Prawer shows limits of Israel’s strategy to divide and rule

A plan to dispossess Bedouin in Israel's Negev Desert is disproving the divide and rule policy used by the Israeli government.

It’s rare when Arab citizens of Israel can claim victory in their struggle against the government’s systemic discrimination, but signs that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet is backing away from its plan to displace 30,000 Bedouins in the Negev desert is one of those fleeting moments.

Since its first election in 2008, Mr Netanyahu’s coalition governments has led an uncompromising and escalating campaign to restrict the rights and marginalise the Arab minority in Israel. From laws against commemorating the Nakba – Israel’s 1948 dispossession of 800,000 Palestinians – to the creation of loyalty oaths to Israel as a Jewish state, the drastic shift to the right has largely been based on defining Arab citizens as an enemy from within.

Reacting to this increasing similarity in treatment to Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, Arab citizens have cultivated an increasingly strong sense of Palestinian identity. After the Prawer plan proposal to evict Bedouins from most of their 33 unrecognised villages, ghettoising them into a handful of townships, this polarisation has come to a head.

Bedouins have had a complicated relationship with Israel – they have been denied basic civil infrastructure in the unrecognised villages, and have been impoverished and repeatedly displaced since 1948. Although one of the most disadvantaged groups, even among Arab citizens, many in the Bedouin community have volunteered to serve in the Israeli army in a bid to elevate their social status.

For many Bedouin, the assertion of their Israeli citizenship has been seen as their last recourse to preserving their rights. Even as the Negev village of Al Arakib was knocked down by Israel more than 60 times over the past three years to plant a forest, many have avoided comparing their situation with occupied Palestinians.

But the Prawer plan changed that. It ignited a sense of Palestinian national affinity in line with the political shift that the Arab community started to experience in northern Israel and the mixed Jewish-Arab cities during the first Gaza war.

On the “Day of rage” protests on November 30, thousands of Bedouin, Arab citizens of Israel and Palestinians in the occupied territories protested in unity against the Prawer plan, as international supporters rallied in 30 countries. Two weeks later, the government stalled and announced that the plan would be shelved. The announcement has been followed by public cabinet infighting where Miri Regev, a far right parliamentarian chairing the committee on the plan, has criticised the idea.

“Israel wants to turn the Negev into another West Bank,” said Hasan Masri, an organiser in the anti-Prawer campaign, referring to the intent to uproot and confine the Bedouin residents so it can expand Jewish settlement. “At the same time they are putting hundreds of millions of shekels into policing the area,” he added standing on the edge of Hura, a village facing eviction and the location for the main protest of the day.

Originally from the Negev, Mr Masri is Palestinian who now lives in Jaffa. He is emblematic of the political shift that is taking place – both among the Bedouin community and the wider Arab community in Israel. For him, the Prawer plan is just the latest step in the continuing habit of Israel forcing Palestinians from their homes and land.

As the demonstration got underway more than 1,000 people carried Palestinian flags and appropriated slogans from the Arab revolutions. It quickly descended into clashes as Israeli security forces charged with horses, and used tear gas and rubber bullets while young protesters responded with rocks as they retreated to the entrance of Hura to set up tyre fire barricades.

Amid the dust and tear gas, the distinction between Israel’s treatment of its own citizens and occupied Palestinians seemed to vanish. As rights groups condemned the government and images of the crackdown beamed around the world, the similarity with Israeli security forces’ repression of young Palestinians fighting dispossession and ghettoisation in the West Bank became too powerful to ignore. This reality was only accentuated by the fact that young Bedouins arrested during the clashes still remain in Israeli custody weeks after.

The escalation in repression coupled with the government’s paralysis on how to proceed is the clearest indication that Mr Netanyahu is worried about the fallout from his escalating campaign against Israel’s Palestinians. Relying on a divided Arab community, attacks against them have traditionally been a politically risk-free way to seize more land for Jewish settlement, stoke Jewish nationalism and push the country further to the right.

But in its attempt to push through the Prawer plan, the Israeli government has broadened the sense of a common identity and struggle between its Arab community and Palestinians in the occupied territories. Simultaneously, it has focused international attention to the commonality of its oppression of Palestinians regardless of their citizenship.

This latest stumble won’t stop Israel’s practice of allotting rights based on ethnicity but it is a clear sign that its divide-and-rule strategy is showing cracks. As Bedouins join Israel’s Arab community in adopting a common Palestinian political identity with those in the occupied territories, they have forced Israel’s most unrelentingly ethno-nationalist government to pause.

Jesse Rosenfeld is a journalist based in the Middle East

On Twitter: @jrosyfield