AL-ARAQEEB, April 20 — A group of Jewish women and a PL’er met with the women of this “unrecognized” Bedouin village to show solidarity with their struggle against the government’s moves to uproot them and steal their land. Most outsiders talk only with the men here, but we needed to hear the village’s women as well. The meeting was initiated by the “Unrecognized Village Team” of the broad left Tarabut movement.
Last week, “the only democracy in the Middle East,” as Israel likes to present itself, demolished Al-Araqeeb for the 49th time since the summer of 2010. This vicious policy exposes Israel as a racist state that serves Israeli and U.S. capitalists, never the working-class residents of Israel-Palestine.
 Under the colonialist Prawer Plan, the Israeli government can evict Bedouins who live in “unrecognized villages” and grab their land. In these villages, the state denies the residents water, electricity, telephone, medical and educational services. All of these communities are Bedouin; no Jewish settlement goes unrecognized by the Israeli bosses. The government routinely funds the moshavim and kibbutzim, the individually or collectively owned farms settled by Jews. One government ploy is to grab Bedouin land by planting Jewish National Fund (JNF) forests on it. Every dollar people give to this Zionist organization is a dollar for theft and demolition.
In 2000, the Israeli rulers established the Ministry for the Development of the Negev (southern Israel-Palestine) and the Galilee (northern Israel-Palestine). Under Shimon Peres (now president of Israel and a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize), the Ministry created Givot Bar, a settlement exclusively for wealthy Jews, on lands belonging to Al-Araqeeb.
The Bedouin residents of Al-Araqeeb hold legal title to 115 acres. The village once had a population of nearly six hundred, and none were unemployed. As in East Jerusalem, they paid taxes to the government and got nothing in return. This is the bosses’ method to pressure residents to leave for “planned” towns, the Israeli equivalent of reservations for Native Americans.
In July 2010, the village was demolished for the first time. The Israeli rulers’ media described this act of state terror as though it were a wartime operation in the occupied West Bank. Later, during the winter, the village was demolished five times in a single week. The cops ordered residents to move to a nearby cemetery to smooth the way for the land grab.
In protest, residents are holding a protest vigil. They are struggling to hang on to their ancestral land despite the violence of the U.S. real estate tycoons and the Israeli government at their service. It is important to note that the Bedouins are fighting the state’s racist, divide-and-conquer policy, not Jewish workers.
The destruction of Al-Araqeeb is part of an accelerated plan of evictions and theft of Bedouin lands in southern Israel-Palestine. Last year, the state ratified the “Law for the Management of the Bedouin Settlement of the Negev,” which expands the Prawer Plan. Its goal is to evict 30,000 Bedouin workers from their lands and force them into “planned” towns where the unemployment rate ranges up to nearly 50 percent and crime and drugs abound. Objections filed by Bedouin groups and Amnesty International failed to turn back this racist law.
Billionaire Ronald Lauder, heir to the U.S. Estee Lauder cosmetics empire, is the biggest donor to the JNF and president of the World Jewish Congress. While he fattens his profits, his servants in the JNF, the Israeli police and the Israel Lands Administration destroy Bedouin crops and evict Bedouin workers to clear their lands for luxury Jewish settlements.
The Progressive Labor Party has joined this fight against the Israeli state and U.S. real estate moguls. We fight for working-class rule, where each and every worker, regardless of ethnicity, nationality, creed or sex, will have equal rights. Under communism, all workers Bedouin, Jewish, and Arab alike — will share in the bounty produced by society.