Israel Begins Ethnically Cleansing Bedouin Community to Build Jews-Only Town

Liberal supporters of Israel have traditionally operated on a political binary that runs along 1967 armistice lines — the Green Line — separating the Occupied Palestinians Territories from Israel. Though Israel enjoys no internationally recognized border between itself and Palestine, refusing to even produce a map proposing any such borders in peace negotiations, the border in the liberal Zionist imagination is firmly established. According to Peter Beinart, the widely published liberal Zionist pundit, Israel-Palestine is divided between a “Democratic Israel”representing Israel inside the Green Line, and “nondemocratic Israel,” signifying Israeli military control over the Palestinian West Bank. In Beinart’s view, if Israel allowed Palestinians to establish a state in the West Bank (he curiously omits the Gaza Strip), it would consolidate its identity as a liberal democracy.

There is just one problem with this fantastical vision. Some twenty percent of Israel’s citizens are Palestinians, and none of them enjoy a modicum of legal or political equality. Institutional discrimination is particularly acute in the Negev Desert, inhabited by 80,000 Bedouin citizens of Israel whose communities and homes have been declared “illegal” by the self-proclaimed Jewish state. They are considered a demographic threat, and even an occupying entity. Thus plans have been put into place to “concentrate” the Bedouin in special development towns after their communities are demolished and replaced with exclusively Jewish ones.

“The United States had its Manifest Destiny in the West. For Israel, that land is the Negev,” said Ron Lauder, a cosmetics fortune heir and top pro-Israel donor who is central in financing colonization projects in the Negev.

Scenes of brutal settler-colonialism were on full display in Umm Al-Hiran this week, a village of indigenous Bedouin Palestinians in the Negev Desert. The residents of this village are Israeli citizens, but their homes have been declared “illegal” by the state. Nearby, a group of religious nationalist Jewish settlers has been waiting to move into the plots that have been cleared of the ruins of Bedouin homes, and establish the exclusively Jewish town of Hiran. This January 17, bulldozers from the Israeli Land Authority moved in on Umm Al-Hiran and demolished several homes, beginning a process of ethnic cleansing that has long been in the works.

[more…]