Rights Groups Vow to Fight Israel's 'Ethnic Cleansing' of Bedouin Village of Ras Jrabah

Human rights groups on Friday condemned an Israeli court for green-lighting the forced expulsion of hundreds of Palestinian Bedouins from a village in the Negev Desert to make room for expanding Dimona—a majority Jewish city—a move described by Israeli authorities as an "evacuation" and by critics as "ethnic cleansing."

Haaretzreports the Be'er Sheva Magistrate's Court on Thursday approved the Israel Land Authority's bid to force the removal of around 550 residents from what Israeli authorities call the "unauthorized" Bedouin village of Ras Jrabah. Judge Menachem Shahak rejected the villagers' claim that they and their ancestors have been living there since before the establishment of the modern state of Israel in 1948.

Adding insult to injury, Shahak ordered the villagers to pay more than $30,000 in legal fees.

"We don't know where we will go. We have been here before the state of Israel and now we will be expelled from our homeland."

"This judgment shows how Israel's deeply discriminatory laws around land and property ownership are used to enforce apartheid against Palestinian citizens of Israel, who are systematically denied the same rights as Jewish Israelis," Heba Morayef, Amnesty International's regional director for the Middle East and North Africa, said in a statement.

"The clock is ticking for Ras Jrabah's residents, who have just months to pack up their lives and leave the only homes they have ever known, to make way for the expansion of the Jewish-majority city Dimona," she continued. "It is yet another attempt by Israeli authorities to minimize the Palestinian presence in the Negev/Naqab, under the guise of development."

"This judgment underscores the need to dismantle Israel's apartheid system, right now," Morayef added. "The international community must put pressure on Israeli authorities to scrap these cruel plans, and end their policy of forcibly evicting Palestinians in the Negev/Naqab."

Ras Jrabah covers 84 acres in what Arabs call the Naqab Desert belonging to the Al-Hawashleh tribe, who have been living there for generations. The Israeli city of Dimona—which was built on Al-Hawashleh tribal land beginning in the 1950s and is infamous for being the birthplace of Israel's nuclear weapons program—is seeking to expand as its population of more than 35,000 grows.

The modern state of Israel was founded largely through the ethnic cleansing of more than 700,000 Arabs—sometimes by massacre—and the destruction of hundreds of Palestinian villages, an event Palestinians call the Nakba, or "catastrophe."

"We don't know where we will go," Ras Jrabah resident " Musa al-Hawashleh told Middle East Eye. "We have been here before the state of Israel and now we will be expelled from our homeland."

The Israel-based legal advocacy group Adalah vowed to appeal the court's decision.

"Since the Nakba, the state of Israel has employed a range of tools and policies to forcibly displace the Bedouin residents in the Naqab," the group said in a statement. One Bedouin village, Al-Araqeeb, has been destroyed by Israeli forces at least 139 times.

"The forced displacement of Ras Jrabah's residents to expand the Jewish city of Dimona, which was built on the residents' lands, serves as clear evidence that Israel is committing the crime of apartheid against its Palestinian citizens," Adalah added, "and urgent international intervention is necessary to halt it."