Bedouins are the indigenous people who live in the Israeli
Under the directives of
Throughout the ’50s and until the mid-’60s, the Israeli government confiscated a considerable portion of Bedouin ancestral lands and registered them as state land. In the ’70s, the government again moved about half the Bedouin population, this time into seven townships. The remaining half of the Bedouin population was unwilling to give up its property rights and is now scattered across the
After witnessing the recent demolitions, a Bedouin activist asked one of the Jewish teenagers why he had agreed to participate in the eviction. Without hesitating, the teenager replied: “I am a Zionist and what we are doing here today is Zionism.”
The teenager was not wrong. And yet he was probably too young to recognize that even though Zionism’s major goals have not changed, the methods deployed to realize them have been undergoing a radical transformation.
While over the past two decades, the state itself performed the task of Judiazing space, today the government is outsourcing more and more of its responsibilities to private firms. The teenager was hired by a personnel agency, which was employed by the government to expel Bedouins from their homes in order to establish two new Jewish villages. (Incidentally, their establishment is part of a larger plan that includes the construction of about 30 new Jewish settlements in the Israeli Negev, the seizure of Bedouin land for military needs, and the creation of dozens of single-family farms on land that Bedouins have inhabited since
The process of privatizing Zionism has been slow. For more than five decades, the state was the sole agent responsible for all planning of new villages, towns and cities. Private contractors only carried out the construction. Today, land from which the government is expelling the Bedouins is sold at rock-bottom prices to real-estate moguls, who are then responsible not only for constructing Jewish villages and towns, but also for planning them.
The state gives the Jewish farmers large plots of land and connects them to basic infrastructure like water and electricity, and, in return, expects them to be part of an apparatus whose role is to contract and restrict Bedouin movement and development and to help the security forces keep an eye on the
If one drives a few kilometers further and crosses the Green Line into the
In the past year, the state has handed over the management of at least five checkpoints to corporate warriors—working for such companies as Notari Zion (Guardians of Zion), Shmira Ubitahon (Guarding and Security) and Modi’in Ezrachi (Civil Intelligence). But the difference between Israel Defense Force soldiers and hired guns is that the latter operate within the gray areas of the law. They are
As this privatizing continues, the checkpoints in the
In the early ’80s, the Israeli government allowed private contractors to appropriate land within the
Zionism’s privatization does not symbolize a strategic change but a tactical one. The state has been shedding some of its responsibility. The use of teenagers to evict Bedouins from their homes is not only a reflection of this insidious process of privatization, but also the corrosion of moral responsibility.
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