The government's policy has been to force all the Bedouin to move into small cities, sometimes called "urban townships", (the only places where they can officially receive government services), so that they will "take up" less land. The Bedouin who want to live in these townships have to give up any land claims in order to move there. The effect of moving the Bedouin into these cities, which rank at the very bottom of every economic scale except unemployment, is to wipe out Bedouin culture. Whether it is intentional or not, this combination of efforts to uproot the Bedouin has turned the villages in the Siyaj into a battleground where the survival of Bedouin culture is under constant threat. The worst case scenario is what happened to A-tir and Um al-Hiran, which were demolished to make room for two new Jews-only suburbs. Haaretz reported:

The residents of the village[s of A-tir and Um al-Hiran] have been living there for 51 years. They were transferred to the site in 1956 while under martial law. The land they originally owned was transferred to Kibbutz Shoval, while the Bedouin were leased 3000 dunam of land for agriculture and grazing. The government approved the establishment of Hiran in 2002, and in 2004 the state submitted a court order claiming that residents of Al Hiran should be evacuated as they are using state lands without permission.

Click here to read about a project of the Reform movement's Israel Religious Action Center to help one of these villages.

Click here to connect with Dukium, the Negev Coexistence Forum, which works on getting these villages recognized.

View a detailed map of the Negev showing unrecognized Bedouin villages, alongside recognized Bedouin villages, Jewish rural communites and cities, etc: