Summary
The term used by the state and the literature, in Dinero’s account, for the unrecognized, informal, “illegal” Bedouin settlements built on lands the Bedouin claim as historically under their ownership (Settling for Less — The Planned Resettlement of Israel’s Negev Bedouin, PDF p.42).
Details
- The 1975 Albeck Committee restated that the state does not recognize Bedouin ownership of the land of the pezurah; compensation on relocation is premised on moving to a planned town (Swirski & Hasson 2006:21, as cited, PDF p.42).
- By law, Bedouin living outside the town system in the pezurah are illegal squatters; no court attempt to fight government relocation has succeeded, and the government razes vacated settlements with bulldozers to discourage return (PDF p.50).
- Some 40 percent of the Bedouin population do not relocate to the towns, and are replacing tents with tin shacks and cinder block structures in the pezurah to signal permanence against demolition (PDF p.51).
- A town lot (migrash) applicant from the pezurah must go through the Bedouin Authority; state and resident accounts of how streamlined that process is conflict (PDF p.49).
- Dinero argues the roughly 40 percent of some 175,000 Bedouin who do not move stay because of potential land loss and the towns’ failure as magnets, in approximately 40 settlements subject to demolition at any time; the Bedouin Authority Director concedes the courts require the state to provide services there while the state deems living there illegal (PDF p.58, 62-63).
- Dinero notes against official descriptions that all unrecognized settlements have access to running water (though not at each dwelling), none have sewage in the streets, and they do have roads, though not necessarily paved (PDF p.59-60).
- Dinero’s small comparative survey of 45 pezurah households near Segev Shalom (3-13 May 2007), which he calls a small, non-representative snapshot, found polygyny at 48 percent against 32 percent in the town, no electric or water utility service, and 97 percent saying they were not treated equally with Jewish Israelis, against 77 percent in the town (PDF p.114-115, 117).
- The same comparison found household income and male employment not significantly different between the pezurah and the town, while pezurah residents remained free to add agrarian activity to the same wage work town residents do — leading Dinero to conclude the towns offer men no more economic opportunity than the pezurah, and less scope for self-sustenance (PDF p.116).
- Chapter 7 gives the pezurah from inside: at Hiram/Attir, recently demolished houses became the spectacle of a Bustan tour, and at El-If’dai Suleiman El-Hrenik runs a tourist shiq while a demolition order stands on his son’s house (PDF p.203-204, 209-212).
- Chapter 8 argues that so long as the forty-plus pezurah communities remain illegal, unrecognized and lacking basic services — high schools, fully operating health clinics, running water, sewerage, electricity, paved roads — no bedouin will trust that the state recognizes the community’s rights, and the planned-town initiative as a whole remains jeopardized; Degen estimates 60-70 percent of the Negev’s camels are in the pezurah (PDF p.222, 228).
Related pages
Settling for Less — The Planned Resettlement of Israel’s Negev Bedouin, Bedouin Authority, Green Patrol, Naqab, Regional Council of Unrecognized Villages