The Negev desert is a good place to bury dogs. The dog cemetery of Tsan Yatir provides a final resting place for beloved canines. Arab Bedouin humans are not so lucky. Increasingly they are discovering that the Israeli state has no place for them – dead or alive.
Following the news this week that an Israeli court has ruled the death of ISM activist Rachel Corrie, who was killed protesting the demolition of Palestinian homes in Gaza, to be “a regrettable accident”, we should remember it’s not only Palestinians living in the Occupied Territories who have come to fear Israeli forces. Israeli citizens are being forced out of their homes by dint of their ethnicity. In September 2011, the Israeli government approved the Prawer Plan for mass expulsion of the Arab Bedouin community in the Naqab (Negev) desert. At the beginning of this year the government announced its plan to establish ten new exclusively Jewish settlements along the Green Line demolishing 35 “unrecognised” villages and displacing more than 70 000 Arab Bedouin from their ancestral lands.
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