WEST BANK (Middle East Eye) – Newly unearthed historical records reveal Zionist regime officials’ relentless efforts to forcibly empty Palestinian lands of their Bedouin inhabitants in the Negev during the 1950s.
Haaretz reported that the records were revealed as part of a legal case over land ownership pursued by Palestinians in the occupied territories in al-Araqeeb, one of the dozens of villages deemed illegal by the occupying regime and barred from water, electricity and transportation services, among others.
Araqeeb was demolished 197 times by the occupying regime, which seized its lands, and its Palestinian inhabitants have long challenged the regime in courts over the issue.
Haaretz reported on Monday that the regime is considering the case as of “strategic” importance to set the bar of other lawsuits filed by Palestinians contesting the confiscation of their lands.
However, Araqeeb’s case has been followed with an opinion and appendix by Gadi Algazi, an Israeli history professor at Tel Aviv University, who spent the past eight years studying the regime memos, records and letters regarding the Negev, the largest region in the territory.
Algazi had revealed documents as part of the legal case of numerous plans to push Palestinians, who remained in what became the occupied territories after the 1948 war, out of their lands.
A military operation was set up by Moshe Dayan, the southern region commander, in November 1951 to kick out Palestinian Bedouins from areas in the northwest of the Negev to the east and from north of Al-Khalil-Beer Sheva road to the south of it.
“The transfer of the Bedouins to new territories will nullify their right as landowners and they will be [treated] as tenants of regime lands,” Dayan wrote in a letter, first reported by Haaretz.
Dayan’s plan was then approved by the regime’s army chief of staff Yigael Yadin, which also suggested that if the Palestinians were not “voluntarily transferred”, the Zionist fledgling troops would “be forced to transfer them” and forcibly remove them from their lands.
More than 600,000 Zionists live in over 230 settlements built since the 1967 occupation of the West Bank and East Al-Quds. All the settlements are illegal under international law as they are built on occupied land. The United Nations Security Council has condemned Israel’s settlement activities in the occupied territories in several resolutions.
Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh says the Zionist regime’s rejection of the “creation” of a Palestinian state is an incitement to more violence in the occupied territories.
On January 28, Zionist prime minister Naftali Bennett provocatively said he would not allow any talks leading to the establishment of a Palestinian state.