Tension is growing between the Israel and the Bedouin population as implementation of the Prawer Plan for the regulation of Bedouin settlement in the southern region of the Negev draws near. The proposed bill, promoted by former Minister Benny Begin already in the previous Knesset, will soon be approved by the legislature and become law. It is based on the plan prepared by a team headed by Ehud Prawer, the former deputy director of the Israeli National Security Council.

Prawer’s team was tasked with implementing the findings of a committee headed by retired Judge Eliezer Goldberg, which examined the state of the Bedouin settlement in the Negev. The Prawer Plan, approved by the government in September 2011, is intended to resolve the land ownership claims by Bedouin living outside recognized localities and to provide a solution to the 35 Bedouin villages scattered throughout the Negev which the Israel refuses to recognize as permanent habitations.

This week the Bedouin in the official and unofficial localities announced a general strike of their public institutions after members of the Knesset’s Interior Affairs Committee, headed by Knesset member Miri Regev, conducted a tour of the Negev, ostensibly without coordinating it with Bedouin representatives.

“The right wing and the Regavim movement (an Israeli NGO [nongovernmental organization] dedicated to monitoring and documenting the illegal activity of Israeli Arabs on government-owned lands) want to kick all the Bedouin out of the Negev region,” says Atia al-Asam, chairman of the Regional Council of Unrecognized Bedouin Villages, in an interview with Al-Monitor. “What’s galling is that the Prawer Plan moves 30 villages, destroys them, and at the same time Regavim plans to settle Jewish residents in their place. There are plans to establish 20 Jewish localities, most of them on the ruins of these villages. We’re asking ‘why?’ The Negev is wide and large, they can live wherever they want. Why on the villages of the Bedouin?”