I read the other day about a terrible act. I didn't read it in the Guardian, the Times, the N.Y. Post, or any of the other major newspapers or mainstream media websites. The Electronic Intifada (EI) ran the report by the Regional Council for the Unrecognized Villages (RCUV) with the headline Israel Destroys Bedouin Village for the Second Time. The Israeli government destroyed Twail Abu Jarwal (pic 1) for the second time in as many months: "Large police forces, with the aid of special-task forces and with the aerial help of a helicopter and two bulldozers, demolished the entire village."

Bedouin Villages have been on the land since before the state of Israel was conceived. The Israeli government doesn't recognise them and calls them illegal, therefore they are not entitled to any infrastructure. The "illegal" villages lack even basic amenities such as running water and electricity.

According to Yeela Raanan of the RCUV the elders have held receipts since the 70's of payments made to Israel for plots of land in the town of Laquia. They lived on other people's land in shacks and tents on the outskirts of the town, waiting for their land — which never came — to build homes for their families. A few years ago, their makeshift homes outgrown, the Bedouin returned to their ancestral land.

The recent demolitions flew in the face of the Israeli Knesset Interior Affairs and Environment Committee (IAEC) recommendation to postpone the demolitions of Bedouin villages until the residents could find alternative housing. Israeli Interior Minister Roni Bar-On told the IAEC that the state has the authority to demolish all 42,000 illegal building of the Negev's unrecognized villages.

"Knesset member Talab El-Sana from the United Arab List called the actions a crime no better than the IDF committed in Beit Hanoun. She also said the demolitions left children and the elderly without a roof over their heads in the dead of winter, and signified "a declaration of war by the state against its Bedouin citizens." Arguing that while the state was demolishing Bedouin houses, it was also approving the construction of tens of farms and houses for Jewish residents of the Negev. According to El-Sana this derived from "a policy of racism."

Echoing a 2003 Guardian report, the Dec 2006 RCUV report said:

This policy's aim is to force the Bedouins off their ancestral lands and to concentrate the Bedouins in urban townships, regardless of their wishes or their culture. However, there are no options for living in the concentration towns the government has built, as there are no available plots of land for homes. Therefore the government can "legally" demolish the homes of 80,000 members of this community, while they cannot build one "legal" home.