As Naqab protests intensify, Bedouin women are taking the helm
Bedouin women and girls protest Israel’s afforestation and expropriation of their land, Sa’wa al-Atrash, Naqab, 12 January 2022
Samah Salaime reports in +972:
Bedouin citizens in the Naqab/Negev are escalating their struggle against Israel’s Judaization policies, the expropriation of their land, and against the afforestation project of the Jewish National Fund at the expense of unrecognized villages. But those who have really come to the fore in this wave of protests are the women and girls from the villages facing dispossession, who went out and stood together with the men to confront the JNF’s bulldozers.
Anyone who has been following the generations-long struggle for the recognition and regularization of the Palestinians in the Naqab could not have failed to notice this phenomenon: in every protest there have been more and more women and girls standing on the front lines.
Twenty-six women, along with dozens of male activists and protesters, were arrested during demonstrations last week in the village of A-Sawa against the JNF’s plans to build a forest over Bedouin agricultural land. Most of the women were released to house arrest, with the exception of one young woman, 25-year-old Nawal Abu Kaf, whose detention was extended until this past Sunday. Abu Kaf, a student counselor at Sapir College who supports a family that lost its father, was arrested and beaten in full view of cameras. According to eyewitnesses, she was standing beside other activists, Jews and Arabs, and did not use violence.
Women also starred on social media in Arabic, Hebrew, and English. They placed themselves at the forefront of the media stage alongside veterans of the struggle — politicians and members of the unrecognized villages committee — as part of an unelected popular body comprising representatives from the unrecognized Bedouin villages, and which includes not a single woman.
‘People do not understand the reality of the Palestinians in Israel’
Eden al-Hajoj is an 18-year-old volunteer in the Ajik Association and teaches English to children in the village of Umm Batin. She found herself at the heart of the demonstrations last week, speaking to the camera in fluent and sharp English about what was happening around her. The video went viral on social media, after which she was interviewed by various media outlets.