[Sunday, December 15, 2013] Alternative Information Center (AIC) – The Israeli government has officially announced that parliamental discussions in the Knesset concerning the Prawer plan will be halted. This is to say that the government has backed away from attempts to pass the ‘Prawer law’, in their displacement of Arab residents from the Naqab (Negev). Defeat of the Prawer law doesn’t necessarily bring tidings of peace to the Naqab. The government will continue its war of attrition on Arab citizens in the Naqab through the courts where, because of a series of unjust laws, the state always wins. In the drawer and in stages of implementation is an entire series of plans to ‘judaise the Naqab’. It is expected that, following defeat of the law, home demolitions will increase.
In light of the defeat, the threats are increasing against the Bedouins. The Bedouins will not be offered compensation of land, but only land for rent; in time, they are threatening, they will move to deport people from their villages. What doesn’t go with force will go with more force.
Hithabrut-Tarabut reports: ‘About this must be said: one whose stick of oppression was broken in a demonstration should not attempt to wave an even bigger stick. The threat is indeed real: the state truly knows how to create suffering. But if the only thing they are offering is dispossession, without decorations – they should not expect less resistance to that garnered by the Prawer law.’
Hithabrut-Tarabut is a joint Arab-Jewish social movement seeking to address the most burning issue – the division in Israeli oppositional politics between struggles against the occupation and struggles against inequality and for social justice within Israel itself.
(Originally translated from Hebrew by AIC.)
