Evicting the Bedouins

The encampment of Tel al Malach--the "Hill of Salt"--is a huddled cluster of tents and tin shacks moored uncertainly on the monotonous wastes of the northeastern Negev, the barren desert that adjoins the Sinai inside integral Israeli territory. The 10,000 Bedouin tribesmen of the region, who are Israeli Arab citizens, have extracted a primitive livelihood there for hundreds of years, tending small flocks of sheep and raising meager harvests of wheat. Though Bedouins are traditionally nomadic, these have never strayed far from the four tribal cemeteries where their ancestors are buried.

It was probably a disappearing way of life in any case, but now its premature doom appears to be sealed. Last week the Israeli Cabinet proposed a harsh plan that would empower the government to seize 37,500 acres of Bedouin lands, with limited compensation but without right of judicial appeal, and to impel the displaced tribesmen to resettle into new industrial townships. The Bedouins have raised their small minority voice in protest, even vowing that blood will be spilled before the controversy is over, but thus far to no avail. When the Negev Lands Purchase Law receives parliamentary approval in the Knesset, which seems assured, the Bedouins of Tel al Malach will have become little noticed victims of irrepressible development, and indirectly of the Middle East peace process.

The Israeli government wants the land for one of three new military airfields it plans to build in the Negev to replace bases that will be lost in the course of the phased Israeli withdrawal from the Sinai. Government officials argue that this vital security interest justifies a special law, that the peace treaty timetable requiring final withdrawal by March 1982 allows no time for prolonged appeal proceedings, and that optional land and monetary compensation--ranging from $83 to $250 an acre--will be adequate.

The Bedouins call such payments paltry. Scoffs one spokesman: "Eighty-three dollars--that's two sacks of flour." They protest the arbitrary denial of judicial appeals. Says Dr. Yunis Abu Rabiya, a respected Bedouin physician in Beersheba: "How can a country that calls itself democratic pass a law that denies the elementary citizen's right of appeal to the courts?" The Bedouins also charge that the proposed law is based on outright "racism" because it is aimed exclusively at Arabs. The Bedouins have a case: last week Agriculture Minister Ariel Sharon began long and detailed negotiations to compensate 5,000 Jewish settlers who will be forced to give up their homes in the Sinai as a result of the peace treaty.

The conflict is also between tradition and progress, farm and factory. Abhorring the very idea of living in industrial townships, the Bedouins argue instead for the creation of their own moshavim, the model agricultural cooperatives that have been especially successful in the northern Sinai. But Israeli government officials have long insisted that the tribesmen are needed as a labor force for new industries that are planned for the Negev. Moreover, the well-equipped, high production moshavim require large tracts and expensive irrigation. And, as one senior official bluntly told TIME's Lesley Hazleton, "I'm not giving good Jewish land and water to Arabs."

The evacuated Bedouins could well have nowhere to go at all for some time. The four new proposed industrial settlements have yet to be built, and the government has no plans for temporary housing. Shrugs Benjamin Gur-Arieh, Premier Menachem Begin's adviser on Arab affairs: "They can double up in their tents until the villages are ready. They're used to it." Opposition to the law is gathering force in the Knesset, but critics of the government are more concerned about the Bedouins' inability to appeal than about the terms of compensation. Says Begin's former adviser on Arab affairs, Shmuel Toledano: "The law is on the side of the government, and justice on the side of the Bedouin."

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