Forced Removal of 30,000 Bedouins Reminiscent of Sophiatown in 1955
Source: Earth Heal – News For An Earth In Transition
Forced Removal of 30,000 Bedouins Reminiscent of Sophiatown in 1955
The State of Israel’s policies of dispossession and forced removal are a mirror of South African apartheid, with plans to displace 30,000 bedouins in the Negev reminiscent of the forced removals of 65,000 blacks in Sophiatown in 1955.
On September 12, 2012, the Bedouin village of Al-Arakib in Israel’s Negev region was demolished for the thirty-ninth time – despite tenure dating back to the Ottoman period.
More recently the government won the right to build a Jewish settlement on the site of the Bedouin village of Umm al-Hiran. The planned Jewish settlement will become Hiran.
Israeli policies of dispossession reminiscent of South African apartheid
Plans to displace bedouins in Israel are reminiscent of the forced removals of blacks in Sophiatown.
by Heidi-Jane Esakov
During the forced removals of the South African suburb of Sophiatown in 1955, around 65,000 residents were moved and “dumped in matchbox houses” in black townships. Only a few years before that, in 1948, Bedouins of Israel’s Naqab/Negev region, who Israel had not expelled, were also forcibly moved “from their ancestral lands into a restricted zone called the Siyag (literally, ‘fenced in’)”. And, just as Sophiatown was completely bulldozed, the Negev village of Al-Arakib was recently razed to make way for a Jewish National Fund forest.
As a South African it is particularly difficult not to see the stark parallels between the experiences of black South Africans under apartheid and of Palestinians today.
