A Bedouin village was razed by Israel. Guess who gets the land at bargain prices

The entrance to the area where the new Jewish community Dror will be erected, on the ruins of the unrecognized Bedouin village of Umm al-Hiran, December 2024

Kim Legziel reports in Haaretz on 6 January 2025:

For the price of a used car, the Israeli government is currently distributing plots of land in the Negev desert to a religious group from the settlement of Eli.

What’s the exact price of a plot of land hundreds of square meters in size, for building a luxury home in the Negev? Well, it depends: If you’re part of a garin torani from the Bnei David pre-army preparatory academy in the settlement of Eli – about 13,000 (around $3,500) to 70,000 (over $19,000) shekels (plus development costs) – without any need for a tender. In case you aren’t, at least 303,000 (almost $83,000) shekels will close the deal, before construction costs, of course.

Yet, if you’re a Bedouin who already lives on that very same plot of land, you’ll be evacuated from your home to a Bedouin city. If you are lucky enough to have deep pockets, you’ll be able to buy a small fraction of the land that was once yours, at market price.  At least that’s how two land tenders that were finalized in recent days on the site of the future community of Dror, near Meitar and Hura, were conducted – and this will probably recur in a series of communities to be established in the Negev in coming years.

About a month after the final demolition in November of the unrecognized Bedouin village of Umm al-Hiran, two Israel Land Authority (ILA) tenders were closed. Entrepreneurs will build residential buildings in the Jewish community to be established in its place, Dror.

Several entrepreneurs won the tender that was closed on December 29, for high-density construction of 620 residential units, at an overall price of 40 million shekels, and development costs totaling 108 million shekels. The price reflects a cost of about 240,000 shekels for the land for a residential unit.

The following day they closed the tender for 36 single-family homes – at an overall price of 1.95 million shekels, and development costs of 8.9 million shekels, or 303,00 shekels for land for a single-family home. Added to that will be the cost of construction and the entrepreneur’s profit. These are considered reasonable prices, which don’t differ greatly from the prices in nearby Arad.

However, it turns out that in 2023 and 2024 there were three Israel Land Authority lotteries, without a tender, for the purchase of plots for private building in that same future community, at entirely different prices.

The lotteries gave priority to “local resident” buyers, who are defined as follows: Members of the Eli academy from the West Bank, who founded a garin torani at the site, and are living in an adjacent temporary camp; or residents of the Tamar Regional Council. It’s improbable, though, that its secular residents will be interested in living in a community being established by a group from the Eli academy, which is led by students of Rabbi Zvi Israel Tau, the spiritual leader of the far-right Noam party and one of the leaders of the Haredi-nationalist sector.

Who is a local resident?

According to Construction and Housing Ministry regulations in the context of the Buyer’s Price Program, a reduced-price program for first-time apartment buyers: “A local resident is someone whose permanent place of residence in the past three years or in four out of the 10 years preceding the date of submitting the request for eligibility, is in the jurisdiction of the local authority where the project will be built.”

This is a mechanism designed to help create a multigenerational population in communities where the younger generation cannot afford to live – and to prevent pushing residents out of their neighborhoods due to an increase in the value of the land.

For example, in a tender opened this week in the town of Shlomi in the north, residents of the community can register and join the lottery for 18 out of 128 plots for privately built single-family houses, at prices similar to those received by individuals who bought the plots in the registration and lottery in Dror. But in Dror for some reason, local residents are defined as follows: “Residents of the Tamar Regional Council or the village of Mahane Yatir.”

And so, without a tender, the members of the Eli academy’s group received 115 of 345 plots of up to 740 square meters for only about 13,000 to 70,000 shekels. Exactly the same number of plots was allocated to the general public, and the rest, 115 plots, were offered in a lottery for the disabled and for active reservists.

The 115 buyers from Eli purchased plots at an extremely low or token price. Development costs account for another 300,000 to 450,000 shekels. Another 100 people, who expressed an interest, were unable to benefit from the deal.

Those not defined as “local residents” for the purpose of eligibility to purchase the plots are the Bedouin who have lived in the region for decades. The Israeli government transferred Bedouin there in the 1950s, and the courts ruled in 2015 that they are entitled to live there, and can only be evacuated for an agreed upon substitute plot of land. They were evicted from Umm al-Hiran under the aegis of armed police forces, to the town of Hura. Why aren’t the Bedouin local residents? The answer is “Because.” Or according to the ILA reply to the question: This is a decision of the Israel Land Council.

This wasn’t the first lottery in which members of this group, who originate of Eli, were given priority as local residents on land from which actual local residents were evicted: In June 2023, 298 plots were similarly included in a lottery for the future community, 100 of them were allocated to the ostensible “local residents” of Eli. The prices were the same.

For the sake of comparison, the price of a plot of equal value for private building in nearby Meitar-Carmit, in the last tender conducted there three years ago, was 350,000 to 525,000 shekels – more than 10 times the price of some of the plots in Dror. And that’s before development costs, of at least 600,000 shekels per unit in Meitar-Carmit, which bring the pre-construction total to 0.9 to 1.1 million shekels, almost double the price to date for the “local residents” in Dror.

The identity of the garin depends on the National Missions Ministry

And that’s just the beginning. Currently, 12 new communities in the region of Arad and Dimona are being advanced, only one of them designated for Bedouin inhabitants, with another series of communities at different stages of advancement all over the Negev. Several garinim are eagerly waiting to move to these communities.

One of them, the garin negev belonging to the right-wing Hashomer Hachadash organization, is already living in a temporary camp near Arad, and a Chabad garin from Canada and the United States will soon move to a temporary camp, in anticipation of the establishment of the community of Yatir, after waiting for years in Be’er Sheva. So that apparently members of garinim can from now on be considered “local residents” and receive plots to build their homes at a token price without a tender.

Maybe at this point you’re thinking about starting a new garin, and competing for the right to receive land in the Negev at a ridiculous price. In fact, in August a manifesto was published requesting offers for settlement garinim to establish new rural communities in Mevo’ot Arad, Ir Ovot and Yatir.

But what will be the identity of the coming garinim, to be formed and transformed into local residents in the future luxury communities? In the Settlement Division, the government’s operational branch for the building of new communities, they claim that it’s at the discretion of a committee in the National Missions Ministry.

In effect, the committee doesn’t have the final say at all: It only submits its recommendations to Minister Orit Strock. In that case, garinim from the left-wing Hashomer Hatzair, or any other group of secular citizens who want to live with their good friends in a new community almost free of charge shouldn’t start packing as yet.

Minister Strock’s spokesman said: “The committee for choosing settlement garinim in the south doesn’t allocate land and doesn’t deal in real estate. The committee was established in order to make recommendations to the National Missions Minister regarding the choice of settlement garinim for rural communities to be established in the south. The stage of allocating land is a later stage, which will take place a few years from now, with the ILA. The committee’s main task is to examine whether a settlement group that has submitted its candidacy is up to the challenge of being a pioneering garin in a temporary camp, with all the difficulties that entails.

“The members of the advisory public committee, who were appointed by the minister, are Moshe Peled, a member of Kibbutz Beit Hashita, who for years was involved in the settlement of the country’s north, in the rural area; Liron Simon, who managed the community and growth division in the Megillot Dead Sea Regional Council; Uri Ariel, who over the years established dozens of communities and posseses in-depth familiarity with the challenges of settlement garinim; Ophir Zimring, a representative of the Settlement Division and the director of the society and community department; and Eli Levanon, a representative of the National Missions Ministry.”

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