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May 27, 2005
Controversy in the Negev
Bedouin rights, environment not priorities, says Brous.
PAT JOHNSON
An Israeli activist who visited Vancouver last week believes that,
in fighting with the Palestinians, her country is losing another
battle – for the environment.
Devorah Brous, a founder and the director of Bustan l'Shalom, an
Israeli nongovernmental organization, said the environmental degradation
being caused to the Negev Desert is a time bomb most people lose
sight of in the current context of international conflict.
"This is a magical land. I just wish that people would see
that we're poisoning it," Brous told the Bulletin during her
last stop on a North American tour. "We're fighting a war over
a holy land, but we're destroying it in the process."
Bustan l'Shalom is an agency that works especially closely with
Bedouin populations in the Negev. (In both Hebrew and Arabic, the
word "bustan" means a grove of fruit trees.) The
main emphasis of her group, in addition to the larger environmental
concerns, is to aid those who live in so-called "unrecognized
villages." These villages, which are settlements of previously
nomadic Bedouins, are nonetheless separate from the official villages
created and administered by Israeli officialdom for Bedouins. The
unrecognized villages do not receive infrastructure from the state,
which means their electricity comes from private generators and
their water comes from tenuous sources. Sewage is not treated and
flows openly in some communities, said Brous.
Bustan l'Shalom puts on creative workshops in schools and holds
interfaith peace vigils. They also employ alternative energy sources,
such as solar power technologies and mud and brick construction.
Though David Ben-Gurion's dream for the Negev envisioned making
the desert bloom, Brous said the reality is that the Negev is home
to some of Israel's most environmentally unfriendly industries and
is a flashpoint of degradation to land, air and water.
An American who made aliyah 12 years ago, Brous has master's degrees
in Israel studies and peace and conflict studies, with a concentration
in conflict management. She compares Israeli policies toward Bedouin
populations with Canadian policies toward First Nations.
"What the Israeli government and the Canadian government have
done in the past is very similar, in that the indigenous peoples
haven't had [a] choice about whether their lives are to become urbanized
or to become sedentarized, in the case of the Bedouin, whether they'll
be able to maintain their traditional pursuits or whether they will
become part of an urban proletariat," said Brous. "Israel's
learned a lot from Canada on how to uproot and marginalize its indigenous
people. I think it's now time to also learn from Canada how the
people can gain a voice inside their own country."
About 76,000 Bedouin people in the Negev are full Israeli citizens,
but they do not have adequate health or education services, Brous
said, and are off the electricity and water grid because the Israeli
government provides services only to designated towns where they
would like the Bedouin to settle. She said the government, through
the Israel Land Agency, destroys homes and agricultural crops because
they view the settlements as illegal.
"Their justification is that the Bedouin people who have their
homes destroyed and their crops destroyed are basically squatters,
that they're illegally intruding on land that is for the future
use of the state," said Brous. The Bedouins, for their part,
believe they have a right to live on their ancestral lands in the
Negev, she added.
"These are rural people and they're saying, 'we're not interested
in moving off of our land,' " Brous said. "They were semi-nomadic
and now they've been sedentarized."
Meanwhile, extensive industrial development is taking place in the
Negev, which is the least populated area of the country. The byproduct
is a sharp increase in health problems associated with pollution,
Brous said: "It's causing very high rates of cancer and a new
phenomenon of miscarriages and asthma."
The industrialization of the land and the urbanization of its people
are not phenomena limited to Israel.
"There are millions of dollars being poured into developing
the development of the Negev. It's not only in Israel where this
is happening, that [there is] development that is pushing a level
of industrialization or imposing a westernized understanding of
modernization without applying a full notion of choice [to indigenous
peoples]."
Raising the issues of Bedouins of the Negev and of the environment
is difficult, Brous said, because people's minds are on other things.
"It is very difficult to bring any attention to a peripheral
part of the country because there is a war happening between the
Israelis and the Palestinians," she said. "People are
afraid that their markets are being blown up and there are other
issues of survival. Over 22.4 per cent of the population of Israel
is living under the poverty line. People are constantly battling
in that land for their own issues, for their own economic stability.
"People are all the time saying, 'Look, we're fighting for
our survival here. We can't discuss the environment,' " Brous
continued. "Always the environmental question is marginalized.
It gets stuck on the backburner so that people can talk about human
rights issues or security."
Zionists have a particular obligation to protect the environment,
she said.
"People who feel inherently connected to that land have a moral
responsibility to challenge principles and policies that are not
sustainable," she said.
More information about Bustan l'Shalom is available at the website
www.bustan.org.
Pat Johnson is a B.C. journalist and commentator.
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