran, will offer housing subsidies for national-religious families.
The Bedouin in this village have an especially strong case, since they were sent there by the state of Israel itself. Following the 1948 war, members of the Abu Al-Qian tribe were evicted from their lands in the western Negev (currently the site of Kibbutz Shoval). After settling in a temporary site, they were sent in the mid-50s by the military governor – who was put in charge of the Palestinian population after the war – to the Yatir area, where they currently live.
........................................................................
The state’s preferred option (according to comments given to the press) is to push the Bedouin population to the nearby town of Horah, which is unsuited to the agricultural lifestyle of many of Umm al-Hiran’s residents, and which suffers from a lack of employment opportunities and severe infrastructure shortages. In our visit to Horah, we saw garbage and animal carcasses scattered along the roads at the edge of over-populated town.
http://972mag.com/bedouin-village-in-negev-to-be-destroyed-jewish-settlement-to-be-built-on-site/56875/
= new reply since forum marked as read
