Source: http://cdi.ulb.ac.be/legal-situation-bedouin-israel-analysis-eric-david/
Timestamp: 2019-04-21 07:04:58+00:00

Document:
1. The undersigned returns from a hike (walkers and cyclists) organized by a Belgian association – Solidarity with Bedouins (SWB) – in the desert of Negev (Naqab in Arabic) in Israel from 1 to 6 April 2013 (map and pictures 1-4). This hike linked several Bedouin villages unrecognized by the Israeli administration, around the city of Be’er Sheva. (pictures 5-6). Having seen firsthand the situation of Bedouin in Israel (pictures 5-6), the undersigned wishes to respond to the emotion of the observations and meetings (pictures 7-9) by a cold and, he hopes, lucid analysis of public international law applicable to the question.
property rights of Bedouins who were already living in the Siyag before the creation of Israel were not recognized (The Arab Bedouin and the Prawer Plan, op. cit., p. 1).
3. Bedouins who fled Israel and who returned were then installed in 1969 in seven urban communities created by Israel and which today account for 85% of the native Bedouin population of the Negev / Naqab 105 000 people. Bedouin communities who had not been displaced and who remained on their historical lands (95,000 people) live in 35 unrecognized villages that existed before the creation of Israel and in 10 villages in the process of recognition. The population of these villages varies from 300 to 10 000 people (ibid.).
As Israel does not recognize these 35 villages as urban communities, Israel refuses to provide them with the basic public services provided to any Israeli urban concentration: running water, electricity, roads, schools; in addition, the Bedouins who live in these villages and who, legally, are Israeli citizens are treated as intruders or squatters illegally installed on Hebrew State lands. They live under constant threat of being forcibly evicted and having their dwellings demolished; in 2011, 1,000 Bedouin houses in these villages in the Negev / Naqab had been demolished by bulldozers (ibid.).
4. Participants in the hike organized by SWB having seen the sad spectacle of demolished houses, the question that immediately comes to the mind of the viewer is whether this situation is consistent with the law. This will be answered in the light of public international law.
The prohibition opposed by Israel to the Bedouins to resettle in their ancestral lands and to recognize their individual rights to these lands is a denial of these rights, thus a violation of their property rights. In 1972, the Israeli courts seized by Bedouins had rejected land claims because the title of the Bedouins had never been recorded before 1948 and because the land had not been cultivated, which, according to Ottoman law, would have allowed them to consider it not as « dead land » (STEINERT, loc. cit ., p. 5 ; also http://apjp.org/israel-court-rejects-6-bedouin/author/archplanjust consulted on 13 October 2013) , but as land held by persons in their private capacity.
to the argument that the Bedouins enjoyed legal autonomy to resolve land issues and that the Bedouin law did not require such registration, the court said that if the Ottomans had wanted to exempt a population of the application of the law, they would have said so explicitly (ibid.).
Bedouin system has always been very far from a practice of pillar and cadastre such as Israeli justice envisaged. It is also likely that, for domestic peace, the administration of territorial spaces in the Ottoman Empire, which stretched over three continents (Europe, Asia, Africa) before its dissolution in 1923, had integrated local customs and traditions in land matters. It was therefore quite logical on the one hand, that the Palestinian Bedouins did not comply with the land registration rules in force in the Ottoman Empire, on the other hand, that the latter never imposed them.
It is therefore in the light of the law specific to Bedouin society that land issues must be considered, and that is precisely what states international law about indigenous peoples.
8. Membership of the Bedouins to the category of indigenous peoples derives from the definition carried by 1989 ILO Convention No. 169 concerning Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention, i.e.
Israel is not a party to that Convention which, in 2013, bound only 22 States, but the definition of native or indigenous people carried by the agreement corresponds exactly to the reality of the Bedouin people.
“Art. 10. Indigenous peoples shall not be forcibly removed from their lands or territories. No relocation shall take place without the free, prior and informed consent of the indigenous peoples concerned and after agreement on just and fair compensation and, where possible, with the option of return.
Art. 26. 1. Indigenous peoples have the right to the lands, territories and resources which they have traditionally owned, occupied or otherwise used or acquired.
Art. 27. States shall establish and implement, in conjunction with indigenous peoples concerned, a fair, independent, impartial, open and transparent process, giving due recognition to indigenous peoples’ laws, traditions, customs and land tenure systems, to recognize and adjudicate the rights of indigenous peoples pertaining to their lands, territories and resources, including those which were traditionally owned or otherwise occupied or used. Indigenous peoples shall have the right to participate in this process.
Art. 28. 1. Indigenous peoples have the right to redress, by means that can include restitution or, when this is not possible, just, fair and equitable compensation, for the lands, territories and resources which they have traditionally owned or otherwise occupied or used, and which have been confiscated, taken, occupied, used or damaged without their free, prior and informed consent.
The right of indigenous peoples to obtain reparation (restitution or compensation) for any deprivation of their lands or territories (art. 10 and 28).
The ownership of land and territories to indigenous peoples is determined by their traditional occupation or possession, a qualification that appears not less than four times in the three relevant provisions of the Declaration (Art. 26, § § 1-2; Art. 27 and Art. 28, § 1). It is therefore no question of determination of the membership on the basis of criteria imposed a posteriori by the dominant group (the Israeli authorities) such as the registration in official documents whose conception remains completely foreign to traditional customs of the indigenous people. By ignoring these rules, the Israeli judicial decisions are, therefore, groundless.
“20. The Committee is concerned about the current situation of Bedouin communities, particularly with regard to the policy of demolitions, notably of homes and other structures, and the increasing difficulties faced by members of these communities in gaining access on a basis of equality with Jewish inhabitants to land, housing, education, employment and public health.
The Committee recommends that the State party address satisfactorily the problems faced by Bedouin communities, in particular with regard to the loss of their land and access to new land. The Committee also recommends that the State party step up its efforts to ensure equal access to education, work, housing and public health in all territories under the State party’s effective control. In this regard, the State party should withdraw the 2012 discriminatory proposed Law for the Regulation of the Bedouin Settlement in the Negev, which would legalize the ongoing policy of home demolitions and forced displacement of the indigenous Bedouin communities.
25. The Committee is increasingly concerned at the State party’s discriminatory planning policy, whereby construction permits are rarely if ever granted to Palestinian and Bedouin communities and demolitions principally target property owned by Palestinians and Bedouins. The Committee is concerned at the adverse tendency of preferential treatment for the expansion of Israeli settlements, through the use of “state land” allocated for settlements, the provision of infrastructure such as roads and water systems, high approval rates for planning permits and the establishment of Special Planning Committees consisting of settlers for consultative decision-making processes. The Committee is greatly concerned at the State party’s policy of “demographic balance”, which has been a stated aim of official municipal planning documents, particularly in the city of Jerusalem (Articles 2, 3 and 5 of the Convention).
The report of the Committee observes in diplomatic terms that the Prawer-Begin plan violates the UN Convention of 7 March 1966 on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, which binds Israel since January 3, 1979.
the Declaration of the UN General Assembly of 13 December 2007 on the rights of indigenous peoples, in particular the Bedouins’ right for respect of their traditional land rights and occupation of their lands and territories (Art. 10, 26-28 ).
12. Israel’s policy towards the Bedouin is not only a violation of international law: it also constitutes a criminal offence as an apartheid crime a crime against humanity.
this policy corresponds to the facts defined as apartheid by Art. II of the 1973 Convention the relevant passages of which are reproduced above (In 2011, at its third session on Palestine, Russell Tribunal had made the same observation about the Israeli practices against the Palestinian people, http://www.russelltribunalonpalestine.com/en/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/RToP-Cape-Town-full-findings2.pdf).
14. Such facts constitute « crimes against humanity” since the 1973 Convention on the crime of apartheid (art. 1) that the ICC Statute (art. 7, § 1, j) call apartheid crime against humanity.
“An example of destruction of an ethnic and social way of life which amounts to sociocide is particularly clear in the case of the Palestinian Bedouins living in the Israeli Negev (Naqab in Arabic). Since the 16th century, it has been the custom of the Naqab Bedouins to move around their usual settlements with their herds of goats and camels which changed grazing according to seasons. During the 1948 war between Israel and its Arab neighbours, Israel compelled the Bedouins to leave these traditional settlements and to stay in a small area of the northern Naqab. Israel promised that they would be allowed to come back to their ancestral lands six months later. The promise was not fulfilled and today half of the Naqab Bedouins live in 46 ‘unrecognized’ villages, only 10 of which are in ‘the process of recognition’ by Israel.” (http://www.russelltribunalonpalestine.com/en/full-findings-of-the-final-session-fr ; for the printed version of the final findings, see Russell Tribunal on Palestine, 2007-2013, pp. 20-21; 51 (French text, p. 51 ; Spanish text, p. 83).
16. The conclusion is quite simple: the emotion and feeling of revulsion felt by the spectator before the Bedouin houses destroyed by Israeli bulldozers finds a form of (symbolic) consolation in finding that public international law formally condemns the destruction as well as the fate reserved by Israel to the Bedouin community in the Negev / Naqab. So far, this does not change the fate of this community, but it is not impossible that one day, the facts eventually comply with the strength of the norms. History will judge Israel without complacency; in the meantime, one must continue the struggle so that the rule of law becomes a reality.

References: Art. 26

Art. 27

Art. 28
 § 1
 Art. 27
 Art. 28
 § 1
 § 1