The Bedouin.

Two weeks before IDF troops rescued Farhan al-Qadi from the Gaza tunnels in which he had been kept for the majority of his ten-and-a-half-month captivity, the Hamas terrorists tasked with guarding him fled leaving him to fend for himself. According to news media reports, al-Qadi’s captors abandoned him in an underground room with nothing but some bread to eat. It appears that they heard the IDF’s Combat Engineering Corps pneumatic drills working nearby. Before leaving, the Hamas terrorists rigged the surrounding tunnels with explosives, to ensure that he would not make it out alive, should he try to escape. When IDF troops entered the tunnels days later, al-Qadi was asked to identify himself. “Don’t shoot! I’m Farhan,” he answered. When “I heard Hebrew outside the door, I couldn’t believe it, couldn’t believe it,” he told President Isaac Herzog in a phone call soon after his rescue on Tuesday. According to the Kan public broadcaster, he was able to inform the IDF which parts of the surrounding tunnel system were booby-trapped. Al-Qadi was abducted on October 7 from Kibbutz Magen, near the Gaza border, where he worked as a security guard at a packaging plant. The 52-year-old Bedouin father of 11 recounted that he was kept in complete darkness in the tunnels for most of his 326 days in captivity. At the start of his captivity, al-Qadi said he was held in an apartment above ground with several other hostages, but he was soon moved below ground. “After about two months, the terrorists moved me to a tunnel,” he was quoted by Israel TV Channel 12 as having said. “I was alone there, with only the terrorists around me. I didn’t know the difference between night and day.” “The terrorists were masked, and gave me food, mostly slices of bread — there was very little food,” he said. Qaid Farhad Alkadi, 52, is one of Israel’s roughly 300,000 Bedouin Arabs, a poor and traditionally nomadic minority that has a complicated relationship with the government and the courts. While they are Israeli citizens and some serve in the army, about a third of them, including Alkadi, live in villages the government considers illegal and wants to demolish. Since November, about 70% of Khirbet Karkur residents have been told the government plans to raze their homes because they were built without permits in a “protected forest” not zoned for housing. Alkadi’s family hasn’t received a notice, but the looming mass displacement of this close-knit community has cast a pall on what has otherwise been a joyous 24 hours. Unrecognized villages are not connected to state water, sewage, or electricity infrastructure, and the roads to many, including Khirbet Karkur, are dusty and potholed. Khirbet Karkur is nestled in the shadow of a large garbage dump, and the smell of rotting garbage drifts over the squat corrugated metal homes. Piles of construction debris and trash ring the small cluster of dwellings. Israel’s Supreme Court has previously deemed many of the unrecognized Bedouin villages illegal, and the government has said they are trying to bring order to a lawless area and give a better quality of life to the impoverished minority. For decades, Israel has been trying to convince scattered, off-the-grid Bedouin villagers that it is in their interest to move into government-designated Bedouin townships, where the government can provide them with water, electricity and schools. Muhammad Abu Tailakh, the head of Khirbet Karkur’s local council is also a public health lecturer at Ben Gurion University in nearby Be’er Sheva. Most of the Negev Bedouin tribes migrated to the Negev from the Arabian Desert, Transjordan, Egypt, and the Sinai from the 18th century onwards. Traditional Bedouin lifestyle began to change after the French invasion of Egypt in 1798. The rise of the puritanical Wahhabi sect forced them to reduce their raiding of caravans. Instead, the Bedouin acquired a monopoly on guiding pilgrim caravans to Mecca, as well as selling them provisions. The opening of the Suez Canal reduced the dependence on desert caravans and attracted the Bedouin to newly formed settlements that sprung up along the Canal. Bedouin settling in permanent communities began under Ottoman rule following the need to establish law and order in the Negev; the Ottoman Empire viewed the Bedouins as a threat to the state's control. In 1858, a new Ottoman Land Law was issued that offered the legal grounds for the displacement of the Bedouin. Few Bedouin opted to register their lands, due to lack of enforcement by the Ottomans, illiteracy, refusal to pay taxes and lack of written documentation of ownership. The Negev Bedouin are Arabs who originally had a nomadic lifestyle rearing livestock in the deserts of southern Israel. The community is traditional and conservative, with a well-defined value system that directs and monitors behaviour and interpersonal relations. The Negev Bedouin tribes have been divided into three classes, according to their origin: descendants of ancient Arabian nomads, descendants of some Sinai Bedouin tribes, and Palestinian peasants (Fellaheen) who came from cultivated areas. Contrary to the image of the Bedouin as fierce stateless nomads roving the entire region, by the turn of the 20th century, much of the Bedouin population in Palestine was settled, semi-nomadic, and engaged in agriculture according to an intricate system of land ownership, grazing rights, and water access. Today, many Bedouin call themselves 'Negev Arabs' rather than 'Bedouin', explaining that 'Bedouin' identity is intimately tied in with a pastoral nomadic way of life – a way of life they say is over. Although the Bedouin in Israel continue to be perceived as nomads, today almost all of them are settled in permanent communities. Fast forward to 1963 when IDF Chief of Staff Moshe Dayan was in favour of transferring the Bedouin to the centre of the country in order to eliminate land claims and create a cadre of urban labourers: "We should transform the Bedouin into an urban proletariat—in industry, services, construction, and agriculture. 88% of the Israeli population are not farmers, let the Bedouin be like them. Indeed, this will be a radical move which means that the Bedouin would not live on his land with his herds, but would become an urban person who comes home in the afternoon and puts his slippers on. His children will get used to a father who wears pants, without a dagger, and who does not pick out their nits in public. They will go to school, their hair combed and parted. This will be a revolution, but it can be achieved in two generations. Without coercion but with governmental direction ... this phenomenon of the Bedouins will disappear." Ben-Gurion supported this idea, but the Bedouin strongly opposed it. Later, the proposal was withdrawn. Today they are only partially integrated with problems yet to be solved. Take care. Beni, 29th of August, 2024.