Freedman tries Pavlov

CiF Watch

“No Eastern land occupied by a sedentary population has as uncertain a water-supply as Palestine. Its Mediterranean climate leaves it without any rain for about half of each year, on the average. Since Palestine is at the southern end of the rainy westerly winds, its rainfall becomes progressively more scanty as one goes south towards the Negeb. Winters with inadequate rainfall are both frequent and unpredictable, and disastrous famines have thus been common throughout its history.”

The above words were written by the famous archaeologist W.F. Albright in his fascinating book ‘the Archaeology of Palestine’ in 1949, but Seth Freedman would have us believe that water shortages in this part of the world are not only relatively new, but somehow deliberately engineered. In his familiar florid style, Freedman recounts his visits to encampments of the Jahalin Bedouin tribe and with typical British romanticism – a sort of ‘Lawrence of Suburbia’ – dramatically depicts the suffering of these noble tribesmen at the hands of the dastardly Israeli regime. Whilst there do exist many difficulties with Israel’s attempts to reconcile the existence of a modern, democratic welfare state with the traditional nomadic practices of the Bedouin in southern Israel (it should be noted that the case of the northern-dwelling Bedouin is quite different), it is certainly not correct to imply that Israel’s policies towards its Bedouin population are based on racism. At the Negev Conference of 2008 former PM Ehud Olmert made the following statement:

“I want to say a word to the Bedouin population, whose representatives, I hope, are here. I heard from the Foreign Minister that she visited Rahat today. The Mayor of Rahat is one of the most important leaders in the south, and we value and respect him. When I arrived in this area via helicopter, I could see the entire infrastructure development, which is close to completion, for the construction of 2,200 additional housing units in Rahat, with lands allocated by the Israel Lands Authority – a development made through budgets from the Israeli Government and the Ministry of Construction & Housing, in order to allow the Bedouin residents of the south a high quality of living, in areas that constitute an inseparable part of the Bedouin places of residence in the southern part of the country. This is part of the effort we are making, but we are doing more to solve the problems of the Bedouin population, as you know full well. We established a committee, headed by Supreme Court Justice (Ret.) Eliezer Goldberg, to resolve the issue of Bedouin settlement in the Negev and address the issue of compensation in the allocation of alternative lands, as well as the enforcement of these arrangements and a timetable for their implementation, and I expect the committee to submit its recommendations soon. This is not a simple thing. We are not willing to accept illegal seizures of land, but we will not allow the eviction of the Bedouins without a settlement that will respect their needs, address their quality of living and enable them to live in areas slated for habitation by these populations, in accordance with their needs, while making certain that the law is enforced and illegal land seizures are prevented.”

In fact, a case which reached the Supreme Court in Israel would imply that anything but racism against the Bedouin is the case.

“Moreover, to provide affordable housing the Israeli government has sometimes leased residential land to Israeli Arabs at subsidized rates unavailable to Israeli Jews. For example, while the government charged Israeli Bedouins just $150 for a long-term lease on a quarter of an acre of residential land in the southern community of Rahat, Israeli Jews were charged $24,000 to lease similarly sized plots in neighboring areas. In response to such policies favoring Israeli Arabs, Eliezer Avitan, an Israeli Jew denied the subsidized rates, sued the government for discrimination. In Avitan v. Israel Land Administration (HC 528/88), Israel’s Supreme Court ruled against Avitan and in favor of the government’s “affirmative action” policy.”

With regard to the Jahalin tribe specifically, it is worth reading what CAMERA had to say on this issue some three years ago.

“The Jahalin have been making claims about the land of Ma’ale Adumim, and squatting on state land assigned to the community, since the 1980’s. They have been warned many times by successive Israeli governments that eventually they would have to move. Most of the Jahalin eventually agreed that they did not have rights to the land. For example, according to a January 29th, 1994 Los Angeles Times article, “no one, not even Hairsh (Mohammed Hairsh, a Jahalin leader) claims that his tribe has a legal right” to the land they have been occupying.”

Of course, that does not prevent the Jahalin and others being used by various NGOs (or journalists) posing as human rights campaigners to promote their own political agenda. Freedman lauds the efforts of NGOs to find solutions to an apparent water supply problem, but unsurprisingly fails to mention the recent controversies surrounding the methods employed by some NGOs in an environment in which water is scarce for all and is a commodity which has to be paid for by all sectors of society. We are by now well aware of the political use of water shortages in Israel as a method of delegitimizing the Israeli state.

So let’s take a look at what happened on that thread once Freedman had pressed the Pavlovian buttons of Bedouin (i.e. indigenous, poor, tribal, romantic) fighting as underdogs against a more powerful state ( i.e. authority, government, Westerners) for those most emotive of commodities, land and water. This first comment should be abundantly clear even to those who have lately been claiming on these pages that they have no idea why some of their posts of CiF are antisemitic.