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Off the Map Land and Housing Rights Violations in Israel’S Unrecognized Bedouin Villages

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Off the Map Land and Housing Rights Violations in Israel’S Unrecognized Bedouin Villages March 2008 Volume 20, No. 5 (E) Off the Map Land and Housing Rights Violations in Israel’s Unrecognized Bedouin Villages I. Summary.................................................................................................................................. 1 Key Recommendations..........................................................................................................6 II. Note on Methodology and Scope............................................................................................ 8 III. Background...........................................................................................................................11 Legal Basis for Land Confiscation........................................................................................ 13 Government-planned Townships......................................................................................... 16 Battle over Land Ownership ................................................................................................ 18 Unrecognized Villages.........................................................................................................20 Developing the Negev .........................................................................................................22 Is Resolution Possible? .......................................................................................................23 IV. Discrimination in Land Allocation and Access ......................................................................27 Land Ownership and Distribution in Israel...........................................................................27 Discrimination in Land Jurisdiction......................................................................................29 Individual Farms .................................................................................................................33 Selection Committees .........................................................................................................39 V. Discrimination in Planning .................................................................................................... 41 Bedouin Needs Not Met ......................................................................................................42 Absence of Planning Participation and Consultation of Bedouin..........................................45 Lack of Local Representation...............................................................................................47 No Criteria for Recognizing Communities.............................................................................50 Retroactive Legalization and Changed Zoning ..................................................................... 51 VI. Home Demolitions................................................................................................................54 Twayil Abu Jarwal—A Bedouin Village Repeatedly under the Bulldozer.................................54 Legal Authority for Demolitions ........................................................................................... 55 Demolitions on the Increase................................................................................................56 Justifications.......................................................................................................................62 How Demolitions Are Carried Out ........................................................................................64 Warnings ......................................................................................................................64 Orders and Demolitions ................................................................................................ 71 No Prior Warning of Demolition .....................................................................................77 Destruction of Belongings.............................................................................................79 Demolitions Accompanied by Police Violence/Clashes ................................................. 81 Self-demolition .............................................................................................................82 Impact of Home Demolitions .............................................................................................. 86 VII. Lack of Compensation or Adequate Alternatives................................................................. 89 Comparison of Compensation Rates.................................................................................... 91 Recognized Townships........................................................................................................ 91 VIII. Israel’s Obligations under International Law, and Comparative Practice ........................... 98 The Prohibition Against Discrimination............................................................................... 98 Right to Adequate Housing, Privacy, and Choice of Residence ............................................ 99 Security of Tenure ............................................................................................................. 101 Right to Land..................................................................................................................... 102 Forced Evictions................................................................................................................102 Indigenous Land Rights..................................................................................................... 104 Recent Practices of Other Governments............................................................................. 105 New Zealand............................................................................................................... 105 Canada.......................................................................................................................106 Australia .....................................................................................................................106 Creating a Land Claims Mechanism in Israel...................................................................... 107 IX. Detailed Recommendations ............................................................................................... 109 X. Acknowledgments................................................................................................................113 Appendix A: Special Procedures Address the Bedouin Problem................................................114 Appendix B: Home Demolition Statistics ..................................................................................117 Appendix C: Sample Warning.................................................................................................. 119 Appendix D: Sample Administrative Demolition Order ............................................................ 121 Appendix E: Sample Judicial Demolition Order ........................................................................ 123 I. Summary Tens of thousands of Palestinian Arab Bedouin, the indigenous inhabitants of the Negev region, live in informal shanty towns, or “unrecognized villages,” in the south of Israel. Discriminatory land and planning policies have made it virtually impossible for Bedouin to build legally where they live, and also exclude them from the state’s development plans for the region. The state implements forced evictions, home demolitions, and other punitive measures disproportionately against Bedouin as compared with actions taken regarding structures owned by Jewish Israelis that do not conform to planning law. In this report, Human Rights Watch examines these discriminatory policies and their impact on the life of Bedouin in the Negev. It calls on Israel to place an immediate moratorium on home demolitions in the Negev and establish an independent mechanism to investigate the discriminatory and often unlawful way in which land allocation, planning, and home demolitions are implemented. The state controls 93 percent of the land in Israel, and a government agency, the Israel Land Administration (ILA), manages and allocates this land. The ILA lacks any mandate to disburse land in a fair and just fashion, and members of the Jewish National Fund, which has an explicit mandate to develop land for Jewish use only, constitute almost half of the ILA’s governing council, occupying all the seats not held by Israeli government ministries. While the Bedouin were traditionally a nomadic people, roaming the Negev in search of grazing land for their livestock, they had already adopted a largely sedentary way of life prior to 1948, settling in distinct villages with a well defined traditional system of communal and individual land ownership. Today they comprise 25 percent of the population of the northern Negev, but have jurisdiction over less than 2 percent of the land there. Planning in Israel is highly centralized, and state planners fail to include the Palestinian Arab population, especially the Bedouin, in decision making and in developing the master plans that govern zoning, construction, and development in Israel. Even though Bedouin villages in the Negev pre-date Israel’s first master plan 1 Human Rights Watch March 2008 in the late 1960s, state planners did not include these villages in their original plans, rendering these longstanding communities “unrecognized.” As a result, according to Israel’s Planning and Building Law, all buildings in these communities are illegal,
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