Why Bedouins are pining for their old lands beneath new evergreen saplings

'Unrecognized' Bedouin are staking land claims in Israel.

The Jewish National Fund aims to plant a forest over the lands of al-Araqib. Co-sponsored by evangelical Christian organization God-TV, this forest would involve forcibly displacing the 300 Bedouin residents of the village, who are all Israeli citizens, from their homes. A non-profit organization in charge of forestation and Jewish settlement throughout Israel, the JNF controls approximately 13 percent of the land in Israel today. This land falls under the management of the Israeli Lands Administration (ILA), and can only be leased to Jews, or for Jewish settlement purposes.

According to Israeli activist Haia Noach, while the JNF initially denied any involvement in the destruction of al-Araqib, residents and local activists saw JNF bulldozers destroying property in the village during a demolition in early February:

“We connect them with this; they are directly responsible for what is going on there, for the fact that people lost their houses, lost their herds, their orchards,” said Noach, the Director of the Negev Co-Existence Forum, a joint Jewish-Arab organization working for Bedouin land rights in the Negev.

The destruction of al-Araqib is part of a larger Jewish National Fund project called ‘Blueprint Negev.’ Launched in 2005 at the cost of $600 million, the project aims to increase the population in the Negev area by 250,000 Jewish residents by 2013.

“Since the foundation of Israel, JNF was actually planting forests on Arab villages’ remains. And you see it all over Israel, in the North and even in the South. There will be more and more Arab villages in the Negev that are threatened by the forestation of the JNF,” Noach predicted.

Hat tip to OpenDemocracy and Jillian Kestler-D'Amours,filmmaker, for this important news. Residents were evicted by more than 1,000 riot police officers, who destroyed homes and animal pens, uprooted thousands of olive and other trees and confiscated personal property.

It's a fruit, not a veg, and it splats! Catsup with the Besor Tomato Fest

At Besor's Shalom Park, on the northern edge of the Negev, a weekend battle is guaranteed to stain fighters with red pulp. It's a tomato festival, complete with mosh pit, which is modelled after La Tomatina, a pitched tomato fight that takes place in Bunyol, Spain every year at the height of the harvest. Some 30,000 people gather to pelt each other with 115,000 kilograms of overripe ammo and revel in the foodfight every year, as the town's population triples in size. The tamer Israeli version is now in its third year, and promoters aim for a gentler image, even extolling the beneficial effects of astringent tomato juice on the complexion. But if the relentless High holydays and so much family togetherness drives you to the brink of hurling something, this definitely is the place to go.

R.I.P. Dubak - Jewish settler

The Time magazine blog is running an admiring obituary for Dov Vineshtok, aka Dubak, called 'Requiem for a Jewish settler'. This hard core Zionist befriended the desert Bedouin and delivered secondhand clothes to their remote families, helped out troubled settler teens, and once voluntarily gave water to a thirsty Arab laborer. The piece caught my attention because this frontiersman belied typical knee-jerk stereotypes. Izzy Bee twice met this gruff guy, whose wife was a Jewish American Princess from Beverly Hills and, under his influence, had transformed herself into a Mother Earth figure for their sprawling family. Dubak preferred the outdoors. Together, we'd contemplated the beauty of the dunes, the camel trains and the tenacity of fig trees; When pressed, Izzy Bee admitted that the wilderness seemed blighted by too many red-roofed settlements erected on distant hills. He laughed and coughed. What I admired about Dubak is that he was so open to talking with people who were not like-minded; he will be sorely missed.
Dubak's beloved desert cliffs above the Dead Sea.

Israeli scientist captures power of 1000 suns in Negev Desert

First Israelis made the desert bloom; now it's time for that blistering desert sun to run the power grid. A cutting-edge scientist in Israel's Negev Desert has tapped into the sun's energy in a new way. Professor David Faiman's solar power breakthrough magnifies the sun by a factor of a thousand, so it can yield an incredible 4,500 watts per square foot.

Professor Faiman, head of the National Center for Solar Energy in the Negev desert, has invented a super-reflector. According to his calculations, using just a dozen square kilometers in Israel’s Negev desert he could supply enough electric power for a million people, roughly one sixth of Israel's population.

Professor Faiman explained: “The achievement is that we separate out the collection function of a photovoltaic cell to the light conversion to electricity function. When we collect the light, instead of using a huge area of solar cells, we use an equal area of cheap glass mirrors and they are curved in such a way as to concentrate the light onto a very small solar cell, the size of just one cell, and in this way you concentrate the light a thousand times and you can get a thousand times more power out of a small cell”.

Some cat-nap: Negev man subdues wild leopard

Israel abounds with unlikely heroes, such as Arthur Du Mosch, the Dutch immigrant dad who used his bare hands to subdue a wild leopard for 20 minutes and so rescued the household kitty from its jaws.

The male leopard apparently slunk in through a window left wide open so night breezes might cool the house near Kibbutz Sde Boker in the Negev desert.
There was wide sympathy for the scrawny and elderly wildcat whose arthritic joints hampered hunting and reduced it to eating dried pet food, and then pets. And photos of the nature guide in his underwear, wrestling with the spotted cat got wide play. Click here to watch the bedroom struggle. Only about ten wild leopards are left inside Israel, including this malnourished male.

But tell a man on the street in Jerusalem a beastly tale and it inevitably gets a political twist. Hence this letter in today's Jerusalem Post

How Israeli!

Sir, - "Wild leopard pays late-night cat-call" (May 29) reminded me of Israel's approach to terrorists.

In the incident, the nature guide grabbed the leopard around the neck and pinned it down for 20 minutes until the authorities arrived. Once the leopard was in captivity, the nature officials were assessing its health and planning to feed it sufficiently to help it "put on some weight" and then, once it was in good shape, "to release him back into the wild."In our jails we have 10,000 "beasts" who make every effort to destroy innocent Jewish lives. Our special IDF units capture and incarcerate these murderers with great daring and risk to their own lives. During their sojourn the terrorists are provided with exemplary medical treatment to restore their health. But then, in short order, the unrepentant assassins are released so they can have still one more opportunity to accomplish their nefarious missions.

Give me patience!

ROBERT DUBLIN
Jerusalem

The listless leopard gets a spot check from veterinarians before his release to a nature reserve, reuters photo

phony kasbahs, righteous gentiles, and oily ice cream

After a hiatus in America, Izzy Bee is back in Jerusalem. Such a buzz.

The nomination of the first Arab "righteous gentile", a Tunisian farmer named Khaled Abd al-Wahad who, according to a Jewish woman's testimony, saved Amy Boukris and 24 of her relatives from Nazi persecution, is huge news here. The Holocaust Museum, Yad Vashem, reportedly declined to rate the likelihood of its recognising this Arab hero nominated by the American scholar Robert Satloff, although 60 of the more than 21,000 named heroes who risked their lives to save threatened Jews from the Holocaust are indeed Muslims. Yet Khaled would be the first Arab ever to win such kudos, and some analysts predict that the high profile honor would help counteract the trend towards holocaust denial in some Arab countries.

Haaretz, the leftish newspaper which reported this item on its front page, also ran a weird recipe for a Holy Land ice cream containing whipped cream, honey and olive oil. Sprinkle on a bit of rosemary with the drizzled olive oil and you have a Biblical sweet treat. Milk and honey, I can see...but this takes some getting used to. Not a likely prospect for a Baskin-Robbins scoop of the month.

The Jerusalem Post devoted lots of space to the IDF's new American-built war gaming town, erected near Tze'elim in the southern Negev, where mock mosques, a marketplace, and an ersatz kasbah give a hyper-realistic setting for training exercises aimed at countering urban guerrilla warfare. William Arkin, a Vermont-based reporter, had leaked much of this last year, and the inaugural war games were opened up to the press. According to journalists who looked on, the young Israeli Defence Forces cadets were really ready to rock the kasbah. Canine and media handlers also will undergo training in the mock-up Muslim neighborhood, to prepare new tricks for the old dogs of war.