Introduction

Abstract

A critical problem facing the Israeli Government in terms of the Arab community in Israel involves the rights of the Bedouin to recognition, housing, infrastructure solutions, and economic opportunities in the country’s Southern District (Negev (Hebrew) or Naqab (Arabic) desert). Conflict roils around recognition, planning, and appropriate municipal frameworks for Israel’s 224,200 Negev Bedouin, especially the 55,700 Bedouin living outside localities in dispersed unauthorized and unrecognized villages. These issues are presented from the standpoint of the various stakeholders, exploring a flexible set of planning options for creating new, revised, and supportive municipal structures which might reconcile the various interests. This volume investigates the interface between land rights; administrative, judicial, and boundary decisions; and spatial planning and planning rights, within the contradictory contexts of state-imposed top-down policies and the Bedouin community’s bottom-up counter-responses to these policies. The theoretical prism considers indigenous land rights and counter-planning, urbanization in non-Western societies, and environmental/distributional justice. The book’s focus is the Bedouin of the Negev. Some components are unique to Israel and its relationships with its Arab citizens in general and the Bedouin in particular. However, the complexity of the situation has universal value regarding spatial planning and resettlement in peripheral areas for marginal communities existing amidst geopolitical and sociocultural conflict.