What an excellent article! Maybe the “o” could also stand for “oppression”.

Thank you for sharing some information about the plight of the Bedouin.

This past April I posted a five part series on my Blog entitled Bedouin & Brous & Bustan. The first part begins with

“I first met Devorah Brous, an extraordinary person and dedicated committed human rights activist, when I was visiting Santa Fe and attended a weekly meeting of the Santa Fe Tikkun Community. I was so impressed that I invited her to visit Boston and speak to the New England Tikkun Community. After she spoke, my wife, Joan, proposed that we form a sister community with Wadi Na’am, an unrecognized Bedouin village IN ISRAEL (all caps provided to emphasize that the Bedouin live in Israel and are Israeli citizens). Through the sister community project funds were raised to help construct a medical clinic (for which the Israeli government would not authorize a permit) in Wadi Na’am. This year the clinic received an Honorable Mention in Israel’s Most Prestigious Architecture Competition.”

http://judaismandisrael.blogspot.com/2007/04/bedouin-brous-bustan-part-1.html

Part 1 has some history of the Bedouin in Negev from 1948-2004. The next four posts are about our sister community project with Wadi Na’am, an itinerary for a visit (that never happened) and details of Devorah’s recent tour in the US.

While you are in Israel, you might want to contact Devorah and participate in one of her projects and/or take one of her one day visit to the Bedouin Negev (which she may still be giving.). Her US tour ends on June 10. Since I am not sure whether she will be visiting her parents in New Jersey after the tour, I don’t know when she will be back in Israel.

You may already know all this, but do you have any plans or interest in making contact with human rights activists; for example, Rabbi Arik Ascherman, Jessica Montel, Jeff Halper? If I can be of any help, please contact me at admin@ronaldwfox.com or you can go through Devorah.

I look forward to reading more about your travels and insights.

Ron

The various anti-Torah, Israeli regimes have made many mistakes. One of their biggest was not annexing Yehudah, Shomron, & Azza. Another was handing control of the Temple Mount to the Arabs.

See https://users.cs.jmu.edu/abzugcx/public/Biblical-Hebrew/Map-of-Israel-&-the-Arab-World-plus-Iran.bmp

The Arabs already have plenty. There’s just one problem. None of them like the so-called “palestinians.” Jordan kills them, Egypt and Kuwait kicks them out. So, all of a sudden, it’s supposed to be Israel’s problem. Go figure…

The Bedouin? Some of the friendly Israel clans my be entitled to some assistance under Jewish Law, like many loyal Druze, and Lebanese Christians. It’s worth investigation. Any hostile elements should be taken care of in a different manner. And, it should be openly, without any hesitation, embarrassment, nor concern for the feelings nor opinions of the goyim.

And let me respond by agreeing, in essence, with 2 of your statements. First, perhaps Israel should have annexed the Territories after 1967. But then you would have had to make everyone who lives there — everyone — a citizen of Israel, no? That would seem to change the demography in a way that I am guessing you would not be satisfied with. Why suggest annexation, then? Or would you have advocated something more than just annexation?

Second, I will refer you back to a post I put up last week: http://semitism.net/2007/05/30/it-was-supposed-to-be-different-here/. In this post, I quoted Buber, who agrees with your statement, “The Land belongs to the Almighty.” And I do, too.

So if the Land belongs to God, even if God commands us to “take” the Land on God’s behalf, the question remains then of what happens to all of the people who then live there, Jew or Arab or other. Do we fulfill the vision of God by living according to God’s commandments, and treating all of those who live within the Land with respect and honor and as neighbors, or according to more nationalistic, earthly pursuits of power and oppression?

Look around you, Ben-Yehuda. Surrounded, I imagine (based on my visits to your region in the past) by barbed wire fences and soldiers and gates and hostility and fear, both from within and without. You may feel you are fulfilling Jewish destiny, which then provides comfort and resolve in the face of everything else, but your post on the buses makes the point implicitly — are you not remote and distant from the Land, even the very Land on which you live?

This cannot be what God wanted for the Land. Are we not obligated, then, to make of the Land what God does want?

As a non-Orthodox, committed Jew, I’ve struggled for quite a while with the religious Zionist claim to the land. I have great respect for the Orthodox as keepers of strict Jewish law and tradition - perhaps they are those closest to G-d.

Certainly there is an interpretation of Torah and of Jewish history that justifies a Jewish claim to the land. But it’s also true that Judaism has evolved to a point where we no longer need the Temple to worship. We have prayer rather than animal sacrifice. We believe that G-d is everywhere, and that we can worship G-d anywhere.

Do we, then, really need the Land of Israel to show our devotion? Or are we simply distorting G-d’s Word to justify something we want for purely material reasons? - property, wealth, security - all the interests that really drive Israeli policy with regard to land and borders (think how much property values rise in Israeli settlements when the government announces it will be within the separation wall).

I am aware, of course, of the mitzvah to settle the land, in its many iterations.

But, in my human heart, I simply cannot believe that the dispossession, exile, oppression and impoverishment of other peoples is what G-d wanted from us when He commanded Abraham, at the very beginning, to “be a blessing.”