SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
Deep in the south of Israel in an Arab region known as the Negev Desert, members of the Arab Bedouin community who have lived there for generations are fighting to stay in their homes. Around 90,000 of them are doing everything they can to try to stay put in more than 30 desert villages. That's despite the Israeli government's plans to redistrict the area and clear most of those villages.
In the latest twist in this ongoing standoff, the 500 residents of one village, Ras Jrabah (ph), tried to stop an order by the Israeli government to dismantle it, but last month, the Israeli Supreme Court issued a ruling siding with the government. Now, successive Israeli governments have not recognized these Arab villages and dispute the residents' claims of land ownership. The government describes the villages as illegal encampments and has been withholding basic infrastructure for more than 70 years.
Khalil Le'moor is an Arab Bedouin who runs a hostel in the Negev. We called him up to talk about the impact of all of this. Welcome to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
KHALIL LE'MOOR: Thank you. Thank you for having me.
DETROW: How long have you and your family lived there?
LE'MOOR: We are 104 years.
DETROW: Wow.
LE'MOOR: My family arrived to this place in 1921, 27 years before the establishment of the state of Israel.
DETROW: You've lived your whole life there?
LE'MOOR: Yes. All my life is here. My father was here, lived here, and he passed away 12 years ago. And my grandfather and all my family and all my 15 brothers and sisters living in the same area, the same place, in the village called as-Sirrah. Today, we have 500 people and 85 families, and the village is unrecognized. So we need to struggle for everything, starting from running water, electricity, infrastructures, schools, kindergartens, clinics, nothing here in the village. We need to improvise and work very hard...
DETROW: Yeah.
LE'MOOR: ...To receive some of these services in a modern state.
DETROW: So there are a lot of struggles to living there. What to you is the best part of living there? What is the draw? What keeps that deep, century-old connection?
LE'MOOR: We want to maintain our traditional life, our culture, our link to the land and to the tribes. And the government doesn't respect these ties, and they want to uproot us from our villages and concentrate us into these - I call them refugee camps, or camps - and take us to these places and say, now you are modern. You have electricity. You have microwaves and washing machines.
DETROW: Yeah.
LE'MOOR: And this is the struggle. The state of Israel want to Judaize every inch here, want to uproot us, bring new families, new Jewish families to occupy the space and build a new Jewish town.
DETROW: You think that's the Israeli government's motivation to put new settlements there, to bring different people there?
LE'MOOR: They did in everywhere.
DETROW: Yeah.
LE'MOOR: Just a few months ago, they uprooted the - a very old village here. It's called Umm al-Hiran. They uprooted the village, and now they are building a new Jewish Orthodox settlement. By the way, one of the new people that is coming to replace Umm al-Hiran citizens is the son of Smotrich, one of the radical right-wing ministers in the government. He will have a plot, a piece of land to build his house.
DETROW: How did that demolition earlier this year - how did that change the broader Negev community? What was that like when that happened?
LE'MOOR: We were already used to see demolitions in - about 2,500 demolitions a year. Now they double these numbers. We are talking about 5,000 demolitions a year, and they force the people to demolish their houses by themselves. Otherwise, they will they will find them.
DETROW: Yeah.
LE'MOOR: If they don't demolish their houses by themselves, the government will come, and they will bring the bulldozers, and they will pay - they will need to pay for that.
DETROW: If all of these villages are demolished, if everyone is forced to move, what, to you, is lost?
LE'MOOR: We are losing our future. We are losing our values, our tradition, our culture, our way of life, our connection to the land. This is the last traditional and indigenous community that remained in Israel. And they are going to uproot all these families and force the people to move, and they don't know where to move. Some of them live in improvised tents that their relatives or the other neighbors provided them. Some of them live in public spaces like schools, community centers, in the neighboring towns. And the others are struggling now with the hard weather that we have in the desert.
DETROW: That is Khalil Le'moor, an Arab Bedouin who runs a hostel in the Negev. Thank you so much for talking to us about your perspective and what you're seeing and what you're living through.
LE'MOOR: Thank you for having me.
DETROW: And NPR did reach out to the Israel Land authority for comment on this story. We have not received a response. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
