With the way Israel has been treating Bedouins, it can’t be surprised when things boil over

Demolition of Bedouin homes in the Negev

Eden Solomon reports in Haaretz on 20 August 2025:

Last week, Israel endured a record-breaking heat wave. While most citizens shut themselves indoors under the hum of air conditioners, about 1,000 Bedouins in the Negev were crammed into sweltering tents that turned into ovens. Why? Because the government demolished their homes.

For over a year now, they have been left to live this way – without support from the welfare authorities, the Ministry of Construction and Housing, or even the Authority for Development and Settlement of the Bedouin, the very body meant to support them but which in practice has become their enemy.

This is how a new generation of mistrust and hostility is being cultivated between citizens and the state. What remains for a child who watches their home crushed by tractors and surrounded by dozens of policemen? What remains for a family condemned to the endless cycle of construction-demolition-living in a tent? They’re left only with the understanding that the state is the enemy. And when the state is the enemy, the natural response is alienation, defiance and crime – as far as possible from integration.

The Bedouins of the Negev have long been familiar with the harsh hand of the authorities. But the cruelty exercised by the present government is unprecedented. Homes are now demolished not as part of a solution or in pursuit of a future legal arrangement – but simply because it can be done. All in the name of a hollow “governance” that solves none of the basic problems of a population already scarred by decades of neglect and discrimination.

For a long time, the wave of demolitions went on with almost total silence. Only with the destruction of the village of a-Ser near Segev Shalom did protests erupt. In Be’er Sheva, thousands of Bedouin gathered outside the courthouse in one of the largest demonstrations the city has seen in years There was a lot of pain but no rioting, no vandalism. At the end of the protest, the demonstrators collected bottles and trash, leaving behind a clean square.

But the children who stood there – children I had seen only weeks earlier in the Segev Shalom community center, after their home in a-Ser was demolished – already carried a different story in their eyes.

I also recalled my last visit to Wadi Khalil: children helping their parents fold the makeshift tents they’ve called home for over a year, all while glancing nervously at the authorities. And I remembered 23-year-old Iyat Aloul, from the Aloul neighborhood near Ar’ara in the Negev, who suffers from a debilitating illness. Last July, she sat surrounded by the ruins, her younger brothers fanning flies away from her, her mother desperately trying to cool her, and her father begging over the phone for any solution that could put a roof over their heads.

This reality engraves a single truth: the state is the enemy. And once that realization is seeded in childhood, it matures into hatred. There is no alternative housing plan, no long-term vision. Only brute force. That is how you break people. That is how you scar families for life. This government is treating the Bedouin with an unprecedented level of cruelty, and when people are pushed to the edge, do not be surprised when they rise up. It will not be a quiet or contained protest; it will be an explosion beyond control.

For now, Israeli society remains silent, if not willfully ignorant, about the plight of the unrecognized villages. But this silence cannot last forever. When the explosion comes, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir will stand before cameras and say, “I told you so.” He’ll continue to spew the hatred and incitement as only he can. But we’ll know the truth: that children, families, and the elderly were forced to live without compassion, without dignity, without a future. And when that happens, we will not be able to judge them.

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