Expulsion of Bedouins, 1949-55
By Nur Masalha, from his book Land Without a People,
1997 pp. 11-12
[...]
In November 1949, some 500 Arab Bedouin families (2,000 people) from
the Beersheba area were forced across the border into the West Bank.
Jordan complained about this expulsion [31]. A further expulsion of
700-1,000 persons of the Azazmeh or Jahalin tribes to Jordan took
place in May 1950 [32]. On 2 September 1950 the Israeli army rounded
up hundreds of Azazmeh tribesmen (a United nations Truce Supervision
Organizatoin --UNTSO-- complaint spoke of 4,000)from the Negev "and
drove them ? into Egyptian territory"[33]. A week later further
expulsion of the Azazmeh tribesmen was carried out. UNTSO chief of
staff Major-General William Riley put the total number of Bedouin at
Qusaima in Sinai in mid-September 1950 at 6,200, the majority having
been recently expelled by the Israeli army from the Negev. Riley also
wrote that the Israeli army killed 13 Bedouin during these expulsion
operations [34]. (The Israelis claimed that the Azazmeh tribesmen
were crossing back and forth continually between the Negev and Sinai.)
In September 1952 the Israeli army expelled some 850 members of the
Al-Sani tribe from the northern Negev to the West Bank. "Subsequently,"
[Israeli historian Benny] Morris writes, "several thousand more
Azazme [sic] and other Bedouin tribesmen were expelled to Sinai" [35].
Morris quotes and Israeli Foreign Ministry report as stating during
1949-53 "Israel expelled all told 'close' to 17,000 Negev Bedouin,
not all of them alleged infiltrators"[36]. The Arabs of the Negev
had been reduced through expulsion and flight from 65,000-95,000, at
the end of the British Mandate, to 13,000 by 1951 [37]. In fact the
remaining Arabs of the Negev were not granted Israeli identity cards
until 1952, a situation which made it easier for the Israeli army to
push them out. A year later, in 1953, it was reported in the United
Nations that 7,000 Arab Bedouin, approximately half of them from the
Azazmeh trine, had been forcibly expelled from the Negev [38].
Two years later, in March 1955, members of the Azazmeh tribe, including
women and children, suffered a massacre at the hands of the notorious
'Unit 101' of the Israeli army, which had been created by Chief of
Staff Moshe Dayan in 1953 [39]. Commanded by Ariel Sharon and patronized
in particular by Ben-Gurion, Unit 101 was considered the "bayonet" of
the army and carried out numerous raids against Arab targets across the
border. The tactics used by the unit were debated widely in Israel.
Its expulsive action against Bedouin tribes of the Negev in the mid-1950s
was described in the daily Haaretz in November 1959:
"The army's desert patrols would turn up in the midst of a Bedouin
encampment day after day dispersing it with a sudden burst of
machinegun fire until the sons of the desert were broken and, gathering
what little was left of their belongings, led their camels in long
silent strings into the heart of the Sinai desert." [40]
A shaykh of a Negev tribe, Tarabin al Sani', recalled in a conversation
with a journalist in 1985:
"Those were the days of military government and do you know what that
means? It meant they could kill people as if they were stray dogs out
there in the desert with no witness to record their atrocities."
[?]
31. Morris, Israel's border wars, p.154
32. Ibid.
33. Ibid., p155
34. Ibid., pp.155-56
35. Ibid.,p.157
36. Ibid.
37.Cited in Maddrell, The Bedouin of the Negev, p.6.
38. Cited in Christina Jones, The Untempered Wind: Forty Years in Palestine, (London; Longman, 1975), p.218.
39. On this little known massacre, see also Adnan Amad (ed.), Israeli League for Human and Civil Rights -- The Shahak
Papers (Beirut: Near East Ecumenical Bureau for Information and Interpretation, n.d.), p.99, cited by Kurt Goering,
"Israel and the Bedouin in the Negev", Journal of Palestine Studies 9, no. I (Autumn 1979), p.5.
40. Quoted in Jiryis, The Arabs in Israel, p.258, n.32.
41 Quoted in Maddrell, The Bedouin of the Negev, p.7
