Stop the bulldozers, stop the propaganda: Israel’s Bedouin citizens are not a ‘planning problem’

Israeli authorities demolishing houses in Qasr al-Sir, a Bedouin village in southern Israel’s Negev desert, May 2025

The lead Haaretz editorial on 3 June 2025:

Since it was sworn in 17 months ago, the Netanyahu government has left hundreds of Bedouin citizens – including children, older people and people with disabilities or chronic illness – without roofs over their heads. Some have lived in tents for a year, others have managed, with great difficulty, to rent apartments. But a case like that of Qasr al-Sir has never been seen before: The state has begun to demolish gradually an entire unrecognized village with about 3,000 residents so as to expand the adjacent town of Segev Shalom (aka Shaqib al-Salam). Two neighborhoods have already been razed, and the demolition is expected to continue this week (Eden Solomon, Hebrew Haaretz, May 30).

If the state’s plan is completed and all the village’s homes are demolished, it would be a tragedy of unprecedented scope. Not just because of the demolition itself, but because the state is not offering residents a solution. It is simply leaving them out in the open.

Segev Shalom’s community center became a refugee camp last week. Dozens of men, women and children found temporary refuge there after their homes were destroyed. Others stay in tents or with relatives. They have three options: a tent, the community center or the street.

Qasr al-Sir’s residents initially opposed the plan of the Authority for Development and Settlement of the Bedouin in the Negev, which was drafted without their input, but in the absence of other options, they gave up and agreed, forgoing their rural-agricultural way of life, to move to a dense urban neighborhood. This happened only when a gun, in the form of new demolition orders, was pointed at their head. But even after they surrendered and complied with the plan they had tried to prevent, thwart, they were not given a viable solution. The promised neighborhood is still only on paper. There are no lots, no infrastructure, nowhere to go.

“It’s not only homes that are being demolished, but a way of life,” said signs at a large demonstration outside the offices of the Bedouin authority in Be’er Sheva last week. Thousands of people came, not only in order to stop the bulldozers but also to place a mirror in front of the face of the state, a state that chooses to view its Bedouin citizens as a planning problem.

Yasser al-Kharumi, a math teacher and father of seven, stood beside the rubble of his home and said: “If I agreed to cooperate, why are you demolishing the house?” Meanwhile, other residents have started razing their homes by themselves, to avoid the “fine” the state demands for the forced demolition. By the end of August, Kharumi estimates, the entire village will be gone.

This can and must be stopped. The bulldozers must be stopped, as well as the situation in which the state ignores its responsibility for these people. The state can suspend the demolition until a temporary solution is found, a consensual and humane one. This process should be stopped until a neighborhood that is respectful of the lives of its inhabitants is built. This is a request not for compassion, but rather for the recognition of their basic rights.

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