lOn August 27, the Israeli army announced the release of Kaid Farhan Alkadi, following a “ complex operation » in a tunnel in the Gaza Strip. Alkadi was kidnapped on October 7, 2023 in Kibbutz Magen, bordering the Palestinian enclave. This 52-year-old Israeli Bedouin worked there as a guard, although he himself lives, like many members of his Arab community, in a village in the Negev desert. Alkadi’s release after 326 days of captivity was welcomed by the entire political class and the media in Israel, and President Isaac Herzog celebrated ” A happy moment for the State of Israel and Israeli society “. However, the village where Alkadi found his home and his family, Khirbet Karkur, is under a government order to demolish 70 percent of its homes. Although authorities have said Alkadi’s home would be spared such demolition, the case illustrates the plight of Israel’s Bedouin, who are in many ways caught in the crossfire.
Sedentarization and expulsion
The Bedouins have been settled for centuries in the now Israeli Negev desert, which extends to the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula and the Gulf of Aqaba, the Jordanian port opposite the Israeli seaside resort of Eilat. These Bedouins have developed a semi-nomadic lifestyle, combining extensive agriculture and pastoral activity. The Ottoman Empire accelerated their settlement by establishing the city of Beersheba in 1899 on a site known since antiquity but abandoned for a millennium. In the UN partition plan for Palestine in 1947, the Negev was supposed to return to the Arab state that ultimately never saw the light of day. On the other hand, Israel, shortly after its foundation in 1948, managed to defeat the Egyptian army in the Negev and capture it. Of a population of about one hundred thousand Bedouins, all of them Palestinians, 80% were forced to flee, mainly to Gaza, while about twenty thousand remained there.
Having acquired Israeli nationality, this Bedouin minority lived for two decades under a strict regime of military administration, which regulated, among other things, movements in such a strategic area. But the Bedouins had the possibility of voluntarily joining the Israeli army, a privilege appreciated in a largely militarized society, a privilege from which the Arab population of Israel was in fact excluded, with the exception of the Druze, subject to compulsory military service in the same way as the Jews. It is often the very detailed knowledge of the confines of the desert that opened up scouting positions for the Bedouins, before a possible promotion within the army. In addition, multifaceted pressures are exerted on the Bedouins to force them to settle in seven “new cities”founded between 1968 and 1990, the largest of which is Rahat, currently populated by about 70,000 inhabitants.
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