Hundreds of Bedouin demonstrators gathered Thursday outside the Bedouin Settlement Regulation Authority offices in Beersheba to protest the demolition of homes in Bedouin communities in the Negev. The protest came after inflammatory remarks by National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, who said this week that he would continue demolishing “more and more” illegally built homes.
Rahat Mayor Talal Al-Krenawi told the crowd, “We want to live in peace, we want cooperation,” but said the authorities’ conduct was unacceptable. “We condemn it strongly. To be proud that you are a minister who demolishes? Whom are you demolishing, the citizens of the state?” he said. He added that if the policy continued, “the next step” would be to set up tent cities at the entrances to Beersheba, Ofakim and Dimona.
Ben Gvir addressed the expected protest during a Local Government Conference on Wednesday. He said he had been told that Bedouin residents whose homes were demolished were sleeping in a school in Arad, and responded that they should prepare “many more schools throughout the Negev” because he intended to keep demolishing homes. A day earlier, he had said he would not be deterred by the demonstrations and insisted that since he took office more than 5,000 illegal structures have been demolished, with land returned to the state equivalent to the combined area of Tel Aviv and Givatayim.
The Council of Unrecognized Villages in the Negev sharply rejected Ben Gvir’s figures. It said the area of Tel Aviv and Givatayim is 55 square kilometers, while the area cleared in the Negev is at most 2 square kilometers. The group also said thousands of families had lost their homes and estimated the total economic damage from the demolitions at about 250 million shekels.
