Summary
Director of the Ministry of the Interior’s Southern District, quoted throughout Settling for Less — The Planned Resettlement of Israel’s Negev Bedouin (interviews of 24 April 2007) as a principal voice of the state’s Bedouin planning agenda (PDF p.90).
Details
- Cohen explains the original town rationale as service delivery: a government can only deliver services in a central location, “you can’t do it in the wilderness” (PDF p.37).
- He concedes the failure of a single settlement model: “we know that we failed in the fact that we planned only one model of settlement for them”, with the Abu-Basma settlements’ mixed agricultural neighbourhoods presented as the fix (PDF p.56).
- He describes pezurah children’s exposure to town electricity and the Internet at school as “non-formal education” pressure on their parents to relocate (PDF p.60).
- Proposing employment, he argues for first-phase industries — carpentry, metalworking, greenhouses — alongside high tech for the young (PDF p.54).
- Quoted at length closing Chapter 2 (24 April 2007), he connects women’s restricted occupations and schooling, polygyny and the single low-tech breadwinner to place the onus for development on the community itself, a perspective Dinero reads as the foundation of the state’s planning agenda (PDF p.90-91).
Related pages
Settling for Less — The Planned Resettlement of Israel’s Negev Bedouin, Segev Shalom, Bedouin Authority, Abu-Basma, Polygyny