squire: Not to mention that making the desert bloom is exactly what they did. This had a positive impact on both Jews and Arabs. The Arab side is evidenced by wide spread imigration to Palestine from other Arab countries - a direct result of the impact the Jews were having on the economy and environment. Not to mention on basic liberties and freedoms.
Impact on the Environment in the Negev Desert
There's pollution from Chemical Plants which are affecting the biology of all life, people, plants, everything, that's one quarter of a million Negev Dwellers living in mainly 'unrecognised' villages and what counts for a town. Read a report: http://1breathtime.com/negev/index-eng.htm
There's over 1,000 acres of evaporation pools which pollute the air and have allowed chemicals to leach into the soil and water and miles of burial sites of toxic waste containers that are largely unmarked, and most are buried in shallow pits and leak badly.
squire: As the Jews came, drained the swamps and made the deserts bloom, something interesting began to happen. Arabs followed. I don't blame them. They had good reason to come. They came for jobs. They came for prosperity. They came for freedom. And they came in large numbers.
And those 'interesting things happening' would include the effects of this place: http://www.ramat-hovav.muni.il/eng/ - (toxic waste in the Negev Desert) - toxins which the native Bedouin population residing in the vicinity of Ramat-Hovav exposure effects on vulnerable population are exposed to daily.
The most grave of ecological disasters is occurring NOW in the Negev Desert, a disaster which should be evaluated NOW, rather than your current state of 'denial' and repeptition of what you've been told.
The inhabitants of the 20km radius around Ramat Hovav are concerned about the long-term effects of continued exposure to the range of known and unknown carcinogens and toxic matter being released into the air, soil and groundwater and other environmental pollutants created by the Israeli chemical factories at Ramat Hovav, where the 250,000 inhabitants experience significant increases in hospitalization for respiratory illnesses and a higher than national average (65% higher!) of incidences of cancer among Jewish and Bedouin communities in the area.
http://www.iued.org.il/page.aspx?pid=124&cid=0&menu=34The reality is so very far away from the rosy picture which AJ6 UJS BETAR Jewish students are exposed to in the UK.
squire: Prior the Jews arriving the land has been sparely populated, with the exception of a few cities. One of these was Jersualem which had a far larger Jewish population than Arab population."
Aha. You're using that old adage, are you? "A people without land' in 'a land without people'. Sparsely populated - that's a 'myth'.
Bedouin who remained in the Naqab were transferred to the northern part of the Bir Saba’ (Beersheba) and forced to settle in an area one-tenth the size of the former area in which they lived.
Israel has tried many times to extinguish all Bedouin land claims and thereby ensure the full transfer of all Bedouin land to the state of Israel for exclusive and inalienable Jewish use. For the Bedouin community, the legal process appears to be a no-win situation as no Bedouin has ever won a land claim to any of the more than 3,000 lawsuits filed over the past several decades.
Here's the Bedouin's story:
230,000 Dunams in the Negev Confiscated since Land Day 1976
07 April 05
Arab Association for Human Rights (HRA)230,000 Dunams in the Negev confiscated since Land Day 1976
Issues of land and housing are still main issues of concern among the Arab community within Israel, in particular in the Naqab (Negev). Since 1976, the year Land Day first begun, 230,000 dunams of land have been confiscated in the Naqab.[18]
http://www.arabhra.org/publications/wrap/wraphome2005.htm
A couple of weeks ago, the local building and planning committee in the Naqab made an unprecedented suggestion to recognize more than 60% of the unrecognized villages in the Naqab.[19] This would have been the first time where the will of the local Bedouin population was taken into consideration. Unfortunately, the planning and building committee has retracted their initial suggestion and is now planning to establish Jewish settlements on the lands of unrecognized villages.[20]
The government and the local planning and building committee are now encouraging individual Jewish settlers to establish farms and homesteads onto thousands of dunams under their control. This is being done to prevent Arab inhabitants from using these lands. In the Naqab, according to information last updated on February 29, 2003, there are approximately 59 individual settler families controlling 81,000 dunams of land.[21]
[18] Kull Al-Arab, April 1st, 2005. P. 34.
[19] The “Unrecognized Villages” are villages not recognized by the government. As such, they are not supplied with basic infrastructure, including water and electricity. For more information see July 2004, HRA Report “By all Means Possible – A report on the Destruction by the State of Crops of Bedouin Citizens in the Naqab (Negev) by Means of Aerial Spraying with Chemicals”
[20] Fasl al-Maqal,. April 1st, 2005. P. 11.
[21] Sawt al-Haq wal-Hurriya – Weekend Notes, April 1st, 2005. P.2-3."
from http://bustan.org/news/archives/2005/04/230000_dunams_i.html
The 'argument' isn't about Israel's right to exist. Israel exists. The arguments are caused by HOW Israel exists, and the policies to executes to continue to exist, it's continuous expansion programs in the illegally occupied territories, it's forced re-locations of indigenous people, the sheer brute force of military and governent actions, the deliberate quoshing of peace demos on both Israeli and Palestinian/Arab sides. For example, how did the Bedouin managed to be relocated to living just across the road from the Ramat Hovav chemical plant? Why does the ILA spray/destroy Bedouin Crops? Why are the Arabs of the Negev been marginalised and treated so terribly?
Where is your evidence of that?
Squeezing the Bedouin into one tenth of their original lands, forcing them to live in known environmentally polluted areas, depriving them of legitimacy (less legal rights), purposeful destruction of crops?
(http://www.badil.org/Publications/Press/2002/press225-02.htm)
"The Bedouin are not squatters. They are peaceful farmers, citizens of the state of Israel since it was first established and who had worked their land for many generations before that, who are in possession of all the necessary documents, and who had asserted their ownership of the land in a document submitted to the Ministry of Justice as long as 40 years ago."
squire: Israel has a lot of experience making deserts bloom and is more than willing to share that.
The ILA has been using a chemical called ROUNDUP (Made by US Seed Giant MONSANTO) to spray Bedouin crops from the air in the Naqab, destroying thousands of dunams of land over a period of three years. The ILA issued no warnings, either before or after the spraying. This year alone, more than 1,100 dunams of crops in the area of Hashem Zane (South to Nevatim village in the Negev) were destroyed by tractors of the Land Authority and 4,000 dunams of crops were destroyed in Al-Aragib and Awagan.
http://dukium.org/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=23
Isaac (Yanni) Nevo, of Ben Gurion University writes about the Israeli policy of UN-RECOGNITION - the withholding of official acknowledgement regarding the existence of Bedouin villages (and claims to land ownership) in the Negev:
"Public recognition of cultural and collective identities has recently become an important theme in political philosophy, and although our issue here is a specific policy of un-recognition – namely, the withholding of official acknowledgement regarding the existence of Bedouin villages (and claims to land ownership) in the Negev[1] - it might serve us well, in trying to understand such a policy, to look into the arguments that have been used to introduce the theme of recognition as a universal political concern.[2] Without fully endorsing the so called “politics of recognition” (or “difference”), I shall argue that it supplies basis enough to strongly criticize the policy in question as a violation of a universal human right, namely, the (negative) right to cultural self-definition. The point is not merely that such policies are discriminatory on an ethno-religious basis, that is to say, the very basis that defines Israel as a State, nor just that they are rooted in settler-colonial practices of domination, as these have been developed since the pre-State period of Israeli history.[3] Rather, it is that withholding such recognition from existing villages and communities is a particular, and particularly pernicious, form of such ethnic and cultural discrimination, with its own attendant harms and social costs. In particular, the form of discrimination that is involved, and the harm that it brings about, can fruitfully be accounted for in terms of the ideas of recognition and identity as universal human needs, and of the de-humanizing effects of a policy whose aim it is to outlaw a whole collective form of existence. As will become clear, however, I argue for such recognition and identity as universal human needs (and rights) only under a “thin” construal of such rights as “negative,” rather than “positive” rights, the distinction being one between the corresponding (State) duty of non-interference with a collective form of existence, on the one hand, and the corresponding (State) duty of granting minorities special collective powers, services, or immunities, on the other, thereby setting minority groups as legally enforceable intermediaries between citizen and State. The policy of unrecognition is democratically questionable in so far as it stands in violation of the thinner, negative rights in question."
from http://dukium.org/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=9
